Building Bhakashal - Session Report

Building Bhakashal – Session Report

Strap in, this is a long one.

My Thursday group started back in September, they were originally booked for 6 sessions to learn how to play and run the game, but they decided to keep me on for the year. We had our penultimate session last night.

They started the campaign as agents of Quin Faal the Iolite, a powerful Bhakashal Lord at House Quannar. Faal is the patron for two of my groups. One of Faal’s closest allies in the House (Bamal the Boastful) betrayed him, stole a powerful magic sword from him and fled. Faal sent the party to retrieve him. They met Bamal and decided instead to throw in with him and betray their patron.

I have no idea what inspires players to do this sort of thing, but they ran with it. For the last year they have been secretly helping Bamal with two tasks as part of his machinations against Faal, while avoiding discovery by their patron. 

First, the island where Bamal hides has a small dungeon complex hidden in the forest. The complex is a maze, and it had four “anchors”, rooms where magically bound monsters that represent the elements are kept. It ends up the maze is a magical prison which uses the magical elemental essences of the bound monsters to create a magical cage. Bamal was studying the maze when the party arrived on the island and accidentally freed the four monsters that were anchoring the magic of the place, a shocker, a firedrake, a hoar fox and a carrion crawler (lightning, fire, frost and earth).

The party released the monsters, so one of their tasks was to replace them with other elemental avatars. That has occupied multiple sessions, as they needed to bring back live creatures to use in the maze.

The second task related to swords.  Bamal planned to capture Quin Faal and imprison him in the maze complex, but to do so he was going to enlist the aid of a Marilith Demon (a type 5 demon). Quin Faal had obtained the demon’s amulet and was keeping it in the warlock’s tower of House Quannar. Bamal knows the exact location of the amulet. He plans on summoning the demon, offering her the location of the amulet and giving her 6 magical swords as a gift for her to go into the tower, regain the amulet, and bring Quin Faal back to the island maze prison where Bamal plans to entrap him.

Over the past year of play the party has retrieved three powerful magical swords, Bamal has found two, so they have 5 of the 6 swords needed.

Bamal used divination magic to find the location of another powerful sword, in the lair of a pair of White dragons living in a mountain cave on a small island nearby. The party went to the dragons and attempted to deceive them. The spun a story about there being an underground complex on their island that they couldn’t enter, with a massive treasure hoard. They asked the dragons to use their breath weapons on the entrance to the complex to freeze it then they can shatter it and gain access. They claimed they only wanted the magic sword, the rest of the loot would be for the dragons.

The dragons, who had lived on this island and hunted on nearby islands in the long chain for a hundred years, were aware of the island that the PCs were describing and decided to fly there and access the complex without the PCs. This was a useful reminder to the players that intelligent monsters are a bit more of a challenge.

Fortunately for the PCs one of them had a two potions of Polymorph Self she had been sitting on for months, and another had the spell. They polymorphed all three of the PCs into birds that flew faster than a dragon and beat the dragons to the island.

They created an illusion of an entrance to a dungeon complex in front of the caves that they and Bamal lived in on the island. They sat in wait with Bamal and the two Bhakashal Warlocks they had converted to their cause, Kanai Grith the Hessonite and Bham Veen the Mercurial, as well as the Mercenary Reit Layl and the Phantasmist, Boylea the Silver. Reit was the captain of the Wyvern, Boylea was the ship spell-caster, while transporting the party the Wyvern went down, the two have stuck with the party as Layl looks for a new ship.

The dragons saw the “complex” entrance from the air and landed a short distance away. The party, concealed by illusion, gained surprise on the dragons.

Then it all fell apart.

Kanai Grith and Bham Veen both had Evard’s Black Tentacles as a memorized spell, they decided to double cast the spell upon the dragons. They had done this a while back to great success and the party was anticipating the same.

Both warlocks failed their casting rolls, and their spells fizzled.

Ref – “Standing close to each other, you both take out a tentacle from your pouch and wrap it around your fingers, clutching it like a pair of brass knuckles, you cover that hand with the outstretched palm of your other hand, and recite the words of the incantation, staring at the general area of the dragons to target the spell’s effects. You move your cupped hands in a circle, as if stirring a pot, and whisper the words of the incantation in unison. When you finish you pull your hands apart, but instead of tentacles emerging from the ground around the dragons, the tentacle in your hands bursts into blue flame and falls to ashes, pushing your hands away from the hands of your fellow caster. It was as if the spells were cast to the same place and bounced off each other.”

Bamal cast Fire Shield on himself, anticipating a breath weapon attack.

The PC warlock cast Reduce towards one of the dragons, but it made its save so the spell was ineffective. While this was all going on the party PC fighter and Reit went into the caves to retrieve two of the powerful magic swords that the PCs had collected for Bamal, hoping to use them against the dragons. That was a last-minute decision that saved their bacon.

That was the end of the surprise round, and the dragons were unharmed.

Then we rolled initiative.

The dragons only saw the illusory entrance to the complex and magical effects emerging from that entrance, they had no idea the party was there. But they did see a pencil thin beam of energy shoot from the complex entrance, and there was a disturbance in the air around them (the miscast Evard’s spells).

Initiative was rolled.

The party PC warlock went first and cast Dimension Door to get behind the dragon, she took the party thief with her.

Then the dragons attacked.

They did what you would expect, they used their breath weapons against the complex entrance hoping to either destroy it outright or make it possible to shatter the entrance and stop the magical effects coming at them, and so they could get in. One dragon was adult and 6 HD, the other was old and 7 HD, so that’s 30 HP and 42 HP respectively.

 This instantly slayed the NPC illusionist Boylea the Silver and the NPC warlock Bham Veen the Mercurial, while reducing Bamal the Boastful to 2 hp. Bamal got lucky as he had the Fire Shield up and running. The two fighters emerged from the cave with their swords, to see two dead party members frozen solid, their patron apparently on fire LOL, and two other party members weren’t anywhere to be seen. They panicked and charged the dragons.

The first dragon used Charm Person and charmed the party PC fighter, convinced her to stop and attack Reit. She was planning to use the PC fighter as a bargaining chip to get the rest of the party to capitulate.

The other dragon breathed frost on to the ship captain, he made his save and dodged the worst of it.

At this point the PC thief who was brought along with the Dimension Door finally got to act, she pulled a “Crom” and backstabbed the dragon. 10HP damage, x3 for a backstab and the dragon died on the spot.

REF - “You leap forward and drive your sword into the dragons back between its wings, the sword bites deep and strikes the dragon’s heart, running it through and slaying the beast instantly.”

She had just one-shot a dragon!

That rendered them all speechless for a minute.

The PC magic-user tried to use Reduce again but failed the casting! We go multiple sessions with no failed castings, and in this session we had 3 for the PCs side.

Madness.

However, slaying the other dragon broke the charm and the fighter was released. They needed to capture one of the dragons to use in the maze complex, so she dropped her sword and changed to her Rod of Smiting as a weapon. She charged forward and struck a solid blow in an attempt to subdue the beast. I performed the calculation, ratioing the damage she did against the total HP of the dragon, and this yielded a 16% chance that the dragon would be subdued.

She rolled the dice… a 16 on the nose.

There was a lot of screaming at that.

On the nose.

REF – “Your head cleared of that buzz of enchantment magic, you drop your sword and run towards the drake, it is transfixed on its dead companion for a moment, and in that moment you bring your Rod of Smiting down in a sky-to-Earth blow that smashes the beast on the side of it’s head. The dragon stumbles two steps to the side, shakes it’s head, and collapses to the ground, flattening it’s body and burying it’s head in the grass, obedient.”

Dragon subdual is an old school mechanic that the players adored.

The dragon was subdued.

They led the dragon to the maze and Bamal magically imprisoned it, providing the third of four elemental “anchors” for the complex. The last component is a sandman (for the “earth” monster) and the magical prison will be complete.

They then went back to the dragon’s lair and looted it, obtaining a few magic items, a lot of coin, and a powerful intelligent magic sword (the real prize), Dakam the Crimson. They came back to the island. They now had 6 powerful magic swords to give to the demon, a +4 Defender, a +3 Vorpal Sword, the intelligent sword Koslanth the Righteous, a Sword +2 Nine Lives Stealer, a +3 Blade of Skarak and the final weapon, Dakam The Crimson.

All they need to do now is to capture and contain a sandman and the magical maze prison would be complete. Next session, assuming they get the maze up and running, Bamal will summon the demon, reveal to her where Quin Faal is hiding her amulet and give her the magic swords in exchange for bringing back Quin Faal to the maze so Bamal can imprison him there.

 

Observations

This session was so awesome. They lost 2 party members to the dragons but managed to slay one and subdue and capture the other. They learned that dragons are killable but very deadly, but for a low initiative roll the party PC magic-user and PC thief would have been killed as they would have been hit by dragon breath weapon and neither had the HP to survive even if they made their save.

One dice roll was the difference between life and a TPK

They lost a treasured party member, Boylea the Silver was a party favorite, a phantasmist that didn’t do big damage but saved their bacon a few times, they loved interacting with her, we did a lot of RP with Boylea, she even sketched portraits of the PCs (all illusionists in Bhakashal are artists) and taught them a few card and dice games (you don’t spend time as a shipboard caster without learning how to gamble!)

This whole campaign sprung from the PCs going off script and deciding to betray their patron. I didn’t suggest the idea, but I didn’t push back against it either. Spontaneous decisions like these are the lifeblood of an exciting, immersive sandbox style game.

The cherry on top is that the patron they are betraying (Quin Faal the Iolite) is the patron for another gaming groups of mine, so if this plot is successful, Faal will cease to be a patron for this group, something that will have an impact on the shared world that all of my groups play in. My Saturday group (Quin Faal’s other group) has just recently merged the two branches of the Bhakashal Brass Blade Guild (thieves guild) by slaying the previous guildmaster of the Raosk branch.

Player decisions impact the game world.

But perhaps the most awesome aspect of all of this is that our table is a “no fudging zone”, I don’t run a story focused game where I tweak results to “serve the story”, instead we roll everything in the open. When they were rolling initiative they KNEW that if the dragons went first they were done. They knew how much damage they could do.

You can’t script that kind of excitement.

When the two NPC spell casters failed their casting rolls (both had casting odds in the high 80’s, when they failed back-to-back there was much shouting) they were reminded that I don’t fudge things to save favored NPCs and help out the party. If I rolled behind a screen and fudged regularly they would think I made both of the casters fail their rolls for “dramatic effect”, instead they got the dramatic effect KNOWING that it wasn’t something I did, it happened because the dice made it happen.

So much digital ink spilled on the problems with “binary pass-fail” mechanics in games like D&D, but those pass-fail mechanics create the dramatic reversals and successes that get my players screaming at the table. When that 16% chance was rolled with a 16, while standing in front of a dragon that would have killed the PC in one shot with a breath weapon attack.

She charged something that can one shot her and brought it to heel with a single blow.

EPIC, and BTB first edition AD&D.

The player of the thief was another good example. Her family has been experiencing challenges this year, and the game has been a real life-line of distraction. When she tried the backstab I wasn’t expecting her to kill the thing in one shot, and I knew that it would turn around and either rip her to shreds (she didn’t have great HP) or breath frost on her and that would be that.

But as I remind myself regularly at the table, the key to running a sandbox game is to trust the process. Don’t interfere when you are tempted, instead let it play out and respond to that. It’s radically freeing as a referee. I used to get hung up on whether or not to change something because it was “bad” for some reason, now I just let the game happen and we roll with it.

And this one was a corker.