All the play reports from this campaign are accessible in the play reports category. The hex map for this campaign is available here.

---

Prep for this session was fleshing out the Grey Men, figuring out who they are and what they do and giving them in-game stats. I also built the first section of floor two of the dungeon, which involved generating a couple of maps using Watabou’s One Page Dungeon Generator, sticking them together in Photoshop, and then stocking them with the following dungeon stocking table:

2d6	Room Contents
2	Trap & Treasure
3	Trap
4	Monster & Treasure
5	Monster
6	Stairs/Egress
7/8/9	Empty Room
10	Monster & Treasure
11	Treasure
12	Special

Characters present: Wemut, Brint, Svind, Westward, and Ator
Session length: Two hours

We begin exactly where we left off last time.

---

In complete darkness, pressed in tight between a closed door and a narrow staircase, with an unknown assailant beating on their backs, fear and chaos quickly gripped the party. Brint felt a heavy, wet force on his back and for a moment could feel his limbs beginning to numb and seize up, but he shook it off. Svind managed to get a torch lit, and as Brint retreated down the stairs the group turned to look at their enemy.

They saw nothing, just an empty space at the top of the staircase. I like gelatinous cubes to be invisible unless there’s something inside them already. Here I rolled on the Mörk Borg Corpse Plundering table. With a result of “The remains of something worthless crumbles in your hand”, I decided that there was nothing currently inside the cube. As the group tried to work out what was going on Svind noticed that the smoke from his torch was collecting on the ceiling above the stairs and beginning to flow downwards, as though sliding down an invisible wall.

Brint pulled his sling and the group placed a chunk of burning lard into it, which they launched up the stairs. They watched as its progress slowed suddenly and it began to slowly glide, the flames extinguishing as it came to a halt in mid-air. Deciding they didn’t want to know what was causing this the group piled through the door at the bottom of the stairs – but not before Ator was struck by a shimmering, transluscent tentacle that lashed out from the invisible space above them.

Westward retrieved his eye from the floor of the room with the cage and Ator took out his lock picks to the gate. Initially he failed, but after some inexpert poking around he managed to get the thing open. Ator is Wretched Royalty and has no reason to know how to pick locks. I set the DR for this at 18. He initially failed the roll, but Svind’s player used one of his Omens to lower the DR by -4 and turn it into a success.

While the rest of the group very bravely argued about who should be the first to descend the stairs, Svind took the initiative and disappeared below. He found himself in a long rectangular room with a few exits, and the remains of a heavily armoured figure in the corner. On closer inspection Svind found that the armour didn’t contain any human remains, but that the inside was coated in a slimy grey residue.

The rest of the group made their way downstairs, and Westward decided to explore. He picked a door and, before anybody could listen at it or check it in any way, he booted it open. The noise echoed loudly and for a moment everyone froze to see if there would be a response from the other exits. Nothing came from elsewhere, but as the sound faded the group heard a ferocious snarling from beyond the opened doorway and then a creature with far too many eyes and even more teeth burst through the opening and leapt at Westward. I made an encounter roll for the loud noise and came up empty. Then I made a modified reaction roll for the creature in the adjoining room where the door had been kicked open and got a result of “Kill!”. The monster here was pulled from the Mörk Borg GM screen when I stocked the dungeon.

Seeing that the creature had as many eyes as Westward, he embraced it as it lunged at him and cried, “Brother!”. Unfortunately the creature didn’t seem to care, and continued trying to eat Westward’s face. I had no idea whether this monster understood language but this was a cool roleplaying moment, so I made another reaction roll for the monster to see if it responded to Westward’s friendliness. I again got a result of “Kill!”

Westward managed to force his way into the chamber while the creature was still wrapped around him, his feet splashing in a shallow pool of water that flooded the room. Ator took a shot at it with his bow while Svind set his bear trap across the doorway. Ator’s aim was true but the creature didn’t seem to be harmed by the arrow, though it did drop Westward as it skittered away. I’m writing this play report at the same time as I write the report from the previous session, and I now realise that Svind had already set his bear trap across a door before they entered the dungeon and had never retrieved it. None of us had kept track of that, but it’s largely unimportant.

Brint grabbed Westward and dragged him back through the doorway, managing to avoid the bear trap. The creature was less fortunate, skittering through the door after them and immediately being caught in the jaws of the trap. As it struggled to free itself, gnawing at its own leg, Westward fashioned a lasso from his rope and dropped it over the monster, managing to tie it up and incapacitate it. Westward showed the creature its reflection in his mirror, trying to convince it that they were brothers and it should be peaceful, but it continued to hiss and spit at the group and they decided to kill it.

Svind recovered his bear trap and the group moved deeper into the dungeon, crossing the flooded room to the east and into another chamber. Here they found a room filled with skeletal bodies suspended from the ceiling on hooks, a large stone door to the south and another door to the east. As the group examined the southern door and found it locked, Ator decided to remove a femur from on of the skeletons.

The second he touched the skeleton, gray ooze began to flow out of the eye sockets and coalesce across the bones. The group watched as the now-ooze-covered skeleton reached up to the hook it was suspended from, lifted itself off, and dropped to the ground. The room filled with the sounds of creeping ooze and creaking bones as the ooze began to emerge from the other skeletons and they all dropped to the ground. The group realised that they were cut off from their exit, and that they would either have to fight or bolt for the door to the east.

They chose to fight, and it went badly. Both Brint and Svind were hit with mighty blows that destroyed their shields. These were two critical hits, which both players sacrificed their shields to negate. After a frantic melee the group found themselves separated by the monsters into three groups – Ator on his own by the exit, Westward and Brint by the locked door, and Svind and Wemut near the eastern door. They decided to try and flee to the east room, pushing through the monsters without caring about whether they got hit. Brint made it to the door but Westward was overpowered by the enemies, and Ator was grievously wounded and lost an eye.

Here I called for Strength tests to push past the enemies and make it to the door. Westward and Ator both failed and were struck. Ator was reduced to negative hit points, which should be instant death, but when he was rolling to defend against the many attacks he suffered one of those rolls was a critical and I ruled that he could instead roll on the Broken table. (Mörk Borg has a death system in which going into negative hit points is death, but reaching exactly 0hp asks you to roll on a d4 table with varying results, including a 25% chance of dying anyway). The result of this roll was that he lost an eye and couldn’t act for d4 rounds.

With the group mostly at the door they began the escape attempt in earnest. Brint read from a healing scroll, stumbling over his words initially but managing to restore some health to a wounded Ator. He failed his initial Presence test to read the scroll but used an Omen to reroll it. Westward once again tried to force his way through the mass of enemies, succeeded with help from his friends. Because he was being aided in this by Svind trying to pull him loose I reduced the DR of the Strength test to 10. The group – minus Ator, still cut off from everyone but no longer unconscious on the ground thanks to Brint – got the east door open and piled through it, slamming it shut behind them. Imagine their dismay when they found themselves in a small room barely the size of a closet, with no exits and three more skeletons hanging from hooks.

In the main room Ator watched as three of the skeletons collapsed in a heap on the ground, giving him a straight shot at the exit. In the cupboard, the rest of the group watched in horror as grey ooze began emerging from the skeletons on the hooks. The main ability of the Grey Men is that they can teleport short distance between corpses. At this point they realised they were in real trouble, but that the large mass of enemies in the main room was reduced. They burst out of the cupboard and fled, forcing their way through the room and back into the flooded chamber.

They sprinted across the flooded room, ignoring the way out and instead crossing into another chamber where they found a large, dry fountain with a gem on top of it and two more doors. Behind them they could hear slow footsteps splashing through the water of the flooded room. As the enemies approached, Ator decided that now would be a very good time to try and loot the gem.

This was a frustrating moment, as Ator’s player absolutely refused to engage with the fiction and the fact that the group were being actively pursued by enemies. Part of this was caused by the fact that he repeatedly talked over my descriptions of what was happening, meaning he missed vital context. My response in these situations has always been to simply keep running the game and let the consequences stand.

Having removed the gem, Ator ran back into the flooded room where he immediately came face to face with the pursuing enemies and was struck, losing his other eye. Here he was reduced to 0hp and rolled the exact same result on the Broken table as before. The rest of the group dragged his limp, unconscious body back into the fountain room. Opening the door to the west they found another identical cupboard containing more skeletons. Knowing what to expect this time, they used the same tactic as earlier – hiding in the cupboard, waiting until the Grey Ones teleported in, and then trying to run past the split group of enemies.

That was the plan, anyway. Brint and Svind ran through the flooded room, past the few remaining enemies, and out into the first chamber, slamming the door shut behind them and holding it closed. Meanwhile Wemut and Westward had opened the south door, finding a room covered floor to ceiling in mirrors. In the centre stood the remains of a human man, pinned to the ground by a giant sword and holding a torch that was somehow still burning, surrounded by gold coins scattered across the floor. This chamber is very much the seed of what became Cael (Room 21) in The Moss Mother’s Maze.

They moved into that room and quickly discovered that though the Grey Ones pursued them to the doorway, they wouldn’t enter the brightly illuminated chamber. Westward tried to pull the sword out of the ground but soon found that it was welded in place. Instead, he grabbed the torch.

This was another frustrating moment with Ator’s player. His character at this point is completely blind and also unconscious, but he insisted that his character was scooping up the gold coins and interacting with things in the room in a way that was, frankly, impossible, and became increasingly belligerent when told no. As the session was coming to an end here I simply said “yes, fine, you take 6 gold pieces” so that we could keep things moving to a conclusion rather than ending the session with frustration and bickering, and made a note to talk to the group about this after the session.

The session ended with Westward, Wemut, and Ator moving into an adjoining room that was equally mirrored, with a locked door to the north that they deduced was the same one as the locked door in the first skeleton room, and a huge metal disc set in the ground. With the group separated in the dungeon, we called it a night.

---

Once the session ended and we’d logged off I received messages from multiple players expressing frustration at the way Ator’s player had behaved in both this session and previous sessions and indicating that he was seriously damaging their enjoyment of the game. I felt similarly. It’s been my impression since session one that this player intends to “win” the game and sees his relationship with the GM as an adversarial one, and that’s simply not how I play games. As a group – minus Ator’s player – we discussed how we would deal with this.

We initially agreed that we would speak to him and ask him to address his behaviour, but as the conversation went on it became clear that most of the group only wanted to do this as it felt like “the right thing to do”. This player was not a friend of anyone in the group, he had been found in a Looking For A Game group online (as had one of the other players) by the person who put this group together (not me, for a change). It was agreed that as a stranger we didn’t actually owe him anything, and that the impression we had was that he would not respond well to being told he was causing problems. That player was not invited back to the game after this session, and the person who had initially put the group together offered to tell him that this was happening and why.

It’s been my experience – and I think this is a shared one – that the burden of finding players and managing/dealing with problem players falls on the GM. Running this game so far has been a very refreshing change, with the player who originally asked me if I would run it taking on the job of finding players and, in this instance, volunteering to be the one to deal with a problem that was impacting everyone’s fun after we had talked about it as a group. During our conversation it became clear that the rest of the group fully expect that I should be having as much fun at the table as they are and that it shouldn’t feel like a job for me at any point, which I’m incredibly grateful for. As you’ll see in future play reports, we’ve picked up a few more players in the meantime and I’m happy to report that we have had no problems at all.

All the play reports from this campaign are accessible in the play reports category. The hex map for this campaign is available here.

---

*No hex fills were used in this session, as the group were delving into the first level of the Citadel dungeon that I’ve built. I feel much more at ease running dungeons, and I was really looking forward to this session.

We ad a new player, a character called Wemut, and so as is tradition at this point I had him roll to check for Miseries. We didn’t get one. After catching the new player up on the events that had brought us to this point and what the group were hoping to achieve in the dungeon, we began.*

Session length: 2 hours.

Characters present: Westward Seals The Truth, Brint, Svind, Wemut (new player).

---

The group woke in their camp along the stretch of road beneath the fallen star. Viresh, the Wickhead who was accompanying them, identified a set of narrow steps descending from the eastern edge of the road as being the entrance into the Citadel, but declined to come with them.

I didn’t want to just say no to the group’s request for this NPC to accompany them into the Citadel, but likewise I thought that if this character knew the location of the Citadel he probably knew some of the dangers and wouldn’t want to face them. I made a Morale check for him, which he failed, and I interpreted that as meaning that he would not enter.

Taking this in stride, Westward made a now-familiar request of his newest follower: to go forth into the world and spread the word of The Hanged God. He asked specifically that Viresh return to the homeland of his people and spread the word among the Wickheads. As with the deserters encountered in the abandoned village, Westward gave the wickhead one of his eyes as proof of his claims to divinity. The wickhead immediately stored it in a belt pouch and went on his way.

This gave me an easy goal for Viresh: to reach the ancestral home of the Wickheads. Since this already exists in my world due to [A Waning Light](a waning light [Limited Edition] – Loot The Room) I know exactly where it is and roughly how far away it is, so I set this as a seven-segment goal that updates weekly. Because the wickhead is storing Westward’s eye in a pouch rather than his face, Westward won’t get any useful information out of trying to scry through it. This means that I don’t actually need to track the exact location of Viresh.

After sending Viresh on his way, Westward checked in on his other followers by looking through the eye he had given them. He saw them crossing an empty plain, seemingly doing well.

Because I’d updated their goals I knew exactly where they were. I made a quick encounter roll to see if they had got into any trouble on their journey and it came up negative, so I simply referred to the hex fill for their location and narrated what Westward could see.

Before heading into the dungeon the group decided to investigate the doorway across the road, which was coated in a strange gelatinous membrane. Westward began to poke at it with the severed arm he was carrying, and the flesh immediately started to hiss and dissolve. The group quickly lit a torch and tried to burn the membrane away, to great success.

This is the Membrane of Sarkantha. The dungeon they’re about to enter has a very strong ooze/slime theme, and this seemed like a good opportunity to use a cool monster and also foreshadow some things. I actually read my own key wrong here. This creature/hazard was meant to be placed on the door inside the room they’re about to enter rather than on this entrance. Ultimately it didn’t make a difference at all.

Beyond the membrane they found themselves in a ruined shop, which they quickly looted before turning their attention to a heavily barricaded door to the south. They quickly determined that someone had blocked it up to try and keep something locked in behind it. They knocked on the door and were treated to furious scratching and scraping on the other side, and they decided it was smarter not to open the thing. Svind set his bear trap across the entrance and they retreated back to the road.

Down the stairs they found themselves in a small square chamber. The wall opposite the stairs contained a carving of a doorway that was scorched black as though by fire. Three small holes in the wall on the carved door looked like keyholes, but there was no visible means of opening it. Sensing danger Wemut sent his jester to investigate, who poked his finger into one of the holes and was immediately electrocuted and died.

Showing very little remorse, the group immediately turned out his pockets. In them they found a porcelain mask bearing the likeness of Brint (the result of a roll on Mörk Borg’s ‘Corpse Plundering’ table), which Brint didn’t find particularly entertaining but pocketed anyway.

Their attentions turned to the doorway, the group began examining the keyholes. They discovered that there were no lock mechanisms inside the wall, but that there were small buttons at the back of each hole. Pressing one using the fingers of Westward’s severed hand triggered another lightning shock. With a stroke of inspiration Westward used three fingers from that hand to press all three buttons simultaneously, and the wall slid open to reveal another small flight of stairs.

My room key here reads, “Trap. A scorched stone gate with three keyholes. If all three aren’t turned simultaneously, electricity trap”. I realised quite quickly that I hadn’t actually given the group any sort of key for this, and none of them had lockpicks. I didn’t want this to descend into a frustrating encounter where the group failed to open a door, so I adjusted the encounter on the fly to suit the questions the group were asking and their attempts to find a way past.

Faced with a flight of stairs down into darkness, and having already encountered one trap, the group decided to make use of the jester and threw his body down the stairs. Finding them safe, they descended.

Inside, they found themselves at a crossroads of sorts. A long corridor ran ahead of them, and another passage to their left. To their right was a stone door. Every surface was spotlessly clean and free of dust.

At this point Brint’s player began asking me how long the corridors were and asking me to describe the locations of exits and doors so that he could map the dungeon. He’s never played an OSR-style game before, so I was very pleasantly surprised that he chose to do this entirely unprompted.

With nothing to guide their decisions, the group turned to the door to the right as their most immediate option. It opened into a long, tiled room, with a pool of murky water in the middle. A tiled walkway ran around three edges of it, with low steps descending into the water in front of them and another set of steps rising up to the mouth of a corridor in the east wall.

Sensing danger the group grabbed the jester’s corpse and tossed it into the water, which immediately erupted in chaotic churning as two large alligators rushed the body. As they feasted Westward tried to cross the room, slipping into the water and rushing for the exit to the east. A failed Agility test saw him step on the tail of an alligator, which turned and attacked him.

Westward’s Power that day was Roscoe’s Consuming Glare, and he decided to use it now. His Presence test to cast it was a success, and his d4 roll to choose targets came up with a 4. Jets of hot white light erupted from the eyes on his body, striking the alligators but also striking Wemut and searing Westward’s own flesh.

The text of the power reads, “d4 creatures lose d8hp each”. We decided that the targets beyond the two alligators should be determined randomly, and I rolled for them.

Westward fled the carnage and Brint followed, but the rest of the group decided to drag the heavily-wounded Wemut back through the door to safety, closing it behind them. With the sound of thrashing and alligator feasting continuing behind them, Westward and Brint began to run. They came to a crossroads, with a door ahead of them or a passage to the south, and they decided to burst through the door.

Beyond it they found a large room stained with viscera. Meat hooks hung from the ceiling, holding a pair of dead alligators. A pair of hunched, pale humanoid creatures were feasting on the dead alligator flesh, and they turned to challenge the intruders. There was no aggression, but a strong sense that Westward and Brint had entered territory they shouldn’t be in and needed to explain themselves.

Thinking on their feet, Brint offered salt and lard to the men in order to better season their alligator meat. This was gratefully accepted, but the men (who identified themselves as Gotven and Grin) made it clear that this was now the toll that the pair would need to pay any time they came through. With the deal struck, they allowed Brint and Westward to venture down a passage to the south rather than a door to the north. The men chuckled to themselves at the direction they had picked, but allowed the pair to leave.

This interaction was driven by a reaction roll. I adjusted it due to the urgency with which the pair entered the room, but it still came up “Indifferent”. Since the pale men know this area of the dungeon well, they also knew that Westward and Brint were going to be forced to come back through the room in a few minutes – at which point I had already decided they would try to extract a second toll.

The pair moved south, where they came to a large metal doorway, welded shut and humming with electricity. A passage to the east led into a small, square chamber that seemed to be where the people in the other room slept. With time to catch their breaths, Westward and Brint began debating what they should do. They ultimately decided that they were going to go back into the alligator room and rob the pale men at sword point.

Unfortunately, they hadn’t travelled particularly far from the pale men’s feasting hall and they had made no effort to be quiet. A voice called down the passage behind them, mocking them for having reached a dead end and asking exactly how they would like to be gutted. After exchanging some heated words back and forth, Westward and Brint began to head back up to the room where the pale men were waiting for them.

At this point I cut back to the first group, who had fled the alligator room to the north. One of the players was having connection problems and the other prefers to be quiet for most of our sessions and simply listen, so they asked me to stay with Westward and Brint.

Returning to the room ready to fight, Westward and Brint were dismayed to find that the pair of pale men had grown to a group of six. They immediately recognised that fighting would be a mistake, and instead they chose to try and talk their way out of the situation. They offered more salt and lard, along with their most sincere apologies, and eventually the two groups found their way to some semblance of civility.

The larger group was the result of an encounter roll producing four more pale men. Since it didn’t make sense to have them appear in the corridor between the sleeping room and the feasting room, I decided that they had returned from elsewhere in the dungeon and joined their companions in the feasting room.

Gotven, the apparent leader of the pale men, explained that he and his people were on edge because they were dealing with constant incursions into their territory by some strange creatures who live on the lower floor. He described them as “weird grey ghoul things” and said that the group would recognise them when they saw them. He explained that although the entrance to the lower floor was kept sealed the grey things kept finding their way upstairs and killing his companions, and he asked the group to find out how they were doing it and put a stop to it if possible. The group agreed, asking for something in return, and were promised both a scroll and a baby alligator as payment. Gotven explained that he had a key to the lower floor but that he didn’t currently have it on his person, and that if the group returned the next day he could furnish them with it.

Saying that they would be back the next day for the key the party left via the door to the north, where they immediately saw Wemut and Svind’s light at the end of the corridor to the west and reunited the party. Then, as a group, they began exploring some more while Brint mapped.

They were immediately glad that they had begun mapping as they entered a labyrinth of sunken streets and shop fronts crumbling under the leaden weight of the fallen star. They passed through ruined public gardens, dilapidated two-storey buildings, and a network of streets that circled back on themselves confusingly.

Eventually they came to a room with a thick iron cage in the corner, a gate sealed with a heavy padlock and a spiral staircase descending into darkness. They quickly judged that this was the entrance to the lower level that they had been promised a key to. As they examined it through the bars they saw glistening ooze-like flesh ascending the stairs, and they called out to it. It immediately ducked down out of their light, and they received no reply.

This was the result of a random encounter giving me a GRAY ONE, then a reaction roll of Indifferent.

Impatient now that they had seen one of the creatures from below they began trying to pick the lock. With no lockpicks Westward turned again to his severed hand, flaying one of the fingers and trying to use the bones to pick the lock. Unfortunately his attempts were unsuccessful.

Seeing that the grey things were coming up the stairs and deducing (incorrectly, but they have no way to know this) that they are afraid of people and wouldn’t try to come back up with the group present, the party hatched a scheme. Westward spent a power to remove one of his eyes and placed it where it could see the stairs, and then they left through the door they had entered by. They immediately realised that Westward’s eye couldn’t see anything in the dark, so they headed back into the room. They smeared Westward’s severed hand in lard and ignited it, placing it in one corner and leaving Svind’s torch in another corner, and then they left again.

Outside the doorway they gathered on a short flight of stairs and waited in the dark, Westward looking through his eye ready to alert the group when the grey thing emerged. They figured that this way they would be able to see how the thing was bypassing the lock, and could go back to Gotven to obtain their rewards.

They sat in the dark, quiet and still for some time, waiting for something to happen. Then, right as the session drew to a close, something thick and heavy began to close over Wemut’s back, burning his flesh and dissolving his armour. We ended the session with panic gripping the party as they frantically tried to light torches and find out what was attacking them in the darkness.

I got very lucky with encounter rolls at the end of the session here, generating the grey one coming up the stairs initially and then generating the gelatinous cube that stalks the dungeon right at the end. The group haven’t seen a cube before, so they had no way to know that my description of the corridors as being perfectly clean is one of my tells for cube activity, and I’m excited to see how they react to it when we start the session next week.

All the play reports from this campaign are accessible in the play reports category. The hex map for this campaign is available here.

---

Play time: 2 hours

Prep for this session involved building a small point crawl through hex 29 and mapping and keying the first level of a fairly large dungeon, then rolling for faction/enemy goals. There were some developments on that front:

• Techiya the Devil has a breakthrough (double evens) on its “Find a better host” goal, which is now complete. As it was on the Galgenbeck road pursuing the PCs I decided that it came across the Cult of the Forsaken and has possessed one of the gang who fought the PCs. This gives me somebody that they will recognise when it eventually catches up to them. Its second goal, “catch the PCs”, suffered a second setback. I don’t really need to know what this is, but I’m saying that it’s to do with the Cult of the Forsaken and some sort of fighting with them.
• Three days passed in game last session. Eldar and Qilnach’s “reach Galgenbeck” goal is a daily one, so I rolled three times. They now have two filled squares and two empty ones remaining before they reach the city.
• The Cult of the Forsaken suffered a setback in their goal to “take over and refurbish the Hangman’s Church”. I think we can assume this is the result of the devil Techiya falling into their midst. They also made a square of progress on “retrieve the Book of the Hanged God from the PCs”, so I’m ruling that a small party is now tracking the PCs south across the countryside.
• King Fathmu IX made progress on both of his goals, “discover the hiding place of Verhu” and “fill the citadel’s stores with food”. No immediate in-game effect from these.

Hexes used this session:

• 20. Mountains. Monastery. Monks try to prevent Miseries.
• 24. Barren. Abandoned village. Burned. Huge (40’) sword buried in a massive anvil.
• 29. Original fill was “Barre. Empty.” but after last session it now reads “Barren. Fallen star amidst ruins of destroyed citadel.”

This session features the group using mind control abilities against NPCs. Consider this a content warning.

---

The group spent a week resting and recuperating with the cult of the alligator god. The cultists used a scroll to heal Westward Seals The Truth’s broken arm, and the party was able to stock up on some supplies.

When I run dungeon-based games I usually assume that there’s a week of downtime between delves so that characters have a chance to heal, scribe scrolls, etc. Because this is an overland exploration campaign I’ve been running things differently, tracking time day to day and picking up exactly where we left off last session. At the beginning of this session, with the group having found a safe haven to rest in, I explained how I usually run things and how it differs from the way we’ve currently been doing things and asked them what they’d prefer when resting in something we can class as “town” – to track time day to day as we’re doing while exploring, or to assume a week of rest. A week of rest means that they can take advantage of local amenities to do things like heal lingering wounds, but the trade-off is that faction goals and time in the world will advance by a week. The group chose to have a week pass, and we agreed that this is how we’ll run things from now on when they rest in a safe location.

This meant I had to quickly update some more faction goals. The cult of the Forsaken made progress on taking over the Hangman’s Church (which filled in the previously crossed-out setback box) but suffered a setback in locating the party. Fathmu IX suffered setbacks in both of his goals. Techiya made progress in tracking the PCs.

Qilnach and Eldar’s goal to reach Galgenbeck is daily rather than weekly, so I made 7 rolls for them. They reached Galgenbeck, but have suffered a setback in their attempts to make contact with the Two Headed Basilisks. Meanwhile, the alligator cult have made some progress in their various goals.

Setting out overland the group headed down from the mountains and out onto barren moorland, Westward Seals The Truth navigating with confidence. After travelling for most of the day they began to see structures of a village in the middle distance, and a large tower of some kind looming over them. Visibility was poor due to the weather and it was hard to make out details. Svind and his dog moved out alone as scouts, with Westward Seals The Truth spending a Power to remove one of his eyes and passing it to Svind.

A short distance from the village Svind saw that the village looked to be entirely abandoned. Roofing was in a state of disrepair, doors were rotting in their hinges, and the ground covered in broken glass and shattered furniture. The tower they had spotted from a distance revealed itself to be an enormous rusting sword. He loaded his sling with Westward’s eyeball and launched it into the midst of the village, allowing the Pale One to scout the area from a distance.

Westward saw that the village was entirely empty, with no movement and no apparent danger, and so the group moved to catch up with Svind and then press on into the village to search it for anything valuable or edible. With night falling they also decided to look for somewhere dry and defensible to spend the night. They located a building with front and back doors and a stone fireplace that they could use, and they set up camp. Svind’s bear trap was placed just inside the back door, and Ator spent some time gathering broken glass into a bucket. Then they set watches and bedded down for the night.

All of this was done narratively. The group told me exactly what sort of building they were looking for and I saw no reason to say no to them. While they were discussing their plans with one another and deciding what to do I spent some time rolling encounters for each watch. With a positive result for Watch 3 (“d6 Crypt Breakers heading out from Schleswig on a mission from Fathmu”, from my own encounter table rather than the tables in Feretory) I also made an initial reaction roll so that once the group had settled on a plan I was ready to go with no interruption to play.

The first two watches passed without incident. As Svind sat by the fire with his dog he began to hear approaching footsteps and chattering voices, seemingly making no attempt to be stealthy. The group moved further into town and he was able to make out their words as they discussed finding somewhere to bed down for the night. Very carefully he poked his head out of the doorway, and in the faint light of the half moon (I have the phases of the moon on my calendar for moments like this when it suddenly becomes useful) he saw the forms of three large figures, the light glinting off heavy metal armour.

Svind hadn’t been spotted by the intruders, but he ducked back into the building and began to rouse the group. As he did so he heard one of the voices express surprise that he could see a fire burning in the building the group was camping in, and the party heard heavy steps approaching.

The voice called out a greeting, asking to know who was there, and Ator replied very brusquely to tell them that it was none of their business and that people were trying to sleep. After some back and forth, with the newcomer trying to ascertain who he was speaking to and Ator stubbornly repeating his plea for the group to be quite and go to sleep, the intruders fell back into a nearby building and set their own camp.

This was the combination of an initial neutral reaction (“Uncertain, make another offer, roll again”), the group (surprisingly!) actually making what I could interpret as an offer (“go to bed and leave us alone”), and a further reaction result of “Friendly, accepts offer”. I rolled the second mainly out of habit, with the result simply confirming a course of action I was already leaning towards based on the way the interaction played out at the table. I also rolled in part because Ator was being incredibly hostile to the NPCs, cutting them off every time they spoke and shouting over me and the other players, and it was actually making me feel quite on edge and like I wanted to argue with him. I decided to let the dice decide whether this encounter turned violent rather than it being driven by my own reaction to what was happening.

With the intruders quiet and settled down for the night, Westward Seals The Truth took over for the final watch. He debated sneaking out and using one of his Powers to cast Enochian Syntax on whoever was standing guard for the intruders but chose not to, and the rest of the night passed without incident.

Morning broke, but the sun failed to rise and the group found themselves waking to pitch darkness. (This the result of a roll on Mörk Borg’s weather table.) In the light of Brint’s fresh torch they saw the intruders stepping out of their nearby house. The apparent leader was clutching a tin mug filled with some sort of hot drink, and he began to make his way over to the group to say good morning in an attempt to be friendly. Seeing him approach, Westward Seals The Truth used a Power and hit him with Enochian Syntax.

The NPC’s approach was the result of a new reaction roll with a friendly outcome. Westward’s player asked to cast his spell then realised that it was a new day and that he had to roll to see which Power he got access to today (this being a feature of the Pale One class). I was about to rule that since the sun hadn’t risen it wasn’t actually dawn, and that Powers reset at dawn – partly because I wanted to see how this played out, and partly because I thought that that was an interesting consequence of this weather result – but Westward’s player had already rolled and come up with Enochian Syntax as his Power for a second day running. The group were delighted by this and I decided not to say anything about dawn, since this was a fun moment for them and I didn’t want to taint it with bookkeeping (i.e. “actually don’t roll for new Omens, and your spent Powers from yesterday are still spent”) and well-actually rules lawyering.

The Power went off successfully, and Westward Seals The Truth commanded the stranger to “worship me as your god”. The NPC immediately fell to his knees in tears, overawed at suddenly finding himself in the presence of divinity. Mörk Borg spellcasting feels a little strange to me, because NPCs and the like don’t get saving throws rules-as-written. I think this is largely because players roll to activate their powers, which functions in the same way as a save, and so when they work they just work. It’s definitely taking some adjusting for me as a GM to get used to it, and I do wonder how powerful magic is going to be once we’ve levelled up a little and Westward is rolling with a +3 Presence every time. But we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Hearing the commotion the other two intruders stepped out of their lodgings, crossbows raised and ready to fight. Westward Seals The Truth spent another Power to use his spell again and was again successful, and he now found himself with two followers prostrate at his feet. The third, seeing his companions overcome with this weird fervour, immediately turned and fled into the dark morning.

The third guard fleeing was the result of a Morale roll. At this point the group began to wonder how long this effect on the two intruders would last. The wording of the Power gives no end state, it simply says that one target will “blindly obey a command”. Since the command “worship me as your god” is open ended rather than a discrete task that can be completed, we agreed that this effect will simply continue until something disrupts it. This obviously has the potential to be a very, very powerful ability for Westward Seals The Truth to have to hand, but I’m not overly concerned about it. He needs to roll his Powers randomly every day, so he won’t always have access to it, and in a world as preoccupied with gods and religion as Mörk Borg it’s only a matter of time before a much more powerful group learns about this new prophet gathering a following and decides to intervene. The Two Headed Basilisks don’t look kindly on heretics, so this feels like a self-correcting problem – if, indeed, it ever becomes a problem.

Westward Seals The Truth began to read from the book of the Hanged God to his new disciples, who were (respectfully, fearfully) confused. Why, they asked, are you telling us about this god when you are our god? After some back and forth Westward Seals The Truth set his followers a task; return to Schleswig and begin to spread the word of my coming. And while you’re there, see if you can convince Fathmu to start building some roads in the Valley of The Unfortunate Undead. (I don’t know why the group have decided that their long term mission is to develop some infrastructure in the Dying World but it apparently is.)

Before they left, the new disciples asked Westward Seals The Truth for a gift, something to mark them as his followers and help them prove the truth of their words when they speak to the uninitiated. He spent a Power and removed one of his eyes, handing it to the first intruder he had overpowered. Without missing a beat the man raised a hand to his own eye, tore it out of his head, and forced Westward Seals The Truth’s gift into the bloody socket. Then, as the group looked in horror, the two men thanked their new god and disappeared into the gloom on their new mission.

This was quite an extreme thing for the NPC to do, and I had the rare opportunity as a GM to see actual shock and horror on the faces of the players during this sequence. I wanted to convey to them the gravity a command like “worship me as a god” and give a sense of the lengths someone being compelled to blind, uncritical faith with go to in order to impress their deity when they know that god-figure to be factually real, alive, and walking the earth. I’ll also admit that I just enjoy this sort of horrible fucked up nonsense, too, and over the past few weeks I’ve grown to learn that the players enjoy it as well. It was also very satisfying to have the NPC be able to mirror or invert Westward Seals The Truth’s regular practice of removing his extra eyes. This exchange wouldn’t be appropriate at a lot of tables, and I checked in with people afterwards to make sure we were all okay with where it went.

Still reeling from what had happened the group set off to the southwest, set on finding the citadel. Brint lit a torch to navigate the unnatural darkness and they began their trek cross country. Another successful navigation check meant they held their course, and soon they began to feel the ground changing beneath their feet as it sloped down, becoming hard like granite. After a few hours of trekking through the dark they began to see forms in the darkness of the middle distance – something that looked like a vast archway, and a dully shining metal dome maybe a mile to the east of it.

Here they had entered the next hex, which contains the citadel. As part of my prep I built a small 7 node point crawl to mark the approach to the citadel itself, with two potential entrances connecting to different routes. Given the way I’d described the darkness of the day it didn’t make sense for them to be able to see the landmarks in the two starting nodes, but I wanted to offer them some semblance of a choice rather than me choosing where they should enter. I decided to just describe the landmarks as shapes looming out of the darkness, letting them choose from incomplete information rather than providing absolutely nothing.

They chose to stick to the east, heading towards the dome. As they approached it the details began to resolve themselves and they could see that they were heading towards the head of an enormous statue that was lying in the lee of a steep hill. The mouth gaped open, revealing a hollow interior, and a low light flickered inside one of the eyes.

Another Power spent, and another one of Westward Seals The Truth’s eyes launched from a sling. Svind’s aim was true, and the eye flew through the open eye socket and into the room beyond it. There Westward Seals The Truth witnessed a strange sight, a humanoid figure with a lantern for a head asleep under a blanket, clutching a wicked knife to their chest. The soft eyeball rolling across the floor didn’t seem to have disturbed the creature, so outside the group quietly began to discuss what they should do.

Brint headed into the skull via the mouth, where he found a featureless metal space. A narrow shaft in the roof led up into the space behind the eyes, the surfaces slick with mud and blood. Choosing not to try and climb it, the group instead lashed some rope around Svind’s bear trap and decided to try and use it like a grappling hook to scale the side of the skull and climb in through the eye. Taking hold of it Svind gathered his strength and threw the trap up in the direction of the window, and Westward Seals The Truth watched through his separated eye as the trap clattered down into the room and the strange lantern-headed creature woke with a start, grabbing its knife and skittering to the back of the room to hunch against the sloping wall.

I called for a high DR Strength test to throw the bear trap. Svind failed initially, but spent an Omen to reroll and was able to succeed. I rolled a reaction check for the wickhead and got a result of “Uncertain, monster confused”. Unsure how to interpret this based on the fiction I decided to also make a Morale check, which he failed. A further check for the result of this failed morale test gave me the answer that the creature should flee.

As Brint began to climb the rope attached to the bear trap the creature in the room turned tail and fled, sliding down the shaft inside the skull and running out of the mouth opening in an attempt to get away from the group, but Westward made use of his Enochian Syntax Power and was again successful. Once again, another reluctant follower was commanded to worship him as a god. The wickhead was less immediately subservient than the humans who had previously been commanded, but he cast aside his knife as commanded and promised to lead the party to their destination.

In writing this up I’m wondering whether we kept track of Westward Seals The Truth’s daily powers properly, but nobody seemed to mind if he used them more often than he should have been able to. Something to bear in mind for the future, there.

The wickhead’s lack of fear for this new deity was a result of my “head canon” for wickheads in the world of Mörk Borg, which is informed by my adventure A Waning Light. The wickhead was birthed from the flesh of its people’s living god, and as a result is less impressed by physical manifestations of divinity since he technically is one himself. The group, of course, don’t know this. I also haven’t yet figured out how (or if) this interacts with the longevity of Westward’s magic. I don’t want to unfairly nerf this thing, because it’s a very creative use of the ability that ties directly in to the events unfolding in the campaign and punishing that because it’s being used to steamroll some NPCs would be poor GMing. I also want to keep it interesting, though, and make sure that this doesn’t become the sort of ability that renders every encounter completely trivial on the days where Westward has access to it.

The wickhead led them on past a stone tomb that the group briefly debated breaking in to and exploring (which they may have regretted, as it was Death Temple Sztun) before deciding to press on. He led them into a crack in the ground that opened into a tight tunnel, and when they finally emerged from the other end they found themselves standing in the shadow of a huge black rock – the fallen star. A jagged crack in the base opened onto the buried ruins of the Citadel.

The group scrambled down into it to find themselves standing on a stretch of ancient road lined on both sides by the ruins of shops and houses, the huge weight of the star hanging above them and the road terminating at both ends in immovable walls of rubble after a very short distance. As the group assessed the situation and tried to decide which building to explore to try and find a way deeper into the Citadel, we brought the session to a close.

There’s very little prep for me to do for next time, which is nice. Since they’ll only be resting overnight here I only need to update one faction goal, and there’s nothing for me to build or write. At this point I still needed to work out what the Book Of The Hanged God does, but it wasn’t a huge priority and I decided to let ideas gestate about it until it became more important. That process ultimately resulted in the Book as featured in The Chapel of The Hanged God.

All the play reports from this campaign are accessible in the play reports category. The hex map for this campaign is available here.

---

Prep for this session was minimal. I’ve adopted some ideas from the Mothership Wardens’ Operation Manual about how to track faction goals, adding pages for King Fathmu IX, the Cult Of The Forsaken, Eldar and Qilnach, and Techiya the devil to my campaign notebook and giving them all goals with varying numbers of checkboxes next to them based on their difficulty. Each in-game week I’ll roll 1d100 to see how these goals progress.

For this session I didn’t roll anything for the Cult of the Forsaken, since the party only met them last session and we’re starting play with that encounter still ongoing. I rolled for Fathmu IX and Techiya’s goals, and to see how much progress Eldar and Qilnach have made in their journey towards Galgenbeck.

In the notebook I’m tracking these with squares that either get filled in when they make progress or crossed out when there’s a setback. For the purposes of these play reports I’ll indicate unfilled boxes with a _, filled boxes with a C, and setbacks with an X. Their goals look like this:

Techiya, Devil

Goal 1: Find a better host than Borda’s corpse. C _ _ Goal 2: Catch up to the PCs. X _ _ _

Eldar and Qilnach

Goal: Reach Galgenbeck. X _ _ _

Fathmu XI

Goal 1: Discover the hiding place of Verhu. X _ _ _ _ _ _ Goal 2: Fill the citadel’s stores with food. C _ _ _

It’s not important that I know exactly what impact most of these goals have on the fiction, just that I’m aware of them. The only one I’m keeping an active log of is Fathmu’s second goal, which is going to impact encounters and hex fills nearer to Schleswig as his forces tax and raid more of the countryside. Right now, though, the party are nowhere near that area, and so it doesn’t really impact anything in the game.

Hex fills used this session: 01: Woods. Village of the Forsaken. Suicide cult. Weird ritual to determine whether someone dies each week. 10: Mountains. Empty. 20: Mountains. Monastery. Monks try to prevent Miseries.

Play time: 2 hours.

---

With the remaining two cultists fleeing into the trees and the sound of a large force heading down the road from the nearby village, the party decided to break south into the forest and try to reach Schleswig in the next few days. Brint made an attempt to heal Westward’s broken arm using a scroll but failed. The scroll wasn’t damaged, but Brint suffered ill effects and the next hour of travel was marred with dizziness and mild hallucinations.

Westward attempted to navigate for the group. A failed navigation roll (just a DR12 Presence test) meant a secret check to see if they veered off course and became lost, but fate was on their side and they managed to keep a southerly route.

I use a very basic procedure to check for veer, rolling a d10 and mapping it onto the three sides of the hex in the direction of travel. 1-4 means veering to the left (so in this case, exiting through the south east side), 5-6 continues straight, and 7-10 veers to the right (south west, here).

The afternoon passed without incident, with no sounds of pursuit from the forest behind, and as night fell the group emerged from the edge of the forest into the foothills of a sprawling mountain range. They decided to press on uphill a little, finding a spot where they could watch the edge of the forest for signs of pursuit and making a dark camp with no fire.

Watches passed without incident and the morning brought no Miseries. My weather roll gave a result of 6: Dead quiet, and the group decided that this was good hunting weather. As Westward continued to navigate south into the mountains (passing the navigation test), Brint led the hunt.

Here I called for a Presence test from Brint to see how successful the hunt was, and he failed it. The group had been excited to use the ‘Eat. Prey. Kill.’ hunting rules from Feretory and were disappointed by this failed roll. My encounter roll came up positive, though, so rather than using my normal encounter table I instead rolled on the creature list for this area in ‘Eat. Prey. Kill.’ and treated them as a normal encounter.

As the group wound their way up a steep ravine they heard the sound of hooves ahead and, rounding a corner, saw a group of three fleshless, boney horse-like creatures grazing on bracken and moss. Brint drew his bow and started to sneak up the ravine, trying to get high on the wall and duck behind rocks to remain out of sight. A failed Agility test meant that he sent a small avalanche of gravel tumbling down the slope, alerting the Bonemares to his presence. The mares immediately began to charge the group.

The Bonemare’s Special ability is that, on its first go in combat, it uses a random Unclean Scroll’s power. As well as rolling for reactions (Hostile Reaction) I rolled a random power for each mare ahead of the encounter moving into combat. Since ‘Hostile’ is distinct from ‘Immediate attack’, and since I’m treating these as wild animals, I gave a 50/50 chance that they’d either break and flee or else charge the group. The dice told me that they’d charge, but I made the call that they wouldn’t stick around and fight – they’d simply try to charge through and flee down the ravine.

The group won initiative, and Brint unleashed an arrow that made contact with one of the Bonemares but skittered off the exposed bones, not seeming to do as much damage as expected. (Brint rolled a 4 for damage, but the Bonemares have -d4 reduction and I rolled a 3. This seemed the most obvious way of narrating that.) While Ator climbed a nearby tree to stay out of the fight Svind unleashed his sling and Westward charged forward to try and backhand one of the mares with his broken arm, which has the severed arm of one of the hanging cultists from the forest strapped to it like a splint. All of these attacks missed.

I’ve ruled that while Westward’s arm is broken, all of his attempts to do things with it will be at DR+4 (so DR16 as standard). This did not help him out in this situation.

Initiative switching to the horses, they unleashed their random powers. Svind was immediately rendered unconscious (Eyelid Blinds the Mind), but Westward managed to shrug off the effects of two powers simultaneously trying to push him backwards along the path (Te-le-kin-esis) and choking him (Daemon of Capillaries).

Here I gave each player a value from 1-4 and rolled 3d4 publicly to choose targets. Mörk Borg doesn’t call for the GM to roll very often and I tend to make my encounter rolls, reaction rolls, etc. privately, but when I’m picking targets for random effects I like to roll in the open so that players know I’m not unfairly picking on anybody. Westward passed his first test, then used an Omen to reroll the second one that he initially failed.

As the mares closed ranks they attacked, one trying to bite Westward and another simply charging down Brint. With the Bonemares in their midst, Westward brandished his warhammer and attempted to strike the mare that had just bitten him but was unable to make contact as it barreled past him.

Here Westward’s player chose to use one of his Omens to reduce the test of this attack by 4, bringing it to DR12 and missing. Ator’s player then questioned whether a warhammer uses one or two hands. Most of us agreed that, traditionally, it’s a two-handed weapon, but Mörk Borg doesn’t particularly care about this and the illustration of the weapon in the book makes it appear much smaller than we’re used to in other fantasy games. We decided that it is a one-handed weapon, and since we’d already ruled that Westward has broken his off hand I agreed that the warhammer can be used one-handed. Since That would have made the DR for this attack 12 rather than 16 we agreed that there had been no need for Westward to spend the Omen and he got it back, but he was happy to stand by the result of the original roll – which was still a miss.

Up in the tree, Ator began to concoct a plan to throw down a length of chain, wrap it around Svind’s prone body, and drag him up to safety. He quickly realised that not only would this be very difficult to achieve but that a chain long enough to reach from the top of a tree to a body several feet away on the floor would be very heavy, and would be likely to do serious damage to his friend on impact. Instead he applied some poison to his arrow and unleashed a shot at the charging Bonemares, which missed.

The charging Bonemares lashed out again at those around them, kicking Brint who would have dropped to 0hp without the use of an Omen, and attempting to bite Westward but being foiled by his use of an Omen to reroll his defence. Svind, asleep on the ground, took some damage from being trampled but was mercifully not killed. Having now broken through the party the mares continued their charge down the mountain, and the group chose not to pursue them.

As the dust settled the group decided to press on up the mountain, guessing that they should be approaching the end of the range at this point and being a little dismayed to find that there was still lots more mountain ahead of them.

If I were running this in person I’d ask the group to map, and when I’ve played hex-based campaigns on VTTs the GM has often revealed the map to us a few hexes at a time. In this instance, because the group started out with a map of the area and because none of them are used to this mode of play, I’ve given them access to the full map but am leaving it up to them to figure out which hex they’re in. So far they’ve been used to covering two hexes per day, but their pace has slowed as they climb these mountains and they hadn’t accounted for that in trying to figure out where they are.

With Westward navigating again they continued south, and Brint once again went on the lookout for something to hunt to replenish their rations. Successful navigation and hunting rolls meant that they were able to proceed along their chosen course, and Brint harvested a clutch of fat grubs clinging to some rocks that he thought looked edible. As night fell the group began looking for a cave to camp in, somewhere sheltered from the massing storm on the horizon where they might also be able to light a fire. Westward had rolled very well on his navigation check (a natural 20 on the dice), so I provided a clean, empty cave for them to spend the night in. They decided to set up Westward’s bear trap at the entrance of the cave, assigned watches, and turned in for the night.

As Westward kept watch he became aware of the sounds of shuffling feet somewhere outside the cave, and as they grew closer he also began to hear low, rhythmic chanting that he identified as being religious. With no night vision due to his proximity to the fire he spent a Power to remove one of his many eyes and tossed it out onto the road, calling out “Keep it down!” and waking the rest of the party. His eye tumbled onto the path behind the group, who ignored his calls, and he was able to catch a glimpse of flapping green robes and sandalled feet disappearing into the night. Telling the group that he had seen some weird green ghosts in the night, the party chose to go back to bed. The rest of the night passed without incident.

*At night I’ve been using the ‘Nightly campsite events’ table from Feretory rather than my normal encounter table, just for some variety (at least until I get bored of it). The result here was “A band of blind albino cultists pass by, quietly chanting eerie hymns to their alligator goddess”. My initial reaction roll was ‘Indifferent’, so I had them give the fire a wide berth. Once Westward drew attention to the group I made a second reaction roll, producing the same result.

In the morning I rolled for Miseries and came up blank, and I made the decision that this seemed like a good time to use the “Getting better” rules. The party had had a mostly successful dungeon delve in session 1, survived a potentially deadly encounter in session 2, and successfully evaded their captors in this session, and it felt like time to give them a reward of some kind. Brint’s player – who isn’t using any of the optional classes – asked if he could use the ‘Unheroic Feats’ from Heretic, and we agreed that when we do ‘Getting Better’ he can choose to either roll for ability score improvements or roll for a random feat (or make the case for why he should gain a specific feat if it fits with the established fiction of the game and the things he’s been doing).

This is the first time I’ve used the advancement rules and I think the players were happy to gain some more hit points. I’ll be interested to see if their approach to violent situations changes now that they feel a little more resilient, since so far they’ve been pretty good about not defaulting to violence the second they meet NPCs.*

Morning broke, bringing no Miseries and roaring thunder from clouds amassing to the south. They decided to press south , hoping to get down out of the mountains before the storm hit. Westward navigated again and as they travelled south they saw a monastery perching on the mountainside above them, with uneven stairs carved into the stone leading up to it. A rope handrail along the stairs fluttered with green flags.

I decided to combine the scant details from my hex fill (“Monastery. Monks try to prevent Miseries”) with the alligator cultists of the night before. As the party debated what they wanted to do I jotted down some quick notes about this alligator cult. I invented names for their god, the leader/head priest, and the guard who would answer the gate should the party knock on it, and I came up with some details about their customs and attire.

Deciding that this must be where the “green ghosts” from the night before lived, the group decided to try the same trick that they had used on the Cult of the Forsaken and attempt to convince whoever lived here that Westward was the avatar of an almost-forgotten god. He decided to strip off all of his clothes, covering himself in moss and foliage and painting himself as green as possible. Then he climbed the stairs and knocked on the door.

Reaction roll for the guard: ‘Enthusiastic. Volunteers help.’

A small panel opened in the gate and the group were greeted by a very strange man. His head had been completely shaved, the white of his eyes tattooed yellow, and he had small green scales like those of a lizard stitched into either cheek, just beneath his eyes. As he spoke they saw that his tongue had been forked and tattooed black.

He greeted them and asked their business, and Westward began to read from the Book of the Hanged God. The doorman, unable to understand a word that was being said by this naked man covered in mud and leaves, was obviously concerned for Westward’s well-being and turned to ask the group if he was okay.

The group explained that they are prophets of the Hanged God, that they have big plans to bring roads and running water to the Valley of the Unfortunate Undead, and that they were visiting today to ask if anybody in the monastery was in need of a friendly god and wanted to join the cause. The doorman explained, very patiently, that everyone here already had a perfectly good god that they had pledged their service to, and invited the group inside to bathe, eat, and join the residents for mass.

This is the second time Westward has read directly from the Book of the Hanged God. Initially I didn’t give it any special powers, since I didn’t anticipate it becoming so central to the action, but I plan to change that. The writing on the wall in the catacombs of the church caused one PC to become rapt with religious fervour and hang himself, and the page from it that had been used to create the group’s original map had glowed brighter and brighter as it approached the hanging figure in the room where the book was found, so I want this book to do something interesting. I don’t know what yet, and that will be part of my prep for next week.

Very cautiously the group accepted the offer and were led into the small courtyard of the monastery. Inside they saw more figures in green robes going about their business, all with shaved heads and all bearing different numbers of scales stitched into their cheeks. The doorman led the group into a tunnel carved in the mountainside and along several branching passages filled with more cultists, finally coming to a large archway hung with a green curtain. As a bell began to ring somewhere above them and cultists began to pass through the curtain, he beseeched the group to disarm themselves before they stepped into the chapel.

Westward and Brint agreed but the others refused to part with their weapons, and the doorman patiently explained that they wouldn’t be allowed to attend mass if they came armed. Westward and Brint handed over their weapons to their friends, who were led back out to the courtyard by a young robed figure the doorman recruited for the task. They were given bread and water and told to make themselves comfortable.

Inside the chapel, Westward and Brint sat through a very long and tedious mass in a language they couldn’t understand. A man who looked very much like he fitted the description of “head priest” – another person with tattooed eyes, and a mass of green scales stitched into his face and neck – led sermons and prayers from an altar beneath a huge statue of an seven-armed alligator with large, fist-sized emeralds for eyes. The doorman explained, in hushed tones, that the god Zushrazk was an ancient enemy of Nechrubel, who had risen from the swamps to the south west and fought to keep the light in the sky. Now her followers prayed for her return and tried to recover her lost magics to fight off the onset of Misery.

After mass the group were offered the chance to bathe. Accepting, they were led down more passages that spiralled deeper into the mountain. The temperature grew, and they soon emerged into a vast natural cave filled with steaming water. They stripped and settling into the pool, but it wasn’t long before they spied movement in the shadows and discovered that they were sharing the water with large alligators. As the beasts moved closer the party fled the waters, shouting for help from their guide who appeared quickly and seemed entirely unbothered by the presence of the reptiles in the water. He explained that the beasts were sacred, and when Westward asked if he could ride one the man laughed and told him that he was welcome to try.

Feeling like things weren’t quite right here, and deeply suspicious of the overt friendliness of these alligator monks, the party dressed and took their leave. As they were gathered at the door, ready to strike out to the south and find somewhere to camp for the night, the doorman stepped out and shut the door behind him so that he could have a private word with the group. He explained that the residents of the monastery were the descendants of people who had once lived in a great citadel to the southwest, in barren land that had once been a swamp. There, he said, they had lived side by side with the living god Zushrazk. Then Nechrubel had sent death from above. Several centuries ago the citadel was crushed under the weight of a falling star and the survivors fled into the mountains.

Zushrazk was believed killed, but many maintain that divinity cannot die and that she must still live, sealed in the ruins of the citadel in the place that came to be known as the Black Star Crater. There had been several expeditions there over the years, attempts to gain entry to the fallen citadel and recover whatever could be saved of Zushrazk, but the monks were not fighters or explorers and they were not suited to this work. The party, though, looked like they might be the types who would take on such a job. Would they be willing to venture to the crater and see what they could recover, in exchange for pay and the use of the monastery as a safe haven should they need to pass through the mountains again?

After some discussion – much revolving around whether they could eventually convert these cultists to the Hanged God and being building an army, for purposes currently unclear – the party agreed, and allowed themselves to be led back into the monastery to sleep for the night.

This final part of the encounter was driven by me deciding I wanted to give the players something to grab hold of here, should they want to. When I placed this monastery in the hex I should have spent some time figuring out who lived here and what they wanted, so that I wouldn’t have to invent this stuff on the fly. I quickly rolled on the Adventure Spark table at the back of the Mörk Borg core book and got the result “Movement in a black star’s crater”. After inventing the stuff about the citadel and the fallen star I decided to place it in hex 24, since that’s barren and the fill simply reads “Barren. Empty.”

Prep for next time will involve writing up this new faction, building out at least one level of the dungeon that the party is now heading towards, and updating some faction goals as it’s now the start of a new in-game week. I also need to think about what I want the Book Of The Hanged God to do, and how I’m going to introduce that to the game in a way that doesn’t feel unexpected or unfair.

All the play reports from this campaign are accessible in the play reports category. The hex map for this campaign is available here.

---

Prep for this session was a little more extensive than session 1. I generated a hexmap for the Valley of the Unfortunate Dead, overlaying hexes onto the map in Mörk Borg: Feretory and bounding my region with the roads between key locations in the area. You can see that here if you’re interested. I filled them all using Luke Gearing’s hexfill procedure, sticking to very terse one sentence fills for each hex alongside a fairly extensive encounter table and the weather table on the Mörk Borg GM screen. (Part of my aim with this campaign is to make more use of extant material in the core book, plus Feretory and Heretic and maybe some select 3pp, to make my prep more about collation and re-interpretation than invention. We’ll see how that goes.)

The hex fills used in this session were:

• 4. Barren. The ground smoulders and smokes, patches of eternal fire. The road tuns to tar.
• 5. Woods. Road. Empty.
• 1. Woods. Village of the Forsaken. Suicide cult. Weird ritual to determine whether someone dies each week.

Session length: 2 hours

---

This week saw a new player joining us, and one of the players from last week unable to make the session. Characters present were Svind and his small but vicious dog, Brint, and newcomer Westward Seals The Gate.

I run a drop in/drop out game. If you can’t make it to a session your characters just aren’t present that week. When you come back – or, as with this week, if you’re a new player – we just pretend that your character was here all along. This breaks a little bit of immersion/verisimilitude, but it also means that nobody gets upset that they come back from missing a week to find that people have made decisions that negatively impact their characters.

At the start of the session I rolled a Misery check. I’ve decided to use a d20, giving a 5% chance of a Misery each dawn, which gives us a decent chance of seeing some of that stuff happen without the game feeling really compressed.

Play started with a short discussion about what the group was going to do next. All agreed that they needed to return to Schleswig with the book of the Hanged God. Their original journey to the Hangman’s Church brought them cross-country, but the map that led them here no longer exists. With a choice of heading out into the wilderness without a guide or choosing the roads heading in the direction of either Bergen Chrypt or Galgenbeck, they chose to head east in the direction of Galgenbeck. This decision was made easier by the fact that tracks in the mud indicated that Eldar and Qilnach had also headed in this direction with the donkey and the wagon. The plan, then, was to head off the deserters along the road, retrieve the donkey, and then head to Galgenbeck before turning back south to Schleswig.

When running overland travel I generally assume that a group can cover two hexes a day on foot. On a well maintained road this would probably increase, but this road isn’t well maintained. I check for encounters at the start of the day and roll to see if it occurs in the morning (generally, unless they spend a lot of time exploring in a specific hex, this means hex 1) or evening (hex 2). Once night falls I make another encounter check for night time events. On this first day, both came up empty.)

An uneventful day of travel saw them reach the Galgenbeck road and start following it to the east. The road itself was in disrepair, formed of huge slabs of old slate riddled with cracks, shattered chunks, and pools of stagnant standing water. The wagon tracks vanished as soon as they reached the road, but the party assumed that Eldar and Qilnach would follow the road rather than head out across country on their own. The land either side of the road was flat and barren, marked by patches of burning shrubland and blasted copses of trees turned to carbon. In places the road surface itself was melting despite the chill in the air, and the party gave these pools of liquid stone a wide berth.

They pressed on to the east, making camp for the night at the edge of dense woodland. As morning broke a cloudburst brought an onslaught of cold rain, and heavy thunder rumbled across the sky. They quickly followed the road into the trees, hoping to gain some shelter under the canopy.

Pressing on along the road, the group soon began to see dark shapes a few hundred yards ahead of them. The rain made visibility poor, so rather than approach they stopped and let Westward Seals The Gate take the lead. He spent a Power to remove one of his too many eyes and threw it as far as he could down the road, hoping that it would roll close to the figures and allow him to get a better view. With his eye settled beneath them, Westward saw that the figures were a pair of men hanging from the trees by their necks, clothing removed and piled neatly beneath them. They appeared to be very dead.

Here I finally got a positive encounter roll, giving me “two roadside corpses”. This hex contains a village containing a suicide cult, so I made the decision that these were cultists who had hanged themselves from the trees. I didn’t consider how this would link back to the Hanged God and the hanging bodies in the church from last session.

Deciding that there was no danger here the group approached. Searching the clothing they found a scroll, which they took without examining. Then Westward decided to climb one of the bodies and sever its arm, reasoning that Svind’s small but vicious dog would need food on the journey.

As Westward was up in the tree he heard noises from further along the road. From his vantage point he was able to see a group of 6 people in brown robes walking along the path toward them, each of them holding a length of thick rope while chatting amiably to one another. Seeing Westward in the tree, the leader of the group waved and called out a friendly greeting.

This was a successful encounter roll that gave me the result “2d6 hopeless cultists seek Village of the Forsaken”. Since that village is in this hex I decided instead that these would be members of the cult coming from the village. I made the call that today was a ritual sacrifice day and that this group were the lucky few chosen for the task. A reaction roll gave me the result “Friendly”. (I’m using the Holmes reaction table rather than the Mörk Borg one simply because I’ve internalised it enough that I can roll 2d6 and not have to look up the result).

Initially the group were wary of the cultists, but they were quickly disarmed by their openness and friendliness – especially as nobody seemed to care that Westward Seals The Gate was in the process of butchering one of their former members. They explained that their elders had read the omens and determined that this week called for a sacrifice to keep the coming apocalypse at bay, and that they were the ones chosen to make it.

Hearing more about this suicide cult, the group made the connection between their beliefs and what they had gleaned of the Hanged God when reading the writing on the walls in the Hangman’s Church. They asked the leader of the group of cultists – whose name they never bothered to learn – whether he was a worshipper of the Hanged God, and the cultists made it clear that they had never heard of such an entity.

Once again Westward Seals The Gate took the lead. Being literate in dead languages he was able to read the text inside the book of the Hanged God, and so he began to read passages from it to the cultists. The group learned that the Hanged God is an old god worshipped before before Verhu’s prophecies were found in the Nameless Scriptures and His predictions began to manifest themselves. The Hanged God opposed Nechrubel, sacrificing his own flesh and that of his followers to keep the darkness that crosses the sun at bay.

When the Nameless Scriptures were found and Verhu’s prophecies were discovered to be unfailingly accurate the Two-Headed Basilisks began purging followers of the old religions, decrying them as heretics and burning them in honour of He. The congregation of the Hanged God was small to begin with – it’s an inherent problem of suicide cults that membership will naturally decline even without outside influence – and they were quickly stamped out, their church left to rot forgotten in the Valley of the Unfortunate Undead.

The cultists from the village were amazed by this revelation, and they began to wonder whether the elders they follow knew of the Hanged God. They asked that the group come with them to the village, to speak to the elders and hand over the book and, perhaps, begin the process of returning the church of the Hanged God to some semblance of stability and health.

The group declined, and instead chose a different tack. They claimed that Westward Seals The Gate, in his alien countenance, was a prophet of the Hanged God, and they beseeched the cultists to abandon their old masters and instead pledge allegiance to Westward Seals The Gate. The elders, they said, are exploiting you, and you should leave them. After some back and forth on this topic, with the cultists growing more and more unsure and more irritated, things soon deteriorated into violence.

I had no idea where this exchange was going to end up. For a long time it looked like the group had made a good alliance with an interesting group of people, but it all unravelled in a few seconds. No dice rolls were made to dictate the outcomes of this encounter, it was all driven by roleplay and having the NPCs react in realistic ways to the things the PCs were saying to them.

The fight was gruelling and quite drawn out, with the cultists using their thick ropes to variously beat the PCs or else try to choke them with their nooses. Westward Seals The Gate suffered a broken arm, and Svind took a bad blow to the head that caused haemorrhaging that would have killed him had he not remembered the elixirs of health taken from Gotven’s corpse in the last session. One of the cultists fled partway through the battle, running back to the village to raise the alarm, and after the PCs killed three of the remaining cultists the other two fled into the trees.

The first cultist running back to the village was a decision I made about how a smart enemy might act. The two fleeing at the end of the battle were the result of a failed morale check I chose to make after the leader of the group was killed.

Thus the session ended with the group battered and broken on the road, all their Omens spent, and the sound of a mass of people heading down the road towards them from the village.

I’m making an effort to write more play reports of my games. They’re an important part of the scene that I don’t think we see enough of any more, and they serve as a good oral history of what play looks like. I’m less concerned with solely narrativising play and more interested in talking about my techniques for running the game and decisions I make in play. As A Dungeon Game is something of a “living” game still in active development I’m also interested here in looking at how the game survives contact with real players.

Last night I ran a session of my adventure FEAST using A Dungeon Game for two players new to the system. We created characters and played through half of the adventure in a little under 2 hours. FEAST was written to be system neutral and I converted it on the fly with ease. For the purposes of this post I have written up a full conversion of the adventure, which you can find here.

Character creation was quick and simple, with some decent rolls from both players. One player chose to learn a pair of Rituals, sacrificing their relatively high Cunning and rolling well (a pair of 1s) when asked to pay the price. The characters are:

Deandre Rall

Former hangman. Face twisted into a grimace due to a permanently swollen lip.

• A 17 B 12 C 13 HP 7 AC 0 Scars 1
• Extra: +1 Damage
• Rituals:
  • Phrase: Corrupting Blade
  • Phrase: Lingering Bears
• Medium ranged weapon (heavy crossbow)
• Medium melee weapon (machete)
• Equipment:
  • Torches x6
  • Tent
  • 8sp

Chauncey

Former brewer. One leg shorter than the other due to a poorly-set break.

• A 11B12 C11 HP 11 AC 6 Scars 1
• Extra: +1d3 health
• Medium melee weapon (mace)
• Small ranged weapon (hand crossbow)
• Equipment:
  • Rations (1 week)
  • Torches x6
  • 11sp

The only reason I’m writing up the full characters is because I wanted to experiment with how to present them in text. This can be reduced even more if I use “H” in place of “HP” and “S” in place of “Scars”.

We began on the edge of the dense beech forest, with a small cabin nestled in the shadow of the trees and a track winding past it and disappearing into the woods. Our characters had met while travelling cross country to get here, both drawn by the sight of a falling star a week earlier that they intended to find. I had them both roll on the “Fungal Coercions” table to give them both a reason to be here. Their rolls were identical, and the players filled in the detail. I determined that both were infected with the fungus but had not yet become aware of it.

Noticing smoke rising from the chimney of the cabin and movement inside, the pair knocked on the door and let themselves in. Inside they found a woman who greeted them warmly, offering them tea and biscuits and asking them their business in the forest. She introduced herself as Amanya and explained that she had been conducting research here for a month or two, and that in recent days the forest had begun to attract more and more visitors.

They questioned her about her research and she happily explained that she was a scholar of old and forgotten gods. The locals know of a spirit in the forest that they call Pahloun Efagddu[^1], but Amanya believes that it has a much older name that has been forgotten. She told them that there is a standing stone in the heart of the forest that according to her old books marks the burial place of a powerful sorcerer who could commune with Pahloun Efaggdu, and that there is rumoured to be a network of ancient caves beneath it. She offered the pair 30 silver if they could locate the standing stone and an entrance to the tunnels, an offer that she said she had extended to other travellers who had visited her.

This exchange was driven by a positive reaction roll and my desire to give them just enough information to want to explore the forest and interact with the things they found. The fallen star is, of course, a red herring and doesn’t exist.

The pair agreed to look for their stone during their search for the star – though not before bargaining Amanya up to 40 silver – and took their leave. As they left she delivered a warning to them. Treat the forest with respect, or it will defend itself.

With the morning burning on they departed the cabin and headed into the trees, following the track until it diverted into three separate paths. The first continued due east and showed signs of recent foot traffic. The other two split off into narrower tracks that looked more like game trails, running to the north- and south-east respectively.

Rather than throw the group straight into the encounter with the distressed, mutilated logger, I decided to give the players a choice about which hex they started in.

Deciding that they didn’t want to run in to anybody else in the forest just yet the party decided to forgo the obvious path and began following the game trail to the north-east. They followed the trail as it wound through densely packed beech trees, the forest floor and trunks coated in thick moss, the air filled with the sound of nuthatches and woodpeckers. They soon found that the game trail began to fade but they pressed on in roughly the same direction, using the position of the sun glimpsed above the canopy to aid with navigation.

After a few hours they came to a place where an ancient beech tree had been cut down. The stump was wrapped in thick chain as though somebody had tried to pull it out of the ground and failed. The chains themselves were rusted and old, and the scene was being reclaimed by moss and creeper. The pair began examining the scene, and wondered whether it might prove useful later to salvage some of the chain. With about 30 feet of the stuff wrapped around the tree they decided that it was too much to carry, and that if it was so decayed that they were able to snap it then it wouldn’t be particularly useful, and so they left it.

Their interest was piqued, though, and they began scouting further out to look for evidence of whoever might have been working here. They moved further into the forest, searching slowly and carefully, and a few hundred yards from the tree they discovered an old camp, apparently hastily broken down. Pots lay cold in the ashes, overtaken by furry mould, and nonsense sigils had been carved into the bark of the surrounding trees.

The first encounter with the chained tree was the result of an encounter roll. The abandoned camp was a decision I took to place another result from the encounter table in front of them. Part of this was driven by the fact that they were actively looking for exactly this sort of location, and part of it was driven by the fact that we were running this as a one-shot and I wanted to introduce the weirdness in the forest early in order to set the tone.

Deciding that there was nothing of interest here but now slightly on edge the pair pressed on into the forest, heading east and keeping a look out for any sign of damage caused by a fallen star. After maybe an hour of exploring they came to a small clearing dominated by a giant beech tree. The trunk was ringed by a perfect circle of purple-capped mushrooms, and its bark was covered with carvings of the same symbol they had seen at the campsite earlier.

As they circled the tree they noticed that the hilt of a knife was protruding from the trunk, and Deandre decided to step into the ring and take it. For a moment the world lurched around them with a feeling as though they had missed a step on a flight of stairs, and then everything righted itself again. (This was a passed saving throw, and my desire to indicate that something had nearly happened.) Deandre took the knife, which they found was made of bone, and pulled it from the tree. Immediately they were gripped by the sensation that this knife was theirs and that nobody would take it from them.

Deciding that there was nothing of interest here and sensing that they were not approaching any sort of fallen star, the pair turned back with the aim of finding the original trail near where they had entered the forest. They retraced their steps, easily following their own tracks, and soon found themselves back at the crossroads. I called for a Cunning test to navigate and Chancey rolled exactly their Cunning, which serves as a crit in A Dungeon Game. I decided that the result of this would be that they did not need to make any more checks to navigate while they were in this already-explored area. Once there they picked the middle path, deciding that the other visitors to the forest must have known something they didn’t.

It didn’t take long before the air began to fill with the scent of fresh sap and saw dust. Up ahead they spied a pair of tents in some disarray, and as they approached they became concerned with the sight of blood and viscera dripping from the branches and daubed across the wood of the trees.

They immediately left the path, stepping into the woods and keeping low to try and circle the campsite and see what was going on. Getting closer they began to hear the sound of low whimpering and crying, and as they circled the tents they saw a lone man sitting on the ground beside one of the tents. His arms ended in jagged, bloody stumps where his hands should have been, and he was desperately trying to apply a tourniquet with unsurprisingly poor results.

Here I made a decision on the fly that this NPC’s missing hands probably constitute a Scar, and I decided that if it somehow came to combat I would allow him to apply a Scar modifier to his rolls. This isn’t something I’ve done before while running A Dungeon Game but I like it as a way to make human enemies a little more varied. It didn’t become relevant here, ultimately, but I’m keeping it in mind for future sessions and have included Scars in the stat blocks of enemies in the conversion for this module.

As the man’s cries rose in volume Chauncey slipped around behind him, approaching quickly but stealthily. He clamped a hand over the man’s mouth, hissing in his ear to be quiet, that they were here to help. Deandre approached from the trees, squatting down and applying the tourniquets so that the man wouldn’t bleed out. Chauncey removed his hand and began to question the man about what had happened, but very little sense was had from him. He babbled and raved about the trees coming to life and attacking him and his friends, and Chauncey and Deandre realised that his friends were still present in the clearing – pulled to ribbons and scattered among the trees.

Deandre was meanwhile searching the wreckage of the campsite, and they came across a leather pouch filled with runestones. Each of them was carved with the same symbol seen on the trees, and as Deandre picked them up they were struck by a vision of a great standing stone, pulsing veins, spurting blood, the symbol carved into flesh. They felt their hand pulled to the boneknife, and an almost overwhelming desire to use it.

This was all narrative, with no saving throws or in game effects (enforced or otherwise).

In an attempt to try and calm the man’s mind and get more sense out of him with the hope of learning more about the runestones, Deandre turned to magic. They had learned the phrase Corrupting Blade, and they wondered whether they could reverse the word “Corrupting” to “Cleansing”, using the bone knife they had recovered from the tree as a focus for the spell to help clear the man’s mind.

I really liked this interpretation of the words and was fully prepared to let this work if the roll went well. I was particularly impressed with this level of creativity and engaging with the system from a player who has never played RPGs before. Unfortunately Deandre’s player failed their roll, and chose not to Exert themselves to make it work. The following encounter was a result of their roll on the Mishap table, plus subsequent rolls from me for encounter distance and reactions.

Holding the knife in their hands Deandre placed the flat of the blade against the man’s temple and tried to channel the words to clear some of the panic from him. As they focused on inverted the phrase they knew, though, one of the words from their other Ritual slipped into their mind instead: Bears.

The magic unravelled and Chaunchey and Deandre froze as a pair of deep, rumbling growls sounded from somewhere very close by. Then the air filled with the sound of rustling undergrowth and something – a pair of somethings – very heavy crashing through the trees towards them.

They ran, Chauncey grabbing the man they had been helping by the ankle and dragging him along behind them in an attempt to keep him safe. Deandre put on a good burst of speed but the man slowed Chauncey down. He could almost feel the hot breath of the bears on his neck, and so he made the hard decision to release the man’s ankle and leave him as bait while he escaped into the forest with Deandre. (I called for Agility tests to determine the result of this chase, with Chauncey rolling at disadvantage. He failed, and chose to leave the NPC behind to be able to escape.)

They ran until they could no longer hear the bears, but they soon found themselves hopelessly lost. Rather than pressing on deeper they decided to turn to the west, pressing through the woods until they found something that they recognised while keeping an eye out for bears. They walked for another hour or two, getting into late afternoon with the sun starting to dip, before they emerged from the forest into a clearing dominated by a wide, low hill. At the top they spied a standing stone – the standing stone – and they climbed the slope to investigate it.

The stone towered over them, ten feet tall and two feet thick, daubed in old graffiti and wrapped with thick green-black vines that wound their way through three holes carved all the way through the rock. Deandre recognised them as matching the shape of the symbol on their runes and carved into the trees, and they felt a pull from the stone and the knife. They knew that they had arrived somewhere they needed to be, and that there was some way to make this stone move and reveal the secrets beneath it.

Deandre took out the bone knife, drawing it across their palm and smearing their blood onto the stone. Immediately the vines pulsed and tightened, writhing and pulling as the ground rumbled beneath. Slowly the stone pulled itself apart along invisible seams, revealing a dark hole in the earth and crude earthen steps descending into humid darkness.

Chauncey suggested that maybe they should find their way back to Amanya and tell her what they had found, but Deandre was possessed with a desire to see what was inside and descended into the darkness. Chauncey followed.

This was all driven entirely by the players buying in to the fiction. I would have been happy for them to go away and not enter the dungeon, but I was even happier that they chose to go inside despite both of the players acknowledging that it felt like a really bad idea.

We left the session here, and will pick it up again inside the dungeon next week.

I’m aiming to write more play reports this year. I really enjoyed writing play reports of my sessions of The Isle and A Dungeon Game over on my Cohost blog and I want to try and get caught up on my current campaign. I think session reports are an important part of the space, a record of how games are actually played that have waned in popularity in recent years. I’d like to see them come back.

As with my other play reports I’m less interested in narrativising play – though that will of course happen – as I am in showing the “behind the screen” workings and how they impact play. GMing has been something of an oral tradition for a long time and I think part of the hesitancy people feel about running their own games is that fear of “getting it wrong” or a feeling that they don’t really know what GMing looks like on a practical level. My hope is that play reports such as these might help with that, simply by saying “here’s how I do it”.

All of the reports for this campaign will be in the Play Reports category.

I ended up turning the dungeon from this first session into a full adventure module called The Chapel of the Hanged God. It’s available in digital and print editions.

---

My prep for this session was building a small dungeon in the crypts beneath a church. I intended to run it as a funnel, with each player having 4 characters each (which meant 12 characters total). If you’re a Patron you can look at the actual prep for this session here.

Names used in the report are those of the characters.

Session length: 2 hours

Content warnings for mind control and suicide, along with all the usual sorts of horrible violence you’d expect in a Mörk Borg funnel.

Session 1

The group arrived at the Hangman’s Church in the Valley of the Unfortunate Undead. Crypt Breakers in the employ of King Fathmu IX in Schleswig, they had been given a map and a task: go to the Hangman’s Church, delve into the crypts beneath it, and return with a map of the complex and whatever relics you can pull out of the earth. If you find evidence of the presence of Verhu, so much the better.

Before entering the church the group decided to scout the grounds, heading to a nearby mausoleum to look for something to loot. The first encounter roll yielded a result of five mindless undead, dice telling me that they were 200 feet away. Having described cloying mists and poor visibility I decided that these creatures would be heard but not yet seen.

Hearing the shambling horde they decided to stop fooling around outside and get to their task. Svind’s small but vicious dog, having smelled the zombies, began barking and pulling at his chain but was forced away. Gotven’s four monkeys, meanwhile, were not at all bothered by the approaching hoard.

Approaching the church, a ruined skeleton of masonry long lost to time and fire, the group realised that Harga’s wagon and donkey probably wouldn’t be able to make it up the steep stairs to the main door. Rather than spending time finding another entrance they elected to tie them up outside, concealing them as best they could behind fallen branches and hoping that the undead would wander past.

Inside the church the group were immediately greeted by the sight of multiple bodies hanging from old rafters around a thick central column, their flesh bloated and ready to pop. They gave these corpses a wide berth, heading up to the altar in order to investigate a bookcase that looked like it may hold some texts of value.

*My first regret, here. In my notes, one of these bodies is possessed by three devils. One of them came here with purpose, seeking the avatar of the Hanged God lurking in the catacombs below, and the other two hitched along for the ride. They’re trapped inside this corpse, in a constant battle for control of the flesh. I rolled to see which devil was currently running the show but, because the group didn’t show any interest in the bodies, I didn’t do anything with it. Only one of the devils is able to actually move the dead corpse slightly and this wasn’t it. *

In hindsight I should have drawn some attention to this, because the players currently have no idea that they exist. That’s not a huge problem, as you’ll see when you keep reading, but it would have been nice for this encounter to happen.

Beside the bookcase they spotted a door that opened onto a spiral staircase leading down into the crypts. Gotven, the heretical priest, started to investigate the books but found that they crumbled to dust when touched and so immediately lost interest. Another slight GMing mistake here, which I’m putting down to not having run a game for a few months and to nerves from running for a group made up of mostly people I’ve never met before. I’d stashed some scrolls in this bookcase – which are how Mörk Borg characters get access to magic – and I didn’t do anything to let the player know that there was more than just rotting, useless books on this bookcase, which meant he didn’t find them.

Harga tested the stairs and noted that they shook slightly under his weight, with an ominous creak. Ignoring this, he, Gotven, Eldar, Brint, and the monkeys started to descend. With a shriek of twisting metal the staircase collapsed underneath them, sending the pair and their troop of monkeys crashing down 30’ to the ground below. A failed Agility test meant full damage for Gotven, who succumbed to his wounds and died – as did the monkeys.

Because I’m running this as a funnel I’m not using the Dying rules for this session, so there was no d4 roll to see what the effect of hitting 0hp was. Once everyone is in control of just one or two characters as of next session we’ll be using the rules as written.

At the bottom of the shaft the survivors picked themselves up, lit a torch, and immediately looted Gotven’s corpse to find that he had been carrying 3 elixirs of health. At the top of the stairs, the rest of the group affixed two 15’ lengths of chain together and then went about trying to decide how to secure it at the top so that it could be climbed. One suggestion was to remove one of Gotven’s legs and fix it across the width of the door with the chain wrapped around it, but they decided instead to run the chain through the heavy brass ring handle on the door, fixing it in place with the blade of a short sword and hoping that it held. A bear trap was placed across the mouth of the door as a deterrent to anybody who might want to follow the group down.

At the bottom the group found themselves in a passage that led to a chamber filled with sarcophagi. Many had been broken open, and the bodies of historic looters were strewn about the place in various stages of decay. Several of them bore large impact wounds to the chest as though they had been shot. The small but vicious dog immediately started chewing on a femur.

I had given the corpses a 2-in-6 chance of animating and the roll didn’t give me it. In hindsight, this being a funnel, I should have just had them come to life. I had also placed grave guns in some of the unlooted sarcophagi – foreshadowed by the gunshot wounds to the chests of the corpses – which I hoped would kill one or two PCs, but the group showed a complete lack of interest in opening any of the remaining caskets.

The room had two exits, identical doors to the north and the south. The players chose here to split the party, with most of the group heading to the north door but Eldar and Qilnach going south. To the north they found a crossroads, with a door to the north as well as doors to the west and east. To the west the door was off its hinges, the doorway filled with the dead body of a looter who appeared to have been choked to death. Searching him turned up a map strapped to his leg.

Meanwhile, the pair to the south had discovered an identical crossroads, though here all the doors were intact. Choosing the west door, Eldar and Qilnach found themselves standing at the base of another spiral staircase. Climbing it, they discovered that it emerged from a door concealed behind the bookcase in the church. Having already seen members of the party die and expecting that things wouldn’t get any better, the pair decided to cut their losses. Heading outside they discovered that the donkey and wagon were still were they had been left, so the pair took hold of the donkey’s reins and simply left.

*The player made this decision because he wasn’t enjoying running four characters at once. In hindsight I should have come up with a stripped-down “level 0” style character generation method for Mörk Borg ahead of the game just so that there wasn’t as much to juggle. The reason funnels work in DCC is because your characters are just a name, a couple *of stats, a length of rope and a rubber duck.

Back up north, unaware that they’d been abandoned, the rest of the group was exploring. In the northernmost room they discovered lots of old furniture covered in dusty sheets, and an ornate mirror mounted on the north wall coated in a rime of frost. They spent quite a lot of time trying to figure out what the deal with it was, before vowing to come back on the way out and loot the thing.

In the room to the east they found a large tapestry on the wall depicting a hanged figure with a crowd of peasants gathered around his feet. The crowd feast on his flesh and drink from wine glasses filled with the blood running from his wounds. They also discovered that the map that had led them here had grown warmer upon entry into this room, and begun to glow with a soft light. The vellum the map was inked on felt more alive, like it was thrumming with a gentle heartbeat.

After some experimentation they began to use the map as a compass of sorts, determining that it grew warmer (and brighter) the further east they moved. Not seeing any way out of this chamber (if they’d removed the tapestry from the wall they would have found a hidden passageway) they headed south in search of their companions, and in doing so discovered that the map also reacted to being taken south. Passing the open door they spotted the stairs and decided that this would be a good time to take the mirror to the wagon, which they promptly discovered was missing.

Vowing revenge on the deserters they headed back into the crypts. With a choice between identical doors to the south and east, and only the reaction of the map to go off for navigation, they chose the east door. This opened onto another small chamber, with a huge stone door in the eastern wall that was hanging at a dangerous angle on rusted hinges. The stonework around it was filled with cracks and trickles of dust fell from the ceiling as the door they came through banged on the wall.

For the second time Harga displayed a complete lack of caution, pulling the door open only for it to collapse backwards into the room. As the dust from the door and partially collapsed ceiling settled the group saw that Harga had been crushed to death, but there was no time to mourn him (or, more likely, loot him). From out in the passageway they had entered the room from, somewhere beyond the southern door, rose furious, bestial screams of rage. Hearing the door begin to open, the group fled over Harga’s corpse and the fallen door and into the partially-flooded passage beyond

I had been rolling encounter checks this entire time but getting nothing, so it was nice to have an opportunity to inject some urgency/a sense of danger into the action by having a monster in a nearby room react to the noise and begin to give chase. The creature in question (which the party never actually saw) is huge, and can’t fit through the passageway they had entered, but there was no reason for the group to discover that without choosing to stand and face whatever it was.

Having to act quickly the group chose to head south rather than north in the passage, based on the fact that the map had reacted more strongly when heading south previously. They spilled into a square chamber where every surface was covered in small, angular writing in a language nobody recognised. They judged that their decision had been a good one, as the map began to grow warmer and smoke began to rise from it. Brint, carrier of the map, was gripped by the urge to press deeper into the crypt to “reunite with the Host”, but managed to rid himself of the compulsion (a successful Presence test).

As the group barricaded the door against whatever was creating the hostile noises outside, Borda decided to try and decipher the writing on the walls. Although it was not written in a language he could understand he found that he could read it, and began to learn about The Hanged God who is destined to slay Verhu and prevent the end of the world. Though the god is currently dormant, stripped of his power, the willing and joyful sacrifice of his followers could potentially provide the means to bring him back to full force.

Borda was enraptured, overcome with the urge to sacrifice himself to the Hanged God and begin the return. He immediately thought of the chains that had been used to descend the collapsed staircase, and begin taking apart the barricade on the door to head back to them and hang himself.

The group immediately tried to stop Borda taking down the barricade and an argument ensued, with Eldar (A different, second Eldar, Wretched Royalty rather than the fanged deserter who ran away with the wagon) commanding his followers to cut Borda down. Compelled to die but not lacking in his other faculties, Borda argued that if Eldar’s men were going to kill him anyway they might as well let him be about his business, since the outcome was going to be the same but they wouldn’t have literal blood on their hands. This diffused the situation immediately, and after checking that the monstrous noises from outside the room had subsided the barricade was taken down and Borda was allowed to go about his business.

Here I called for a Presence test with a range of DRs rather than a binary pass/fail as Borda read the writing on the walls. I didn’t explain this to the group, just asked for the result of the test and compared it to my list. The result was a complete failure, and so the worst effect took hold. What followed was all interspersed with regular check-ins with the group, including Borda’s player seeking – and receiving, enthusiastically – consent from everyone to play out Borda’s ritual suicide.

After taking a few moments to gather themselves and tend to their wounds, the group pressed on to the east. As they moved the map began to burn, and as they stepped into what would be their final chamber the ink began to slough off the page to reveal more writing hidden beneath a palimpsest layer, writing that matched the text on the walls in the previous room.

The final chamber was a large chapel, ornately decorated with carvings of the Hanged God. At the far eastern end steps rose to a dais above which was suspended a truly pitiable figure – a man suspended from thick black rope by his neck, his arms and legs severed and his flesh flayed repeatedly in several patches. Somehow he still lived, eyes rolling in his head as he muttered to himself in a language nobody understood. In front of him, at the foot of the dais, a large gold lectern held a massive book. Many of the pages had been torn out, and it was immediately clear that the map the group had used to navigate to this place had been drawn on one of said pages.

Attempts to speak to the hanged man, who the group assumed must be the Hanged God himself, were unsuccessful. (I made a reaction roll and got a result of Indifferent, so decided that he simply was not aware of their presence. I also made another encounter check as they entered the room but came up with nothing.) Seeing that they would get no sense out of the hanging figure, the group decided that taking the book definitely fit their task of recovering relics from the crypts. There was a brief discussion about the other part of their task, i.e. mapping the catacombs, and a debate about whether they should continue to explore, but they decided that they shouldn’t push their luck and instead returned to the surface with the book. The session ended with them standing at the exit of the church, trying to decide what to do about the missing wagon.

I only had one successful encounter check this session, the horde of mindless undead outside the church right at the start of the adventure, so they had a fairly easy run through the place. That’s just how it works sometimes, and everyone seemed happy with the way things went. This session did a nice job of setting up some things that can reappear in the future, and we ended with the party seemingly intent on tracking down Eldar and Qilnach and getting their donkey and wagon back.