Mörk Borg Session 6 – Play Report

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:

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.