Session 6: Diversions

After more than a year since the last post and several months since I touched my solo materials, I've felt the urge to play out the next leg of their journey. I've enjoyed playing a lot of different games: a long-running weekly D&D game; more Mythic Bastionland; Seven-part Pact, a game of jealous, unstable and powerful wizards; Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, leading a campaign of delusional vampires through the wastes of Aqshy; CAIN, a dark and tense paranormal investigation game borrowing from "analog horror" and shonen manga; and Shirtless on a Rooftop, a Like-a-Dragon-like skirmish TRPG.

Speaking of CAIN, I've been hosting an interactive record of our investigations on an isolated page: the Sin Cabinet. Each "relic" corresponds to a psychic monster and lists some key clues about its host.

Day 1, The East Road

Presently, Bluethorn believes his fellows could win some favour with local powers by hunting down the devilish wolf that's hunting along the east road out of Starforge, where caravans travel through steep passes—the haunt of mountain bandits.

A brief thunderstorm had rolled over the village while the party was idle, which now gave way to drifting, summery cloud banks. Travel along the high road was speedy, taking them quickly to the riverside. They resolved to hunt up and down the river banks, looking for signs of a den or more attacks.

Fate had something else in store: traipsing across the crags and endless tiny streams that made up the headwaters, they ended up doubling back and emerging in the foggy woods across the river, unable to find their way back to the main body of water. Lost in the damp woods, they also found something unusual: an abandoned campsite, where crates and barrels had been crushed and pulled apart with great force and precision, some of their contents sorted or sometimes even carefully unwrapped. Yet, there were no marks from tools, only odd, tangled prints like a wet mop being dragged through the soil: land octopi, canny and amphibious lake-dwellers, usually only found to the northwest, further beyond the Black Grotto.

They were certainly not worth pursuing now, despite how far afield they were (did they travel up the river from the marshes, perhaps?), so the party borrowed this good site and camped themselves.

Day 2, Hunting

The dawn brought a cloudless sky and relentless heat. They were glad to be travelling by the riverside today, and hunting northward with it to their left, they didn't lose their way. All day was spent hiking up the riverbank, then doubling back along mountain trails until they reached the road again, but there wasn't so much as a tuft of wolf hair found.

Day 3, The Encounter

The heatwave broke on the third day as they crossed the woods again to scout the mountains south of the road. The southern range extended in a long ridge beside the road as well as further south into uncharted wilderness. The Fingerling Ridge was said to be a haunted place, the refuge of madmen and unnatural beasts.

True to its reputation, the hunting party stumbled across such a thing. Lounging in the shade of cave, beyond the treeline up a gravelly slope, a pack of wolves had gathered around a single, massive specimen; doubtless this was the plunderer they had sought. The air was electrified: the wolves had clearly been sleeping off the afternoon heat, but the hunters were no more ready for a sudden confrontation.

Versus Wolf Pack

Here is where this doomed venture ends: marshalling themselves, the party forms two lines, with the dwarf, half-foot and elf in front. Bluethorn casts Sleep over four wolves, Mackenroe blinds the dire wolf with Light, and Cynewyn and Mic Lakt throw stones and javelins at mid-range without striking their targets.

Then the wolves are upon them, rolling exceptionally well to hit and damage and killing off the front line in four terrible bites. The rest fled, successfully, to the northeast, but the wolves caught them the next day in pursuit and their luck didn't hold (they had about 65% chance to flee every time these wolves caught up).

Usually I'm in favour of taking failure on the chin, but something about coming back after a long hiatus to find my coinflip many months ago would lead to having to redo all my groundwork was very defeating. I resolved eventually to do it, but I considered for a while just rewinding and playing out another delve.

In the next post, I'll intro the new party: five treasure hunters chasing a story about a golden tablet, a relic of the titans, and great wealth unearthed from lost Anzenmezzeron... perhaps in the intervening months the castellan has sent his guard to deal with those wolf attacks properly.