The Barony of Darkmoor

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2025-01-21 Barony of Darkmoor Session 2

Session Notes

Arthur remained ensconced at the Ragged Moon tavern as his temporary seat of power. He immediately sent word (or word rapidly leaked out) that he was hiring laborers to conduct repairs at the tavern at least while he occupies it.
Kog identified that one or more laborers might be attempting to defraud the Baron and be paid multiple times for a single day’s labor. He quickly brought a stop to that.
Hammond volunteered to accompany Arthur to the Earl’s capital city of Gwinned to attempt to hire an engineer who might manage repairs within the Barony, especially at the Manor House. They two departed in a stage coach for a multi-day trip.
Kog remained to mind the construction efforts. Arthur seemed especially concerned that workers received prompt payment daily, for which purpose he left a large sack of coins in Kog’s care.
Arthur requested that Dixit seek out Sylvar of the Aldmaar peoples, who had been called away, it seemed, on urgent business and not yet returned.
Sylvar spent a couple days on the road, making his way to the Twisted Wood. He met the perimeter security forces, rangers in the trees, of the Aldmaars. He was then led to where Sylvar was preparing a rescue team, which he joined. It seems that a Merith Emris of the Aldmaars and his woodsy crew had set out to preempt a team of the King’s lumberjacks operating in the Wood but not returned after several days. The decision to send Sylvar and his associates to rescue Merith was far from unanimous, but Sylvar won the argument. Dixit joined this emergency team.
The Aldmaars and Sylvar made their way, tracking, through the dense forest. Crossing a cold, winter stream, they moved through a thicket and were confronted by a goblin tribe in the trees. A skirmish resulted. After regrouping, the elf team moved once again further and the goblins, this time, were willing to parlay. They reported that a group of elves had come through a few days prior, chasing a group of goblins. Both groups had moved through.
The elf group proceeded and came upon an area of loose earth, from which voices seemed to emerge. As did two large ant-beasts, which, when killed, splashed a thick glue onto those around them, temporarily immobilizing them.
After defeating the ant-beasts, the elves descended into the crude tunnels of their lair. Within, they located a sort of chamber where victims, some still clinging to life, were buried. While attempting to rescue Merith and the surviving members of his crew, the seeming ant-beast matron returned. More carnage ensued. Eventually, the elven crew defeated the great beast and managed to extricate themselves with Merith and some of his associates. And with one goblin, as well.
In Gwinned, Hammond sought out followers of San Nicholas. Befriending one such, he was brought to a hidden tavern filled with like believers.
He and Arthur would be spending at least another day in Gwinned, while Arthur sought his expert engineer.

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2025-01-14 Barony of Darkmoor Session Notes

Session Notes

  • Party arrived with Arthur at the manor house, which, of course, had been damaged in the War and has fallen further into ruin. Arthur was shocked to find it in such a state and fell into a depression.
  • The party continued, on foot to the Ragged Moon Tavern. There, Lady Ravensbeak, the High Guildsmaster and the representative from Aldmaar all departed on separate business.
  • Arthur felt, sitting, sharing an ale and some bacon, some sense of familiarily at the Tavern, though he’d never been there. He approached a spot on the stone staircase and somehow, discovered and opened a concealed door, which seemed a surprise to everyone, even Master Louvel, Tavernkeeper.
  • Arthur and the party descended, discovering abandoned catacombs beneath the tavern. After forcing a door, they discovered a room filled with the long-withered bodies of soldiers, having died in some long-gone skirmish. As they moved into the room, the bones clattered to life and attacked the party. One skeletal being indicated Arthur and instructed his fellows to “kill him!”
  • The party managed to defeat this knot of rejuvenated corpses, finding a heavy ring on the leader with a symbol of a tentacles horror embossed in its steel. Kog had fallen in the fight, and continued to struggle with a poison. The party returned to the Ragged Moon, where Louvel tracked down the Town Witch and returned with an antidote for Kog.
  • Returning underground on the morning, as Arthur continued to report feeling drawn towards his collapsed manor and the throne therein, hoping that these catacombs might lead him thence, the party continued their explorations and, once again ran afoul of reanimated skeletons.
  • Two greater skeletons, one multi-limbed, with eyes of fire lead the fight with several minions. Another, cloaked entirely in fire instructed the four-armed skeleton to pursue Arthur. As the fight proceeded, the flaming skeleton disappeared. Dixit was surrounded and brought down by the skeletons. Cut off for a time from his allies, Dixit was being dragged away by the skeleton leader. The party fought their way through the rank of skeletons and managed to engage the skeleton leader before he could make away with Dixit. The party managed to smash through the remaining skeletons, though Hammond also fell from his wounds.
  • Arthur was able to staunch the bleeding of the two allies and after retreating once again to the tavern, they were able to recover from their wounds.
  • Arthur, abashed at having caused his new inner circle so much pain, indicated that they should not further pursue the catacombs, given the evil that seems so abundant underneath. Rather, he made arrangement with Louvel to rent out his rooms to temporarily make his court at the tavern.
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The Installation of the Lord Baron of Darkmoor

You gathered before sunrise two days ago, just east of Elder Pool, where the High Way turns finally east. Horses and carriages had been sent by the Court. Each of you presented the wax-sealed summons that was your passport to Mainesbury and the “celebration.”

The royal guard, resplendent in their finery had treated each of you with appropriate respect, but with a firm hand. When the Royal, Lord Sparrowhawk had puffed out his vest about being seated amongst rabble, he had been informed in no uncertain terms that he was a guest of the King as were all those who had borne the sealed summons. You may have smirked at that.

The travel was long and you each had a chance to say something about yourselves, about the peoples that you represent and their hopes and fears for what a restored Baron in Darkmoor might mean.

After an overnight at an inn, where you had been helped to clean if unremarkable lodging, but good, warm food and better ale, you had continued. There had been some unrest on the road yesterday, but nothing the guard had any difficulty with. War, it seems, is imminent on the far eastern borders. Some suggest that it has already begun.

You have, personally, never before been to the capital. Mainesbury is vast. Wealthy beyond belief. More citizens worked the river, in their fishing boats, crabbing nets, water taxis and dredgers than live in all of Darkmoor. And that is merely the river. There are broad, mostly clean boulevards. Vast arches and pillars, shrines, monuments and glittering temples are seemingly around every corner. Dandies in their finery sip at cafes along the brickwork, rubbing elbows with artists and artisans, courtesans and plumbers.

Your trip through the streets of Mainesbury was dizzying, but did little to prepare you for the opulence and extravagance of the Royal Residence. The Court, with its marble-floored, silver-columned, frescoe-ceilinged richness was more than you could take in. At a certain point, it simply overwhelmed the senses. The smells of lilac and incense, the gold and ivory, the music in every chamber, the clever, concealed heating and lighting suffusing every room, despite the blustering wind outside.

You listened intently, for a time, at the pronouncements at the ceremony. Then, as the long lists were recounted, of lords and barons, relations and relations and webs of relations… who sired whom who later sired someone else.. your attention flagged. But, finally, he was revealed. Arthur Grey, Lord Grey. Now, at a sweeping gesture of the silvered sword from the great King, Baron of Darkmoor. The young man, clean-shaven, broad of shoulder and guileless in his demeanor. He accepted the honor with a seeming sincerity of gratitude that you found difficult to dislike, as much as you might have been prepared to do so.

Now, after the applause and the scraping, the hand-shaking and backslapping, you have been lea back to the carriages. To return to Darkmoor. Now, however, there is a great, ornate vehicle, drawn by a half-dozen pearl-white steeds at the front of your convoy. The emblem of a raven rampant on the silvered doors. The Earl of Eregore’s carriage, someone whispers to you. And here is young Arthur Grey, being introduced to each of you in turn by his man-at-arms in his heavy armor, the wolf of Darkmoor cut into the cuirass.

Lord Grey approaches you, an embarrassed smile on his face as he stretches out his hand. “I’m sorry,” he says. To you, the Baron of Darkmoor apologizes in his fine voice. “I did not catch your name.”

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Dundracon 2023 — Lessons Learned

Joe and I attended DunDraCon in Santa Clara in February. DunDraCon was the first ever gaming convention I attended, way back in …1990? I lost track of it, but attended again in 2017, where I ran my Fate “Kung Fu Wombat” game (though I called it something else back then).
As I’m interested in attending more gaming cons in retirement, I booked us a room and secured tickets to this year’s event.
I didn’t submit to run a game, mostly because I was too late to submit one. More on that later.
DunDraCon has a — being charitable — idiosyncratic system for registering for games. They break down the event into a handful of time windows, such that you will only get assigned one (or zero) sessions during each window. One chooses their top 3 choices for events they’d like to attend per each window. The drawing that determines which, if any, of your choices you can attend, only happens eight hours or so before the window opens1. So, even in the week leading up to the con, even if you registered on the first day of availability, you still don’t know what sessions you will be in.

And, spoiler, you will almost certainly have windows where, you did not get into any session. For the entirety of Saturday, the first full day of the con, I got into only one session. Joe got into zero. An entire day of the conference with no events.

To be fair, not understanding how this was likely to play out, I made two choices that contributed to this problem. First of all, I didn’t register to run any games. Had, I that would have guaranteed that I could have played, and you can be damned certain I would have made sure Joe had a seat at the table. Additionally, GMs get a “priority” registration that increases the chance that you will get into an event when you register with the priority. The dude who ran the game we got into on Friday night said he has never failed to get into a session when he used priority.

The second screw-up was I didn’t book us for events in every window. Many of the scheduled sessions are intended to run 6-8 hours, but the session windows tend to be more like fours long. I didn’t book any sessions for windows where, if we had got into our choices in the previous window, we would still be playing and therefore unable to attend whatever we chose in the previous window. They would have overlapped. Little did I know that there was no chance I would end up in overlapping sessions because we would have been lucky to get into any session at all. For the whole day.

We played eight hours of D&D Friday night, which was fine. The scenario “Bad Water” was one where all PCs were dwarves and gnomes living in the Underdark who had never seen the light of day. We were required to investigate a problem with the local water supply, an underground stream that served the community in which we all lived. It was a bit of a meandering affair that probably could have been a punchy four hour adventure, but it took us all of eight hours. It was fine.

The venue, the aging Santa Clara Marriott is a decent site, and an upgrade from the hotel that hosted the event last time I attended, in San Ramon.

Here are the key takeaways for me, for next year:

  1. Sign up to GM a game, to ensure that we get to play and to get a priority registration.
  2. Book events for every session.
  3. Maybe think about spending part of Saturday at Great America? It is literally just across the parking lot from the hotel.

Joe and I played some D&D and DDC in our hotel room. We made the best of it.

Next year will be better.

Footnotes

I could confirm some of this if DunDraCon’s site

  • 1) hadn’t already archived their event list for this year, so you can’t see how things were scheduled and

2) wasn’t having such performance issues right now that it’s essentially unusable.

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Default macros in my macro bar

… when I’m running a game.

Name:GroupInit

Script:

!group-init

Comments: Just a dumb shortcut for running the standard GroupInit API Script. I don’t have to remember the syntax (which couldn’t be simpler). Allows me to select a group of bad guys click on macro, it launches Turn Tracker, rolls their initiative and the bad guys initiative gets added.

Name: GroupCheck

Script:

!group-check

Comments: like GroupInit, just a simple call to the standard GroupCheck API Script. Select bad guy tokens and click macro button. It produces an inline menu in Chat window, where I select the type of check, including saving throws and skill checks, and rolls for each token selected.

Name: SaveApply

Script:

!group-check {{
–?{Save|Dexterity|Constitution|Wisdom} Save
–process
–subheader vs DC ?{DC}
–button ApplyDamage !apply-damage
~dmg [[?{Damage}]]
~type ?{Damage on Save|Half,half|None,none}
~DC ?{DC}
~saves RESULTS(,)
~ids IDS(,)
}}

Comments: Nice script I found that uses GroupCheck. For selected tokens, it rolls a Saving Throw, asks what the damage to apply is, whether one takes half or no damage if save is successful, asks the Difficulty, and then applies the results to the tokens after all that. Awesome for area damage spells such as Fireball.

Name: Dead

Script:

!token-mod –set statusmarkers|=dead bar1_value|0

Comments: Dead-simple script leveraging TokenMod. Bad guys get the big red X of death and hit points reduced to zero.

Name: TokenSetup

Script:

!token-mod {{
–set bar1_link|hp
–set bar2_link|ac
–set bar3_link|speed
–set name|@{selected|character_name}
–on showplayers_bar1
–off showplayers_bar2
–off showplayers_aura1
–off showplayers_aura2
–on token_vision
}}

Comments: Using TokenMod, sets up token for PCs with just the basics. I have a very similar one for NPCs.

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Welcome to SkyCity!

The citizens of BezosCorp’s unique crystal toroid located at the L5 Lagrangian point in the Earth-Moon system welcome you to live the life others can only dream of!

Grown from crystals harvested from asteroids and even Comet Halley, SkyCity is a gleaming gem suspended in a perfectly safe and stable orbit.

Come ride your bicycle amongst the green trees and pure air that only your grandparents can remember from their youth on Earth!

Feast on the finest gourmet foods! Real beef imported from Lunar Colony Heinlein! The finest wine and beer from crops grown right here at SkyCity! The universe’s finest chefs all work for BezosCorp!

Swim in the perfectly clear water of Lake Amazonia!

Like to hike? Rock Climb? Run? Ever try it in 1/3 gee? You’ll never want to go back to the oppressive gravity of Earth!

The streets are spotless. Crime is unknown. And those views! The moon is always full! From L5 we see half of the moon that’s visible from earth and half from the back-side! You’ll never grow tired of seeing Earth …..

;jafjqwfd…. … .

Transmission interrupted.

Welcome corporate criminals! You’ve destroyed the earth and now you’re seeking your last refuge where you think the people that you’ve left behind, poisoned and bereft can’t reach you.

Let this be your notice. There is no escape from your crimes. We are the Fist of Destiny. You will answer for what you have done. Our reach is infinite and we have the support of the 20 billion lives you have fled from. There is no nuclear engine powerful enough to escape Earth, to escape us, to escape your fate!

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Mission Report #133

Krisskross has joined a group of adventurers into the Undermountain.

This soldier accompanies a unit composed of a goliath, a human story-teller, a dark elf sorceress, and some odd halfling-dwarf hybrid.

Upon arriving in Undermountain, we were confronted by a ludicrous band of humans playing as vampires. They were pathetic and easily bested.

We managed to make our way through a magical portal which seemed to grant random enchantments, as likely to be fell as boon.

We fought a group of manticores, fed ritually by a troll, all of which we eventually bested.

We have continued to explore. My compatriots are typical gold-grubbing adventurers with no higher purpose than to fill their coffers until such time as their drinking and carousing forces them into poverty and they must sally forth again to complete the cycle.

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W:DH Week 22 – Knock, knock…

The bugbears streamed out of the open doorways and we met them with steel and spell.  As the battle ensued, I spotted an intellect devourer approaching.  I began to call out, but a searing pain in my skull silenced all thought

When I regained my senses, I found that we had won the fight.  Along with the bugbears and intellect devourer, a lone Gazer arrived with warnings about crossing the Xanathar.  It died as readily as the rest.  My fellows had searched the contents of the adjoining rooms and found a potion that restored my faculties.

As we continued to search for the vault, the Stone led us to a blank wall.  Losser found a secret door embedded in the wall, and we proceeded thru it.  At the end of the hallway beyond, was a door with a lock that looked quite secure – even to my untrained eyes.  Tobby spent just a minute with the lock, and it sprang open.  After we all entered the following room, Tobby closed and re-locked the door behind us.  The room beyond was oddly shaped with many pillars featuring dwarven carvings.  It was a truly impressive sight.  As we approached the front of the room, the Stone again led us to what looked like a dead end.  Losser again found a secret door, allowing us to proceed.  As we moved down a very long set of stairs, the passage began to widen.  Eventually, we reached a massive set of double doors.  Dwarven writing on the doors indicated that the three keys should be brought forward.  While we opened the small crate, Boaz sang the Dwarven song.  We removed a severed hand from the crate and pressed it against the doors.  Tobby pressed the dead Gazer from earlier against the doors

A loud crack rang out, and the doors slowly began to open…


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W:DH Week 21 – Back into the sewers

Barnabus sent a message-bird – delivered to Jumanji’s head.  In it, he mentioned that he found a Dwarf to accompany us.  Boaz and Tobby departed to meet him.  While that happened, Shava and I made our way to the Yawning Portal.  There, we convinced Renaer to join us on our trip as well.  He was not thrilled at the idea, but reluctantly agreed that his presence may be vital

The Dwarf that Barnabus found for us is named Losser Mirlklav.  He was sitting in a cell awaiting sentencing, and he had no idea he was about to be asked to join us.  Barnabus vouched for the man and his expertise, so Boaz and Tobby pressed forward.  They talked to the warden, paid Losser’s bail, and promised to have the man back in five days.  Losser was happy to be out of his cell, but he would require some convincing before he agreed to accompany us

We all met back at our manor, where we received two deliveries.  We got one small crate, and one large crate.  We can only assume that there is a severed hand in one, and some form of a beholder in the other.  We left them unopened and continued our talks with Losser.  He explained how he knew the dragon that is reportedly guarding the vault.  At one point, he was at the vault’s location with the dragon but had escaped.  The final step of his escape was at the Bloody Fist.  Our plan will be to retrace his steps in reverse. 

We arrived at the Bloody Fist and met Renaer.  He was accompanied by Miloon Wardragon, for personal protection.  We made our way to the sewer grate outside the Bloody Fist and descended into the sewers below.  Transporting the unopened crates has been cumbersome.  We explored for some time, following Losser’s recollections, until we came to a room with several doors.  When we quietly opened one of the doors, the other sets of doors suddenly sprang open.  Creatures began pouring out of the doorways with murderous intent.

Tymora, protect us!