The Carrow Campaign: Play Report 2

Agartha, by Steph Cherrywell

In Which the Players Encounter Drugged Crazies, Cows and Crossbows. Take it away, Steph:

Spucky and the monks are headed to town to find someone who can cure Toby's poisoning, when the way is blocked by a somewhat deranged guard. His name is Sven, and he's not letting anyone through, not Spucky, not the monks, and not Agartha, the human barbarian who's also here. Before the situation can escalate too much, another guard, Carraton, appears. It turns out Sven is just total bonkers nuts, and has been ever since he went to investigate a nearby farm. With Sven subdued and sent off to town with the monks in the hopes that the healers can help him as well as Toby, Carraton hires the two adventurers to investigate the Awlstone Farm. I finally got around to picking Spucky's spells (detect poison and magic, create water, and cure light wounds) somewhere in here, which was good, because they came in very handy later!


DM: Enter Kitty’s PC Agartha and my first hopefully reoccurring NPC, Captain Carraton of the Gibbering Gap Guard. What’s a Gibbering Gap? “It’s a rock formation” Sven told them, while Carraton told them it was the last major trading post between here and the great city state of Carrow.

Agartha is a human barbarian. She is very big, and very strong. As we soon learn, even a level one player can do massive amounts of damage with a great axe and a rage-enhanced strength.

Old MacDonald had a farm... OF DEATH

The farm is quiet on the approach. Carraton notices a tripwire attached to a crossbow trap, and sneaks around it. She approaches through the underbrush with Spucky following. There are digging sounds coming from inside the barn. Suddenly, someone starts shooting a crossbow from the house! Carraton runs around the side of the barn, while Spucky takes cover behind some firewood. (I was a little unclear about where things were for a while, because the 'fog of war' option in Maptools made it hard to tell which building was which!) [I’m starting to find Maptools’ Fog of War more trouble than it is worth - DM] Agartha runs towards the house as attackers pile out of it. A little girl runs out of the barn wielding a crossbow -- Spucky doesn't know if she should attack a little kid, so she stays put. Meanwhile, Agartha goes into her barbarian rage and turns everyone around her into chunky spaghetti sauce. An oaf (well, that's what his icon looked like) runs out of the barn and attacks Spucky and Chops. Chops jumps him and the world's supply of oafs is messily decreased by one.

Spucky comes out from behind the woodpile, hoping the girl will surrender. She didn't -- instead, she fires a crossbow bolt. What a brat! Spucky tries to bonk her with the sling, but not kill her. (But as I was quickly learning, at level 1 it's pretty hard to hit as it is!) It's a miss! Fortunately, Carraton had been busy stampeding cows, and one of them lumbers right over the obnoxious little punk and knocks her senseless.
Another child, a twin of the first, appears and runs up to shove some mysterious black moss into the unconscious girl's mouth. The sole remaining adult enemy also doses herself with the moss and immediately drops like a rock, but Chops manages to keep the second little girl from taking a dose by non-lethally chewing the hell out of her legs. We've got three prisoners now, and search them to find a few blue potions and some more of the black moss as well as some crossbows and daggers and whatnot. Also, one of the cows wanders into the tripwire and gets itself killed with a crossbow bolt. [Actually the bolt just poisoned it with a sleeping drug, but there was no way to tell unless you examined it. - DM]

This is DnD so the treasure is completely safe to touch.

Investigating the storm cellar under the house, we find the last member of the gang, who's poured oil on the Awlstones and is holding them hostage with a lit torch. Hiding behind Agartha's mighty leg, Spucky creates water on the torch. Poof! He dies with the look of surprise on his face (Agartha got him, I think.) The Awlstones are grateful to be free, even though Spucky makes the faux pas of suggesting they eat the cow that died (they're vegetarians). Apparently the gang is here looking for a rumored barrow with something valuable in it. They tricked the Awlstones by having the girls put on the ol' innocent act, then taking them prisoner and claiming the farm for themselves. About this time, one of the other cows finds the hidden barrow, by falling into it. It's an underground room filled with bones and treasure, as well as a giant statue and a laid-out giant's skeleton. Spooky. But treasurey!

The cow is brought back safely to the surface. Everyone enjoys a nice home-cooked meal, except for the gang - we're going to interrogate them tomorrow morning!

"Cry prettier, Jessica."

Another post unrelated to RPGs: sorry folks. But, I had to spread the word about this overlooked quote from Jessica Alba to Elle:

"I remember when I was dying in Silver Surfer...The director was like, 'It looks too real. It looks too painful. Can you be prettier when you cry? Cry pretty, Jessica.' He was like 'Don't do that thin with your face. Just make it flat. We can CGI the tears in.'" And I'm like, But there's no connection to a human being. And then it all got me thinking: Am I not good enough? Are my instincts and my emotions not good enough? Do people hate them so much that they don't want me to be a person? Am I not allowed to be a person in my work?

Thanks to Written World for drawing this to my attention: You should really go read that author's thoughts on the subject. It got me wondering about not just Alba's post-Dark Angel career, but a lot of actresses I've long thought to be cast only for looks. In how many cases is that not their fault? How many are being directed to be bad?

On a Polygonal Horse He Rides...

Not dead, just busy. Anyway, here come this comic got nothin' to do with table-top gaming.

Creature Feature The Last:: Tommy Rawhead

Nowhere near the 31 mark, but here's the grand finale anyway!

Art by Steph Cherrywell

In our world there are two versions of the Tommy Rawhead (or Rawhead and Bloody Bones) folk tale. The UK version is a kind of arch-hobgoblin that lives in cupboards and under stairs, devouring disobedient children.

But I'm from the American Southeast, and our Tommy is quite different. And that's who I'm basing this version on.

There once was a quite ancient hag living deep in the swamp. Amid the will'o'whisps and corpse-candles, she wove strange magics unlike any other. Unlike most of her kind, she didn't abide the company of other hags nor did she live in seclusion. Rather, she lived with a pet razorback hog she named Tommy.

No one knows if Tommy was this way to begin with, or if the hag made him so, but the hog was much larger than the average razorback. He was the size of a black bear, and when on occasion he was seen wandering the swamp some swore he walked upright.

On one occasion, after going out on an errand for the hag Tommy didn't return. Perturbed, she cast a spell of scrying to find the hog, and the vision brought forth such a horrid cry of rage from her gnarled green lips the whole swamp shuddered.

Tommy, it turned out, had wandered near the house of a hunter and skin-trader, a man full of hubris regarding the dangerous powers around him. He spotted the hog and, despite the warnings of his comrades, brought the beast down with an arrow through the heart. By the time the hag missed him, the hunter had already skinned Tommy's corpse. All she saw was a raw, bloody skull.

But Death and the hag were acquaintances, for all hags must bed Death as a lover in exchange for their eternal lives. But this hag loved Tommy more than she loved that life, and her lust for vengeance was so strong she traded everything Death allowed her in exchange. As she slumped to the dirt floor of her hut, Tommy's raw head rolled towards his carcass.

First, Tommy pulled on a pair of overalls from the hunter's clothesline. Then he staggered into the swamp and searched for dying beasts. From them he borrowed all their most frightening parts - the claws of a panther, the fangs of several vipers, the eyes of a hawk.

Then Tommy returned to the Hunter's cabin. Unfortunately his desire for slaughter didn't die with his murderer.

COMBAT:

It cannot be understated: Tommy Rawhead is a dangerous opponent. Despite his massive size (he's only gotten bigger as he grafts new animal parts on), he is swift and agile. He has all the benefits of being undead, and several odd side-effects of years spent eating leftovers of the hag's spells. For instance, and spell intended to do harm to the target only strengthens Tommy. Some spells, like magic missiles, actually reflect off. He has the natural attacks of whatever beasts he's currently taken "additions" from, and has the unsettling habit of appearing places he shouldn't have been able to reach without being seen - like inside bedroom closets that have already been checked once.

Creature Feature 19: Childcatcher Costumes

Another contribution from Steph Cherrywell, I'll let her do the talking:

Art by Steph Cherrywell

A construct creature, based on the idea of trick-or-treating, if there is a festival similar to Halloween in the campaign world.  These creatures pretend to be inanimate but very scary-looking costumes and wait until a child puts them on - then they take possession of the child's body and force them to acquire candy by any means possible  (first begging, then scaring, and finally attacking people if it's allowed to run free long enough.)  The  costume stores some of the energy and uses it to gain more power and control the longer it's worn.  These costumes were created by a hag and set loose as a way of fattening up the local children for eventual eating, without having to go to the trouble of doing it herself (or the expense of building a gingerbread house).

Really, any holiday in your campaign world that involves a) people in costume and b) food can have Childcatchers. I can see a similar version for adults.

Unrelated: When we do Halloween, we do Halloween.

The daring steamship bandit Topper Lee, who never met a bank vault he couldn't blow big holes through.

Wanted across all seven skies, Evil-Eye Estrella has left a trail of death, destruction and flustered young ladies.

Left to right: Kitty's six-round mini-singularity instigator, this one's a Quantum-Industrial Labs "Imploder X-9Z." Only a handful of prototypes of the "Imp" were produced - the likelihood of adverse litigation made QUIL reconsider mass-marketing a purse-sized handgun that creates black holes inside people's torsos.

Chris's gun, also sporting a six-round chamber, is a Hydrogen-Carbon Fusion Cell Protocaster, a custom magnum version standard issue to the Priests of the Order of World Commerce. Rumors persist that Lee modified his to fire other ammo, probably due to the high rates of radiation poisoning among OWC's priesthood.

The problem with the Age of Steam was all the coal dust in the air. The problem with the Atomic Age of Steam is that the coal dust can mutate your lungs into a separate organism with its own motives that might clash with your own. Best to wear a mask when outside quantum-filtered air conditioning.

The Hour Grows Late

The most recent Creature Feature was #18. Today is the 26th. Obviously, I've very behind if I'm to have 31 on Halloween.

I have one more from Steph Cherrywell to post, so there's 19. And I know who #31 is, as the finale was the first one I thought up (Steph illustrated it weeks ago). That means I need to come up with 11 more in 6 days, roughly two a day.

I'm also trying to catch up on the work I'm paid to do. All this is to say, I may not make it. Regardless, you can expect a few more before the big finale on Halloween. I'll repeat this Sunday, but I want to thank everyone that's commented and encouraged me to slog through this little experiment in spontaneous creativity. I hope at least something I've spewed out finds life in another's campaign!