Gaming | Roleplaying Games | Fantasy
Into the Odd + Best Left Buried: One Week in January
two plays reports
TUESDAY TWENTY-FIRST
- As part of the nascent Role Play Haven branch in Charing Cross, I ran a 5E oneshot, restatting my horrid seaside dungeon Fishguts of Kinstow (originally written for Best Left Buried).
- We had three characters, each of level two — a wild magic wizard, a gnome monk, and an orc woodskeeper. The team were tied together under the pretence that “if this were a film, this is the sequel to the film where you met.”
I like that as a way of bringing a team together. It gives enough plausible deniability for interwoven backstories that explains why things might be a surprise and it gives a sandpit to those players who want to dig deep into this shared past.
I’ve been using level two for my 5E oneshots for a while, because I’m mostly running for children and beginners. There’s not so many toys as to become distracting and there’s a tad more staying power than the first level proper.
- By the end of the session, the group had explored the entire dozen rooms of the dungeon, managing to avoid almost half of their fights — with my favourite (repeated) trick being to mage hand some food in the direct path of the creatures they were trying to distract.
- One of the players dropped in the last big fight and because of environmental difficulty it gave a genuinely tense moment — my players finally learned why some healers actively prefer healing word to cure light wounds.
But gosh one-man-one-turn combat feels like it takes ages to probe through, even when I gave the enemy combatants 25% of their expected hp totals, doubly so after having run Tunnels and Trolls over the weekend.
FRIDAY TWENTY-FOURTH
- With David Lynch’s dying last week, I have been wanting to run a surrealism-forward game “in his honour” so to speak. I ended up opting for Into the Odd since its starter packages give pleasant prompts for players to build interesting stories. Both players were close friends who have played extensively with each other too, so it felt excellently natural to drift into surreal weirdness.
- I wanted to keep away from screens as much as possible, so I flicked through my library to find something to run today, eventually settling on Emiel Boven’s Rot King’s Sanctum, which I’ve got as hardcopy in Knock! #2. The players had been given the second hook, of a gnome lady asking them to find her brother — and offering 11ŋ to do so
The group would go on to find two dozen gems in the first few moments of the dungeon, each worth 15ŋ.
- We had «Gregor», an erstwhile yet ersatz noble, with his footman «Pauper» and some hired muscle who goes by «Hawk», and we had «Kingsley Geoff» with his lackey «Jeff» and his parrot «A’aron»
A’aron ended up dealing first blood to almost every single combatant in the fights that broke out.
- We finished after two hours forty of play, with Kingsley sounding his bell to produce brown sound, causing every other person in his immediate vicinity to defecate — the two foes and his four allies. That seemed like the best moment to bring the session to an end.
Come to think of it, I didn’t get him to roll a ST save for the parrot.
REFLECTIONS
- I really don’t have the patience for one-man-one-turn this month.
- Hive Pocket makes for some excellent abstract player / monster tokens.
