Stonetop, Great Wood arc: Session 2
For part one, go here
This session went very well. I went into it with multiple avenues prepped for my players to travel through the Great Wood, and fortunately for me, they chose my favorite one. I got to introduce them to an original creature that I wrote for this session and provided them with some intense consequences for their decisions.
My players had several conversations with NPCs who were important to them at the beginning of their first session, one of which was that our Blessed's mentor and mother figure asked him not to do something stupid--specifically, to not approach the Golden Oak. Just keep that piece of information in mind as we get deeper into the play report.
The party woke up in their creepy campground after a night of bad dreams and Crinwin fights. They didn't have much time to enjoy the dewy morn, because a pack of dog-sized feathered dinosaurs were noisily breakfasting on the remains of the Crinwin left behind after the night's struggle. The party's Judge bravely and wisely woke up our Blessed who can speak with animals to engage the drakes. These guys didn't want much to do with the party, mainly because I put them there as foreshadowing (you'll see why at the end of the post). As a GM, I had fun roleplaying as a dinosaur. It was interesting to inhabit the mentality of a scavenger pack animal that mostly judged the world according to worthwhile risks for filling its belly.
They didn't have to deal with these things for long because my scripted Rage Drake (read: T Rex) showed up to chase the smaller drakes into the forest. The point of this was, once again, divined for the purposes of spooking my players and punctuating their lives with adventure. I did prep for the event in which they challenged the Rage Drake, but nobody took me up on it and the party proceeded with their quest.
We were down a player, so we had a quick conversation about how everyone could assume his PC was doing something expected that we would figure out later. I'm still cooking his letter, but I have too many ideas to even start with for now.
I decided to use Stonetop's environment tables to decide what each scene would look like as we progressed into the Wood. The process looks like rolling a d12 and some d6es that set up the terrain, the scale of the natural features, a point of interest, and maybe an encounter. In our case, we ended up with a crevasse in a large meadow with deer bounding away in the distance. The crevasse was noteworthy--a site of evil power radiating from a gash in the earth. Brief shenanigans ensued.
I'm a huge fan of the tables. My players seemed to understand that anything could happen. Their outcomes range from the mundane and peaceful to the wonderful and deadly. For example:
1d12 terrain
1 Pond, wetland, or lake
2 Creek, stream, or river
3 Rocky outcropping, cave(s)
4-5 Clearing, meadow, sparse trees
6-7 Dense thicket
8-9 Swath of one type of tree
10 Briars, thorns, nettles
11 Slope, hill, ridge, ravine
12 Single, notable tree
Combined with...
1d6 discovery
1 A change of terrain, and roll again
2 A chance for insight into a threat or danger (e.g. tracks that reveal numbers, whereabouts, etc.)
3 game/wild creatures
4 Useful or valuable flora
5 A crinwin, Fae or spirit of the wild , curious or indifferent
6 A point of interest
And maybe...
1d6 point of interest
1 A place corrupted by the Things Below or the Fomoraij
2 A place haunted by death and the undying
3 A place bearing traces of the Forest Folk
4 A place sacred to the spirits of the wild
5 A Fae domain or waystone
6 A ruin or artifact of the Green Lords
...gets you a really broad range of situations. It is fortunate that you can't find yourself with a game encounter and a point of interest if you proceed with the tables AW.
I like that every combination of outcomes leads to the situation somehow changing. It's also a handy tool I've been using while experimenting with how the passage of time should work in this game. We have supplies, but not clocks, and only a brief rule of thumb for travel times to notable locations in the Basic Moves handout. Book I offers suggestions for describing the passage of time, but I decided to ultimately put it in my players' hands. They could tell me how long they wanted to spend on something, and after it was obvious that a lot of time had passed we would call it a night (i.e. use a point of Supplies) or they could push on and use a special move I've been drafting (read: wrote down the name of and put it on the backburner). The point is, we used terrain tables to portray the passage of time.
Looking back, I liked this process and will probably follow it again. We continued this way until eventually running into the Spirit I wrote for this session called the Oak-Ward. This was a lot of fun to portray. I had to make several on the fly decisions about ways to show them that this spirit had powers over time and space. Apparently I pulled this off to good effect, because my players exploded with praise by the end of the session.
The Oak-Ward was my answer for "teleport across the Great Wood?" questions that came up in Session 1. They learned hints about this thing in a book that it then asked them to hand over. Its instinct was to conceal its existence, after all. Our Blessed spoke with it, asking for help and beseeching it to lend them its powers for the purposes of their travel. Our Fox also spoke with it and found out that the Oak-Ward recognized them. This was based on a brief conversation in DMs where I asked that player's permission to reveal that something had happened to them that they didn't remember.
The Fox, being a goo-drinker, decided to strike a bargain with this spirit: let them remember seeing it here. After I revealed that the Oak-Ward recognized them, we rolled a d6 to find out how many times the Fox had approached this thing. 5 times! Our Fox has encountered this spirit 5 times! I thought about making them roll to persuade, but instead I just offered them a deal that I hoped would be too disastrous to accept. I think this was cheesy but consistent with what might happen when a tricksy spirit meets a tricksy mortal. Sure, puny human, I'll let you walk away with your memories of me, but I totally have the upper hand still if I make you forget how to speak. In other words, the Oak-Ward requested the Fox's voice in exchange for preserving their memories of the encounter.
They obviously accepted, which led us to the following situation: From most of the party's perspective, everyone has suddenly moved from the last environmental table we rolled (just prior to encountering the Oak-Ward) to a floodplain next to the Dread River. They also don't know how they got there. The Fox knows, and the Fox remembers everything, but the Fox can't tell them anything. At least not with words. Meanwhile, our Judge lost their memories of promises made to their young mentee, while our Seeker forgot ever swearing to their parents that they would never return to Marshedge. The heaviest loss of all was sustained by our Blessed: he did the worst on What Was Kept and had to sacrifice a playbook move, for the time being.
Now, earlier in this post I mentioned that our Blessed's mentor warned him away from the Golden Oak. This was a person who taught him how to perform the Rites of the Land, the one who ushered him into the very role he performs for Stonetop. He did it anyway and now doesn't remember how to do his job. Worse, he doesn't know what he doesn't know (he will get it back, but I have to figure out how this works).
My players ended their session in a strange land they had never seen before with injuries they didn't remember sustaining, hours or even days missing from their lives (they don't know), with no idea of why the Fox can't speak to them. It's a pretty tight spot. It's not all bad, because I was obviously going to honor their purposes for getting into this mess (rolling a 10 on Let Spring Burst Forth and choosing to get insight on repelling Crinwin), so I revealed the secret before the session concluded. It was drakes the whole time! They had interesting theories on how to use drakes to manage crinwin populations, the details of which we'll most likely get to see in session 3.
There are probably tens of other beautiful details that can't really make it into this post and belong just at our table anyway. I feel like I'm close to hitting my stride with this game and have lots of plans for our next session. Notably, I think I want to start with two points of prep and let them take the reins from there. I'll need to write a letter for my missing player that catches him up to the rest of the party in an interesting way, and after that I think I just want to drop some dangerously curious and intimidating Manmarchers on their location and see what happens. A loose goal exists of getting back to Stonetop, but there's lots to explore on the way. Maybe we'll figure out what's going on with our Marshal's strangely disquieting follower...