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Author Topic: One-Shot (?) Session Report
jeffdee
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Posts: 427
Post One-Shot (?) Session Report
on: December 9, 2014, 09:39

Copying this from my post on Facebook:

Played a short Bethorm RPG session with Talzhemir Mrr tonight. We created a pair of Pe Choi (6-limbed insectoid humanoids), and played through several days of random encounters in the Chakan forest. We'd given ourselves a mission: travel from the Monestary of the Gray Cloak to the Hrika Ruins and back, a round trip of about 33 days. We'd heard about a secret, unguarded treasure chamber in the Ruins. When we got there, we'd have a 50% chance of finding the treasure and collecting a big (but random) treasure so we could buy a friend out of prison. But it was not to be! We'd set out with only a few days of provisions, and were constantly on the lookout for game. On the 4th day, after a couple run-ins with wild humanoid/dog Renyu, we came upon a big, lumbering Tsi'il - one of Tekumel's prized meat animals. Talz' character cast a Blessing on my warrior, and I snuck up within range of the Tsi'il's huge mace-ended tail, and dealt it a terrific blow on the head. That made it mad! But we'd prepared well, and the creature's initial docility proved its undoing. Better still, the Tsi'il has a valuable gland (4000 gold Kaitars!), which we proceeded to harvest. Now well-provisioned, and carrying this potential wealth, we decided to turn back for home. Our luck in not encountering anything particularly dangerous continued to hold, and we got back to the Monestary on the 8th day. We tried selling the Tsi'il gland, but only got 2000 Kaitars for it - which wasn't enough to free our friend.

The entire session - including character creation - only took about 2 1/2 hours. We've resolved to use the money to buy better gear, and set back out seeking more dangerous prey in hopes of raising the needed funds before our friend's incarceration ends atop an impaling stake!

jeffdee
Administrator
Posts: 427
Post Re: One-Shot (?) Session Report
on: December 17, 2014, 09:55

Second Shot: Our Sad Tale of Woe!
by Talzhemir Mrr, edited by Jeff Dee

Image

Recap: Our characters' cousin was to be executed in a month if sufficient Inducements could not be raised. The days were slipping by without promise so they were getting more desperate. (We use a print-out of a month of the Tsolyani calendar to record the events. Five six-day weeks. One experience point per week survived; one Advantage point for lasting the month.)

The random city encounter tables (based on Professor Barkers' original city encounters) said the one hiring us was taking some sort of illicit action, perhaps on some kind of covert mission, and we were not informed. Only the ask-no-questions nature of the mission let us ask such an enormous fee.

For this encounter, I made a secret sketch of where the bad guys were, and Jeff had charge of the PC's movement. So I was a quasi-GM, revealing things as we found out IC (In Character).

Béthorm uses miniatures EXTENSIVELY because the rules care about missile range, cover, zone-of-control, who gets hit by an attack gone badly awry, and so forth. Every PC has to look different. Here, our players are represented by Tyranids. Talzy truly needs Pe Choi minis.

Attempting to scale the wall, my sorceress succeeded but Jeff's warrior was delayed. As the odd turn of phrase puts it, that's when "things went pear-shaped". Ladders placed around the interior allowed our opponents to get up on the wall. My character was swarmed on, and went down. (That's a set of Ral Partha 'Warriors of the World' playing the enemies.)

After a desperate battle, eventually Jeff's character was defeated, too. In a game with a GM, this might have been fudged to let our heroes live. As this is still one of our first experiments with GM-free tabletop RP, and we had never had the need for anything of that sort, so our characters were ignominiously slain.

We never found out if we were in the service of a person with sinister or heroic motives. If we had lived, we would have used Orical to query which. So the last part of our tragedy will be, we'll never know what that was all about.

In future, I think we'll opt-in to a plot assumption that the player characters only die if the players truly want them to...

jeffdee
Administrator
Posts: 427
Post Re: One-Shot (?) Session Report
on: December 27, 2014, 11:08

Talzhemir Mrr and I took our new characters (Vimuhla/Chiteng worshippers from the Red Stone clan) into a new underworld beneath the city of Katalal.

My warrior character, No'otl, was interested in exploring beneath the old Bednalljan fort, or the abandoned compound of the Legion of the Sun-Bright Sword which the Mu'ugalavyani wiped out during their occupation of the city in 2020 A.S. Talzhemir's sorceress character wanted us to find some site that's not so well known. She had a point. We've talked about approaching the local wizard Meshetsu for advice, but decided we were probably too far beneath his notice.

Then Ravítri (Talzhemir’s sorceress character) was approached by her old disreputable slaver associates. They were having trouble with an infestation of Kúrgha (6-limbed, half-meter tall Tékumel ‘rats’ with sharp beaks), and they were willing to pay us a pittance to root them out of the sewers. Ravítri didn’t want to, as her reputation was already damaged by association with these people, but the 50 gold Káitar offer was better than nothing, plus there was a chance we’d find other loot during the excursion. So we agreed.

We found the place where the Kúrgha were coming out, but it was too small for us to enter so the slavers sent a work gang to widen it. Then No’ótl (my warrior character) shinnied down a rope to the chamber below – setting off an ancient trap dart that narrowly missed me. The Underworlds are full of these old forgotten “defenses”. We proceeded out the left-hand door. At first we encountered only worms and flies and other denizens of the sewer muck, but as we delved further we met with a couple of Mrúr (animated corpses) and a Qól (a snake-headed mutant creature). The sewers of Katalál are known to be unstable, and here and there creatures of the deeper catacombs crawl up and present a hazard. We dispatched these with little difficulty, gathering a few coins and bits of equipment for our troubles, but eventually we came to a dead end.

Retracing our steps, we ran into a wandering pack of Kúrgha. These managed to scratch No’ótl up a bit during the resulting melee, but nothing too serious – and now we knew we were on the right track. Back at the room where we’d entered, we took the right-hand door. This took us into a pool chamber of the sewers, occupied by a larger group of Mrúr. Their ‘leader’ was well-equipped, and he managed to get close to Ravítri, but concentrating our efforts we quickly dispatched him. The others began to swarm upon us. Ravítri and her bearer-slave fell back to the entrance while No’ótl fought a defensive action. The undead swarmed upon him, and nearly overwhelmed him before his swords and Ravítri’s arrows took them down.

The next door led to the final room, which proved to be the Kurgha’s lair. These, again, swarmed upon No’ótl when he rashly charged into the room, but after testing himself against these ‘rats’ in the previous encounter he felt pretty confident. One of these proved cleverer than the others, though, and began biting at areas unprotected by his light Chlén-hide armor. No’ótl was badly bloodied by the time the fight ended in our favor. We located some of the items the slavers said had been taken by the creatures, as proof that we’d found the lair, and brought them back in exchange for our pay. We’ve also got a few salvaged weapons and shields, but No’ótl managed to insult the first merchant we tried to sell them to (on a fumbled Negotiation check). We’ll need to find another buyer in the marketplace if we’re ever going to see profit from those items.

jeffdee
Administrator
Posts: 427
Post Re: One-Shot (?) Session Report
on: January 17, 2015, 10:06

Another Bethorm: Plane of Tekumel session report from the 'solo duo' campaign I'm playing in with Talzhemir Mrr:

Ravitri (Talz' sorcerous archer) and No'otl (my warrior) found an entrance into a tunnel complex beneath the old Mu'ugalavyani earthworks near Katalal. There we had a rather desperate battle against a handful of Mu'agh (the Jellyfish). Though not physically very impressive, their anemic-looking tendrils carry an acid that burns flesh rather badly. Chlen-hide armor is proof against it, but No'otl was only wearing light coverage, so the things kept landing hits on his exposed skin. Worse, they're highly resistant to physical damage: No'otl's swords had little effect. Ravitri slowed a couple of them down by firing arrows into their little floating 'organs', (a called shot 'around armor' in Bethorm). But still, they forced us out of their room and back up the corridor a good distance before we managed to turn the tide. And this despite their crawling pace! We found a wonderful cache of trinkets on that expedition, but not quite valuable enough to pay for an upgrade to the fine steel swords that No'otl dreams of owning.

-Jeff

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