AAR: What's in the DOME?

This continues a long-form campaign, Zen and the Art of Caravan Maintenance.

Emmett, Joshua, and Zalephona are now cattle ranchers, all seeking a quiet change in career for various reasons. They’re driving buggalo from Emerald City to the Porcelain Citadel. Or at least, in general. Currently they’re amusing themselves in Potsherd Crater to see what is going on. Hazel has promised them an autogolem, so there’s no rush to leave.

Time for some constructive pillaging!

Story

The gang are at loose ends. They check into the Crater Hovel, a hotel whose sign was successfully grafitti’d enough that the name stuck. It doesn’t encourage staying around, but there’s no obvious bugs. Everyone splits up.

Joshua volunteers as a healer, as he can perform Cure Light Wounds a few times a day. He tries to help people getting turned away for being too poor at a clinic he’s found. The healed are terribly grateful and insist on giving him the money that wasn’t enough for the clinic. This means when one final person comes up that’s beyond his skills, he gives them all that money to go into the clinic. He feels pretty good about it.

Emmett goes drinking in a bar, regretting being too poor for a proper carouse. He makes a friend and they get chatting. This person is really interested in the buggalo, and where Emmett’s been with them, and who he’s been talking to, and what the Lime Nomads are like, and basically anything except revealing their own name. Emmett fakes ignorance until they get bored and leave.

Phonie goes rummaging for shenanigans, and places where she might earn money without doing hard work. She hears about a quarry where some honest work will turn out some decent porcelain worth selling. This sounds suspiciously like hard work. She hears about a mansion where a porcelain prince died that’s currently awaiting legal wranglings. This sounds a bit too hot. She also hears about a mysterious chromium dome to the South a few days. This sounds just right. She buys a hammer and persuades the others that it’s worth trying to pillage¹.

They get out to the dome. There’s some big ugly lions on top of it. Just a few, but nobody wants to disturb them. Walking around the dome reveals it’s literally half a sphere of wind-polished metal. It’s hot in the sun, clearly why the lion-things are on it. They growl when the party approach but stop when they retreat. Otherwise they sit, and occasionally yawn, showing plenty of teeth.

Smacking the dome with the hammer when the lions are on it seems like a bad idea.

So they instead go to the far side, and try to carve under the dome with a dagger. It does indeed just sit on the dry hard soil, but digging under it with a dagger isn’t going to be quick. They decide to encourage the lions to move away with a complicated plan:

1. Wait for night so the dome gets cold
2. Put some food on the ground, and scratch a square around it because cats like squares
3. Wait some more

Weirdly enough this actually works! The party get a shock when the lions unfurl bat-wings and fly to the food. Their “ugliness” is actually bat features informing the cat face.

With them out of the way, the party climb the dome by throwing the rope over the top and holding it either side of the dome. They eventually all get to the top, and find a softer divot in the top, about the size of a person. It’s not metal, so they decide to smash it with the hammer² they brought this whole way.

Lessons learned

I’ve realised this game is in danger of becoming a Free Kriegsspiel game³. As we’re consciously going for quite a chill game, I’m skipping more and more rolls for the players.

I’m still using them for my RNG though.

I prepped three small side-quests for this session, as the players had indicated they’d be interested in hanging around rather than heading immediately onwards. Of course they didn’t pick the one I spent the most time on! On the bright side, I didn’t draw out a map for it.

Instead I took Luka’s two lines about a dome with batlions around and just decided they were big lazy cats and would stereotype as hard as possible. The session including googling “whether cats sit in drawn boxes” and “what does lindor lindt look like” for verisimilitude. My task for next session is to decide what’s in the actual dome as I have no idea.