This continues a long-form campaign, Zen and the Art of Caravan Maintenance.
Emmett & Joshua are seeking ancient truth in the scrolls of the Lime Nomads, in a pink Routemaster autogolem. Joshua wants to cross the Final Barrier and be able to raise the dead.
Story
Emmett and Joshua say goodbye to the Ultra in the Nomad City. Not that Emmett can remember anything since being (voluntarily) possessed by an Ultra. It’s all polite though, Joshua’s refusal was politely accepted. They take their ponies back to the autogolem, which turns out to be in a bit of a state.
There’s no Nomad escorts, and no Salmon. Just Spiral, crying and making a (bad) makeshift grave out of rocks. The autogolem has a lot of bloodstains in it. Once they get Spiral to calm down, he says Salmon tripped and fell, and bashed his head open.
Emmett distracts Spiral while Joshua goes straight to the truth and uses Speak With Dead to ask Salmon himself. Salmon tells Joshua that Spiral fought (verbally) with the escorts and they left; and then got upset. Salmon tried to calm Spiral, but while he was waving his arms around, Salmon flinched at just the wrong time and tripped. While the root cause was Spiral’s fault, from the Pale Country Salmon now sees that Spiral wasn’t trying to kill him, and it was a terrible accident. Joshua offers a better burial, which Salmon accepts.
After a much better grave is dug, and a more formal service conducted, a sombre caravan heads North to Violet City. The weather remains cold, and becomes very dry. It makes getting water difficult, and then dangerous. The caravan turns off the road to get water from a seep in one of the cliffs, and a vome attacks! It was using the seep as an ambush point. With three shooting though, the vome doesn’t last very long, despite being very tough.
The rest of the trip back to the Violet City seems much more relaxing, by that standard. They say goodbye to Spiral in a hotel “befitting him” before returning to a shabbier end of town to the Plucky Pengling, which still doesn’t have anywhere to put a caravan. The autogolem is left in a nearby (paid) garage.
Tools
I upgraded to Foundry v11.
The docker container is such a nice way of doing it, and backing up the data volume is pretty straightforward as well.
Although disk space does take a bit of a hit (temporarily, keep on track with those docker system prunes).
Only problem is that one of the players can’t load the new version, her computer is old and doesn’t support it. However as we’ve moved further from combat, it’s not used much.
Lessons learned
Murder mysteries don’t work if you can’t ask the victim if he was murdered or not!
I didn’t actually prep enough for this session - I didn’t think the party would make it back to the City in one session. This annoyed me more than it should do. I don’t need to over-prep!