This continues a long-form campaign, Zen and the Art of Caravan Maintenance.
Emmett & Joshua are exploring a brand new mystery island in the Cirle Sea. They’ve landed with Spiral and his servant, and are in an abandoned village. Strange and wondrous things exist here, but the only person is Tim, who thinks they’re the other side of the Circle Sea.
He’s also reporting being chased by mysterious creatures.
Story
The party spend the night in the (unnamed) village on the Island. Spiral’s servant, Jim, is volunteered to take watch instead of Spiral abjectly failing at it again. Emmett and Joshua want to see what’s in the mountains that spooked Tim, they’re pretty sure he’s exaggerating. He gets more and more anxious as they enter the hills and the sounds of the Circle Sea die away.
Some kind of automaton attacks - from a distance it appears to be a tall cylinder with three arms. It’s very slow, but when it fires its first arm, it completely melts the rock they’re hiding behind and hurts most of the party.
All the NPCs run off, absolutely terrified. Joshua and Emmett shoot the arms off the robot and run between hiding places until they have “de-armed”1 the automaton and it self-destructs.
The players follow the tracks of the robot as it appears to have followed the same route several times, maybe circling the largest peak? As they go round, they see another robot up ahead, and urgently hide. The robot passes by without detecting them.
Further on, they find an entrance into the mountain. It starts off as just a square hole but rapidly improves into metal floor, ceiling, and walls. They find a warehouse of unactivated robots and other stores, and behind that, some sort of base. It has an engineering room, canteen, rooms of beds, and a large pile of gold in breeze/cinder block size ingots.
Joshua is distresssed to discover he can’t even move a single ingot as they weigh almost 3t each.
They set down for some thinking.
Tools
Due to one the players still having issues with latest Foundry, for the encounter we used Dice Maiden in Discord for rolling. This required cribbing the few stats needed by The Black Hack.
The robots came from a few rolls in the Tome of Adventure Design and a lot of British sci-fi. Yes, canonically their scenes did take place in a quarry.
The idea of “give the party a room full of gold and no easy way to transport it” was on the Stratometaship discord and I can’t claim I did anything but steal it outright. I used Wolfram Alpha for calculating the mass of a gold ingot of the right size.
Lessons learned
Pretty happy with this session - as usual trying to create a “difficult but not insanely lethal” monster in TBH is hard. I had already learned this lesson. Combat in this game has become more of a puzzle rather than actual dice-rolling.
Not sorry. ↩︎