Last time in Illmire, the Ranger Leithidir turned out to be cursed by the Deathly Spade. If only Yorivar, Illmire’s druid, was still around! Leithidir would also still like to replace his hand, he’s only been able to find a wooden one.

After a lot of arguing, the party choose a route that involves going through as much forest as possible, to utilise the Ranger’s favoured terrain. This goes well until the edge of the lake, where a Giant Crocodile 🐊 attacks them while fording a river. This ambush is super effective!

I’ve got terrible at keeping up with these. Let’s try to sort that out!

The players leave the surrounds of Illmire and get supplies, and more importantly recruits to reinforce Illmire. They travelled out on the King’s Highway, and got torrentially rained on. I like AiME and so a good excuse to make this journey a Journey with Exhaustion and suffering¹ is one that’s been missing for me up until now. The party were very relieved to see a cabin just off the path and the bears prowling around outside it menacing the occupants were of no mind at all.

I finally had a go playing Dungeon Crawl Classics. As a player, too. It’s a D&D retroclone with those dice, the “funky” ones. We played the game from the Quickstart Rules, which are free, and include two adventures. We played The Portal Under The Stars.

I decided to shake up my Evils of Illmire campaign with something different, and I’d been meaning to run “Do Not Let Us Die”¹ for a while. It’s by Cecil Howe who made Hex Kit which I’ve mentioned and used a few times.

The premise

The premise is basically almost a board-game. The players are nebulous here, they don’t have physical characters, they’re just each in charge of a fraction of a town that is under-resourced for a fearsomely cold winter that restricts the ability to gather resource. They get abstracted to being a Wizard, Fighter, or Thief, with attendant bonus at gathering one of the following resources.

Villagers need wood (collected best by Fighters), to prevent freezing to death immediately. They need food (which Thieves spot best) every other turn, or they will starve. They can need medication (gathered by Wizards) within a few turns or will die of some malady.

It is, in short, grimdark.

So last time, the players decided to sneak into the cult’s temple in Illmire. Coincidentally they managed to knock out the window to the only room without cultists inside it.

This session started with a happy murder of all the cultists desecrating the temple that didn’t surrender in time. Most notably the ranger found a sacred mace, that he very carefully didn’t touch with his skin and passed back to the cleric for safe-keeping. And keep it safe the cleric did, not sullying it with combat.

I finally got a chance to play a game I’d been very curious about, Alice is Missing. It was organised by the very excellent @proopypants. The plot is in the title: Alice, a girl in a sleepy American rural town, has gone missing a few days ago. It’s winter 2020 and you play her friends trying to find her again.

Except only by text.

🙊

TL;DR: It’s great.

It’s Hypertellurians time again! I ran the Heart of the Atom Isa over two sessions, and it finished with the party sledging down a mountain on a moon, on a wave of alien mucus. So, if you take nothing else away from this, then you can do some very silly sci-fi.

The party’s rocket, the Atom Isa, has its heart stolen from it, and they have to get it back from Argencia, who is seen on the ship’s logs - departing for the tremendostaceans of the Zelteen nomads. The party are:

• Garmotte, a human-sized Alien amoeba
• Khepri-the-Rising-Sun, a beetle-man Royal
• Philomena Dashwood, a young explorer and Ultranaut

We continue the tales of the Evils of Illmire. And what I’ve learned while running it.

The party start in the sunken Bastion, keeping a Black Skeleton Turned at bay while they rob his throne room. They then have a short rest, and explore the room unlocked by the key on the Skeleton’s belt. Some normal skeletons provide no trouble, but the Wraith they unleash from the cell is much more of a problem, especially when it starts raising the freshly interred skeletons as Spectres. This was a long hard fight, and very nearly ended badly.

Jim Parkin likes making and playing very streamlined games. Really, very very streamlined games. He’s into the idea of free kriegsspiel (FK) feeding back into RPGs (the FK revolution, FKR) and summarises it well. This goes past OSR’s “rulings not rules”, and could be encapsulated as “why have the rules? Just talk through the action and agree what should happen”. This requires trust at the gaming table (no /r/rpghorrorstories), and (I personally think) a bit of confidence for the Referee. I barely have confidence that I’m applying rules that are written down correctly, so this terrifies me. Here’s Jim’s words:

So, last time, in the Evils of Illmire… well, it went a bit to shit. See for yourself.

Rancidius, priest of the Cult of the Illuminal Star, and the bandits defer to him. He knocks Vert, the paladin, to the ground, and then pulls a mindphage from his ear.

Useless thing, so much for control. You were supposed to have betrayed the party much earlier! Not that I suppose you needed to, you’ve been much less competent than I expected!

The monologing continued in this vein for some time. Once “Father Rand” got this out of his system, he dispatched the group to the cult HQ for sacrifice to the Fearmother. However, en route, the cult see mantismen causing problems ahead, and resolve to tip the party into the Gecko Pit and call it quits.

But they’re keeping the loot, of course.