You can take them home

I tagged along in Prince of Nothing’s B/X game, run in Aaron the Pedantic’s discord server. It’s the first game I’ve been able to enjoy in a month or so, on account of no internet access.

This play report is filled with descriptions of play without context. I was dropped into the middle of the game without context, and to convey the experience, it’s quite appropriate to detail what happened without a massive introduction to setting lore, mission details, etc. Any context I provide is done as I learned of it.

As a final note regarding the game’s context, I found dropping in without it ideal. I wanted to focus on the game’s mechanics (or lack thereof).

Prince first suggested I play a henchman, but then considered a PC was absent; one of the campaign’s only two level 2 characters. Isildur the Thief was available, 50 XP away from becoming the only level 3 character this campaign had seen. Obviously, getting this guy killed would’ve been awful. It’s my first B/X game, too. Will I walk in the wrong door and extinguish the last flickering hope of anyone progressing in this campaign?

I Have 475 Eels

We begin the game in a corridor, within a partially flooded keep. Apparently a Castellan wants an enchanted horn here, which (according to legend) has the power to summon armies. We come to a Dead Soldier, add loot to the list, and continue down the corridor. Not much happens as we bumble along, it’s empty rooms.

We met up with some Friendly Bugbears, giving us a pittance of information and a potential resource for a future encounter. Not much happened there, just some talking.

We continued on to a tower’s spiral staircase. Our treasure was likely on the lower levels, either the first or the basement level. Unfortunately, the basement was completely flooded, and the first floor was covered in 2 feet of water.

Edit: while in the tower, we discovered a nest with threevery large eggs, and a smattering of gold and silver coins. As Prince points out, we wisely ignored it for the time being, both to avoid an unnecessary encounter and to hurry in finding the horn. We weren’t the only ones looking for it!

Someone other than me asked if we could bring the party’s canoes in, which was a brilliant suggestion I was immediately in favor of. This is where the session turned; from here, it was action all the way through to the end of the session. It’s about 2-3 in the afternoon, the canoes aren’t all that far away, and we could have all our extra supplies, men at arms, wounded PC, and canoes inside the keep for any use we could think of. Whoever suggested we use canoes was expanding the future space of possibilities.

Traveling down the corridor, we came across a room with some schools of fish (a nearby river was feeding the flooded levels, keeping the water relatively fresh). A backpack was floating in the corner, and playing the thief, I couldn’t resist. Not resisting turned into an eel encounter. They dealt a small bit of damage, and inflicted a save vs -2 to hit poison on hit. The thief I was playing had a net in his inventory, so I spent my first round of combat recovering it. Another party member threw a ration out to distract the eels, which worked on one of them. Nicely done! I asked them next round to help me spread out the net, back the party into a corner of the room, and hold the eels at bay. Prince updated our AC to 2, attacks were rolled, two eels were killed, and the rest fled. We tried catching the ones which hadn’t died, to no avail. Oh well!

I collected the two remaining eels. The next room had a few kobolds fishing, who were adamant we leave. I handed them an eel for safe passage.

Lovely.

The most exciting portion of this game was the arrival of a barge carrying roughly two dozen cultists. This conveniently took place as we sought out our canoes, having finally reached the keep’s exit on this side! Two men of arms (heavily armed archers) the party had left to guard the canoes were pointing and shouting, and grabbed a wounded PC from his makeshift canoe bed. The MAA made it into the keep, dragging the PC behind us.

I tell everyone to retrace our steps through the keep, ignoring the kobolds we passed earlier and running into the southeast tower. We flee to the second floor, where I and another party member were split on whether to explore the second floor, or retreat into the third floor. The party had ostensibly cleared the floor in a prior session, and I wanted to bottleneck the enemy as much as possible.

After brief argument, I was declared the Caller, and we moved on to the top (3rd) floor. I asked the magic user to pick up one of the eggs, prepare to 1) smash the egg onto the staircase and 2) cast sleep. The magic user failed successfully; he shouted while holding the egg, directing the cultists to our position. After some clarifications on what he’d be throwing the egg at, the MU finally egged the steps. A great shriek, like that of an eagle was heard, and my heart soared at the prospect of success.

Meanwhile, the rest of the party smashed oil flasks at the stair’s top, at my instruction. The magic user refused, instead wishing to wait to see who was coming up the stairs. This was a mistake, and quickly got him killed by a griffon, coming to avenge its friend.

My hope for how this would’ve gone is detailed in the next section.

The griffon continued its rampage against cultists coming up the stairs, and so we were given brief reprieve to plan at the other side of the keep. I directed the fighter to take his potion of invisibility as I did the same, and we progressed down the stairs. We found diseased Kobolds (whom the party had befriended prior), armed and waiting by a barricaded door.

The second group of cultists were beginning to bust down the barricade, so I took out a grappling hook and escaped to the water. I then swam to the barge, plan in mind, while the party was stuck trying to decide on what to do. They did nothing for about four rounds, listening to the sound of whimpering, yelping kobolds and the clang of metal on metal. Some stripped in preparation for a jump, while others attempted (and succeeded) in setting the barge on fire.

The party spent then swam, sunk, and drowned their way in my general direction. I had boarded the barge (still invisible), looted the captain’s quarters, tossed a strongbox out the window (with a silk rope attached, for later retrieval), swam back around to one of our canoes, swam it out to the back of the barge, retrieved the strongbox, and started rowing.

This was more or less the end of my participation; I was escaping. The surviving two PCs caught up to the canoe and started rowing back. The character I was playing began suffering ill effects of plague, but was saved (barely) by a cleric back at home base (which of course charged us out the nose for it).

The Elites Don’t Want You to Know This

Common among boomers is the assumption their having grown up with books, and inability to use cellphones must translate to the reverse; young people, being able to use cellphones, must not be able to read books!

This obviously stupid position, which is in no way defensible by anyone with two brain cells to rub together, is nevertheless the subject of smug chortling, which you may hear echoing through retirement homes and fishing clubs across America. The truth of the joke is of no concern to boomers, who are enjoying an imagined lead in a pissy status game no one else is playing.

Similarly, average fanboys of the Old-School Renaissance assume their tactical stupidity, bafflement at classes with more than one character ability, horror in the face of feats, and (most importantly) inability to get past New School character creation must translate to how new players would react to a game like B/X.

I don’t think this position describes anyone I played with, and among the players was another 4e enjoyer, pictured below.

Folks who play New School games (and to a far lesser extent Legacy Games) are to some extent judged on their tactical skill with regards to encounters, meaning they have to think, plan, react, and make good decisions to do well. Your game has an OODA loop, and your success is measured by how far and quickly you progress. Obviously, this skill can be translated to Old School games. In lieu of granted character abilities, you focus more on practical uses for equipment and the occasional spell, especially as they pertain to your environment.

It’s not that difficult, especially since all of the stumbling and bad play OSR types have already done for 50 years is out in the wild and easy to learn from. Not only that, I found New School strategy and tactics were easily applicable to situations in game, where OSR players were more inclined to scratch their heads.

The Tower

Here’s how the tower encounter was supposed to go.

Cultists approach up the tower’s spiral staircase, a bottleneck which is easily filled with hazards and bodies (literally their purpose).
The egg of a presumably large creature is smashed upon the stairs, hopefully luring whatever laid it through the tower’s open roof, back to its nest.
Oil is poured upon the doorway leading from the staircase’s summit, keeping whatever creatures and cultists coming from the towers from exiting it.
When the cultists approach, the MU may cast sleep, bottlenecking the cultists further and keeping them at bay to escape.
If a creature then returns to the nest, it may fight the cultists, preventing an entire encounter’s worth of combatants from approaching.

This almost went as planned. Had it gone as planned, we would’ve retained a magic user. This magic user would’ve provided a Charm Person spell, several pieces of treasure, use of scrolls and potions on their person, and an additional warm body’s worth of hitpoints to be expended in the name of powergaming.

New School players think this way; the OSR apparently has catching up to do.

The Barge

This was the second encounter with a host of rather hideous mistakes, the majority of which could’ve been avoided merely through acting in any fashion whatsoever.

To recap:

There were 6 armed and diseased kobolds waiting by a barricaded door.
The enemy gave us ample (accidental, via shouted order) warning they’d be breaking the door down.
The other invisible player informed the other players of this, while I went down to sabotage the barge and secure our escape.

Rather than help the kobolds, or act, or do anything, the remainder of the party fumphered about and took off some of their armor, as they listened to the sound of kobolds valiantly fending off cultists for about 4 rounds (very impressive on their part). To the party’s credit, they did eventually decide after the moment of opportunity to set the barge on fire from afar. It helped my character alive, but we missed out on a great deal of loot and men to carry it out. Additionally, an enemy force remains at the keep, with far more men than needed to live. This forced us to leave the area entirely, rather than doubling back to finish off additional cultists and hauling off even more loot. A charm person against the cleric would’ve been tremendously handy as well.

The party had three options to make this set of encounters go more smoothly, suffer less losses, and keep more strategic possibilities open for future sessions. This was the key; the party’s decisions in this last section of the game narrowed possibilities for future sessions (with these characters) substantially.

The party could’ve themselves continued doing nothing by and large. However, the two men at arms could’ve been sent into the lower level to assist the kobolds in their defense, softening up the enemy will well defended archers, and making their future decision (whether to fight the cultists or jump out the window) far easier.
The party could have (again) done nothing, but had their hired archers shoot at the cultists guarding their barge.
The party could’ve traveled down, prepared with the kobolds for forced entry, and used them as meat shields to (again) destroy cultists trapped in a bottleneck, at little or potentially no cost to the party (certainly not compared to the cost of players drowning immediately afterwards).

Option 3 produced the most backlash when I mentioned it to the party afterwards, but seriously; they had the opportunity to prepare, trap or reinforce the barricaded door, fight at ranged at no cost to themselves, give themselves a better chance of breaking the enemy’s morale, etc etc etc. What’s a heavily armored fighter going to do in the water anyways? Drown, that’s what! Might as well kicks some ass on your way out. The archers also died pointlessly, might as well have them shoot before the no-win scenario.

Final Notes

I’d like to thank Prince of Nothing for letting me attend on short notice, adjudicating fairly and quickly, responding well to my improvisations, and performing well in a long list of ways being a good DM.
You can find his recount of the session here.
I’m going to attend next session if possible, with a character of my own. Might as well flex the RPG muscles, be the example of #EliteLevel play, and lead other players to powergaming.
My thoughts on B/X:

B/X, on first impression of playing it (as opposed to observing it), is a Role Playing Activity (or has a culture of playing it as such). Its specific focus (or again, culture of playing it as such) is to practice deciding, communicating, and negotiating actions with a given referee. Because it has little to no structural elements to make it an actual game, the only potential subject of focus is the character's equipment and how they relate to the environment.
For some folks, this is perfectly entertaining and will keep them sated as far as RPGs go.

Remember folks, play to win!