A quick recap. Temple, rescue daughter, guards, disease, fights, heads rolled, blood splattered, spell casting priest and a weird, monstrous, psychic, teleporting space beetle.

This week the party’s Cleric, Romula (Clarky), made an appearance and the slaughter continued, with Blegrin (Alex) leading the way and Faqual the Sorcerer (Dave) adding to the carnage with his toblerone inspired molten chocolate magic missiles (both milk and white chocolate varieties).  All was going well until the space beetle, host of the Lunar Seed (you don’t need to know but can imagine) hugged Fean the Quick (James) to death.  If he’d been Fean the Strong he may have survived.  Putting the bad guys on the back foot having killed or mutilated all of the guards, the party pushed on through the temple to find an underground cavern, infested with pustulent fleshy growths clinging to pillars and a stink from the bowels of hell.  People who had been drawn into the temple were lying around, covered in the diseased growths, almost like human grow bags. It was here the bad guys, Elias Goldtongue and the beetle made their stand while the last guards fell upon our remaining heroes (saddened as they were by the loss of Fean).

A plan was formed: block the corridor with a 2 man shield wall while Andromeda the Thief (Matt) and Faqual make Molotov cocktails with their oil flasks, then set the whole cavern on fire.  Great plan and all was going well until the beetle used it’s cosmic spray ability and Faqual failed his saving throw, falling into a euphoric daze and spilling the remaining contents of his oil flask on the floor where the party stand. It was about this point that they spotted Mina, the daughter of Olga they were there to save.

Most of the guards now out of the fight, Andromeda lashes her Molotov cocktail and starts setting the flesh and some of the poor, diseased supplicants on fire – a blaze which quickly spreads.  Romula and Belgrin run to rescue Mina while Andromeda tries to slap the idiotically drooling Faqual out of his daze.  And so we left it there…

The Black Hack thoughts

The OSR roots of the game started to show through this session. A few failed rolls and things can quickly turn bad, and once armour is depleted characters seemed far more vulnerable in combat.  At the beginning of the session Fean the Quick had full armour and hit points, but just a handful of failed rolls took the character out.  When a character is reduced to zero hit points they are ‘Out of Action’, unconscious and unable to contribute for the rest of the encounter.  After the encounter the player rolls on a d6 with results ranging from just knocked out to dead, with other results including penalties to dice rolls to disfigurement.

The Black Hack is far from a perfect system. Some of the ideas don’t make sense – the usage die for resources is a clever idea, but is perhaps too abstract.  If you wanted to buy two flasks of oil, that’s what you should do instead of one flask with a d6 usage die.  And there are gaps in the rules – how to make contested ability checks for example. But those issues aside it is great fit for Lunchtime Lairs – light, easy for players to pick up and it just works.  I suspect it may struggle with higher level characters.

Next week shall see a resolution to this adventure, The Curious Fane of the Lunar Seed, then it will be GM rotation time with Clarky up next.

After a slow paced start to Lunchtime Lairs last week with much investigation, reaching out to contacts and trying to discover just what the hell was going on I had expected there to be a bit more action this week.  I wasn’t disappointed, from kick off axes slashed and heads rolled.

Before I get into more of that though I have to mention our players.  Twice as many as last week – if we carry on like this I have no idea what we’ll do.  Bar room brawl anyone? In addition to myself, Clarky (Romula the Cleric) and Matt (Andromeda the Thief) from last week we were joined by Dave (Faqual the Sorcerer), James (Fean the Quick, a Thief) and Alex (Blegrin the Warrior).  Perfect.  With characters chosen and a quick explanation of the rules (which takes all of 5 minutes) we were underway.

The new players were brought up to speed with a summary of the previous session and the current plan.  It was a sensible plan; stake out the temple and look for an opportunity to get inside, maybe taking out a guard or two, while other party members would investigate the diseased pustules appearing in parts of the slums.  While Romula and Faqual visited the Sisters of Mercy, a benevolent religious order caring for the poor and sick and lead by the mysterious Brother Eldritch, Blegrin, Andromeda and Fean observed the temple.

Everything was going according to plan until Andromeda and Fean where disturbed while peaking through a window and Blegrin took the opportunity of a distracted guard to chop his mates head off.  Thus combat was entered and chaos ensued.  Blegrin quickly found himself outnumbered by guards and their captain, while the thieves took out a guard at the rear of the temple and quickly found themselves embroiled in a combat with more guards, their leader Elias Goldtongue and huge hairy psychic beetle.  Faqual arrived and was slinging about sleep and charm spells with mixed results, and so we had to end the session there in mid combat.  There’s no doubt the party are in a tricky situation.

And where was Romula while all this was going on? After an losing her lunch emptying a bucket of filth and vomit she had to get some rest, convenient as unfortunately Clarky had to leave early, real life once more proving that it is far less fun than living in an imagined fantasy land.

The Black Hack in combat

I was interested to see how combat would work with the Black Hack and with the rest of the session being one long scrap we were able to take the rules through their paces. There are some clever ideas in the rules, for example, to determine initiative players must pass a Dexterity test (roll under it), with a success meaning they get to act before the bad guys and a failure meaning they act after.

To score a hit with a weapon the player must roll under their characters relevant attribute with various modifiers, Strength for melee attacks and Dexterity for ranged. Attributes are the gold standard and created as nature intended. Damage is based on class, for example a warrior always does 1d8 damage with an axe or dagger.  When a monster or NPC attacks a character the player rolls for them to avoid the attack, with a +1 to the roll for each level the enemy is above the character.  A couple of the characters had Strength of 16 which meant they had a 75% chance of hitting, and also a 75% chance of avoiding being hit.

The armour system is unique, I’ve not seen it any other systems.  Each item of armour has a number of points which reduce damage, but once used they are spent until the character takes a one hour rest. Leather armour has 4 points, Chain Mail 6 and Plate 8.  After a couple of hits armour is generally depleted and anything beyond that comes straight off the characters hit points.

The characters were very effective in combat, with the percentages being in their favour, but when they do get hit their armour quickly diminishes and they are much more exposed.

Spellslingers

Sorcerers and Clerics (from level 2) have spell slots which they can either fill with remembered spells or use with any spell from their spellbook. After a spell has been cast they have to test their Intelligence or Wisdom, with the spell slot being retained on a success. This meant that Faqual the Sorcerer with his single level 1 spell slot was able to cast a number of spells – sleep a couple of times and charm person.  It’s a neat idea, but I can see a situation where a Sorcerer at higher levels rarely runs out of spells and is just blasting through everything.

The Wild Bunch

All great adventures have the odds stacked against the heroes and that’s just what we have here.  Will the characters survive next weeks session or will it end in a Wild Bunch style TPK?

If you’re interested in Lunchtime Lairs and can get into Liverpool city centre between 12 and 2 on Wednesdays get in touch with either Clarky (@DissectingWrlds on Twitter) or myself via this blog or @nfbenson on Twitter.

Today myself and Andrew Clark (@DissectingWrlds) started Lunchtime Lairs, our attempt to fit in weekly short RPG sessions.  The venue was Just Play in Liverpool, the time 12-2.  As part of our planning we had decided on a generic fantasy setting and a simple system – The Black Hack – the idea being that all adventures would be short and completed in a single session. Then anyone could step up and GM the following week.

We had one other player turn up (Matt, a chap I work and whose ear I have bent about RPG’s for some time) for a total of two players and a GM.  Taking on the GM role for this inaugural meetup, I had determined to go for light preparation with theatre of the mind delivery which is very much not my usual approach or style of GMing.  For ideas I turned to Frog God Games Tome of Adventure Design; there are many products of this type around, but this one is fairly comprehensive and gave me more than enough idea to get started.

The Adventure

Andromeda the Thief and Romula of the Red Hand (a Cleric) were our characters, rolled up in the first half hour.  Within no time they were in the employ of Olga the leper, a merchant struck down by the disease; their mission – to recover her daughter, Mina, who has disappeared into the Temple of Joy and Serenity, drawn in by the preaching of the priest Elias, the warden and keeper of the temple.

Tapping into underworld contacts a dark picture unfolds, poor and vulnerable folk from the slums are being drawn to the temple and disappearing within.  Worse still, pockets of diseased, pustulent flesh have been seen clinging to the walls of building in the slums, exploding and spreading disease.

The duo stake out the temple and learn something of the movement and patterns of it’s inhabitants.  Carefully they lay their plans which shall be put into action next week…

With one new player to RPG’s, a fairly cautious approach was adopted, so this first session was largely discovery and planning.  We only scraped the surface of the Black Hack rules with a handful of ability checks – I like the roll under stat mechanic; whether it has any significant shortcomings is yet to be seen.

I’m looking forward to next weeks session; seeing how the party approach the temple and testing out the TBH combat system.