Tales of Escia

TALES OF ESCIA: Running an OSE Hexcrawl 09

Player Characters

Melora Kriss - Human Druid
Myr’tacae Malenia - Elf Fighter

The Premise

As explained in my previous article, we’re running a modified version of Old-School Essentials in a minimalist romantic fantasy setting, which will be fleshed out as we play.
We began with our first session of B2 - Keep on the Borderlands and decided on a bi-weekly rhythm every second wednesday evening, playing for 2 hours.

For the play report of the previous session, click here.

Session 09 - Stupid sexy demigod!

TL’DR: The party spends an evening partying like ancient greeks and returned to Margrave Keep to find an unpleasant surprise.

Everyones invited!

The group of fauns invited Myr’tacae t join their merry evening and escorted her to the human figure, who turned out to be Dionysos, demigod of wine and revelry (yes, the himbo demigod as depicted in the video game Hades).
She was offered to stay for the party, and, talking about the people she left behind, free to bring them over also.
Myr’tacae went back and got everyone, except for Sandy Honeyman (already asleep) and the breggles who stayed to watch him.

Don’t blink

As the evening went on, the fauns seemingly increased in numbers everytime one blinked.
In a private conversation with Melora and Myr, Dionysos offered to help with the goings-on in Margrave Keep and the Caves of Chaos, in exchange for them checking out a place called Sunbelow Abbey. A monastery to the southwest and source of the best wine in this region, the flow of wine stopped recently for unknown reasons. As a show of goodwill, Dionysos provided the party with a possible location for Stepladder Burke, the missing mage from Margrave Keep.

Return to the Keep

The next morning, the party and their entourage continued their trip to Margrave Keep.
On their arrival, they were confrontd with captives of the Addercapper brigands on pillories, held for possible execution.
Pearl went home to her husband immediately. The party went and informed Woken-Too-Early about the dealings with the hobgoblins and asked him, if some of the Addercapper captives could be deputized to help the group, if not outright pardoned.
Woken-Too-Early went on to explain the martial hierarchy and informed them of persons of higher station than Commander Margrave in the city of Specularum to the south, to possibly overrule Addercapper executions.

Closing thoughts

Faction action! Ever since the unintended mention of the Addercapper brigands to Commander Margrave in session 6, I’ve been tracking their knights’ efforts in tracking down the fugitives. By the end of session 9, they have been searching for ten ingame days.
I made two contesting four-part clocks for each faction and, using the Mothership systems’ downtime rules, rolled 1d100 every two days for the knights. A success on even numbers for one faction meant a failure for the other.
After four rolls I had 3 successes for the knights and 1 success for the brigands, which meant the knights rounded up most members of the small group, but not all of them.

See you next time. =)