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View Full Version : Fire Dragon Clan Ain't Nothing To **** With (HackMaster 4E Campaign Log)



Morghen
2018-07-13, 01:43 AM
We've recently begun a new campaign, and because I enjoy reading about other people's campaigns, I thought other people might reading about ours.

We're playing monks but not European monks (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuziQsUrbeM). We're more like (https://i.pinimg.com/736x/95/da/b8/95dab8e79d2370f3af5f1e66304b481e.jpg) these (https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2011/09/08/lau1_wide-9147cb52a8d82f21177c61045e0c2bc88860d8b1-s900-c85.jpg) guys (https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2011/09/08/monkstraining_wide-be2a193d17aa509a291c1c09a71e68ccdbc34b5d.jpg?s=140 0). Two homebrew-y wrinkles from standard HackMaster 4E: We're all dual-classing as Monk/Something Else from 1st level and all race restrictions for class are off. So we can play as a Halfling Monk/Paladin if we want.

The Party
Shun Li - High Elf – Monk/Cleric
Hageshidesu Kuroshi - Halfling – Monk/Double-Specialized Invoker
Jing Jiao - Sylvan Elf – Monk/Sole Practitioner Abjurationist
Sankil - Half-Ogre – Monk/Fire Elementalist
Kathong Devek Deshai - Human – Monk/Acrobat I should make a note here that Acrobat is mostly a Thief substitute with some cool mobility tricks, but at character creation I used a chunk of my build points to grab a package intended to make Acrobats less-terrible in combat. This package is intended to offset the big penalties everybody but Monks have when trying to fight with their bare hands. I get a big bump to my AC under certain conditions, I have a ridiculously high chance to dodge area spells, I can trade one of my attacks for a chance to dodge a hit that has already been rolled, and I can delay an attack in exchange for a +1 to hit for every segment I delay. But because I am a Monk I’m going to be a ****ing MONSTER once I go up a couple of levels. It’s gonna be gross.
Things You May Need To Know About HackMaster

Honor - There's a stat called Honor. It accumulates as you do cool things and handle your business but diminishes if you do uncool things (back down from a challenge, pee yourself in court, fight dirty). If you’re in the appropriate range for your level, you get one re-roll per session and +1/dice to ALL your dice rolls (skill checks, saving throws, spell damage, new HPs when you level). Outside that range means -1 to ALL your dice. You can burn a little bit to affect a dice roll here or there but the only time we ever use it is to rewind and change something that just happened (avoid a really gruesome crit, prevail in a save-or-die situation). This is called Purging Your Honor and it’s a big deal. Purging your Honor reduces you to 10% of your former total (which generally takes a LONG to recover) and can only be done one time per level.
Exploding Dice - Damage and healing explode when you roll the max. If you roll a 4 on a d4, roll again... unless you roll another 4. Keep rolling until you roll something that isn't the max, then total all those rolls. Same goes for GM rolls, so now and then you’ll catch a stupid amount of damage from some random mook.
Threshold of Pain - If you lose more than 50% of your HP in a single round, you need to make a Threshold of Pain check. If you pass, you’re fine. If you fail, you’re down for as many rounds as the margin you failed the check by. In the body of the log below, I’m going to refer to them as ToP checks.
Critical Hits - Crits require a roll to determine location and another roll to determine the severity. Remember the exploding dice thing above? The severity roll can also explode. Crits in HM4E can get REAL nasty. Also: Crits frequently have some kind of additional consequence to them. A low-severity crit to the shoulder may just be some extra damage dice but a high-severity crit may mean the arm is disabled or even severed.
Specialist Casters - In a bunch of systems, casters can specialize in one certain school of magic, giving them a bonus to that school but leaving them lacking in other schools. In HackMaster, there’s also a thing called a Sole Practitioner. Sole Practitioners focus on one particular aspect of one particular school with huge bonuses to that one thing but with the drawback of never being able to learn spells of 2-3 opposed schools. For example, one kind of SP Alterationist would focus on spells that move things while another would focus on spells that change things, but both would be barred from ever learning Abjuration, Enchantment/Charm or Necromancy spells. Also: One of our party is a Fire Elementalist. His spell list is fire spells from the arcane and divine list. A cool trick Elementalists can pull is that they have the option to cast spells on their list several levels higher than they actually are, in exchange for possibly blowing up their party or healing somebody they were trying to kill or a whole list of other unpleasant stuff.
Hack (https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51gOYRwRumL._SX367_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg)Master (https://www.kenzerco.com/images/rpg/hackmaster/hm_gmguide.jpg)was built to feel VERY similar to early (https://pocgamer.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/1eadd.jpg)editions (http://iimu.kapsi.fi/limunropellukset/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ADD_Dungeon_Masters_Guide_Old_p1.jpg)of AD&D.


The Setting
North Central Burma in 4022 of the Chinese calendar, the Year of the Wood Ox. (1385 AD)

There are four main orders of monks (Fire, Water, etc.) and each order has Houses corresponding to the 12 signs of the Chinese zodiac. Other houses are Air Dragon, Earth Snake, Water Ox, and so on. Two years ago a disease killed all 25 of the low-level Fire Dragons, leaving only the master and two sub-masters. We're the first class of brand-new monks in the House of the Fire Dragon since that disease. The Fire Order is led by House Fire Pig.
Important: If you've read this far, you know that I use a crapload of links. If you ever find one that's broken, lemme know.

(Unrelated to this campaign: We had a long-running campaign that I chronicled from “upper mid-level” (a little after I joined it) to when it fell apart at “high-level” (Morghen's Monday Night HackMaster Log) (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?194737-Morghen-s-Monday-Night-HackMaster-Log) a while back. People seemed to like that so I’ve linked it.)

LibraryOgre
2018-07-13, 01:27 PM
Yay, Hackmaster! Any reason y'all're going with 4e instead of 5e?

Morghen
2018-07-13, 03:08 PM
Any reason y'all're going with 4e instead of 5e?
We playtested 5E and tried to like it but instead ended up hating the holy moly out of it. The healing (and maybe the skill system IIRC, but it's been almost 10 years) were beyond awful and the people at KC weren't listening to us so we stopped playtesting and went back to playing 4E.

Opening Session! – Why Not Start With A TPK?
Characters Present
Shun Li - Cleric
Hageshidesu Kuroshi – Double-Specialized Invoker
Jing Jiao – Sole Practitioner Abjurationist
Kathong Devek Deshai - Acrobat

The five graduating monks and the three teachers had a party to celebrate on the night of our graduation. The next morning we were summoned to the main hall by Master Soo (Master Nat Soo, human Monk/SP Invoker). Master Soo gave us two tasks: First, a short trek to the chapter house of the Fire Pigs. He wanted us to introduce ourselves to the Master there and let him know that the Fire Dragons are still functioning as a house. The second task is to permanently be on the lookout for potential new Fire Dragons.

We examined a map of our possible routes and decided to take the forest road because the other option was going by raft and I didn’t take a swimming skill.

Late afternoon on the first day we ran into a Systems Check random encounter that was bandit types throwing rocks at us from the trees. We killed a couple and the rest ran off. As lawful types, we thought that tracking the bandits back to their hideout would serve the public good so our tracker crit-failed a tracking check and we spent a couple of hours wandering around in the woods. We decided to turn back when we came across 10 house-sized beetles relaxing in a clearing. We got back to the road around dark and decided that camping in the wilderness would be a worse idea than walking another hour in the dark. We got to Melhai about an hour later.

The guard at the gate told us we could sleep in the park, so we went. When we got there to set up our camp, we found three monks (Earth Rats) already set up for the evening. We went to talk to them but because the rest of us turned into overheated weirdos around real monks with real levels the only one they were welcoming to was Jiao. (The rest of us botched a reaction check by a lot.) After a bit the town guard came by to check up on us and also see if we needed anything, and a bit later we all went down for the night.

In the morning we made a run by the only store in town and then hit the road.

Late in the morning we ran into a big family who had the obvious look of refugees (https://www.billboard.com/files/styles/article_main_image/public/media/fugees-1996-billboard-1548.jpg). We offered help but they wanted nothing to do with us because, they said, their home and farm had been burned by Fire monks. We tried to explain that Fire monks would never do such a thing, but they were certain and wouldn’t even let us escort them back to Melhai. So we went our separate ways. (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-euND2Cxr_4Q/U9LKry5iTkI/AAAAAAAAUq0/fOwl0czHHUY/s1600/well...+...bye.jpg)

Around mid-day we botched the hell out of a surprise check and two big-ass toads jumped out and started ****ing us up like we owed them money. In pretty short order three of the four us had ALSO failed a poison check and gotten knocked out. Fortunately, Jing Jiao made all his poison checks, threw down some hellacious damage from crits, killed the toads, and kept the three sleepyheads from getting eated on the spot.

So. About one mile from the unfriendliest refugees ever or 3 hours back to Melhai? Jiao grabbed one of the dead frogs (to see about having somebody make an antidote) and Hageshidesu (because he’s tiny) and started back to Melhai. “Nah,” said the monk. “**** those refugees.”

Morghen
2018-07-13, 03:25 PM
Session 2 – A Wild Deus Ex Machina Appears! Also: A Triceratops!
Characters Present
Shun Li - Cleric
Hageshidesu Kuroshi - Double-Specialist Invoker
Jing Jiao - Sole Practitioner Abjurationist
Kathong Devek Deshai – Acrobat
Sankil - Half-Ogre - Fire Elementalist

We opened with Jiao hauling a big-ass frog under one arm and an unconscious Halfling under the other. He got about 50 feet before two more big-ass frogs jumped him and before long he’d failed a Poison save and his lights went out.

We re-opened with Sankil getting out of bed on the same day we got our heads kicked in. He’d been sick, so Master Soo gave him a horse to help him catch up. Sankil zoomed through 1.5 days of foot travel in a few hours and got to The Unfriendliest Refugees just before they got to Melhai. They didn’t hate him, which is weird because he’s DEFINITELY NOT A HALF-OGRE, just a regular dude who happens to be 9 feet tall and has oversized canine teeth and shaves twice a day. He handed over a small pile of gold to help them on their way, gave them his blessing, then continued on his way to catch up to us.

Sankil rode on past the refugees and a while later he noticed bloody drag-marks leading off into the brush on the side of the road. Sankil cried, "Drag marks?! MY BROTHERS WORE DRAG!" and left the road in search of us. (Joke aside, he wanted to investigate to see if anybody needed help or if it was just a predator/prey animal situation.) Sankil made some tracking checks and followed the trail to a cave a bit off the road.

Right inside the mouth of the cave, he saw his Fire Dragon brothers laid in a row with our wounds bound, and also our hands and feet. Sankil made an Herbalism check and knew he could quickly mix up an antidote to Big-Ass Venomous Toad venom, which apparently are pretty pervasive in the area. While doing that, he looked around a bit and saw fresh footprints nearby leading in and out of the cave. We woke up and had a tiny catch-up chit-chat and in the middle of that we heard the sound of Something Inside The Cave. We called in to the cave and a voice came back, “We’re trapped.”

Because I don’t have infravision, I got stuck in rear-guard duty. The rest entered the cave. Room 1 just had a pair of shackles on the wall. The voice kept calling out for them to hurry. Also, they heard the clear sound of pigs ahead, so that was a weird wrinkle. Room 2 held six captives. Our guys talked to them and learned that this was a bandit hideout and that the bandits were currently out. About this time I saw eight bandit-looking people and two dogs come out of the tree line. I headed into the cave to relay this news and we decided to lure the bandits into their home territory. The bandits got to the cave entrance and found No Monks where they had left Unconscious Monks and called in to the cave. We taunted back and forth a bit, and then the bandits came in after us.

As soon as all the bandits were in Room 1, Sankil dropped a Baby 1st Level Fireball on them. Right after that, Sankil, Kuroshi, and I charged them and a serious ass-beating ensued. Three of them fled, so Sankil and I ran them down and killed two but Sankil left the leader alive (Tran, human female).

We returned to the cave with the bodies. Sankil made a pyre for the dead. A couple of us felt bad about leaving the pigs in there to starve so we went to free them. As it turns out, these particular pigs hated either freedom or monks or both, because they immediately attacked us. So we killed them and Jiao cast Preserve on one of them so that we could present it to the Fire Pigs once we got there.

We got to the next town, Tavaki, after nightfall and the guard at the gate recognized Tran. He told us to take her to the Town Hall for a reward. He also told us that the Air Snake temple is in town. Air Snakes and Fire Dragons are cool with each other, so we headed that way. We got patched up, threw a little bit of money in the donation box, got a MacGuffin to take to the Fire Pig leader, and then it was time to feast on the un-Preserved pig.

In the morning we headed to the Town Hall while Shun Li tried to convert Tran. She wasn’t much interested. Sankil gave the entire reward to the orphanage in town and we left.

Late in the morning we heard the sound of something huge stomping through the trees toward us. We foolishly waited around to see what it was and it turned out to be a triceratops. Those are TERRIBLE for your health, so we beat feet out of there. About an hour later we ran across a company of the Burmese Royal Guard so we reported the triceratops to them and continued to the Fire Pig temple. We got there near the end of the day and were immediately floored by how huge and overall impressive the place was. Then again, the FPs are the head of the Fire Order, so it's probably important for the Fire Pig chapter house to be impressive.

Morghen
2018-07-13, 10:48 PM
Session 3! – We On That Low-Level Grind
Characters Present
Shun Li - Cleric
Hageshidesu Kuroshi - Double-Specialist Invoker
Jing Jiao - Sole Practitioner Abjurationist
Sankil - Fire Elementalist
Kathong Devek Deshai – Acrobat

In the morning, we joined the FP’s morning exercises and ate with them before Master Khan and his entourage appeared for the morning briefing, prayer, yada yada. (Info: Master Khan is the Master of the West Wind and he has four sub-masters with him. They’re levels 11, 10, 9, 8, and 7.)

Master Khan gave a short speech welcoming the reappearance of the Fire Dragon House and said that he was sure we’d help all of the Fire Order gain prominence. He told us to come see him, so we did that right after breakfast and clean-up were done.

We gave him the MacGuffin from the Air Snakes and he gave us a tiny mission. He told us that all new Fire monks must drink from the Fire Chalice, which is in the catacombs below the FP temple, which have been here for over 1000 years. We have to take the Chalice to the well down there, drink, then return the chalice to where we found it.

So we went on a dungeon crawl.

Right off the bat we got surprised by a crapload of rats but killed those without much trouble. We ran into what looked like a puzzle/door situation and immediately went the other way. We found a pile of dead desiccated rats and the big damn spider to go with them. That was pretty tough until Sankil's Baby Fireball spell went off like he was 4th level instead of 1st. We looted the spider, hit a dead end (IN THE CATACOMBS GET IT) and had to go back to the puzzle/door thing.

The puzzle/door thing was a giant plank laying on the ground with a ring on the top side of it. After some thinking and looking we tied a rope to the ring and ran it through the pulley on the ceiling I forgot to mention a second ago. Puzzle solved, we descended. Yes, smartypants, it wasn't really a puzzle. Fine.

Below was a small chamber with a single door. There was no information to be had from looking at the door, but we heard noises behind it. With nothing else to be done, we Lenny and Squiggy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AcBqfMH4fU)-ed our way in, surprised the 2’ long cockroaches behind the door, and promptly murdered them.

Morghen
2018-07-14, 02:18 AM
Session 4! – We Drink More Blood Than Is Strictly Necessary
Characters Present
Shun Li - Cleric
Hageshidesu Kuroshi - Double-Specialist Invoker
Jing Jiao - Sole Practitioner Abjurationist
Sankil - Fire Elementalist
Kathong Devek Deshai – Acrobat

The Room of Murdered Cockroaches had a double door at the other end. Inside those, set on the wall, was a large stone mouth that started talking as soon as we got close.

“The heads of all 20 were chopped off.
Killing was not done, nor blood shed.”

I’ll put the answer behind a spoiler tag so you can take a swing at it if you feel like.

We puzzled over it for a minute before I said something about fingers and toes. As soon as I did, the GM was like, “[Sankil’s Player] said that it was probably fingernails and toenails right after I finished talking but nobody heard him.” So, yeah. It was a mani/pedi.
The Magic Mouth revealed itself to be another door and we proceeded into what was obviously a Very Special Area because the tile and walls were much more ornate, the floors were much cleaner, and also we entered it by walking through a riddle-dispensing Magic Mouth.

We entered and started clearing chambers (not 36 chambers, but a lot) that turned out to have nothing in them but sarcophagi. Being mostly good guys (Sankil and I are LG, the rest LN) and pals with the owners of these catacombs, we left them sarcophagi alone. Also, undead monks are positively TERRIBLE for your health and we’re really low level.

After a few rooms and a few hallways, I started to get the impression that this area was a big grid, probably three hallways wide by four long. At one point, we found a spot where, against a wall on one side of the hallway, a healthy flow of water was falling from somewhere above the ceiling straight through the floor. We gave a collective “Neat” at the indoor waterfall and moved on. After a bit, we reached the far end of the original hallway, turned right at the fourth perpendicular hallway, made another right at the 3rd hallway (parallel to that original hallway) and started coming back opposite our original direction. Ahead, we could hear what sounded like water splashing against the side of a basin. We proceeded.

Soon we came to a room that opened to the left directly from the hallway. The room was shaped like a blocky T (https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/aNsAAOSwMVdYHJ6f/s-l300.jpg) with short arms and the entire room was bordered by a deep pool. Shun Li pitched a clove of garlic into the water and we saw something swirl up and nom it before it disappeared from view. That made us a touch nervous until we examined the water further and saw it was just koi.

At the junction of the T was a stone pedestal with a small metal cabinet on it. There was an inscription on the pedestal that read “As the wind blows, her body grows. If she drinks water, she dies.” We gave the answer and the cabinet popped open. Inside, we found the chalice we were looking for. Master Khan told us we had to drink from the chalice, so Jing Jiao dipped the chalice in the water to grab a drink. As soon as he did so, the Murder Koi in the water started throwing themselves out of the water to take chunks out of us. There were something like a million of the damn things, but we killed them all fairly quickly because they were tiny damn things. Strong tactic against a million tiny things biting the hell out of you: Throw your ass on the ground and roll around on top of 'em.

As it turns out, the water in the T room was not what we were supposed to drink from the chalice lolololol.

Somebody pointed out the weird ceiling-to-floor waterfall we’d found earlier. We went. After some examination, we discovered words on the wall inside the water. “Drink from basin.” So… ****. We went back to the T room and continued following the hallway past it and pretty quickly we found stairs. We took the stairs and at the bottom we found a square room with a translucent dude standing in front of a door, just looking at us.

After a second he raised his hand and welcomed us. Because he wasn't actively trying to murder us, we gave him the benefit of the doubt and approached him. I didn’t record the whole conversation, but the gist is that he was interviewing each of us. So we RPed for a bit and it turned out that he knows Shun Li’s people. After we assured him of our good intentions and solid beliefs in the way of Fire he allowed us to enter.

In the next room, we found three basins. The left basin had a red liquid that smelled metallic, the central basin had a clear liquid that burned my nose when I smelled it, and the right basin held a brown liquid that had a light floral scent.

One of us drank the tea. Nothing. The rest of us drank the tea. Still nothing. We repeated those steps with the blood. More nothing, except for Con checks to keep down the chalice full of blood we just drank. We repeated the process with the basin full of more-or-less-pure alcohol. Nothing. We all drank one chalice each of tea, blood, and alcohol. More nothing. FINALLY, somebody hit on the solution, which I’m going to hide, in case any of you want to think about it a little more.

As Fire Dragons going through our initiation, lighting the pure alcohol on fire probably should have occurred to us quicker. We lit it, drank it, and a soft chime sounded through the room for each of us. After three chalices each of pure alcohol, several of us were a touch tipsy on our way out.
We replaced the chalice and headed back to the surface. Some monks saw us and ran off to tell Master Khan. They came back with the info that we should go get cleaned up for the “Welcome To The Fire Order” ceremony that was about to go down.

During the preparations, Master Khan came to have a little chat/debriefing with us. He sat and listened until we got to the bit with the ghost. Then he had some specific questions for Shun Li. Master Khan told Li that Shun Ji hasn’t appeared in a long time and congratulated him on his Ancestor Connection happening this early. (I don’t recognize the term, but capitalizing it feels right. Maybe it’s an Elf thing? Or a cleric thing?) We offered to return the loot we’d found and he told us that the Fire Pigs don’t stock their catacombs with treasure, which meant that we could take it back to our order to help Master Soo continue the rebuilding efforts.

Then we had a big damn feast and everybody wanted to hang out with us and hear our story, and that was pretty awesome.

Morghen
2018-07-18, 07:37 PM
Yay, Hackmaster! Any reason y'all're going with 4e instead of 5e?
I hope I didn't poop on a thing you like. Sorry if I did. I don't think we ever played the finished version, so it might be great.


Session 5! – Everything In Nature Hates Us

In the morning, we got up and started looking into some scrolls we found in the catacomb. Jiao got a face full of cursed scroll and had his charisma permanently dropped by one so we stopped until we could have a professional look at them.

We went through morning exercises with the Fire Pigs, had breakfast, then went to a meeting with Master Khan. He asked us to deliver a crate to Master Minh at the Fire Tiger temple, about two days away, before we went back to our own temple. The FT temple was only two days from the Fire Dragon temple, so we’d barely be delayed at all. Also, the head of the entire Fire order wanted us to do a thing, so hell yes.

We went by foot, because we’re still a bunch of 1st level chumps. The path we were on was pretty much just a game track, so that was kind of lame. About an hour down the road, Jiao started sneezing. A couple of skill checks told us that he had a cold. More lameness. Late in the afternoon, we heard Scary Monkey Sounds from ahead of us. We had about five seconds to react to that before a zillion Scary Monkeys jumped out of the jungle and started wailing on us. The Scary Monkeys gave us a pretty hard damn time. Jiao ended up unconscious from dropping below 0 HP and Kuroshi took a disabling crit, but we were killing a bunch of them and finally they broke and ran. We patched ourselves up as best we could (1st level chumps, remember?) and continued.

Just before night, right outside a little town, we found a Giant Damn Hornet chilling in a tree right in the middle of our path. We were thoroughly NOT INTERESTED in dealing with that nonsense. Sankil hit it with a baby Fireball, I hit it with a rock, and it fell down because it failed a ToP check. We hustled over and stabbed it the rest of the way dead.

We got to the little town, Yedo, and found it to be tiny and ****ty. We found the only inn in Yedo and asked the barman/owner if there was any healing to be found in town. He pointed out a dirty, ****ty-looking drunk in the corner of the room. Despite our skepticism, we went over to see if Tisodi The Drunkest Cleric was willing/able to get us back to full operational strength. We chatted him up and bought him a couple of bottles and he threw a couple of strong healing spells at us. We thanked him, bought him another bottle, then went upstairs to clean up.

We made ourselves presentable and went back down for dinner and a drink. As dinner went on, we realized that most of Yedo must be in the room, (and I remembered our directive to recruit for the Fire Dragons) so we took the opportunity to show off for the locals. We all did something related to our non-Monk classes and at the end of the evening an older couple and their kid came to talk to us. The kid, Win Bo, was 16 and didn’t want to be a blacksmith. We assured his parents that we’d take good care of him and keep him safe and that the Fire Dragons would give him a bright future. After a bit, they were convinced and told us that they’d bring him back in the morning to leave with us. So that was pretty awesome.

------

Hey, if anybody has any questions or comments about anything, feel free to fire away. I'm down for whatever.

LibraryOgre
2018-07-18, 09:19 PM
I hope I didn't poop on a thing you like. Sorry if I did. I don't think we ever played the finished version, so it might be great.


Nah. I was curious, and know the system isn't for everyone. I do kinda want to chat about your issues in more detail (I evangelize the system when I can), but this post isn't the place for it.

Morghen
2018-07-24, 12:24 AM
Session 6! – Is This Plot? I Think This Is Plot

The next morning, we collected Win Bo and hit the “road.” Just affter noon, we heard loud voices ahead speaking a language we didn’t understand. Sankil WHO IS DEFINITELY NOT A HALF-OGRE told us that the language was Ogre and that the last thing they said was, “Walking sucks. There’s nobody out here to rob.” With that, we knew these were probably not good guys, so Jiao and I went into the brush on either side of the path to potentially flank them while Sankil planted himself in the middle of the path (Li and Kuroshi behind him) and waited for them.

Four Ogres came out of the jungle and stopped at seeing a potential victim waiting for them instead of fleeing from them. The rest of us didn’t understand what Sankil was saying, but he spoke to the Ogres. He started with a hearty, “Brothers! I heard you talking just now!” and went on to admonish them for their lawless lifestyle and encourage them to change their ways before it lead them to a violent end. A couple of the Ogres engaged him in conversation, raised some important points about the socioeconomic inequality inherent to a feudal system, and got Sankil to concede a few of their arguments hahahaha just kidding they told him to **** off and charged him.

Jiao and I came at them from the side at about the same time that Sankil critted the lead one and dropped him to a ToP check. We hit ‘em with a couple of spells and also our weapons and they went down pretty quickly. We were all super pleased at how well that had gone and Win Bo was looking at us the way a kid looks after they see their first magic trick so we strutted (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUUQe1gX23w&feature=youtu.be&t=23s)the rest of the way to the Fire Tiger temple.

When we arrived at the temple, we found a collection of tents near the entrance and nothing but female monks standing around them. Our arrival drew a bunch of attention. One of the monks approached us. “Hey, you guys from the Fire Pigs? You got a delivery?” She was obviously excited when we handed over the crate. We followed her over to a collection of other monks, where the crate was opened and its contents revealed.

It was a bronze statue of a tiger that even from a few feet away clearly held powerful magic. A Halfling Fire Tiger turned to us and introduced herself as Master Minh. She thanked us for returning their stolen artifact and then it was story time.

She told us that about a week ago a group of men (mostly human) attacked at night and drove the Fire Tigers out of the temple. Half of them left with the Fire Tiger totem and half stayed inside behind a ward. (The FT’s arcane types had come to the conclusion that the ward prevented women from crossing it.) Master Minh told us that the invaders were attempting to destroy the remaining artifacts in the temple, but if the totem could be returned to its place inside, the ward should break and the Fire Tigers would be able to enter and drop a beatdown on the interlopers.

We agreed to replace the tiger totem and she drew up a quick diagram of the inside of the main temple building. The main feature that concerned us was the location of the plinth that had previously held the bronze tiger. It was a cylinder about four feet tall and four feet across, and 2/3 of the way between front and back of the room, 60 feet from the door.

The five of us went back and forth about several different plans for a while. Finally, we settled on: Li would enter first and start an Intimidating Display, Jiao and Sankil would run past him to engage whoever they came to first, Kuroshi would hang at the back to poke targets of opportunity with spells, while my job was to sprint past everybody while carrying the bronze tiger on my back and Acrobat myself through anybody between me and the plinth. Then we’d try to play defense and survive until the Fire Tigers came in to rain destruction down on the invaders. We asked the Fire Tigers to keep an eye on Win Bo and made our way over to the main temple building.

How that went down:
We pulled the door, immediately noticed that the interior of the building was… dim as we ran inside, and found a wall about 20 feet ahead of us. This was a big deal because it wasn’t supposed to be there. Definitely not on the map that Master Minh drew up for us. It was a wall of shadowy darkness with something that looked like a plaque in the middle of it. We checked the room for Things That Would Kill Us, found none, declared our dislike of the weird twilight situation that was happening indoors, then went to the plaque.

The plaque had a series of removable tiles numbered 0-9 at the bottom. At the top were the words “The truth will get you nowhere” and in the middle was a field we figured was meant to hold the tiles. We puzzled over it and discussed some options for about 20 seconds before Sankil came up with the answer.
The player behind Sankil is an engineer and nerd and is excellent at puzzles and the idea of using leet came to him pretty quickly. His guess was “lies” so we put the 7135 tiles into the spot for tiles.As soon as we did, the wall vanished and the rest of the interior appeared (through mediocre, shadowy visibility). Importantly, six Bad Guys were now visible (kinda), and us to them, and they charged us.

We put our plan into action.

The Bad Guys at the front engaged Jiao and Sankil while a couple at the back started taking potshots with some kind of missile weapon. (I’d be more specific about the missile weapon but my notes here are incomplete. I think maybe one of them hit one of us with a Magic Missile?) I took off at a run and did some sweet flips and handsprings and **** and landed on top of The Plinth That Held A Bronze Tiger Until Some *******s Stole It. It took me the rest of the round to undo the straps holding the tiger totem to me, but at the beginning of the next round I replaced the Fire Tiger Totem in its proper resting place.

As soon as I did, the entire temple suddenly lit up. The combination of sunlight suddenly flooding through the windows and some kind of magical light coming from the totem combined to remove every bit of shadowy darkness from the temple. I took cover behind the plinth, then ran to assist my friends in their fight.

About the time I got to Jiao and Sankil, Sankil knocked the hell out of one of the Bad Guys, who failed a ToP check and dropped. As soon as that happened, one of the Bad Guys at the back of the room threw something on the ground and the rest of the Bad Guys ran to him and jumped through a hole in the ground that hadn’t been there before. As soon as the last one dropped in, the hole closed and they were gone.

So that sucked.

But we still had the one guy, so that was something. Now that things were calmed down and we had a second before our captive came to, we asked the GM some questions about the things we’d just seen and done. The only details worth mentioning here is that all of the Bad Guys were dressed like us (monk’s robes), except grey featured prominently in their colors, they didn’t have any kind of insignia, and those two things were unlike any other monks we knew about.

So we were probably dealing with some kind of Bad Guy Monks. We weren’t sure what that meant, but we were all confident it wasn’t great news.

As a ton of ready-to-rumble Fire Tigers ran into the room (https://youtu.be/2quc-iQ96R0?t=3s), we tied the hands and feet of the only remaining BGM and prepared some scenarios for questioning him. He regained consciousness. As soon as he did, he sat up, looked around the room, then flung himself backwards, intentionally smashing his head into the floor.

Now, none of us have a ton of medical skill, but a smashed-in skull is a smashed-in skull, and this dude definitely had a smashed-in skull. Surprised doesn’t feel like a strong enough word for the moment, but we were all pretty surprised by this turn of events.

Master Minh was close and had seen the whole thing. She called one of her sub-masters over to cast Speak With Dead, but it was unsuccessful. So that was irritating.

We decided to inspect the dead guy to see what we could learn. He had no marks on his body (other than where the back of his head looked like a hairy cherry cobbler that fell off the table) and he wasn’t carrying anything at all. Ethnically, he looked Chinese, not Burmese. We were pretty much stumped and upset about our near-total lack of information on these guys, until I remembered (Local History check) that there are a number of legends about unaffiliated monks seeking to undermine the main structure of monks across the entire region. That felt like something I definitely wanted to ask Master Soo about.

After that, we helped the Fire Tigers give their temple a scrub-down before they did whatever spiritual stuff they felt like they needed to do, then we all had a giant feast to celebrate the return of their totem. Master Minh told us that we were welcome any time and asked us to take a letter to Master Soo.

In the morning, we grabbed our boy Win Bo and headed out for his new home at the Fire Dragon temple. The first day of our trip was miraculously free of Monk-hating wildlife. A little after noon of the second day, we heard somebody call out, “Help! I’m stuck!” from somewhere off to the left of the path. We yelled back, “Where are you?” and the voice replied, “Help! I’m stuck!” and we shouted, “Are you hurt?” and the voice called, “Help! I’m stuck!” and we noped right the **** on down the road. We arrived home late in the afternoon.

We all cleaned up, then delivered Master Minh’s letter to Master Soo and delivered Win Bo to Master Soo and sub-masters Laht Rur and Nyf Caw. We introduced Win Bo to them and explained his situation, then he talked for a little bit, then Master Soo asked us for a recounting of our deeds over the last nine days. We did that, and our superiors congratulated us at appropriate points, laughed at our jokes, and offered wisdom at the things we’d screwed up. As chapter-ending montages go, it was a pretty good one. I asked the masters if they had any knowledge of those unaffiliated mystery monks that I’d heard about and if they were likely related to the super spooky dudes we’d fought for about 5 seconds at the Fire Tiger temple. Master Soo’s only information he had to share was that one of their previous group of students (the diseased ones I mentioned way up above in The Setting) had told Master Soo that he’d seen a monk he didn’t know in the Fire Dragon temple just before all 25 Fire Dragon students contracted the disease (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1Y73sPHKxw).

Morghen
2018-08-01, 02:10 AM
Session 7! – Jing Jiao Helps Make Glass

A small but important point needs raised here. Every creature in HackMaster's 8-volume Hacklopedia of Beasts has an entry for any usable parts of their anatomy. Spell components, potion ingredients, skin that can be turned into extra-powerful leather armor, etc. Every time we end a fight and don’t have to run for our lives, there’s a flurry of skill checks. Several make Animal Lore or Arcane Lore checks to see what information we recall about the critters we just killed, then one of us takes the lead for Skinning/Slaughtering checks. The point I’m building to is this: Somewhere between 25-50% of our total GP value of non-magical loot collected is in dead monster bits. We cast Preserve a lot.

While I’m on the subject of loot, here’s a thing. We’re Monks. Monks are supposed to eschew worldly possessions, right? So we’re doing that. I mentioned it above when Master Khan told us to take the catacombs loot back home to help the Fire Dragon rebuild. Monks can only carry a few magical weapons and a total of maybe five-ish total magic items. I don’t know exactly because we’re nowhere near that number. Also, we’re not supposed to build up a ton of wealth unless we’re specifically saving for something like a new monastery or whatever.

Session 7 started with us giving Master Soo just about every bit of loot we’d gathered up to that point. At that point, we all had exactly 100 GP on us. Sankil wanted to take some money over to the orphanage in Melhai, so we went.

On the way, Sankil revealed to us that the orphanage in Melhai had once been his home before he was adopted. Yes, he wanted to support them financially, but he also wanted to see if any of the kids there were old enough/interested in entering training to become Fire Dragons.

Lumps in our throats, we continued on our way and ran into a whole crapload of some kind of tree-dwelling scorpion. We were annoyed at the scorpions for killing our mood, and then our Cleric sprinted off in the opposite direction as soon as he saw the scorpions. We were pretty perplexed at this behavior because Li had never displayed a fear of jumping into the middle of a fight before. We decided to just give him a minute and continued dealing with the tree scorpions. Mid-fight, Jiao took a hard crit to the lower body that more or less disabled him (dislocation or some such), but we polished them off fairly quickly.

Jiao, nursing a pretty serious leg injury (https://www.fxsupply.com/props/images/IMG02skeleton.jpg), decided that he was done with nature, Melhai, orphans, backstories, scorpions, overland travel, and pretty much everything in general. We weren’t totally sure what he was so worked up about, but his negative energy was kind of bringing us down (https://media.giphy.com/media/bbqLPs5kVEhzO/giphy.gif). He hobbled off toward home to get healed and wait for us to get back.

The rest of us followed Li’s trail and found him heading back toward us. He explained that he had a crippling, unreasonable fear of scorpions and was unable to stay in their presence for even a second. (Behind the scenes: Shun Li’s player got extra BP for a Quirk called Psychotic Aversion: _________ and rolling on the appropriate table gave him Scorpions.) We all agreed that mental health issues never seem to get the attention and respect they deserve, and encouraged him to keep his chin up, then we made fun of him the rest of the way to Melhai.

Cut to Jing Jiao: Jiao is barely able to walk, but he’s making the best time that he can. As he limps along, he hears a sharp crack and a figure made of coherent flame appears in the road ahead of him. The figure says something in a language that Jiao can’t understand. At full volume, Jiao encourages the living embodiment of fire to engage in intercourse with itself. The Fire Elemental makes more sounds. Jing Jiao is still not interested and heaps more abuse on it. While the Elemental might not have understood any of the words that Jiao had used so far, it got enough from Jiao’s tone and body language to understand a challenge. The Fire Elemental charged forward. Jing Jiao shuffled forward kinda. There was a brief fight (in the strictest sense of the word) aaaaaaaand fade to black.

The four of us arrived in Melhai without further incident and went straight to Sankil’s former home. We were welcomed with open arms. Sankil handed a sack of coins to the woman in charge, then explained his wish to give the kids there a path forward in the world. She brought three teenagers to us, and Sankil gave them a big speech about finding a purpose (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymucqmjJs20) in the world and serving a cause greater than yourself. Two of them were interested, but the other one was totally in. She said her name was Lod and we high-fived her for her excellent decision-making skills. Then we hit the road.

We ran into another batch of scorpions. We were all amused/annoyed to see Li sprint away into the jungle again, but on the bright side we had surprised them pretty badly. We used our advantage to our advantage and beat the mess out of the Huge Scorpions, then tracked down our Cleric. We zipped home to the Fire Dragon chapter house to check on our boy Jiao and introduce Lod to his new bosses. (Along the way, we found a big blackened spot in the middle of the road and a couple of items easily recognizable as Jing Jiao’s that lead us to believe he hadn’t made it back home at all. We were appropriately bummed.)

We arrived home, updated Jing Jiao’s status to Dead, handed Lod over to the FD leadership, then high-fived ourselves for a job well done. Okay, so losing one of our brothers isn’t something to be excited about, but in our defense he was really tired of playing that character and needed a change.

New guy incoming next week.

Morghen
2018-08-08, 11:29 PM
Session 8 – Did We Just Become Best Friends?

Shun Li and Kathong Devek Deshai took a week to gain a level in their off classes, and at the end of that Win Bo came to us with news that Master Soo needed to see us.

Master Soo told us that he needed us to go to Arimaddana. (Background (https://media2.giphy.com/media/3og0IMJcSI8p6hYQXS/giphy.gif): Arimaddana was the former capital of the empire until it broke up ~50 years ago. Now it’s neutral ground among warlords because none of them could hold it against the rest. It’s still a big city, and also has a ton of importance to all the Monks. Arimaddana has 12 temples there, one for each sign of the zodiac (http://www.thechinesequest.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Chinese-Zodiac-Placemat-Chinese-New-Year-Animals.jpg).) He’d received word that someone had looted the Dragon Temple there (specifically known as the Sulamani Temple) and he wanted us to go and check it out. Arimaddana is close to a week away from our home temple, so we were all pretty excited about the dozens of random encounters we were sure to run into along the way. (Not really. Getting our asses kicked in by monkeys or whatever every 20 minutes sucks.)

At that point, Master Soo introduced us to a short dude we hadn’t noticed standing in the shadows behind him. The short dude stepped forward into the light and it turns out he’s not a short human, just completely average height for a Dwarf, and also has no beard. Master Soo told us that the new guy was somebody that we could trust, but that he didn’t talk. We didn’t press the issue, so I’m not sure if Dorax took a vow of silence or a kick to the throat or just thinks it makes him seem spooky and dangerous (https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/018/170/847169841228430465.jpeg). Either way, he don’t talk. And yes, he does use a katana. Just one, though. I guess he doesn’t want to overdo it.

The Party
Shun Li - High Elf – Monk/Cleric
Kuroshi Hageshidesu - Halfling – Monk/Double-Specialized Invoker
Dorax – Dwarf – Monk/Ninja
Sankil - Half-Ogre – Monk/Fire Elementalist
Kathong Devek Deshai - Human – Monk/Acrobat
Jing Jiao - Sylvan Elf – Monk/Sole Practitioner Abjurationist - Deceased
We grabbed provisions and our new BFF and hit the road heading west. Over the course of the day, the forest started to thin out as we traveled. Maybe this had something to do with the fact that nothing tried to kill us all day. This was a surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one.

That night, Sankil was on watch when he heard a large number of large voices coming from the dark road ahead of us. He woke the rest of us, and we grabbed our crap and hid as best we could in the 15 seconds before a jillion ogres stomped out of the darkness and into view.

Yes, I’m approximating, but it was a lot of ogres.

Sankil greeted them, and the one in the front asked Sankil why he was standing in the middle of the road in the middle of the night. Sankil told the ogre that he was looking to keep the roads safe and protect the innocent from any who would do them harm. The lead ogre laughed and told Sankil that he wasn’t sure somebody so small would be able to protect anybody from anything at all. Sankil laughed right back. He went on to bluster and threaten the crowd of ogres HARD and they blustered and threatened right back (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eq_JtDWIvk) until they collectively decided that a solo Half Ogre threatening a crowd of 15+ Ogres was somebody they didn’t want to tangle with and kept on going. Sankil graciously stepped out of the road to make way for them.

The rest of us weren’t entirely sure what had just happened, but Sankil had definitely stood in front of a crowd of Ogres and talked to them until they went away. We tried to be cool about it, but it was pretty damn impressive (https://media.giphy.com/media/14c9sviMHGJ6Bq/giphy.gif).

Day 2 was also uneventful. We picked up clues from the condition of the road that it was barely traveled. We saw nobody the entire day.

That night, Dorax and Sankil were on watch when Dorax heard a noise (some kind of humming) from the very lightly wooded area to the left of the road. Via infravision, he saw eight humanoid-shaped Somethings slowly walking toward us. He got Sankil’s attention and conveyed enough info through pantomime that Sankil got the message, looked for himself and joined Dorax in waking the rest of us up. We popped up, ready for a fight, and then we waited.

The Somethings coming our way were making terrible time. Turns out that whatever the things are move at less than half of our speed. We had a very brief conversation and then grabbed our gear and kept moving. We left them behind pretty quickly and made another camp a couple of miles down the road.

Day 3, we crossed some seriously dry terrain and saw no other living beings the entire day. The not-quite-desert conditions had us eyeing our supplies, but not having to fight for our lives even once in more than 24 consecutive hours had us feeling weirdly happy about walking through the wilderness.

DAY 4! NO RANDOM ENCOUNTERS TODAY EITHER! We were actually moderately weirded out by the total lack of homicidal wildlife. The only thing that tried to kill us all day was a large stream. It looked like something had come through recently and wiped out the middle 90% of the bridge. We hoped it was just crappy engineering, but more likely it was a giant carnivorous turtle or some damn thing. I pole vaulted across the stream (10’ wide, pretty deep, moving fast) and threw a rope across to Sankil. Our brothers held onto the rope and crawled across one at a time until only Sankil was left on the far side. He held onto the rope, jumped in, and immediately failed some kind of check that made him drop the rope. Sankil can’t swim, so this was kind of a big deal. He floundered and we all kind of panicked a little bit. Then this exchange happened:

Me: “Use your club to float!”
Sankil: “It doesn’t float!”
Me: “WHAT THE HELL KIND OF WOOD DOESN’T FLOAT!?”
GM: “Natalie.”

And then we had to pause a second because I couldn’t see, hear, or breathe because I was laughing so hard. If you don’t get the joke, google the name Natalie Wood.

Sankil kept failing checks and took some damage because he’d gone so long without air, but he finally grabbed on to something that kept him from actually drowning all the way to death. I didn’t write any of that down because I was still recovering from the joke a minute ago.

We dried off and continued. That night was uneventful.

Day 5 was less uneventful. Things were going fine until the late afternoon when we spotted some large-ish critters flying our way. A few seconds of observation revealed that three manticores had decided that we looked like their next meal. We weren’t super happy about this development.

The manticores came in with a pretty basic frontal assault. We went right at them and we killed one fairly quickly but took some decent damage in return. Then Shun Li, who ALWAYS looks for the most cinematic option, jumped on the back of one of the manticores. Skill checks, attack rolls, yada yada. He hung on while the manticore tried to buck him off, then held his spear with one hand at each end and reached over the manticore’s central head (lion) and pulled the head back as far as he could, trying to choke it (and maybe try to break the thing’s neck).
A visual aid if I’m not explaining well enough.Go over here (https://youtu.be/fQm9hPmVUCs?t=2m47s) and immediately pause the video. The guy in red is our boy Li and the guy in black is the manticore. If I was more tech savvy or better at googling, you’d have a pic and not a video. C’est la vie.
We all thought that was a pretty slick move until (strength checks, saving throws, yada yada) Shun Li wrenched the lion’s head back far enough that he actually snapped the thing's neck and the head dropped straight down lifelessly. The rest of us had an "OH ****" moment over it, but unfortunately the HoB specifies that you can kill one head and the other two heads will continue trying to eat you. Still, he did a bunch of damage in one go, so that helped. Also, it was super, super cool.

After that bit of theatrics, finishing off 1.66 manticores was pretty anticlimactic, but we went ahead and did it.

Knaight
2018-08-09, 01:34 AM
Me: “Use your club to float!”
Sankil: “It doesn’t float!”
Me: “WHAT THE HELL KIND OF WOOD DOESN’T FLOAT!?”
GM: “Natalie.”

And then we had to pause a second because I couldn’t see, hear, or breathe because I was laughing so hard. If you don’t get the joke, google the name Natalie Wood.

Just googling didn't pull up much, but I had a hunch, so I looked up "Natalie Wood swimming".

Suddenly the joke got much funnier.

Morghen
2018-08-09, 11:59 PM
A thing I meant to post the other day:

Anybody in to Dungeon Crawl Classics? Four of our five party members were in the group that tied for 1st at the DCC Open Tournament at GenCon last weekend.

GM didn't go because he's a broke-ass college student again, and I didn't play because I didn't get there until Friday night.

(Full disclosure: Our guys tied for 1st but lost a dice-off. So they're listed as 2nd place.)