We Play Dark Ages OSRIC - Season Finale, Part 1

I'm a sucker for Season finales, although I have high standards. To me, one of the best was "Best of Both Worlds", the Star Trek: Next Generation finale for the third season. The slowly building onslaught of the Borg, the virtual helplessness of the Enterprise and crew, the apocalyptic feel to the situation and the music... yea, that was killer music. Anyway... so I like ending things with those kinds of overwhelming, non-stop, OMG, kind of finales.

With the Dark Ages campaign about to be temporarily suspended for the holidays (I wrote an Examiner.com article about holidays and campaigns- I get a penny per pageview, Thank You if you read it!) I sat down to figure out where the campaign had gone in a "campaign year" and where it should be headed. It's hard to believe that it's been about a year since I first read Ben Robbins' West Marches posts and got the crazy idea about running a 1e game.

I looked over all the things that the players had done over the year and a lot of it has been scattershot until recently. They've touched on first and second levels in the Abandoned Mines. They've gone through most of the first level of the Monastery and found the opening to 2nd level. They've been going to the abandoned Inn and exploring the cellars. They've done some wilderness map exploring and they've gotten involved in some interesting goings on. They've found a dynamic world where things will react or change as they interact with it.

I've had a "world flow" in my head of what would happen if the players didn't do anything, and then I altered that flow based on what the players did and didn't do. So knowing all this, and knowing some of the hints and rumors that I've put out there, I looked to see what I could pull the trigger on. Quite a bit, as it turns out, and the best part is that it's all either in lieu of player interaction (meaning that the players didn't interact with these events or people, so they continued as I set them up...) or they happened in reaction to the players.

The best part about it was starting it as a slow slide, then adding another thing, then another, then another, until at the end of the day, they had a picture of a world where things had really stepped up a notch. With each revelation, I could see the "Hmm... oh crap" reactions. Some of them were funny - some players wanted to launch themselves into danger and other players wanted nothing to do with it as well. I also got to introduce one of the players into the dangers of magic.

(I know I'm being vague, but I'm hoping one of the players will post a recap of what they found or what happened.)

I had two new players show up last night, I'm sure they had a "What the hell just hit us..." feeling. One of them plays a paladin - joy! He did it pretty good too, including the remonstrating of another fighter who was trying to do something fairly bad. He's taken to the approach I want for paladins in the game - a fairly by-the-book approach to being a knight for the lawful good of society and religion. He's not chosen if he's a paladin for the Light or an older god, but I'm looking forward to him coming back next year!

We had a total of 8 players, plus 2 hirelings. There was some dungeon diving in amidst all of the bigger world stuff going on which descended into another series of ongoing skirmishes. The players were going back to old haunts to complete a paying job, but the "goblyns" got there first and they were investing into holding the place. While the party did manage to survive and get some cool loot, they also nearly lost 3 people.

That brings me to my first "retcon" that I've had to do in my campaign. I've always said that I will not let a character die due to my mistake and last night, that almost happened. One of the multi-class demihuman characters was driven to negative 15 (critical hit, I rolled a 6 - double damage) after the player had missed with his attack. What we both spaced was that as a fighter/mage, he gets the benefits of the fighter class, including two attacks per round vs. <1HD creatures! He might've prevented that critical attack by a successful 2nd attack. I know there are those who say, well, deal with it, but it really was my error, especially since I was reminding the human fighters that they got 2 attacks per round. Ugh. So I retconned it by putting him at -9 upon someone stopping his bleeding and left him in a coma until the players returned to town. He now has a gimpy right foot that aches when the weather changes and it could affect his movement rate. A compromise, but we both were happy with the outcome.

And yes, he acknowledged that he should have thought of it as well, so it was shared responsibility, but fair is fair and I thought this the fairest route to take.

It's a good game when the players are cheering at dice rolls revealing victories, when they all get up from the table looking as drained (in a good way) as the DM and I get people telling me how much fun it was. The best part is they made it fun. I think they learned just how deadly I will play the game - again, but they survived and they got an eyeful of the stuff that awaits them when the Dark Ages Tuesday night game restarts in January.

I can't wait.