Mediums and Messages

Eyes Unclouded - Session 26

A session report from our ongoing Studio Ghibli-inspired Cairn game.

Setting Out

The party broke camp after a night spent resting in the now wolf-free cave. They were:

And they were accompanied by:

The night before, Ambrose had persuaded Merlina to transcribe a copy of the Limited Polymorph spell that she had been using to transform the mountebank into various useful objects. She warned that the spell was not really intended for self-use and there would likely be unexpected consequences. The party chipped in some looted silver, which Merlina melted down to produce the necessary magical ink.

Wesk was volunteered to fly back to Eleutheria with a report.

Trying out spellcasting for the first time, Ambrose polymorphed himself into a small dirigible maneuvered by Flame. The party embarked, and they began their journey west. They anticipated entering the rough area of their search by nightfall.

Scouting Sorties

September flew ahead to scout. The landscape grew more and more desolate. The ground was swampy and only sporadically studded with cloned trees. Huge pools of black ichor floated across the ground like clouds. Most alarmingly, the ground occasionally gave way into deep shafts. The depths below seemed to fade into nothing.

September flew back to report this to the party. Nanaki used some spare parts and silver to fashion a makeshift pinhole camera. The druid took this and headed out to complete their reconnaissance.

This time September found what they were looking for: a circle of pines sunken into a valley. The noxious black ooze flowed down the slopes, between the pines, and down into three drain-like pools in the center. Nearby, on a stone platform lay a huge wolf - gaunt and haggard. The ooze seemed to flow from a wound on her side.

September stopped to snap a selfie with a bottomless pit before heading back.

Emergency Landing

Just as September returned, something went awry with Ambrose's spell. The mountebank could feel they were about to turn back into their human form. Focusing, they managed to control the process, changing slowly and intentionally bleeding gas in order to sink gradually to the ground.

The rest of the party sprang into action to ease the landing. Flame took the helm and began steering towards the only nearby landmark - a slight rise with a single tree on top. Madrigal pulled out a rope and lassoed the tree while Nanaki busily reinforced the line. September tried to lift some of the party members, but wasn't able to carry them for very long.

Sir Percius used his shield to zipline along the rope down to the tree. This removed his weight from the equation and gave him a leverage point from which to help steer.

All these gambits gave Ambrose time to figure something out, managing to reform not into a human but into a boat (or rather a "rigible" as the party called it). The balloon part of his form folded away leaving only the buoyant gondola.

As Ambrose plopped out of the air, Sir Percius tried to cut the line and leap aboard. His sword bounced off the momentarily slack rope, failing to sever it. The tree bent down as the rigible lurched into the water, then snapped back. The whole party grabbed on where they could, but Flame and Sir Percius were thrown overboard. Fortunately, Merlina's Mage Armor protected them from the worst of the ooze's noxious effects.

Towards the Clearing

After recovering their fallen party members, the party sailed west.

When they came to the region of bottomless pits, September volunteered to fly down and explore. The party tried various safe experiments first. First, they lowered a rope which came back fine. Second, Madrigal offered a mushroom. They lowered it on the end of a line. Pulling it back, it seemed withered and "shocked" to Madrigal's expert eye.

Finally September flew down, again on the end of a rope. As the druid descended, the shaft grew darker and darker. The walls seemed to fade into nothing, then suddenly there was no light, no air, no gravity. The druid yanked the rope and the party tugged them back to safety.

Alarmed but unsure what to do about these holes, the party decided to sail on. They reached the edge of the valley and began to float down the sludge towards whatever awaited in the ring of trees below.

GM Notes

I am writing this session report about a full week after the fact, and that tends to be enough time that I start to second guess myself (as I think many GMs are prone to do). Even accounting for that, I think this was a fine session, but not my best work.

I probably should have given a little more pushback on Merlina teaching Ambrose a spell. She has previously taken the stance that she doesn't teach spells outside of an apprenticeship. In the moment I thought:

In retrospect, I think I could have stressed this last thought more. That eases the problem of needing an external NPC for a character to perform their core verbs, but still preserves some friction.

In general, I think that advancement is a little bit out of whack at the moment. There are too many spells (or sources of spells) in circulation, and because Cairn doesn't restrict casting to certain backgrounds, anyone can pick them up. Since we have only just started engaging with the game's growth systems in earnest, characters who have been seeking out spells have been gaining new abilities while those who haven't have not. This tension came up briefly at the table.

On one hand, I think this is an inherent risk of a laissez faire advancement system like the one proposed by Cairn. If a mechanism is dependent on players stepping up and stepping back, then it feels like it will inevitably be applied unevenly at the table. On the other, I recognize that my messy 5e-hack has exacerbated the issue. As has the fact that I haven't really had the bandwidth to follow up with all the players individually outside of the session to check on their goals.

The best solution here, short term, is probably to institute something like the end of session questions from Dungeon World. They don't need to be shared across the players but having some kind of check on "hey, is your character changing? If so how?" during the session will help keep things manageable. Long term, it might be worth considering moving to a system that is a touch more rigid and self-serve.

On a brighter note, over the last few sessions I have been using Cairn 2e's encounter system verbatim and it has worked pretty well. The encounter die is heavily overloaded; almost every result does something to the fiction, even if its just a slight change in weather. This feels like it's added some nice detail to the day-to-day travel in between landmarks. The dirigible crash was a consequence of a roll on that table.

That crash sequence worked pretty well. I ran it as a skill challenge, looking for three successes before three failures. This is not very old-school of me, but it fulfilled a couple key goals. First, it framed a complex situation that we don't have rules for as a sequence of actions that I could start asking concrete questions about. Second, and probably more importantly, it gave all the players something to do with the scene. Between splitting the party for scouting and an early focus on one character's advancement B-plot, we really needed something that got the group acting as a party and not just individuals travelling in the same direction.

I maybe should have given it a 5/3 or 4/3 split instead of 3/3. It was a bit anticlimactic when the situation was more or less resolved by the time we got to the last character, but those are the kind of minor ruling tweaks that I am less worried about.

So, overall, not a disaster, but not my best work.

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