January Dungeon Mail - Session 1
Charles offers the whirlwind a drink.
I'm playtesting Dungeon Mail, my work-in-progress fantasy roleplaying game about couriers delivering weird mail to weirder beings. My friends agreed to run a micro-campaign of it. I'll record the details of our sessions here, as well as some (hopefully) spoiler-free notes.
Worldbuilding
This session, our party was composed of:
- Charles MXLI (pronounced Mixili), a little clone fighter
- Evelyn Flatnose, a big clone fighter with a scythe
- Zachariah Ward, a wedding expert turned to crime
- Melek, an acolyte of the Hare who can speak "flesh"
During character creation we established a couple key ideas:
- Charles and Evelyn are clones of a brother and sister duo that conquered the realm before ascending to the stars, leaving their clone legions behind.
- The current king is King Charles XV (the number designating distance from the original). He has outlawed all weddings in an attempt to make his the final and most significant.
- Melek worships the Hare, a trickster spirit who has stolen the hunting power of predators. It lives in the moon.
As part of our first session we built out a setting. It features an unnamed major city with a few notable features:
- Palatia, the ritzy downtown district
- A giant tower that looms over Palatia
- An overgrown region of town where the forest has intruded within the city walls.
- The Turntable District, mounted on a colossal spinning plate that gradually rotates throughout the year.
In the environs nearby are the following major landmarks:
- A perpetual storm to the west.
- The Tunnel Lands to the southeast, home to the kingdoms of mole people.
- The Deep Forest, trees that grow both up to the sky and down into the underworld, masking a gradual decrease in elevation.
- Kai Banal, a city on the back of a giant wandering turtle. Once common, now rare.
Finally, the following rumors are common knowledge:
- The storm is home to storm parasites, capable of latching onto and encasing a human like a second skin.
- The Tunnel Lands are close to a state of war following the assassination of a prominent musician.
- The turtle that carries Kai Banal is dead and maintained by a cult of necro-priests. It appears fine though.
- Something called the "Clockmakers' Plot" is rumored to target the mechanisms under the Turntable District.
- There is a city, Ankhbayar, that doesn't exist. To be "on a trip to Ankhbayar" means "doing nothing."
Special Delivery
The party was issued the following task by their postmaster: deliver a sealed envelope to someone named Kylox based out of the Works, the system of maintenance shafts that undergird the Turntable District. The letter was sealed, but smelled strongly of perfume - something like pomegranate but more red. The postmaster had stamped it with the word "cognitohazard."
Arguing this was a dangerous job, Zachariah successfully persuaded the postmaster to issue them an advance of 10 silver each. They used this to variously outfit themselves with gear. Evelyn hired a passerby to join the party as a hireling and shield Charles. Charles paid the man a silver piece to take a hike.
The delivery address led them to a store in a crowded marketplace in the Turntable District. Inside, they found an older Charles running a shop that sells brass instruments. He tried to sell them a discount tuba. Refusing, the party insulted his wares before inquiring about Kylox. Hearing the name, the old Charles told them not to say that name so loudly and brought them to a secret tunnel entrance hidden behind a shelf of trumpets. He told them to knock four times if they wanted to come back up.
The Works
Our Charles lit a torch and the party descended as Old Charles sealed the door behind them. The walls, floor, and ceiling were made of tarnished and scuffed brass. Down a short staircase they found Charles' workshop - a small table scattered with tools, a rack of expensive looking instrument parts, and a brass door leading deeper. The party debated stealing something, but decided getting out with it would be too hard.
Behind the door, they heard a faint whir. Upon opening, they found the next room to be a long rectangle bisected by a rapidly spinning metal shaft at waste height. They'd have to duck under it to reach a door across the way, army crawl under it to explore the shaft it disappeared into to the right, or settle for another door immediately to their right on the same wall as the one they came out of. They chose the last option.
Zachariah took the lead and cracked the door, finding a cozily furnished apartment with a couch, a bookshelf, and a wet bar. In the middle of the room, a vortex of wind gyrated to the music of a record player, twirling a set of old records and dancing to the music. Across the room, an open door led into a small bedroom.
Evelyn tried to slip across to fix a drink, but the vortex whirled over and scooped her up, carrying her away. She managed to slip out of its grip and the distraction was enough for Charles to make a "Moletown Mule." He offered it to the vortex and it took it happily.
The party asked if they could pass through and the vortex gestured "no" as clearly as an orbiting selection of records and one mixed drink can. It moved to the door and shut it.
At this point, Evelyn broke the record player, hoping that would cause the wind to dissipate. Instead it flew into a rage. Quick on their feet, Evelyn and Charles sprung into action first. Charles uses his torch to try to swat the records, melting some. Evelyn managed to burst through into the bedroom, finding it full of swaddling and noise dampening cloth. She got clobbered by the whirlwind for her efforts, but her armor absorbed the fire-weakened blows.
Zachariah tried to rush in as well and also took some hits. He tried to pull a blanket down to throw on the whirlwind but couldn't get a good grip. Melek asked if this vortex was Kylox and brandished the letter. It signaled "no" again and pointedly gestured for them to leave.
At this point, Charles grabbed his stun baton and tried to swing at the point where the whirlwind hit the ground. As he did so, he scooped the whirlwind up and found himself carrying it on the tip of his weapon. Thinking fast, he rushed out of the room and touched it to the lathe. The baton shot out of his hand, but the vortex dissipated, caught up in the gyre.
GM Notes
A wild session! In addition to building characters for Dungeon Mail, we did a version of a worldbuilding approach proposed by Prismatic Warren. Each player got to invent a notable landmark in town, a feature in the region, and a rumor situated in one of those places. The results got more gonzo than expected - more Troika! than Dolmenwood.
I had initially planned to run Tomb of the Serpent Kings to test the hypothesis that the courier/package framing would cut a clear entry into pre-existing modules. That didn't match the outcome of our world-building though so I decided to call a break for 10 min after character creation and generate a quick dungeon using a mix of Bite Sized Dungeons by Marcia B. and some off-the-cuff spark tables.
This approach is a lot of fun, but I would say its extremely unfriendly to a beginner GM. This really underlined the need to include an annotated starter dungeon in the final book.
Playtest-wise, it is quite hard to both take notes on the system and GM. Still, we found a bunch of missing critical details - stuff like how long a torch burns or what the abbreviated stats actually refer to. I mostly noted a few passages to clarify, particularly in the sections relevant to character creation.
One critical ambiguity is "who rolls a test?" The rules currently have no notion of opposed tests and I am inclined towards the Cairn solution - the character most at risk rolls the dice.
With character creation, we only got to run about an hour of actual adventure. As a result folks were stretching a bit for experiences. That said, spinning a yarn about the session is the point. Finding the exact bound (grounded in truth, but perhaps exaggerated) deserves some rules text.