Mediums and Messages

January Dungeon Mail - Session 3

"YES, I AM KYLOX."

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. You can find last week's session here.

Another New Arrival

This week, the party consisted of:

This time it was Antonia's turn to go back up for air.

With a new party member, we continued to expand our setting:

Zachariah and Blackguard met on the stairs and made their way down to join the rest of the party.

Dipmolacy

The molefolk guard who the party had conversed with last session gave a secret knock on the colorful glass wall behind them. With a metal shriek, it slid to the side revealing a clockmaker's workshop in the process of being turned over by a band of molefolk soldiers. Instead of clocks, the workstations appeared to have been used to make strange pipe and gearwork crossbows.

The molefolk had an officer who could speak the party's language. She cordially asked them what their business was. They said they were delivering a package. She responded that they were here to pick up a package from Kylox. The party asked where the molefolk had looked so far and she said the upper level and a few rooms on the second floor down. She said she had no plans to harm Kylox as long as the package they were looking for was delivered intact.

Among the soldiers was an Evelyn in a molefolk uniform. This was very upsetting to Evelyn (Bentnose) and Charles.

Rocket Tag

The party weighed their options and decided they didn't trust the molefolk. Evelyn drew a saber and challenged the molefolk officer to a duel. She laughed and commanded her troops to open fire.

Acting quickest, Blackguard tried to cast Torch to ignite the explosive lances of a group of molefolk. Unfortunately, he just got knocked out by the force of the spell instead. Melek shouted a disruptive command at the enemy's clawed hands in the language of Flesh, stunning them long enough to cause some to misfire their weapons. Charles wrestled a lance away from the nearest molefolk who had opened the door and Zachariah unwrapped a brown paper package to reveal he had always brought along a healing potion. He fed it to Blackguard who came sputtering awake.

Then the molefolk's rockets flew in. Two hit near Evelyn, wounding her but leaving her standing. Another exploded near Charles. Fortunately, several of their weapons misfired thanks to Melek's command.

In the ensuing chaos, Evelyn stalked up and beheaded the enemy officer and Charles fired his captured rocket lance at the trio to the party's left. Zachariah opened up with his shotgun and Blackguard cast another fanning Torch spell for minimal damage. With their leader dead and their weapons discharged, the soldiers fled leaving behind two of their dead.

The party quickly looted the remains and applied a little first aid. They found three extra rounds for Charles' captured lance, a pair of sabers, a pair of heavy uhlan coats, a map of the local area, and a small book written in Molse Code.

Downwards

The party discussed their options. Most routes down seemed dangerous in one way or another, but the slide from Session 1 was deemed the least so. Arriving back at its mouth in the back of the small apartment on the entry level, Blackguard opened the hatch only to hear a mechanical skittering sound from below.

Blackguard and Zachariah slid down to investigate, crashing into a giant mechanical spider (and one another), but avoiding serious injury. The spider fled away down the corridor where the party had first encounter the molefolk and out a door on the far end.

With Blackguard leading the way the party entered, finding a small ballroom draped in patriotic bunting. A bandstand on one side was home to an even larger mechanical spider, this one nearly ten feet tall. The thing had flickering paper characters where its eyes ought to be that it could use to speak.

It asked who they were and the party said they were looking for Kylox to deliver a package. The party asked if they could go see him and the spider said no, but it would be willing to fetch him. It dropped a smaller spider out of a hatch on the bottom of its torso which scurried through a hidden exit in the back of the bandstand.

The party waited about thirty minutes, patching up their wounds and lighting some lanterns. Charles played a calliope but managed to avoid attracting any more attention. Eventually Kylox returned.

Kylox turned out to be (or at least seemed to be) a beautifully articulated copper human head pierced through with hundreds of thin needles. It spoke in a booming, monotone voice. The small spider carried the head into the room and the big spider picked it up. After a moment the head emerged from the top and Kylox seemed to fully take over the spider-body.

The party delivered the package (a perfumed envelope marked "cognitohazard") and paid them without much fanfare. The being intimated that it was planning to use the letter in some sort of plot against the Sibling-Monarchs.

Blackguard asked about the molefolks. Kylox said it would pay another 600sp for "the heart of their vehicle." After that, there business concluded, Kylox dismounted from the spider and was whisked away by a smaller drone back into the tunnels behind.

Back to the Surface

On the way out, Charles and Evelyn searched for the molefolk's point of egress. Crawling under the lathe shaft on the top floor, they found a ladder marked in the former officer's map.

The ladder went down to a room with a giant, rapidly turning gear for the floor. The party labeled this gear hell and decided to leave it alone.

The ladder also went up several stories to the roof of a building in the Turntable District. There Charles found skiff tracks for some sort of small skyship.

In the meantime, Zachariah recovered some instrument parts and some crossbow parts from the various workshops, finding them all strangely mutually interoperable. The party deduced that Kylox had some sort of plan involving concealing weapons inside musical instruments.

Downtime

Severely injured but well paid, the party took a week to rest and recuperate. During that week, the Unnamed City was shocked by the news that the Sibling-Monarchs were easing the Wedding Ban to allow Evelyn to marry. To whom remains unknown.

During downtime:

GM Notes

I honestly had no idea that the players were going to pick a fight with the molefolk. I had rolled a reaction last session (quite friendly, all things considered) and anticipated a sort of truce / race to see who could find Kylox first. That wasn't how it panned out.

This was our biggest combat so far and it was a weird one. I liked seeing so many abilities being used. Some lucky rolls meant no one got badly harmed, but folks took some injuries and I could definitely see those piling up into a problem in a hurry. Overall that system seems to work fine.

We also saw our first cast spells this session. A couple feel bad moments (in my opinion, though the players in question seemed happy enough in the moment): casting even a 1 MD spell is pretty likely to knock a caster out cold, fizzling the spell. This is too punishing. It's also not ideal to invest so much health in dealing damage to a group of enemies only to have it mostly be mitigated by even light armor. Expect tweaks to this part of the rules by next week's session.

The party stumbling onto Kylox's scout drone was a happy accident, and relatively close to its carrier. I gave these things speech capacity, so when they asked I figured, sure, they could go find Kylox. He was only a few rooms away anyhow. Reaction rolls continue to be a godsend.

The downtime rules, adapted from Marcia B.'s Cinco, worked splendidly. We had a nice mix of folks pursuing idiosyncratic growth options and helped sculpt what might happen in the next adventure. Perfect amount of weight.

Finally, this is the first session where folks have played enough to write letters. I'm really excited to see how those play out in practice since they were so much one of the inciting ideas for fleshing out this game.

#Dungeon Mail #session reports