Mediums and Messages

January Dungeon Mail - Session 5

Antonia pulls the skiff into a steep climb to evade Zachariah.

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.

In Media Res

This week, our consists of:

Picking up from last session, our party found themselves on the top deck of the royal airship, Their Grace. Assassins had boarded the vessel, the ship was on fire (thanks to one of Blackguard's spells gone awry), and an entire neighborhood of town had teleported into the air overhead where it levitated as a UFO-like obstacle. The entire ship began to gradually roll to starboard. The dead-king-in-a-barrel slowly slid towards the side of the ship.

Melek pulled out a parachute and immediately dives overboard (their player being unavailable this week).

We started with the party in conflict. Zachariah had just tried to throw the current King Charles to his assassins. Blackguard stepped forward and slashed at Zachariah with a saber, but the wedding expert narrowly avoided the blow. Evelyn dove to stop the dead king from rolling off the side of the airship as Antonia tried to tackle Zachariah. He dodged and pulled a brown paper package from his pack, unwrapping it to reveal a glider he had cleverly thought to bring on this excursion. He leapt overboard and sailed out of sight.

With the immediate threat gone, King Charles regained enough composure to give some orders: rescue him, rescue his sister, and rescue the dead-king-in-a-barrel. He said that Evelyn should have been down on the lowest deck, receiving guests and that she should be close to the lifeboats in the extreme aft. One of the King's bodyguards, a clone wearing a white plastic symbiote suit joined the party and shared a more detailed layout of the ship.

To the Helm

The party debated possible routes, but decided that their best bet was to retrace their steps: down the elevator, through the buffet room and gun decks, and down to the gift room near where they had arrived. The new Charles clone led the way to the elevator at the rear of the garden on top of the ship.

With the airship rolling at an extreme angle, the elevator was inoperable, but fortunately the car was only one floor below. Charles climbed down through a trap door in its roof, then used the immense strength offered by his symbiote suit to crush the malfunctioning elevator door. This opened a passage down to the crew quarters (empty), stairs downwards, and a door forward to the helm.

The party pushed forward towards the helm, finding a small band of crew members fighting a cadre of assassins in marching band uniforms. A dead helmsman was draped over the wheel, causing the ship to turn precariously to starboard. Blackguard, drawing his saber, threatened to burn the assassins as he had the ones on the top deck just moments before. Miraculously this worked and the battered band members promptly surrendered.

As the assassins threw down their weapons, one of the surviving crew members asked where they should try to take the airship. Someone pulled the dead body off the helm and stabilized the ship. King Charles meekly looked to the party, who after some debate suggested bringing the ship down on the beach outside of town. The crewmember estimated that unless the fire was brought under control, they had about an hour until they would crash land.

Evelyn used a said of brass pipes to call down to lower decks to see if she could find the Queen. After a couple tubes, she tried one marked "Rear Electrical" and found her. She said she was safe but penned in by assassins blocking her from the life vessels.

Below Decks

The party decided to make haste to Queen Evelyn's rescue. They took the elevator behind them down to its lowest floor, emerging into a small vestibule adjoining the buffet hall. As they cracked the hatch, they found themselves facing an angry crowd of wedding guests who demanded to be let through to the life rafts in the aft.

The party tried to explain that the life rafts weren't in this direction, but to no avail. Blackguard tried to threaten them as he had the assassins, but the crowd just started to get violent. Deciding they had tried their best, the party just let the guests file past to an unknown fate.

The next few rooms proved blessedly free of conflict. The party passed through the buffet room and into the makeshift kitchen. As they entered, they heard a distant bang and then a crash as a huge brass shell connected with the port wing, rattling the entire vessel. As they watched in horror, the shell revealed itself to be one of Kylox's spider automata. It began crawling along the wing, smashing propellers as it went.

The party decided to flee dropping down the ladder onto a now gull-free gantry, then cutting back through the gun deck. They briefly debated shooting the giant spiders with the giant cannons here, but decided it would take too long. They hustled down a flight of steps aft into the hangar they had arrived at, finding all the vessels inside long gone. The diplomatic envoys from Kai Banal were here, but the party just rushed past them.

Gift-to-Gift Combat

The party found an open hatch towards the room where Queen Evelyn had been receiving gifts. The room was full floor to ceiling with oddly shaped packages covered in ribbons. Two flights of stairs flanked the entrance, cutting back and up to the life vessel hangar. As they approached, a crossbow bolt whizzed out and a voice called to turn back or the next one would find its mark. The party pushed the dead-king-in-a-barrel forward as a shield and two crossbow bolts immediately embedded themselves in its side.

At this point, Charles proposed a plan. He would extend his symbiote suit to its limits, making a solid wall to screen the party as they rushed in and up a small flight of stairs to the right. The party decided to try it.

Charles ran forward and extended the suit out into a solid shield as bolts deflected harmlessly off of it. Blackguard ran forward and used his magic detecting vision to grab a package shaped like a broomstick that radiated sorcerous energy. Evelyn and Antonia hauled the dead and living kings along behind them. Unfortunately, in the process, Charles felt the symbiote suit slip from his fingers and start to writhe with a will of its own.

Dashing onto the deck above, the party found themselves in a room with two small skiffs dangling from chains over a set of rear-mounted slides. Two currently closed hangar shutters cut into the aft wall and a hatch to the fore presumably led to the rear electrical room where the Queen was. Four assassins in marching band uniforms immediately shouted in alarm and readied weapons.

Blackguard was faster though, unwrapping his present to reveal an ornate musket. Leveling it to fire, he shot one of the assassins through the head, killing him outright with a beam of blue light. Instead of continuing in a line, the shot ricocheted lancing into the chest of another assassin and killing them as well.

Evelyn ran to the hatch and opened it, revealing Queen Evelyn in full bridal regalia complete with some ten yards of train looped over one arm. The Queen seemed unphased, asking for a status report and saying that she had already cut the power to some of the damaged parts of the ship. Evelyn Bentnose asked the Queen to cut the lights to the gift room and she immediately set to work.

Meanwhile, the assassins in the life vessel started to fight their way out. One fired a crossbow bolt which thunked into Blackguard, severely wounding him and knocking him unconscious. The other scrambled to the shutter controls and opened the route for the vessel to launch.

Down below, Charles suddenly found himself in the dark as Queen Evelyn killed the lights. He felt the symbiote suit slip from his fingertips and heard awful crunching sounds as it leapt onto someone in the dark. A crossbow bolt flew out and glanced off his shoulder.

He decided to dash up the stairs, grabbing the fallen Blackguard's musket and firing it at the remaining assassins. With another miraculous shot, he killed one, then the bullet ricocheted to kill the second. He turned to face whatever was coming up the steps as Antonia ran to ready the life vessel for launch.

Evelyn escorted the King and Queen aboard the skiff and dragged the unconscious Blackguard aboard as well. Before Charles could move something dashed at him from the dark below - the white plastic symbiote horrifically engulfing a dead assassin, using her legs to run forward and attempt to engulf the royal guard.

Charles decided to throw the gun to the waiting couriers and grapple the thing. He failed to wrestle it away and was quickly engulfed and thrashed about. The wound would have been lethal had tricky Antonia not thrown her baton at the beast as a distraction. Charles managed to free himself and throw himself onto the life vessel and Antonia punched it, dropping the ship into freefall out of the back of Their Grace before gunning the small skiffs twin propellers.

Zachariah Returns!

As the skiff flew by, Zachariah revealed himself. Since gliding away, he had been waiting above the life raft hangar for the couriers to make their escape attempt. Flying down after them with his hand glider, he pulled a vessel of flammable liquid from yet another brown paper package. He sailed after the party, aiming to finish off the King once and for all.

Antonia at the controls pulled the skiff into a steep climb. Most folks managed to grab onto the rails or strap themselves in, but Blackguard, freshly awake, fell out the back. He chose to jump after his new gun rather than hold on to the skiff. Immediately, Evelyn Bentnose drew her saber and hucked it end over end at Zachariah. Miraculously, it flew true, clobbering the wounded wedding expert out and sending him tumbling through the air, unconscious.

Evelyn sprung into action, grabbing a parachute from beneath one of the skiff's chairs and diving after her falling comrades. She grabbed Blackguard easily, but couldn't quite catch up to Zachariah before needing to pull her ripcord. The former courier fell towards Palatia below, presumably to his death.

Antonia spun the skiff around to catch Evelyn and Blackguard and with the party safe and the three royals in tow, they decided to fly to the relative safety of the Great Tower.

GM Notes

Another action-packed session! I came into this one low on fumes after a day of work and a little under-prepped. I had the layout of Their Grace and a rough timeline of events, plus an encounter table for the sinking airship and a table of random wedding gifts. Still I felt like this session was particularly off the cuff.

We also started immediately with a PVP combat. Dungeon Mail did not handle this super well out of the box. In general, I have tried to make systems relatively symmetrical between players and non-players, but the one exception is initiative rolls which are a string before or after the enemy affair. This doesn't work if one of the players becomes an enemy. I was able to quickly make a ruling using a sort of kludged together opposed test, but it makes me want to dramatically alter those rules for the final edition.

Major props to Zachariah's player for a) handling PVP gracefully and b) seamlessly hopping into control of the royal guard that accompanied the party after being routed.

Combat struck a nice balance this session between feeling snappy and lethal, but not so lethal that you couldn't make any decisions at all. I also feel like the pressing urgency of escaping a crashing airship helped move things along and was a nice way to recontextualize the map knowledge the party already had.

Blackguard's player highlighted how absurd a musket that deals d10 damage and ricochets into a second target for half is in a system with no to-hit rolls. I'm kind of fine with that being the case, especially since all gear is inherently limited in its use thanks to wear and tear, but its something to keep an eye out for.

We ended the session somewhat abruptly as I more or less totally ran out of steam. The party is sailing towards safety, so I figure we'll start next session with downtime. The experience system felt much more seamless this session, despite the fact we strayed away from traditional dungeon crawling, which seems like a good sign to me for that system's longevity.

#Dungeon Mail #session reports