January Dungeon Mail - Session 6
The skull at last.
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.
The Queen's Couriers
This week, the party consisted of:
- Evelyn Bentnose, a bulky clone of the Sister-Queen Evelyn.
- Antonia Eckart, an airship hijacker and wedding officiator.
- Blackguard, a pyromancer who loves to fight.
- Charles MXLI, a scrappy clone of the Brother-King Charles.
After successfully rescuing the Sibling-Monarchs, the party has been gifted effectively unlimited credit, access to the Royal Archives, and a clear route to glory and power. The party spent about a week of well-deserved rest and independent study:
- Evelyn got herself fitted for a form-fitting symbiote suit in shimmering silver.
- Antonia commissioned a custom gyrocopter backpack.
- Blackguard retained the services of an expert markswoman, Liliana, to use his magic musket.
- Charles set about studying the origins of the Turntable District, discovering that it predated the Unnamed City and may always have been some kind of alien spacecraft.
Throughout this time, the Turntable District hung overhead. Communication from the levitating disc was cut off as all approaching crafts suffered a hail of shells.
Eventually, the party was called to one of Queen Evelyn's many throne rooms. There she gave the party her orders: take her and the pickled remains of Charles II to find her spouse in the Deep Forest to the southeast of the city.
The party asked why her spouse was there and why they were needed. Under pressure Queen Evelyn revealed that Weddings (capital W) are magical binding ceremony by which two entities merge their powers. Normal weddings are just echoes of a proper Wedding. Evelyn's spouse was a spirit that could be found in the skull of an ancient giant turtle rumored to be lost in the region she indicated.
When asked about the terrain, Queen Evelyn shared the locations of two landmarks and a rough map of the area. One was the ruined remains of some sort of temple or shrine. The other was a seemingly bottomless pit far to the southeast.
Into the Woods
The Deep Forest is a biome where the trees grow to a consistent altitude, even as the grounds slopes farther and farther downwards. The result is a forest of dense pines and little ground cover that gets progressively darker as the trees get taller and taller.
The party started at the walls of the Unnamed City, already infiltrated by the giant trees of the Deep Forest. Immediately they came upon the remains of a royal soldier, seemingly skeletal and fully engulfed by a giant pine.
After a perfunctory funeral rite by Evelyn and Charles, the party set off due northeast, planning to wind their way through the region in a serpentine search pattern, losing as little altitude as possible as they go.
About a mile along the trail, they came to the ruins of an ancient gatehouse - overgrown proof that the city used to stretch further out and had since been lost to the forest. They heard a horrible sound from the far side like the wings of a huge locust.
Using her gyrocopter backpack, Antonia flew up and landed on top of the gatehouse. She discovered a horrible amalgamation of two skeletal soldiers on patrol, seemingly hovering via unseen force. She threw a rock to see if it would respond and it promptly followed, thrashing at the earth with seemingly random skeletal limbs.
Freaked out, the party decided to head south, avoiding the place entirely and heading down towards the ruined structure on their map.
To the Temple
The party snaked their way down a series of switchbacks, dropping precipitously below the treetops. It became dark enough that vision was limited to some 60' without a light source.
As they made their way south, they eventually came to the ruin - a stubby tower surrounded by a low curtain wall and flanked by some short square structures. The party moved in cautiously, finding themselves in the long abandoned yard of a small settlement. Charles inquired if this was part of the Unnamed City or another settlement, but noone knew for certain.
Approaching the large structure's yawning entrance, the party's torches revealed a huge chamber filled with spider webs from floor to ceiling. Huge spheres of webbing dangled from the rafters and behind them a twinkling gold inlay in the form of some kind of topographical map.
The party debated whether the map would even be helpful if they could see it. Would a giant turtle even appear on it? They decided any info would be better than none though and Blackguard cast torch to start the process of slowly burning away the webs.
As the fire spread to one of the pods, it ignited dropping the scorched remains of half-formed baby spiders. When they fell, something rustled in the webbing on the floor. Reacting quickly, Blackguard and his retainer, Liliana, opened fire. Liliana's blue beam of magic lanced into the thing, then ricocheted out to embed itself in Charles' armor, its magic always seeking the next nearest target.
The bullets weren't enough to stop what was beneath - a colossal trapdoor spider using a crypt below this former temple as its den. "What have you done to my babies!" it yelled. Evelyn ran forth to hack at one its legs with her scythe, dealing a hefty blow but taking one in return. She only avoided being dragged below because Charles helped drag her back to safety.
The party continued to fire on the spider, eventually bring it down (though another shot from Liliana nearly felled Evelyn as well). Evelyn took a pause to drink a healing potion and have a snack as the former temple filled with smoke and heat, eventually snuffing itself.
Inside the party found a precise map of the region, but with the southeastern-most region covered by stylized turtle shell.
Across the River
Following their new lead, the party headed further south, coming to fast flowing river with a far bank out of sight in the darkness. Trees punched out of it at steep angles, as if pushing against the current to ford the crossing. By this point they were so far down that it was permanently night.
The party decided to make camp and rest before making the crossing. Both watches proved uneventful, though late in the night Antonia heard a horrific sobbing echoing from the north.
In the morning (as best they could tell from Evelyn's stolen pocket watch), Antonia suggested a plan to cross - fell one of the giant trees and use it as a makeshift bridge.
The trees were some 400' tall in this area, but only 2' in diameter - impossible proportions. Evelyn tried to topple the tree with sheer strength, but to her horror and dismay it dodged, somehow scrambling atop her and attempting to crush her with its immense weight.
Charles fired a rocket at the tree, detonating a chunk above Evelyn's head and showering her with splinters that glanced off her armor. Antonia rushed to help Evelyn as the others tried to push the toppling tree in the right direction. They succeeded - the clone was unharmed and the tree fell over the river.
Antonia used her grappling hook to attempt a crossing - tying herself off to one tree at a time as she balanced her way across the fallen log. The crossing was more than 400' feet, but the top of the pine rested only 20' or so from the far bank.
With that info, she hustled back and led the party back across. They abandoned the dolly they had been using to ferry the pickled King Charles II. When they hit the top of the tree, Blackguard used Antonia grapnel and rope to secure a route across while Antonia used her gyrocopter pack to carry the barrel.
The Wedding
Nor far from the southern bank, they found the skull of the giant turtle. More than 200' across, it was larger than the spider-infested ruins. The creature's upper beak was made of some kind of glistening crystal.
Here Queen Evelyn gave the party more details on the Wedding ceremony. They would need to get inside the skull. They would lay out the pickled King as a sacred medium. Evelyn would need to stand over him, separated by some sort of barrier, then bind their hands together with a cord. She said she could do it herself, but the party decided to escort her.
Blackguard found a route inside the skull, beneath one side of the jaw a crawlspace that passed under feet of bone. Crawling through the party found a cavernous space riddled with dimples and nooks. Two pines grew through the skulls eyes, but the floor was paved as if an ancient road passed under their feet.
Queen Evelyn asked the party to uncork the barrel and she retrieved the pickled king from within. He was weirdly light with a long beard and longer fingernails. They laid him between the two pines.
Next, Antonia laid her cloak over the dead king, saying the monarchy would pay for the cleaning. Evelyn produced a silver and blue cord and bound her hand to her dead ancestor.
The dead king stirred, then vomited a stomach-ful; of brine. He began to lope around the floor on all four as a turtle would and then Queen Evelyn cast a spell, siphoning the summoned spirit into her body.
And so the ritual ended. Queen Evelyn explained that turtles like this one or the one carrying Kai Banal are immortal, at least in spirit. Their bodies persist even after they die. By Wedding the turtle spirit she had guaranteed her own longevity. This would be the last Wedding after all.
Epilogue
The party returned with Queen Evelyn to a life of power and influence:
- Blackguard launched a mercantile empire, his name plastered all over the Unnamed City.
- Charles went on to be a diplomat. His skills were sorely tested as the Mole War threatened to engulf the entire region.
- Evelyn died shortly after, defending Queen Evelyn from the rocket strike of a would-be assassin.
- Antonia set herself to work designing new, better airships. Maybe something a little more practical.
GM Notes
And so concludes our playtest of Dungeon Mail! We could have left off after last session but I asked folks if we could try out the overland travel rules. The Deep Forest was a small hexcrawl composed of 1 mile hexes with a clear map of grade and a couple landmarks.
Overall, the system worked well, providing just the right mix of incident and logistical decision making. The party crawled at search speed, but sometimes considered upping the pace to cover more ground at the risk of being ambushed or missing a secret. Some players wished the crawl itself was more like Mausritter, with each hex containing an obvious landmark visible from a distance, but that's not really a system flaw so much as an oddity of this weird setting.
Sadly, Melek's player couldn't join us this week. They had originated the Deep Forest and the giant, maybe necromantically motivated turtles. We used both those beats to round out the campaign.
The Wedding ritual was mostly improvised on my drive home from a hazy memory of stills from The Color of Pomegranates and a whiff of imagery from Avowed. I was shooting for something that wouldn't look out of place on a tarot card. I rolled dice for Queen Evelyn to cast a major spell, but (suitably) miraculously, she rolled almost no damage and did it without incident. A bit of a mechanical anti-climax, but the moment seemed to work at the table. I still feel like I have a lot of work to do on ending campaigns in a satisfying manner, especially in the micro-campaign format where it comes up much more often.
I'm super thankful to my group for playtesting Dungeon Mail for so long. I'm excited to get this into the shop and make some major tweaks - mostly tuning every aspect of the game to be more package related and probably rewriting the magic system altogether. The one word spells are too narrow and just lack the juice, even if my hacked together TEA / GLoG casting hybrid generally worked.