The Electrum Archive - Session 1
I'm running a game again! Namely, a short campaign of The Electrum Archive. I'm testing out a sort of micro-campaign as a way to avoid burnout AND oneshot hell, while still getting some of the juice of sticking with characters and their relations for an extended period. These session reports will mostly serve as public facing notes, plus some observations on my GMing practice / experiments with this game. I'll strive to keep this spoiler free for players.
Rolling Up Characters
We started our session by rolling characters live. Our party consists of:
- Et, a performer whose been every where twice, now a fixer who knows folks everywhere.
- Shabai, an ex-laundress, now a warlock with a greatsword.
- Dunda, a former pit fighter, now a vagabond and the party's primary healer.
- Gun, a Houseborn noble, now a warlock and Child of the Crimson Moon.
Outside
We opened on the party sheltering from a sandstorm brewing on the edge of the Electrum Sea, somewhere on the road between Titan Port and Bara Mar. They're headed to Bar Morvyn, a small border outpost, with a coded missive for the outpost's commander inscribed on a silver rod.
The party had made camp in a butte called Whistling Rock, named for the long canyon-cave that cuts through the middle of it. While settling down, Gun found a stone doorway cut into the rock, hidden by a loose boulder. Shabai and Dunda, the party's strongfolk, tried to move the boulder but were astonished when it stood up, revealing itself as a huge stone humanoid creature.
The stone thing wasn't immediately hostile, but brusquely gestured for them to leave - out into the brewing sandstorm. Instead, Shabai tripped the creature and the party ran inside.
The Upper Tomb
In the dark, they found a smooth cut square room with a stone column in the center of it. A stone door concealed a passage opposite the entrance and the wall to their right seemed to have caved in, revealing a dark slope below.
Gun examined the column by torchlight and found it covered in ancient Nollish hieroglyphs - close enough to the Lahmaic Script that he was able to decipher them. This was the tomb of an ancient skiff captain, Ryllufar. "Cleave to the seas or meet my fate," the column warned.
Unphased, the party ventured into the next room through the stone door. A larger rectangle, this room's floor was laid out with a low-res mosaic of a map of Orn in the era before the fall of Maldrazagar. The ancient city itself was marked by a coronet, but otherwise only broad regions were differentiated.
The other key features of the room were four niches with skeletal remains, and a series of holes ported in the ceiling.
The party made short work of this room, recovering two badly rusted scale vests and a chrome puzzle orb from the niches. They even broke through the floor in the middle of the Electrum Sea to find a cache of ancient jewelry and trinkets (pretty, but not especially valuable in gold-drenched Orn). One misstep caused a broken spear to come vomiting forth from the ceiling, but fortunately the trap misfired and noone was hurt.
Finally, Et leapt onto the tile marking Maldrazagar. On doing so, one of the creches lurched open, revealing a tunnel leading into the darkness.
The Smugglers and the Captain
The party rounded a corner and descended a short flight of stairs, approaching another stone door. This time Dunda opened it, only to reveal two humans idling in a room full of boxes and crates. Two more doors marked the east and west walls (or left and right from the party's entrance) and the south was notable for a large human-sized hole bored into it.
The humans tried to kick the party out, but not before letting slip their boss was a smuggler named Sunosar (a distant acquaintance of Et's?) and revealing that their "host" in this tomb was some sort of "1000 year old ghost." The party made a reasonable effort to make peace, but the smugglers weren't having it. Gun and Et thrashed them with their staves before the smugglers could do any harm with their weapons.
The party thoroughly searched the room, finding provisions for living in a desert cave, a box full of Crimson Moon incense burners (nauseating for magic users to even look at), and four sheathes of tremor lichen - a smokable compound that grants synesthetic vision of sound waves. Tremor lichen was controlled in law abiding Ker Onar territory, but the party nonetheless split the sheathes among themselves.
Curious about this host, the party cracked open the door to the West, revealing a large dark chamber with a sarcophagus on a raised plinth. Upon entering, their torch was suddenly blown out and a booming voice demanded to know who had dared to disturb their slumber.
The party paid suitable obeisance, so the shadowy ghost materialized, inviting them to sit on the edge of its funeral plinth. The ghost admired their haul and invited them to try the tremor lichen so it could vicariously enjoy their vice. Shabai, Et, and Gun took the invitation (with varying degrees of enthusiasm), Dunda having sworn the stuff off.
With tensions relieved, the party asked what kept this ghost, Ryllufar, on the mortal plane. After some thought, they answered: "I never had enough money..."
Mechanical Notes
Character creation in TEA is funny in that it is already approaching a sort of micro-AD&D experience. Character options are scattered across two volumes in multiple passages, and even if you stick with the basics, you are still flipping between the character creation procedure, your archetype features, and the equipment section. I'm tempted to make a handout with just the condensed character creation options and some page numbers for details.
We tried out a little combat. The party got the first cracks in, but they weren't that much stronger than the smugglers they tussled with. A few bad initiative rolls and they might have been trading 1-for-1...
On the note of combat, spears and staves seem extremely strong, especially when starting characters don't have access to shields or even multiple weapons to use their off hand. High speed and a top tier damage number seem hard to beat.
I'm threading the needle a bit here - invoking all the juicy lore about Orn, but setting this adventure off the conventional map. So far so good, but I can already feel a bit of an urge to avoid areas that haven't received their gazetteer yet in the form of an official volume.
Finally, I like the end of session XP system in TEA. It's a sort of hybrid between Dungeon Worlds end of session questions and... well, I don't know what other system has you rolling dice for XP like this. My only potential qualm is about the extra XP awarded to one MVP player. It mattered deeply at the end of session 1, pushing one player over the threshold to level 2. Maybe that's just a session 1 quirk, but in such a small numbers environment, I'd be tempted to award it for effort away from the table - session recaps or such like.
Overall, a great time and I look forward to playing more with this group!