Mediums and Messages

The Electrum Archive - Session 2

Artist unknown, USSR postage stamp depicting a desert zone of the former Aral Sea, 1991

This post continues my account of the micro-campaign of The Electrum Archive I'm running. As ever I'll strive to keep the report spoiler-free for players, while still including my impressions as a GM and critical notes for next time.

The Spirit's Offer

This week, our party consists of:

Et, perhaps suffering from a sudden bout of claustrophobia, decided to scout ahead for another exit (i.e. his player was unavailable).

Over the lingering tremor lichen fumes, the thousand-year-old pirate ghost Ryllufar struck a deal with the party: free Ryllufar from their tomb and they would join the party. They'd only take a meager share, a few drops of ink here and there, and to sweeten the deal, they offered their sand skiff, The Sparrowhawk.

Ryllufar was up front about the complications. The ghost couldn't stray from the room where their material remains were buried. The skiff was interred in the next room and guarded by the mummified wights of its former crew. The party opened the door to confirm, but the wights didn't immediately respond. Ryllufar warned that the wights weren't sentient and likely couldn't be reasoned with.

Dunda (failing an Archive test) recalled his time in the arena, remembering that the undead cease to attack when you command them to halt.

Smuggler Interlude

After some scheming, the party decided to use supplies from the nearby smuggler's stash to make a bonfire trap that would ignite the mummies as they entered the room with Ryllufar's sarcophagus. Turuta set about the laborious process of engineering the perfect trap.

Before completing the trap, the party backtracked to the smuggler's stash to check the eastern exit they hadn't explore previously. Listening through the door, they heard the groaning voices of two smugglers, clearly hungover after sampling the tremor lichen. Shabai burst in and began hammering a ladle against a nearby stewpot, while the rest of the party disarmed the two smugglers inside and ransacked the room. They looted vials with a few dozen drops, an ornate short bow, and a dungeoneer's kit worth of loose tools.

The party barricaded the incapacitated smugglers into their own bunk room with stacked crates. One of the smugglers roused themselves enough to issue some threats, but seemed too discombobulated to make a serious escape attempt just yet.

Shabai bundled Ryllufar's remains in a stolen blanket, then hauled them into the smuggler's depot, just in case.

Skeleton Skirmish

With all the pieces in place, the party set up for combat. Gun stood on the plinth with the sarcophagus wielding the short bow, while the rest of the party clustered on either side of the double doors into the skiff room.

The Sparrowhawk was a catamaran with two canoe-like sleds supporting a central deck and a collapsible mast. On that central deck were the remains of six mummified sailors, each with a shield. Gun loosed an arrow and shot the closest one, causing the wights to jerk awake and rush the party.

The wights triggered the trap, immediately being set ablaze. Three went up in an instant. The remaining three were handily dispatched by Shabai, Dunda, and Turuta as they came smoldering out of the blaze.

Moving the Sparrowhawk

With the skeletons dispatched, the party inspected the ship. It was surprisingly modular - like a ship in a bottle. The party could move each piece, one at a time, and then reassemble it outdoors. The tunnels Turuta entered by would make for a straight path to the surface. That left two loose ends: the earth spirit in the canyon and the trapped smugglers.

The party decided to free the earth spirit. Shabai snapped the chains holding it to the pillar in the canyon entrance. The being wandered off without offering thanks or even really recognition.

The smugglers were a different story. Moving the Sparrowhawk would take long enough that they'd eventually escape. Ryllufar offered to handle the situation, promising not to kill them but telling the party to avert their gaze. Only Gun stayed in the same room to see the light sucked out of the space and to hear a distant wind and cries for mercy from the bunk room. The smugglers disappeared from sight behind the crates and the party didn't check up on them.

Eventually the Sparrowhawk was assembled on the sand outside, the sandstorm having faded into the distance. Ryllufar seemed delighted to return to the world of the living after a millennium underground. When their remains were interred in the cargo space embedded in the skiff's deck, they quickly set it ship shape, animating rope and hoisting the sale. The ghost would be able to operate the skiff for them, but lacked the long range sense needed to navigate.

As we closed, the party boarded their new ghost ship and set sail for Bar Morvyn to finally deliver the coded message they had originally been dispatched with.

GM Notes

A real old-school session! At the beginning I presented the party with a clear problem to overcome by some combination of guile, engineering, and force of arms. The rest of the session more or less unfolded from the process of them resolving that problem.

I appreciated how dangerous six wights would be to the party. Even with stats roughly akin to an adventurer, one bad round of speed rolls would have spelt disaster. The party flirted with just rushing in, but settled on a more laborious route that ended up working out nicely.

I floundered a bit when it came to when to actually call for a roll this session. I often ended up saying "You have a relevant talent? Okay, you can do it automatically if you don't mind it taking a while." The few times I did ask for rolls outside of combat, I ended up leaning into Dungeon World-esque failing forward. For instance, Turuta failed to install the trap (something I maybe shouldn't have called for a roll on in the first place), so I asked whether it took too long, made too much noise, or used up all of their kit. I think this works fine, but I want to keep that too a minimum, really only reserving it for center piece moments in a session and keeping the risk of actual factual failure live.

This aligns with something I have been thinking about a lot lately after listening to some interview with Chris McDowall about Into the Odd - adjudicating difficulty through position and effect rather than worrying too much about mechanical advantage and disadvantage.

Giving the party access to a skiff immediately puts pressure on the travel rules from TEA, at least as long as they are traveling short distances. I'll likely need to hack together some rules for rolling for encounters when puddle jumping or otherwise making several short trips rather than one long one, otherwise it is pretty unlikely they'll ever encounter anything at all while staying in the vicinity of Bar Morvyn.

Finally, a note on pacing. In each of our ~2 hour sessions, the party has had one combat, one extended puzzle / engineering sequence, one brief social encounter, and one... hornswoggling? (overcoming an obstacle via a trick). It wasn't really my intent to have that so easily distributed, but that seems like about as much as we can fit into our time slot once you account for start and end of session rituals.