Adventures in a Doomed World: Session 1

 

The village of Laford and its surrounding hexes.

Introduction

We'll be getting back to Thousand Year Old Vampire soon but I wanted to share something else I've been playing. I'd been reading about hexcrawls and funnel adventures and thought "Hey! Why not try combining them with a nice crunchy OSR style solo campaign?"

It turned out this was harder than I thought.

I bought the printed rulebook and field guide (monster manual) for Basic Fantasy RPG and downloaded the rest of the books as they're open source. It really does what it says on the tin - provides you with a simple ruleset for playing a D&D style game. There's no official campaign setting which is fine by me.

A note about funnel adventures: If you don't know what this is, it's where the players roll up a group of level zero commoner characters and play through a short adventure where most of them will inevitably be killed along the way, leaving only the best of the best who level up to become first level characters of an appropriate class. This is also known as a tumbler or meat grinder, and as far as I know it was made popular by the game Dungeon Crawl Classics, which uses it for character creation (I think - I've never played it).

The Tools

One of the best things about Basic Fantasy RPG is how many free supplements players have made, and they all kindly use the same template provided by the designers so they all look really neat and official. After a bit of googling I found the Hexcrawl Adventures supplement by Luke Kennedy, which not only provides tables for generating the geography in the map hexes but also a whole set of rules about travel, rations, quests and things.

Next I was able to find the Level 0 Character Tumbler by Austin Schaefer. This has tables for generating a group of unlucky peasants complete with jobs and equipment. Helpfully Schaefer includes a table of stat arrays that you roll a D100 on, so you don't need to roll for strength, dexterity etc for everyone. They all start with -100 XP and their goal is to reach 1 XP, when they'll become an actual player character.

Most of the playtime will be spent exploring the wilderness and dungeons, enjoying the brutal combat of BFRPG, but for picking up quests in towns I'll probably use the oracles from Ironsworn as they're really amazing and spark off so many creative ideas.

There are tons of free worldbuilding resources out there, and I had a vision of the future: me sat in front of my PC spending days reading long treatises on how to design or generate a fantasy world, and taking so long it ends up being weeks before I actually sit down and play the damn thing. So I simply generated random names for a world and a village using Donjon and got stuck in.

The World

The name the generator threw out was Eithlombas. I simplified it to Eilobar, and generated a starting village, Laford. I drew it on the map above and added a river to it, deciding the name came from the fact there was a ford (easy place to cross) there.

My idea for the funnel/tumbler/meatgrinder quest was that Laford is being terrorised by a tribe of goblins from a nearby cave, and, fed up with the lack of support from the local nobleman and with no adventurers in sight, a group of villagers decide to use whatever makeshift weapons they have to fight back against the goblins and wipe them out.

So then I wondered why no heroic adventurers had shown up to help, when normally they would in any fantasy RPG. Maybe there aren't any at all in the whole world? Perhaps the world has had a long period of peace but has recently entered its version of the end times. Monsters are stirring deep in their lairs and raiding settlements. There's no prophecy about a chosen one who'll rise up and defeat them, but perhaps there is one about a dark lord who'll unite the monsters and plunge the world into a thousand years of chaos and evil.

So that's it - the world is doomed but a small group of peasants has decided not to go down without a fight.

The Characters

As mentioned, the Level 0 Character Tumbler lets you create a group of NPCs relatively quickly using a table of stat arrays. I decided without much thought to make eight random characters, hoping that maybe three or four might survive to level 1. A name generator on Donjon provided the names. I won't show waste time detailing their character sheets, but they were:

Jamath, male human farmer

Eaneris, female elf butcher

Eryn, female halfling mariner

Hildo, male halfling pilgrim

Eglil, male elf mariner

Gauwill, male halfling farmer

Ingor, male elf blacksmith

Cicily, female human alchemist

The Adventure

To begin with, I used the Hexcrawl rules to try to find the goblin cave near the village. The villagers wandered about for several days, encountering nothing.

I realised randomly generating terrain and hoping that a dungeon would materialise was probably a bad idea, so decided they probably knew where the goblin cave was if they'd been suffering raids for a while, and marked it on the map near the village. It turned out to be in a swamp, which seemed fitting. Here's a log of what happened when they arrived, divided into rounds.

The villagers entered, finding a cavern with two rock pillars, a pool of water and a raised area. Six goblins were there.

They engaged the goblins immediately. Jamath and Eaneris were both killed right away. Gauwill killed a goblin with his pitchfork, and Hildo the pilgrim brained another with his club.

A goblin stabbed and killed Eglil.

Gauwill impaled another one, Ingor bashed in the head of another.

Eryn the mariner, one of the better armed villagers, was slashed by a goblin's shortsword and killed.

Cicily the alchemist smashed the head of one with her staff. Ingor the blacksmith killed one with his hammer.

With all of the monsters killed, they realised they party had been half wiped out and Hildo had been badly wounded, so they retreated outside to treat his wounds. It took him three days to heal, during which time Ingor the elf blacksmith noticed a group of six giant scorpions approaching from a distance, so they relocated for a day and came back once the scorpions had gone.

They went back into the cave and found three goblins in the next cavern. Ingor killed one with his hammer in one blow, Gauwill the farmer stabbed one with his pitchfork, killing it.

A goblin hacked at Hildo, reopening his old wound. Another stabbed Gauwill, sadly killing him.

Cicily bashed the last one with her staff, but it was tougher than the others and didn't go down. Ingor hit it over the head, followed by Hildo who knocked it out. Once it was down they dispatched it easily enough. They gathered their fallen friends' belongings and left for the next room.

This room had a huge chasm in the ground and five more goblins. The party took up a defensive position near the edge of the chasm, luring the goblins to it.

They approached, stood at the edge and all attacked, but the three surviving party members parried and dodged all of them.

Ingor hit a goblin with his hammer, knocking it into the chasm. Hildo bashed one with his club but was unable to knock it down the hole.

After that the goblins seemed to rally. One hacked into Cicily's neck with its sword, killing her. Another stabbed Ingor, killing him too. Finally another visciously gutted Hildo, and the last of the villagers fell.

Conclusion

Well, so much for the villagers of Laford. I'm not too experienced playing this sort of RPG, especially not when the characters are all level zero and can barely hit a goblin. The farmers seemed to fight best with their pitchforks, but most of the others were hopeless.

Back to the drawing board I guess. I think I'll try again soon with a party of twelve, although that means a hell of a lot more dice rolling. I'll also try to be more tactical in combat and use the features of the dungeons more to my advantage, like I did with the chasm.

We haven't seen the last of the world of Eilobar though.