i finished running Newt's lovely and famous fall of emermeraan which I ran using these rules and i'll talk about it a little bit and it'll be another zuihitsu. so now you know what to expect.
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| meurs for fears... |
Fall of Emermeraan is completely wonderful and it deserves to be more famous than it already is. there is exactly the right amount of language of exactly the right kind. it is Melancholic and Classic without being Gay and Boring. there is a poem at the beginning and an evil mountain called the Mount of Woe and hexes titled "Where Hangs Weary Londir, First and Last of the Champions." wherever you go it's always worse than it was once in those golden days long ago... there are Winged Bulls and a Hydra in a Lake. there are Twelve Magic Swords!!!!!!!!!
the longest hex in it is mayybe like four paragraphs. because i am a lucky ducky i got to use the unpublished Tomb Dungeon that Newt wrote and it rocked but i ran a fort invasion and a wizards tower battle and a sunken library delve and a dragon cave without any maps and it was totally fine. the tone set is strong enough that you know what the fuck all of that stuff looks like by the time the players get there.
the tomb dungeon really is great; it's full of gold plated mummified winged concubines and was a huge part of how i imagined Belarad, the ancient God-King we All Adore. as a result, the entire game was kinda woven through with Sexually Frightening Undertones which is that shit i like. I do think most of that kinda skated off the lovely knucklehead fellas I played with but I got to have fun being like "actually... this is all pretty fucked up..." and they'd be like "damn... true... anyway do u think i can turn into a bird and have sex with other birds..."
the campaign was a shorty sweetie which is how i like it. about 14 sessions were played, each about 2-3 hours. this is the right amount of time for me. if you are on a video call for more than 2 or 3 hours it is bad for you. i ran in the mornings (about an hour after I woke up) for a change and i will never run a game at any other time again. that's the right time to run a game because it lets you go dancing on saturday night and you don't have any time to try and do nervous prep beforehand. we used Owlbear Rodeo instead of tldraw which for me is preferable if the players aren't going to be drawing the map. it just comes down to little things like a fog of war being easy to manage and making and moving little shapes to represent everyone being very consistent. the laser pointer tool is also superior.
besides the module itself I also used Luke Gearing's monsters & & & treasure. people have written better monster books than Luke (though not many) but the language in that book is the right amount of the right kind for this sort of Sparse Melancholia type thing Emermeraan has going on. nobody has written a better treasure book than & treasure.
i did not prep for this game at all not one time. i took notes during the sessions but not afterwards and unless i got a really good idea and had to write it down (for i avoid at all costs disappointing david lynch) i really didn't engage with the game at all outside of actual play. i separated my notes into Map Stuff, where I tracked stuff that was happening on the map, Monsters Stuff, where I made notes abt monsters who got away wounded or that I had changed from the original text, and Rules Stuff, where I kept track of like time passing and weather.
my notes looked more or less like this:
Eunuch at 0404: Pestilent Mebulu
blood is a xenomorph type crazy acid
gave one of Belarad’s beloved concubines a venereal disease
Dorodain healed but his song is now one of vengeance; +2 weapon damage
Black Birds from the Mountain of Woe have been spotted
the game was a closed group but an open table. on average I was running for about 3 people; at its largest, about 7. the group was all guys i've known and played games with for like 10+ years as well as a single session that the famous and powerful gamer Nathe dropped in for. that session was awesome; his kid lived out a morality play about how you should never lie, as he watched a guy lie himself to death and then flew through the air on his sword, lost the sword, fell into a well, told the truth to a giant snake, and walked home naked surrounded by a herd of beautiful horses. it turned out that his guy was over the available character count so he became a figure of myth and speculation, a sort of Noble Fool that the other kids referred to often.
truth-telling is absolutely one of the all time magic system greats. Newt just doesn't miss! magic was almost always subtle and naturalistic and even when it was bombastic followed a very graceful kind of fairytale logic; a storm washed away an enchantment, a fire was kindled so hot it melted steel plate.
there were a few sessions where the number of encounters was basically doubled due to the efforts of a fortress of Arming Men, which I used to replace the Hobgoblins in the module. I came up with them at runtime when the players first encountered hobgoblins and I was like ??? i don't want goblins... Arming Men were the dead evil wizard's remaining soldiers, guys who had full plate nailed to their bodies with magic nails and weapons nailed into their hands. they could run long distances and leap and somersault in full armor and felt no pain as long as they were armed and armored. if their weapons or armor were ever lost or damaged they would freak out and roll around on the ground and cry like babies. in lieu of Evil Wizard Instructions they were kidnapping people from the barbarian towns around the city of Emermeraan and nailing weapons and armor to them to transform them into more Arming Men. they were a huge pain in the ass to fight, but the players crumbled bridges under em and melted em in magic fire and burrowed under their fortress with a barbarian army and collapsed towers on em with a magic gauntlet-hand and used truth-telling to make a giant blacksmith immune to their weapons (for he had forged them while enslaved). for the big assault on the tower we used bannerlords which worked very well; everything went great until the last few rolls which killed like 4 different kids.
I'm extremely good at integrating shit with other shit. like, my shit is all integrated and it's like fuuuuuck... this means that for a beast like me a book like & Treasure is kind of the only thing I'll ever need to run a good game. almost all of the major elements of the world and campaign could be directly tied to magic items I rolled randomly at play time. The False Gift (a ring that gives you a buff if you give it to someone else as a gift) completely characterized the relationship between the barbarians and the people of Emermeraan, a dynamic which was central to about 2/3rds of the game; the Genealogical Tree (physical family tree with gold leaves that could tie you to a line of kings) turned into the focal of the campaign (to crown a new King who could break the curse) and a power struggle between two characters for the right to the throne that resulted in the exile of one of them, who became the primary antagonist for the rest of the game. Also they were 11 and 12 respectively.
It's also very very easy to riff on preexisting material. When the players recovered the Hammer of Belarad I wanted it to do some cooler shit than just Be Really Strong Hammer because I am always wanting to make something do some cool shit. So I said during downtime it could improve the magic swords of the champions that the kids use, like making the light from the glowing sword blind barbarians and serpents, and making the sword that lets you become animals you have killed instead letting you become the King of that animal. you do not have to prep this kind of thing! the key is to be using something with simple, repetitive tonal consistency and attention to motif, which Emermeraan has a ton of. Barbarians and Snakes are always evil, Light is always good, being King is always the best thing ever.
I turned the Mountain of Woe into the mountain from mines claws and princesses which is a tonal match and also kind of the best thing ever. It was not relevant at all but it was nice to me to know it was there, and led to me deciding that the dragon from Emermeraan was one of two; he the Father of Truth, and she (the one from mines claws) the Mother of Lies, sleeping beneath the mountain.
somebody would probably tell me that turning all the hobgoblins into guys with 20AC who don't feel pain or fear isn't fair and it literally doesn't matter. players are like water in that there is no cruelty it is not justified to inflict on them. they are also like water in that they will overcome all challenges and save us all :)))
one of my biggest frustrations with running games is my voice. i mirror
tone and cadence on that autism type shit and when i am playing a game
with Beloved Dudes it is nearly impossible for me to not slip into a Guy
Voice that really fucking bugs me. I get more self conscious about it
with people who have only known me as a woman; if I don't know people
well enough to know how they perceive me, I'll default to a self
conscious guy tone because I Forget I'm Lowkey Fish. anyway it fucks
with my Gamer Mojo, Nathe and other gamers of the Purple Circle have
received a much more stilted version of myself than what I'm happy
with. for these reasons I much prefer running games where there are not
that
many people for the players to casually talk to. I really hate
situations where I'm supposed to be speaking as more than one person in a
group of people. Those only came up a couple times during Barbarian
Negotiations and I basically turned that into a cycle where I'd
summarize, ask the players what they decided/said, summarize again, etc.
in the light of this Emermeraan was p great. everybody is either dead
or sleeping or a million years old and cryptic.
I turned the Hobgoblins into Arming Men and the Wyverns into Eunuchs (Monsters &) who were like cursed human guys whose robes had become part of their skin so they could glide around and had long gnarly fingernails and toenails and bled a unique poison out of their perpetually bleeding crotch wound. Orcs and Bandits both became Barbarians with two major cultures; Men of the Hill, who had been subjugated by Emermeraan and did phlox martial arts and could tunnel like crazy and were ruled by women who took the elements as lovers, and the Men of Orgotha who had been genocided like crazy and lived on stilt houses and built big walking skeleton sculptures out of the bones of their dead. These details I also created at runtime cause I wanted some distinction between the two barbarian cultures. The Men of the Hill I made up entirely because the players went into a hex that was misskey'd on the map (which has since been fixed) and I had to make up something really fast.
I don't fuck w purely humanoid skeletons or skeletons whose means of staying attached are in question. a skeleton should be like one of those sculptures from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and be tied together with string and stuff. I added snakes to the encounter table because there's a ton of serpent stuff in the module anyway and I wanted more.
Trolls I replaced with Collectors, who were cursed for their greed and had huge arms and huge backs and regenerating flesh they used to stick all sorts of treasure into themselves. The players fought 7 of them in a series of crumbling towers and palace chambers in a swamp and it was rad as fuck people were getting thrown through walls and two kids lassoed a troll and then jumped out a window so it got hoisted into the air and everyone else could pinata it. the kid with the glowing sword used truth-telling to make his sword into a flaming lightsaber blade.
There was a limit of 12 characters; the game was lost at 0. The players lost half of them by the time the game ended; at first every major victory was punctuated by the death of a child but after a bit those victories started to compound and the kids started walking around in full plate with 42 Strength and stars from the sky in their hands.
There was only one instance of PvP. PvP is something I consider healthy and natural and exciting. in this case it occurred when the kids recovered the Crown of Belarad by transforming into a pheasant and stealing it from a hydra while the others fought it to distract it. the kid who fought the hydra and the kid who stole the crown both wanted to be king, and everyone took the side of the pheasant, so the two of them dueled in the throne room and then the king used truth-telling to compel her fealty and she tried to tell truth of her own but failed and then she tried to lie but she failed and so, unable to use magic and entirely humiliated, she said she'd serve him from a distant place and exiled herself, taking a wolf-head-helm that prevented you from speaking (& Treasure) and a company of Barbarian followers and going north to try and free a dragon.
The game was won when the players broke the wizard curse on their land that had made everything all Children of Men Nightmare From Hell. That was the stated (by me) objective from the beginning. I like a campaign with a clear win condition and stopping point; it provides a clear direction, rids me of any anxiety about having to find a place to wrap things up without wanting to stop too soon or too late, and gives everybody a real sense of progression. oh boy!!! we're almost there!!!!
the players were a good mix of cautious objective doers, goo drinkers, Waxing Poetical Types and guys who didn't give a fuck if they lived or died. this is an optimal mix for me and I would gladly recommend these boys to anyone in need.
I changed truth-telling in two ways and I was very pleased by the results. The first was if you exactly met the difficulty of the truth you're uh telling then you get your way but in a cwaaaazy way... it was thus that Nathe's character claimed to have left his sword at home in order to avoid giving it to a Collector and found himself rocketing through the air, pulled by his sword as it sailed unerringly homeward. the second was Secrets, which could be discovered or granted by magic items and gave +1d4 on a truth-telling roll of a particular kind like Authority or Crystals; this was neat and gave the more timid gamers some direction in terms of truths to try and tell.
I dynamically revealed the hexes players were in as well as the areas surrounding them but kept everything else fog'd. since it was an open table, players wrote on the map to make sure other players would know what hexes were important and stuff. there were also a few hexes I kept permanently revealed; areas where the perpetual storm and fog of the sky was broken by golden fields of magical sunlight. This decision had a big impact on the game! It meant that players were way more prone to visit the areas they had already explored, which meant I was encouraged to decide what had happened in those areas over time and make sure that encounters were meaningfully engaging with those areas so they felt more real. Players liked their limited orienteering and going "uh yea I remember there was something up this way" but I don't think I would do this with a bigger hexcrawl. Emermeraan is pretty much perfectly fun-sized; I got 14 sessions out of around 2/3rds of the keyed hexes, with a whole ass Evil Wizard Mountain as yet unexplored. It's small enough that the "your hex and surrounding" is enough to feel significant and include a variety of terrain and usually at least one keyed hex on average; if it were bigger, I feel certain this approach would lead to "its fields in all directions Who Cares." For something on a larger scale I think doing like Regional Reveals upon discovery could be good. I'm sure someone is doing something like that already.
I used D100 Occurring for every single encounter. it is the correct maneuver and ensures that everyone is freaked the fuck out by encounters. However, I also use a generous reaction table where "neutral" is edged out in favor of "curious" and most things are at least willing to engage in an exchange of some kind with you. not D100 snakes though. D100 snakes is willing to engage in biting you.
At the start of each session I let each character declare they'd been doing one downtime action; this was usually studying a magic rosetta stone for more secrets, using the hammer to improve a sword, or hunting. sometimes players would want to do something like tame a hawk or train a choir and I'd just handle that with an ability check.
I think I call for more ability checks than some of the gamers I play with. I like coming up with stakes for actions, I can do it quickly and it creates more flashpoints that can cascade out into interesting situations. There's a definite ebb and flow to it though; you have to know when to let something ride till it gets interesting. I let Nathe hold onto his flying sword without rolling as it blasted him out of the mountain depths, but then made him roll once a dragon started pursuing him because it was Hype and Tense. I don't believe in Trve Verisimilitude, I believe in having a good time.
and Emermeraan is a good time, so I believe in Emermeraan <3
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| it's jeffery alan, love <3 |
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