Dragon Heresy: A Decent Burial

Cast of Characters

T: Dragonborn fighter. Played by my nephew, who very well may have read Dragon Heresy cover to cover, and knows the rules details the way only an obsessed 10yo hypervocal intelligent young man can. Yeah, I love him, but he’s definitely that guy. 

S: Tiefling wizard. My daughter. We really dug into the spell rules this game, and so she picked out her six “known” spells, loved choosing three each day, and had her two spell slots at the ready.

L: Dragonborn wizard. My daughter’s classmate. He finally has a character I sent him, but he has no dice (or has them but doesn’t know where they are) so I have to do all the rolling for him. I have discovered I despise rolling for players, because I want them to have the fun of rolling their own dice.

The Play’s The Thing

The game started with a bit of a rewind, so that I had them coming into Akkerisborg instead of already there. Good perception rolls showed several of the party members a trail of broken foliage. They investigated and found “humanoid” footprints, with evidence of a dragging foot.

T: “Oh, definitely a vaettr.”

DHC: If that’s the case, you should run.

T: “Oh, well, you wouldn’t do that to us.”

S: “Do you even know my dad? Of course he’d do that to us!”

T: “Oh. Right.”

In any case, they decided to follow the trail, and found the corpse of a youngish woman, dead for at least a week. She was wearing soft but serviceable boots (the dragging foot), and investigation revealed that she’d bled out from serious wounds. Even more searching found two 50gp carved bloodstone gems, and a journal describing the young adventurer and her two friends’ trek to an underground complex.

They discussed it, decided that the important thing was to get the young woman back to Akkerisborg for a proper Viking burial. “After all, there were three of them, and there are three of us. If two got killed and she died here . . . the same fate will happen to us.”

I Did Not See That Coming

So there we go. I didn’t really want to be That GM with the Quantum Ogre, but I really did figure “X marks the spot for treasure, and there’s more where that came from” was going to do the trick.

I made a thing out of the wall guards praising them for bringing back the body for burial, and they summoned a priest of the Death God (Hela) to send the spirit to the afterlife properly. She spoke to the dead, who revealed her name (“Remember me! Sing songs!”) and that she died in battle, and her friends didn’t make it out of the complex.

S and T: “Well, we better go get their bodies, then! It’s only right and proper.”

I Guess We’re Having a Delve After All

So we did a few days of cross-country, mostly a quick roll on the weather table (really hot for October in Akkerisborg, with the temps in the upper 80s), followed by a fast rain at night and the temps getting back to closer to normal. In any case, everyone made their CON saves for temperature under exertion and no wandering monsters showed up. So then it was delve time.

They entered the maze after following the dead woman’s journal instructions, and S cast Detect Magic. I told her that she sensed somewhat dimly two sources of magic, one to the north and the other to the west. That’s not really how the spell works, but otherwise it’s a wasted spell slot use, and it’s more fun to dangle stuff.

For the record: one is a +1 weapon, the other is a set of magic runes that allow you to scry anywhere in the dungeon. I’m sure that will include the “not on the map but it’s going to be” second level of the place.

Fight Fight Fight!

The first encounter was they busted in a door and met up with a ghoul, who very rapidly succumbed to 3:1 odds the way any outnumbered creature did. T lost a bit of vigor but made his paralysis save. The thing got knocked down to zero vigor and rapidly succumbed to wounds from sword, arrow, Ray of Frost, and my daughter deciding to run up to the thing and brain it with her quarterstaff.

She really likes mixing up her attacks. I dig that. This was enough to bring them to Level 2; they all wanted to level up right there, so I said why not? Extra vigor was rolled, spell slots added, but I did say “no, you can’t just learn a new spell right there in the cavern, you need to be in town for that.” They accepted that gracefully.

The second encounter was a direct result of the first: the noise from the quick fight brought three skeletons into the fray. With T being the only real fighter of any sort, this quickly became a melee fight between T and a skeleton, and Ray of Frost (and one very timely use of Thunderwave by S) vs two skels with shortbows. The kids used line of sight denial very well; T realized that using his reaction to take an arrow on his shield was spectacularly cool (1d6 for a shortbow can never pierce the shield), and that one shield (and one reaction) vs two people with bows was Less Cool.

The PCs lost a bit of vigor but otherwise did quite nicely. We ran a bit long but finished the fight. They’ll collect (if they wish) a few old shortbows, two battle axes and a shortsword, and a good roll on the treasure table results in the three skeletons having about 35gp between them. Not a ton, but not bad for such low CR creatures (normally they’d have about 32sp – it was a VERY good roll).

What to do?

My daughter used each of her spells already: thunderwave, shield, and detect magic. She’s out until she can take a long rest. L still has spells left. Fighters never really run out of boom stick but T did use his Action Surge so a “short rest” is probably needed. They still haven’t found the Big Treasure for this, and there are maybe three monster-filled areas left (a set of zombies, a skeleton on a skeletal warhorse, and a horde of “creeping claws” that should have be busting out the grappling rules.

Today, with a bit more direction, went WAY better than last time. So booyah, and next week it’ll be even more.

Lessons Learned

Be prepared 1: Having tried “open crawl” the last two times, having them explore a maze was definitely The Right Call. Having Roll20 open and doing screen share worked really well, and gave them something to worry about and engage with. “Why are you dragging skeleton icons to the map?” “No reason. Carry on.”

Be prepared 2: Even so, “here’s X marks the spot” treasure map did NOT work. Give Vikings a proper Viking burial DID work. That surprised me, but it was cool roleplaying. I really do have several back-up plans, and much like megadungeon prep without the megadungeon, as we get farther a long, I can outpace them. Even so, it was a near thing if I was going to have to wing it on the primary backup.

Know the Rules: Everyone thinks they know the 5e rules. Many do. Some think they do because the house rules they learned under, to them, ARE the rules. (“We start at level zero!” No, pretty much level 1. “No!” Yeah. Can we move on?) In particular, T is me when I was a kid: he really knows the details of the game I wrote, and is a born GM. Even when he’s playing. Still: he keeps me on my toes.

Know the Rules 2: I blame GURPS. 🙂 I had a few things creep in to both play and expectations that are pure “GURPS is still my system of choice” for me, and it was funny. Calling DR “Damage Resistance” (a GURPSy thing) vs Damage Reduction (a 5e thing) got me a Yellow Card from T. Yeah, fair.

Visual Aid for the Win: I mentioned it above, but having the vigor and wounds right there on the icons, picking out good tokens for the three players, and having them interact with the map was super important to them. It helped me retain focus as well. I need to refresh myself with the features of Roll20 like vision blocking layers so that they can’t see the map that they’re not on, but for now, I don’t care. “There’s a room over there!” is fine. It’s meta, but since I pulled the GM map off and use it in a different window, that was more motivation than not. Even so, using more cool visual effects will make them happy.

Still Enforce Turn Priority: At least one of the kids will happily shout over anyone talking. So “Look, it’s [person’s] turn and until they’re done calling their action, KEEP YER MOUTH SHUT” is still needed. With my adult friends, side conversations are relegated to “OOC chat,” and mostly we’re all good at knowing when our turn is, declaring it fast, and then getting out of the way. The kids are still mostly still looking for as much spotlight time as possible. So a bit of heavy handed “it’s not your turn. Please wait.” is needed. That’s fine. I’m a dad. I can handle it.

Another Slugger Wanted: These guys really need more melee help. I’m thinking a nice Cleric of Storms, Law, or Warding. A bit of help on fisticuffs, plus a healbot.