Crypts and Things in the World of Beasts and Barbarians

The City of Jalizar, the Rotten Flower of the Northern Empire, has fallen under the rule of Par the Horrific, a red hand and savage barbarian. Despite the iron handed rule of the bloody tyrant, Jalizar is still a city of opportunity where a fortune can be made (and lost) if you are bold enough. However, beware the dangers. If the city guard were not dangerous enough, the city is infested with thieves, demon worshipers, cutthroats, mercenaries and evil sorcerers. The Gods worshiped in the city, if they exist at all, can't be counted on. They only thing that you can trust is the steel in your hands and your own skills.

If you have followed this blog, then you know that I love Beasts and Barbarians and I love Crypts and Things so I decided that I would run Crypts and Things in the world of Beasts and Barbarians.  Specifically this new campaign will take place in my own version of Jalizar, the City of Thieves.  I have three players.  Kevin will be playing the part of Chantel, a barbarian woman of the north.  Brandon will be playing Khale Roley III, a magician that primarily, at least so far, has stayed away from black magic.  Matt will be playing Raelic, a thief and capable warrior who has been marked by darkness. 

I started this campaign the same way that I started the last Crypts and Things campaign:  I have the players play characters that were doomed from the very beginning to introduce them to Crypts and Things system and the narrative of the campaign.  The introduction also introduced the players to forces of evil and darkness that are simmering just under the streets of the city…..

Kevin, Matt and Brandon played three mercenaries hired by the merchant Yagha to guard him while he made a delivery in one of the more unsavory parts of the city.  Like so many D&D games (well, technically this is C&T but I call all tabletop fantasy RGPs that use a 20 sided diced and have saving throws and armor class “D&D”), this one starts out in a tavern.  The mercenaries are checking their weapons and adjusting their armor while a bard sings a song lamenting the fall and the betrayal of good King Euedun at the hands of his blood thirsty General, Par the Horrific.  The song cursed Par for betraying the city’s rightful ruler and forcing King Euedun’s daughter Ninga into marriage in a vain attempt at legitimizing his unlawful rule.  Finally Yagha arrives and the mercenaries can earn their coin and be done with this strange business.

Yagha leads the mercenaries into a part of the city aptly named The Rat’s Nest near the part of Jalizar that collapsed into the ocean after an earth quake.  Also with him are cloaked servants carrying the trade goods.  Really little better than slaves but Par the Horrific had banded slavery from the city upon seizing power.  The mercenaries reason that the goods must be illegal items otherwise Yagha would not need their swords.  Nor would the business need be conducted at night.  One of the servants opens a grate and now the party descends into the catacombs.  One of the mercenaries realizes that the cloaked servants do not seem to require torch light….

The mercenaries, the merchant and the servants walk in the catacombs until they reach a stone door with strange markings and symbols.  The markings on the door seem to move and slither if you stare at them for a moment or two.  The door opens into a room with a robed figure which greats the group.

The robed figure offers Yagha boxes full of gold items, items that take the shape of unearthly and twisted things.  The mercenaries find them hard to look upon.  Yagha has his servants offer the robed figure a long, flat box.  With their business concluded, Yagha gestures towards the mercenaries.  “As per our agreement, here are the three offerings that you were promised as well.”  The robed figure removes his hood, revealing a creature out of a nightmare.  The horrid creature has slimy green/grey skin, claws and dead fish eyes.  Although the mercenaries are terrified (at least one of them failed their sanity roll) they draw their weapons and attack.  Yagha’ features shift into a serpent like creature.  One of the mercenaries is bitten and falls to the ground.  The fish man makes a gesture and one of the mercenaries is turned to stone.  The final mercenary is beaten into submission.

A Serpent Man and a Deep One priest!

The mercenaries awake to find themselves strapped to a slimy stone alter.  Green flames burst around them, revealing the massive stone idol to a twisted, tentacled and inhuman god.  One of the mercenaries succumbs to madness and becomes a giggling wretch.  The second one is barely lucid.  Only one of them is still sane enough to realize his fate as the robed fish man raises his sacrificial blade and declares that Jalizar will fall….

This is the end part on of the first session of my new Crypts and Things campaign.  

You can pickup Jalizar City of Thieves here: http://www.rpgnow.com/product/109576/Jalizar-City-of-Thieves

It is a great product and I highly recommend it.

It is live! The Crypts and Things Remastered Kickstarter is here!

The Crypts and Things Remastered is here and it is alive.  I  have already made my pledge.  I was part of the original Indiegogo campaign and I am glad to support this one as well.  If you are fan of Sword and Sorcery and if you play tabletop RPGs, I would highly recommend supporting this.  I recently started a new Crypts and Things game and I looking forward to checking out what improvements have been made to a game that I already love and support.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/645319106/crypts-and-things-remastered?ref=email

Crypts and Things is getting a make over

I loved the original version of the game but I am definitely jumping on board for the Crypts and Things Remastered Kickstarter.

http://sorcererundermountain.d101games.com/2015/02/03/crypts-and-things-remastered-kick-starter-opens-march-1st/

Crom! I had to get this!

What is best  in life?

http://www.80stees.com/products/best-in-life-conan-the-barbarian-t-shirt



WWCD?  What would Conan do?

Savage Worlds: Beasts and Barbarians: The Betrayers of Rhybard

Back in September, I ran the The Betrayers of Rhybard scenario from the Beasts of the Domains supplement. http://www.rpgnow.com/product/104616/Beasts-of-the-Dominions. The party was hired/forced to infiltrate a group of rebels in the Boarderlands   (The EVIL Governor Horatio had kidnapped Hawk and Sylph's adopted son to force them to do his dirty work.) I really don't have much of write up but I took pictures from the sessions so I might as well publish them. Sylph was Slyph, Shangor was Shangor and Hawk finally found a man worthy of her bed that she didn't kill in combat.  From the old group, Sul’khaz and Katrina were replaced by Gilan Gask, a archer priest of Uletu the God of Strength and pacific Monk whose name escapes me.

Sneaking into the Fortress of Mines dressed as the Governor's soldiers

The fight begins

It is the Beatles!  

The Hand of God. Well, actually Rianna if I remember correctly.

Chris' Pacifist Monk about to kick the crap out of Lipless

The Governor and Lipless are defeated.

The Five Moons RPG Kickstarter by Sean K. Reynolds.

Here is a Kickstarter that I am supporting.  I am a fan of Mr. Reynolds work.

http://kck.st/1pbSex0


I actually ran a brief Savage Worlds Beasts and Barbarians game with Hawk, Slyph and Shangor.  I will have to update this blog with that campaign log at some point.

Castles and Crusades: Vikings vs. Cthulhu.

Actually, it more like Vikings vs. Deep Ones. The premise of this adventure that I gave to the players was that of a Viking raid of the coast of Ireland in the 9th century that goes very, very wrong.  The players were Troy (Olaf Skullsplitter:  4th Level Fighter), Adam (Wulgar Bear Breath:  4thlevel barbarian), Casey (Lars the quick: 4th level rogue) and Kevin (Elfin: 4th level Cleric of Freya).  All of the players were people from my Crypts and Things game. 

The Vikings had heard tales of wealthy village along the northern coast of Ireland.   So far, the village had been untouched by the raids of the Northmen.  Supposedly there was a monastery of the White Christ nearby as well.  Monasteries were always a favorite target of the Vikings as they contained much gold and were undefended.  Unarmed Christian monks would be able to offer little resistance to the swords, axes and spears of the Northmen.  Their armor and weapons ready, the confident Vikings set forth from their settlement of Dublin in three longships to raid the village whose name, when translated from Gaelic to Norse, meant “Inn’s mouth”.   Despite the Northmen’s confidence, the raid would not go as they had planned….

The attack came at night.   Out of the darkness, Olaf, Wulgar and Lars heard screams of terror and war cries to Thor and Odin from one of the other longships.  As they peered into the darkness to try to see what was happening, the screams came from their craft as well.  From out of the ocean they came, demons from the depths and spawned from Hel.  These creatures walked like men but they had greenish scales, gaping maws, claws and armor and weapons made of sea shells and coral.  Worse of all were their eyes, fish eyes:  Lifeless, dark and completely vacant of any human emotion or thought.  Warriors that had fought face to face against the Saxons, the Franks and the unarmored mad warriors of Ireland were paralyzed with terror in the face of such nightmarish creatures.  Most of the Vikings were slain within the first seconds of the fight.  However, Wulgar, Lars and Olaf would not go down so easily. 

The Viking world map from the 2nd Edition Viking Handbook

Heading out on Raid.

Deep Ones Attack

Although he was shaken with fear, Olaf gave a war cry prayer to Thor and swung his axe.  His fear was overcome once he split the head of one of the monstrosities in two with a mighty blow.   Wulgar fought savagely, his blade dark with the blood of the ocean fiends.  Lars also fought bravely but he was at a disadvantage as his element was to scout and spy, not go head to head with demons from the watery abyss.  With all of their sword brothers now dead and the longship now taking water, the surviving three Northmen were determined to die with weapons in their hands so that they could join their brethren in the corpse hall of Odin.  But first, they were going to send as many of the vile ocean demons back to the nightmarish realm that spawned them before they were finally dragged down and slain.  However, before this could happen, the longship was capsized and the three Vikings were cast into ocean and then, oblivion…

Into watery oblivion.

Wulgar, Olaf and Lars awake to sound of crashing waves, face down on a beach with their weapons in their hands.   Glancing around and found that they were not alone.  Elfrun, a woman warrior priest of Freya, had also been washed up on the shore.  She had been on one of the other longships. 

Washed up on the Shore

Further down the coast, the now stranded Vikings noticed that there was a fishing village and a Christian monastery on the hill overlooking the village.  After Elfrun cast a healing spell on Wulgar and after scavenging a few more weapons that had washed up on the shore, the party headed inland. 

The Vikings had two choices; either they could go to village or they could go to the monastery.  For reasons I can’t recall, they chose to go the village first. 

Just outside of the village, the party encountered an idol unlike they had ever seen before.  I didn’t represent the Christian god nor did it represent any god that the Norse knew of.  If anything, it looked sickeningly close to the creatures that had crawled out of the ocean and attacked their longboats.  Wulfgar and Elfrun decided to knock the idol over.  

Olaf and Lars were very weary of doing so and declined to assist them.  Wulfgar and Elfrun succeeded in knocking the idol over but they were struck by a curse (-1 to everything)!  Despite this, they party continued on. 

As the Vikings got closer to the village, they noticed two things:  First, there was a longship beached just outside of the village.  The second thing that they noticed was that the Church at the center of the village was not a Christian one for the cross was missing from it.  All of the raiders knew that the Irish were mostly Christians but the people in this Irish village obviously were not.   Instead of marching directly into the village, Lars the quick was sent in to scout the place first.  What he saw chilled him to his bones.

He observed a young child being led by the hand of what was obviously the boy’s mother.  The boy looked human but his mother did not, at least not entirely.  She had human skin and hair but she had the same cold dead eyes that the demons from the ocean had.  As he continued to scout, he noticed that many of the people in the village also had similar inhuman features as well.  He decided to check the church at the center of the village.

Lars could tell that one time, this had been church dedicated to the Christian god that was followed by the Irish, the Saxons and the Franks.  Now in front of it, there was another idol depicting another demon from the ocean’s abyss.  He could also hear the screams of dying men inside the church.  The inhuman villagers were sacrificing his sword brothers to their vile and disgusting god!  Lars immediately returned to the others and told them what he had found. 

Angered by the horrid fate of their captured comrades, the Northmen (and one Northwoman) marched into the village to save their Viking brothers.  The villagers fled before the heavily armed warriors and Wulgar and Olaf kicked in the door of the church.  They were greeted by a scene straight out of a nightmare.

The church was full of robed figures in the center of the building.  At the back of the church on a raised platform, a blood stained alter to some obscene god had one of their Viking brothers strapped to it.  They party could clearly see that several captives had already been sacrificed in some abominable ritual.  Two figures in blood splattered robes were conducting the sacrifices on the raised platform.  Lars rushed in and struck down the first robed figure that he could with his sword.  The fight was on.

One of the two robed figures spoke in a language never meant for human tongue and sacrificed Vikings rose to their feet.  The party would have to fight their own dead to free the remaining survivors!  The other cast a spell at Lars but he was able to resist it. 

The heavily armed Vikings made short work of the cultists at the center of the church but Lars succumbed to his founds and fell to the floor.  Elfrun called upon Freya to drive off the undead abominations but she failed in her efforts.  They would have to cut through the risen dead to get to the vile priests!

Fighting their own dead!

Although he was seriously wounded (3 hit points!), Olaf rushed up on the platform and swung his axe.  In a great feat of might, he dispatched three of the undead in single blow.  (I used the siege engine to simulate the Greater Cleave affect from D&D 3.0.  Troy was on a hot streak with his dice at this point.)  Wulgar ignored the undead and managed to strike both of the foul priests.  Elfrun summoned a spiritual weapon to strike down her foes and the priests of Dagon and Cthulhu retorted in kind.  One point, one of the dark priests successfully compelled Wulgar to flee the battle but he soon returned.  Finally, the last of the evil priests was struck down and Olaf gave out a cry of victory! 

Odin be praised!

The victorious Vikings freed the captives and Elfrun managed to save Lars from going to Valhalla for now.  They found many strange items in the church, things in shape unknown by man and obviously not created by man.  Since they were items were gold, it mattered little to the Vikings as they would melt them down into more appealing items.  The party re-armed the captives as best they could, put the village to the torch and departed on the beached longship in haste to avoid another encounter with the creatures from the deep. 

That wraps up my one shot Vikings vs. Cthulhu adventure.  Everyone had a blast.  The next Castles and Crusades game that I am running is a conversion of the classic AD&D Adventure N3 The Destiny of Kings.