Welcome to Hollowreef - Soulbound AoS roleplay campaign session 1

Life quite firmly got in the way of blogging (and painting) lately. Luckily I did find time to host some roleplaying sessions. On the downside: I didn't get around to actually giving them a write-up. Lets go for it now. I started a new campaign using the Soulbound Age of Sigmar rolplaying game ruleset by Cubicle7. You can read my review/first impressions of the game system in this previous post. In this first session we formed a merry band of heroic misfits who got the job of helping colonists reclaim the lost city of Hollowreef. 

Age of Sigmar: Souldbound shows its Warhammer roots by being completely D6 based (although I think they should Easter Egg in a scatter die at some point).

The first session was the basic 'let's make characters, find out how they click together, talk a bit about rules and play a quick introduction'-type. I gave my group an overview of most of the rules and a general Age of Sigmar background primer (about half the group didn't know the setting at all). The new game system with its archetypes went over quite well. All but one of the six players chose to customize a mostly created character (archetype). The one holdout really felt like playing more of a human rogue type and used the full creation rules to make his own archetype. 

The group of misfits

Even with this seemingly speedy way to choose characters, creation still takes time. People have to pick skills and talents, need to look up rules and make a lot of (poor) jokes while they're at it. In the end the group created the following characters: 

• Daughter of Khaine Witch Aelf - A half naked, knife wielding Elf Aelf who follows the teachings of the god of murder;
• Fyreslayer Doomseeker - A half naked, axe wielding Dwarf Duardin with a murderous death wish; 
• Idoneth Isharann Tidecaster - A fully dressed deep-sea Elf Aelf with a damaged soul and water related magic abilities;
• Kharadron Overlord Aether-Khemist - An overdressed steampunk style Dwarf Duardin with a penchant for mixing dangerous chemicals;
• Sylvaneth Branchwych - A completely nude walking tree Sylvaneth with a giant treeworm as a pet (I might have to cover up this character's anthers in the US version of this blog ;);
• Human rogue - A roguish human with a focus on leadership abilities and a full range of options clothing-wise.

With the characters established (and all clothing related jokes out of the way) we used a lot time to establish connections within the group. There's a helpful table in the book to roll random hooks. I opted for two rolls per player. One for the person to the left and one for the person on the right. After each roll both players had a chance to explain (think up a reason for) the results. Its a fun way to make a disparate group of characters stick together without going for the old 'you meet in a tavern and a fight breaks out'-trope (Fizban is getting along in years after all).

This random picture of the rulebook and the GM's Screen shows I need to make some 'stock photos' to illustrate these session logs. 

The (not so) Great Arkanaut Frigate Caper

Long story short. The human in the group dreamed of stealing an Arkanaut Frigate (flying boat). During a night of heavy drinking he tried to recruit the Witch Aelf and the Idoneth. The next day the Idoneth missed the heist due to a hangover. The Daughter of Khaine decided to go her own way and never showed up. Undeterred, the Human went on with it anyway. At the gangplank he met an Aether Chemist (with a tendency for winks at inopportune times). The human rogue was seized and arrested (everyone had heard him go on about the heistthe night before). When the Aether Chemist gave a suspicious wink on the 'are you involved'-question he was slapped in irons too. 

Meanwhile the Doomseeker had been pressed into his fate due to his dastardly good looks. Well those got him into bed with the thane's wife, which in turn got him in hot water with the thane. Forced to atone for bringing disgrace to the thane's name, the Duardin had been chosen for life as a Doomseeker. Banished, he arrived in the city only to discover the vengeful thane had sent warning that he was a wanted criminal. The local guard captured the Doomseeker. The Witch Aelf suffered about the same fate (without the infidelity). She'd left the coven because she suspected the leader was corrupt. It turned out she was right, and the corrupt leader used her influence to have the wayward Witch Aelf arrested. 

The Idoneth was still out and about as his hangover cleared. Unfortunately he saw what looked like an artifact belonging to the Deepkin. The actual owner disagreed and the town guard arrested the Aelf for thievery. Last - but not least - was the Sylvaneth. It walked the streets and saw the people pay with holy Water of Ghyran (Soulbound's currency). The Branchwych tried to tell people this wasn't anything as profane as money and asked them to give it back to nature. It was promptly arrested for begging. So much backstory from a single table :).

Into the paddy-wagon and on to adventure!

With the entire group in the paddy-wagon all it took was a quick kangaroo-court and an immediate deposit into an obsidian hellhole style prison. Fortunately they got the chance for early release by agreeing to join into a soulbinding. This would involve tying their souls together to fight the good fight. The group never found out about all this. They simply said yes without quite asking out what a Soulbinding meant. I took my opportunity to describe a rather nasty and vague ritual where one of the resident priests give a quick explainer of the consequences after the group had been tied up to stay in place for their part. 

With their binding complete, the group was stuffed onto a flying Kharadron ship and taken to Ghyran, the realm of life. A Fabio-faced Stormcast from the Hallowed Knights named Vandinos joined them. He could've given the group some extra background exposition, but everyone instantly hated his silver armor and Fabio style good looks. They decided to avoid the paladin. To make matters worse, they blamed him for the aloofness they projected on him. Poor Stormcast. 

The cursed city of Hollowreef

Arriving in Ghyran the group was flown towards the city of Hollowreef. This city was build by hollowing out a large reef with a Realm Gate to Ghur in its base. Huge sea monsters occasionally swim through the gate. The city itself has taken over the entire reef, making it look like a haphazard collection of square Adobe style houses sitting in the ocean in front of a cliff-faced shore. A second, smaller island next to Hollowreef is covered in Red plants that seem to grow from the island onto Hollowreef, coloring bits of the sea and the city red. A small monastery sits on this island.

A basalt fortress stands on the cliff overlooking Hollowreef. It flies banners of Sigmar, the Hallowed Knights and the Four Brothers Freeguild. Next to the fortress is an ancient brass cable lift whose luxury cabin can be ridden towards Hollowreef. On the other side of the fortress sits a small wooden village built on stilts. 

Next to the stilt-village the group saw a collection of green glowing pools. Beyond those a second village has sprung up . This one hangs haphazardly on the cliff-face, stretching from the top down to the ocean fifty meters lower. As the group landed, a few houses fell off this village into the ocean. Small boats where launched to rescue survivors, but this quickly turned into a rather bloody struggle with the local meat eating fishes.

The Age of Sigmar background is growing at an amazing rate, I've recently added four Broken Realms books to this part of the 'rpg library'.

The mission: lift a curse, save the colonist 

The group followed Vandinos the Stormcast into the fortress. There they met with General Aekuri Aethersight, the leader of the local Freeguild. She told the group that the Hallowed Knights had built the fortress half a century earlier during the Realm Gate Wars. From it they planned to lay siege to Tzeentch’s forces living in the city of Hollowreef. After a short siege the city turned silent. The Stormcast entered the city only to discover that everyone had left.

With no time to solve this mystery, the Hallowed Knights left a Freeguild army to guard the now empty Hollowreef. Once every few years fortune seekers enter the city, but no one returns. A small colony has formed around the fortress, led by a group of artists. They built the wooden houses on stilts. With the Dawnbringer Crusades starting, settlers from Azyr have arrived to live in Hollowreef. They tend to stop at the Artist’s Colony as they dare not enter the city.

The steady drip of colonists has been noticed by the local populace. Hoping to find safety, more and more people are gathering around Hollowreef. Unfortunately there’s only so much space in the Artist’s Colony. The poorer people have been forced to build their houses against the cliff-face in the ramshackle Rookery. Anything that's build anywhere else is almost instantly destroyed by Ghyran’s living jungle. The Rookery - as the cliff faced village is called - has occasional house-slides as the Realm tries to push the city of its cliffs.

The group met with Shahrarius Realmsoul, a dapper looking witch hunter who offered to help them with advice from time to time. Draelassan Sternsoul, a mercenary captain from Azyr, also introduced himself. He took the time to explain his rather bigoted opinions on locals versus Azyrites. The first group has chaos in it if you ask him (or if you don't ask him). Being chaos infected they deserve all the hardship they get, don't they?

The mission for the group was simple (har): find out what was happening inside the cursed city of Hollowreef and try to stop it so colonists could move off the deadly coast and into the city. 

The Glowing Pools

With the mission explained, the group was advised to look up two people. The first one, Thaumenna Cantman, was head of the Trader’s Guild and spokesperson of the Azyrite settlers. The second one, Arden Bourne, was leader of the Trade Union and spokesperson of the locals. 

The group first checked out the glowing green pools, called Frog Pools. It turned out locals catch large frogs and eels here and sell them as delicacies in Azyr. The Branchwych wanted to step into a pool to feast its roots. Locals stopped the walking tree, warning that the pools were bottomless. Anyone stepping in got sucked down and never got out again. Disappearing seems to be a bit of a theme around the cursed city. The Branchwych thought the better of its spontaneous ‘bath’ and moved on.

The group then had a chat with a guard from the Rookery. He told them that the better off inhabitants on the cliff face where called topsiders, as they live in the top houses. The bottom dwellers mostly subside by fishing dangerous waters and operate the rickety fishing boats. The inhabitants in the center parts gut and clean the fish (throwing the leftovers down onto the bottom dwellers' houses). The ones in the top part earn their keep by selling the fish to the merchants of the Trader’s Guild. The guard also told the group that Arden of the Trade Union did not live in the Rookery (as the group presumed) but had a house in the Artist’s Colony.

The group turned around intending to meet Arden, they met Thaumenna first. Her house was just too hard to miss (big and opulently decorated). She was arguing with some hunters trying to sell her exotic furs. A check by the Branchwych proved that these weren’t real green furs, the hunters had dyed regular furs green. After sending the hunters packing the group had a short conversation with Thaumenna. They learned Arden had traveled into the jungle to check with the local woodcutters. He should’ve been back already and Thaumenna was getting worried.

I really need to up my artistry skills to get more out of these combat zone maps. 

Into the woods

The group walked into the woods and after a short expedition saw a fortified wood cutter’s shed (this profession is even more dangerous in world where the trees walk, talk and take offense at your chosen profession). Corpses of wood cutters littered the floor alongside those of half-naked followers of Khorne. The surviving Blood Reavers where trying to bash in the door to the fortified blockhouse. A small distance away the group saw a ruined tower. A large warrior with a brass shield was standing atop it, getting full marks for his 'strike a pose'-skill.

A fight ensued. The chaos followers at the tower set the woods alight. The Idoneth wizard used his magic to drown Khorne followers in a water vortex. The Kharadron sucked the air out of their lungs. The rest of the group cut and hacked at the enemy or inspired others to acts of valor (and bloodshed). It almost seemed too easy to cut through the followers of Khorne. Then a giant Khorgorath monster, taker of skulls, crushed through the underbrush with the jungle behind it burning.

The fight took a turn for the worse for the group. They barely managed to kill the Khorgorath and then a Lord of Khorne jumped, bawling, into the fray. He mortally wounded the Idoneth mage. Only careful coordination by the rest of the party led to victory. One lucky break was a blunder by the warband’s Blood Secrator . He stepped right into a vortex and got mauled by the bodies of his own blood mad soldiers.

With the Lord of Khorne dead, the door to the shed was opened and a wounded Arden stumbled out. At the same time the battered Blood Secrator crawled out of the burning jungle. Ever subtle, the Doomseeker stepped up and planted his axe into the creature’s skull. The Duardin found a map in the Blood Secrator’s hand. Picking it up, the group could not quite make heads or tails of it. They bandaged Arden and got hum moving. With the jungle now firmly ablaze, they decided to quickly retreat towards the fortress at Hollowreef. This ended our first game session.

Ssssh, this is actually a picture of my space behind the GM's screen while playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Did I mention needing new pictures to illustrate these session logs?

GM's Perspective

Planning a new campaign is always a mixed joy. On the one hand you get to be really creative and on the other hand its a lot of work. I think most of it has to be done before the first character has been created for two reasons. One: it prevents you from writing bits of your main story with a specific character's skills in mind. Players can quit or switch characters forcing rewrites and besides I think you should never plan solutions for the problems you think up for an rpg scenario, it takes away creativity from the group. Two: planning ahead makes it easier to make foreshadowing actually pan out. 

Planning a fresh campaign for Soulbound gave an extra difficulty. It is a new system that's rather different in approach from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1, 2, 3 or 4) or AD&D (3.5 and 5), also known as the systems I mostly played for the past ten years. As noted in my review of the system, Soulbound focusses on epic combat against big monsters and large groups of underlings. During the planning stages I occasionally felt more like planning a Marvel Superheroes campaign than a standard dungeon crawl. 

This is not entirely true. Superheroes tend to focus almost entirely on fighting (a giant bar of light at the end of the ill-conceived plot (sigh)). Soulbound has everything needed to give social skills, puzzle instincts, mystery and all the other good bits a fair shake too. It differs from - say - Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay in that the characters have an easier time recovering after combat and that they start out as  rather capable heroes. 

The combat zones used for encounters make planning of fights important. The rules (especially in the recently published Bestiary) emphasize thinking of external complications (slippery floors, burning trees, rain, etc.) and not just enemies. Doing this makes the fights feel more epic and gives the players reason to think about what they're doing. 

A quick warmup fight

After the long introduction to the setting a quick warmup fight was just what everyone needed to get a sense of this part of the system. It was quite interesting. Standard henchman like Blood Reavers (basically Khorne marker Chaos Thugs) can be taken out by the half dozen. This is necessary as they might overwhelm the players. But the true villains of the story are the main antagonists. Having a bawling Khorgarath step up after the group literally laid waste to about twenty Blood Reavers was awesome. They had just about lost respect for their enemies when real damage was done. 

As they had to focus on taking out the main threat, the Korgorath, the waves of surviving Blood Reavers suddenly became a problem as the distracting pinpricks suddenly started to hurt. Mages with area affecting spells where important here. But fighters doing massive localized damage and back-up characters helping everyone perform better where important as well. Basically it made the group click. At that point they felt save again only to be dispelled of the notion by getting one character near dead because a bigger threat (Chaos Champion) managed to get in close with a mage. 

Desiging the city

Aside from the combat I had a lot of fun developing the setting. A cursed and abandoned city in the midst of a dangerous wildernis. I drew a bit of inspiration from the classic (eighties) Pools of Radiance computer game and campaign module for AD&D. At first I planned to rework this adventure for this campaign but, to be honest, reading through the module with fresh eyes I realized I only liked the 'reconquer an abandoned city' part of the story. So a lot of actual creative work from my part was needed :). 

I developed a setting and populated it with quite a large number of npc's. They breathe some life into  the story. From the people wishing for a new home (giving the players a bit of a stake (later on) in the adventure) to the villains whose (conflicting) motivations I'm not going into until the story is done (my group occasionaly reads this blog). I went the same route I did with my Ruin's End campaign and wrote a full history (in bulletpoints) of the city first. From its founding right up until its current state. This takes a bit of extra time, but enriches the story and informs my descriptions of what the group sees. If you're a GM who's stuck in the planning part of the adventure, try writing histories of the item the group is questing for, the place they are in or even (some of) the people they meet. It really helps you give hooks and breathe life into the setting. 

With that said, I have a second finished gaming session to still write about...