Brigands of the Entwash

hacking fandom

Game On Greensboro

I spent tropical storm Ophelia in the best way possible, under a roof, rolling dice at a local game convention.

This was the second incarnation of a church-based outreach effort. I wrote about the first one here.

Three Little Cons

The Ophelia Edition featured vendors, but since my game ran long (at the players’ request), and since I thought I was catching the 5:37 bus (which — surprise! — does not exist on Saturdays), I left early without meeting any of them. Crowdsourcing opportunity?

Adventures in Middle-Earth: Hybrid One-Shot

Saturday’s 5-hour session was set during the same time period as last spring’s campaign for SF^3,

• https://laketownblues.obsidianportal.com/

just after the death of Smaug the Golden and the revival of the Lonely Mountain as the richest kingdom of the north.

Because I’m working (and a lazy, greedy wyrm) I dug into my hoard and smashed together a pair of old modules:

Iron Crown Enterprises started as a group of UVA grads who turned their gaming passion into a company. They managed to hold onto the Tolkien gaming license longer than anyone else, in part because the estate seemed less mercenary in those days, less focused on the short-term cash grab.

Instead of the sample characters from the AiME book, I took the colorful crime-boss villains from Brigands and made them into player-character protagonists. They were all 7th or 8th level.

• Conul Uld, one-handed burglar, 60 years old (the player conveniently forgot about the 1-handed part);

• Allit the Breeze, a Beorning pickpocket who literally outgrew his profession when he hit 7 feet tall (not used, sadly);

• Hrothgais Inidwi, “Lord of the Muggers,” who stood out for his dark Southron complexion, played by the father of Rillit, below;

• Gam the Fair, pox-scarred headmaster of the Beggar’s Guild; and

• Rillit the Squirrel, 70-year old second-story woman, enthusiastically played by a high school student wearing long fishnet gloves. She took home my translucent red d20 because the way she was rolling, it had clearly bonded with her.

I left it to the players to roll and place their basic statistics, using only 3d6 to reflect their advanced ages, because that component of character creation is fun for beginners and doesn’t take too long. I did most of the more time-intensive leveling up beforehand. I left them only the 5e level advances to their basic stats.

The basic set-up of the town of Strayhold, on the southeastern edge of Mirkwood, is that it’s a hideout for the various gangs, who would undoubtedly be at war with one another if not for the evil mage Leardinoth, a servant of the Necromancer from the sunken island empire of Numenor. I let them wrangle their way through a criminal council, planning the heist of a passing Dwarven caravan — business as usual — until that got boring and the mage’s apprentice appeared with a summons.

When they met their old and feared protector in his luxurious stone tower, he looked ancient and weak, physically, but his eyes still blazed with mystical power, and his Orcish guards were as nasty as ever. He openly tasked them with abducting them a new body for himself, on a short timescale. This was beyond their normal petty thievings and murderings; this was directly participating in soul-crushing black magic. The NPC apprentice (the back-up body-to-be) was of course eager to help them, but he somehow got left behind.

There was some weed-induced silliness on the road, and hints of a troll haunting the neighborhood, but they made it easily to The Mouths of the Entwash, where they met a pair of characters I sarcastically call The Happy Couple, a handsome young hero of Gondor and his beautiful Elven wife, who live alone in a Dwarf-built country house on a silver lake. After spying on them for a while, and witnessing their love, rather than trying to fulfill their mission, the players openly and honestly spilled the beans about the ritual and recruited the sacrificial victims to their brand-new spontaneous plot against the wizard. And they went along with it! Bloody heroes . . .

Just as the sun set, and they were setting out on the road back to Strayhold, feeling confident, a pair of underwater undead called Mewlips rose from the lake and turned the hero into a swan, who flew away. That was a shocker.

Due in part to a lot of bad dice rolling on my part, our party managed to wrest the magical staff away from the head undead and send it back to the depths, minus one decrepit hand, which remained attached to the staff until Rillit took it for a macabre trophy. It twitched and clawed at darkly comic moments throughout the rest of the session. With the hero restored and the Happy Couple reunited, they ran straight for the oncoming Dwarven caravan and recruited them to join the rebellion as well, specifically to occupy the Orc guards with a frontal assault on the gates of the wizard’s citadel, while they went in through a “completely secret, completely safe” back way (multiple critical failures on Conul Uld’s Investigation roll).

That back way led through a ghost-guarded vault. Tolkien’s take on the rarity of spellcasters means that undead are really dangerous in that world. They probably would have all died there. Fortunately, with time running out for the session, their distractions had actually broken down the front doors, and were slaughtering the Orcs while the townspeople were looting the manse in a general flaming riot. The wizard Leardinoth ran right past them, on his way out the back door, in the body of the Orc captain, and it was relatively easy to chase him down and knock the soul-containing circlet off his head. Unfortunately, Hrothgais Inidwi picked up the circlet with his bare hands and was immediately possessed. As his soul floated out into the Void, he watched Leardinoth, wearing his body, disappear into Mirkwood.

So the story ended with the citadel in flames, the town in ruins, and the arch-villain escaping. Everyone seemed quite happy with those outcomes. Con games can be a little weird that way. Disposable characters sometimes lead to a shift in the players’ investment in the larger story. Not more, not less, but definitely distributed in a different way.

As an aside, while I was searching up pictures and links for this post, I discovered that Lord of the Rings Online was still a going concern. Huh. I had no idea. But then I was never much into MMORPGs. They require a different skill set and a different kind of patience. I don’t enjoy the mindless grinding. I’m more the guy sitting in a corner under a lamp, reading 30-year-old modules that I found at Crazy Egor’s during grad school.

So well known in the industry at the time that it got its own card in SimCity.

Not a judgement; just a point of view.