After two weeks without a game, I was super anxious for this session of our Primal Quest campaign! We gathered back at our friendly local store, Game of Boards, and all hell broke loose! To read the previous session’s report, click here.
This session we got 2 new players, for a total of 6, so the group is pretty much full for now, but since people come and go, we can occasionally have some special guests to play with us too. But let’s take a look at what kind of characters they made!
One of them created a character named Todon, a Hunchback Pariah from another distant tribe that was welcomed by the People of the Vele. He seeks acceptance, has a big heart, a pet marsupial and strong bones.
The other went for something unorthodox, he created a character named Lucavi Victorius, a stranded Time Traveller who is adept at improvisation and jury rigging, and is a bit of a conman.
And, if you can remember what happened so far (read the last session report here), the party was in a really bad spot. They have decided to attack the Death Siblings invaders inside Morik, the village at the foot of Father Mountain. And after some commotion, the session ended with two of the 3 of the 9 invaders killed, their leader burning alive, and 5 others ready to fight, 2 of them with holding stone knives to the necks of hostages.
So that’s how the session began, and the players started discussing what they should do, almost as if they were having a meeting to discuss the events. But they were right there, things were happening right now! So I took out my 1 minute hourglass, put it on the table and said “I said drop your weapons, you pieces of sh#t.” And I described their leader finally toppling down, dying in flames.
“He ain’t gonna like that.” Said a tall dark skinned woman invader with a smirk. And then I described how the previously deceased leader twitched and started getting up, with his face melted, and a howl! “WHO THE F#%K DID THIS?!”. He was not happy at all! “Oh, now you’re gonna regret this!”. And now they saw the guy had a shiny smooth dark stone jutting out of his abdomen. Dark veins extending from it under his skin.
But before anything more drastic could happen, Ray, the Birdkin warrior/sorcerer, used their arcane focus to gather incredible strength, swooped down and grabbed the recently risen leader and carried him upwards, towards the sky. That was a surprise action, and then it was time for Initiative.
Usually initiative can be determined simply from the circumstances, but since Ray attacked without warning, it was all up for grabs so I asked everyone to make a Body Test to see whose reflex was faster. If they could get a result equal to or higher than the enemies Lvl, the PCs would act before the invaders. But no one rolled higher than 4, the leader’s Lvl, so he was acting first.
He was being held by a super strong birdkin warrior, but he still had super strength and the confidence of being immortal thanks for the weird stone inside him, so he bit Ray, and it was a devastating bite. Almost half the PC’s Vitality points. He took out a piece of the birdkin and spit it out. “I will eat you alive, you damn chicken!”
Things were getting serious. And the invaders who had hostages quickly cut their throats, readying themselves for what was to come. At that moment I said the other two characters were there in the village, in the buildings, seeing all of this going down. Todon, the hunchback pariah, was part of the PCs tribe and was in Morik when everything happened, he was stuck. Victorius, the time traveler, had recently arrived and was helping the village with his futuristic ideas. Both of them quickly joined the fray, Todon without much effect, falling down after clumsily throwing a rock, face down on the mud (the player rolled a set back and failed the test), but Victorius used some of his remaining futuristic stuff (recorded as an arcane focus for game purposes) to create a cloud of caustic gas, taking two invaders out of the fight for a few minutes.
While this was happening, Thark (the half giant brute) and Banuk (the shaman apprentice) were fighting the other invaders, and two were quickly dispatched. But then Ray threw the leader down from the sky, and he hit the ground with a loud thud. And then I asked him for a Luck Test to see if the stone had dislodged with the fall. That’s basically a roll without modifiers (unless you have an appropriate Tag like “I’m a lucky bastard”), and he was just enough. The stone had just slid off the wound, and the guy would not immediately rise again. Bhur, the watcher, quickly grabbed it, and felt its cold touch.
After that and a few demonstrations of strength (CW: VIOLENCE – like pulling an eyeball out), the 3 remaining invaders surrended.
And, of course, the dabate of whether to kill, torture, take them in and all variations of this started. I love when the group is divided in these questions. Two of the invaders were clearly not nice. They surrendered but were still smiling from all the bad things that happened. The people of Morik told the PCs the Death Siblings took many of their people with them, saying they were going to work for the Siblings now. And these two were smiling. The other one, however, said he was forced to fight, he didn’t want this, and is willing to help however he can. He told what he knew of their tactics and that they have many others with those stones. So yeah, they are treating this one “nicely” (for a prisoner), and the other two are being, well, abused (they are beating them, making animals bite them). Not a good look. The people seeing this aren’t liking it either. Not everyone at least.
After that, they bound their wounds, helped the survivors, buried the dead and rested until the sun came out. The plan they formulated was to send Ray and the bird down to Lakit, so they can ask for help to defend Morik for when the invaders invariably come back, while the rest of the group would train whoever could fight, rebuild the village wall, reinforce its defenses and so on. And with a time traveler with them, they prepared some nice surprises for the invaders, thanks to basic engineering training.
However, Ray found some trouble on the way south. His eagle companion was sent ahead to warn Brikla and ask for help. That part went relatively well, but Ray was still leading about 10 people through a perilous 4 days journey, and a Random Encounter occurred when they were near the badlands, sending a flight of pterodactyls in their direction. About 15 of them. Ray tried to find a place to hide, but in the plains where they were passing by there weren’t many of those nearby. He failed the Mind Test. Now he tried to rally the people and coordinate the to run, and escape, and he failed the Heart Test too. As a commentary, this particular player is kind of a min/maxer kind of player. He always (at least in my games) creates optimized characters for something specific (in this case, a combat sorcerer focusing on strength and vitality), but tries to do everything else and makes great speeches. However, to lead the people in this situation he would need leadership and a strong heart. He doesn’t have it. The character babbled instructions, but 7 people died or were taken by the creatures, and morale sank.
Early the next day, they met with the people from Lakit, their village, coming to help them with Ray’s eagle companion. They were being led by Brikla, riding on top of her triceratops friend and protector. Ray quickly explained what happened, but Brikla asked more questions. The death of so many of her people weighed heavy on her. She wanted to simply comply. If they comply, people wouldn’t die anymore. Their lives were much more important than the resources they had. Maybe they could give even more to get the people they took with them back. But the PC obviously insisted they needed to fight. They needed to contact other villages, other people to rally together to fight these invaders, because they will come for everyone. But Briklas wasn’t convinced yet. She needed to see with her own eyes what happened and lead their people there as well. So they went north.
While this was happening, in the north, in Morik, the other PCs were keeping busy. The time traveler kept overseeing the preparations for the siege, making elaborate traps, digging a moat, and so on. The rest of the party joined together to perform a ritual to contact the local spirits and ask them questions about the weird dark stone they took from the invaders. For this spell I asked them what kind of contact they would want with the spirits? To make it an Invocation (a kind of spell that is quick to cast but is limited to the effects a single person with the right tool could potentially do), they would be able to ask only a few yes or no questions. If it was to be a Ritual (a type of effect that would take several people or advanced equipment and takes minutes to cast), they could ask a few open questions. However, making it a Miracle (a kind of effect that can cause real lasting change way over what anything natural could accomplish, like causing an earthquake, teleporting, creating a volcano, and takes long hours to cast, being very difficult to master) could allow them to simply converse with the spirits. Being cautious, they chose to make open ended questions and extend the casting time to make it easier, and the participants also spent Vitality points to empower the casting. They succeeded and could make 3 questions to the spirits (and they took a long time deciding what these would be).
Their first question was “what’s the origin of this stone?”. So I had to make a few decisions about how this was gonna go. The stone is an alien weapon that fell from the sky. It’s not from this world, and the spirits have no real knowledge of it. However, they know what it is not. So I say they reply telling them they are not sure, but they know it’s not natural, it’s a fabrication, and it’s alien, not from this world. Their second question was “what powers does the stone possess?”, and as established, the spirits reply in a echoed voice that they don’t know, but they know it corrupts whoever uses the stone, changing them into a thing, ceasing to be what they once were. And at that time they realized they needed to think hard to ask questions about the stone. The spirits could only know what it was not, as it was as unknown to them as it was to the PCs.
After a few minutes, I made a proposition to just tell them something the spirits know, and it would count as the third question. We were running out of time. They took it. So I told them the spirits feel that the rock has similar vibrations as something else that fell from the sky. A great rock crashed in the plateau east of Lakit, and the spirits suspect the two things are connected. So the PCs have a new plan. They will go to this crash site and see what happened there. Brikla, their leader and elder, would seek more answers, taking the weird stone back to Latik, into the Cave of Our People, as she sought to speak to their ancestors..
The session ended with the group making preparations. The invaders will arrive in a little more than 2 weeks and the journey to the crash site takes a week. Time is running out. Will they be able to defend Morik and find out more about this weird dark stone?
Let’s find out next week!
In the next post we will be back with some more details on adapting core classes of Old-School Essentials for Primal Quest and The Primal World of Thaia, an upcoming zine for Old-School Essentials and Primal Quest!