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The game is set on Skeele, a small island in an archipelago off the coast of Midgard, a continent. Skeele and the surrounding islands are populated by Vikings, Midgard by giants and the British Confederacy. The Vikings and the British are not at war, but are in constant combat and raids against one another. The game is Iron Heroes.

Dramatis Personae:

Rob the DM
Erik the Vengeful (Archer) by me

Erik is a Viking who was enslaved by the British, escaped when a god saved him, and swore eternal vengeance against the Confederates. He is broadly chaotic neutral.

Victor Geiste (Bare-knuckle Brawler optional class) by Curtis

Victor is a murderous psychopath who was born a Viking but has preyed on Confederates for years. Victor is chaotic evil.

Cavatheer Kincaid (Armiger) by Chris

Cavatheer is an Confederate orphan who was initiated in an order of paladins and has recently gotten in some hot water for insulting a high-ranking member of the church. Lawful good.

Bjorn Bjornsen (Man-at-Arms) by Si

Bjorn is the nephew of a chief of Skeele, out to prove himself and become a mighty leader of men. Neutral goodish.

We've all played D&D for years. This is our first Iron Heroes game (we are four or five sessions in now).

Session 1:

The game starts with the PCs in different locations. Bjorn is the nephew of the local chieftain, Logard, of one of the tribes of Skeele (the Bjornsen tribe). The Bjornsen tribe has just received a message from the Confederates that they are sending a delegation to negotiate some sort of trade deal. The Vikings prepare for trouble and back-stabbing.

Erik is sailing along in a boat belonging to the Halfleyer tribe of Skeele. They have picked him up in a southerly port and are transporting him back to Viking lands. However, Quendal, the Halfleyer captain, throws Erik overboard as a cruel joke. Erik swears vengeance and swims to Skeele's shore, where he encounters the god Vidar, the Viking god of revenge, whom he has previously pledged his allegiance to. Vidar explains that he needs Erik to find the Well of Life for him. Since Ragnarok, Vidar and the other gods are no longer "alive" and it is up to Erik to restore them. There are two wizards on the island, and Erik must meet with them to discover its location. Vidar does not know where they are.

Cavatheer is being reinstated as a probationary member of the Order of God after being drummed out for insulting a cardinal. His adoptive father has died only a short time before, killed by Victor. Victor has been captured and imprisoned. Cavatheer is placed under the care of Terris Onara, a paladin of the Order of God.

Cavatheer, Terris and this priest go to visit Victor's cell. Victor has been working to escape the entire time they've had him there, despite being chained to a wall. When they enter, he grabs the priest (good rolls) and holds him hostage with a sharpened bucket handle against Terris and Cavatheer, who are unprepared for this attack. He manages to nearly escape, but they beat him unconscious. When he awakes, he has been branded with the Heathen's Scar. The Heathen Scar inflicts overwhelming pain whenever he breaks the Ten Commandments (idiosyncratically interpreted in our game) and forces him to obey the orders of certain members of the Church (including Cavatheer and Terris). The idea is that Cavatheer must learn to forgive Victor for killing his adoptive father as the final test showing his purity of spirit (and thus worthiness to become a full-fledged member of the Order of God).

Cavatheer, Terris, Victor and this chump named Marshall are told that they're going on a mission to the Bjornsen tribe to negotiate some sort of deal. Why they've been assigned to do so is not clear to the PCs. They show up, are given a special cabin apart from the rest of the Bjornsen town, and Terris and Logard go off to negotiate.

Erik comes down from where he met Vidar and encounters Bjorn. They go drink in the longhouse and Erik explains to Bjorn and some of the other Vikings  that he is on a quest from the Viking gods. Everyone is suitably impressed. Then he finds out that there are Confederates in town and flips out.

Erik challenges Marshall to a feud duel the next day, which the Bjornsen people support because they dislike the Confederates. Victor explains to Marshall that this is purely ceremonial and fought only to first blood (it's not). The next day, Erik creams Marshall from a distance with his bow on the doorstep of the cabin when he's not expecting it, forcing Marshall to retreat inside. Cavatheer and Terris step up and block things.

There's some PC on PC combat, which ends in a stand-off. I can't take on Cavatheer and Terris at the same time, but they don't want to kill me. Terris uses some magic during the fight, which makes Erik think he might be one of the wizards. Logard shows up and demands we stop, which Erik tries to ignore. Logard challenges Erik to a duel, which he wins, and take Erik's dagger. Erik, bleeding and seriously injured, hurls some abuse at the Confederates, but agrees to abide by Logard's decision. The Bjornsen tribesmen support Logard's authority, but also back Erik's idea of killing the Confederates, so Erik is not exiled.

Erik slinks off to recuperate and drink himself into a stupor. Bjorn commiserates. Terris and Logard go off to talk further.

Victor, meanwhile, wanders off in the confusion. He ends up groping some woman, which we thought was a rape attempt at first, but it turned out that he was just trying to provoke her brothers into attacking him. Victor the character doesn't know what the limits and conditions of the Heathen Scar are exactly, but he does know that it can exert control through incapacitating pain. Murder isn't allowed, but killing self-defense is (even if he provoked the guy).

So, the brother comes after Victor, and Victor kills him by ramming the sharp edge of a broken mug into his face. People see this and start running for Bjorn, who comes up armed and beats Victor unconscious. The Vikings carry Victor back to the Confederate cabin, where Cavatheer and Marshall are. The situation is getting out of control and Erik pops up from the crowd to point out how the Confederates are monsters.

Terris and Logard calm the situation down by exiling Victor. Cavatheer goes with him to keep him out of trouble. Erik goes too because he wants to keep an eye on them. That night, things calm down in the Bjornsen village a little.

Erik, Victor and Cavatheer are out in the woods. Cavatheer reads agonisingly dull passages from the Bible to Victor who cannot escape, and Erik, who ignores them. That night, when Cavatheer falls asleep, Victor tries to convince Erik to kill Cavatheer, but Erik thinks Cavatheer might be useful for getting Terris to tell him where the Well of Life is, and refuses.

When we return the next day to see what punishment awaits Victor beyond exile, the village is under attack by Sergeant Tidwell and his troop of Confederate soldiers. Most of the non-combatants are in a pen in the centre of town, and some of the buildings are on fire. Erik starts shooting as Bjorn returns from fishing on the far side of the village. Cavatheer tries to calm things down and stop the fighting, but Tidwell tells him to fuck off. Cavatheer sees Marshall being restrained by the Confederate soldiers, and Tidwell refuses. Tidwell orders them to start executing the people in the pen, and Cavatheer and Victor join the fight.

To cut a long fight short, we win, Tidwell is unconscious but alive and in our power. Erik goes and tries to hunt down Confederate survivors while Cav tends to the wounded, Bjorn finds his family, Victor buries the dead, and Rob tallies the number of casualties on our side.

Comments:

This is about typical of the level of PvP we have. It actually gets more vicious and deadly from here on out, both between PCs and just generally. Next session, I rip off Tidwell's jaw in homage to Vidar and wear it as a chinstrap after Victor and I kidnap him (stay tuned). "We are bad men in bad times" as Erik says to Victor.

We had three fights this game. Me vs. the three paladins, Victor vs. the Viking dude whose sister he groped + Bjorn, and the entire party vs. Tidwell, and about ten or twelve Confederate soldiers.

The PC vs. PC combats in this session were less deadly than we thought they would be, because we were still getting used to the special abilities. We were also surprised at how effective heavy armour was. In the big fight at the end of the session, Cavatheer waded into four or five guys and didn't even get scratched thanks to some good rolls on his armour DR. Meanwhile, Bjorn and Victor were bouncing around thanks to super jump checks they kept on getting, allowing all sorts of dramatic leaping attacks.

Each fight got more dynamic than the last one, as we got used to using the maneuvering rules and special attacks to our advantage. This has continued into further sessions. It's mostly the little things that are throwing us off. We're used to how jump "normally" works in D&D, so we keep on forgetting the little changes. We're getting better as people read up between sessions and remind each other.

We didn't use the stunting system in the fights this time around, and I think only Victor used a combat challenge for some extra damage. Rob wasn't used to adjudicating how to do them, but I mentioned them at one point, and he read up for the next session.

Damn, that's some hard core PVP action. When you generate characters are you already thinking of how these characters are in conflict with each other or does this happen during play? Have you ever found that the PvP gets in the way of any campaign "goals" ?

Regards,
David R

We tend to generate our character ideas on our own, and then chit-chat about them online in the week or two between campaigns. The level of intra-party conflict and its nature is worked out then, usually between PCs with minimal oversight from the DM. There's usually mild pressure from the DM to have PCs be able to function as a party - that is, as a cohesive combat unit - at key plot points, but otherwise we're usually given free reign.

Our relationship to "campaign goals" is tortuous at best. I've noticed that the group tends to calibrate itself to the maximum possible amount of PvP it can take while still moving the plot forward. However, the forward motion of the plot may not happen at the pace the DM thought it would. For example, we took three sessions to finish what Rob thought would take us one because of PvP and character development. We tend to think of the slower pace caused by this as good though - Curtis, Rob and I all love doing things like having our characters (depending upon who's DM) fight over who's going to sleep with a girl, etc. and Si and Chris don't seem to mind.

We do try and avoid completely fucking over the game though, and just killing the other guys because you can. For example, if I dropped Cavatheer in combat, I probably wouldn't finish him off with a coup de grace automatically, as I would with most NPCs. Similarly, it's considered bad form to slit another PC's throat while they're asleep; It's also bad form to do so without a proximate reason for the combat - you can't just say "My character gets angry with yours and attacks". It's unlikely anyone would stop you OOC, but they would disapprove, and make it difficult to do IC (through Listen checks, people interfering, etc.). There's an implicit etiquette to PvP keeps things just within the tolerance of the plot. Our DMs build a lot of tolerance in though - they have to.

I think our group is able to maintain this due to our strong OOC bonds. We're all friends, or at least good acquaintances with the other players, and the group as a whole treats PvP as an interesting outlet for character development, so fighting with another character is more like roughhousing with your friends than just being some douche to some guy you only know around the table.

A couple of more questions. Has your GM ever based the goals of the campaign on your group's PVP conflict?* And do you think for you guys, the whole "kick" of rpgs is about PVP conflict and not the other stuff ?

*I'm thinking of doing something like this in my Aces in Spades campaign. There was the usual amount of PVP conflict (not as hard core as yours) in my In Harms Way games...but this was more of a personality/ideological conflict between two characters and the other characters choosing sides for various reasons of their own.

Regards,
David R

Intersesting stuff, Pseudophedrine. I'm intrigued by the setting details-- Vikings, Giants and The British Confederacy? A few more details on how it all hangs together would be appreciated.

I'm also looking forward to reading how your group fares with stunts and challenges. When combined with the right feat combos they can be downright terrifying.

It's not a realistic setting. It just has a few details that suggest the real world.

The set-up is fairly simple. There are three main cultural groups - the British, the Vikings, and the Giants. The Vikings live on an archipelago that is composed of five major islands (some of which seem to be as large as Greenland, but more temperate), and dozens of smaller ones. The Vikings are split into clans that are basically autonomous, usually with multiple clans sharing the larger islands. They mine, farm, produce iron and steel goods, trade, raid and build fortified settlements (though we haven't encountered a true city yet). The Vikings worship Odin, Thor, etc., but these gods are never seen anymore. This is because the game is set _after_ Ragnarok, when the gods have been killed and so live on only in spirit form. The implication is that they must be restored and in time _another_ Ragnarok will come.

The British seem to be colonists from a land far across the sea. They came over a hundred or so years ago and have built castles and cities all over Midgard. They're Christian, though it's that religion as idiosyncratically interpreted by a couple of agnostics who don't know a ton about it and don't care about recreating the details. They're basically at a high fantasy mediaeval level of technology - knights in plate mail, crossbows, etc. I don't know why they're called the Confederacy, but the nobles seem to have much more freedom because they're far away from their king.

Both the Vikings and the British enslave each other _and_ members of their own societies (losers in honour duels, PoWs, etc.) They also speak a common language. They trade with and raid one another, with individual nobles and clans having relations with one another that may be at odds with the rest of the Vikings and British.

The Giants live to the south, on a piece of land that is contiguous with Midgard, where the British live. The two groups fight all the time, and most of the British military is bound up fighting them off constantly. We don't know much more about them than that so far.

Hope that clears things up.

Quote from: PseudoephedrineHope that clears things up.

It does indeed. I was thrown a little by the concept of a unified British Isles coexisting with Vikings, that's all.

It sounds like it's great fun, with plenty of potential. I look forward to reading more. :)

Session 2:

The game begins with the Vikings figuring out how to react to the Confederate attack. Tidwell is semi-conscious, and no one can get any information out of him, though Victor beats him a little to see if he can. The Vikings decide to rally the tribes and confront the Confederates at Fort William Sykes, the main British settlement on Skeele. Messengers are sent to the other clans.

Terris, Cavatheer and Marshall claim that they had nothing to do with the attack, and are distinct from the British military anyhow (they're paladins working for the church). They are allowed to stay.

Victor and Erik get together while everyone else is hashing things out. Erik has discovered that Tidwell is the nephew of Nathan Stark, Warden of the East. Nathan Stark enslaved Erik many years ago, and was the man responsible for his crucifixion. They decide to kidnap Tidwell. Victor wants to use him to bargain with the Confederates to get the Heathen Scar removed, while Erik wants to torture the shit out of Tidwell and sacrifice him to Vidar. Neither PC confesses their specific plans to the other PC.

They wait until everyone is asleep and do it. They take him off the woods to a secluded location. Victor tells Erik to wait there with Tidwell until he comes back. At this point, Rob had us make spot checks for an unknown reason, which we both failed. Victor then goes and spends several hours making his way back.

Upon discovering that Tidwell is missing, the Vikings are very displeased. Reports indicate that Victor and someone else took him, and Bjorn is sent to find them. The paladins insist that Tidwell be recovered ASAP and returned to Lord Stark (they hope to avoid making things worse for either side by doing so).

Victor beats himself up in the woods and when discovered by Bjorn claims that it was Erik's idea, and that they were attacked by a British cavalry patrol, which he has just barely managed to escape. He races back with Bjorn, and the Vikings go apeshit when they hear there might be Brits in the area. Logard rallies the men and they leave immediately, meeting up with other Viking clans as they go.

Meanwhile, Erik hangs around with Tidwell, preparing for a long haul. At this point, Rob mentions the consequences of the spot check, which is that Tidwell is dead. Victor and Erik failed to notice that he was bleeding out of his ear, and he has bled to death. This leads to some OOC debate about whether that's complete bullshit or not, since Curtis, Victor's player, had mentioned that he was making sure Tidwell was all patched up, but he didn't roll for it. Hands are thrown in the air, eyes rolled, grumbling allowed, and the game continues.

Seeing that Tidwell is dead, Erik forgoes torture. He just rips off Tidwell's jaw, desecrates the corpse, and dedicates the act to Vidar. He loses his fatigued condition for staying up the whole night and heals some reserve points as Vidar smiles on his bloody vengeance. He flenses the jawbone, carves little runes into the teeth, and wears it over his own. Now that Tidwell's dead, he starts heading back to town to see what Victor's doing. They aren't there, so after some searching around, he follows the rest of the party.

By this point, the rest of the party and the Bjornsen clan have met up with a strong Viking force of a few thousand men. They're about one or two day's march from Ft. William Sykes. Not all of the clans have joined this group - clans further north are still a few days away, and the Halfleyer clan, the most powerful tribe on the island, refuses to get involved and jeopardise their favourable trading position with the Confederates.

Erik shows up, and Victor sweeps him aside and tells him to shut the fuck up and tell everyone he had to escape from a British cavalry patrol. Erik does. Nobody asks him about the jawbone.

Bjorn is with his uncle, Logard and the council of chiefs, planning for the parley with the Brits the next day when a voice echoes in his head. The voice is weak and sounds injured. It claims to be a wizard, a kinsman Viking trapped on a mountain nearby, and pursued by the Confederates. The voice asks Bjorn to rescue him.

Bjorn tells Logard and some other men, and the story starts to get around camp. Erik volunteers to go help, especially when he finds out the man is a wizard. Terris, the British paladin, hears it too and tells Cavatheer to go volunteer. Evidently the British _are_ looking for an escaped criminal (the crime is not clear) in this area, and finding him is very important. Cavatheer should go with the Vikings and see if this is the man. Victor is forced to accompany Cavatheer.

The party departs for the nearby mountain, and spends the day climbing it. Along the way, they notice that the air is very quiet, but they don't see any Confederate patrols or any sign of human life, really. We encountered a large black snake up the mountain, which is unusual because snakes shouldn't survive in the cold climate near the top. It just slithers away though, and the party takes care to keep an eye out for others.

Just before dusk, the party sees a cabin. Inspection shows that the only inhabitant is dead, and it looks like they were attacked by a wild animal. It happened recently. We start getting ready to camp for the night, staying in the cabin to fortify our position. But before we can get everything sealed, undead forest critters attack.

We have a cool fight with Cavatheer swinging a giant two-handed hammer to smush birds, Victor nearly getting his dick bitten off by an undead ferret, and Bjorn getting dropped but not killed when he gets dogpiled by undead wolves and foxes. I have to rush in and stab wildly with my spear (Erik is an archer - that's how desperate we are) to get them off of him. The feeling is kind of like Hitchcock's "The Birds" in that one scene where the birds are zipping around in the house and everyone's running around screaming and waving things to drive them away.

Comments:

Rob originally thought that this would be the end of the first session, but we delayed things. The main monkeywrench was kidnapping Tidwell. Rob didn't expect us to, and he did everything he could as DM to prevent us from pulling it off. It was only thanks to lucky dice rolls we got away with it, and the ear bleeding argument took a couple of minutes to sort out (and is still referred to by Curtis and I fairly openly as "that ear-bleeding bullshit"). It's not the worst argument we've ever had at the table, but we're currently going at a rate of one argument of this sort per session.

To be fair, Curtis and I are somewhat disruptive players. Curtis is normally a DM, and always tries to be the star when he's a PC. Rob does the same thing when Curtis is DM though. Meanwhile, I can't spot a railroad without wanting to dynamite it. As well, I'm usually given the responsibility of fitting myself into the plot, rather than being given a place within it, which means that I'm usually not part of the mystical prophecy or brotherhood of assassins or whatever and need to grab onto anything in order to participate.

Still no stunts or challenges in the one fight this session. We were mostly trying out flanking rules, attacks of opportunity, token pools, feats we hadn't used in previous fights, and the grappling rules. We're pretty satisfied on a mechanical level, though we have a bunch of houserules that there's some dissatisfaction with. We're trying out a bleeding-out houserule (basically, if you get below 10HP, you have to start rolling to stabilise, rather than below 0 HP). It's mainly fucking us because Rob forgets to roll for goons, and we forget to remind him. The actual Iron Heroes stuff is fine though.

One really cool thing Rob is doing is giving our characters reasons to worship the Gods and get involved in the cultural side of things. Frex, Erik getting some minor bonuses for sacrificing to Vidar, the Viking god of revenge. This was the first instance of it, but it becomes a much bigger thing in the next two sessions (and presumably on from there as well).

Session 3:

The party decides to rest for a bit before heading on. The decision not to camp is that more undead forest critters might be about. The party tramps on.

The voice pops into Bjorn's head again, and he's kind of able to home in on it at this range. We don't have torches lit, and Rob makes us make survival checks to avoid falling into chasms and other holes that now dot the mountain. No one falls. We come to a depression in the mountainside as if a landslide had scooped out a chunk of the mountain. At the bottom are several chasm-caves.

We finally light a torch, and start exploring the area aboveground. The first thing we find is a partially buried piece of rope that connects to a bindlestaff buried in the rocks. We open it up and find a bunch of junk, plus a strange piece of metal carved in Viking runes. My character is the only person who is both literate _and_ able to read Viking runes (Cavatheer can only read British writing, Victor and Bjorn are illiterate). It has the rune of Odin, the All-Father carved across it. When Erik (me) reads it, a voice echoes in his head saying "Sacrifice to me".

Erik and Bjorn burn the rest of the stuff (a dagger, some clothes, some rotting food) as a sacrifice to Odin, but nothing happens. Victor and Cavatheer roll their eyes in contempt, and I say that it probably didn't work because we didn't nail someone to a tree for nine days. More snorting. This subplot, about Victor and Cavatheer crapping on Viking culture and religion, really gets going at this point. Bjorn sits on the sideline during all of this.

To avoid a fight, we start searching. Bjorn investigates one of the chasms, which is about fifty or sixty feet deep. It has a hole at the bottom (worn away by water), and the voice in Bjorn's head tells him that he can see the flame, but the hole is too small to get through.

We check the other hole. It's got sloping walls down to a choke point, then widens. Bjorn goes down, and Erik follows. Cavatheer and Victor stay up top. Cavatheer has the worst armour penalty (he's wearing plate mail) and we don't trust Victor without Cavatheer around to command him.

We get down, and the room is basically a large gallery with a raised area under the hole and a thin ledge around the periphery with the bottom covered in water of unknown depth. After a few seconds search, we spot the body of Oberin on the ledge nearby (we don't know his name yet).

Bjorn goes after him, while Erik stays close by to provide light. Rob has us make Balance checks of varying DCs as we creep out. We spend about two minutes OOC on a discussion of what exactly I'm doing. My plan was to "take 10" combined with my 7 in Balance (4 skill ranks + Dex) for an automatic 17 result on my balance roll, and to move out as far as I could along the ledge until a 17 wouldn't auto pass the check and then to stop. I think I explained it in a weird way.

Bjorn eventually gets a shitty roll and slips about ten feet before reaching Oberin. He goes into the water with a splash, and we discover it's about waist deep or so (Waist deep on the 7 ft tall Bjorn that is). As he struggles back to his feet, Erik looks back and notices a giant black snake crawling out of a hidden hole onto the raised area under the hole. It's clearly the mommy of the little black snakes that came from the large eggs that the party saw on the mountainside last session.

Not only that, but it's undead. Part of its face is eaten away and the eye shines like a black star in it (one of Rob's better pieces of description, I think - I could picture it perfectly in my head during the battle). Erik drops the torch and shouts "Jormungandr!" in horror. Jormungandr is the world-serpent in Viking mythology, and Rob gave me a hero point for the reference even though the other players didn't get it.

Bjorn gets his axe out, I draw my spear, and Victor and Cavatheer come down the hole. It should be noted now that the two of them had not tied the rope off on anything since all the potential anchors were too far away, so the rope came down when Cavatheer let go of it.

A heated melee ensues. Rob uses a set of keys to represent the snake on the battle map, and we finally start using the Iron Heroes system to good effect. I do a cool leaping "bear attack" down on the snake, Victor grapples with it until he goes into a rage and Cavatheer whips throwing hammers from his belt at its skull. Bjorn nearly chops its tail off, and for its part, the snake does this awesome whipping around tail trick that trips everyone and then uses the free attack (from Imp. Trip) to start a grapple. Victor ends up killing it by crushing its skull with his bare hands. The snake has strength-draining poison, and both Victor and I get nailed with it.

Once the snake is dead, we're stuck on how to get out. Oberin recovers when Cavatheer makes a heal check, and introduces himself to the party. He explains that he was with a ship that went to the "Sunken Reaches" to look for relics of the gods. The Confederates have a treaty with the Jomsviking that they won't sail through the Sunken Reaches, but they had broken the treaty and attacked the ship as it was returning with precious artifacts - pieces of the gods' souls. The Confederates seized two of the three, but Oberin escaped with the other.

Here's the weird part. Oberin thought the attack happened off the (southern) coast of Raxar, a major Viking Island about a week's sail to the south of Skeele (so, he starts off both on the other side of Raxar from Skeele, and a week's swim from Skeele's southernmost shore). Oberin escaped by leaping into the sea and swimming off through fog for "about a day or two" until he ended up on shore. He thinks he might be in Jotunheim (the closest piece of land to Raxar's southern shore) and is genuinely surprised to find himself somewhere in the middle of Skeele.

So, "Will of the Gods" and whatnot. The concern is how to escape. The hole is unreachable as is. Bjorn, our best climber, would have to make about ten climb checks of at least DC 20, and going up to DC 25ish (with a +11 check modifier, admittedly). Ten sounds a bit excessive. Oberin says that he's explored most of the rest of the caves before he discovered the snake and laid low, and they don't really go anywhere. The party gets worried that Rob has TPKed us through starvation.

We decide to go out fighting. I'm the only character with Escape Artist, so I slide through the crack the snake came from, and discover that it (eventually) leads to an outcropping that rings the gallery like the ledge Oberin was on, but wider and more stable. I sling a rope down to Bjorn, and he comes up and gets ready to climb. It'll only be 3 checks from here.

At this point, Oberin, who has introduced himself as a wizard, does something kind of neat. Before Bjorn begins, Rob makes a couple of rolls in secret, and then has Oberin tell Bjorn what will happen if he climbs (basically, Rob divulges the results of the rolls). It's mostly favourable, and indeed, Bjorn, makes it out. The rest of the PCs escape shortly thereafter.

This is probably the friendliest the PCs ever are. We work together to escape the pit - Erik and Bjorn probably could have left Cavatheer and Victor to rot if they'd been real bastards. It doesn't last. Oberin finds the burnt bindlestaff, searches for the Odin-metal-piece, and when Erik shows it, mentions that stuff about it being Odin's soul, and having great power. I bring up nailing someone to a tree, but Oberin says that the only sacrifice powerful enough is "the blood of battle".

That night, as the party sleeps in the foothills of the mountain, Victor creeps over and steals the Odin-soul for a moment. He asks Odin what it will take to get the Heathen's Scar removed from him, and Odin responds with "Blood" Victor thinks for a while, then tosses the soul back onto Erik and goes to bed.

The next day, we come down and back to where the Viking army had gathered. They've already left for Ft. William Sykes. We start tracking them.
Eventually, we stumble across the body of a Halfleyer clansman filled with Confederate arrows. Things start to break down here.

Erik, of course, has sworn vengeance on the entire Halfleyer tribe, and starts to cut off the guy's jaw. Cavatheer stops him with Victor's help, and knowing that Victor wants to provoke a fight with him (and has for a while), Erik doesn't resist them as they grab and drag him physically off the body.

Right after this, there was a smoke break, and Si (Bjorn's player) and I went outside (we're the smokers). I said to Si that at this point, I figured I was pretty much going to have to kill Chris' character unless there was some sort of change in how he acted. I brought up the "throat slit in the night" possibility. I couldn't see a reason Erik would leave Cavatheer alive. Erik had the wizard, he didn't need Cavatheer for anything, and Cavatheer was a hated Confederate who shat on Viking culture and religion. Si admitted that though Bjorn had done nothing during the confrontation where Erik was drug off the body, he was tempted to have him rip the jaw off for Erik while Cavatheer and Victor were busy. I encouraged him, and told him that we ought to go "full-out balls-to-the-wall Viking-style" with our characters. I'd back him if he wanted to do that, and I asked him to back me.

This convo was important almost as soon as we came back inside.

The Viking forces we were tracking were nowhere to be found. The occasional corpse, but nothing else. Instead, as night came, we found a Confederate encampment blocking the road ahead. Hundreds of British troops were stationed there, and looked battle ready.

Cavatheer was in favour of going in and "talking to them". He had next to nothing to fear as a Brit, of course, but Bjorn and I were against it. After some debate, we told him that he was welcome to go into the camp, but we were going around and that was that. He agreed to come.

We started going, but about halfway, someone tripped a simple alarm near to a picket position. Victor, clearly intending to stir shit up and get someone "accidentally" killed, started running towards the position, screaming that he was a British soldier who'd been attacked by Vikings. Cavatheer went after him, but being in full armour, was slower and took a few rounds to catch up.

Meanwhile, I turned to Oberin and pointed to Cav's back "That man wants to give you to the Confederates who will torture and imprison you for the rest of your days. We have managed to shrug him off, let us go."

And Bjorn, Ob and I started booting it.

Victor's bluff was nearly bought by the British soldiers, but Cavatheer blew it a few seconds later when he showed up and said something along the lines of "This man is a criminal under the care of the Order of God, of which I am a member, please ignore, etc." The British dudes weren't cool with that, and basically, a scrap ensues with Victor instigating the violence (without actually attacking first) and Victor and Cav being forced to kill the soldiers barring one, who sprints back to base and raises the alarm.

Team BOE is booting it now trying to get the fuck away from the camp ASAP. Team CV meets up with an advancing line of Confederates, which includes Marshall amongst its members. He hails Cavatheer, and gets a crude situation brief. Cavatheer claims he can get BOE to surrender peacefully if Marshall can buy him some time. Marshall agrees to give Cavatheer a few minutes to see what he can do, but then he'll have to move in.

There's a tense chase, and Cav ends up getting close enough to Oberin to ask him to return with him peacefully. I pop out from behind a bush with my bow drawn and tell him to fuck off, while Bjorn has his axe out and backs me up. Cav refuses to instigate violence, Victor is still catching up (Marshall lent Cav, but not Victor, his horse). We boot it, leaving Cav and Victor high and dry.

The rest of the session is basically an epilogue. Cav and Victor meet up with the rest of the British and are taken to Ft. William Sykes. Unexpectedly, they are thrown in prison right upon their return.

Bjorn, Erik and Oberin escape. They're pursued by British troops for the rest of the night, but our woodcraftiness gives them the slip. We spend a few days evading patrols as we duck south back to the Bjornsen village. Upon arriving there, we find it and the neighbouring villages abandoned. The only clue is a song written in Viking runes that through metaphor tells us to go the Darner Mines, owned by the Darner clan. That's sensible, because it's where the Bjornsen women and children were supposed to hold out in case the attack failed.

We get there, and we discover that most of the Viking army dispersed and retreated here before the Confederates could crush them - the dead bodies we saw were a diversionary attack by some of the hot-blooded young Viking men that drew out the Confederates and let everyone else escape. Other clans have continued to arrive, and there are now more than 10,000 Viking warriors equipped and ready to fight (this is about twice as many Viking warriors as there are Confederates).

The plan: Attack and capture Ft. William Sykes, the bastion of Confederate strength on the island of Skeele. To do this, a small party of men will need to sneak in and open the main gates while the rest of the force engages those British still in the field.

And of course, Bjorn, Oberin and Erik, now heroes of the Skeele clans, volunteer to lead this small party...

Commentary:

This was a really tense session. I really thought I was going to have to slit Chris' character's throat in the night. Luckily, I didn't, but I got to screw them over. Both this session and the next one are really weird in that Erik is really unsuccessful in standing up directly to others, but still manages to get his way in the end through luck, balls of brass, and quick thinking.

I was also glad that Si backed me on ditching the others. He's a more passive player than the rest of us, so I was worried he was going to try to keep the party together, which would fuck the two of us over as PCs. Instead, we get away and become Viking heroes.

It also seemed like Rob had another plan for us to get out of the cave, but it was never clear what it was. Most of the entrances had caved in, or didn't seem to go anywhere. Luckily, Bjorn is a wicked climber. The escape seemed that it was more due to being lucky enough to have a member with a character who had the necessary skills.

Oberin is my favourite NPC so far. He's also one of the few NPCs Erik gets along with. BTW, this might come up later, but doesn't fit cleanly in the above narrative - the ship he went to the Sunken Reaches on was owned by the father of Cavatheer's childhood love. The ship escaped, and Oberin knew it originally planned to stop at Skeele briefly before going on further north.

This whole session was weirdly paced. It began with a decision about whether to camp for the night or not, and ended with a fifteen or twenty-minute epilogue that didn't actually resolve questions like how we were going to attack Ft. Sykes. It had its big fight at the start, and a little fight at the end.  It was a lot of fun though.

The next session (#4) was my fav yet. More on that soon.

Ive never played in or GM'ed a game with as much PVP as you guys. But WOW! Its sounds like a wild ride! Love reading the updates.:)

Thanks. It's pretty awesome. We're running wild and loving it.

this reminds me of our games from years ago.  same amount of PvP.  and it got "better" when we switched to traveller. . . .

keep up the good stuff!  go vikings!

Sorry, there was a delay between the fourth and fifth session, and the fourth ended on a major cliff hanger.

Session 4:

The Vikings, Erik and Bjorn, plan how to assault Ft. William Sykes. The newly-built Ft. has an incomplete wall facing the sea which might be vulnerable to assault, but the Vikings have very few ships. What they do have though, is twice the Confederate forces in manpower. So Erik and Bjorn, along with sixty other Viking dudes in the last three longships, are to lead a rear assault. We will land, fight our way through the fortress to the main gate and open it for the rest of the Vikings. If we can't do that, then we should try to cause enough trouble that the Confederates are thrown into disarray.

After planning this, I go for a smoke with Bjorn's player. We're pretty hyped. We decide that we're going to take the piece of Odin's soul that we have and dedicate the battle to Odin to see what happens. Bjorn has it to start with, because he's less fragile than I am.

When we return, it's team British time. Cavatheer and Victor are imprisoned in the same room Victor was in at the start of the game. Victor keeps on trying to break his bonds so he can escape, but Cavatheer won't help him. Curtis uses the strain rules for the first time in the game to tear his chain out of the wall, which is really impressive since it was a DC30 check. Cavatheer eventually has to order him not to escape or harm anyone, and the Heathen Scar kicks in.

A couple of weeks pass by in-game before anything happens (this is the time team Viking spent planning for the assault). Eventually, they're told that they're going to be court martialled and are taken to a court chamber.

There are a number of officials of both the church and the army there. The most important five are the prosecutor Captain Harkness, Terrin (with an "n", not an "s" it turns out), the Cardinal, Captain Valloren who is one of the judges and the bureaucrat that Victor tried to kill in the first game who I thought was a priest. I can't remember his name, but I think it's Ferris Lemuel. Because Cavatheer is only a probationary member of the Order of God, he does not have the right to an ecclesiastical trial.

Basically, Harkness begins hammering Cavatheer about the times in the previous sessions where he's killed Confederates, especially in the assault on the Bjornsen village at the end of the first session. This is a really great scene, if a bit unfair to Cavatheer. It's a great scene because one of Rob's strengths is cutscenes, and he's going back and forth between two NPCs bickering (Terrin and Harkness) while still holding a conversation that Chris can follow. It's a bit unfair because Rob has kept his notes on everything that happened, whereas Chris has only his memory to rely on, even though Chris' character was actually at the events in question, while none of the NPCs Rob is playing right now were.

I really enjoyed this scene, though I'm not going to try and capture the back and forth of it. It took about twenty minutes to a half hour to resolve, and the conclusion is that Cavatheer will be set free (his fate was the one under debate - if he lives, Victor is thrown in as part of the bargain, if he is supposed to die, then Victor gets the noose too).

Except, Nathaniel Stark, Warden of the East, comes storming in. Nathaniel Stark is Sergeant Tidwell's uncle. Tidwell was the guy we captured, manhandled until he died, and then desecrated the corpse of in the second session. Stark is not happy about this, though he doesn't know about the corpse desecration, and thinks that Cavatheer and Victor just killed him outright. He is the high commander of the British forces against the Vikings, and orders their summary execution the next day, and trial be damned!

Team British is thrown back in prison, to be executed at dawn the next morning, hung by the neck until dead, dead, dead.

Luckily, it's that very night that team Viking makes its assault. Things start to fuck up from the very start. Two of the longships don't make it - one gets lost in the fog, and the other one engages with a Confederate ship and gets drawn off. It's just the boat carrying Erik and Bjorn, Oberin the wizard, and some mookings. We beach near to the incomplete section of the wall, with our plan being to capture the lighthouse and go further in from there. The initial Viking assault has already begun, and Confederates are streaming to the front gates.

However, we do encounter some resistance. Ten of our dudes are killed off by fiat before initiative begins. The way the fight progresses is that we start off behind cover being pinned by archers, while a smaller group of Confederate foot soldiers and serfs come streaming out of the lighthouse to press the advantage. It's a very tough fight. I'm the only Viking with a ranged weapon, and I can't see half the guys or get clear shots at them. Meanwhile, Bjorn is getting feathered with arrows as he mows down the foot soldiers.

Just before this fight starts, Cavatheer and Victor hear the alarm and decide to escape... to help with the fighting. They bash down the door and Cavatheer runs to grab his gear (they left him his armour, but nothing else), while Victor hops out the window onto the wall. Now, Cavatheer wants to help the Confederates, but Victor just wants to kill some people. The building their prison was in was the lighthouse, so Victor is up at the top of incomplete wall, and he starts hurling dudes off of it.

Meanwhile, Bjorn drops from too many arrows and then getting sucked by our bleeding-out rules. This was unfortunate, since we weren't that far into the session, but his player, Si, had just had his wisdom teeth out and was only semi-conscious from the Tylenol-3s, so he ended up passing out on the floor and waking up from time to time to get a blurry and semi-coherent idea of what was going on.

By the time Bjorn drops, most of the Confederates in combat are dead. We're second level as of the end of last session, so I'm able to rapid fire my large arrows from my large composite bow and basically punch holes in people (2d6+2 per shot). However, most of the mookings are dead. It's down to me, Oberin, three mookings, and Bjorn's unconscious carcass.

But, we can't get into the Lighthouse. Cavatheer is standing in the doorway, hammer in hand, telling us that we shall not pass, etc. etc. I seem to recall telling him in character to go fuck himself, and we retreat and regroup. We notice a small door in the rock when we do, and sneak in through it. It leads to a set of tunnels that go under the wall and into the Confederate fort.

We emerge from the tunnels unnoticed in the chaos. We let Bjorn down and try to treat him, but it's not happening. I take the piece of Odin's soul. At this point, I'm starting to despair IC and OOC until two voices appear in Erik's head - one promising eternal power, and the other storming and raging. Oberin hears them too, and we realise that it's the other pieces of the gods' souls that the Confederates took. They're here! Oh frabjous day!

So, we get back on our mission from the Gods. We start sneaking towards one of the two large barracks buildings that serve as interconnected keeps for the fortress (they have a long bridge connecting them, and each one is built into the side of a cliff). We barely make it to the building without anyone noticing us, and once in the barracks, we slip into Confederate uniforms. Our disguises aren't super-convincing because we're big, hairy vikings with beards and axes and whatnot, but they'll survive a very casual inspection in the dark.

Once Cavatheer locks off the Lighthouse, Victor begins moving to find a spell-casting priest. His goal, if you recall, is to get the Heathen Scar removed by any means necessary, and torturing a priest is certainly allowed by that. The most powerful priest - the one who put the Scar on him in the first place in fact - is the Cardinal (the same one from the trial), who lives in the top of the barracks building that Erik and Oberin are in. During the trial, Victor and the Cardinal didn't directly talk, but made a few comments at one another that seemed portentous.

Cavatheer has an oh-shit moment when he realises that Victor is running off to torture the Cardinal into getting the Scar removed, and runs after him.

So, all three conscious PCs are heading to roughly the same place. We actually converge on the stairs, Victor holding his ears and running up them (holding his ears so he can't hear Cavatheer's orders to stop), Cavatheer booting after him, and we Vikings trailing so as not to get too closely involved in whatever the wacky British are up to.

Victor runs past some knights guarding the upper level, and Cavatheer comes chasing along a moment later, and the knights basically go after them, trying to sort out the situation. This allows the Vikings to stroll up to the topmost level. The level is set out in a cross radiating out through a hexagon (which is the overall shape of the barracks). The knights, Victor, and Cavatheer are running down one hallway, while the voices in our heads are coming from another. We start busting down doors until we get to a chest, and then we break the chest...

Victor bursts in on the Cardinal, who is discussing the situation (the Viking assault on the gates) with a paladin. He claims that he has an important message for the Cardinal's ears only, but the paladin refuses to leave, and the knights come in a moment later. Cavatheer is there and explains the situation. Victor keeps on trying to make bluff checks to get out of it, but can't really convince them.

Erik grabs the bag in the chest, tears it open, and finds Loki and Thor's souls, the same kinds of metal chunks that Odin's soul was. He fits the three pieces together, and each of the three gods begins babbling to him. Selecting one, he asks Thor to grant him the strength to see his quest through, and Thor gives him +4 to Str and Con.

Right about then, the Cardinal magically notices some shit is going down, and tell Victor to go get the thieves who have taken the Viking artifacts. He orders his knights, Cavatheer, and the paladins to help.

They come busting in on us, and we have a shoot out. We're on the top story of a building with a balcony below us, and another below that. The mookings move into position to attack the knights as they come through the door, but I know that's hopeless. Erik throws a rope to Oberin and gets him to sling it up off the balcony. I shoot one of the paladins and let the mookings attack while Oberin and I dash through the window, onto the balcony, then, with a tight jump check, to the balcony below.

So, we're now two stories down, but the mookings are quickly being mauled, and Cavatheer and the paladins are hopping down after us (albeit much more slowly, because they're wearing full plate). Victor is still talking with the Cardinal, dickering about getting the Scar off and making some deal that I didn't hear entirely because I went out for a smoke.

Erik and Oberin are in a bad situation. Oberin is a slow runner (x3), and has just sprained his ankle from landing badly (he rolled a 1 on his jump check). Erik looks him and goes "Split up". We start running in opposite directions - me towards the main gate, Oberin across the bridge connecting the two barracks buildings. He has a paladin chasing him, I have Cavatheer (in full plate) and eventually Victor chasing me.

I basically have to run a half-kilometre or so of wall under assault by Vikings, dressed in an unconvincing disguise as a Confederate lieutenant. I try to throw things off a few times by issuing orders to retreat, but no one listens, so I give it up. It does waste some time though, so Victor and Cavatheer get closer.

Finally, I'm at the main gate. To open the portcullis, I need multiple guys working giant axles that pull chains. My raiding party is currently down to Me (at 6 HP), Oberin (missing), Bjorn (unconscious and at the other end of the fort). This ain't happening. Erik is a godly man though, so he stands in front of the Confederate forces guarding the gate, pulls out the gods' souls, which have snapped together into a sort of buckler, holds them aloft, and prays, "I dedicate this battle to Odin!"

We get +10 to Str, Con, Wis and Cha (I didn't bargain with Loki, so I didn't get Dex and Int). Not just Erik, but _every_Viking_ in the battle gets these bonuses.

Victor comes running up to snag me and I blast him with an arrow. He (being of Viking birth), realises what's going on (the power of the gods is coursing through our veins) and promptly switches sides. I grab some Confederate dude who's running past and tear off his jaw casually with my 25 Str just to test it out. We each grab an axle and crank it, opening the portcullis as the rest of the Vikings come storming over the walls screaming "For Odin!"

End of session.

Commentary:

Even in hindsight, I'm not sure how I pulled that off. I thought I was capital-F Fucked in the ass once Bjorn went down. Then I thought I was Fucked again when Victor and Cavatheer started chasing me. But in the end, me and all my buddies got +10 to four stats, I'm carrying a glowing shield filled with the power of the gods, and my side is just about the triumph (temporarily, as you'll find next session).

This was my favourite session of the game so far. Everything was working really well. We have some PvP, we had characters moving their individual stories forward as well as the overall story developing. Everything just clicked, except for Bjorn going down. Even then, that fight was awesome. It was this tough, grueling slog for position and cover with shot and counter shot and daring raids into open ground and so on.

The situation we were in at the end of this session was a bit awkward though. Cavatheer is siding with the Confederates (even though he has a death sentence on him). Rob thought that Chris would side with the Vikings once that happened, but he didn't. As someone put it "He's lawful good. He chose law over good this time." Rob even had the Confederates set fire to the slave quarters that enslaved Viking women and children were barricaded in to get Chris to jump ship, but he didn't. And it was completely plausible on Chris' character's part that he wouldn't, even under a death sentence.

This session had absolutely no pacing issues, no overly long cutscenes, no NPCs taking the centre-stage, nothing but pure gaming goodness.

THIS IS PURE AWESOMENESS

thanks for sharing, P!  :D

Session 5:

Session 5 begins with the Vikings pouring over the walls. The Confederates are making a hasty retreat, trying to regroup near the centre of the fort. We vikings don't give them a chance, charging forward and tearing them limb from limb.

Three plots are going on simultaneously. In order of importance to the story:

1) I lead the charge, the pieces of the gods' souls having formed into a glowing buckler. Victor is somewhere in the rear, but his player keeps on having to go AWOL from the table to deal with some personal stuff by cellphone. I drive the Confederates back to the bridge connecting the two barracks structures then lead a charge up the stairs.

One of the barracks buildings is overrun quickly but most of the British have already abandoned it to regroup in the other. They slow us down with fire, blocking the hallways with furniture, and some fierce fighting. This plotline went on for four hours IRL, without a lot happening. It was basically a holding pattern for my character while Rob dealt with other stuff. "Yeap, you murder some dude holding an axe. Then a dude with a spear. Then you get bogged down at a staircase with some burning furniture that the Confederates are firing crossbow bolts over." And so on. In game, I spend about six to eight hours doing this. The power of the gods is rushing through me, so I don't even really get tired.

2) Bjorn wakes up to find himself peppered with arrows. A Valkyrie is standing over him trying to pick him up and carry him off to Valhalla. He refuses, and she insists, but the more the will to live grows in him, the heavier he becomes until she can't even lift his hand anymore, and has to fly off to bear other departing souls.

He meets up with the chieftain of the Darner tribe whose mines the vikings were hiding out between sessions 3 and 4. The chieftain hands Bjorn a bow, and he and his men help Bjorn get revenge against the bow-bearing dudes at the top of the lighthouse who did this to him. In this battle, Bjorn finds that he wheezes and gets tired easily. At the top, they light the fire in the lighthouse to signal to the longships carrying the women and children away from Skeele to return. They begin to.

Out of game, Rob declares that Bjorn now has the following ability. By spending a hero point (normally used for rerolls), Bjorn can get back HP (not reserve points) equal to his level + his hitpoints per level, plus his Con mod. So, for a second level Man at Arms with Con 16, that would be 14HP. In exchange, whenever a fight goes on for more than ten rounds, he has to make escalating Fort saves or be fatigued (this fatigue doesn't stack with itself to become exhaustion if he fails two). Cool beans. This is the first time he's done anything like this, though he mentioned at the start that he would be from time to time.

Bjorn kills the bad dudes and rejoins me eventually. When he does, Si and I go outside and smoke while the Chris plotline wraps up.

3) Chris/Cavatheer. Last seen retreating before the viking forces. This plotline involves only him and some NPCs, and takes approximately four hours to resolve (we started at 8, it resolves around midnight). To cut a long story short, he flees before the vikings, and Rob has a number of picaresque episodes designed to convince Cavatheer that the Confederacy he loves and has chosen to serve (which has also just sentenced him to death) is probably not that good. Incompetent and cruel officers, men throwing their lives away, the slave quarters being burnt, etc. are all brought up. None of it really phases Cavatheer until he and Terrin are accused of being disloyal, and Ferris, the bureaucrat Victor tried to kill in the first session, tries to have them arrested. They escape their captors and go hide in some tunnels.

So, it's around midnight that the game really gets going. Erik and Bjorn take breaks from killing the British to chill. Victor shows up, since Curtis had sorted out his personal stuff. Oberin and Logard turn up as well, and all seems well. We pow-wow a bit, and grab some shut-eye. In the night, Victor tries to bargain with Loki to get the Heathen Scar lifted, but it's no dice. Loki wants eternal service, and Victor won't give up the Scar just to serve him instead. We had an out of game argument about whether it was reasonable for Erik to take minimal measures to prevent Victor from stealing the shield. It ends when I realise that Curtis probably isn't going to have Victor steal it.

We wake up the next morning around dawn when Oberin comes in shouting. We gear up and Bjorn and I rush outside. I think at first it's an army of undead (dead animals, including people, become undead monsters if Oberin is around them too long, though this hasn't been mentioned explicitly in game yet - I figured it out) but it turns out to be an army of Confederates. They have us surrounded.

The assault hits the vikings nearly completely unprepared. The basic plan is for the thousands of viking men to hold the line for as long as possible so that the women and children who landed during the night can reboard and flee, then the surviving men will follow.

We find ourselves near to the fort's docks several stories up in a building. Thousands of people are streaming past onto the docks while a Confederate raiding force moves into position to cut them off.

We proceed to have one of the longest fights I've ever had in a D&D game. It's 17 rounds long, which sounds like nothing if you've never played D&D, but is actually insanely long. It took us another four hours to finish. Luckily, it was a really cool fight.

Cavatheer and Terrin have emerged from secret tunnels (like the ones I slipped through with Bjorn's body in the previous session) and are helping us once they see the Confederates slaughter innocents. Most of our cool dude NPC mookings are at the battle line - Rogal, who Erik first told about being on a quest from Vidar, Kitya the one-eyed fletcher, Tiverton who is Bjorn's cousin, and so on.

The fight basically works like this - every round we roll a d8. The higher the better. Low rolls mean anywhere from 1d4 to 1d6 Confederates show up in various places (the lower, the worse tactically for us). High rolls mean reinforcements show up for us (usually 1d4 vikings). Usually we get between 3 and 5 new Confederates showing up and piling in. The longer we stick around before taking off, the more people survive to make it to the boats.

I am the murder-king in this fight. The Confederates we're fighting are mostly lightly armoured mooks. I've got a rapid firing composite bow that lets me kill one or two dudes a round, and I end this fight with somewhere around 25 notches on my belt. Even the dudes I don't actually slay are wounded so badly that a single blow from a mooking will finish them off. The other PCs do pretty well, but I am the mediaeval equivalent of a dude with a machinegun.

The important points:

Victor meets up with Cavatheer and Terrin and tries to get them to leave immediately, but they refuse to stay and help the viking women and children.

Oberin is down in the press and eventually (twelve rounds in), a single dead Confederate comes back to life. Bjorn dispatches him and I realise that my wild guess was right.

The Confederate navy shows up and rams the dock, sending all these dudes flying and nearly making Cavatheer (who is an armiger in full plate) fall into deep water.

Around about round 14 we realise that there's a single friendly ship out there that Oberin has a connection to. It's the ship of Lindsay Courtwright, Cavatheer's childhood love, and the ship Oberin went to the Sunken Reaches in. Victor begins swimming out to it, while Bjorn and Oberin disengage after slaying the zombie and begin to head for a nearby cliff to jump onto it.

The last few rounds are pretty nuts. Logard, the chief of the Bjornsen tribe, has shown up and he's seen Terrin. The two of them plow through the Confederates between one another and face off. I start making my way down off the balcony to follow Bjorn and Oberin, but linger a bit to see exactly what happens. Terrin has two swords, only one of which he's used so far in the campaign. One is called his "holy sword" and the other his "regular" sword. His holy sword comes out now and he goes nuts. He cuts Logard (who is near full HP) in half from fifteen feet away, and then starts murdering everyone within reach. I nail him in the back with an arrow which nearly drops him (he was at 2ish HP), and Cavatheer charges in and slugs him for subdual damage. Cavatheer grabs Terrin's body, I grab the dagger Logard took from me back in the first game, and we go charging off a cliff and land on the boat (which we've been able to see for a couple of rounds) as the Confederates break through and slaughter anyone left on the docks.

Escape!

End of session.

Commentary:

Four hours of Chris' adventures weren't as bad as they sound, since the rest of us were smoking, sorting out personal affairs and downloading shit off the internet. But it was really the second half - the big battle - that redeemed the session. Rob is the best battle planner in our group, and it really shows in little set pieces like this. Everyone had a moment to shine.

Also, this game gave rise to two of the most brutal deaths we've had so far. Curtis mentioned that it was really only in killing people that we started using the descriptive power of language, and while it's a bit of exaggeration, it's not much. In the first part, when we first encountered the British, Victor fishhooked a guy so hard that his fingers tore a hole in his cheek from the bone to the lips. Some unnamed NPC viking tore off a guy's face. I threw a dude out a window into a battle below. In the second battle, Victor used the belt of a corpse as an improvised weapon to hook a guy's front jaw and rip it out. There were lots of other nasty bits though. I shot some guy in the dick, and Bjorn buried his axe in a guy and swung him into a window, breaking the window and using the force to sever the two halves. Cavatheer mashed a British soldier's head so hard his brains spurted out his ears. While it's pretty gruesome, it also helps break up the butchering a bit, since we killed about forty mooks in this battle.

Rob told us after the battle that we could have stayed for a maximum of 20 rounds, and that would have let every viking who could escape. Staying for 17 rounds meant 85% of them got away, which wasn't too bad. I was a bit surprised at my own actions, since Erik is normally pretty willing to cut and run if he thinks it's in his own interests. But everyone) was treating him as this great hero (or, at least the NPCs were), and so rather than make a mad dash for the boats, I stuck around and killed guys and helped save the day.

SWEET

i used to (still do, actually) get descriptive with combat deaths when i DM.  then i discovered the crit/fumble tables in MERP, then WFRP after that, and i guess it's standard now.  but when robert redshirt is down to 1 hp and the player inflicts 22 points of damage, intense descriptions get the "overkill" point across nicely.

did you still have the +10 to all stats until the end of this session?

this is iron heroes, right?  
1.  do you need 3.5 core to run it?
2.  if no, is your ref using any other books?

thanks for the massive transcriptions!  :D  :emot-black101:

:maniac:

I'm a big fan of Iron Heroes, and I love reading this thread; I could never get that sort of (OOCly) good natured player fighting to work in my group, but it's really neat to see it when it works.

Quote from: beeberSWEET

i used to (still do, actually) get descriptive with combat deaths when i DM.  then i discovered the crit/fumble tables in MERP, then WFRP after that, and i guess it's standard now.  but when robert redshirt is down to 1 hp and the player inflicts 22 points of damage, intense descriptions get the "overkill" point across nicely.

did you still have the +10 to all stats until the end of this session?

this is iron heroes, right?  
1.  do you need 3.5 core to run it?
2.  if no, is your ref using any other books?

thanks for the massive transcriptions!  :D  :emot-black101:

:maniac:

We had lost the +10 once we slept. I thought about invoking the gods again, but I was 99% sure that Rob wouldn't give us the +10 again. I did try and bargain with Loki (as did Victor) but he just insisted on servitude in both cases, so we both told him to fuck off.

As to your other two questions:

We don't use any of the 3.5 core for it, though we could theoretically use the DMG and MM if needed. We have Mastering Iron Heroes, the Player's Guide, and the Bestiary though, and while none of them have been drawn on yet, I personally am pretty happy to have some of the options. So far though, it's mostly a one-book game.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine. . . it's mostly a one-book game.

very cool.  nice & easy.  i'll have to check it out

shame you lost the bonus, but man!  made for a great fight!  :D

If you do want to take on monsters, you are going to need the SRD + the willingness to rewrite some of the stats (breaking AC into Defense and Damage Reduction from armour mainly), but we've mostly been fighting other humans so far. There is also a bestiary that I notionally own (Rob currently has it, and I've never so much as opened its pages), but I can't speak to whether it's any good or not.

Personally, if I were going to use monsters for it, I'd grab the Arcana Unearthed Diamond Throne supplement for the Rhodin and Chorrim (goatmen and militarised ogres) and use Midnight's undead rules (which are wicked).

Though it's not actually a session, me and the rest of the crew are getting liquored up to celebrate one of the fellows getting a new job instead of playing tomorrow night. This kind of non-gaming association is key to pulling this kind of PvP intensive game off - you've got to be chums with everyone so you treat it as scrapping with your mates instead of some dick you see once every fortnight killing your character because he's a lump of menses in a T-shirt.

Very fun to read. Thanks for taking the time to post it.

Come on buddy, I want to read your extended summary of Victor getting laid.

I always post the next-to-last session so I don't miss anything from it that crops up next session.

We have three sessions backlogged and done right now that I've got to write up. Work's been a bitch, and D&D has, happily, eaten up the time I would otherwise spend talking and writing about D&D.

Session 6:

We begin on the boat that we all leapt onto and escaped last time. In the distance, the Confederates are finishing off the last Viking defenders of the newly-doubly-conquered Ft. William Sykes. Viking women and children are adrift in boats, their only protection the thick fog.

Lindsay Courtwright, captain of the boat and Cavatheer's childhood love, introduces us briefly to the crew. There's a guy named "Rip" who looks Spanish, a Viking who looks like Aquaman named "Vater", Lindsay herself (referred to only as "Linz"), and Oberin. The ship is an ocean-going sloop.

Cavatheer takes Terrin below decks to the crew cabin and begins tending to his wounds. Terrin is near-comatose and on the brink of death, and due to a houserule, requires hourly care (heal checks) to avoid bleeding out.

Bjorn and Erik are in a grim mood, and go into the galley by themselves, where they get shitface drunk on whiskey. Victor remains on deck, sizing up Lindsay. Terrin and Cav have left behind Terrin's magical sword (his "holy" sword which he only drew when he went mad, as opposed to his regular, non-holy sword that he otherwise uses). Victor snags it and debates throwing it overboard before holding onto it. Curtis has Victor find some black tape and wrap the cross-hilt, a big Christian cross.

The next day dawns, and life on board ship gets underway. Cavatheer is below decks tending to Terrin, and refuses to come up when Lindsay calls a general meeting. She gets pissed but holds it anyhow. She tells us that she is a smuggler, and that we are heading to the Sunken Reaches, but first we will stop off at an island off the coast of Raxar (the southernmost major Viking island) to resupply. Raxar is where any survivors from the evacuation of Skeele were supposed to go.

After the meeting, Erik goes outside. Last session, I snagged some maps from the Cardinal's storehouse as I was stealing the pieces of the gods' souls. I give them a read through but they're mostly useless - they show what look like Confederate forces throughout Midgard and the islands, but don't show any particular information about the Sunken Reaches.

While I'm reading them on deck, Victor grabs Oberin in the galley, throws him out onto the deck and demands that he remove the Heathen Scar. Victor seems to think that Oberin promised he would, and Oberin thinks he's a fucking maniac. Grapple checks are made, and Victor basically has Oberin pinned with Rip, Lindsay and Erik facing him down when Oberin clarifies. Victor has misunderstood what he said. On the island we're going to, there's a sorceress there who might be able to do it if anyone can. Victor is mollified and we don't have to kill him, though things are tense for a while afterwards.

Shortly after this, Erik and Bjorn are outside on deck by themselves. The conversation goes:

Erik: So. Your family is probably dead.
Bjorn: Hmph.
Erik: I saw Terrin kill Logard.
Bjorn: Hmph.
Erik: We'll get revenge for all of them. But not now. We need the wizard [Terrin] for now.
Bjorn: Fine.
Erik: You'll get your revenge though, don't worry. Vidar will help us. Until then, we need to pretend to get along with the Confederates. But we won't forgive them for what they've done.
Bjorn: Agreed.

So we become good little worker bees. Eventually, Terrin is conscious again. He's wracked with remorse or something, but doesn't actually show any. Cavatheer comes up on deck, and while he is, Erik slips down and tells Terrin that they know that he killed Logard, and tells him to apologise to Bjorn. Terrin refuses.

Victor keeps on sizing up Lindsay and making veiled but obscene propositions to her. She deflects them with witty repartee. Eventually, he has to go down below to be shrived by Cavatheer (every Sunday) and he returns the holy sword when Terrin and Cavatheer order him to. Until that point, we weren't sure if Victor was now going to possess this incredibly powerful magical weapon or not.

Anyhow, time passes and we arrive at the island. Everybody splits up to do their thing. Lindsay and Rip go to meet with the chief of the island, Cavatheer goes to find a healer for Terrin, and Victor takes off to drink. I arrange to have some arrows made, then meet up with Oberin and Bjorn, and plan to go meet the sorceress Brythynia to see if she can give us some guidance on what to about restoring the gods once we reach the Sunken Reaches.

While we're getting ready, Victor goes to the inn where a bunch of Vikings are recruiting for the Jomsviking's army (the Jomsviking is the leader of all the Vikings). They say that a war between Confederates and the Jomsviking is imminent after the attack on Skeele, and they're looking for men to join. Victor tells them to fuck off and nearly gets into a fight with them until we show up. We have the supreme pleasure of calling Victor a "dog" and telling the Viking recruiters that he can't do anything unless they attack him first. They try and recruit us, and we decline. We've got more important stuff to do than go to war, satisfying as it would be.

Cavatheer finds a healer, takes Terrin to her, and then goes off to talk to a paladin of the Order of God. He's on this island for the same sort of reason Terrin and Cavatheer were assigned to Skeele - to get to know the locals, convert them to either Christianity or British culture if possible, to keep an eye on trouble for the Confederacy, and to ensure smooth trading.

We round up our wayward son and head for the sorceress. She lives on the other side of the island. We tromp there and go up into her cave, where she appears as a doe, and then transforms into a human. She tells Erik that the Sunken Reaches were once Alfheim, and that they sunk into the sea after Ragnarok. There is a palace in Alfheim that we must go to, and we will find the correct spot for the shield somewhere in the palace.

Cool, we fuck off with what we wanted to know. The sorceress asks Victor to stay behind to discuss the scar. I went out for a smoke, so I missed Victor and the sorceress fucking, but Rob and Curtis had wrapped up most of the interaction by the time I came back in. Basically, Victor and the sorceress fucked, and she told him that she could remove the scar if he would retrieve something from a certain vault in the palace of Alfheim. She gave him some magical metal bands and told him to put them on underwater when he next had the chance. She gave him the vault number and the combination to gain access to it. Then they fuck some more, and she lets him go back down the mountain.

There is a hilarious interlude here that doesn't directly relate to the plot. Cavatheer finishes up with the paladin and goes to find Terrin at the healer's. He walks in just as Terrin is taking a shit with the healer's help. The line of the session is "No! Cav!" Everyone burst out laughing for a couple of minutes at the thought of someone stumbling in on a badass paladin mid-shit.

Cavatheer walks out, and goes to resolve another plot thread. Chris had until the arrival on the island played it so that Cavatheer didn't know Lindsay Courtwright was Lindsay Courtwright. No one had called her "Lindsay Courtwright" around him - she was only referred to as "Linz" and Cavatheer had last seen her about twelve years beforehand. Because of this, he had pretty much ignored her, or at best treated her formally as a stranger with authority. It was only when someone greeted her upon arrival that he put it together and realised she was his childhood sweetheart. Lindsay had been in negotiations with the chief all day though, and he hadn't had time to apologise.

He heads back to the ship and finds her drunk in her cabin in a foul mood. He starts to apologise and explain that he just didn't recognise her, and she tells him to fuck off and die. Sulking all around!

We reform the next day, with Victor showing up just in time. We depart for the Sunken Reaches.  Two notable things occur on the way. When Oberin and Erik start drinking with one another. A difference of opinions finally comes up on Ragnarok. Oberin thinks that Ragnarok has already happened and that the world as it is is the epigone of that event. Erik thinks that Ragnarok is part of a cycle, with the gods and the world being born, living, dying in Ragnarok, and then being reborn. It's unclear (in this session) who's right IC or OOC, since I wasn't not sure if I made up the cyclical part myself or if Rob had Vidar mention it way back in the first session.

Also, we see a Giantish warbarge in the far distance. It's being rowed by all sorts of giants, and is really four barges stuck together around a giant fan-like sail. We avoid it, since it has hundreds of Giant raiders in it.

Eventually, we arrive at the Sunken Reaches. Oberin and Terrin are both jacked from the magic coursing through the area. Above water, the tips of towers jut up into the sky, and underneath, there's an entire submerged city. We have to enter by swimming down to a mostly intact building with pockets of air, then following the pockets across to the palace building and root around inside. To get down to the building, a glass dome the Dagger has been carrying is pushed down and we swim from it to a nearby entrance to the air pocket region. It's meant to be tense, but thanks to Iron Heroes rules, we're all master swimmers and we make it pretty easily, even the dudes in plate mail.

And that's the end of the session.

Commentary:

Yeah, there really was no combat in this session, other than the brief Victor-Oberin struggle, and that was at most one round of grappling. This session is probably the least interesting to read, but it was great fun to play. There was all sorts of OOC banter that made the game lively, even though it wouldn't translate well in a summary. For example, when Erik went to borrow the money from Vater to buy arrows, Vater was teaching some kids to swim. I said "I split the kids into two groups - one for fucking, one for eating!" Si and I came back from smoking to Rob and Curtis dealing with Victor talking to the sorceress after fucking her, and someone shouted "Conan!" by way of reference to what they'd been up to while we were gone. Also, the Terrin taking a shit thing was really hilarious.

This session ended a bit early. We were late starting, and to get to the combat would have taken another couple of hours from where we were at 1:30 in the morning. So we called it an early night.

One note: All ships, in all of our games, are always under-crewed. We regularly have four guys with no experience steering an ocean-going ship capable of carrying several tons of cargo. No one wants to deal with hiring crews, etc.

The next two sessions are full of combat and traps, and even have a PC dying... from an octopus swarm!

Session 7:

We come up from the swim and prepare for combat, but nothing shows up. We're in a staircase in a tower that stretches up above the waterline. The first significant thing we encounter as we go up the staircase is a locked door covered in ornate scrollwork of animals and vines and fairies, etc. We ignore it for now and head up the stairs to the top of the tower. It ends up being a dead-end, as the top of the tower has been sheered away, leaving only some planking behind. Rob describes the view in exhaustive detail, taking about ten minutes (I peeked at my cell phone to time it). Two minutes in, having realised it's a dead-end, Oberin, Erik and Victor have already turned back and are at the door, leaving eight minutes of talking about fog and the low visibility to sit through.

The door is magical. Cavatheer sees a little fairy in the artwork wink at him. Presumably there is some sort of complex magical puzzle to be sorted out here, but Victor and Cavatheer just smash the door down as soon as we've established that it won't shock us or activate some sort of terrible trap etc. if we do so. We end up following a set of descending tunnels between the towers, smashing doors as we go. We can occasionally glimpse out still-intact windows at the surrounding landscape, which is an eerie submerged garden. Defoliated trees, the occasional muck covered statue, etc.

Somewhere along the way, Oberin explains that there is a magical, insubstantial guardian of this place which only he and other wizards can fight. However, the last time he fought it, it cursed him and this is why anything he kills comes back to life (thus, the zombie woodland creatures on the mountain, and the dead Confederate at the dockland escape).

We eventually reach a large feast hall. Some of the tables at the feast hall are human-sized, but there are also giant-sized tables with giant chairs and cutlery at them. Despite the tremendous age of the ruins, the feast hall is not only intact, but in fact has fresh food and drink available. I suspect magic, and try to keep the Vikings from eating any of it, but Victor grabs a roast chicken off a spit and begins gorging himself (Victor has a low wisdom and a "chaotic evil" alignment, which Curtis plays as a lack of self-restraint and caution).

Oberin takes this time to point to two globes - one pink, one green - that are embedded in a pillar. He explains that these are a source of magical power the inhabitants of the Sunken Reaches used, that they can be activated or deactivated, and that breaking one can be catastrophic.

Victor eats the chicken, and finding himself thirsty, looks about for something to drink. At the head of the feast hall, on a small dais, is a huge jug - it's close to the size of a barrel, really. He goes over, craving a drink of beer, and finds the jug filled with frosty and delicious liquid. He tries to drain it, but the fluid keeps on pouring out, as if the jug were bottomless. He quenches his thirst and starts wandering around while Erik and Oberin come up and check the jug. We have a brief debate, then decide to hold onto the jug. At the very least, it's an eternity of beer, and besides that, it's a powerful magical artifact.

There are two rooms off from this one - a kitchen, and a private dining room. Every dungeon we are in has a kitchen somewhere in it, though this one isn't particularly interesting except as a running joke.

The private dining room is where we end up. It has bottles of strange liqueurs none of have ever seen before, two doors, and a giant crystal growing out of the ground against one wall.

Erik ends up touching the crystal. He sees himself dead - or at least looking dead, with cuts and bruises covering himself. Most importantly, his corpse does not look much older than he is now. This becomes important when Lindsay touches the crystal, and her corpse also appears. However, she is significantly older in it - maybe ten or fifteen years. I forget exactly how she's supposed to die, but I think it was hanging.

Finally, Victor touches it. He appears not one day older than he is now. His face is blue from choking, and he is covered in cuts and scratches, with two thin tendrils of blood coming down from his nose. As we will discover later, the prophecy crystal is surprisingly accurate about the events of the session.

We start to go down one of the doors when Bjorn knocks the table slightly. One of the bottles falls over and a thin stream of red railro^^wine goes towards the other door. We ignore this obvious gesture to get with the plot and go towards the other door.

It goes down a long corridor to a small room with a map of the nine worlds of Yggdrasil. However, the geography is that of the world _prior_ to Ragnarok (remember, we are post-Ragnarok - most of the gods are already dead, and I am carrying around some of their souls in the form of a rune-engraved buckler).

Out of character, my first question is "Where's Muspelheim?" because I think "Muspelheim" is the most awesome of the names of the nine worlds (side note: Rob and I are the only ones who read up on Viking culture for this game). Rob delays that question and has Oberin explain the nine worlds. However, one of the worlds is "unknown", its name having been lost to history, and unfortunately, it turns out to be Muspelheim. I felt like a bit of a goof, but I also figure this means that Muspelheim will figure in the plot later on, which is good.

Anyhow, it turns out that we're in Alfheim, the land of the elves, which sank into the sea during Ragnarok. Rob mentions to the British PCs that they know this map is bullshit, and that it puts landmasses where they know for a fact they aren't any, and ignores the existence of Britain and the other far western countries. Terrin and Cavatheer are both still pretty skeptical about this "quest" Erik, Bjorn and Oberin have drug everyone along on.

After the metaphysical exposition, we go down the other door from the private dining room. This leads us down a long set of stairs, where a fantastic mural/frieze of Ragnarok has been etched and painted. Rob reads out a prewritten speech by Oberin as he explains what we see. We all marvel at it, even Terrin, who admires the artists and seems to be warming to Viking culture, even though he doesn't believe it to be true or not. Cavatheer and Victor are dismissive of the Viking gods, but we brush them off - we're wandering around Alfheim and encountering magic everywhere, and complaints about Jesus being the one true god ain't gonna get them anywhere. Oberin and Erik have a brief debate about whether or not Ragnarok will happen again, with Oberin once again claiming it won't, and Erik claiming it will.

We emerge into a hallway and do a bit of exploring before coming to a statue with a tunnel in its base. I climb into the tunnel and explore it for a few seconds before a spike trap nearly crushes my head. All of a sudden, the floor pivots ninety degrees and most of the party is dropped into a pool of seawater that breaks our falls. It also keeps us from being impaled on spikes at the bottom of the pit, which prior to the submersion of this place would've been pretty fatal.

The party recuperates and regroups. There's a small tunnel at the bottom of the pit, but the water goes on far enough that air supplies could be a problem. So, most of us get out of the water and up onto solid ground again (the floor stays pivoted, but another part of the hallway forms a ledge we can sit on and plan).

Victor does not. Last session, he got those metal Bands of the Sea that let him breathe underwater. While the rest of us look for secret doors, etc. Victor jumps into the water and starts exploring. This will be his doom.

At first he's fine. The tunnels he's swimming through are bare stone and set in concentric circles. Better yet, he finds a vault door, and recalling the information of the sorceress from last session, he opens the door using the combination she gave him. Inside is a fortune in gold and a single wooden dart made of holly - the object she sent him for. He pockets the dart (I whisper to Rob "Baldur's dart!" out of character and receive a nod), and. takes a fistful of gold. Rob describes the coins in detail and then sketches a picture of them for us.

Victor continues on to the centre of the circles. To do so, he must manipulate some levers in the inmost circle which drop a glass drawbridge that blocked his way. The tunnels come out over a pit, which the drawbridge crosses. Above the pit is a pocket of air, and below it, a faint and dim green light can be seen. Far above him, a pale pink orb hangs from the ceiling. He also sees that the pit chamber opens up, about fifty feet above the surface of the water, to an air-filled room.

Before he can explore further though, shapes begin to flitter in front of the green light below him. These shapes resolve into pale white octopuses that attack him. The tension is broken somewhat as there is a debate out of game about what the correct plural of octopuses is (octopi, octopodes, or octopuses, with the later two being correct), which Si, Bjorn's player and our resident linguistic expert resolves by consulting dictionary.com.

The combat is a bit quirky, and has at least two distinct rules arguments in it between Rob and Curtis. The first is whether or not the octopuses have the Improved Grab feat, and second, whether or not Victor threatens squares in three dimensions.

In brief:

The first arises because the octopuses are swarming Victor, but he can kill them with a single attack (they have low HP). If they do not have Improved Grab, then he can get an attack of opportunity whenever they try and grapple him (which they are all doing). Victor has Combat Reflexes and a Dex of 16, so this is potentially three additional attacks a round - very important because he is being swarmed by approximately sixteen or so octopuses who  grapple him and bite him with their beaks.

It is decided that the octopuses have Improved Grab because octopuses in the SRD have it, even though these are not SRD octopuses.

The second comes about because the octopuses are swarming Victor from three dimensions, but Rob only wants to give him Attacks of Opportunity in two dimensions. The octopuses have a reach of 0 squares (they are Tiny creatures), meaning they must move into Victor's square to attack. This too could provide him with up to three attacks of opportunity per round, meaning four dead octopuses instead of just one or two.

It is decided that Victor only gets AoOs in two dimensions, though only Rob really supports this decision.

Victor ends up killing all the octopuses anyhow, but a house rule we've been quibbling about all campaign now rears its ugly head. Victor has been reduced to nine or so hitpoints by the attacks, with two subdual damage. We have a "bleeding out" house rule Rob came up with. Whenever a character takes a wound that reduces them below ten hit points (even if they originally had less than ten hit points), they must make stabilisation rolls. Rather than using Iron Heroes stabilisation rules, we use another set of house rules that we've had for two or three campaigns now.

The rule is: Roll a d10. On a 1 (or if one prefers, another number that one calls out prior to rolling), one stabilises. On 2-9, one loses a hit point and continues to roll. On a 0, one of two things can happen. Cjaracters with positive HP totals drop to 0 HP and continue to bleed out from there. Characters with negative HP totals die (later amended to, in both cases "they lose two HP instead of one").

Characters may stop bleeding out if they are still conscious by making a heal check, or having someone make it for them, DC 15.

Curtis ends up failing about seventeen rolls, even using hero points, and fails all the heal checks (low wisdom, and Rob gave him a penalty for trying to staunch wounds in cold saltwater without anything to treat them with). Victor bleeds to death, cold, alone, and in the dark. He struggles desperately against death, but succumbs to his wounds and floats there, awaiting discovery.

Minor note: Victor is nearly naked, because Rob ruled he could break octopus grapples by stripping off clothing/armour the octopuses had gotten ahold of. Victor's pants, and thus Baldur's dart, are now at the bottom of the pit, well out of sight.

Back at base camp, we notice that Victor has been gone for about twenty or thirty minutes, and we decide to investigate. Lindsay and I volunteer because we are both fast, strong swimmers.

I try something with the jug. I leap down into the water and have it lowered to me, and tell Rob that I desperately want it to be filled with air. I am gambling that it is a jug that provides me with any fluid I want - and air is a fluid (not a liquid admittedly, but I am making my case to a DM who was trained as a mechanical engineer and therefore ought to know the difference).

And it works! Normally, my ideas are shot down like biplanes circling King Kong, but this one works. We begin Operation Go Find the Corpse.

With a few careful swimming rolls, we do, with plenty of air. We explore a bit further, notice the room above, and then decide to return with Victor's body. We bring him back, haul him out of the water, and debate what to do with the corpse. I suggest (in and out of character) mutilating it, but the Confederates want to bury him. We also try to figure out how we was able to stay underwater for so long, and we notice the metal bands. We can't slip them off from around his neck, so I once again mention decapitating his corpse, but the suggestion is brushed off.

I then suggest we immerse him in water (we know OOC that this will make the bands softer), but this is derided as metagaming, so I drop it. Eventually, Oberin tells us that he will return to the ship with Victor's corpse while the rest of us go on. We do so.

For his part, Curtis grabs some dice and begins rolling up a new character like a trooper. We break for pizza and talk about what his new dude will be like. Victor's death will really change the tone and feel of the game, since he and I were the two prime motivators of PvP shit disturbing (with Cavatheer helping out where he could).

We come back from the break and continue exploring. At the top of the pit Victor died in, we find a room made of tiered circles that opens into three corridors. I explore the central corridor, and find a massive pit of spikes that I can't cross, and another branch that's partially blocked. I can duck through a side door that seems to lead to a library, but I don't pursue it further because I can hear noises further down.

Bjorn gets a mysterious flash telling him to go through the third corridor, and when I return, we do. We emerge into a room with a pentagram on the floor that looks like a puzzle. There are five kinds of dirt (white sand, red dirt, etc.) and some skulls - children's skulls - in the centre of the pentagram. I realise after a few steps that we're immediately above the pit of spikes I saw down below, and everyone panics a little. We end up taking it slow, using rope and climbing the walls etc. to get across, only to realise that unless we disturbed the skulls, nothing was going to happen.

And then, on the other side, Victory!

The next room has an artificial pond with an artificial island containing a giant statue of Freya. The statue is dressed as a Valkyrie, and has a sword in one hand. The other hand is empty, but looks like it grips a shield.

Team Viking gets to it, losing no time making it across, eager to restore their gods. But, trouble ensues. Just as we get onto the island, valkyries pop in. They're in war chariots with two valkyries to each chariot - one spearwoman, one archer. The valkyrie leader, whose name starts with G and that I can't remember comes to the forefront and tells us to stop what we're doing.

We tell her to fuck off and I move to put the shield in Freya's hands. Combat ensues.

The combat basically goes like this: We start on the island in the centre of the pond, while the Valkyries are circling around on on the "shore" (a circular ledge of stone higher up than we are). We have minimal cover from the statue and some fallen rubble, but they have higher ground and I'm the only one of us who carries a ranged weapon. The leader summons in this four-armed hydralisk cyclops demon to get into melee.

The interesting thing about this fight is that it's really the one where our party begins acting like a party. Curtis controls one of the Valkyries so he has something to do during the fight, and he tries his damnedest to kill us.

Basically, Si and Chris move Bjorn and Cavatheer in to hold the hydralisk. It starts tearing them to shreds, but they tag team it and start putting out serious damage, with each one trading aggro, so that the monster keeps on finding it advantageous to attack one, then the other, then the first one again. They have it flanked, so Lindsay comes in for sneak attacks.

Terrin runs out and intercepts war chariots as they go by, while I soften them up with arrows when I can dodge the attacks of the monster (since its goal is to stop me from placing my shield in the statue's hand).

The Valks are a tough fight, but Bjorn/Cav/Lindsay end up murdering the monster with some savage critical hits, and I take the opportunity to dart over and place the shield in its hand.

Except, pretty much the exact opposite of what we expect happens.

The statue drops its sword and reaches over with its other hand to grip the shield. Odin tells me that he can't take my sacrifice because I'm pledged to his son (presumably, Vidar). Loki screams quickly to me as Freya grabs the shield. He gives me a cryptic line about the best place to hide a gate being a well-travelled road before the statue pipes up. The statue grabs the shield and begins tearing it apart. It intones that only one beast knows the hiding place of the Well of Life, and it is neither Aesir, nor Vanir nor Elf nor Giant. It then proclaims that the betrayers shall never escape again, and crushes the last fragments of the souls of Thor, Odin and Loki into scrap.

Then everything explodes. PCs are flung in all directions. A piece of Odin-soul shrapnel catches Bjorn in the eye, driving itself into his brain. Odin appears to Bjorn and gives him some wise words of wisdom, and IIRC, his two ravens flutter over onto Bjorn's shoulders as he fades out.

End of session.

Commentary:

After the session, there was a long debate about the bleeding out rule, and we decide to modify it so you could only bleed out while we were in initiative/combat. While Curtis had been killed by a freak occurrence (not a single one in seventeen rolls), it was still kind of silly. Curtis also told us about his new character, who is a Hunter (an Iron Heroes class) who is super-intelligent, wields a bastard sword, and is a sort of cultural attache for the British government to the Vikings.

Overall, this session was remarkably low on PvP. It was a sort of dungeon-crawl without many monsters, and the PCs only bickered a little. We were goal-oriented and unified against a common foe (the environment). The party dynamic is highly unstable right now, especially with Victor's death, and it fluctuates all throughout the next session.

I refer to the piece of metal in Bjorn's brain as his "railroad spike" out of character. The connection with Odin that was developing all session was presumably the cause of the mysterious omens he had.

Speaking of omens, I thought it was clever that the prophecy crystal had correctly predicted Victor's death. Rob claims that he is often completely surprised by what we choose to do, but he correctly predicted Victor's hubris leading to his death. Actually, he wasn't too far off on my character either considering what happens next session, but I survived it.

Next session: We decided to play on Labour Day Monday, but Curtis doesn't come because there won't be a way to slot his PC in until the end of the Labour Day session. Cavatheer saves my life, and Bjorn mows down zombies. Also, a major NPC dies.

Update this, you lazy fuck!