Beneath the Missing Sea Episode 2

Barricades and Boiled Dog

Episode 2, in which the party returns to Brost to deal with the most pressing issue facing its former residents: that they might ever run out of beer. Their first real fight ensues.

Played August 25, 2023

The Party for Episode 2

• CaptainSabatini playing Esgorman
• Igneous playing Fiske
• mtb playing Manqoba

Esgorman, Fiske, and Manqoba awoke the next morning in their uncomfortable bunks in Ogden's Tap in the suspended town of Coiner's Shelf and decided to head back to Brost in order to track down the intended recipient of the industrial tubing and grab the rest of the beer. Less than a day had passed since they'd returned from the previous trip but there was little to keep them in the smelly, windy, creaking, and tragic village nailed to the side of the now-drained Andrussian Basin. Quickly they reenlisted Hemmingway, who was happy for the continuing lucrative employment which had so far involved only the slight risk of wild dogs, although that would soon change. They wasted no time setting out.

The trip was miserably rainy, so much so that the road was entirely empty during the two-day trip. Manqoba spent the time watching the sea floor hoping for the sight of water accumulating but it always quickly drained away. By the time they reached Brost, it had cleared up and was then merely unpleasantly cool. They found the town much as they left it, mysteriously empty for a place that had supposedly been invaded by monsters. They proceed to break into an abandoned home, raid its pantry, and bunk down for the evening, their first in the town. Wary of monsters, they kept a close watch but saw, of all things, those strange Levanthic cultists engaged in a procession down a nearby street. They soon passed out of sight and the party went to bed wondering where they were going and what they were doing.

The next morning continued to be cold but clear and they quickly broke camp and headed out. This time they passed through a lot more of the small fishing community: the shipyard with an abandoned, half-finished trawler; the emptied harbor with a scattering of grounded boats; a strange bridge that led to an arm of land that sheltered the harbor that once floated but which now hung loosely over nothingness. They inspected the cliff face of the opposing shelf for signs of where the monsters might have come from. Seeing none, Esgorman braved the loosely hanging bridge to observe the face directly beneath Brost and it was only then that he spotted the mouths of caves. Even better, he noticed a path heading down to the cliffside holes reachable from just out of town. They made a note but decided that finding the dwarf machinist was still their primary goal so they left the mystery of what was on the other side of the bridge for another day.

Not long after they found a place much as was described: a lone house, just out of town, with a large attached workshop and a great field in front of it. Before the field was a number of signs displaying symbols that clearly meant death. Esgorman idly wondered if there might be buried explosives but dismissed the idea as silly and impractical. Nonetheless, they endeavored to give their loudest shouts towards the house, to no apparent effect, and so considered going around, but Esgorman happened to have a whistle on him and gave it a blow. A stout, unkempt fellow with a long beard and a longer musket peeked around the corner of the workshop and shouted at them to go away; they'd found their dwarf. 

I gave them a couple slots of quantum inventory. The intention was to use that to forgo gametime shopping, one of the worst things in tabletop roleplaying games, and then have those slots exchanged for coin that could be used to buy whatever it was they wanted after the session. Alas, I didn't check up on this and so forgot to have them make the exchange. Esgorman's player CaptainSabatini would undoubtedly have bought his whistle anyways, so it's not a big deal. They'll just be a little more prepared than they might be in the near term.

mtb proposed just whistling with fingers, and that might have worked. While much ink is spilled about "OSR playstyle" (which shouldn't be because you should just play the game you want to play and not worry about labels or if you're doing it "correctly"), one elemnt of it is the importance of inventory. As such, if CaptainSabatini was willing to use up an inventory slot for an occassionaly useful whistle, then for tasks that use it, it should be as effective as can be. In other words, if they had tried without using the tool, it might elicit a roll. With the whistle, its a given.

Vorst instructed them how to cross the field without turning themselves into pink mist, Esgorman was shocked at how close he'd been to correct. The gruff fellow didn't much want anything to do without outsiders until he saw that they had his missing industrial tubing, which had been mistakenly taken to the Black Sail Inn and forgotten in the chaos of the Drain. He was extra unhappy to have to pay for it now, a second time, but seemed more keen to get back to work on his project, which he proudly showed them: an armored diving suit. Now of questionable usefulness, the dwarf inventor was nonetheless continuing to see it done as well as the assumption that things can always get worse. Such an attitude had served him well; after all, wasn't he the only one that seemed fine post-Drain, prepared as he was for such an eventuality? The players quietly noted that the dwarf probably had a lot of food stocked away.

He was looking for a last couple of items to complete his latest work, some rubber gaskets that might have gotten stolen by the shipbuilders, who were always greedily trying to steal what he needed for his creations, and some waterproof galoshes, which could certainly be found somewhere around town. The party promised they'd keep their eyes peeled.

The text calls for calipers instead of gaskets. Perhaps calipers have some other additional meaning, but from what I can tell they refer to a tool for measuring the size of small things. This doesn't at all seem like the sort of thing one would need to finish a diving suit (if they're needed at all how did he get this far?), and they also leave little hint of where it might be found without the dwarf straight-up telling you (is there some other machine shop in town?). I improvised rubber gaskets because water intrudes everywhere, no matter how hard you try to stop it, so something to help stem the tide will always be needed.

Knowing that they had passed the shipyard recently, they decided to stop there first. It wasn't a huge place, mostly an open yard where a half-finished boat sat on rollers and a two-story building lurking nearby. They immediately realized that they weren't alone when they saw movement in the windows of the upper story. They snuck up and attempted to work out what it might be, and considered attempting to ambush it, before eventually deciding to just knock and hope it's humanoid and friendly. Luckily, they were correct, and a fearful woman named Eleanor who worked for Dagweyn, who it turns out was very insistent on finding that boat hook he had told them about a couple days before, answered them. She had searched high and low for it and was beginning to think it wasn't in town. Manqoba deduced that the goblins might have taken the shiny object, and they offered a spot with them for the return trip, but she steadfastly refused. They did manage to find the box of rubber gaskets and shoved it into their packs on the way out.

Random encounter. I figured it would be more fun to place the potential threat at the destination rather than somewhere it could be avoided. Approaching openly would undoubtedly put someone at ease in such a situation, for the monsters don't knock, so I played her fairly forthcoming. The reaction roll to see if she would return with them was very low so she shied away, even willing to brave bandits alone rather than journey with them.

The most obvious place to find goblins would be the caves below Brost, so they stashed Hemmingway and his cart in a house and headed toward the path they saw. They found a gently sloping route along the cliff face, narrow but not dangerously slow, and quickly made their way into the cool darkness of the caves. Reeking of dying sea life, rotting kelp, stagnant puddles of seawater, and many, many chewed bones, it was an altogether unwelcoming place, and which only exits into a slimy tunnel half the height of a man. They quickly realized that they were ill-equipped for dungeon delving, carrying but a few torches and few weapons designed for cramped conditions. Manqoba ends up leading with his hunting knife while Fiske and Esgorman follow behind and hope for space to use their katana and pilgrim's staff, respectively.

Black Sword Hack treats all weapons as dealing 1d6 damage with two-handed weapons providing advantage on the roll. Many people have proposed clever options to give them more variety, the most common sort being weapon tags. The easiest way to add some is to take their size into account: two-handed weapons cannot be stashed on your person and so must be carried in your hands at all times, and cramped environments make them difficult to use. These commonsense disadvantages are a lot less objectionable than unexpected penalties to use.

Crawling through muck around several slime-covered bends in darkness relieved only by their sole torch, they soon found a tiny shelf sitting above the first real water they'd seen, a pool of salt water in a cavern just tall enough for them to stand and descending who knows how many feet into the depths. They glimpsed a dim light in the depths and seriously considered diving for it before deciding that discretion is the better part of valor. Seeing nowhere else to go, they turned to leave but spotted a glint of metal on the rocky ledge: the boat hook, safely stashed out of the water! They eagerly stashed it away and retreated back up the algae-covered passage and then back out and up into Brost, happy to be back in daylight.

The sun was setting and they still hadn't made it to the remaining beer so they decided to stay put for the night. They made it back to Hemmingway and did their best to unobtrusively barricade the building so they could camp out on its top floor. 

Unfortunately, their luck failed them, as a small party of clearly nonhuman figures made their way down the street under the dim light of the cloudy night. They looked to be patrolling, checking houses for stragglers and happened to check the very house the PCs were hiding within. It has a cart jammed inside the front door and the goblins are clever enough to realize that barricades mean someone is inside. The three crept around the sides of the building while the three adventurers waited breathlessly in the loft above, weapons drawn. 

As one crept up the ladder they got their first glimpse of the creatures occupying Brost, as the dimly glowing protuberance above its toothy face lit up in surprise as a staff, a katana, and a great axe all descended on it in unison. It falls, dead, to the bottom of the latter, but not before letting out a croaking gurgle. The two others, one much the same and the other holding a staff and with a small pouch hanging from its neck, quickly realize something is *up*, so the first watches while the second pulls something from the pouch and sprinkles it over the corpse. It stands up, head barely still attached, and quickly begins to climb the ladder.

Esgorman decided to drop from the top rope, crashing down on the anglergoblin shaman. Meanwhile, Fiske, who'd been itching to unleash his magic for days, happily summoned forth fearful whispers to assault the lone remaining unscathed goblin, provoking it into immediate retreat. Finally, Manqoba clashed with the headless one, taking a scratch for his efforts.

Fiske's sorcery reads Murmurs - The target hears strange whispers in their ears, revealing their darkest secrets. That's not a lot to go on. Monsters don't have saving throw in either Best Left Buried or Black Sword hack. So I ran it as a reaction roll, as I tend to do, with an assumed default of "scared" and let it tell me how the creature responded. I rolled highly, meaning it went in the player's favor, so I just decided it worked like a failed morale check. A mediocre result might have left it stunned, while a poor one (for the players) would have perhaps left it hesitant, or hesitant towards Fiske specifically.

People get too literal with attack rolls. It's not one roll equals one swipe of the sword. It's a roll to see how effective you were in a round of combat. Often that's a boring blow-for-blow in a melee, but doing something more interesting like tripping, disarming, or leaping down upon a foe are all combat actions, many of them explicitly taught in historical combat manuals (probably not a lot of the last one), benefitted by being skilled in combat. So just make an attack roll. If you need to see how effective if was, roll another die, usually the one reserved for damage. The quickest way to make your fighters boring is to make it about being strong or swift since they will never get better at that, while they will get continuously better at fighting. So avoid turning it into an ability check. Also only roll once: either an attack roll *or* a saving throw for the target, never both. There, now you don't need to figure out how to import Mighty Deeds from DCC.

In seconds the battlefield had transformed. Esgorman, now alone with the arcanist downstairs, dueled it staff to staff while shouting encouraging battle cries to his allies. Manqoba and Fiske worked together to shove the headless one back into the hatch. The gods were with them. With a crack Esgorman's staff connects with the goblin's head; with a crunch, the animated corpse lands awkwardly below and stills. The three catch their breath and decide that sleep is probably done for the night.

Huh, Best Left Buried monsters lack Morale values, or seemingly anything that can be easily converted into such a thing: all the major stats tend to cluster around 0, while Grip is sanity for the PCs and magic use for PCs and Monsters, so most will have 0 as well. A major oversight.

With the dawn, the group ran to the familiar tavern. It was much as they left it so they quickly loaded the two remaining kegs and started the journey back to Coiner's Shelf. Except for running into a carper carrying, strangely, a cartload of fishing encyclopedias, their two-day trip was uneventful. They bunked for the night back at Ogden's Tap and started planning their trip down onto the seabed for the first time.

Statistics

Days Passed: 10

Hexes explored: 0
Foes vanquished: 1 feral dog, 1 anglergoblin, 1 anglergoblin shaman
Treasure obtained: 300 previously + 190 for the kegs + 80 for the tubing = 570 coins
Money spent on hirelings: 90 coins
Questionable meals consumed: 24
Disgusting things eaten: Anglergoblin jerky, boiled dog.
Kegs recovered: 5

Party deaths: 0

Map

Episode 2 Notes

The party returns to Brost. I'm a little more prepared this time but my road encounters never show up. So it goes with dice.

The text continues to occasionally frustrate. It could do with some hyperlinking given how interconnected a lot of it is. For example, Brost is shown across a two-page spread. The sea caves where they found the hook point towards a table in the front of the book of random Anglergoblin lairs and also reference *Dagweyn's Fishhook* with a page number, which takes you to the NPC chapter which has an entry for Dagweyn which includes his task to find it. Thankfully it's only special for its sentimental value or else there would be a further reference to the special (usually magical) items section at the back. 

I don't think this is a particular problem with the structure of the text. This is a hexcrawl but it is far, far denser than a typical hexcrawl, with dozens of named figures, each of which has things they need hiding somewhere else in the world. This is what attracted me to it as a module, to be sure, after the nautical theme. There really isn't a way to organize the overall layout better than how they did it: the randomized locations, the named locations, the NPCs, the monsters, the special items, the special rules (sea rot, etc.), with quick reference charts on the inside covers. But such a format *will* involve page flipping for even simple uses, and page flipping calls out for hyperlinking in a PDF. It's a shame that didn't happen.

Hyperlinking would also involve an additional round of checking page numbers.  I've stumbled across incorrect references in play each session as well as during my prep. What's weird is that I've seen the editors of this text do fantastic work before (who I will leave unnamed while I criticize the text), so I don't know what happened here.

A big problem for cross-referencing is how monsters are handled. Monsters are listed in a big block with a standardized format: Mood, which is which table you roll on for attitude (more games should do this; sort of like how Troika does Miens but a bit less bespoke and a lot less work to produce); the basic stats of Brawn, Will, and Wit; Vigor, Armor and Grit; the type of weapon they use (but not any stats for it); the advancements (I think called Adaptations for monsters) it has; and finally any special notes. The advancements are where it gets rough. These are features common to many monsters. Some, like Aquatic or Fears the Light, are fairly obvious. Others are a little less obvious and have specific meanings within the Best Left Buried system but could be used for characterization. Disorganized, for example, utilizes some rules the system has for being surrounded; easy enough to play them that way. But there are others that essentially require checking the back of the module, the player's guide, the GM's guide, or the monster's guide for reference. If they all have the same list, that's pretty lame you have to pay for it three times. If they don't, that means you have to check four different books to find what, for example, "Spirits of the Beyond" means. Even worse, some of them are Player Character advancements which are found in an entirely different place. While it's pretty slick to use templates and standardized pieces remixed in various ways, it requires a lot of cross-referencing to track them all down. I had even gone to the trouble of exporting out just the monster advancements ahead of time and still found myself using the PDF search function to track down what things meant for a random encounter.

I'll point out for probably not the last time that I think this module is very cool. It's just a lot easier to point out the issues I have than to find effusive ways to compliment the text.

The players sound like they're finally ready to brave the seabed. I'm excited.