DivineDetritusRichesInTheSwamp

April 1 to April 4, 1236

"Merki here. Time to cash in that favor. Please meet me in my office at the East Ferren Trading Company right before lunch."

With that message, the party is summoned to their mutual supervisor, Merkinalious Urgh at the East Ferren Trading Company. He is eager to give them a top secret mission, and explains it is their sudden and unannounced vacation.

Merki talks about an angel named Perseverance. It focused on rallying people to subvert and rebel authority. It often wore a headband that many believe have magic properties. Merki wants the party to visit its last known location, Terria Swamp aka the Swamp of Despair. It is about 1 day’s travel outside of town by horse, which would be available on April 2nd.

Norvi is preoccupied on a special mission and is unavailable for the initial outing, but the rest of the party spends the day getting ready for a long outing. The next morning, Fi gives some of the more urban characters a quick primer on riding horses and the party travels along the road for most of the day.

During the evening, the party notices an abandoned caravan in a campsite. It isn’t abandoned and they party notices an elven merchant named Audren and his half-elven daughter Selina trying to hide from bandits. They have heard about the Gulliver Bandits, who split from the Magmere Construction Company, a recently exposed criminal organization. Everyone decides to stick together for the night.

On April 3, the merchants continue their trip to Harvest Wharf and the party heads the other direction toward the Swamp of Despair. Reaching the swamp, Fi decides to cover the search over two days, avoiding the large pond that separates the swamp. The swamp is eerily quiet, devoid of all life besides some dying plants.

Fi notices two people notice the party and run off. Vegeta gives chase and reaches a bandit camp. All 12 members of the camp exit and begin marching in perfect step, moaning “Throw them into the morass.” Everyone manages to defeat the bandits, although Vegeta is knocked out. As soon as the bandits are defeated, they die instantly. They do find some loot from the camp, including an item that belongs to one of Fi’s friends.

• Longbow
• Thorn Bracer
• 3 bolas
• 2 Studded Leather Armor
• Light Steel Shield
• 10 gp in coins
• Stash of gems
• Leather armor

The party leaves the swamp to sleep for the night outside of the moist swamp. On April 4th, the party heads toward the large pond. In fact, the pond is so large that Fi can’t see how long it is - the only effective way is to knock a rotting tree over and walk over the pond. Norvi’s incredible strength knocks down the tree, and Vegeta tests the tree’s stability. As soon as Vegeta closes in on the pond, the party is overwhelmed by a feeling of hopelessness and despair. Hawk, Norvi and Fleir are in fact so depressed they decide to walk into the pond and try to drown themselves. There are already about forty bodies in there, seemingly members of the Gulliver Bandits. Fi, Vegeta, Nidri and Claire manage to rally to rescue everyone. Fi especially chips in by leaping into the pool and swimming Fleir to shore.

Vegeta grabs a rope, crosses the fallen log and holds the rope to guide everyone else. Fi goes last and helps cross. The party continues along and actually sees a wolf in the swamp. Unfortunately they do not see the goblin hiding in ambush, who quickly opens fire and sics 3 giant flies at them. Vegeta distracts one of them, while Norvi quickly crushes another. Fi and Fleir kill the third and brave the goblin’s many arrows. They even avoid a direct hit from a flask of alchemist’s fire!

The goblin calls herself Reeta Headeeta, and giggles whenever she is hit. She thinks Claire shoots pretty fire, and doesn’t want to hurt “the divvy.” She thinks Fleir was poorly trained and his trainer stinks. Fi decides that insult was personal and quickly shoots Reeta while Fleir chews on her arm. Giving up the ghost, Reeta asks daddy to help her out and she bursts into flames! Her wolf quickly charges and bursts into flames, scorching Fi. Luckily Nidri is nearby to heal everyone.

From Reeta's remains:

• 1 Dogslicer
• 1 Small Longbow
• 1 flask of Alchemists's Fire
• 2 quivers
• 20 arrows
• 10 gp

Looking around, some of the members spot a headband. Claire identifies it as some kind of angelic headband and wears it. It glows blue as it conforms to her forehead. On the way out, the pond of hopelessness has shrunk, and even though Nidri slips and falls in she has no trouble climbing out. The party soon makes their exit from the swamp, and begin discussing their trip home.

Post Mortem

Things that went well

roll20.net

The first step was to find a way to actually play the game asynchronously. We’re all busy, we have different schedules and responsibilities and meeting one day per month is hard enough. However, it’s pretty easy to type into a web browser and send a message. I couldn’t decide between roll20.net and using utter-chaos + Google Draw to handle multiple people and battle maps. Chris convinced me against utter-chaos (mainly by forcing me to build and maintain it), and he and Dan convinced me to try roll20 (Chris liked the features and Dan is a veteran on the site.)

The hardest part was finding decent tokens - sometimes the search works and sometimes it gives me nonsense. I’m already subscribing to them, but I can draw my own stuff. Fun!

loose initiative

Initiative is “before the enemy”, “the enemy”, and “after the enemy”. I used a handout to keep track of everyone’s turn and add status ailments. The big reason to order initiative this way is to reduce waiting. You may as well give your action when you’re online. Most of the team is working together anyway, so they would normally delay and try to make an optimal turn.

An idea I thought up during the first combat was to ask for queued actions. You tell me what you plan to do next turn and if it’s still valid, I’ll do it automatically if you’re offline. If you’re online, I’ll ask if that’s what you want to do. It keeps battle moving.

Things that could go better

Making sure everyone has a chance to participate

I was worried people wouldn’t stay active (someone not posting kills Play by Post pacing), so I made an informal rule that if all but 1 person were here I would keep going. Unfortunately this means if the party is in combat and one person is missing, I either stop the run when the missing person’s turn comes up, or I skip their turn entirely.

Take the battle against Reeta and her giant flies, for example. Norvi’s round 1 action was pretty clear: kill the giant fly in front of him and move up to engage Reeta. After that though I should have stopped and waited for Dan to give input. I don’t mind auto-piloting PCs if the decision is negligible (ie RPing during the day) or obvious (melee unit is locked in melee, continue melee combat) but I don’t want to fully overtake a PC. That steals the element of choice from the Player, and that’s no fun.

Avoiding marathon sessions

The other reason I should have stopped that Reeta battle was because we were all up until midnight completing it. It was a Saturday night, but I should have called it early and finished up on Sunday. I didn’t plan too much more after that fight and I had to scramble to make new material for the next quest. I had a decent idea of what I wanted to do, but I definitely want to avoid “making stuff up” or enforcing a downtime break when the party catches up sooner than I expected.