H&Y Infinite Open Table Session 5 Notes (Underworld Observatory) | Thoughts on open table session framing
In Attendance:
- Flamagio Delecino (Reeves) [elf]
- Aster the Veteran (Kimani) [human]
- Houtgrout Cavebuster (Wheezl) [dwarf]
Starting Date: Summer 10, 6023
Vincent Vanini, Flamagio's longtime mercenary and mule-guard, decides he would like to actually come along on these adventures he hears so much about and joins Flamagio's side as a Retainer. Flamagio decides that he wants to investigate the talk of Duergar beneath the earth to help Zavos break his curse, as the elf only stands 2'2" after the second shrinking and he doesn't have a lot of height left to lose.
Flamagio, Aster, Houtgrout and Vincent load up on supplies and sail north to the Buzzing Temple. Along the way, they pass a longboat full of Redmountain orcs on their way north to Dakssonhold after the events on Summer 05. The orcs greet Flamagio as they pass by. The party enters the Buzzing Temple through the River Gate, getting assurances from the monks that they'll watch the S.S. Eggbert as well as their mules as they travel down through the trapdoor beneath the cellar.
The party climbs down the ladder beneath the cellar, at least 1000 rungs. They wander through some natural caves below for 2 hours before coming to a small waterfall plunging into a hole in the floor. Aster lets down a rope and the group climbs down, finding themselves on a large balcony above yet another waterfall. They could tell that they were on the edge of a huge cavern filled with water, but couldn't see anything due to the size of the cavern and the limits of their lights.
Finding some doors into a complex at the other end of the balcony, the PCs found themselves in a hallway blocked in several places by rubble and cave-ins. They met a hooded and robed hunched-over traveler who called himself "Ramblin' Ralph" who asked them to trade, offering them [a magic helmet, 10 flesh rations, 3 flasks of basilisk blood, a silver knife]. Houtgrout traded his lantern, all of his candles, and his coins for the magic helmet. After purchasing, he determined it to be a Helm of Telepathy. Ralph informed the party that the duergar could be found to the southwest, through the complex.
The PCs headed south. They got to a rubble-blocked door in the middle of the hallway, the rubble looking purposefully placed. They cleared the rubble and checked the door, finding it to be warm and covered in condensation. They also heard the sounds of machinery (cogwheels turning, hiss of steam) from the other side of the door, and decided to open it.
Within was a cloud of steam and darkness. Flamagio entered the room to map the corner to his east, but ended up merely attracting the attention of the basilisk that was making the warm machine room its nest. As Flamagio's petrification set in, he cast Acid Geyser, dousing the giant snake in acid. The rest of the party attacked the basilisk with great fervor, dispatching it with a great imbalance in luck for both sides. Unfortunately, both Aster and Flamagio were petrified in the skirmish.
Houtgrout harvested the basilisk's blood quickly, guessing that the blood could be used to cure the petrification. He dumped blood on both Aster and Flamagio, luckily returning them to flesh. Vincent, Aster and Flamagio also all took pieces from the basilisk, respectively: 1 scale, a fang, and a basilisk eye. The commotion brought Ralph back from wherever he had gone, who exclaimed in happiness after seeing the dead creature. The merchant immediately began taking apart the machinery in the room, though he stopped after the PCs asked him to.
The party left the machine room through a door to the east labelled "Control Room" in Dwarven. They found a room of charts and levers, which Houtgrout immediately started pulling. They stopped pulling more levers after hearing the sounds of breaking machinery both from the machine room as well as a room to the east of them. They continued east and saw a giant telescope pointing through a hole in the roof, seemingly into solid rock. The party spent a while arguing about theories for why a telescope would be so far underground.
After determining that it was very possible the basilisk was the one that moved the whole complex nearly a half mile beneath the earth, the party continued exploring into a southern hallway. They saw that the hallway connected to the control room, the machine room, and a 3rd room that was farther west. They headed through that last door, finding themselves in a library full of books in Dwarven.
Flamagio, hungry for knowledge but unable to read Dwarven, immediately began a search for a book written in both Dwarven and Elven. The party found a wealth of books on the following subjects: the Scribe profession, Painting, Architecture, Rhetoric, and a few collections of personal letters. Houtgrout found a Tome of Stars written in Dwarven holding up a chair leg and a book analyzing the architecure of the current complex including a crude floorplan. Aster chose to continue southwest through a natural tunnel lined with books while the rest of the party looked through the study.
Aster traveled for 30 minutes before discovering another set of doors similar to the balcony doors to the complex above. The doors were labelled in Dwarven and Aster could see anti-elf graffiti through one of the doors. Aster returned, bringing the rest of the party to the doors. Houtgrout saw that the doors said "STREET ENTRANCE." The party entered.
Within the room beyond, the party encountered a scouting party of duergar exiting the room to the west. Flamagio acted quickly and pulled his hood up, fearing that the anti-elven graffiti from before was their doing. Houtgrout approached the duergar and spoke to them in Dwarven, learning much of the political landscape underground. The duergar were allied with "The Hungry Ones" and "the Dead Gods" against the Elves (w/ the Troglodytes) and "The Ones that Followed." From the descriptions the duergar gave of pointed red hats, the party surmised that "The Ones that Followed" were gnomish. Houtgrout struck such an impression on the duergar that they shared directions to the nearest duergar stronghold should the surface dwarf want to learn more of their ancient heritage.
Fearing additional complications in this new area, the party ventured back towards the study and the machine room. They left the study heading north, Aster disarming a trap containing a bucket full of firebombs. They went north from the hallway and walked into a room of Troglodytes camped out around a broken statue. Flamagio again acted quickly and spoke loudly, commanding the Troglodytes in Elven to leave the complex entirely. The Troglodytes feared that this elf they had never met was one of their elven masters and fled over the edge of the balcony to return to the friendlier territory.
The party continued north, finding an ancient storeroom with boxes of coins and sealed metal canisters of food paste. They kept going and entered a wrecked kitchen full of flour and some camoflaged creature rampaging around. Vincent killed the creature, breaking his spear in the process, while the PCs continued to hear more movement in the hallway beyond. Houtgrout flung a bag of flour into the hallway and split the bag open with their Bronze Wind spell. Aster flung a firebomb into the hallway into the fine flour, causing an explosion that made it easy for the rest of the PCs to finish off the creatures in the hallway.
The party continued through the last few rooms to loop back to the initial balcony, disarming an automatic crossbow trap on the way. They decided to camp out in the room with the automatic crossbow trap, ending the session and establishing an Outpost in the room.
230 XP per share, 460 xp for the PCs and 230 for Vincent. 21 coins per share from the splittable loot, each PC got 43 coins and Vincent got 22 coins.
Warning
Follows contains GM commentary. If you're a player at my table, do not read further unless you want to understand my underlying thought processes while GMing, which may change the experience for you.
Open Table Session Framing
One of the classic methods to run an episodic open table is to have every session begin and end in a central town. This ensures that every player character can participate in every session without breaking verisimilitude, because you can always assume that PCs are in the central town. This isn't the only way to frame open table sessions, but it is a fairly common method due to it solving a few large problems: nobody has to start a session in the middle of an adventure they didn't choose to go out on and you dont have to run a session in the nightmare scenario where none of the PCs that started an excursion are in the session that ends it. Under a paradigm where XP is given for gold returned to a safe area, it also makes a lot of sense to end every session with returning to a safe area to split loot and XP.
The problem with starting and ending every session in a central location is that unless you skip over large chunks of travel time, all excursions are limited to a fairly small area around the central location. PCs always have to be thinking about how to return back in time while also fitting in as much adventure as possible. It's unsatisfying as well to explore deeper locations because a group will skim through and grab all the easiest loot then leave, marking the location as "explored" in their notes and conversations to other PCs. If an area can't be explored in a single session, PCs begin to get reticent to explore it at all.
I've ran all of my past open tables strictly with the method described above. It worked well when I was just running "one page dungeon of the week" type content but I always felt a bit unsatisfied with that level of play. I began to elide travel procedures and encounters to preserve more session time for the week's dungeon itself. Players would never return to past dungeons because they would find half-looted and mostly-explored husks (even if I restocked it). This pushed me to write even more small dungeons so groups would have "fresh" content to go through. This went away from what I wanted with dungeon crawling, which was to flesh out the character of the world from repeat visits to locations.
The tactic I'm taking to fix this problem is to implement more "safe areas" for sessions to end in. I'm calling them Outposts and allowing any session with any PC to start and end from any Outpost as if they were the starting town. Here's the small procedure I provided my players on it:
Outpost Rules
If you clear the vicinity of an area, provide a source of renewable water and 12+ places to sleep, and clear a path of travel from Circlebrook / another Outpost to the area (don't need to expend travel resources beyond rations, so no ropes, pitons, etc needed), you can designate a single 50'x50' room or space an Outpost. You have to name it.
A session can start from any Outpost that exists, and you can return to an Outpost to end a session the same as returning to Circlebrook.
I'm hardly the first person to come up with such a change, solving the initial problem by just saying "there's more than one safe place to return loot to to gain XP" is I think a very straightforward solution. I do think it will alleviate a bit of the problems I mentioned above, specifically regarding a lack of domain play, a lack of incentive for characters to explore deeply, and a lack of ability for PCs to join an excursion mid-way out. Parties can delve deep into dungeons and adventure sites while knowing that they only need to return to an Outpost to end the session and get XP, not return all the way to the starting town. Any PC can start and end a session in any Outpost, reducing the amount of questions about how some characters end up in places they shouldn't be (though I'll likely need to implement a "travel" delay between sessions to allow for the actual travel of said characters). Adding an explicit procedure to establish a foothold in an area drives players to think about the surroundings in a domain-play state of mind, driving them also to think about faction-controlled territories as they start claiming territories of their own.
I think the procedure I described above is also not perfect. Mechanizing these Outposts is explicitly eliding the travel between them, to the detriment of skipping over a lot of the character of the world between them. The encounter during session that Flamagio had where he saw the Redmountain orcs won't happen if he's just travelling between Outposts "off-screen." I'm going to need to endeavor to show the character of the setting more during other travel and exploration to make up for the lack of it happening here.
If you've got ideas on the above, please feel free to reach out to me to discuss further via Discord (Domicilius) or Twitter (@DomiciliusPDX).