[Travelogue] Cauldron Con, Saturday and Sunday

Saturday: Tigers & Taverns

After a hearty breakfast, I played in Der Oger's Tower of the Tiger Tyrant. Our party started in a camp at the end of a valley, where the titular tower — a legendary site of a bygone era — stood. After hearing some rumours about hobgoblin amazons, a water spirit, and the tower itself, we hired ten horsemen and began our journey into the valley. Our hex crawl didn't last long: after evading a hunting chimera we discovered a floating balcony over a river. Hobgoblins were feeding the hungry eels that lived in the water. We ambushed them, left our mercenaries behind to guard our back, and climbed the aerial structure.

Behind its door was a storage room, beyond which awaited our doom. It turned out we had both found a shortcut into the tower and alerted everyone within. What followed was a tense and seemingly never-ending encounter with hobgoblins, their mother, their beastmaster, and two smilodons. Those goddamn cats had hit points like a truck — and hit like one too. It was mostly sheer luck that we survived. I vividly remember my character lying on the cold floor for half the encounter, too busy trying not to bleed out, and praying to the gods that a smilodon wouldn’t hit him again.

Once we prevailed, we wandered around a bit. We evaded further encounters, picked the diamonds out of a vault door that was meant to hold something back, had some weird hallucinations of dead sisters, and activated an ancient defence mechanism that carpet-bombed the valley into oblivion. Remember how the sessions in the first report all ended with more henchmen than we started with? Not this one... While this session began a bit slowly and we were acoustically challenged till the end, it still ended up becing a fun gonzo science-fantasy romp. Fingers crossed we'll see this one published.

The moment where shit hit the fan.

Grützi ran Lipply's Tavern, which was published in the Adventure Sites I compilation by Coldlight Press. Can one create a tavern adventure, which has a cool layout and engaging exploration? Turns out the answer is yes. Lipply's halfling hill complex has everything a proper dungeon needs: multiple entrances, two levels, loops, branches, secrets, traps... Our Dungeon Master utilized every piece of technology at his disposal to ensure we didn't have to do any mapping. I'm thankful for that, because the tavern didn't seem to have a single straight corridor or 90-degree corner in it.

Our zealot-heavy party ventured into the old, burnt-down tavern to investigate if it has anything to do with recent disappearances. It turned out the owner owed both his fortune and his eventual demise to making a deal with a devil. His ghost still haunted his old office, waiting for someone to bury his corpse in sacred ground to free his soul. Meanwhile, an imprisoned erinyes waited in the cellar for someone to release her, so she could claim the halfling's soul. If this wasn't enough, a bunch of giant spiders had taken over one of the upper sections, while an entire orc tribe had tunnelled into the tavern from below, and began refurnishing it into their lair.

On our first trip, we smoked out some spiders, explored Lipply's known and secret offices, massacred half the orc tribe, stopped our thief from making a deal with the devil, and escaped with Lipply's corpse. After giving him a proper burial, we returned for a second round to clear out any leftover orcs. They expected our return and were better prepared this time, but not enough to make us sweat. We cleared the entire place and rode off into the sunset with fat loots. A damn fine adventure, I can wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone.

High adventure using high tech devices.

This year's auction featured a bunch of awesome items for sale, many offered to support the noble cause — aka Cauldron Con. As usual, it was filled with moments of friendly trolling, duels of will, great losses, and great victories. Settembrini has a knack for presenting even the biggest piece of trash as something worth dying for, which made the whole event immensely amusing. I didn't pick up anything this year, since I already paid a small fortune on a stack of HackMaster 4e books Iudex saved for me.

Sunday: Awards & Au Revoirs

Since Sunday was sabotaged by the castle's owners, there were no official sessions that day. I do remember Melan holding a guerilla session in the morning. We packed our shit, threw out our trash, had breakfast, then patiently loitered around until the closing ceremony. I was pretty satisfied with the magyar raiding party's results. Chomy, Premier, and I earned a runner-up certificate for our participation in Children of the Sea. Our group looted the most treasure and would have won if we hadn't suffered three casualties. Premier also got a small cauldron for "human resource management", for having the most hirelings and henchmen on an adventure. Of course, it helped greatly that he participated in a naval wargame with a fleet rowed by 800 slaves...

Settimbrini announcing his future plans for dominating the german scene.
Behind him his family, who put the "awww" in "awwward ceremony".

Leaving the con was bittersweet. Behind every handshake was a shared adventure, a sense of camaraderie, or at least a foggy memory of having a drink together. There wasn't an ounce of enmity between the players, despite all the conflicts their characters had with each other over the last few days. Alas, the farewell also meant that many of us won't see each other again for a year.

The journey back was mostly long and uneventful. I'm now eagerly waiting when the registration for Cauldron Con 2025 starts. It will be at a different place, it will be bigger, and I'm pretty sure it will be better too. Kudos to every organizer, staff, player, and DM who participated! I hope we'll see each other again soon. If any one of you is planning to visit Budapest until then, drop me a line.

I'm off to Lisbon soon. Once I'm back, I'll compile and share my remaining photos of the event.

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[Travelogue] Cauldron Con, Thursday and Friday

Thursday: Bratwürste & Brauereien

Thursday morning we left Neubiberg in a black Mercedes we christened "The Hearse". We stopped in Bamberg for lunch. We marvelled at the town's old half-timbered buildings, majestic churches, and visited Schlenkerla brewery for some sausages and smoked beer. Awesome place, I can't wait to visit it again.

Bamberg, the perfect place if you need some Oldhammer inspiration.

We arrived to  Schloss Hohenroda late afternoon. While that night's Braunstein game was tempting, Chomy and I decided to do some "networking" instead using the two and half bottles of pálinka I brought with me. We were too tired anyway to meaningfully participate.

The Hungarian OSR pope packing out from his carriage.

Friday: Corsairs & Corpses

Friday's first session was Jonathan Becker's tournament module, Children of the Sea. Our referee was Philippe, who turned out to be such an expert in AD&D1e, that in the end I just asked stuff from him instead of borrowing rulebooks - except for casting times. Our quest was to retrieve the Hand of Saint Emma from an old temple that was repurposed as a pirate base.

We assaulted the temple from above, through an opening at its roof. Our magic-users put a bunch of pirates to sleep with Sleep (duh) and we killed their pet wyvern as it ascended from below. We left one survivor to interrogate, who told us that the hand was already used by captain Rodrick to bypass a tunnel of shadows in the undertemple, but he hasn't returned yet. We found the tunnel, got ambushed by shadows from above (typical Becker), turned the shit out of them, met Rodrick, who turned into a crab-mummy hybrid by the time we arrived.

After a good start he fled south thanks to my cleric's turning. Following him we ran into three sea hags (typical Becker), who got an Ice Storm and Fireball in their faces. They resisted them all and still got pissed. That manoeuvre cost us three characters, plus Chomy's and Premier's friendship. After we fled we finally killed Rodrick in a cave, and levitated up a shithole to meet his second in command and some leftover crew. Later we learned that the shithole was literally a latrine, which explained why they were surprised to see us coming up. Anyway, after murdering them we returned to the undertemple, found the hand, looted a shitton of treasure, and escaped with the pirate ship. Good times!

Not our proudest moment.

In the afternoon we played a true classic: baexta ran Lichway from White Dwarf #9. Prince of Nothing wrote a pretty good review of it. I was becoming sleepy by the afternoon thanks to the food, beer, and snoring roommates, but after the prelude the game shook me up. We faced most of the iconic encounters of the dungeon, from the whimsy to the creepy. 

After freeing him from bandits, we became "henchmen" of a delusional guy thinking himself to be a magic-user and the husband of Odo, the sorceress who moved in to the ancient tombs. We murdered some goblins torturing a stirge, then turned the remaining two into followers of Ra - and our henchmen. Just in time so the newly joining Michael could take them over! We met some xvarts, laughing at halfling jokes while on break. We walked the mammoth halls, where over 600 corpses were sleeping only because of the eerie music of the weird wicker man-like creature whistling in the silver cage at the southern end of the dungeon.

Since we didn't have a better goal, our more zealous members thought we should hunt down Odo. After alarming some of her minions though, the tides turned, and we were basically chased out by her companions from the dungeon. While I was diving in a flooded room, looking for treasure and an exit, the party was cornered by Odo, but someone popped a Wall of Fog to keep her away while everyone escaped. I wish we had another session so we could return with a vengeance.

The original NAP champion shitposting in the middle of a Lichway run.
Iudex is trying to remember if he has the White Dwarf issue with the module.

The rest of the night was spent with more "networking". To be continued...

[Travelogue] Into the Cauldron

It was 5:30 in the morning when I got out of the bed in Neubiberger Hof. Even far from home I woke up three times during the night to listen if the kids are asleep, only to realize I'm all alone in a room and I'm an idiot for messing up my opportunity to sleep well. That's what you get for eating german food all night long.

Of course excitement didn't help either. Today our humble magyar raiding party (Chomy, Iudex, Melan, Premier, and yours truly) leaves for Schloss Hohenroda, to meet all the OSR luminaries, fans, and freaks, who attend to Cauldron Con.

It will be tons of fun. Especially if the beer is free this year too.

I lost 4 kgs just for this trip.

Early haul I got from the absolute gent Iudex
and the remains of some good homebrew pálinka.

Neubiberg by Night