[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...

[Loot] All Things Dragonbane

In the chaos of packing my shit for the big journey to Cauldron Con I did not have time to appreciate last Tuesday's delivery. The postman surprised me with two thick cardboard envelopes chock full of Dragonbane goodies.

Forgot to include the dice. Believe me, they too are nice.

The thinner one was from Free League, containing Path of Glory, a remake of the classic Drakar och Demoner campaign, Ärans Väg. Like the standalone Dragonbane Rulebook and Bestiary, it's a full colour book with glossy cover, sturdy pages, and solid binding. It seems more coherent and more interesting than the smorgasbord of adventures in the core boxed set's Adventure book. There is also a neatly folded map in the back of the book.

Sneak peek from the completely rewritten chapter 3.

The chunkier package is Windheim, a third party campaign by Nordic Skalds, which funded on Kickstarter last year. The package consist two hardcovers, the adventure The Horn of the Dawn Part 1: Traces of Darkness and the supplement Windheim Companion, along with a set of icy blue dice, and a couple sturdy maps. The books have similar production values to the official Free League hardcovers, except for one thing: they have a matt cloth cover, which is superior to the glossy cover of the Dragonbane hardcovers. Covers aren't the only thing that catches the eye, the interiors are pretty too, especially the full page illustartions. What surprised me is that the authors didn't try to imitate Free League's sleek modern in-house style, but went with something that feels right out of the nineties.

High quality third party publishing reared its head
in the Dragonbane community. 

Alas, I have no clue when can I finally read them - I have a HackMaster Basic to gush about, a HarnMaster: Kethíra to read, and a Cauldron Con to write a recap for.

[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

[PSA] HackMaster in Bundle of Holding

How the HackMaster community will look like
when the new edition is finally announced.

HackMaster is now on sale on Bundle of Holding. It is a game near and dear to me, one that I have fond memories of, one that I yearn to run again. Alas I have to bid my time till the stars are right again, and I can sleep through the night without getting woken up 2d4p times by my daughter. You, on the other might be luckier than me. And if you are, then what better could you do with your surplus time and energy, than read, play, and run the best game ever developed by mankind?

The Player Collection costs $12.95 and gets you the following:

• The Player's Handbook, which holds the finest medium-high crunch class and level-based fantasy role-playing ruleset within its hallowed pages.
• The first two Zealot's Guides, for those who need more flavourful religions and clerical spells in their game.
• In the Realm of the Elm King and Legacy of the Elm King, two introductory adventures. They involve bugbears, who eat children, like all bugbears should.
• A bunch of resources you can download from the internet, but now neatly collected in one place.

The GameMaster Collection's threshold is at $29.31 at the moment and contains the following:

• The GameMaster's Guide, which actually contains advice and more rules for GameMasters. Shocking, isn't it?
• The Hacklopedia of Beasts, the most stunning monster book ever. It even has silhouettes, like the dinosaur books of my childhood!
• Frandor's Keep, a little sandbox on the borderlands.
• More free shit from the internet.

If you can't decide, feel free to check out HackMaster Basic, a free rulebook that contains pregens, rules, and content up to level 5, or buy HackMaster Basic Plus for a buck, which goes up to 10 and even has character creation.

And of course while we are at it, don't forget to get the best rpg's best character sheets.

I've been quite hyped for HackMaster lately. Kenzer and Jolly have been teasing a revised edition for a while now. A Kickstarter was promised for this year, then for the next year, and they have been pretty dormant since they've lost Steve Johansson, so I'm not holding my breath. But since it's become a meme that whenever I turn up on reddit I either recommend some d100 game or HackMaster, I think it's time to give the devil his due, and write some reviews for the rulebooks - starting with the now out of print, original HackMaster Basic.

Plus it's easier on the long to just link a blogpost than write it down again why people should care about the game. It's also good for the blog's traffic...

[Session] Fauxhammer S03E04: Dead Zeppelin

Red guy turned out to be
a red herring.

The rest of the family was out of town for a week, so I seized the opportunity to hold a fourth session for our Mordschlag campaign on the 4th of April. I used the last few months to digest player feedback and overhaul the core system to something closer to WFRP1e in feel. The most significant changes include transitioning to twelve attributes instead of ten, using the units of the attack roll to determine hit location, rolling d6 for damage, introducing Mythras-like special effects, and a experimenting with a freeform skill system. The feedback was surprisingly positive, so I feel I'm on track now and not just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.

I'm a big fan of train levels in first-person shooters. We had one in the last season, where the party attempted to escape a speeding skaven train. It was one of the most memorable adventures in the campaign. I thought it was time to try another adventure where they are confined to a small enclosed space with something dangerous - this time, in air!

Dramatis Personae

Blitzkrieg, dwarf veteran slayer: Half-deaf, naked, and in possession of a magical axe he fished out from the belly of the legendary Moby Squig. He is on his way to Altdorf to find the love of his life: the dwarf priestess Agonia.

Edgar, human [redacted] (cameo): The former monster slayer's skin turned black and white after a short trip to the Realms of Chaos, where he saw several of his clones crucified, was granted apocalyptic visions, and obtained an ominous sword. He is also followed by the black and white horse of a former Chaos warrior.

Paether von Sternwart, human astromancer: Eager to get back to Altdorf, graduate as an archmage, and put his elven sword back into the daemon prince it was pulled out of.

Ruben Schultz, human mercenary captain: Downtrodden Sylvanian noble on his way back home from a Breatonnian trip. He firmly believes there are no vampires in Sylvania. 

Rudolf Fürst, human ex-daemonologist (NPC): Former student who summoned a herald of Slaanesh, caused some trouble, and was beaten into becoming Ruben's squire.

Session Report

The party concluded the last session with their balloon hanging from the nose of a dwarven zeppelin. Following a short rescue mission they met Roli Balderson, the wheelchair-bound captain of the ship. They learned the airship is carrying passengers between Araby and Marienburg. Roli offered the party a free trip to Altdorf as compensation for the accident. However, he cautioned them against visiting the city. Since the incident at the docks there is a sickening green smog hanging over the streets, weird folks are gathering there, the decent ones are leaving in throngs, and the emperor is dying.

In the first half of the session the party got to know some of the crew and passengers.

• Squinting Skegi was the half-eyed navigator of the ship. He was rarely seen out of the map room or away from the window with a telescope on his remaining eye.
• Mighty Margit was the leader of the stevedores. She had the lovely voice of a long-time smoker and whiskey drinker. She had a crush on Blitzkrieg since the moment she met her.
• Hardy Harald was the dirty chef with a permanent scowl on his face and froth leaking from the corner of his mouth. He showed a surprising amount of respect towards Blitzkrieg because his brother was also a slayer - one who died early in his career.
• Benjamin Hill was a halfling stand-up comedian. It was a miracle he wasn't thrown out of the airship earlier for his jokes.
• Rüdiger von Kopfsmerz and his family were the quintessential irritating imperial nobles who thought the world revolved around them.
• Alfonz Verpacken was the Kopfsmerz family's valet. They didn't bother booking him a room, so he travelled in the storage with the luggage.
• Faqir al-Gebra introduced himself as an Arabyan envoy. In reality, he was a Strigany charlatan trying to rip people off by gambling. His latest victim was Rüdiger, who lost some money and family jewels while playing with the "envoy". Blitzkrieg tried his luck against him. The dwarf lost a small sum and couldn't prove the "Arabyan" was cheating.
• Professor Heinz Burgsch was an academic from the Altdorf University specialized in Nehekharan archaeology. On his latest dig, he discovered an undisturbed tomb in the Land of the Dead. He packed a few sarcophagi containing the remains of a priest and some of his warriors on the airship. Paether had a long discussion with him about his discoveries while Blitzkrieg was gambling.

Skegi discovered that a green cloud was coming from the direction of Altdorf, which they didn't have the time to evade. Roli told everyone to return to their rooms and prepare for turbulence. Paether started getting headaches from the warp dust cloud.

Far from their tombs
they still guard.

The adventurers, of course, didn't heed the captain's warnings. Ruben and Blitzkrieg wanted to search the sarcophagi, fearing that the cloud would raise the dead or cause some magical bullshit. They even bought garlic and salt from Harald at a ridiculously high price. Meanwhile, Paether realized they haven't seen Rudolf for a while, so he went looking for him before he caused any trouble.

They all met at the storage room at the back of  the gondola. They didn't find any sarcophagi, but they saw Benjamin getting ripped apart by a pair of red arms that disappeared into the darkness with a bang coming from above. Among the boxes, they found Rudolf in the middle of a protective circle. He told Ruben that he heard some weird noises from above, panicked, and summoned a Bloodletter of Khorne to protect himself. Then he lost control of the daemon. After Ruben disciplined his squire, they all climbed up through the trapdoor to hunt down the daemon.

The adventurers found themselves in a huge labyrinthine cargo bay full of crates. Claw marks showed the creature's path, but the adventurers had no time to track them as the shambling corpses of the dwarven stevedores attacked them. After beating them down, they scrutinized the corpses and realized that they weren't killed by the daemon.

While Ruben and Blitzkrieg held back another wave of zombies deeper in the cargo bay, Paether zealously followed his daemon-slaying elf sword's light. He found the Bloodletter climbing up a crate in an Exorcist-like spider-climb. Paether killed the daemon with a single strike, but then acid started spraying from the screaming corpse. The acid burned the wizard, but Ruben pulled him out of the acidic stream's path, which kept flowing for a minute before stopping.

After the last wave of zombies, ancient khopesh-wielding skeletal warriors showed up. While the two warriors quickly dispatched them, the skeletal remains started to move again. While they were busy destroying them, a cackling voice called forth a cloud of scarabs, gravely wounding Ruben and slightly wounding Blitzkrieg. They followed the caster to the other end of the cargo bay, where Paether stunned another bunch of undead stevedores with a stormblast, then climbed down through another trapdoor to the entry hall, and burst into the lounge, where they finally met the mummy wielding a Scarab staff and a meteoric iron khopesh. In a quick and brutal battle, Paether disarmed the mummy's staff-wielding hand with a magical blast. Literally, Ruben was gravely wounded, but in the end, the adventurers prevailed.

Once the danger was over and they left the cloud, the professor got a bitchslap from the captain for bringing dangerous cargo on the ship, Blitzkrieg received special treatment from Margit, and everyone got a warm handshake for saving the day. As the airship reached Altdorf, Margit visited the adventurers to give each one of them a backpack 

[Update] Irons in the Fire

How it felt cutting the
umbilical cord.

With the birth of my daughter and my son being in his Terrible Twos, my life is once again in turmoil. I hope we!re going to reach a point where we adapt or no longer give a crap about the current situation in a few months. In the meantime I'll spend my limited free time with the following:

• Mordschlag: Since we're done with Death's Dark Shadow and on the threshold of a new chapter, it is about time I analysed player feedback and overhauled the mechanics. One thing everyone agreed on was that they like random hit locations rolling for damage. I'm also thinking about reintroducing some of WFRP1e's lost characteristics and introducing a more freeform skill system.
• Eremus: Because I got extremely bored of running Old-School Essentials and wanted to referee something that isn't D&D, I converted the Eremus campaign to Mythras. In-game the changes were explained by a cataclysmic event that started messing up the setting. After four sessions we decided to finish the campaign using Mythras. I had the opportunity to run the campaign's penultimate adventure again after a major overhaul on Kalandorok Társasága using OpenQuest. It was a blazing fast and endlessly amusing session.
• Dragonbane: I'm aching to give this game finally a shot. I have a lot of issues with some of its design decisions, but I fucking love this game and its community. I'm planning to run a conversion of Legendary Duck Tower as a Jaquays memorial game once I'm done with one of the above campaigns. Once have some actual experience, I'll definitely write a proper review for Dragonbane.

I don't dare to plan more for this year. I'll do my best to blog about all the above though, so get ready for more house rules, conversion notes, and even less reviews.

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