Three Princesses: Off the Beach
With the firsday’s business of survival done, Captain Jack Cardinal sets watch and orders his men to rest. To his three charges, princesses of the southern kingdoms, he admonishes caution.
It doesn’t work.
Shipwrecked on a mysterious island a thousand miles outside the known trade routes, our players have opted for exploration over rescue. In the dead of night, the PCs wake a selected few advisors/cannon fodder, and appoint the most charming of the three to sweet-talk the pickets into letting them explore the nearby woods.
Our players consist of a charming fighter named Izzy, a swoleceror named Maya, and a thief named Sycamore. Izzy rolls snake-eyes on her attempt to charm the pickets, and they immediately call over the burly and abrasive Captain Cardinal, who upbraids the girls for their fool-hardiness, reminds them that he only answers to the Emperor himself, and that they are to follow his orders to the letter. The very next of which is, get back to your bedrolls in the makeshift camp and get some rest. He assigns a guard to each of them, the better to ensure compliance, and the girls comply but make it known they are looking for a chance to escape.
Their chance comes the next morning as the first check for encounters indicates an attack of giant crabs! Since they are camped out on the beach near a broad river (subhex 8), one sensible random monster table for the moment is the Shallow Water encounters on page 180 of the AD&D DMG. Since the players are brand new to the game, we’re starting off with a stripped down Moldvay Basic, but I’m pulling inspiration from the AD&D three core rulebooks, and showing them how the dice can be trusted to make things more interesting. The check for encounters roll was made in the open, as was the roll to determine what the encounter would be. We went over a few of the possible results, and how we could have incorporated those had the dice come up different, for a couple of reasons:
- They need to know that whatever happens, we have the fun of rationalizing and explaining some sense into things. We don’t have to micro-manage events. In a game like RPGs, a part of the fun comes from solving the mysteries of why weird results happened.
- They need to see that there are whole other worlds out there, and just announcing a results leaves too much of the backend of the game unexplained and unexplored by them.
As it was, the giant crabs burst from the sand, hungry and annoyed at the interlopers on their beach. Two giant crabs lunged at the nearest sleepers, and several rounds of combat ensued. Captain Cardinal, in the van, leapt at the crabs as our heroes stayed safely out the way – as ordered – and took a terrific wound before being dragged away from the melee by his first mate. The girls merely lobbed a few desultory arrows at the monsters, being more cautious than expected. After two rounds of combat, the swoleceror noticed that nobody was watching, and suggested that this was the distraction they needed to make a clean getaway.
The others agreed, and paused only long enough to grab the nearest supplies before making a break for the woods. You’ll notice on the map that the woodline lies almost a mile to the northwest, several minutes away even at a sprint. Some talk was made of stealing the ship’s launches and rowing up-river, but the low line of dunes screening the woods covered them almost long enough to almost make a clean getaway. As their party, large by normal standards, entered the woods, they glanced back to find a large party of sailors cresting the dunes in hot pursuit.
Into subhex 5 they plunge, and Maya’s woodsmen prove handy as they leave false trails, stage slowing ambushes, and a few non-deadly traps to slow pursuit. Still, the crew can hear the angry shouts of the Captain as they plunge through the light fringe and into the deeper woods. A mile into the woods, they cross a wide clearing when Father Dolsom, a priest of the line of Malkyzidex, hisses at them to take cover. Overhead, a strange lion-unicorn hbrid, purplish of hue with a striking silver mane, gallops through the skies overhead. After a whispered conversation, Izzy calls out to the thing, which begins to circle around, cautiously curious about the large armed band of strangers.
Murtaj, an imposing fighter with a massive two handed sword ready to defend the Lady Sycamore mumurs, “I can hear it. In my head.” The thing has reached out, telepathically, to what it assumes is the leader, and in this manner the princesses coax the thing to the earth. He asks why they run from the others and why they don’t turn and slaughter them, and is pleased to hear that they don’t want to kill the Captain and crew, just escape. Reassured they are good people, he introduces himself as Mustafar and tells them to strike southwest for the cliffs. There they can lose the Captain, and Mustafar promises to draw the men of the Skyhook away to the north.
Taking his advice they soon come to a long line of cliffs in Subhex 13, only fifty feet high where they stand but growing every higher to the south. After following the cliff line for a short ways, one of the men spots a cliff entrance half-way up, and Izzy calls her spellmaster Peter Parker to the fore. The young wizard casts spider climb and hauls a rope up to the first dungeon of the campaign. He descends after hauling Murtaj up, and now the girls with a half-dozen retainers choose to explore the dangers of the mythic underworld.
They really got a lot accomplished in this first session. Not only did we get the first combat, we ran an easy pursuit, did some light inter-party role-play, but even got a taste of the random reaction table. The passing Ki-Rin might have proven hostile, but for the charms of Lady Izzy. Anyone who thinks Charisma is a dump stat just got schooled by a ten year old girl. She turned what could have been a terrible encounter into a ‘get out of pursuit free’ card.
By way of analysis, these girls have way too many retainers to keep track of. In an effort to give them the option of doing a lot of downtime activities, I gave each of the three NPCs ten nameless soldiers/sailors/woodsmen to command. The thinking was that these men would serve as de facto hit points and allow for attrition without completely dead-ending the campaign with a TPK. By starting off with a more resource heavy game, and asking them to consider the risks and rewards of sending men out die, the hope was to avoid the snares that caught so many gamers in the late 70s and early 80s.
We’re still selling the game on these girls, who mostly think of D&D in the way that normies think of it. They been exposed to it through the usual means of the modern era – shows like Stranger Things and Big Bang Thingy or worse…Critical Role *shudder*. Unlike the “been playing this way for 40 year crowd”, these girls don’t have decades of bad habits to break. You can just explain a different way to play, and they just adapt and adjust and enjoy the game for what it is rather than what they think it should be.
In our next post, you’ll see that this problem should solve itself readily enough. The massive party of men will make for a good base of operations and pool of talent to draw from, but will mostly be tasked with defending the rudimentary basecamp established at the end of the session. You have to wait for next week to hear about that, though, we’re already way over our word count for today.
Teaser alert: We are absolutely playing in 1:1 time, and the girls instantly understood how it works. Thank you for your service, Animal Crossing.