Esoteric Enterprises - Welcome to Salt Bay - Weekend With Good Friends Special

I ran another game of Esoteric Enterprises for the latest Good Friends of Jackson Elias Virtual Convention.

I used the same pitch as last time. I got two players, both last minute signups

• James -  Occultist with a sword-cane
• Rick - Lockpicking drug addict
  

They started off at the Love Shack, same as last time. I took the job from the previous convention off the list, which left the players with the following:

• I've got a line to a collector who wants art from the underground gallery to the North.
• Druid drugs are always a hot commodity. They've got a secret grove somewhere under the West side.
• Guy in the underground frontier pays good money for "dungeon meat". What's dungeon meat? Anything, once you kill it.
• Neighborhood Association isn't too happy about the abattoir re-opening. They'd pay big money to shut it down

The players decided to look for the dungeon druids. They could steal their stash and sell it, or just smoke it all. A win, either way. They went into the backroom of the Love Shack and descended into the dungeon.

 

The Manor of the Giant Arminius - Masterpost

The Giant Arminius is dying. Rebels have besieged his manor, fed up with the Giant’s endless raiding for food, slaves and plunder. His children and their human Soldiers mount a desperate defense. Now would be an excellent time for an adventurer to steal his treasure - before his favorite daughter Morwenna arrives to break the siege, and hear her father’s dying words. 

 

By Gustave Doré

The Manor of the Giant Arminius is a system-neutral dungeon crawl for players of varying levels. It's an attempt to correct some stuff I wasn't happy with about a module called Castle Gargantua, while preserving both the atmosphere and the part where you get to climb on the giant furniture. It's got ghouls, wizards, grotesque magical experiments, peasant rebellions, cults of Dionysus, man eating hogs, man eating hog-men, gunfights, guerrilla warfare, giant undead babies, and a whole lot of treasure to steal.

 

The dungeon isn't intended for any particular level or party size. Low level parties can avoid the worst fights by hiding, running, or talking their way past the NPCs, grab a couple giant treasures and get the hell out. High level parties can tackle threats head on, then loot whole rooms full of giant size items at their leisure.

I playtested the game with my own system called Begone, FOE. I based a lot of the stat blocks on the Old School Essentials SRD, so the game should be compatible with all your other Basic-likes. OSE, Labyrinth Lord, Swords and Wizardry, etc. No promises though, since I haven't actually played those games.

 

Enough talk. Here are the links.

• The Dungeon Itself. This folder holds the scenario text with the key entries, along with both the PNG maps, JSONs for use with the RPGmap software I used, and the original sketches of the dungeon.
• Session 1 Play Report
• Session 2 Play Report
• A Weekend With Good Friends Virtual Convention Play Report
• Music Post for tracks used

The Manor of the Giant Arminius - Session Two

A second session of the Manor of the Giant Arminius, run a week after the first. Again using Begone, FOE.

 

The second session took place an in-game day after the first. The Rebels had seized the ground floor of the mansion, and carried off or destroyed all the treasure. The floor above was a battleground, Arminius' soldiers mounting a desperate last stand against the attacking Levelers. Smoke billowed from the second floor windows. If anyone was planning on robbing the place, this was their final opportunity to do so.

From The Ogre Gods by Hubert and Gatignol

 

I had the same players as last session. Thanks to the haul of treasure from the basement crypt, their characters were Level 5.

• Jack Fatherd, Sheep Handling Rogue
• Iren Benedek, Lock Picking Witch
• Aldrich Brisbane, Crusading Dwarfaboo and Ex Hoglord

The adventurers approached the manor in much the same way as last session, stealthily advancing through the brush until they reached the house. Then they walked right in through the front door.

 

FATAL and Friends Reviews

Over the last year, I wrote some reviews of games for the Somethingawful FATAL and Friends thread.

You can read the reviews here.

The RPGs I reviewed were:

• Eclipse Phase: Zone Stalkers
• Esoteric Enterprises
• Castle Gargantua
• How to Host a Dungeon
• Mothership
• Maria in Three Parts
• Think Before Asking
• Delta Green Shotgun Scenarios

The Manor of the Giant Arminius - Session One

I few months ago, I ran a couple sessions of Castle Gargantua. The players loved the weird encounters and giant environments, but did not like the random generation system for stringing the rooms together. Unlike Esoteric Enterprises, which uses random tables to build a huge interconnected world for the players to explore, Castle Gargantua generates rooms one at a time in a linear sequence, without any regard for how they all link together. Meaning the exploration element - ordinarily the most fun part of the dungeon crawl - was nonexistent.

 

So I wrote my own dungeon that used my favorite parts of Castle Gargantua, set in a map of my own design.

THE MANOR OF THE GIANT ARMINIUS

 

From The Ogre Gods by Hubert and Gatignol

 

I ran the game using Begone, FOE, my own homebrew dungeon crawling rules. All the players had played in my Anguishedwires and Castle Gargantua games, where I playtested previous versions of the rules.

 

In attendance:

• Jack Fatherd, Sheep Handling Rogue
• Iren Benedek, Lock Picking Witch
• Aldrich Brisbane, Crusading Dwarfaboo

We began play with the characters approaching the manor through the forest. They had the following briefing to draw from:

The Giant Arminius is dying. Rebels have besieged his manor, fed up with the Giant’s endless raiding for food, slaves and plunder. His children and their human Soldiers mount a desperate defense. Now would be an excellent time for an adventurer to steal his treasure - before his favorite daughter Morwenna arrives to break the siege, and hear her father’s dying words.

Up ahead, the wedge shaped bluff rose out of the ancient wood. Atop its hundred foot peak: the Manor of the Giant Arminius.