A Mountain of Gold - Session 3 GM notes
Session summary by Sticks, yet again (thank you!!! sorry that I probably beat you again)
Interesting session! We pushed the session a week and a half in the future and the notes for the adventure got a little extended in the meantime.
This was mostly in-character talking, which was fun. I used to be a very big 'actor-gm', I loved mannerisms and inhabiting characters. I've fallen away from it as I lost my confidence in my voice (both literally and figuratively, as being trans goes).
Anyway, playing Sapphire the Wise, one of the last living wizards was fun. She had a lot of guards and I should have known the odds were going to mean the party didn't want to fight. She knew that dwarves occasionally kidnap wizards and did not want this to happen to her, by any means necessary. There was the option of a midnight stealth run at the castle which I was prepared for, and I think the players really did have a shot if they used all their resources, but this turned into a negotiation and discussion of the political realities of the world instead, and Sapphire was able to deliver them the artifact I was so excited about I almost didn't sleep for a night.
When planning this session, I was like 'what would the wizard have that the party would care enough about to negotiate for?' and the answer was the Axe of the Dwarven Lords. It's double-sided nature was perfect for what I want. Right now, it's the following:
+3 hammer (following od&d rules for such), -2 AC for wielder, and provides +50 dwarves for building rules in the ready ref sheets. When holding it, you can hear a chorus of quiet mournful dwarven funerary songs, and it provides 1 use a day of 'Speak with Statue'
Sapphire delivering this to the dwarves was emotional for me. Tears were beginning to well up, which is what I want when I play, and what I want out of this game. This game has two sides to me, the building up of the fort and fighting to keep it safe, and I wanted something that reflected both. I have more in store for the artifact, depending on how it's used.
I also wanted to push the timeline along more, less subtlety and more of the powers of the world trying to tie themselves to the dwarves.
So I had one of the two empires show up requesting a huge loan (that will not get paid back in the time-frame of the game) with a blank check for whatever the dwarves want. And they asked for a lot of fun in return, which the session report will talk about.
Reading more about Tony Bath's Hyboria game and other notes from old d&d games makes me want to encourage the players to change the world instead of being reactive, again not unlike something Havoc talked about recently in their games.
I hope I am providing more of that, instead of treating the dwarves as a stagnant fort that will never change. I had an npc directly ask them "What do you want? What are your goals and plans?"
When the players spoke with the dwarven statue holding the artifact and asked what it wanted, it shed a tear (as I was close to doing) and it answered: 'Live'
I also directly talked to the players about how many sessions we have left and I said I was going to cut some fights out of the timeline so we're still done in the 3-5 sessions total we talked about. I imagine there's probably more like 4 sessions left and I'd like to keep it that way, so probably no more big fort fights until later on. Those fights are about a session's length of time (and a decent amount of prep) so I'd like to limit them for the most part.
I added a hex map in case we got to do some aerial combat. I really want to run od&d-style with a list of moves revealed simultaneously and such, it will be stupid but fun.