Monday, August 5, 2024

Dubzaron Session 160: The Hunt for Treedancer

Introduction

The summer of 2024 has been revelatory and celebratory for the BROSR.
TNB. Say its name and it appears!
Jeffro's call to action back in the fall of 2023 to try what he calls a "Battle Braunstein" was very bold indeed. While the event itself was revolutionary in the BROSR clubhouse, it appeared that some players perhaps didn't dig it OR it wasn't going to make the cultural splash with the bros which I believed it deserved. Thus I ran the second ever Battle Braunstein which I called the Fishstein.

Unable to contain my excitement (despite my players hating the experience overall) I then went on the "Rizzmaster Dunder Moose" yortorb podcast and challenged ALL The bros to run a Battle Braunstein before the summer or be left behind. Guess what, they did!

You can watch myself and Bob Stephens rate these Braunstein's on "Rizzmaster Dunder Moose"s show
at your leisure; enjoying the comedic and promo stylings of myself and Bob. We deemed some Battle Braunstein's classics and some meh but the final conclusion was the same: this game mode rules.

Not content to simply receive my well deserved flowers for helping Jeffro champion his amazing idea; I surpassed Jeffro in gaming theory boldness. This may be the first time in his public life this has ever happened to him!

Enter the TOTAL NONSTOP BRAUNSTEIN.

"What could this mean" thought Jeffro. "How could it never stop," thought Dunderrizz. "Where can I use my soup coupon?" lamented Griff.

Well I'll tell you, pal.

The TOTAL NONSTOP BRAUNSTEIN is a mindset change. It's time the players of our campaigns improve and step up. The name of the game, as Jeffro (back on top as being the foremost thinker in gaming after my weeks long time at the top) says: is convergence and diffusion. Convergence is when Player concepts converge for good gaming moments. Diffusion is when Player concepts go off on their own solitaire player or 1v1 with the DM (using up his previous time to help them acquire cash and prizes).

While most legacy bros are still grappling with the above ideas (and ALL are still beneath me on their understanding of TOTAL NONSTOP BRAUNSTEIN [including Jeffro]) a new crop of Developmental Bros have arisen. Scutifer Mike, Night Danger, and others; who just seem to GET IT. RizzMoose, the undisputed winner of the Moonstein, also just Gets It.

So, we celebrate. The BROSR is winning and will continue to win. Despite some boomers wanting us to call it a Sparkling Blackmoor, the Braunstein concept will not stop growing. You may pronounce it as you wish but you cannot deny it's power. Say its name and it will appear in your campaign. And soon you will have no choice but to believe in the TOTAL NONSTOP BRAUNSTEIN.

What does this have to do with my session report for session 160? Not a great deal in and of itself. But I challenge you to read the elements in this session report and see where I may soon be forcing a Battle Braunstein on my Dubzaron players in way(s) they are certain to hate. Put your thoughts in the comments or with your certain screenshotting of my blog on twitter about it.

You see, I simply cannot allow Dubzaron, the best long form campaign in the BROSR (undisputed), to fall behind in TOTAL NONSTOP BRAUNSTEIN thinking. Soon, they will believe! Or ragequit. Whatever.

TimeKeeping: Session played on 07/09/2024 with 2 days of adventure. 1 day of rest required after (unless the PC has Endurance). Can take actions again 07/12/2024.

Session Report

This session had a new Caller and a new mission thread the players haven't seriously explored before. Before I talk directly about the session I'll give some background information on the state of the Dubzaron world that is pertinent.

Last summer I decided to experiment with allowing some yo-yo timekeeping in my game but align it with something story-based and gameable. It was a "Midsummer's Nights Dream" campaign wide event where, for 3 days, each night moved at 1/60 time. Meaning each evening, after twilight, time would begin moving 30 times faster until the sun came up. I came up with "weirding time" based on the "weirding way" from Lynch's "Dune". In weirding time, characters and NPCs could also enjoy the extra downtime but ONLY in the town or hex in which they were at when the sun went down. My purple prose reason for this was how it's so hard to walk long distances or do a road trip in a dream.


Maybe not true in all cases, but it served the purpose of allowing PCs and Patrons to get an extra month of building and crafting each night for 3 days. Essentially adding 3 months of crafting/building to my campaign world each year. Everyone says they want more time to build castles, right? I tried to help!

The event itself was kind of a bust and very few players used it to explore the crafting skills. But Standing Mountain the new (at the time) PC elf used it for some big things.

You see, I made the event so elves could travel wherever they liked in weirding time. That included PC elves. So they could essentially teleport across the map each night. This also meant domain encounters with elves were rappant for those characters with Domains who actually run those.

While the hostile weirding elves didn't really challenge any domain havers for real, Patron Kyle OConner decided to make some story hay out of all of the ones he had. Namely, his daughter was captured by a chaotic elf named Treedancer. Now, some months later she was saved becase... I don't know. But Kyle still holds a grudge against Treedancer who hasn't been seen since the summer of 2023.

This also meant Kyle's peasants hate elves. Just hate em. They kidnapped the princess!

Now, this week, Standing Mountain the elf decided he was tired of being hated when he came out to Kyle's Domain of the Sepia Uplands. What can be done?! Standing Mountain spoke with Kyle and learned all this backstory and decided "surely the peasants will love me if I bring Treedancer to justice?" asked Standing Mountain. "Perhaps," answered Kyle "and don't call me Shirley."

So, this session, with basically nothing to go on, Standing Mountain gathered a group of PC misfits and also-rans, to try and find Treedancer and then apprehend or kill him.

I only vaguely remembered this even from last year and Kyle knew nothing about Treedancer except he's a jerk. As such, I was chatting with Kyle as the PCs discussed on mic how they might actually find some random elf. The "meme it up with rumors" rules in Dubzaron weren't going to be extremely helpful (I decided correctly imo) since there's just no good reason why the people of Kyle's city Claymore Crossing would be keeping tabs on Treedancer to A YEAR. The rumors just confirmed "there is definitely an elven fastness in the forest to the north". But the info didn't tell them n which exact hex or whatever.

The PC plan then was to go to this fastness, likely not Treedancer's exact location, and quiz those elves about where Treedancer might be.

They were all on flying mounts which seems a bit weird to me since these are so expensive and slow to train. I'm assured all the rules are on the up and up so I wasn't going to annoy the PCs or slow down my session by arguing this point.

Point being, they were traveling at like 30 miles an hour. I hoped they Got Lost so I could send them hundreds of miles deep into parts unknown and surprise them with a very different session than they had planned, but the dice assured me they were not lost. Since George of the Jungle and his fantastic direction sense was part of the party, I needed to roll a 1 on a d20 to get them lost. So it was always stacked against me.

They approached a forest hex which had some weird effect for miles wherein the trees were purple, silver, and black and the grasses were dead and crackled underfoot. "This seems fine" they decided and searched the place for Lairs. Indian Jones, Standing Mountain's Explorer, got really sick from this environmental effect and was puking curry for hours. I think all the PCs made the Save vs Disease I called for in this case. I called for another an hour of game world time later and some other folks got sick. This land was not healthy!

They found what turned out to be a treant lair and I described it as a gnarled and messed up copse of trees grown together to form a sort of giant football shape with the tip sticking up. Brad the Pitt (Thief) was sent in invisible to scout the place and the ACKS sneaking rules shined here.

It took about 30 minutes of game time but it was a tense scene of Brad sneaking into the place and seeing a single treant that looked gnarled and evil. He was doing some odd thing of dipping his head into an eerie pool that looked oil slicked then painting other trees with the liquid. Brad noted he had a nice necklace with expensive amulet hanging on a low branch so he pick pocketed that off the treant. Another treant awoke when Brad almost failed a sneak check and that let the thief know there were at least 2 in the place.

Outside the other PCs did some tracking and believed some giant snakes and evil hounds were in this hex. The party decided there were no elves nearby so they split with Brad's sneaky grabbed gains.

The next location they came to they found a lair of brigands who were friendly, for some reason. The party stayed the night there and learned that the bandit queen Valeria hates elves (although Standing Mountain "seemed like one of the good ones") and her men had ongoing tensions with the elven fastness some 3 miles away. The party received a map to the location.

The next day they went to the elven fastness learning its leader's name is Raindrop who loves music. He played "Aqualung" on his flute.

The elves were also Friendly to the PCs (thanks alot, dice) and told them where Treedancer is believed to be... far off in the Istrith forest. This would be a problem for PCs who didn't have like 8 flying mounts. But this was just the party for the job!

During the night the PCs stayed with the elves and I made one check needing a 6 on a d6 to see if the brigands raided the elven fastness. The PCs plan to catch Treedancer would likely run out of time if they go involved in a big army battle!

The 6 hit! Then I made a 2d6 check to see how serious the brigand attack would be. 2 would be the full force of the brigands right at the elves. With 12 meaning the elves caught the brigands scouting or something and made light work of them. It hit in the middle so it made sense to me that an elven scout crew would run into a brigand scout crew.

With ACKS battle rating system I could quickly roll these results while the PCs slept as a sort of background thing. Insanely enough the elves made no successful attacks on the brigands and the brigands destroyed them. The chances of these were miniscule. But it meant the brigands killed 15 elves and took 15 more prisoner. The was about half of all the elves on site!

The next morning the elves went out scouting and found the bodies of their fallen and wrapped them in giant leaves for planting. Raindrop: "please Standing Mountain, join us to bring justice on the bandit queen and her chaotic men of evil!"

Standing Mountain: "pretty busy right now bro... I'll come back later or something".

The PCs flew out to the Istrith and immediately found a longhouse made of giant lotus petals which they could only assume belonged to Treedancer. Brad the Pitt the Thief was turned invisible by Standing Mountain to try the same schtick of sneaking up for recon as before. This time it was no-go since some magical NPC elf (who seemed to be invisible himself) had See Invisible cast and caught Brad approaching his abode.

Treedancer, we can assume that's who it was, started casting a spell at Brad which made the thief aware he was caught. For the first real round of combat Brad reacted faster than the bad guy and ran around the lotus house to try and break line of sight from the spell. This seemed to work since no spell targeted Brad. But the house itself started to move as if it were alive and grew eyes and a giant mouth.

Soon after this some treants who seemingly obeyed the elf tried to pick up Brad. He mostly avoided this for a few rounds since the treants didn't have See Invisible and had to go based on orders.

George, who was was the closest to the action trying to watch from a tree, cried out to get the other PCs' attention. They had to run/fly etc closer to the house since they were far enough back to not be able to see it through the thick growth trees. Despite being able to free, they didn't watch the action from the air.

The fight, which took about an hour or so to run, had the following results and big moments:

-more treants came

-Brad was grappled but escaped only after a round of damage

-Tuck and the other martial PCs rocked the treants down... but it took a while and they took many hits

-multiple casts of Summon Beserkers which were cleaved through by the treants

-no more apparent attacks or spells were cast by Treedancer. He spent the whole combat invisible and at one point just wasn't there anymore. Did he flee?

-two Giant Hawks were lost by the PCs

After this the party flew northwest to one of the smaller Turos forts of the Lawful empire. It was late so they didn't fly back to Kyle's town.

Musings

The story of this session, as a DM, was one of no-prep and bully-prep. The first is obvious. I haven't engaged with much of this background story and none of these parts of the wilderness. That which I did engage with (Kyle's stuff) was long forgotten from last year.

Treedancer himself came from a nice player named Arbethil who ran the insane beserker during the Fishstein. He's a very good tactician who in fact won the Fishstein thanks to this. I realized about 8 months back I suck at running leveled NPCs; especially spellcasters. The evil witch I ran during a Barsoom session just sort of shot a fireball (which I screwed up its damage to the airship) and then got sliced in half. I needed help with tactics, and spell choice!

So, I asked tArbethil to make a few NPC parties for me with various themes. Treedancer had a different name in his notes but I took the magic items, spell list, tactics, and general personality and applied it to the situation Treedancer found himself in.

Arb is now a PC in dubzaron but he wasn't in this session so couldn't sniff out the tactics I was using and know what they were facing and what the NPC was likely to do.

The players appeared annoyed and confounded by the elf's tactics. Which seems just right to me.

Participating PCs

Brad the Pitt: L6 Thief, Tomb Raider. Neutral, probably.

George of the Jungle: L5 Beastmaster. Lawful.

Standing Mountain: L5 Elven Spellword. Neutral.

Tuck: L6 Barbarian.

Hench

George: 1 War Dog

Tuck: Duck L4 Fighter. Ye L4 Bard.

Standing Mountain: Red Sky L4 Half Elf Mage. Indian Jones L4 Explorer.

Total Cuts: 13
XP for Kills: 8,000
XP for Treasure: 9,763 (763 is loose for splitting. 9,000 is in the form of one piece of jewelry which can't be split)
XP for Magic Items: 0
Total XP Pool: 17,763

PC Cut: 2,733
Hench Cut: 1,366

Class Grades

E for everyone except Standing Mountain who gets an S due to leaving the Raindrop elves hanging in their upcoming battle against the bandit queen. I know there were in game reasons for doing so (he was Caller and the other players were depending on him to focus on the task at hand) but it's not in role for Standing Mountain who shares an alignment and value system with the Raindrop elves.

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