Behind the Screen
Mistakes were made.
Spoilers for “Well of Frogs” are below.
Campaign Prep
I skimmed dozens of adventure modules. I read or reread plenty of fiction: (parts of) the first pair of Fafhrd and Grey Mouser White Wolf omnibuses; the first three Thieves’ World volumes; [listened to] The Hammer and the Blade; (part of) The Lies of Locke Lamora; (part of) Gentlemen of the Road; The Daughter’s War and Between Two Fires; all but one story in The Dying Earth; many Clark Ashton Smith short stories; a few Conan tales and “The Moon of Skulls”; a pair of sword and sorcery anthologies, from which Saunders’ “Gimmile’s Song,” Cook’s “Soldier of an Empire Unacquainted With Defeat,” and Pollack’s “The Red Guild” became an immediate source of borrowing for the campaign. I searched up some sword & sorcery playlists on Spotify and created streamlined versions that got rid of undesirable songs. I watched Conan the Barbarian (1982) again, of course, quite possibly for the tenth time.
An unfinished map of Yirith was made to accommodate the modules selected, with several lightly-described areas to allow space for future incorporations. Lots of toponyms were borrowed from Clark Ashton Smith, some via the world of Xoth, and some from Black Sword Hack. I included on the map the polities/regions of the Northern Raiders [“Reavers”], the Golden Archipelago, the Merchant League [“Hundred Taikuns”], the Eastern [“Northern”] Principalities, the Land of Black Pyramids [“Black Archipelago”], the Theocracy [“Caliphate”], the Dust Empire [defunct, ruled by the Mad Pharaoh], and the City of Thieves. Political leaders were given general titles, and for most, this was their only existing characteristic: “The Nizam”; “His Dread Majesty”; “The Readers.” A partial calendar was created, a “Year of the Fish, Moon of the Frog” model, and the set of moons (which maybe made the previous calendar nonsensical) were taken from Harth. An “innumerable” list of gods with generic names was added, including “Lord of the Wastes,” “Goddess of Oblivion,” and the “Frog God.” I did not develop these very deeply, either, hoping they would be malleable enough to fit into the pre-written modules, and flexible enough for player desires. The City of Thieves, intended to be the players’ (first?) base, was lightly developed, with 24 guilds (mostly criminal organizations). The city was an amalgam of (or, a series of plagiarisms from) Lankhmar, Camorr, Adrilankha, Well of Frogs’ Cassidium, Sanctuary, and Eversink. I wrote two (local and long-distance) 20-item rumor lists, mostly hooks or previews for different modules, with a dozen replacement rumors for each. I rewrote my 200-entry carousing list to be Yirith-specific, and changed the rewards to fit Black Sword Hack (since it doesn’t have traditional xp to be a reward).
Session 0
The players (and the GM) were introduced to the system via character rolling. I had expanded and made world-specific the three PC birth circumstances lists, and added a random starting possession per origin. We did not roll up the Black Sword Hack world together; I’m of the camp that collaborative world creation ruins some of the suspension of disbelief, takes the player (me, at least) out of the game. (This was also partly because the results of the worldbuilding tables 8.4 are very uneven, for all the coolness contained within.) Still, we did roll the legendary weapons for the campaign. I planned to start dropping clues toward recovering (fighting against) them around level five for the PCs, but that was deferred for too late, and didn’t happen. The players were introduced to BSH pricing, and grumbled.
Session 1
Players were set in media res as caravan guards for a merchant who had a secret destination in mind (using the PCs to help fight through some ape-men occupying a buried ancient temple, so that he might raise a snake godlet from the earth). A planned encounter took place to introduce both BSH fight mechanics, and Ty Pitre’s Nested Hit Dice. The fight was poorly designed in that the creature had a number of mezzes (three of the four PCs were stunned in some way in that first fight) and I didn’t do enough telegraphing of the monster’s different parts. None of the players were used to hp as anything other than a single pool. NPCs died but also finished the fight, their attacks rolled by the players with mezzed characters. I abandoned nested HD immediately after this, having stupidly not realized that the simplicity of BSH monsters was one of its best features.
The brief dungeon delve–the session was set up to be self-contained–paralyzed an incautious PC with a (randomly-rolled) curse. Two others caught diseases. Reasonably, though, the adventurers fled the snake godlet, meant to show that powerful forces were at work, and that they might encounter unbeatable monsters. I made an error in not making the villain of the session trackable in subsequent sessions.
Phase 1: City of Thieves (Sessions 2-6.5)
Nearly all the characters would continue to be beset by diseases, leading to the most momentous choice of the campaign: leaving the City. The persisting disease issue came about due to layers of poor dice luck: small chances of contraction actually happening, failed saves, failed cures, fighting a mummy. The sicknesses (rolled on tables) were less interesting in practice than they sounded in theory, but did help drive the action. The party delved repeatedly in the City sewers (drawn by rumors and NPC talk), based mostly on the material in “Well of Frogs.”
To make sure I didn’t put my own thumb on the scales during a moment of urgency (a character got poisoned, the PCs burgled a guild’s treasure room, and then left bodies in a public square during the escape), I wrote a small table to determine when upcoming events would be resolved:
1d6 hours til Saartu succumbs (one is almost over) [4, so 3 left]
1d6 hours til Literati stage attack [2] (4 thugs)
1d6 hours til Literati clean up (remove) ink treasure [1]
1d6 hours til Literati re-staff brothel [4]
1d6 hours til Barbers/Flesh-Tailors reach out [2] (5 thugs)
1d6 hours til Watch arrives in square [1], 5 soldiers
The players got drawn into organized crime by their actions, so I prepared “Lounge Temple of Asvraki,” “Grave Matters,” and “Temple of Lies” (two drug/cult fronts and a weird heist), but then the PCs left the city to save themselves from mummy rot and did not return. The hook that worked was the tale of a curative temple on an island, Brad Kerr’s “The Sunbathers.” A weather roll (the main rains of the monsoon arrived) altered that scenario substantially.
Mechanics and Mechanical Errors
I realized that in BSH hordes of low-HD creatures are extremely dangerous (with average abilities meaning players were hit about 50% of the time, even by weak creatures). I added the house rule (explicitly rejected in the BSH rulebook) that PCs with higher level than HD, also got a bonus to hit equal to the difference, although this was tricky to work in the VTT as a roll-under system, and sometimes I forgot to apply the modifier.
I mixed up from time-to-time during play auto-degrades and roll-to-degrade for Doom dice, and forgot to have Doom rolls during fumbles. I also sometimes rolled what should have been player-facing dice. (27 years of rolling for monster attacks is a hard habit to break!) I altered rules about demon- and spirit-summoning and then reversed myself, but this didn’t really matter, since none of the continuing players had those backgrounds. Because of all the missing that had occured in combats, I buffed the character generation stats, which roughly meant +1 to each ability. I composed a 900-word email explaining the rules-changes and the math. Maybe that was why the second player left the campaign….
Downtime and Reputation
I used Gearing’s Reputation system (d20 for the City of Thieves, a new d20 for a region when the PCs left and hung around elsewhere, and a d10 for a subsequent village). The first table was about half-filled by the time the party left, and less-significant events were slowly greyed out. |
| City of Thieves Reputation |
Carousing failures gave PCs a step bonus to the doom die, but the only failed carousing roll was by a player that dropped out. I was sloppy enforcing the BSH rule of two actions per downtime, and downtime was often not simple, as the sessions ended in a way that had no in-world break before the next action.
Missed Opportunities
The characters almost defeated a mummy at low level–the opportunity was there–but they ended up fleeing and missing out on grabbing a relic. Another pair of opportunities went wanting: a death-minstrel offered to produce commemorative doggerel if they were to die spectacularly, and gave them a sample (a hook to Hyena Child, set in the home city of one of the PCs), but survivors never returned to get his remembrance. I wrote a list of 24 romances, adventures, and treatises–just the titles–to serve as interesting library finds, hooks and helpful lore, but no libraries were investigated. One character tried a drug that led to a vision that was an obscure hook. I probably didn’t make the cults interesting, life-like, or deep enough to draw in the players.
Fronts
For a while I kept track between sessions of “off-screen” materials: the snake godlet’s movements, the freed mummy’s actions, the relative struggles of the crime-guilds, and the City of Thieves cults the players had interacted with (or been part of). This was done with a summed 2d6, with 6-8 being a status-quo type roll, and a 2 or 12 equalling great disaster or success, respectively, up to my interpretation. After it became evident that the party was straying further and further from this base, I grew lax in this recordkeeping/mini-game. Once the players became itinerants, I rolled for a few more new “off-screen” actors, but those were never revisited either.
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