A Few House Rules of the Grim North

“Let’s go over there and do adventuring or whatever”

Criticals and Fumbles: On an attack roll of natural 20 or natural 1 a further roll on the critical or fumble table will be required. (These are still works in progress but there were a few criticals rolled in the first session and I was pleased with how they resolved.)

Conan’s Rule: Once per session a PC may regain 1d4 hit points by imbibing a container  (be it flask, bottle, skin or large mug) of strong drink.

I Cut, You Choose: When performing combat manoeuvres the attacker states the desired result, makes their normal attack roll and the defender chooses whether to accept the manoeuvre or take normal damage

Shields Shall Be Splintered: This classic OSR rule means a PC may choose to absorb all the damage of an attack on their shield but it is destroyed in the process.

Grim North Session 1: Into the Temple of the Toad Oracle

Rufus Rose, F1 

Pandora Set, T1 

Dögrenn, R1 

In Nox Aeterna, city of Eternal Night, it was dark and smoky in the cans only bar at the Secret Shack of Mercenaries, Sellspears and Blades for Hire. Three ne’er do wells perused the board marked “Jobs.” It had three handwritten notes pinned to it: 

Escort Sion Malafice to the Temple of the Toad Oracle, beneath the Stilt District: 450sp 

Recover foreign family heirloom from notorious con man Edmund Eldermeans: 400sp 

Evict squatters from the formerly abandoned Von Keinlen mansion: 425sp 

Deciding that con men were notoriously difficult to pin down and that they were dangerously close to being squatters themselves, they decided to peruse the escort job. Outside, in the Spirals, it was snowing moderately as the PCs passed the abandoned church of Garuul and observed the disused fairground where the lights of the Wheel of Wyrd still turned, unattended for over a hundred years. They crossed the river via the Pauper’s Bridge and entered the gentrified district of Rivershore. Beset by ironic beards and espadrilles they forged onward until they were accosted by a smartly dressed urchin seeking charitable donations for the blind, deaf, mute, plague ridden orphans of the parish. Dögrenn’s charitable nature got the better of him and he donated a silver piece. 

They crossed into the Stilt District. The ancient residents of this area feared their terrible, cthonic gods so much they built their houses on stilts to be as far away from them as possible. In the Broken Hare tavern, they sampled the three stouts on offer (Grimniss, Night Porter, Ticket Stout) and met with Sion Malafice. Accompanied by two thugs the golden robed, black masked Malafice explained that they wished to consult the Toad Oracle but it’s temple was located in a part of the undercity that was rife with cannibal mole men and voracious white alligators. 

Just then thugs from the Lightfinger ACs burst into the tavern demanding the money that Malafice owed them. He responded by directing the PCs to deal with this for him, after assuring them that he was good for their fee (it’s not that he couldn’t afford to pay the thieves back, it as the rate of interest he was disputing) Dora erupted from the shadows and fatally backstabbed the lead thug, unfortunately she then caught a plank of wood with several nails in it to the face and was slain. Battle ensued. Dögrenn was temporarily blinded by his own blood but the thugs were defeated, the last one being tripped to the ground by the newly appeared Calypso. 

As they crossed the Stilt District, Rufus discovered a sack cloth doll that represents a little girl; however the eyes had been torn out and ragged stuffing protruded from the holes. Heading down into the drainage tunnels they found the spoor of white alligators but there was no sign of the actual beasts. Supposedly they were the de rigeur pet of the Patrician class some years ago but we’re then discarded into the Undercity once they were no longer sufficiently fashionable. 

They arrived at the entrance the the Temple of the Toad Oracle without any major incident. Steps lead down to a platform facing a huge pool, a hundred feet across, sludgy with ice and swarming with tadpoles the size of a human thumb. A significant amount of planning then ensued taking us to the end of the evening’s session.

The Grim North Returns

Not a great plan

 

Like seriously, for real this time. I did run an online con game set in the Grim North a couple of years ago but essentially now is the time to bring it back as a campaign. Something I feel excited about. Time is against me. Not just me, I realise, but I don’t have a lot of time to prep and play games. The Grim North is probably the easiest thing for me to get to the table because it exists entirely in my mind. There is no referencing of source books or whatever. I have notes and random tables and so forth but any lore comes from me. I don’t have to concern myself with adherence to any particular aesthetic for the setting. When I run the Old World or even Legend I have considerations about whether my additions are consistent with the fictional coherence of those worlds. Not so with the Grim North. This is the great advantage of crafting your own setting. When I was trying to decide what to run after WFRP ended abruptly, I was sat in the garden and surprisingly for a summers evening (even in England,) there was a chill on the wind. It felt like the Grim North was calling me home. Of course it helps that I have been quietly tinkering away on the material in the background of whatever else I was playing or running at the time. So, while I sometimes feel the need to try out new systems and settings I always seem to return to the one that I devised to run over hangouts in the G plus days. It was intended for drop in/ drop out, open world play in a giant fantasy city. It uses old school D&D rules for ease but could really run with anything if I set my mind to it. There are no overarching narratives, it supports emergent storytelling. The stories we tell of our adventures in the Grim North are crafted after the events. Characters explore and interact with the setting, it’s an old school method. Because it springs directly from my imagination it’s dark and whimsical, and it hates pretension. It’s the campaign in the old sense. The story isn’t about player characters necessarily, they are often fragile but their actions can permanently alter the setting. Alvis of the Jug might be dead, poisoned by White Spider venom in the Grimwood, but the Alleyway Brotherhood are still on the warpath after he stole Gary’s Nan’s recipe for scones. The time is right. It’s dark and smoky in the Secret Shack of Mercenaries, Sellspears and Blades for Hire, outside it’s snowing (moderately) and the Grim North awaits…

Endhammer

Aaargh! Ian Miller trees!

My 1st edition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay campaign has come to an end after just over a year and about 30 sessions. Why did it end? Death, lots of death. 

But before we talk endings, let’s review the beginning: This is my second campaign of WFRP set in the town of Ravenstein. I originally chose it because it had a cool sounding name and not much associated lore, so I could just make lots of stuff up about it. The set up for both campaigns was that PCs were all orphans, survivors of the same orphanage, and that common bond was what tied them together as a group of what otherwise would have been fairly disparate individuals. In fact one PC spanned both campaigns as a result, despite two largely different player groups. 

My personal vision of WFRP hews close to the aesthetic of “alcoholic gamblers knifing cultists in back alleys.” I have never had a non-human PC or single orc rear their ugly head with either group. I could write a long post about what I think are appropriate setting elements for WFRP but this blog does it more justice. While I sometimes struggle with games that have a throng aesthetic to maintain, it easier after all to follow the kitchen sink approach to fantasy of early D&D than the low fantasy folklore and horror of Dragon Warriors, I also believe you’ve got to go where the game takes you. This is how you end up with a chicken footed wizard’s apprentice in the group, as well as a one armed Chaos mechanoid that floats around off the ground rather than walks. Or at least it is if you start rolling for mutations on the glorious d1000 table in Slaves to Darkness. I guess once you include a piece of warp stone in the game, there’s no getting the worms back in the can and the campaign was better for it. 

After all the orphans burned down their former orphanage, forced some children into a life of crime, murdered several completely innocent people for money and ultimately all died in a high stakes bid to take over the criminal underworld of Ravenstein. Although the mechanoid did return to life like Arnold in Terminator 2, rebooting by use of his last fate point, to bite off the head of albino gangland boss Kurt Weiss in a spectacular critical attack (only to to have his ruined mechanoid body smashed to pieces by Weiss’s surviving henchman, and new crime Lord of the city, Some Random Guy.)

So yes, we ended on a total party kill. It was glorious, totally fitting, and as with so many of these things could have easily gone the other way with a few better dice rolls on the PCs’ side. Still we’re done with WFRP for now, although a return to Ravenstein could always be on the cards at some point. After all, we never did find out what Little Herman did to deserve a steel crossbow bolt to the spine and a summary burial in the cellar of a burned down pub on Hexennacht.