Champions of the Battlepits

As mentioned previously it is possible to hire a champion to represent you in the Battlepits. Fortunately for the prospective employer, Citadel Minatures produced this handy of catalogue of appropriate candidates back in the ‘80s…

Canonical list of Grim North Battlepits Champions 

So if you’re in legal trouble, and you can find them, you can hire PAPWORTH ORGANGRINDER! Quite honestly, I don’t know why you wouldn’t. 

The Battlepits…

Recently a small group of PCs entered the Battlepits of Nox Aeterna for the first time in the history of the Grim North. Following the disastrous Clam-Slakeheart wedding; one of the few survivors, a certain Graydon Slakeheart, has taken out legal proceedings against Tulip and Rufus. They can’t afford the weregild so they’ve set out to prove their innocence and hopefully entertain the crowds in The Grim North’s version of court tv. 

The Battlepits (tip of the hat to the Bloodsword books, naturally) are the judicial arena of the city. Those accused of crimes can face a variety of different disciplines in order to prove their innocence. This can range from the simple but popular “man vs. wolves” to the considerably more complex “dungeoneering.”  

In terms of determining guilt or innocence man vs wolves is fairly straightforward; if you get chewed to death by wolves then you’re guilty. Justice is done. 

Preoceedings can be made more complex and or entertaining by manipulating the environment. Man vs wolves but we’re on a moving platform suspended over a pit of spikes, for example. Or man vs strange beast from the wilderness. In fact the business in supplying strange beasts from the wilderness is allegedly very lucrative and the sort of thing player characters could easily get involved in. 

Similarly, the introduction of prosecutors can influence matters. Hired by the plaintiffs these are effectively gladiators that fight on behalf of the wealthy so they don’t have to present themselves to actual physical danger. Additionally It is permitted for slaves to represent their owners, potentially earning their freedom If victorious. The time honoured tradition of using a noble excuse for thoroughly reprehensible behaviour. 

So Tulip and Rufus are faced with the Battlepits event du jour: “Dungeoneering.” An artificial enclosed environment of rooms and corridors is created, open at the top so the crowd of bloodthirsty spectators can observe, and the PCs are unleashed. Their goal, find the Emblem of Innocence. The obstacles are mostly traps and puzzles. Also Slakeheart hired a prosecutor to impeed their progress, i.e.kill them, the impressively armoured Ergot Vile Groundshaker.

The Grim Binder

My GM binder for the Grim North is a fairly recent  development. I have always previously worked from notes on my iPad but I was finding it a bit difficult to navigate in a hurry and wanted something that was: A) Easy to reference and B) A bit more permanent. 

There are some random tables that I use all the time and don’t change much in terms of contents so it made sense to start with them and see what needs develop from play. 

So I took an old A4 ring binder and printed some stuff out to stick in there. I’m using plastic sleeves to contain the print out and trying to keep them in some sort of logical order. Failing that, one that makes sense to me. 

The current contents are:

• General Encounters of the Grim North (and what are they up to?)
• So you need a Grim North Adventure in a Hurry?
• What do we Want?
• Where is Tonight’s Ill Advised Escapade Taking Place?
• What’s Complicating Tonight’s Grim North Session
• The Random District Table
• Cults of the Grim North 
• Thieves Crews
• Random Thieves Crew Activites
• Table of Random Contacts
• Random Patrician Names (and associated mental illnesses)
•  Critical and Fumble Tables (very much a work in progress)
• In the Possession of the formerly alive NPC…
• Guilds of the City
• Tavern Generator
• Random Grog Table (important due to Conan’s rule)
• Grim Omens
• Breachers from the Outer Dark/Farthest Black
• Weird Occurrence Table
• Random Portal Destinations 
• What’s on Sale at the Purveyor of Unusual Wares
• Who’s in at the House of Mercenaries, Sellspears and Blades for Hire?

Ideally I’ll add a page for each District of the city, complete with its specific random encounters, and likewise for regions outside of town and I have a big generator for random Gloom locations and events that I need to get around to printing too.

I could die without ever having to hear how you got into RPGs

Podcasters take note. 

So, irony storm inbound. It’s not some story about how my older brother had the books or whatever. 

There was no mentor. Just some confusion about what a book was. It wasn’t a choose your own adventure book. Or it was but not in the way I thought. Dragon Warriors. Cheers Dave and Oliver. I’ll probably never recapture the magic of reading that book.

Without my younger sister none of this would have been possible. She was the first player in every game. Dragon Warriors. Marvel Superheroes. DnD. None of it would’ve happened if she hadn’t played. She’s not big into fantasy, I don’t know that she’s even read a comic all the way through. These days I think her favourite Netflix show is Emily in Paris. Not renowned for its roleplaying potential. However if she she hadn’t been the First Barbarian, been Captain Marvel (the Monica Rambeau one,) or bashed the baddies as She Hulk, been Kara the Cleric; I don’t even know if I’d have got this thing off the ground.

So my RPG origin story isn’t one of someone introducing me to the game but of the person who came along for the ride whether she was super into it or not.

Thanks, the Baby, couldn’t have done any of this without you.

Housekeeping

But for like Grim North houses

Currently playing: WFRP 2e on Sundays. It’s ok. I had this scenario knocking around from my clearing the shelves project. Reading “The Devils” by Joe Abercrombie put me in a Warhammer state of mind so I decided to run it. I’ve not run 2e before and I’m not sure I like it. The game sessions have been fun enough but the early 2000s action economy is not to my taste. The PCs are involved in an attempt to cleanse their mortal souls in the eyes of Sigmar by recovering some holy items of behalf of his Church from the Border Princes. It’s suitably downbeat and gritty so far.

Additionally working on: Grim North open table for Thursdays or like any weeknight really. It’s not that open because I can’t be arsed to advertise for players everywhere but it’s scheduled for this week regardless. Probably tidy up a loose thread with some experienced heads and then start offering it to the world for next week. 

In the background: Been tinkering away with various Grim North bits. The Grim Underworld progresses. If any PCs found the entrance it’s probably playable in its current form. There are seven mapped areas of level 1 and most have at least a minimal key. It very much has the theme of mole men, undead and cultists at the moment  

I’ve added a few bits elsewhere to the world. Encounter tables for the Far North and the Plains of Sanguine Desolation. A few smaller dungeon locations. More details on the factions of the Grimwood. This sort of cumulative prep is building the setting as a whole but doesn’t generally help with what’s going to happen in the next session. It’s very much how my mind works in creative spaces though. 

Considering: Time and healing. One of the WFRP PCs took a fair bit of damage last session which he believes is going to take 6-8 weeks of game time to heal. I’m not sure how fun this is. One of the grumbles about Dragon Warriors from my players was they always seemed to be injured. Access to magical healing should be rare in WFRP and DW, which it is in my games but I wonder whether constantly dealing with injuries, while more realistic, this is the most enjoyable aspect of the game. I’m reminded of Chris in my Carcosa game saying it was easier to die and roll up a new character than barely survive and heal back up. Hmm.

Into the Gloom

“Scarcely out of the city, we were set upon by eel-men. They slew the captain, and when we’d driven them back, only two crewmen were alive. We attempted to recruit a new crew in an accursed town in the Gloom. Only a small boy answered the call, and he proved to be a thing beyond our ken. We lost the last crewmen, and barely made it back in a rowboat.” Rufus Rose, Fighter Level 2

Ste’s Game

Ste was the last of us to get his own D&D. He’d played in my first D&D game, where he was a halfling with a dire wolf as a pet, when I started running Red Box Basic but it wasn’t until much later that he got his own rule box and started running games.

This surprised us all. Ste was quite a passive player, generally going along with what others wanted to do and taking an easygoing attitude towards our games. I suspected he wasn’t really that into the whole thing but it’s what his friends did, so he played along. However when Ste’s parents bought him the rules for Christmas he went all in. Ste had two brothers, two sisters, lots of cousins and lived in a large house with lots of space. There were always other kids at his house. Loads of them. Ste began to run D&D for them and he did it a lot. Ste’s game was always on. 

Ste was a very permissive DM. He was often running for friends who usually ran games for him, so he took a position very much as referee. He assumed his players knew more about the rules than he did and he simply approved or not the inclusion of ideas they game up with. Mostly he approved. He was running the game every single day, open table style, characters would advance loads and it became a battle to keep up with each other. 

His game got extremely high powered very quickly as a result. We often played just one on one or two players, often at lunchtimes at school and frequently with no dice. We were into the domain game before long and this rapidly turned PvP as we competed to control the map of the Known World in the Expert set. 

In a territorial masterstroke Jit (not his real name; it was short for Michael McJitland, also not his real name) had built his castle within the walls of the town of Threshold and as a result come to control that iconic settlement. This was much to the annoyance of all the other players. Until my character, Gurak Bloodbath the Fourth (I was eleven years old) destroyed the town with my flight of brown dragons. However Jit rebuilt the town with his vast monetary and supernatural resources, renaming it Stronghold; now with added anti-dragon defences. We all thought this was a genius move and one we were extremely envious of. 

Meanwhile Ste’s younger brother Matty and his friend Walty stopped engaging with the rest of the group and began adventuring exclusively together. We didn’t know what they were up to but we suspected they were seeking Paths to Immortality and probably seeking to destroy all other players in the process. 

Matty’s character was a ridiculously powerful magic user and one of my strongest allies, so his loss was a great blow to me personally. I didn’t know this at the time but he and Walty were now secretly working against me, and to be fair everyone else, but specifically me because I had access to knowledge that they did not. They were envious and fearful of me because of my esoteric library. While everyone else was still operating at a Basic level, I had surpassed this: I had AD&D.

AD&D gave me a raft of options not available in the basic game. Spells, items and cherry picked rules that Ste allowed me to use to my advantage. 

The game continued in this vein, Matty and Walty betrayed me: murdered my dragons and razed my stronghold to the ground. Jit upped the ante by somehow permanently transforming his body into the form of Demogorgon. I stayed up all night on several occasions; like Batman plotting to exploit the weaknesses of each member of the Justice League in turn. 

You see, despite total immersion in the game, we were all slowly coming to the conclusion that we missed being able to sit around the same table and play together. So when I finally pulled off my grand plan and slew all the other characters as inventively as I could, no one was that bothered about after the initial shock. The very next week we all went to Ste’s house, rolled up new characters and set off adventuring together again.