This is an in-betwener I ran when my crew was headed from a town to a river, escorting a wagon. I run DCC.
The trail heads through a notch between mountains. It’s about fifty meters long and three meters wide. Bandits have set up rubble in piles on top of logs, allowing them to send down boulders and trees at the entrance and the exit of the notch.
The bandits are waiting to use the rubble to 1) block the wagon and 2) separate the party/guardians from the wagon to make it easier to take.
An overgrown trail forked off the main road a few miles back. The overgrown trail leads about a half mile into the woods to a one-room cabin. Bandit guards with crossbows are in the trees about a quarter mile up the trail.
The cabin has glassless windows on three sides. It’s about 30 feet by 12 feet. With only one door. There’s a roof hole or chimney on the far side from the players the side with no window. There’s a fireplace/fire pit on the far side from the trail.
Bandits are level X fighters or thieves where X is a good level for bandits in your campaign. In mine they were level 2. There are two outside the front door sitting on stump stools. One is dozing off. Both have had some drink.
Inside the cabin are eight more bandits. Four are thieves in studded leather armed with bows and longswords. The other six are fighters wearing chain mail with longswords and shields.
Their boss is a level 3 wizard wearing a wicker head mask shaped like a crow and indigo silk robes. In my game, the wizard was an air-breathing octopoid manipulating a skeleton under the robes. Spells included color spray and mage armor. When disabled, it dove into the fire to create smoke as a distraction. It then went down the throat of a bandit, possessed him and escaped out a window.
At the first sign of trouble, the wizard will summon an invisible companion, as per the DCC spell with a spell check of 22: AC 20, 60 ft per move, can fly, 18 HP, all hits have a 50% chance of missing anyway, +5 attack bonus. It wields a magical spear detailed in treasure (the +2 has worn off). This is cool because the PC’s just see a floating spear.
If the wagon owners were captured alive they are bound, gagged and beat up in the corner. The wagon will be out back. There’s a small stable and if the horse(s) hauling the wagon are alive, they are in a small stable to the far side of the cabin.
Treasure:
Yamabushi Spear
Forged in the Land of Rising Sun
+2 hit & damage, melee or ranged
INT 4
Communicates via Urges
Extra ‘+1 vs Lycanthropes or any human<->animal shape changer
Can detect water within 40 feet
Loses +2 bonus when wielder has spent 1 week in the presence of other sentient beings. Other benefits remain. Wielder must spend 1 month as hermit to regain +2 bonus.
Value to collector: 5,000 SP
TREASURE
Longswords and bows as what remained when the bandits were killed.
638 silver
6 rings of turquoise and silver (worth 18 each)
1 prayer wheel
3 sutra texts in Chinese
1 scroll of invisible companion
5 healing waters (1d6+1 HP) 200 sp each
TRAPPINGS
Assorted blankets, cookware, straw, food, drink, rope, etc.
Bring on the Ordinary: Post Your Mundane Requests Here
It’s been quiet around here, thanks to some gainful employment that fries my brain on a daily business. On the good side, I’ve been playing 1e fairly regularly and am helping wrangle submissions to this year’s Secret Santicore. I gotta hand it to Jez, Secret Santicore is a real crown jewel in the DIY/OSR community.
I did write one encounter for someone’s personal use (and thus didn’t blog it) and it was an unusual one for me in that there was no magic. Just the woods, an archer and a road. I purposely avoided anything fantastic as a key element of the encounter and I was quite pleased with the results.
Being one of Santicore’s helper elves also showed me where people’s minds are in terms of what they want from their D&D and I have to say this year will be pretty gonzo. With DCC and Carcosa coming out, I’m not surprised people are in a gonzo state of mind. I’m not immune–I read and want to play in DCC and appreciated Carcosa and I damn sure expect some top-notch stuff from the 2012 Santicore.
But then I’ve been playing 1e AD&D as a fighter with the New York Red Box crew. A dumb one–a pregen in a rules-as-written campaign using a Judges Guild module. And our magic user is reluctant to cast his spells, so in a lot of ways, there’s hardly any magic in this game. And I kind of like being a simple fighter.
And then I saw 13 Assassins. There has GOT to be some sort of kick-ass adventure there. And if this doesn’t make you want to break out Oriental Adventures or Legend of the Five Rings or Ruins and Ronin, you are a fool.
And then today I get my package from Sir Raggi, which had The God That Crawls and The Magnificent Joop Van Ooms, both of which are set on EARTH (thank you) and one in my favorite foreign city, Amsterdam. The God that Crawls scratches that shambling doom sort of itch, as its name should tell you. I expect I’ll give it a try. Joop does me a real solid with a wharf encounter table with only the tiniest bit of magic or the weird and more than 40 encounters that could really have happened in 1615 Amsterdam.
To make this short story long, I’m in the mood for the non-magical. I don’t mind that most of the OSR is running solidly toward the gonzo, but I think I’m going to spend some time working out a table of brigand encounters and a dictionary of con games to run on your players. Low, low magic stuff that can be used every day and which should make your gonzo stuff stand out.
Keeping what I said above in mind, I’m going to take requests again. If you want some sort of material that is low or non-magic for your campaign, post something in the comments below. As I did last year with “Bring It”, I’ll get to it when I can, which might mean you’ll get it this year.
How is everyone doing, by the way?