Schwarzberg trials and tribulations

[amethyst73]

Last weekend we had a cool D&D session run by cerebralpaladin .  Lady Karen and her cohorts have been attempting to deal with a couple of different issues since their return to Schwarzburg (Lady K's home town) a few days ago. 

First, they've tried to figure out who murdered Brother Clovis and why.  Brother Clovis was the equivalent of a local monk in a local brotherhood.  Outwardly a scholar, he was in reality a member of the Inquisition, a secret body responsible for rooting out and destroying sources of Chaos which, by their nature, seek to overthrow the lawful evil dominant church of Paranswarm.  While the in-game sequence mostly consisted of finding people who knew the victim in one way or another and trying to get information out of them, the dice-rolling mechanism was a contest of skill.  Contests of skill in 4th Ed have the general format of rolling against various skills ("I try to determine if so-and-so is telling the truth through Insight!  I Intimidate so-and-so into giving us more information").  In a simple contest, you succeed if the PCs get five successes before they get three failures.  Unfortunately, (1) this was a much longer contest of skill, and (2) the rules don't allow for the possibility of more than three failures in any contest of skill, no matter how elongated it might be.  CP was good enough to indicate that there were three levels of success that one could attain in this particular skill challenge, and we did manage to get the first two.  By this late in the challenge, we also had two failures on our side.  Sadly, in what would have been one of the last few rolls required to get the whole story, I rolled a 1 - yes, a 1 - on trying to get the head of the monkhouse to see things our way.  A 1 is an automatic failure, even if you have a skill of 10 and 2 points of assist. (And this was a hard roll; I doubt that rolling anything under a total of at least 20 would have done what we needed it to do.)  So... we know that Clovis was a member of the Inquisition.  We know that he was done in by (possibly) were-rats.  We know that the Church engaged in a cover-up and tried to keep the local guard from learning anything useful.  We conclude that Clovis was investigating something within the church that may have been demonically-based.  But we'll never know for certain who, or why.

The other thing we've been dealing with is Lady Karen's family history.  Or curse.  Or deal with a devil, which now seems to be by far the most likely thing.  As I posted earlier, she's got a history of ancestors who had 'an heir and a spare', and her own ovaries glow if one does a magic scan on her.  Her own mother is kind of insane, in the suspicious-of-everyone category, up to and including having the grains of suspicion that Lady Karen arranged an attack on herself to throw suspicion on her mother's enemies.  We'd talked to a couple of members of Lady Karen's household trying to get information on the curse or deal or whatever, and got wind of a private diary that the reigning woman of the family (the Margravines) have kept for generations.  After successful completion of a shorter skill challenge (which we completely blew through with no failures), we were granted access to The Personal Codex of the Margravines of Schwarzburg!  CP handed us several pages of the interesting bits, which are tantalizingly incomplete.  There's no details of a deal with a devil, but enough warnings about 'don't deal with devils, particularly this one' by the mother of the first 'heir and a spare' to make us certain there was one.  And plenty of interesting bits to muddle ourselves over.  Bravo CP for a VERY nice in-game document.  :)

We are now going to completely confirm Lady Karen's mother's suspicion of us by (1) leaving behind a Codex of which the lock has been obviously forced, and (2) leaving town VERY rapidly on the morrow.  Yeah... Mom's going to think I'm plotting or something.

Comments

[cerebralpaladin.livejournal.com]

Mwa-ha-ha-ha. (Sorry, just had to get that out of my system.)

I'm really glad you found the Personal Codex neat. I had a lot of fun writing that and hoped you guys would enjoy that.

In the category of technical details that don't really matter, 1 does not autofail skill checks. (It does automatically miss on attack rolls. I don't actually know if it autofails saves, but a +9 save modifier is essentially impossible, so it doesn't much matter.) But yeah, 1+12 wasn't enough to reach the DC.

[amethyst73.livejournal.com]

It was excellent. :) I am writing up a bunch of questions about it, but work has been Busy.

[(Anonymous)]

Smiles - I love real in-game documents. I have happy memories of several - including promptly handing one over to a party member who was literate (since, of course, in a classic feudal society, proper upper crust Barons certainly don't read - that's why we have priests and such..)

[amethyst73.livejournal.com]

You know, that's a good point. But in our case, two of the three PCs were very high-level nobles; Lady Karen will (if she lives long enough) eventually rule a fairly serious chunk of land, so it's important for her to read (and clearly there's a family tradition of writing stuff), and the other is the daughter of a clergyman and granddaughter of a Duchess of Hell - she'll be working on legal contracts between non-devils and devils when she grows up, so important for her to read and write. :) And our third PC is, well, a priest, so everyone gets to read it in-game. :)

[cerebralpaladin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my take on it is that literacy is not that common in the gameworld, but that PCs (being the exceptional sorts of people they are) can all read unless the player wants their PC to be illiterate. If P. wanted John Carver to be illiterate, or if you wanted Urchin to be, that would make perfect sense and be fine. But if you wanted to say "oh, Urchin's a smart kid and he figured out how to read, maybe not well, but enough to be able to get by," that's fine with me, too. On the other hand, if you send a letter to some random farmer or something, you may have to expect that the local priest or a scribe or someone read it to him.

Put another way: if illiteracy will make things more fun for the players, I'm all for it--ladybird97 plays a character in a campaign I play in who is mostly illiterate, despite now holding high office, and thus has to have her scribe read documents to her. But if illiteracy will just be annoying or unfun or require interesting documents to only actually be handled by the mage PC or the cleric--who needs to deal with that.

[(Anonymous)]

Most reasonable, cerebralpaladin! The world in which I was running was one in which it made sense for my character to be illiterate - he was a baron and after the annoyingly-timed death of his father - he ruled a fair chunk of land (when he wasn't off on yet another MFG (mission from god)). So, I was more like ladybird97, really.
Of course, there was the very annoying time in another campaign when we discovered that the player keeping the maps had kept them in runes...which was fine except for when he didn't show up...
Obscure gaming fact of the week: HG Wells may have been the first tabletop gamer.
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