Mörk Borg - Session 2
Use the tags to find my other play reports.
Prep for this session was a little more extensive than session 1. I generated a hexmap for the Valley of the Unfortunate Dead, overlaying hexes onto the map in Mörk Borg: Feretory and bounding my region with the road between key locations in the area.
I filled them all using Luke Gearing’s hexfill procedure, sticking to very terse one sentence fills for each hex alongside a fairly extensive encounter table and the weather table on the Mörk Borg GM screen. (Part of my aim with this campaign is to make more use of extant material in the core book, plus Feretory and Heretic and maybe some select 3pp, to make my prep more about collation and re-interpretation than invention. We’ll see how that goes.)
The hex fills used in this session were:
- Barren. The ground smoulders and smokes, patches of eternal fire. The road tuns to tar.
- Woods. Road. Empty.
- Woods. Village of the Forsaken. Suicide cult. Weird ritual to determine whether someone dies each week.
Session length: 2 hours
This week saw a new player joining us, and one of the players from last week unable to make the session. Characters present were Svind and his small but vicious dog, Brint, and newcomer Westward Seals The Gate.
*I run a drop in/drop out game. If you can’t make it to a session your characters just aren’t present that week. When you come back - or, as with this week, if you’re a new player - we just pretend that your character was here all along. This breaks a little bit of immersion/verisimilitude, but it also means that nobody gets upset that they come back from missing a week to find that people have made decisions that negatively impact their characters.
At the start of the session I rolled a Misery check. I’ve decided to use a d20, giving a 5% chance of a Misery each dawn, which gives us a decent chance of seeing some of that stuff happen without the game feeling really compressed.*
Play started with a short discussion about what the group was going to do next. All agreed that they needed to return to Schleswig with the book of the Hanged God. Their original journey to the Hangman’s Church brought them cross-country, but the map that led them here no longer exists. With a choice of heading out into the wilderness without a guide or choosing the roads heading in the direction of either Bergen Chrypt or Galgenbeck, they chose to head east in the direction of Galgenbeck. This decision was made easier by the fact that tracks in the mud indicated that Eldar and Qilnach had also headed in this direction with the donkey and the wagon. The plan, then, was to head off the deserters along the road, retrieve the donkey, and then head to Galgenbeck before turning back south to Schleswig.
When running overland travel I generally assume that a group can cover two hexes a day on foot. On a well maintained road this would probably increase, but this road isn’t well maintained. I check for encounters at the start of the day and roll to see if it occurs in the morning (generally, unless they spend a lot of time exploring in a specific hex, this means hex 1) or evening (hex 2). Once night falls I make another encounter check for night time events. On this first day, both came up empty.)
An uneventful day of travel saw them reach the Galgenbeck road and start following it to the east. The road itself was in disrepair, formed of huge slabs of old slate riddled with cracks, shattered chunks, and pools of stagnant standing water. The wagon tracks vanished as soon as they reached the road, but the party assumed that Eldar and Qilnach would follow the road rather than head out across country on their own. The land either side of the road was flat and barren, marked by patches of burning shrubland and blasted copses of trees turned to carbon. In places the road surface itself was melting despite the chill in the air, and the party gave these pools of liquid stone a wide berth.
They pressed on to the east, making camp for the night at the edge of dense woodland. As morning broke a cloudburst brought an onslaught of cold rain, and heavy thunder rumbled across the sky. They quickly followed the road into the trees, hoping to gain some shelter under the canopy.
Pressing on along the road, the group soon began to see dark shapes a few hundred yards ahead of them. The rain made visibility poor, so rather than approach they stopped and let Westward Seals The Gate take the lead. He spent a Power to remove one of his too many eyes and threw it as far as he could down the road, hoping that it would roll close to the figures and allow him to get a better view. With his eye settled beneath them, Westward saw that the figures were a pair of men hanging from the trees by their necks, clothing removed and piled neatly beneath them. They appeared to be very dead.
Here I finally got a positive encounter roll, giving me “two roadside corpses”. This hex contains a village containing a suicide cult, so I made the decision that these were cultists who had hanged themselves from the trees. I didn’t consider how this would link back to the Hanged God and the hanging bodies in the church from last session.
Deciding that there was no danger here the group approached. Searching the clothing they found a scroll, which they took without examining. Then Westward decided to climb one of the bodies and sever its arm, reasoning that Svind’s small but vicious dog would need food on the journey.
As Westward was up in the tree he heard noises from further along the road. From his vantage point he was able to see a group of 6 people in brown robes walking along the path toward them, each of them holding a length of thick rope while chatting amiably to one another. Seeing Westward in the tree, the leader of the group waved and called out a friendly greeting.
This was a successful encounter roll that gave me the result “2d6 hopeless cultists seek Village of the Forsaken”. Since that village is in this hex I decided instead that these would be members of the cult coming from the village. I made the call that today was a ritual sacrifice day and that this group were the lucky few chosen for the task. A reaction roll gave me the result “Friendly”. (I’m using the Holmes reaction table rather than the Mörk Borg one simply because I’ve internalised it enough that I can roll 2d6 and not have to look up the result).
Initially the group were wary of the cultists, but they were quickly disarmed by their openness and friendliness - especially as nobody seemed to care that Westward Seals The Gate was in the process of butchering one of their former members. They explained that their elders had read the omens and determined that this week called for a sacrifice to keep the coming apocalypse at bay, and that they were the ones chosen to make it.
Hearing more about this suicide cult, the group made the connection between their beliefs and what they had gleaned of the Hanged God when reading the writing on the walls in the Hangman’s Church. They asked the leader of the group of cultists - whose name they never bothered to learn - whether he was a worshipper of the Hanged God, and the cultists made it clear that they had never heard of such an entity.
Once again Westward Seals The Gate took the lead. Being literate in dead languages he was able to read the text inside the book of the Hanged God, and so he began to read passages from it to the cultists. The group learned that the Hanged God is an old god worshipped before before Verhu’s prophecies were found in the Nameless Scriptures and His predictions began to manifest themselves. The Hanged God opposed Nechrubel, sacrificing his own flesh and that of his followers to keep the darkness that crosses the sun at bay.
When the Nameless Scriptures were found and Verhu’s prophecies were discovered to be unfailingly accurate the Two-Headed Basilisks began purging followers of the old religions, decrying them as heretics and burning them in honour of He. The congregation of the Hanged God was small to begin with - it’s an inherent problem of suicide cults that membership will naturally decline even without outside influence - and they were quickly stamped out, their church left to rot forgotten in the Valley of the Unfortunate Undead.
The cultists from the village were amazed by this revelation, and they began to wonder whether the elders they follow knew of the Hanged God. They asked that the group come with them to the village, to speak to the elders and hand over the book and, perhaps, begin the process of returning the church of the Hanged God to some semblance of stability and health.
The group declined, and instead chose a different tack. They claimed that Westward Seals The Gate, in his alien countenance, was a prophet of the Hanged God, and they beseeched the cultists to abandon their old masters and instead pledge allegiance to Westward Seals The Gate. The elders, they said, are exploiting you, and you should leave them. After some back and forth on this topic, with the cultists growing more and more unsure and more irritated, things soon deteriorated into violence.
I had no idea where this exchange was going to end up. For a long time it looked like the group had made a good alliance with an interesting group of people, but it all unravelled in a few seconds. No dice rolls were made to dictate the outcomes of this encounter, it was all driven by roleplay and having the NPCs react in realistic ways to the things the PCs were saying to them.
The fight was gruelling and quite drawn out, with the cultists using their thick ropes to variously beat the PCs or else try to choke them with their nooses. Westward Seals The Gate suffered a broken arm, and Svind took a bad blow to the head that caused haemorrhaging that would have killed him had he not remembered the elixirs of health taken from Gotven’s corpse in the last session. One of the cultists fled partway through the battle, running back to the village to raise the alarm, and after the PCs killed three of the remaining cultists the other two fled into the trees.
The first cultist running back to the village was a decision I made about how a smart enemy might act. The two fleeing at the end of the battle were the result of a failed morale check I chose to make after the leader of the group was killed.
Thus the session ended with the group battered and broken on the road, all their Omens spent, and the sound of a mass of people heading down the road towards them from the village.