Tomb of the Serpent Kings: Session 1

Finally got around to running a session using my in-development Yoon-Suin Lamentations of the Flame Princess hack. I decided on using Skerples' Tomb of the Serpent Kings as one of the players hadn't experienced OSR gameplay before and I thought I'd put its teaching-dungeon credentials to the test (note: it succeeded, excellently).

The PCs are as follows:

• Juddah Squelch - a slug-man from an opium-trading oligopolist clan.
• Pierrot - a magician from a warrior family.
• Lugash Primiestki - a dwarf from an architectural artisan hold.

 Having gotten themselves into a fair amount of debt, and having run out of familial goodwill to look after them, the party found themselves following the rambling of a feverish beggar outside the tea house they frequented and ventured into Old Town. Deep beneath the foundations of a collapsed manse they found their target: a tunnel entrance engraved with serpents.

Not far inside lay several rooms containing wooden coffins. After carefully examining and opening one of them, Lugash threw caution to the wind and smashed the terracotta snake-soldier inside. The the room immediately filled with poison gas billowing from the hole in the terracotta figure, luckily only affecting Pierrot.

The party settled into a steady routine of carefully prising open sarcophagi and hurling stones from a safe distance until the outer tomb was free of poison gas. They collected a decent collection of shiny gold amulets for their trouble and Pierrot, still suffering from his previous poisoning, popped on a silver ring granting him a snake-bite like finger-dagger-thing, which he was thoroughly impressed with.

A barred stone door blocked the way further into the complex, and the party fortunately noticed the mechanism raising the door brackets as they lifted the bar. Further investigation revealed a false ceiling above the door. Lugash rigged a pulley with his block and tackle and the party hoisted the bar out of the way from a safe distance, as an enormous hammer swung down and smashed the stone door (and the block and tackle) to smithereens.

The next chamber held three ornate sarcophagi. A rock thrown from afar disturbed the skeletal inhabitants. Pierrot conjured some crystalline armour (retaining the spell) and after a few crossbow bolts and judicious use of the hammer trap (including a shotgun-like blast of bone fragments from one skeleton tearing another apart) the party continued onwards, finding a grotesque religious fane and an exposed hidden passage.

Mikhail Greuli

The passage led to a statue lined corridor. Noticing one of the statues was slightly askew, the party discovered a hidden passage leading to an old guardroom containing weapons and shiny loot. They continued from there to a large chamber with numerous side-rooms and a pit in the centre. A smell of licorice filled the air and a muffled thumping echoed from one of the side-chambers. Pierrot and Lugash took a look in the pit only to be attacked by a pair of crawling, mummified serpent hands that leapt from the filthy water within. Pierrot was mildly throttled but the party survived mostly unharmed, and more importantly disease-free, and took to exploring the side rooms.

Discoveries included: a room full of terracotta-army style snake warrior statues, which were duly smashed and a hidden passage found; a silver and emerald icon in a former-dormitory, along with some ancient scrolls in a strange tongue; an unfinished, partially collapsed room; and a set of trapped stairs leading downwards (again, judicious rock-throwing was the party's friend).

The final room that the party investigated held another wooden sarcophagus, only this one contained a foul black slime creature that the party easily outran and sealed inside. It attempted to worm under the door but was driven back, and the party assembled a pre-made bonfire in front of the door in case more fire was needed.

In need of a rest the party made camp in the hidden guardroom, and Pierrot successfully shook off the lingering effects of the poison gas. The party returned to the pit room, and carefully avoiding the source of the thumping and banging, examined another tomb with some sort of metal plate attached to the far wall.

Juddah, despite continuing the careful rock throwing of earlier, stepped onto a pressure plate and was blasted with a bolt of lightning which caused a serious injury and fried their brain, causing them to attack their companions in a wild fury. Pierrot and Lugash attempted to restrain the insane slug-man, but the slippery dilettante proved too much and crippled Pierrot's arm with a blow from their polearm. Lugash and Pierrot took the opportunity to flee with the only light source, leaving the maddened Juddah swinging wildly in the dark. The slug-man's incoherent screams were abruptly cut off as Pierrot and Lugash heard a distinct splashing sound.

Lorenzo Nuti

Lugash tore up some spare clothing for bandages and managed to stem Pierrot's bleeding before going back to the pit. Using his darkvision and a length of rope, the dwarf hauled Juddah's body out of the pit and stripped it of valuables before returning it with a swift kick.

Upon returning to the Yellow City Pierrot was easily able to afford the standard of living befitting one of his family. Lugash was able to bluff his way through and went on a spending spree of equipment, before depositing his remaining money with a consortium of moneylenders and undertaking some legwork in the city, whereby he beguiled a group of merchants with stories of snake-crafted treasure. Pierrot sought the services of a physician which put them only a few weeks away from recovering from their grievous wound. They also recruited a labourer, Bepo, to assist them on their next adventure. The magician also uncovered evidence of a slug-man merchant named Surya Sodi who was smuggling goods through the city - a juicy piece of blackmail material. Through unknown means they also acquired a crab-man slave named Mr Krabbs*.

*Sometimes I really hate my players.

Yoon-Suin: Disease, Poison, Death & Dismemberment

As seems to be relatively common among OSR games, I'm running HP in my games as a buffer for real damage. It's relatively easy to recover HP but the moment it's out you start taking some really nasty damage.

I've had a look round and decided to base my Death & Dismemberment system on James Young's So It Looks Like You're Gonna Die pamphlet, which in turn is based on Hack Slash Master's Crit Table (endless iteration!). I've made some changes, which I'll describe below, but some entries are copied wholesale because it's really hard to come up with over 100 distinct injury entries.

The system covers the following:

1. Regaining HP
2. Ability damage & XP drain
3. Wound tables & recovery
4. Shock
5. Poison
6. Disease

Stepan Alekseev

Regaining HP

Regaining HP is easy and can be done in one of two ways:

1. An hour's lunch break with a campfire, food and drink restores 1d8+CON HP.
2. A night's rest with a bedroll and a campfire, plus food and drink if you've not rested already, restores all HP. If anything is missing, it instead restores 1d8+CON HP like a lunch break.

Ability damage & XP drain 

Some monsters (and other things) can directly damage your stats, you die if any are reduced to 0. Damaged Ability Scores regenerate at a rate of 1 per day if you are active, or 1d6 per day if you rest (no adventuring or strenuous activity).

Really dangerous supernatural creatures can drain your XP (they suck the life and vitality right out of you) and cause you to lose levels if enough is drained. If you lose a level due to XP Drain your character immediately ages 2d10 years, and can take penalties due to advanced age. XP Drain cannot be reversed, save by powerful magic or artefacts, but you continue to gain XP as normal from your new total.

Wound tables & recovery

See the basic draft of the wound tables (to be fancied up). If you're taken below 0HP you count the extra damage into the negatives to find where you land on the appropriate table and suffer the effects. If you suffer any further wounds while recovering you progress from where you previously landed. Some entries to be clarified: +Fire, +Acid, +Lightning have specific effects if the wounding attack was based on them; +LMA stands for 'Lightning & Metal Armour', which (at the risk of sounding redundant) can take effect if you're struck by lightning while wearing metal armour.

You need bed rest/light duties to recover from wounds. Each wound has a duration that it takes to heal. Once per week, while getting bed rest in comfortable surroundings, you can be treated by another character with the Medicine skill. Success means your recovery is sped up by 1d6 days. Failure means that some element of your Wound becomes permanent due to the physician's incompetence. Alternatively you can pay for a physician to care for you in downtime - each day of medical care paid for counts as double your recovery time.

Both arcane and divine magic can provide healing. HP is restored first, then start knocking off recovery days. Save vs Luck when your wounds are magically healed - if you pass then you can be magically healed again the next day, otherwise you require a week's rest as the magical energies sap your strength. Certain spells can also cure Poison or Disease.

Shock

Shock represents internal and/or ongoing damage from attacks. Unlike wounds, shock stacks each Round with the effects getting progressively worse.There are two important factors here:

1. A character's Shock Rating - this is the amount that they progress down the shock track each round. When suffering a wound that causes 'Shock X', use this for the initial Shock Rating.
2. A character's position on the Shock Level - this determines the ill-effects they suffer on the shock table.

Shock is tracked at the end of each Round, so a character with a Shock Rating of 2 would progress down the track by 2 each Round. Shock can be removed by a successful Medicine skill roll, which reduces a character's Shock Rating and Shock Level by the margin of success on the roll (minimum 1). Bandages boost a Medicine skill roll to remove shock by +1 and are used up whether or not the roll is successful. The ill effects of shock are incremental - each level represents the total penalty. Shock is treated as ability damage - a character will recover from the ill effects of shock once their stats have recovered to their normal levels.

Poison

Like Shock this builds up over time and has a Poison Rating and Poison Level, but is tracked every Turn instead of every Round.

The Medicine skill can't help you here, but save vs Doom each Turn - on a success you lose a point of Poison Rating and decrease 1d6+CON spaces on the Poison Level track. Like shock, the poison track is not cumulative.

Disease

Diseases also use a track system, but this is a strict progression instead of having a Rating and Level like poison and shock. Disease is tracked in intervals instead of Round and Turns - each disease progresses at different intervals, some daily, some weekly etc.. Make a save vs Doom when the interval's duration has passed - being treated with a successful Medicine check provides a 1d4 bonus - on a failure you progress to the next stage of the disease. You require a certain number of successes to shake off the illness. As diseases take longer to develop their tracks are unique, so each plague brings different hazards.

Yoon-Suin: Downtime

With further thanks to James Young for several of these entries.

So you made it out of whatever godsforsaken tomb you delved into, and you even have something shiny to show for it! You high-tail it back to the markets of the Yellow City to pawn off your ill-gotten gains and then... Well you're stuck here for the next month, you'd better find something to do.

When you return to civilisation, follow these steps:

1. Cash in your treasure and decide how much of your debt to pay off (if any).
2. Divide up the remaining treasure for XP purposes - 1 silver ring = 1 XP.
3. Hold funerals for fallen companions - you can trade in their XP for silver rings spent on the funeral(s).
4. Determine your lifestyle costs for this month.
5. Go shopping! You can buy equipment, hire retainers and recruit hirelings in this step.
6. Choose up to 2 downtime activities, as detailed below. Crab-men have a special set of options, decided upon by their master.
7. Level up, if you can

Additional downtime activities may become available to you depending on how your characters progress.

Reliah A.

Regular Downtime Activities

Carouse 

You hit the town hard. Your indulge yourself with hedonistic indulgence in opium, tea, rice liquor, whores, and gambling. In mechanical terms you pay up an amount of silver and immediately gain that amount of XP. Your life of excess can have consequences, roll 1d10:

• On a roll of 1 you become addicted to opium (roll again, 1-2 indicates a rare type).
• On a roll of 2 your profligate spending lands you further in debt - roll 2d6 and add the total to the party's debt in gold rings.
• On a roll of 9 you remember a story or rumour regarding a nearby location told during a night of unspeakable excess.
• On a roll of 10 you immediately recruit a hireling - they're in this more for a laugh than anything and will only expect a quarter-share of treasure in the next session's adventure. They'll want more after that, of course.

Bank

Limited to Social Rank 6 or above. You deposit an amount of silver rings into an account run by a reputable and stable moneylender or oligopolist clan. This pays out a guaranteed 2% each month. You can nominate a successor to inherit your wealth if the worst happens, but a death tax of 10% applies your savings. If your Social Rank drops below 6 then your money is quietly returned to you and your account closed.

Invest

As per the Lamentations of the Flame Princess core rulebook. You invest a sum of money in a business venture hoping for a good return, paid out annually. You choose whether the investment if Stable, Risky, or Wild:

• A Stable investment grows by 1d8-4% per year.
• A Risky investment grows by 1d20-10% per year.
• A Wild investment grows by 1d100-50% per year.

Add 10% to the above if you have an accountant managing the investment for you. If the final growth is positive you receive that amount to do with as you please. If the growth is negative you get nothing and the value of the investment decreases. The yearly return amounts 'explode' (positively and negatively) - if you roll the maximum on your investment die, roll again and add this to the total. If you again roll the maximum, make another roll, and so on. Do this for the minimum roll as well, and subtract that number from the return.

If you wish to withdraw your investment, you can only do so freely at the time of the yearly return. Otherwise a penalty of -1d6+4% is applied to the sum returned.

There is also a chance that any investment will go Bankrupt! during a given year and your investment vanishes:

• Stable: 5%
• Risky: 10%
• Wild: 25%

Magical Research

Magicians and slug-men can devote time to arcane research in an attempt to research new spells. Holy-men can meditate and pray on divine mysteries to expand their portfolio of divine invocations. The process for each of these is identical - you pay 100 silver rings to cover the costs of your alchemical materials/divine incense etc. and roll for a new spell/invocation. You can pay in multiples of 100 to reroll the result, but you must specify this beforehand and all payments are final - you don't get a refund for unused rerolls.

To make a magic item you must pay 1d6gp to purchase commonly available reagents.

You must use materials that are soaked in magical, spiritual or otherwise otherworldly energy when creating something magical. For example - regular parchment can't hold the magical energy needed to make a magic scroll but the ritually tattooed and tanned skin of a prince, a strip of cloth from a fakir's robe, or a spell etched into the scale of a dragon definitely could. Likewise a regular length of wood is entirely unsuited for use as a magic vessel, but the finger of a treant, or the petals of a lily that grows in a magic spring would be perfect for a vessel or potion base, respectively.

Inscriptions are one-use instances of a spell - when they are cast the inscription crumbles to ash and adds an extra level of the appropriate class to the spell effects. Thus, scrolls can be cast by anyone (even non-spellcasters) if they have been identified and are legible.

Potions distil the essence of a spell into liquid form. It takes an action to drink a potion and the effects take place immediately. Like inscriptions, potions provide one appropriate level to the effects. The nature of the spell will usually make the effect of the potion obvious, but if not then consult me.

Vessels are a physical containers for spells, i.e. a magic wands or staves. A vessel has an integrity rating based on how long the base material was exposed to magic - 1d100 years exposed for an organic material, decades for an inorganic one. Imbuing a spell into a vessel decreases its integrity by 2d10 years/decades. When creating the vessel you must confirm how many of your levels you are investing into it. Your powers are then stripped from you for an equivalent number of weeks. The vessel has this many levels that can be used to cast the spell contained within, and you can add your own levels on top of this. When you attempt to use the vessel you must roll under its integrity on a d100, adding 10 to your roll for each of your own levels that you added. A successful Arcana check reduces the result by 10 for each margin of success, to a minimum of 10 (1). Success means that the spell casts as normal, failure means the vessel loses d100 integrity and you suffer a Arcane Cascade or Thaumaturgic Revelation. If a vessel is reduced to 0 integrity it is destroyed in an explosion of barely constrained chaos.

Legwork

You frequent the tea houses, opium dens and marketplaces of the movers and shakers in the Yellow City, hunting for something juicy and a way up the well-greased pole of Yellow City social life. Roll on the table below (1d10):

1. Your questions and obvious obsequiousness ruffle the wrong feathers. You are cornered in an alley, beaten, and robbed of 1d50% of your wealth.
2. All in vain - the tea houses are closed to you, the opium fiends shun you, and your contacts pretend like you don't exist.
3. You hear some interesting rumours about a location, known or unknown. It might be nearby or in the far reaches of the Purple Land, but the rumours are guaranteed to be useful.
4. You drink and smoke with some explorers from (1d3) 1. Lahag, 2. Lamarakh, 3. Sughd. They impart some useful wisdom regarding the various threats and terrors of their lands.
5. You strike up a friendship with a local fisherman down by the docks. He'll ferry you out to the Topaz Islands for a small share of the loot you recover.
6. You beguile a wealthy merchant with your tales of treasure and lost artefacts. They'll pay 10% more for your next haul of loot.
7. Your stories of wondrous places and filthy lucre encourage a retainer of your choice to accompany you on your next adventure for half their going rate.
8. Your careful eavesdropping and judicious bribery net you some fantastic blackmail material on a wealthy personage in the Yellow City.
9. You cultivate a relationship with a wealthy patron, fickle though they are. Your next lifestyle roll cost is halved thanks to their patronage.
10. Choose any result on this table.

Expert Research 

Mundane topics limited to Social Rank 4 and above. Magical topics limited to Social Rank 7 or above. You seek out a learned sage to question them about your discoveries. Magical items can be investigated and identified and the sages can shed knowledge on various creatures and phenomena when given enough time. The various madrasas and archives of the Yellow City all require payment for their services, though these costs often fluctuate wildly and the scholars are very choosy about who they will assist. Expert Research costs 1d6+2 gold rings for a purely mundane topic, and double for a magical one. If you can't pay the total, this activity is wasted.

Medical Aid

You hire a doctor of physic and their attendants to heal your wounds via physical and magical means. Mundane healing services cost 28 silver rings per day, or 280 for a month. You recover from wounds twice as fast while under the care of a physician. You can also pay quadruple the day rate to be healed using magic - roll 1d6+2 for the number of days knocked off your recovery time, then Save vs Luck - if you pass then you can be healed the next day, otherwise you must wait a week as the magical energies sap your strength.

Patricio Clarey

Crab-Man Downtime Activities

Your master decides which activity you will undertake:

Crab-Man Wrestling

Crab-man wrestling bouts draw big crowds in the Yellow City and winners can win big. Pay in a stake of 1d8 gold rings, then multiply this by 1d10 - this is the overall pot to be won. Crab-man wrestling tournaments traditionally consist of 32 competitors competing in pairs over 5 rounds - the object is to push your opponent out of the ring, or throw them onto their back and immobilise them. First place in the tournament receives 70% of the pot, second place receives 20%, and third place receives 5%.

When preparing for a bout, roll to see the calibre of your opponent and the modifier for their wrestling rolls:

1. Puny (-2)
2. Weak (-1)
3. Average (0)
4. Average (0)
5. Strong (+1)
6. Mighty (+2)

When fighting in your bout, use the usual wrestling rules. A wrestling ring is 20' in diameter, and it is assumed that both contestants immediately grapple each other at the centre. A pin counts as you having flipped your opponent onto their back and immobilised them.

Train at Fighting Stable

Your master pays for you to be trained in combat by specialist tutors, who also train wrestlers, bodyguards and soldiers. Pay up an amount of silver and gain that amount of XP.

Porter Duties

Your master rents your services as a porter. You spend the month running errands, carrying various worthies and hauling goods. Your master receives 5d100 silver rings for your trouble, and your hard labour means that you ignore a second level of Encumbrance (so you can carry up to 12 items without increasing your encumbrance score) until you next return to the Yellow City.

Assist Master

You attend to your master's side while they go about their business. Your master may reroll a single result on one of their activities and keep the better result. Through close observation of your master you gain XP equivalent to their chosen result x 50.