Session 15: Lokos Valley
Continued From Session 14: Wandering and then Home
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Friday's session began with the party entering the map above from the upper left, along the river shown. The party suggested that I wipe out everything beyond the path they travelled, thus not revealing the remaining map... which I have done, with some exceptions, including those things the party saw or have heard about sufficiently to find that place.
To explain the map, the very large hexes, mostly cut off at the edge of the map but with two of them conjoined in the middle, each represent a "6-mile" hex, which is in fact 6.67 miles wide. Nine hexes across the diameter are 1,302 yards wide (called a "land" hex), which denotes the distance across the smaller hexes above. This is wonderfully gritty. As the party made their way across the top of the upper hex, then down that hex's right hand side, I was able to give descriptions like, "a hundred yards off you can see a pond, which extends a thousand yards across to the other end," and, "that hilltop is about a mile away." I could count time as what was needed to cross one of these hexes (39 minutes if the party was moving slowly along a difficult animal trail, 20 minutes if they picked up their pace).
They encountered a cairn where they could see a shadow in the middle of the night reaching out in the direction they were born, marked by a sigil they could not interpret; a stag that they hit insufficiently to bring down; blackberry and raspberry bushes in season for north Hungary in August. They talked to a badger and learned of wild boars, which they chose not to investigate. They climbed trees for their bearings and steadily made their way into Felsopeteny, a thorp with 18 people. There, wishing to talk to someone, I asked chatGPT to generate me a potential person living in that place in 1650 (as it existed at that time in my real-Earth world), and received,
"Bálint Varga, 43, is the village swineherd. He keeps forty-odd pigs in the oak woods above Felsőpetény, sleeps outdoors from spring until the first hard frost and knows every spring, hollow and half-lost path between the village and Nézsa. His left ear was split by a sabre twelve years ago, though he refuses to explain whose sabre it was. Bálint is taciturn with strangers, unexpectedly gentle with children and can be persuaded to guide travellers for salt, iron nails or a sound woollen cloak. He has a wife, Ilona, two surviving daughters and a widowed sister living in his household."
Took about 30 seconds. Balint told them about the thorp to the northeast of Felsopeteny, called Romhany. Then Balint acted as a guide to take them to Agard, the hex's "free hamlet." On the way they passed the burnt out Alsopeteny, and then the abandoned hamlet of Keszeg; they learned that the hamlet of Nezsa is being oppressed by a giant badger. In Agard, the party learned a little more about the larger hex that they were in: that the Ottoman's have an outpost, that the pile of hills northeast of Agard are dangerous to enter. Armed with all this, and starting to think about what part of the area they'd want to settle down in, the party went to investigate Keszeg.
They were attacked briefly by some stirges which flew off after three rounds. Searching the houses, they flushed an ettercap (with added hit dice, mass, damage done, to make it more meaningful than the old Fiend Folio description) and had a time killing it as it ran off. Ti got to use his new medium warhorse in combat, lancing the ettercap for 16 damage... but the creature had 58 hit points to start and, wounded, chose to flee. Ti alone was fast enough on his horse to manage a running battle... but he was bit twice, failed his save both times and died again, the second time in two runnings. This time, I did require a system shock... but his success is 98%. I pointed out that he could die only 14 more times and still be returned to life. I think he should have let the thing go, but of course it would have harrassed the party as long as I could have, and likely someone else would have died. They did succeed in killing the thing because Ti had weakened it with repeated hits, so in the end it was a job well done. But because he died, Ti got no experience from the encounter. Others, however, who had engaged early in the fight, got experience from watching him die, as the party desperately struggled to run forward to get close enough to throw or fire weapons.
That was the session. The party (temporarily at least) find themselves in the possession of a derelict hamlet, which they'll have to figure out in the next running; they are anxious to run off and fight something else in the hex. The concept of settling down has rooted itself in their heart and I'm going to try and divide a land hex similarly into "blocks" that are 145 yards wide. Wish me luck.
Continued on [[]]
