The Empty Homestead: an Incunabuli Post-Session Report

     Session 3 saw the first use of a creature I designed, and subsequently, the first PC death of the campaign. To be honest, I did not expect it to be so close, but we nearly had a TPK. As always, this session recap is set on Incunabuli's the Coast, and starts in the little hamlet of Bermish, around five days south of Boltthwaite Lake.

If you're looking for the last Post-Session post, you can find it here. 

 

The Cast

John Dole of Bisque, Firlish Stew Captain, he really tried to score a kill by throwing his (full) portable stew pot at an enemy. Missed every time

Else Birkenhead of Inford, Lugger, her skeletal frame is capable of feats of strength many people would deem impossible even for a body-builder.

Dwayne Ottleson of Fir Reach, Firlish Ironmonger, amateur pugilist. The only member to make it out of the session (relatively) unscathed.

Padre  Faustino Calderon Capard del Monte Rubito, Algóran Venturesome Priest, a drunken wreck, drawn to the spotlight all the same, however, he does NOT have syphilis, thank you very much. That is libel! And he would NEVER EVER EVER sully his faith and his oaths by indulging the flesh.

Alagóran

Alagóran

***

After spending several days resting at the Lamb & Boar, the crew was approached by Esme, the proprietor, who begged them to investigate the homestead of her friends, who were more than a week late to get their mail. First, she offered the cutters £50, but Dwayne Ottleson, smelling her desperation, negotiates her up to a full Golden Crown while John Dole went through her safe. Dole pulls off the heist, but Dwayne makes a show of catching him in the act, and forcing Dole to give it back. Confused and betrayed by the cutters' actions, Esme begins to chew Dole out, but Padre Faustino, enjoying new levels of drama thanks to several nights of morbid dreams while the rest of the crew rested, invents a new ceremony to cleanse Dole of Sin. Esme, already morbidly curious of the Padre's Avethan beliefs, is shocked and appalled when he pulls out a knife and cuts open his hand to "Cleanse the Sin." Shouting, Esme forces the cutters out of her establishment and locks the door behind them.

Locked out of their watering hole, the cutters agree to check out the Lamrey homestead, and see if it's as bad as Esme fears... Or worse.

The gang travels for several hours, through farms, fields and hills before they cross a ridge and get a nice look at the homestead... It's not good.

The corpses of livestock litter the ground of the homestead. The barn has burned, ashes and cinders long cooled in the gentle showers of late summer. Far in the fields, a large pit can be seen. The front door hangs loosely on the hinges of a saltbox home. And stranger still, the grounds are covered by eight enormous broad-leaf weeds. Three in the garden, four in front of the house, one near the ruins of the barn.

The crew starts to investigate. John Dole and Padre Faustino dig through the ashes of the burned barn, finding the heads of tools and the metallic parts of farm equipment as Else searches the chicken coop, finding a straw hat and 3 eggs. Dwayne Ottleson examines the remains of the tools, and finding them to be iron, he grins, ready to use them as weapons against whatever agent of the Other is the cause of this attack.

The Padre puzzles over these enormous plants, but it's not until he and Ottleson put their minds together that the group realizes exactly what this was: Mandrakes.

Everyone makes a break for the house, with Else and John Dole thanking their lucky stars and the Padre and Dwayne Ottleson thanking Aveth that they were able to make it inside without disturbing the Mandrakes. It's dark in here, there's smashed furniture, a pot-bellied stove, and the decaying corpse of a ragwretch. Investigating the body, the party sees that while it was stabbed in the chest, its skull is also cracked open, and almost completely empty, so yeah, definitely Mandrakes. 

The gang leaves the house through the back door and sees that this house has a cellar. Dwayne smashes the hinges off of the cover, and they see that there's a bushel of apples and three large piles of hay, not much else. Else searches through the hay and finds several bottles of apple brandy and a purse filled with dried mushrooms, all wrapped up in sackcloth and stashed in one of the hay piles. 

The group is giddy with the potential of so much food, but the narcotic nature of the mandrakes is too tempting to resist, so they prepare for the fight

here you can see my beautiful, not to scale diagram of the homestead situation

Ottleson and Else drag a pig carcass over to one of the mandrakes and prepare to toss it on top of the plant in order to rile it up and still give them time to escape. John Dole stands a little off to the side to give him time to shoot it, and Padre Faustino stands over on the Porch, well clear of the killer parasites.

The plan goes about as well as you'd expect. It starts off strong, with the Mandrake taking several hits, but as soon as it "screams" (actually an ultrasonic click that shatters bones and causes ears to bleed), the rest begin to rise and our cutters find themselves outnumbered and outgunned.

What follows is a three (IRL) hour slugfest, courtesy of me making the Mandrakes 1) slow, 2) hard to kill or even disable and 3) equipped with an auto-hit attack. This was the first monster statblock I had created wholecloth, and I had based them off of the grue statblock, which has since been revised to make them a little easier to kill. Good call on the part of Benton, because as I saw, when the kill conditions of a monster are "score a 3+ damage attack on three or more separate areas or one of two specific areas," that monster becomes really hard to kill, especially when only two members of the crew have weapons/armor and the other two are role-playing pugilists against the undead forces of the Other.

Padre takes down the most mandrakes, but eventually the crew runs out of fléchettes, and Else is cut off from the group. Two Mandrakes take her down, and once she's unconscious, they drag her to the garden, and the more damaged Mandrake slowly, carefully pulls itself out of its previous host, and implants itself in her skull. 

As the fight stretches on, eventually the Padre is downed, but the ranks of the mandrakes are thinned enough that Mandrake-Else isn't actually able to implant a seed in his brain, as she would like, and it's not long before Ottleson and John Dole are able to finish the creature off, as Ottleson, gripping an iron horseshoe in each hand, lays blow after blow into Else's annoying face, before he's finally able to pin her corpse down and crack through her skull, leaving the horseshoe inside the mutilated Mandrake as an insult to the other.

Completely exhausted, the crew heads back inside the house. Ottleson tends to the Padre as John Dole heats up the stove, placing his stewpot on top of it. The stew today is made up of apples, brandy, lard, stale biscuits and a head of mandrake. It is delicious, sweet and tangy, full bodied, even though it leaves your mouth a bit numb and your coordination lightly affected.

The surviving crew devour the stew, and Ottleson piles firewood around the body of their dearly departed friend. The others can wait, but the crew is low on grisodate, and the Padre gives his assent. Even though Else was a heathen, and an atheist, a nuisance and an annoyance, her presence will be missed. Ottleson dumps some kerosene on the pile and the party quaffs some drinks, and deep in the cellar a survivor of the homestead's massacre stirs. She badly wounded, an amnesiac, and somehow missed during Else's examination. She has no name, her hand is pinned to her forehead by a fléchette. She is sore, covered in blood. 

Also unbeknownst to the party, two small figures shiver in the dark of the house's loft, hungry eyes peering at the pot of stew left on the stove... waiting for the right moment to reveal themselves.

 It is Mursday, the 29th of Sextary in the year 3.450. It is not even autumn, and the crew has lost the first of their number... and it will not be the last.

*** 

 This was a good session. I'm happy with how it went, even if we went two hours over our normal deadline just trying to get the combat done. I think that I'll change how Mandrakes work next time, and probably force them to roll for their "scream." Maybe reduce the damage, I don't know. Right now, I have a mandrake scream using the same system as fall damage, which is intentional, but maybe it would have been worth it to write up a hit location/wound table for sonic attacks. But, ahh, I am a lazy GM and a lazy Bookkeeper, so maybe not. We did, happily enough, receive our first dismemberment of the campaign! During their time at the country inn, the Padre gave his Avethean spearhead a shaft, and so  he's been doing a great amount of damage with his polearm. He spent most of the combat sprinting around the battlefield slashing at Mandrakes, which was a great amount of fun.

 Alright, I've delayed publishing this write-up until literally an hour before the start of my next session, so I'm gonna cut it short here and I'll hopefully release another one before next week! It's doubtful, because I'm about to start a new semester of school, but one can always hope! 

***

UPDATE: 

 

I initially forgot to include Else's character sheet, which I gleefully stamped upon her demise.