During my lunch break today, I rolled a bunch of results from my Into the Odd tables and the second of five really grabbed me. I knew what it was, what it looked like and what the challenges would be. I jotted down maps, wrote up a d6 random encounter table and perused the game during my commute.

We still got a few things wrong but after re-reading it and looking more carefully at the example of play, I get what happens when someone hits 0 hit points now. Got it!

Chargen is fast. Roll 3d6 for stats, switch a pair if you want, roll 3d6 for equipment, roll a d6 for Hit Points and roll a d20 for Arcana if you have one because you positioned your Will as your highest stat. Pick a name and go for it.

I talked about the setting a little bit, saying that Bastion was the only known city and it seemed to me that it was built on layers of civilizations that are now long dead. Bastion seems to be the first place where folks are getting their shit together enough to industrialize after a long post-apocalyptic dark age of some kind. I skimmed over the tables I used to make the dungeons with their strange epochs inspired by Dying Earth.

They started at the foot of a 10 story high cube that was grounded on the beach near a fishing village called Fishgut. They found a water vent in and worked their way up the access passages to the roof. I was working on not giving away every detail on their first glance around with varying degrees of success. It is a nice table for that and Bret will tell me when I am being too nice and has a good eye on the rules that I always appreciate when I game with him.

Janaki climbed the thing, despite starting the game with only 1 hit point. I was sure she was going to perish on her first roll of the game but luckily, Hatchet, named after a weapon her explorer parents found, survived the ascent.

There were tech-mummies in diving suits and a dolphin in a humanoid mech (inspired by this AW playbook, one of the folks who left shit behind is the Dolphin-Whale Alliance). Because I knew what the purpose of this beached cube was and how it was later re-purposed, I had a good idea of where things where along with how and why they worked. That context helped a whole lot.

Carly figured out how to avoid the bio-luminescent jelly-fish’s sting and used one as a light source for most of the session.

Tonight’s delve had a good mix of climbing, running, pushing some buttons while not pushing others, fighting, half-submerged & submerged levels, shooting and of course – salvaging shit to take back to Bastion to sell. They got out of there with one of the three kids from Fishgut who is now Bret’s character’s lackey. We rolled her stats on 2d6 and she is tougher than many of the PC’s. Also, she leveled up with everyone else at the end of the session. Matty is a bad-ass kid who saw her friends die at the hands and harpoon guns of mummies and a dolphin.

It was a fine night of gaming with good friends. I felt like I got to sharpen my dungeon refereeing, learning new tools for the GMing Toolbox. Good stuff.