6 – Time, Trophy Gold: Roots of Old Kalduhr

I didn’t sleep last night, so when we got together to game, my prep wasn’t where I wanted it to be for a return to the Roots of Old Kalduhr. I grabbed Attack of the Phase Spider, definitely the strangest adventure I have written. Reading about the False Hydra, I see that the concepts have something in common, though the False Hydra stuff goes a bit further than I’m comfortable with in blurring in and out of game.

Lots of cool stuff happened but I want to playtest Attack of the Phase Spider and don’t want to spoil it. In the end we discovered that Aaron is not a fan of time travel stories but for a meal he wasn’t wild about, it was a fun game.

As written now I feel like this adventure’s text is a hammer to traumatize one’s friends. It needs a ferocious re-write but there is a good idea in there that I can’t wait to get right.

We had a character hit 6 Ruin (but pulled it back with clever temporal magic problem solving). I love the rules for hitting 6 Ruin as they are written and wish there were more games where we had moments for folks to step up and co-GM a bit. I feel much less nervous about a character dying now. Now I want full rules for players stepping up and running an incursion for when their character becomes a monster and shacks up in a dungeon and starts eating folks.

When this adventure is working, it should use the characters’ backgrounds to create a surreal otherworld, blend character’s histories together in confusing and interesting ways and confront parts of characters’ past while thinking a bit about the future (something the desperately in-debt treasure hunters rarely have time to do). As it is, I think I managed to do that but the text isn’t helpful just yet. Still, a good first step.