Photo by Malik Shibly on Unsplash

Introduction

One of my favorite settings to come out of the OSR is GusL's Fallen Empire. This is the setting where one can find the Crystal Frontier, which Gus has published several adventures for. Recently, Gus started an online Crystal Frontier game called Hinterlands of Empire, and I jumped at the chance to play in a setting that I have a great deal of fondness for.

It is an Open Table game, using Gus's heavily house-ruled OD&D rules, with stats and equipment being randomly generated to allow new players to easily join (and for replacements in the event of our characters' horrific deaths). There were six of us the first session, with some characters literally being rolled as the game began.

The Roster

• Agisilius the Fighter (Escaped Penal Templar), played by NondairyGiant.
• Axia, Priestess of the Red Emperor (Legionnaire Chaplin), played by Karim.
• Cyrus the Fighter (Imperial Line Infantry), played by Liam.
• Hella the Fighter (Bull Kingdom Jinete), played by comrade pollux
• Iosis Harvest the Magic-User (Alchemist), played by Naeolin/Derek/Me
• Sigmund Bain the Magic-User (Bonemender), played by Warren D.

Play Report

Please note that some of the locations in the misadventures I describe in these play reports may end up in a published Crystal Frontier module at some point. If your GM likes to run those for you, or has been talking about it, this would likely be a good time to stop reading.

A Classic Beginning, With a Twist

Our adventure began in Scarlet Town, boomtown of the Crystal Frontier and home to the greedy multitude who have made their way to the Crystal Frontier in the hopes of striking it rich looting the fallen crystal tombs of dead Empyreans (Space Elves). Crystal tombs were apparently sparse on the ground whenever the party came together under the tentpoles of Alesandese's Plank and Pot (bar and hostel) and agreed to work together. The exact details of this meeting and agreement are hazy due to the copious amounts of prickly pear brandy involved. In fact, it is entirely possible that some of the parties involved in this agreement accidentally overslept and will join the party at a later date...

The party found three opportunities available:

• An opportunity to travel with a scholar named Truvidias Grape to an ancient barrow three days North and a share of the treasures (including magic swords) found within.
• An offer of 2000 GP from notoriously ruthless Occulith merchant Freytag the Heartless to escort a ransom into the mountains and exchange said ransom with some bandits for an agent of Freytag's. The wrinkle? Said agent, once rescued, needs to not make it down from the mountainside alive.
• A bounty on the Bend Family, hog-thieves and murderers, who have refused the call of justice and are currently holed up in their well-fortified steading.

The party was in unanimous agreement that the job offered by Truvidius Grape to "excavate" the Iron Barrow was the most promising (Sigmund's player quipped that it was the only one where people were not guaranteed to try and kill us). The fact that the party was primarily composed of fighters and the barrow was reputedly the home of several magical swords was no doubt purely coincidental.

However, the party wanted more information before proceeding. After an afternoon asking around the town for any rumors about both their destination and potential employer (and several rolls on the Rumor table...) they learned the following:

• From an elderly veteran of the Auroch Legion they learned that the Barrow was breached during the war (the Crystal Frontier is about a generation out from a nasty civil war between the Imperial-backed Silver Princesses and the Warlock King of the Bull Kingdom). Forces loyal to the Princesses had dug a tunnel into the barrow and were using it as a base of operations, but were driven into its recesses by the King's Legions and the tunnel collapsed behind them. None ever reemerged.
• Chancey, a very forthright leg-breaker, admonished them for wanting to break into the idiot places where the ancients buried themselves and getting their faces eaten by "boney horrors". He insisted they should take up an honest trade, like himself.
• Belinda Pretty-Eye (Gouger), a local rake who takes advantage of the more naïve new arrivals, informed them that Truvidius was a trusting idiot who only cares about old things and scholarship and let himself be fleeced buying a bunch of useless junk for his expedition.
• From Graf the Duelist, noted Gem Robber turned murderer, Iosis learned that long ago, Palace Queens ruled the lands with Chariot Kings who tended to live and die by the sword (and sometimes "lived" afterwards within swords). He was told to stay away from the Barrows, both because looting them was disrespectful and also because they were much more dangerous than they might first seem. Iosis also almost learned what it was like to breathe through a lung with a hole in it when he failed to heed Graf's reputation and almost gave him an excuse to challenge the alchemist to a duel that he had been trying to provoke the entire conversation (I suppose I'll have to remember that he has a decent Wisdom score in future sessions).

Finding out nothing that would deter them from their chosen mission, the party departed Scarlet Town North along the Emperor's Ribbon (an ancient, magically-raised causeway) then traveled East into the evening. The only thing noteworthy the party experienced during this time was a refreshing rain shower (No harmful side effects... yet). Grape's map led them true, and the fading light revealed a massive dome formed by overlapping stone pillars that seemed to have heavy concentrations of iron within them (hence the name Iron Barrow).

Investigations and Desecrations

With daylight quickly failing, the party nonetheless took the time to engage in philosophical conversation: Sigmund discussed the definition and nature of banditry with Truvidius and the scholar confessed that he cares little for treasures beyond those that that will help him earn him tenure (the most coveted of level-ups in academia). Cyrus mentioned that he had tenure once, which greatly interested and impressed Truvidius right up until the point he realized that the former legionnaire had confused it for a venereal disease.

Deciding not to waste any more time with social diversions, the group began scouting the area in an attempt to get the lay of the land. They discovered that parts of the barrow have small holes out of which a reddish water leaks out. Both Iosis and Sigmund were able to detect traces of curdled blood magic within the liquid. Iosis, being an alchemist, naturally collected a sample for later study and distillation. A circuit of the barrow uncovered an outcropping and entrenched positions that were no doubt used by the soldiers who had reportedly breached the barrow during the war. They also discovered several skeletons which were put to various uses: Sigmund pulled the teeth of some to be added as an ingredient to his "tonics", while Iosis collected some for alchemical purposes (decomposition is the first stage of alchemy!).

That night, those of a magical persuasion had unusual dreams. Axia the Red Priestess wandered the barrow while the spirits within warned her to flee while she still could. Sigmund and Iosis had more disturbing dreams, possibly due to their desecration of the site. Iosis dreamed of a time when the Frontier was filled with villages that were continuously wracked by plague, with there being fewer left each year to bury, and later burn, the dead. Sigmund dreamed of being part of a mighty force of bronze-armored warriors, led by a war leader wearing a lion's skin, who were arrayed outside of the barrow in the distant past. The war leader declared he had come to kill the "Plague Goddess's Prophet" and "destroy her temple". The dream faded as the prophet emerged to announce that the plagues can not be stopped.

In the morning, a cautious inspection (a 10' pole was used!) of the barrow's entrance revealed that the massive iron doors, while heavily rusted, were still solid. Truvidius, despite the wary approach of the party, blithely approached the doors in an attempt to gain entrance. He was superbly confident in his cloth shirt upon which was fixed many widely-spaced metal discs, which he insisted was "just as good as all of this plate armor you well-muscled people are wearing." It was then decided that steps would have to be taken to ensure the survival of the group's idiotic patron, though opinions were mixed on whether he was being taken on as the party's pet, mascot, or disposable henchman.

Deciding they didn't want to hazard a direct entrance, and convinced they missed the tunnel previously mentioned, the party did another circuit around the Barrow. Sure enough, they found a partially caved-in tunnel near their where they had settled in for the night. After a couple of hours work, a few curious vultures looking on, lanterns were lit and the party ventured into the unknown.

First Foray

The rough-hewn tunnel traveled on for a short distance before letting out into an abandoned camp, filled with detritus and haphazard barricades. The party thoroughly searched the area, finding a silver military badge (20 GP) showing the former owner's allegiance to the Silver Princesses of Kosse Sildar and half of an iron exoskeleton of a large centipede-like creature (valuable to Iosis and perhaps a wandering freak show if one ever happened to roll into town). The party briefly celebrated their first meager piece of treasure before venturing onward.

From that first room, past the barricades, the party stepped into a hallway that would allow them to travel East or West. From their vantage point, they could see that each path lead to rooms where strangely-shaped statues standing on pedestals could be dimly seen at the edge of the lantern light. Choosing the East path, the party came into full view of a monstrous statue with the head of a bull and the body of a man, made of tarred wood, bronze nails, and the red-painted skull of a bull. At the base of the statue's feet could be found several human skulls etched with an ancient arcane script, unfamiliar to both Iosis and Sigmund. Truvidius showed little interest in the statue or any of its accoutrements, deeming them too primitive to be impressive enough to earn him tenure.

Sigmund attempted to determine what the writing accomplished and was able to deduce that it is a binding spell holding the souls of the human skulls in place, but could not determine the exact working of the spell in question without rotating the skull to allow examination of all of the writing. Sigmund wisely declined to do so (Gentle Reader, if your GM asks you if you pick up, touch, or interact with the human skulls covered in Fantasy Bronze Age Death Magic, the answer is no).

The party continued moving eastward, traveling through several branching hallways. They began to notice that the hallways seem to be made of naturally overlapping stone pillars, but in a pattern far too straight and regular to actually be natural. In these abnormal surroundings the passage of time was hard to gauge, and the party soon found that their lanterns were beginning to run out of fuel (even Truvidius's "most efficacious" lantern that he purchased for an exorbitant rate in Scarlet Town).

The party turned East and then North, attempting to "close any loop" that might be present in order to gain a firmer understanding of their surroundings. They came across another Bovine Effigy, but when they passed close to this particular statue it animated and attacked the back row of the party as they attempted to leave the room. Though surprised, the party managed to fend of the creature's attack long enough for Hella to yank Truvidius to safety and for Iosis to hurl his lantern at the creature's feet and use his arcane prowess (Influence Fire) to cause the resulting blaze to leap from the burning remnants of lantern to the effigy's tarred and wooden body. The resulting inferno quickly reduced the statue to charred wood and lumps of melted bronze.

The party realized two things simultaneously: that all of the statues could likely animate in a similar fashion, and that their easiest means of destroying them would cost valuable resources in the form of light. They decided to double back to the first statue they had come across and destroy it to ensure that their exit would be secure. The walk back seemed to stretch on endlessly, and the party found their initial lamp oil was on its last legs. Torches were ignited, which the party speculated would be more cost effective flaming projectiles to hurl at evil wooden statues anyway.

Upon arriving back at the original statue, the party began to debate how best to deal with the threat it represented. Some suggested not wasting valuable resources destroying a statue that they knew how to walk past safely, but others wondered if that would always be true on every visit: If the party is ever fleeing past and accidentally triggers the statue, it will make a bad situation worse.

Iosis proposed throwing a lit torch at the statue while outside of the room, operating under the assumption that whatever activates the statues is at least partially based on proximity. Most agreed, but the suggestion was made to walk past the statue first in case it animates and manages to block the exit. The party walked past, taking a small risk in doing so, and breathed a sigh of relief when the effigy remained still.

It was as this point that Cyrus suggested that the party use someone as a "canary" to see if the exact trigger could be determined by doing a circuit around the statue. The rest of the group asked if this meant he was volunteering, and so it was that Cyrus did a slow circuit around the statue that culminated in him being sprung upon as he passed the statue to the North.

It was at this point that the party realized they had made two crucial errors (one in-character and one out-of-character): They had neglected to give Cyrus a torch with which to combat the wooden monstrosity (and Cyrus only had 2 HP! Brave soul!). Despite expecting to be attacked, Cyrus and the party were unprepared for the celerity with which the effigy attacked. Cyrus took a glancing blow (1 HP!), but managed to keep his feet under the onslaught.

The party swiftly counterattacked: a flurry of polearms, swords, torches, and eye-beams (Sigmund's Maleficence) were deployed until the wooden statue was reduced to so much kindling. Having secured their exit (and coming up on our agreed-upon end time), the party decided not to press their luck and retreated from the barrow to lick their wounds and devise strategies for conquering the resting place and its blood magic-fueled inhabitants.

Reflection

Feel free to skip this if you don't give a damn about my musings about this session, the "OSR/Classical" playstyle (quotes are for the OSR Historians who might read this and debate me on Discord later), and my personal gaming history.

Confession time: Despite having lurked in the OSR (and later NSR) blogspace for over a decade, I've never played a proper retro-clone. My path to Cairn (my preferred ruleset at the moment) was a long and circuitous one. Unlike many bloggers in this space, I didn't start with some version of B/X as my first D&D experience. I started with D&D 3rd edition, which taught me that D&D is about tactical combat, optimized (or at least pre-planned) character progression, and creatively manipulating the rules to my advantage.

Despite having read an absurd amount of material about OSR games, I've always had a hesitation about playing in or running a true retro-clone because many of the rules seem to get in the way of what I like about the playstyle: I'm not huge on race-as-class, dislike the Thief, and hate movement that involves counting in 5 or 10-foot squares.

One of the reasons that I wanted to play in this particular game is that Gus's version of OD&D has an interesting blend of sensibilities. In many ways, with it's d6 HD and weapon damage, it is more D&D than B/X. On the other hand, it also has Skills! This doesn't offend me, as I am not especially dogmatic about these things and I like how they are reserved for truly specialized things rather than, you know, being able to jump high.

In practice, the system got out of the way and let us get to gaming quickly. We all rolled random stats and random equipment packages. The latter reminded me a lot of Cairn, and had a similar effect of allowing you to immediately jump into the action and define the particulars of your character along the way. I like this particular approach: Not only is it the exact opposite of the three-page backstory mentality that I started the hobby with, but it allows you to easily replace a character and gives you enough of a concept that they aren't a blank page.

Though I have stretched this play report out a decent amount, we actually didn't get a ton of dungeoncrawling in this session. We had about 2 and a half hours due to everyone's schedule, and a lot of that was eaten up with the typical first session tasks of deciding what our first major expedition was going to be, fishing for rumors, etc. It was all fun, but the Dungeon exploration portion of the session was when things began to shine.

We were using abstract movement, and so rather than tracking exact movement we simply decided which hallways to turn into, which rooms to investigate thoroughly, and the Overloaded Encounter Die was rolled an appropriate amount of time. This was really satisfying to me because every decision we made had a natural consequence, but we didn't have to do things like count the squares to see if we could make it all the way through the long hallway. There tends to be a debate within the space as to whether the Overloaded Encounter Die feels unnatural because you can end up rolling the same result multiple times. In practice, I found that this was not immersion-breaking for me. We actually burned through our lanterns relatively quickly, but during the session I was more concerned with tracking our resources and making correct decisions rather than keeping exact time records (Sorry, Gygax!).

I'll end this by talking about my favorite thing I did this session, and how it wouldn't have happened without some prodding by others. As a 1st level Magic-User, I had only one spell at my active disposal. At the beginning of the session, I had to decide whether to memorize Influence Fire or Skin of Iron. Both do pretty much exactly what they sound like, but I could only choose one, so I opted for the one that potentially allowed for the most shenanigans: Influence Fire. That moment where I threw the lantern and used the spell to immolate the statue, though? That almost didn't happen.

I had convinced myself before it was even my turn that Gus wouldn't allow me to throw my lantern and use the spell, and so I would have to do a sort of setup action and bide my time until the next turn. I've played plenty of systems that allow creative solutions in combat, so it's interesting to me how easy was for me to slip into the 3rd edition "rules, not rulings" mentality again just because I was playing something that bears a superficial resemblance to it. It was Sigmund's player, Warren, who encouraged me to attempt to use the spell in that first round, and doing so potentially kept us fresh enough to where that second encounter didn't end in any player deaths.

Sadly, we ran out of time before we could really plumb the depths of the Iron Barrow, escaping with only a meager 20 GP of Treasure to our name, but Iosis will return with the goal of collecting strange ingredients for his Alchemical experiments, and I imagine many of the session's party will as well.

Who will join us? We would welcome the company, especially if you position yourself in either the front or the back of the Marching Order.