Zurth Hobs Retrospective 1

 

This is where I am gonna go through the running of my zurth games and talk about the stuff I am doing as a GM, the rules I am working with, and how I feel about how things are going.

If you are my players don’t fucking read this! Love you and all that.

I am running this campaign in dungeon crawl classics despite my distaste for goodman games post judge’s guild. For the most part I am using base classes but I have swapped out the core Wizard for the Dying Earth magician.

My takes on it so far is that I like rote spellcasting, I don’t like many of the other changes. I feel like it’s just a little too baroque with like the amplification and the immortality thing. I don’t like the bigger hit die size. Rote is cool I just feel like next time I am gonna just take rote and leave the rest of it base wizard.

Some house rules I have been doing because I didn’t have a good grasp on the languages of zurth when starting out the campaign and I am anal about languages was that the characters have quantum languages where if they encounter a language that hasn’t been encountered before in a campaign they can make a luck check to see if they know the language. Taken from Luke Gearing from wolves upon the coast. So far there haven’t been a lot of instances of this coming up but in the few that there have been I have enjoyed it.

I am going to go through the sessions and break down what has happened so far with a few mechanical insights into this.

In session 1 and sort of all of the subsequent sessions roddy has been very cowardly, this is because he had like 2 HP, and also because we started at level one there were some custom things where you roll for one bad one good and roddy got his bad thing as he rises as undead no matter what once he dies. So his player really wanted to play things safe.

In session 2 the reason why Amyl survived dropping to 0 HP was not because of a successful roll the body check but instead because the player decided to cosmic tilt. Cosmic tilt is a mechanic from the wizard van’s stellar stowaway die. Basically you roll all the dice in the dice chain at once and count it all up. You destabilize the multiverse but you live by sheer force of will. The way this turned out is that it summoned an extradimensional analog of a slain nemesis. This was too early in the campaign for this to really make sense so I ruled that the first major antagonist they have taken down will have the extradimensional analog. So far that’s shaping up to be either Xolo or Zssath. Although with how session ten went down that’s probably gonna be Xolo.

The jellyfish space ship dungeon they explored was from danger in the air, it’s one of my favorite funnel modules and it was my first time running it with level 1s, I forgot about the stole that instantly conflagrates you so when a level 1 touched it and died I did feel a little a bad compared to a level 0 doing it.

In session 5 I think I really hit the high note with the far away encounter roll thing, I think it made a really good tense moment of waiting so I am patting myself on the back for that.

Session 6 featured our first use of the quantum languages being used up. Mekinimini’s player used it to have the wizard learn how to code. I liked that I thought it was fun. 

Session 8 was the first time I have ever used dice, the player playing the muranian (counts as a hobbit class wise as a little mouse man) has been using alien cheese stolen from danger in the air. Every meal he puts in a little bit of the cheese, so I implemented a usage die starting at d6, this is dcc so there is more graduation here going down on the chain with the d5 and d3 for a little more generosity. I don’t typically like usage die but this was minor enough that I thought it would be fun.

As for the sessions afterwards I feel like this have gotten a little weird pacing wise, things got very logistics focused and while I am fine with that for one session having the big windfall from pilfering computer parts really allowed shopping to get out of hand. I think it’s gonna be fine in the future but dear god it has been a lot of shopping. It was mainly the player playing Amyl really had some plans for creative use of items and crafting. No ill will towards them it’s just the case. They say they probably aren’t gonna do a lot more shopping for a while and that’s good by me.

I had stuff prepped for the cult takeover of the city for session 10 but we just didn’t get to it really so it was just left as a cliffhanger.

I have been quite enamored with the story that has accidentally developed, between accidentally stealing the robe and mask of the head cultist, and then attacking the mi-gp xenoforming outpost they accidentally convinced the cult that someone was trying to take them out directly and cause this massive war to break out very good very unexpected.

I like that they actually got a shit ton of money from the wizard, I didn’t expect the computer parts to be worth that much because I didn’t know there would be someone who would be interested in them that you could find.

Zurth is a really good hex crawl and there are a lot of tools to make running it easier, really shout out to idraluna and all of the AAJ crew they have made it so I have had to have essentially zero in depth prep for all of this.