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This is an old play report from around October of 2021. I’d just played my first game of Electric Bastionland with my teen siblings. After this my mind has been forever infested with Into The Odd and I can barely stand to look at to-hit rolls.
Why am I posting this now? Well I originally wrote this in a discord post on the Bastionland server, but discord posts have no lifespan, it is long buried and nobody will ever see it. Chris Bissette talked recently about wanting to see more play reports in the OSR sphere, especially ones that elucidate what the GM was thinking while running it. How they used the rules, interpreted their notes, etc. Here’s their recent blogpost with one such play report: https://cohost.org/chrisb/post/2543337-mork-borg-session.
Below you’ll find my original play report, but expanded with some of my thoughts on how I ran it.
I ran the whole game off of two pages. One for the borough my players explored, and one page for a dungeon.
Above you can see a scan of my borough. In retrospect this was way too many locations. I should have minimized it, and made each location more interesting. I tried to create this by the book. All my encounters and obstacles on routes are marked on the map.
Above is my map of Squid Borough for VTT usage. This was what I gave my players.
Above is my notes for the Bronwill estate. A haunted manor. The ghost inside just loves haunting things, and she guards old stolen artifacts. This was a gimmick to make robbing a manor seem a bit more morally palatable. In retrospect I’m not sure I needed anything like that. I was very inspired by The Waking Of Willowby Hall at the time, which was why I built in a sort of clock for the haunting, and put windows all around the manor. I think this worked great. More dungeons should have window entrances on all sides.
Above is a VTT map of the Bronwill Estate grounds and first floor.
Above is a VTT map of the Bronwill Estate second floor.
My players are Cuthbert the Un-Revolutionary (1 HP, 6 STR) and Yerlott the Cryptohistorian (4 HP, 12 STR). The party is in debt to the Pittance Society.
The players started in Squid Borough. A borough renowned for it’s bustling squid market along the canals, and it’s luxury laundry basket factory. A mock cat named Plunket owns a squid launcher emporium and has hired the players to help rescue his music teacher. The music teacher is professor Estonia, a brain in a jar, who was kidnapped by someone named lady Bronwill some years back. Bronwill seems to have gotten away with numerous strange robberies and kidnappings and never had any repercussions. Now there are rumors that lady Bronwill is dead and Plunket has finally gotten enough money to pay some people (the players) to rescue the professor. He loans the players Dave (a squid in a jar) to help them recognize the professor when they see her.
Cuthbert, Yerlott, and Dave hire a small canal boat from a mock rhino (Mockery tables in the book came in handy here) to take them to the base of the tram that leads to the Bronwill estate. No major events along the way. Once on the tram there is a group of elderly duelists fencing with each other in the middle of the tram ride. Dueling until first blood. An elderly woman asks if the players would like to duel. Cuthbert is quite excited to and borrows a sword. He fails his DEX save and with one hit he is critically injured. The duelists give him some rudimentary first aid but warn him that he should really improve his dueling skills. Now with a wounded Cuthbert the party knocks door to door on the small community around the Bronwill estate. An occultist named Maybelline takes the group in and offers to help Cuthbert so long as they can steal an alien idol from lady Bronwill. (Maybelline was made up on the spot. I realized that it didn’t make any sense to have the Bronwill estate sitting by itself, so I said their was a small community of fancy houses. I used Maze Rats to help generate a random NPC I believe.)
With Cuthbert healed the group sets out towards the estate in the middle of the night. The estate is surrounded by a wall and a guard by the front gate points towards a sign. “The Bronwill Estate is absolutely NOT haunted. No visitors welcome!”. After some close run ins with guards the players managed to sneak over the wall and approach the dark abandoned looking house. They manage to break a lock on a back door and sneak in. Once inside it appears abandoned. They have a number of supernatural encounters with some moaning sounds, a walking set of clothing (that Yerlott manages to cut to bits before it strangled Cuthbert), and some books being thrown about in a library. Past a number of disturbing paintings the group finds stairs going up.
Upstairs the group notices the ghost of lady Bronwill reading in a lounge. Luckily she doesn’t notice them. They sneak out a window onto the roof and circle around until they find a room with some treasures in it. (The many windows really came in handy here! Just a huge number of possible pathways.) Yerlott sadly has to break apart her chronometer to fashion a small tool to quietly open the window. Once inside Dave recognizes the professor’s brain, they also find a sad looking salamander and the alien idol.
Realizing that jumping off the roof could be dangerous and noisy, the group travels back through the house avoiding the ghost until they make it to the stairs. Once in the room with the creepy paintings one especially horrible one of a lady with too wide of a grin starts leaking oil paint. A spectre of the woman made of oil paint starts sliding towards them. Yerlott attempts to shine a flashlight at the spectre to see if it dissipates but it has no effect, the spectre starts drowning Cuthbert with oil and dissolves when she is successful. Cuthbert is barely alive and doesn’t have the strength to carry the alien idol or flame thrower so Yerlott must carry those and go to 0 HP.
Carrying so many bulky items and with an injured party member the group decides that a diversion would be in their best interests to escape. They unlock a window and Cuthbert starts moving towards the edge of the estate in the shadows. Meanwhile Yerlott starts a fire with the flamethrower at the front of the house and escapes out a back window. The guards are distracted and some of them exit the area to presumably get help, leaving the gate open as they run. Seeing an opportunity Cuthbert and Yerlott make a run for it back to Maybelline’s house where she gladly accepts the idol and heals Cuthbert.
Below are my original retrospective notes.
It was a lot of fun! A bit of a slow start as the players got used to the strange world, but by the end they were very into it and making plans about what to do next. They are thinking about stealing some of those paintings to sell. They are also wondering why the place was so heavily guarded if it is haunted. I’m looking forward to the next session. Also having HP not equal health is a great boon to comedy. My little brother is playing Cuthbert and he is very gung-ho for violent solutions, so it’s really funny having him play such a weak character who keeps going down, but not actually dying. It also helps with the tension in more scary situations. Having a player go down is more scary than having a player die.
Things I wish I’d done better is I wish I’d portrayed crowds better. I’ve never lived in a city so thinking about it doesn’t come naturally to me. I might have to make some tools for myself to aid with that. Some little reminders, tables, or prewritten interesting things to see in the crowd. I also pretty much completely forgot about my encounter tables so those didn’t come into play very much.
Now for some ideas I have now that two years and a lot more games have passed.
I think this was a really successful adventure. I started the players off on a quest, but after that it was totally led by them. The manor itself encouraged a lot of hiding and movement, while the ghosts and guards kept them paranoid and on their toes. Though I said I didn’t use my encounter tables very much, I did make use of the tables in Electric Bastionland for some spur-of-the-moment characters and that was useful. Main things I wish I had done is made a smaller map. Chris McDowall recommends keeping tables to just 6 really good entries, I think the map would have benefited from the same advice. Cut the location number in half and only keep the really interesting ones. I also think I was trying to make this too much like classic D&D type adventures. You travel on the wilderness map, then you arrive at the dungeon. Instead I think the borough and underground should have constituted the dungeon. Having this adventure location made the borough itself feel a bit like filler.
