Skräckfält episode 1: A slippery situation

 

After making a pact last week to attempt a tabletop game via google meet...The day arrived! My best friend of more than 34 years put his daughter to bed just as I was finishing my morning coffee in Toronto. I borrowed a HD webcam from my excellent girlfriend and set it on a tripod, directed at our 32" round dining table, covered in gaming terrain and fully painted minis.

(I signed into the google meet with another account on my iphone and tried to use it as a close-up camera also.)

Justin and I had built warbands during the week and he chose his minis from my collection. I would push the figures around and he would roll his own dice while observing the camera feed.

Sellswords and Spellslingers is designed to be a co-op game, although I bought it to play solo. It turned out to be a perfect choice for a play over camera game. As we were not competing, it was a stress free experience. The rules are very clever. Brutally simple in places, the action flows very quickly and surprises abound. In my opinion these factors are vital to a solo game and wonderful for a co-op.

Our story begins in the town of Glumhöff, a once bustling hamlet on the Skräckfält hinterlands. It's former glory now somewhat threadbare, as the walls fell into ruin and the nobles fled to the interior.

It is here that we find...

Gal'grax the Grim and the Dirty boys

Once a rising young sorcerer at the Glumhöff Academy of the Arcane Arts and Beauty School, Gal'grax the Grim (Gary Grimes) was "the man" on campus. Famous for scoring 4 ‘touchdunks’ in the inter-school final of the Skräckfält Mudditch league, he was slated for great things with offers from both the Dark Disciples of Doomsguard and United Necromancer League to join the ranks of some of the most powerful of the seven sorcerers.

Just before graduation, he discovered he had impregnated a one-night-stand, Beryl Dörf - the daughter of Glumhöff 's Mayor. Forced to marry her in a "crossbow wedding" he wasn't able to follow his dreams of conquering the world with his mighty magics but settled into village life as a local cobbler.

As he hits middle age, an unhappy Gary came across his old magic staff and robes while cleaning out the attic. Contacting his old school buddies, the "dirty boys" (named after a short-lived boy band they formed in high school) he quit as a cobbler and has decided to fulfil his destiny to rule first Skräckfält and then the world!
Beryl is less than happy about this development...

We selected the second scenario "Orcs and slippery stones". It is a basic scenario and doesn't have too many special rules, so we thought it would be a good learning game. I have a decent amount of GW Grotz but lack any orcs, so will be subbing in frostgrave plastic Gnolls instead. They will use the orc stat lines. 

The scenario background is simply: "Orcs and Goblins harass a nearby village. You must stop them."

Narratively, we decided that Gary used his wife's influence over her father the Mayor, to place a bounty on the local monsters assailing Glumhöff. Conveniently, "Gal'grax" immediately declared he would slay the beasts and made preparations to set off.

As Gal'grax and his chosen men set out to collect the bounty, they are met on the road by a scruffy looking "knight" and his companions. Sir Arvant's seekers. Once a questing party, their time in the Skräckfält has worn them down to just sir Arvant, his squire, Sutter, and the grizzled old battle wizard Mikolas. 

The two groups agree to join forces and share the bounty. 

I set up the table. It has 8 large rocks that block LOS and are considered slippery, meaning that models climbing up onto them risk falling over if they roll badly. Some initial monsters are placed according to the instructions, most of them randomly positioned apart from the 2 Gnoll brutes in the centre. The players are then allowed to choose an edge to deploy on.

Sir Arvant surveys the rocky plain and asks "Well Gal'grax... They have only one group of archers in their number, shall we approach from the opposite side so as to be protected from their arrows?"

"Nope" says Trunk, largest of the dirty boys. "We bum rush those little stikkas and cut them down first, then we can slaughter the others without fear of arrows whilst we do so."

Mikolas grinned. "Agreed! Let's get up 'em!"

It was a fine battle. We decided to alternate activations rather than complete all of each warbands in turn, so as not to have one player sitting around for long. As it is a co-op game this was totally fine.

The S&S system is ingenious. In essence, every time you activate a PC, you roll your choice of between 1 and 3 d20's, needing an 8+ to earn an action. Any dice that come up 7 or less draw a card from the event deck, and are resolved before the PC model takes it's actions (presuming it gets any). The event cards are primarily enemy activations and enemy spawns, with some other twists thrown in, sometimes beneficial to the players.

In the first round of PC activations, Mikolas blew away all three of the goblin archers with a fireball, then Fingers, Posh and Sutter took down the next nearest horde of goblins. Sir Arvant charged off around the flank waving his sword, while Gal'grax fell into a hole and narrowly avoided being killed by the poisoned spikes at the bottom.

With the archers dead, our troops marched cautiously forward, picking off goblins and wearing down the Gnolls with arrows and crossbow bolts.

The dirty boy named "Gulper" has shown up hungover due to his heavy drinker trait. He spent almost the entire game in combat with a horde of 2 goblins, missing every attack, but saving his own skin with his trusty buckler no less than 6 times.

We had bad weather set in, a mana flux causing Mikolas to barely fail all the rest of his fireball attempts, and more than one frightening ambush by freshly spawned monsters. But in the end all our characters survived and the day was won when no monsters were left standing. Success! 

The only slight drawback for my warband was that I only looted bodies twice, so determined was I to win the scenario... While the dirty boys looted most of the corpses and even found a bonus stash of silver and extra XP award... Under a rock. He managed to net over a hundred sliver this way, while I only managed to scrounge up 9! It was so much fun to play a game with Justin again, and the Google meet camera set up worked quite well. There are some small changes to make for the next session, but all in all, it went pretty smoothly. 

I can't wait for next Friday, when we will sort out our between-battle campaign activities and see what happens to our motley bands of ne'er do wells next!