My Stormbringer campaign

Although I was pleased with the start of the Corum adventure, there was one thing that bothered me. The notorious player #3 from my Ugh, Players topic...

therewillbe.games/forum/45-community-cat...-ugh-players?start=0

... arbitrarily decided that his new Corum character dislikes the new Corum character played by player #2 from that same post. Aggresively so. His character hasn't attacked #2's character, yet, but he has been trying to provoke a fight between their characters, loudly, to the visible annoyance of two other players at one point. To his credit, #2 is declining the bait, speaking mildly and diplomatically.

On the one hand, it doesn't seem personal, because there was no conflict at all between their Hawkmoon characters, even in the session just two weeks ago. I think that #3 just thinks that he's role-playing, but I think he is unnecessarily acting like an asshole. It's also possible that he is an asshole. Aside from the occasional issue with his girlfriend, he was always fine in the three years that I have known him. Though I did notice two years ago that the friends who introduced me to him and his girlfriend no longer invite them to their parties.

In terms of their characters, #3 is playing the former barbarian soldier while #2 is playing the elderly farmer/chaos sorcerer. #3's character has zero evidence so far that #2 is a chaos sorcerer, but he has made reference to it twice now just because he overheard while people started making their characters two weeks ago.

With four weeks until our next session, it is probably a good time for me to have a chat with #3 about his behavior. He is an inexperienced role-player, so he might not be familiar with the offense of meta-gaming. And I need him to dial down the obnoxiousness at the table. He hasn't verbally abused his girlfriend at the table for maybe two months now, so I think that I will delay that potentially touchy conversation. And I am tempted to call that behavior out in the moment it occurs, with an audience that will include two other female players.

During the four weeks since the previous session, I reached out to the problematic player via email. I gave him the chance to vent his own minor grievances, then let him know that other players were uncomfortable with his outbursts. I emphasized that we were all there to have fun, but the outbursts were ruining the fun for everybody. So he was fine at last night's game. I noticed him getting a little frustrated by something minor that his nemesis said, but he kept his cool.

To make up for the lack of action in the previous session, I intended to deliver on the foreshadowing with some violence. My first planned encounter was going to be a skirmish with barbarians in chariots throwing javelins at the running player characters. However, the party had early warning of the raiders and took some very sensible precautions to hide, even covering their tracks in the snow. However, one character fumbled both a climb roll and a conceal roll, and the Corum rules have a very interesting little rule: An Ill-Considered Thought.

An Ill-Considered Thought: when any character rolls two consecutive fumbles, they inadvertently summon a chaos beast that will immediately demand payment for service. And the 3d8 magic points are immediately lost by the accidental summoner. Fortunately, the fumbling character was our pirate/necromancer with a POW of 24, so she still had 8 magic points after the summoning. If she had been reduced to zero magic points, she would have fallen unconscious.

In this case, the chaos beast turned out to be a gray humanoid bat. It demanded a live foreigner of any age, and the party briefly discussed it as a possibility. Then they rejected the chaos beast's demand, and a brief combat broke out. The creature chased the summoner, then took a fatal critical hit from an arrow fired by the Vadhagh's Contrived Bow. The fight ended so quickly and decisively that the only wound taken by the player characters was a minor bruise when the fumbling character failed her climb roll and fell on hard ground. Because 2 of our 7 players were going to be arriving late due to another commitment, I decided to skip the skirmish with the barbarian raiders, which worked out great for timing purposes.

My other planned encounter went just as planned. The characters were struggling to drag their sled full of supplies up an icy, rocky slope via a narrow, winding trail. Suddenly some murderous redcaps starting popping up just long enough to take shots with their slings, then vanish the following round. Then pop up again, and vanish after taking shots. They were actually using the same planar shift ability as the Vadhagh player character, only with greater efficiency. The players struggled at first, but finally caught on to the rhythm of the surprise attacks and killed most of the redcaps before the last two escaped.

A larger force of barbarian chariots was catching up with the players as they found an ice-covered lake with a large, pale green building at the center. The players correctly deduced that the armored chariots were too heavy for the ice, so they crossed the ice and entered the building. And that seemed like a good stopping point for the night. Pacing is one of my best DMing skills. So far, I have been going easy on the characters, but that will change next time as they face an actual Moorcockian threat.