The Doug Alone
A man wanders through a liminal space with dice and dominos.

Category: Advanced Fighting Fantasy

On the Strange Histories of Humb [Advanced Fighting Fantasy + Mythic] [Lore]

By

On 2024-11-30

In Advanced Fighting Fantasy, Ick + Humb, Lore, Mythic

On the Nature of Calendars and the Geographic Location of an Insignificant City Growing in Power

Imagine, if you will, we are floating a mile or so over a relatively insignificant place, geographically speaking. Below us, there is a decently sized island at least a week of sea travel from the various centers of Allansia's society.

By Allansia's calendar, it is the Month of Reaping of the year 288 AC. Earthsday to be precise. Night time shadows the Forest Ick.

It is a time where across the ocean, great heroes have overthrown mighty villains like Zagor and the Lizard King while others then go on to let loose ancient stone giants to ravage the lands east of Blacksand.

However, where we currently are, floating over the Island of Phillia, the War of the Wizards had only the slightest of impacts. There was no "Chaos" for there to be a "After".

The Bad King Phillic and his rebel kingdom was for sale and no one bought it. At least his inability to gather dark forces matched the ineptitudes of his moral teachings and The Bad King Phillic is mostly known for bungling a few bumper years of crops and once failing to cut a ribbon properly while unveiling a statue of himself.

We are not floating over whatever remains of Phillos, once capital of the island. Instead, we are somewhere roughly in the south of the middle of the island, and down below is a city. The City of Humb. During the day, you could see that Humb has been growing a lot, recently. New streets and lot of new buildings are cropping up. Farm land now stretches north and south along the River Eos. The old road that once connected the Valley Towns to Phillos is being rebuilt.

Some scholars debate whether Humb is a corruption of "Hub" or of "Humble" but in reality, both camps are wrong. Humb gets its name from a strange hum that once could be heard in the region. Before it was Humb, it was Sennasal: a holy site dedicated to Sennas, a God of Art. Humans and elves created great art and discussed how the land seems to have been a place of giants. It was a golden age of creativity and scholarship for the region.

Then, something occurred. We will get to that, shortly.

When it was Sennasal, there were no months. Time was reckoned in 13-day cycles each known after a shade of purple (Sennas has many, many names for colors). Each day was a shade of pink. Each hour a shade of blue. Years were marked in shades of green. Groups of seven years in shades of yellow. Orange was the color of eleven seven-year cycles. Subtler hues named longer and shorter cycles. The calendar was a sing-song collection of gradients and often these colors would be baked into current art to date it. Being able to read these dates is an art (pardon the pun) lost to time.

A Brief History of Humb

Then, roughly forty years before the end of the War of the Wizards, the event occurred and something crashed down into the land and destroyed much of Sennasal and the Faith of Sennas. Some years later, a few farmers set up homesteads along the Forest Ick and remarked upon the humming sound, and they became known as the People of the Humb. One of those families specialized in cooking the food and in time were called the Bakersfields. The set up a series of restaurants and hearths visited by growing numbers of travelers.

Trade along the River Eos and the Old Road brought in new people and made trade decent but never quite so strong. But Humb endured. Legends of strange sights and sounds were common. The Moonstone Ruins, a remnant of a Sennas holy place, became the center of Humb's biggest festival. The waters flow out of it in a array of colors and change the shades of Eos. Once a year, these colors erupt so vibrantly that even those not trained in the subtle hues becomes aware.

In 234, the mayor of Humb, Malakar Brite, conspired with his warlock followers to try and turn Humb into his own kingdom. At least this is how Shellyton Bakersfield remembered it. Shellyton was only a child at the time. The Bakersfields fled west through the Forest Ick and joined the Seven Tows of the Valley.

In 272, Shellyton decided it was time to travel back through the Forest Ick and battle Malakar Brite and get revenge for the poor people of Humb. Alas, Shellyton died in battle versus the Red Warlocks.

In 287, his nephew, Barston Bakersfield, traveled forth to find what had happened to his uncle. Barston was more successful in surviving the forest and made his way to Humb, expecting to find ruins and corruption.

Instead, he found a bustling city.

ANOTHER Brief History of Humb

In this history, Malakar Brite was a somewhat minor mayor who took Humb from a large town to a small city, in part by codifying the various guilds that ran the town and giving them increased power. Brite passed with honors but is largely forgotten. The guilds are the powers that be with the city mayor being largely in charge with organizing the unions together.

And in this version, the Warlocks are a warring band of two groups - Red and Blue - who have closed off Humb in a thin blockade choking off progress. They are working based off missives from Malakar Brite who, in their version of events, is with the Gray Warlocks and is trying to find a true successor to his teachings.

People are going missing. The city is struggling. Trade is decreasing. Religious temples are emptying of followers and holy relics.

Barston navigates his dual-vision of a destroyed town and a sieged city. He finds a nearly forgotten Temple of Sennas. He inspires the Printer's Guild to keep growing in power. Eventually, a fight with the Temple's Guild exposes that that Guild is being run by the Order of Illker. A merchant's guild who has been using the history of Malakar Brite to send fake commands to the warring Warlocks.

A version of Malakar Brite that makes no sense in this world.

Barston undergoes personal sacrifice but breaks the backs of both warring factions and ends the siege, allowing Humb to start growing again. He then goes into seclusion to restart the religion of Sennas.

In the back of his head, he realizes there's a weird truth here. Humb not only has two (or more) written histories, it might have multiple histories in reality. Different versions of the ruins, town, and city existing together and finding a balance. Some have more factions of Warlocks. Some have other ruins and monuments. Some have giants. Some are centers of trade.

And somehow this might be related to Sennas and the event.

== DOUG'S COMMENTARY ==

This is a bit of a strange trip down a long memory lane going all the back to my Barston Bakersfield beginnings. I've mentioned before but that was a long campaign with two different beginnings and part of the reason I stuck with it is because the ruined-town-of-Humb ended up being a bustling city because of a single goofy oracle roll. Several plot lines got twisted and changed thanks to the randomness of dice. Nowadays, with more solo-play under my belt I would have tamped that down a bit but at the time I was playing what I thought were the rules.

At peak, there were four tribes of Warlocks. At the end, there was two. At peak, Malakar Brite was alive and well. At the end, he is most likely dead. The Forest Ick was both a fairly practical forest and a mythical place.

My final few sessions started building up a theme that somehow the worship of Sennas in the region caused multiple "paintings" to occur. One session's canon being rewritten was not because I had screwed up and failed to follow my own notes but because reality had shifted in the region. Heh.

As I get ready to launch the Barston Bakersfield series on the blog, I want to start with a different focus, though. Alice Hunter and her band of "unofficial guards". Humb is still reeling from finding out that most of its guards were part of a plot to kidnap and ship off people and the most powerful Guild in town was tricking Warlocks into sieging the town to drive up prices. Alice, Lun, Nadya, and Chungly are four characters from the very end of the Barston series that will form a kind of comical detective agency to try and fill in the gaps as the city grows beyond its capacity to control.

== CREDITS ==

This series is played using Arion Games' Advanced Fighting Fantasy and Tana Pigeon's Mythic.

There are a lot of other sources that get brought into play and have been used in the fairly extensive worldbuilding at this point. It would be hard to carry on without acknowledging the tools that made such a long campaign possible (and are still part of the world and its lore):

  • JoyPeddler Games: Harper's Quest 2
  • Ben Milton: Knave 2nd Edition and Maze Rats
  • Cesar Capacle: Random Realities
  • Conjecture Games // Zach Best: Universal NPC Emulator Revised
  • Madeline Hale: Table Fables
  • Matt & Erin Davids: Several of the Book of Random Tables
  • Kevin Crawford: Worlds Without Number, Stars Without Number, and Scarlet Heroes
  • Chaos Gen // Duncan Thomson: various lists and tables
  • Raging Swan Press: Several titles from the GM Miscellany and 20 Things Lists (Dread Thingonomicon and Dread Laironomicon)
  • Third World Games: Into the Wild Omnibus
  • Rory's Story Cubes
  • A few products by Philip Reed

Others as noted.

As always, I prefer splash art that gives themes and ideas rather than being designed to be a precise illustration. Other art comes from various human-created public domain and royalty free art packs or is made by me. Maps are made with Hex Kit, Gimp, Canva, and Google Drive tools.

Special shout out to all the original artists of the Fighting Fantasy and the continued work by folks like John Kapsalis who are big inspirations for my own mental images.

Splash art this time is "Village Hilltop Town" by MemoryCatcher on Pixabay. Alterations by myself using GIMP.

THE BIG BARSTON BAKERSFIELD CHRONICLES RECAP, PART 3 (ADVANCED FIGHTING FANTASY)

By

On 2024-07-08

In Actual Play, Advanced Fighting Fantasy, Solo Campaigns, The Bakersfield Chronicles

 

In part 2 of this big recap, I discussed some of the various characters and elements that had shown up over the months of playing and the general BIGGITY [technical term] of playing out a campaign so deeply decided by random dice rolls. I also hinted that I was needing to parse some things and get back to the Barston Bakersfield core. 

Barston and company had cracked open a big conspiracy. I wanted to do one last dive into the Humb-issue quests and solve the problem of the missing people so I could be freed up to dial a few things back. But, before I could really do that, I had an issue inherent in the whole "always expanding" campaign world: what was meant to be the first or second quest, destroying the red warlocks, had never been attempted. It was time. By the lore of the campaign world, the warlocks were entangled with some of the missing people (*cough* zombies *cough*) but also controlled the northern paths. 

By returning to the campaign roots I would open doorways to more adventures, several which had been seeded and glimpsed in excursions. 

-- The Return to the Forest Ick -- 

Using the original Harper's Quest 2 sessions, I had a rough map of Ick that I could use to track back towards the base (the same place that Shellyton died at the very start of this campaign). I did build up some random tables using Mythic's Location Crafter and I built up some random encounters that made sense and worked out some various objects and complications I wanted to face. It was a way to control some the randomness while still not having a clear impression of what the team - being the now definite main team of Barston, Derron (street punk become something of monk type), and Astrid (elven bard who had developed into a fairly powerful nature mage). Derron has a backpack full of highly explosive fire oil. They plan to go full "goblin sapper". 

It would honestly take 2 to 3 long posts to cover ALL the details of these sessions, so I will sum it up into six quickish sections...

- 1. The Sennas Faith - 

A growing theme hinted at in part 2 was the idea that Humb had somehow been tied to a now lost faith. This faith involved a god of beauty and art called Sennas, appearing as a supremely beautiful male youth and whose symbols was a gauntlet pouring a rainbow of colors. Humb and Ick were still connected to this faith, though most trappings related to it were missing. Barston has pledged to find out more and finds himself drawn to the mystery. He seeks to return a statue to the ancient Sennas temple (now a place full of bohemians and artists drawn to it).

During this adventure, Barston is deeply wounded and has to limp off into a safe spot to try and heal. An encounter leads to a meeting with wood elves (from Ick) who love that he is trying to take down the warlocks. The warlocks have been destroying large swaths of the forest in their spread while the elves have been trying guerilla warfare tactics but know if the warlocks learn too much about where the elves live that the elves will be outnumbered. Dice rolls and oracles lead to a plot twist here where the elves are followers of Sennas. They have kept the faith alive for generations while the humans have let it lapse. Barston is invited to seek out the village. When he is ready, he will be able, though there are some "conditions" initially applied.

- 2. The Warring Reds - 

I realized I had made a slight mistake in that the blue warlock tribe (once more powerful than the Reds) had been largely destroyed so technically the Reds should have been running rampant. I decided to take a side trip and run a short session from the viewpoint of the red warlocks, partially using Mythic Magazine #41's Villain Crafter table to set some scenes, combined with a few Meaning Table rolls. The end result was that the Reds were at war with themselves. The powerful leader, focusing on demonology, had been deemed too theoretical in his tyranny and a younger upstart, focusing more on martial skills and rule-by-force, had started to push him out. Both considered themselves to be the true follower of Malakar Brite. 

On top of this, the remaining blue warlocks had decided to try and take over the Red territory. A few miles from Humb, a bloody war was going down, largely unnoticed. [At the end of each scene, day, etc...I would roll a basic opposed test and keep track of the relative damage each side was sustaining]. 

- 3. The Order's True Place in the Tale - 

Towards the end of these sessions, another clump of plot twists revealed that a major player in backing both sides of the warlock war was The Order of Illkar. The cultists-pretending-to-be-merchants were behind not only the missing people but also behind the gutting of the Humb churches and temples. Barston is able to lay claim to many stolen artifacts (and later, Derron is able to return them) and help start a pretty massive healing project around town. 

- 4. Ick Is Fighting Back -

There is a scene where Ick shifts into a more primal version of itself, an ancient forest full of strange creatures and large mushrooms. A group of warlocks who had been torturing and killing another group of warlocks is trapped inside the event and killed. Barston realizes that the forest is far more deeply magical than he realized and something is reawakening in it to protect itself from the increased destruction by the warlocks. 

- 5. The Great Storm - 

Also near the end, the team gets caught up in a trap that threatens to bring both groups of warlocks down on them. Astrid burns off essentially all of her magic points to create a massive storm. Since the Blues are also decently powerful weather mages, they inadvertently join in and power the storm even more. Portions of the forest are flattened and many warlocks are outright destroyed in the hurricane force event. The entire forest is charged and the trees glow and pulse in the energy. This act weakens Astrid considerably but allows the team a chance to get closer to the warlock base and to try and carry out their mission. 

- 6. The Team Suffers a Loss and Barston Undergoes a Crisis of Faith - 

Right as they get near the warlock base, they find the warlocks in a final death struggle. Too distracted with killing each other to notice the team of heroes sneaking in. Alas, some terrible dice rolls reveals that a telegraphed threat - a wood demon summoned up by the Reds to guard their base - is actually worse than intended. Random rolls all go from bad to worse as Astrid is snatched off the path into the trees. While Barston and Derron try, and fail to free her, she is hit several times and crushed. Derron and Barston are both deeply injured before the dice suddenly "turn back on" and Derron just flips out and pummels the demon into woodchips. 

Barston snaps and takes the backpack from the very-nearly-fatally injured Derron and just runs full tilt into the warlock base (he was here before, it was wear his bow was found), lights all the fire oil, and tosses it in. 

For every dice roll that went poorly for Astrid (and the trapped team that led to her summoning a massive storm), every dice roll about the extent of this explosion agreed: kaboom. The Reds, who use fire magic as a base, have explosives built up in their own plan of wrecking everything. Except now Barston has intentionally but also accidentally set it off. 

The explosion flattens him, kills off many Red, destroys many of their "stored up" zombies, and knocks many tall trees down. 

We have an unconscious, 1-ish HP main hero, his best friend that has around 2hp, and a dead friend who had been a core of this campaign for months. 

- The Aftermath - 

While the team bled out at the doorway of victory, the wood elves they had met a few days before showed up and gathered our fallen heroes. They are all three taken into the secret village of the Ick wood elves - Tarlanei - and there Astrid is buried with her kingdom's crown (used for some time by her as a magical focus) returned to her own elvish people. Derron recovers fairly quickly and returns to Humb with news. Barston stays in Tarlanei and dedicates himself to becoming the new high priest of Sennas. A process which will take months in game-world time. 

Astrid's troupe, the Skipping Faun, has a new leader: Athella. She was taken from the solo adventure "Bringing Back the Princess" in The Warlock Returns #11. I adapted it as a stand alone scenario for Barston and it ended with her joining the Faun (as always, based on a lot of random oracle rolls). 

The Sennas temple, still infested with Bohemians in a now thriving art community, has many of its artifacts restored and awaits Barston to take on his new role as leader. 

Derron keeps the outward appearance of a street punk but is now much more mature and deeply dedicated to understanding himself. He will follow Barston when Barston is ready to lead.

Humb is now freed of the years-long warlock interference and the Order has been destroyed. The town is suddenly finding itself bustling again. 

-- The End of Volume One and the "Truth" of Malakar Brite --

I had a problem on my hand. The main major threat of a year of playing seemed resolved EXCEPT we never got around to main baddie. And it felt like shoehorning in the big bad at this point would lessen what was actually a fairly upsetting (to the characters and to myself) death. Astrid was always a bit of a back up character but she was, inversely, kind of meant to be the one who lived on and told the story so future generations of Bakersfields (possibly half-elf Bakersfields since early meaning tables had essentially set up that her reasoning for following Barston was romantic interest) could follow along. In world terms, Barston and Derron got on people's nerves even though people trusted them. Everyone, including some of the not-so-good people, loved Astrid. 

Prior to this point, I had Brite shoved into every random list, sometimes more than once, and the dice always avoided having him surface, so I basically decided to forget the oracles and just go with my gut.

Brite was an old man when Shellyton and the other Bakersfields fled Humb. That was now 41-years-ago. He would be in his 90s or even over 100. While fantasy wizards, especially evil ones, tend to outstay their welcome, the campaign had clearly painted him as a threat-by-proxy and never something more active. In fact, oracle type rolls to see if the warlocks had received missions "from him" had basically all come back as "no" or "exceptional no" type results ever since the Order was destroyed a couple of months back. 

To wit, my own interpretation of these too-many-rolls is that Malakar is gone. 

Dead? A man who got turned into a legend while being essentially innocent? Whatever. Just "left". Maybe Ick absorbed him. Maybe he is in an alternate Humb painted on a different canvas. In his place, the Order had used warring bands of warlocks by pretending their missives were from Brite himself and had played them off of one another to fill their own pockets. For years. Maybe decades. The destruction of The Order led to the in-fighting led to the downfall. Brite himself might return but it is obvious that Shellyton's beliefs of a Xagor-esque Warlock were the byproduct of a kid who had long processed the loss of his childhood home through some grief-tinged revenge fantasy. The warlocks were real but Shellyton's take on Brite was, at best, outsized. Maybe. Maybe this is the long con. 

At any rate, it barely matters. A final scene played out in the aftermath with Barston and Athella (The Skipping Faun remains loyal in their support of Barston) ended up with the conclusion that Barston now wants to be himself. No longer a continuation of Shellyton's quest. No longer a warlock smasher. A man who is finding his faith while refinding a lost faith for an entire region. 

All the characters tended to anti-adventurers. Barston was a book printer in training, a herbalist by hobby, who beat warlocks while wielding an old family mace. Derron was a kid who took care of animals and got into drunken bar fights. Astrid was a run away princess bride who now played music and hung out with a pair of losers. That theme kept going for all the heroes - the conman, the reformed warlock, the shaggy dog, the amateur detective, the struggling merchant, the crackpot professor, the bard play-acting a mayor, the great-and-powerful wizard who is also kind of a petty power player. 

Barston is now a priest in the proper fantasy sense of the word, struggling to reawaken a faith that is built into the lifeblood of the land. Derron, his best friend, takes on the role of a friar monk and right-hand-man. The two of them will return, eventually, in much more seriously minded storylines. For a campaign about un-heroes, the two of them are now full blown heroes of the realm. Yet, people have barely heard of these two men. I like that contrast. 

But the campaign does not merely end because its titular main character is less of of a main character and has now become an entire plot device. There are plans afoot. 

I had planned to wrap this Big Recap up in three parts, but there will be a part 4. We will finish this up talking about how the campaign will continue with four (or more) different faces: the new city guards, the treasure hunters, the con men, and the priests. And that's not even getting to the grumpy goblins, the young rangers, the town beset by werewolves, the glowing figures in the hills. or the massive power struggle as Athella's mom attempts to take over an entire dynasty. 

The Big Barston Bakersfield Chronicles Recap, Part 2 (Advanced Fighting Fantasy)

By

On 2024-07-08

In Advanced Fighting Fantasy, Campaign Design, Solo Campaigns, The Bakersfield Chronicles

 

In Part 1 of this Big Recap, we saw how a simple Harper's Quest 2 story blended with a too-large Troika campaign to become something in the middle: a simple-beginnings but unknown-endings Advanced Fighting Fantasy campaign. In this part, I will recap some of the ideas and sessions that began to set-up all the threads that I am still working on to this day...almost entirely in ways that I thought would go differently. 

-- Step One: Advanced Fighting Barston --

How to take a character from one system - Harper's Quest 2 uses the a similar STR/DEX/WIS loadout as Into the Odd's STR/DEX/WILL - and convert it into another: AFF's Skill, Luck, Stamina, and Magic? I handled this mostly by starting with the basics. I made a character in the default way and then looked for ways to tweak and update him. He had been pretty good in fighting groups of enemies so he got the Combat Tactics talent that meant he had training in facing multiple foes. He had absolutely sucked at casting or using anything magical so not only did he start with no magical talent or score in AFF but one of the inherent mysteries was why he seemed to be anti-magical. There was no disadvantage like that for him to take but it was baked into his story that he tended to avoid magical items. Even for potions he brewed herbal concoctions. Priestly magic was ok, but he horked up more wizardly magic...for some reason. 

He had a whetstone in HQ2 that gave him +1 Damage. In this case, his AFF mace gets +1 damage but otherwise uses the AFF damage track. 

One of the more perplexing items was a bow found in the HQ2 segment. It was in a secret room in a red warlock base and was tied into a wizard named Yevony The Great who had some non-specific dealings with at least some of the Reds. "Is this bow magical?" "Exceptional No." At the time I just played it as a very-mundane bow. Once the transition happened I wanted something more than that so ended up with it being anti-magic. The bow attracts magically inclined people and then destroys their magic ability when they use it. The supremely non-magical Barston just used it like a bow but it could even strip the magical nature out of entities over time. 

-- Step Two: Building a City Brick by Brick --

Humb was a bustling commerce town...kind of. There were a lot of merchants' guilds and a lot of commerce in potential, but for years the city had been increasingly having trouble reaching the outside world. To the north and west, the red warlocks choked off trade routes. To the south and east, it was the blue warlocks. Shipments got lost all the time. People visiting the city were under attack. Humb was in a long downfall state of decay.

I also rolled on a random table - I forget which one but it might have been something from Matt David's The Great Book of Random Tables or one of his related Quest books - and got some basic hooks to generate some threads for Barston to solve. Outside of the long-term disruption to supplies that put a strain on all trade, there was

  1. A general lack of faith plaguing the churches and the people,
  2. A number of people had gone missing with no clear explanation,
  3. A local troupe was in town having troubles getting people to join. 
A big one with no clear ending, a big one with probably a clear ending once it is solved, and a smaller one for flavor. I liked it. 
I also threw some Rory's Story Cubes to generate a few longer distance oddities to hook some adventures on and got there was a floating island related to missing livestock down south, a site where something had fallen from above and was altering the terrain (also down south), and a person who was trying to research stories of giants (in town, but focusing on the west). 
I plonked a few more threads in about a plague and another about folks turning into statues but both of those kind removed relatively soon [as in, immediately] because it was getting to be a bit too much. Both got just kind of summed up into "Humb has troubles and needs more supplies". 
Using The Universal NPC Emulator to generate some details along with some other rolls on things like Meaning Tables I ended up with some not-so-grimdark hooks such as the current mayor - Mayor Elore Mardias in a direct Romancing SaGa Minstrel Song nod - was an ex-bard and had a lot of fans and groupies who basically elected him and still hung on to him because of that. A river spotted briefly during the HQ2 session became the River Eos - a joke about "End of Service" derived from an online community I am part of for SaGa's Re;universe - and the major way to travel to and from Humb. There was a plotline about assassinating a shoemaker in Nallstay (an artisan city to the north alongside Lake Telos, another EOS joke). 
Barston was staying at the Dog and Duck Inn, near the Brite Green (the only remnant of Malakar Brite in the city's history...a park named for the long serving family of which Malakar was a member). 
The sheer number of details generated over these couple of prep sessions was growing a bit out of hand so it was time to actually play the dang thing.

-- A Grumpy Wizard, a Street Punk, a Reformed Warlock, an Elven Singer, a Con Man, and a Very Shaggy Dog Join a Journeyman Book Printer for Drinks --

Now having a working character, backed by AFF and Mythic GME 2, it was time to Barston to work. Why was Uncle Shell wrong? What actually happened forty-years ago when the Bakersfields fled Humb. How can Barston help all this chaos. The main goals were basically clear:

  1. Find out the truth of Uncle Shelltyon and Malakar Brite
  2. Punch out some Warlocks
  3. Help get supplies to Humb
The first adventure was a quick one. Barston is chilling in the Dog and Duck's bar when he hears shouts. He calls out to see if someone will help and the person who answers the call turns out to be Yevony the Great, the same wizard who seemed to be helping the warlocks (turns out he had snuck the bow in to try and get it to Malakar to destroy Malakar's magic, but that was found out later). The two of them temporarily team up to help the person shouting who is Derron Underhill, a young street punk character who prefers to his fists to any blade. Derron, a rebellious but spiritual teenager, becomes one of the main allies to Barston. At the time, Derron was working in the stables and trying to stop blue warlocks from stealing the horses. 
One of the Blues turns on the others and helps out the good guys. This ends up being Haig Raven: eventual reformed warlock and general digger into ruins and mystical mysteries. 
Besides these three, these early sessions introduced 
  • Astrid - runaway wood elf princess and current troupe leader of traveling performers The Skipping Faun who is intrigued by Barston, 
  • Nizel Torel - supposed Great Hero but actually a conman who told most of his own exploits to help with various schemes, and 
  • Gulwin - a great big shaggy dog that showed up during the HQ2 sessions but returned here to save Barston a couple of times. 

Nizel, by the way, was the one associated with the assassination plot at Nallstay, though this turned out to be a ruse by the Reds. 

It was a lot of characters already. Others got added as NPCs and townsfolk, including a Sheriff that was initially a main ally since the mayor always seemed dismissive of Barston. Our main group, swollen to capacity, eventually ended up tracking down the main base of the Blues and wrecking it, which freed up trade to the south and allowed Humb goods to reach the coast and Goldenbrook, a large coastal town with one hell of a political conflict going down. 
While I was doing a bang-up job of introducing characters and plots left and right - be it by oracle or meaning table to pulling some card or another, etc - one thing was clear: the campaign was losing focus and it was losing fun. The heart of this campaign was Barston and it was quickly becoming a group effort where there was no reason to believe that Barston was anything significant. 

-- The Great Split and the Move from the Original Plot --

Early on, there were two main goals for Barston that had never really been approached or close to solved: find Malakar Brite and find Uncle Shell's stuff. Taking care of Humb became the entire plotline, even greatly outpacing fighting off the warlocks. More and more people showed up. Bill Samford was a poor merchant and a worse guard. Bill had three friends with him (originally, before I made the whole circus, those three friends were going to be Barston's buddies at the Dog and Duck and kind of a Greek Chorus to back up our lone adventurer but frankly I did not have time for them). This cast of a dozen and then dozens became kind of background noise. 
The great split started to happen. Nizel and Yevony (the conman fighter and the morally questionable wizard) got sent north to Nallstay to handle whatever was up with the assassination plot and take care of business up there. Haig and Gulwin (reformed Warlock and shaggy miracle dog) fled town and justice and eventually team up with Ali Ahussa, professor and archeologist who had tried to hire Barston early on to hunt down proof of giants, to go off and explore. Astrid gets about half her time with Barston and Derron, half her time with The Skipping Faun. 
The sheriff got several story beats, A storyline involving Derron and Barston tracking down some bandits ended up triggering some interrupt scenes in which a new character - Alice Hunter - hires the two of them to free her friend and maybe lover, Lun, a member of the Humb guard who has been captured while the rest of the guard look the other way. This introduced a whole new bad guy, The Order of Illkar, which was posing as a merchant's guild specializing in religious supplies. This Order is the major instigator of many of Humb's issues, playing temples against one another while also stealing supplies and kidnapping people. 
There ended up being a rescue mission, finding out that the Sheriff and many of the guards folk were in on this "kidnap people for profit" plot, and a huge fight in the street in which Barston, his allies, and the printer's guild manages to win. The sheriff is arrested. Barston is an unsung hero. Alice and Lun are reunited. 
And absolutely none of these madcap and ever spiraling adventures had ever done anything to answer the question of Uncle Shellyton, the truth of Malakar Brite, or any of the things I assumed the story would be about. I could have reeled it in at any time. Haig had told Barston that Shellyton's stuff was kept in the old Blue base which now was now the domain of a lamia: in session two or so. The plotline about the assassination and the trip up river got delayed until it no longer felt timely but I could have just sent them on up earlier. There was a simple plan, early on, to have the team run missions to disrupt the warlocks, to find out the truth of Malakar, but those kept taking backseat to all the other stuff going on. 

-- A New Meta-Plot Slowly Develops --

While I was having fun, I was getting frustrated by my own allowing of things to keep building. Any attempt to hold myself back ended up with me going "ok, just one more". The "to be played" pile in this campaign was piling up. 
I did find new hope, though, in a series of hints and concepts that were laying a groundwork for a possible way out. Ruins near Humb that emitted brightly colored water every midsummer. A missing statue from a religious temple that seemed to have significance to Barston. Hints that Ick is more than a mere forest. A grove in a swamp with giant fruit trees and giant bees. Glowing people in the hills.  A mask that made the wearers dream, and those dreams keep telling those people to find Barston. Reality was bending, like someone or something had painted on the canvas multiple times...
...and Barston's own strange anti-magic nature might be the key to unraveling it all. 
But first, it was time to return to the original plotline. Barston wants to find the missing people the Order has sold off, but to do that he has to finish the Warlocks once and for all. Our now main three characters - Barston, Derron, and Astrid - set off on an outsized mission to bring volume one to a close. The Blues have been scattered, now it is time to break the Reds. And that mission ends....
Badly.
In Part 3, I will go into how an epic trio of sessions made the world a lot more FANTASY while also making the original plotline more a form of therapy for a lost man who finally finds himself. And I'll go into how I plan to make sense of all these dang characters I could not stop myself from making.

The Big Barston Bakersfield Chronicles Recap, Part 1 (Advanced Fighting Fantasy+)

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On 2024-07-07

In Actual Play, Advanced Fighting Fantasy, Campaign Design, Harper's Quest 2, Solo Campaigns, The Bakersfield Chronicles, Troika

 

I think now is as good of a time as any to discuss the kind of odd origins of the campaign that took me from a long time dabbler in solo roleplay and made me into a solo-first roleplayer, from a person with a couple of solo/oracle type books to someone with a massive shelf of books and tools dedicated to the hobby. 

This is the story of a book printer turned warlock hunter Barston Bakersfield, whose story started out as an absolutely bog standard adventure romp: avenge his uncle's death and kill an evil wizard. But first, we go back a whole generation. 

-- Harper's Quest 2 Era & Shellyton Bakersfield -- 

In August, 2023, I launched a Harper's Quest 2 game after watching The Lone Adventurer play through it on his channel. It sounded fun, the price was right (just $2.50 for the pdf although I did get a physical copy later on), and I wanted to expand out a bit after being on a bit of a Fighting Fantasy kick (about once every two or three years I tend to deep dive through several of the old FF books). 

We had my hero above. Shellyton Bakersfield. He had been driven from his home, the town/city/place called Humb, years ago by the Mayor/Elder - Malakar Brite - after Brite pulled an Obed Marsh and trafficked in powers beyond the human sphere. 30+ years later, Shellyton was ready to get revenge and set out through the Forest Ick to battle Red Warlocks, Zombies, Demons, and more to get to Humb where he could battle Blue Warlocks, Skeletons, Mutant Minotaurs, and...eventually, Malakar Brite himself: The Gray Warlock. 

Shellyton. Malakar. Ick. Humb. Where did any of these names come from? No clue. I think I just syllable-spewed the first bits that came to mind. I know "Brite" was an odd reference to Reginald Bright from Endeavour. The idea was a somewhat unassuming, unthreatening older man who was actually a major threat. 

He set off through Ick. I took my time. I would roll on HQ2's oracles to generate a scene and then would either generate or search for artwork that matched and use that as some additional inspiration. There were some fights but it was partially just about getting used to solo playing NPCs and solo playing the aesthetic experience of hex/dungeon/wilderness-crawling.

And then outside a red warlock outpost, Shellyton went kaput. Terrible dice rolls stacked up back to back. No problem, HQ2 has a "generation" system that is probably meant to be taken a little less literally than I did but still: enter our new hero, Shelltyon's more practical and less fanatical nephew - Barston. He wants to know what happened to his uncle. He was raised hearing about "Crazy Uncle Shell's" revenge stories. Once Shellyton disappeared, Barston took on the quest to finish off Brite and to bring Shellyton's stuff back to the "town in the valley". 

Still, there's another twist in Doug's machinations...

-- How Two Things Were Coming together to Become Something Else -- 

While playing through HQ2, the itch had started. I wanted more and more solo play experience. I had started cooking up an idea for far-too-expansive Troika solo campaign fueled by some fantasy books I had been reading (e.g., The Books of the New Sun). A massive world with seven huge islands surrounding a continent that was also a city that was also two cities. One island was the gothic horror world. One was a Victorian magic school kind of world. One was more Mad Max post-apocalyptic. Another more mythical fantasy. Another more Lovecraftian horror. One more science-fiction-y. You get the idea. Each island was the personal domain of some ancient long-dead wizard who had structured reality to their own personal taste. No matter what sort of story I wanted to tell I could pick an "island" and drop characters into it. There were more minor islands I could make if I wanted to do something more one-shot-y. Over time, I could swap back and forth, have characters criss-cross in funny ways. 

I was already planning on using a few Advanced Fighting Fantasy modules and books and had an idea for a more traditional fantasy world being one of the islands. You can maybe figure out where this is going. 

What if the fantasy island/sphere/world was the same one that Shellyton had lived and died on? What if the "Harper's Quest" land was just a gateway to this more expansive forever-and-a-day Troika campaign, slightly channeled through an Advanced Fighting Fantasy lens? What if Barston (or, some two or three generations of Bakersfields later) might complete the quest and then get transported into this broad campaign? It tickled my creative juices.

It just was not quite meant to be...sort of... 

-- Barston Finds Humb and It All Changes --

One thing I wanted to do to prep for the above campaign was to introduce Mythic Game Master Emulator 2nd Edition into my HQ2 game. For practice. I made a rule that every rough scene needed to have at least two oracle questions: one to determine what had changed in the 10-year-gap between Shellyton and Barston. Another about whatever felt most appropriate. This will be important in just a minute. 

I had even more fun as Barston. He fought better, more smartly. I had gotten better and journaling and building in details. Battles were more tactical. Barston back-tracked, planned ahead. I pushed my comfort zone and had more detailed NPC interactions. I built in intrigues - two heroes of the land, a fighter of reknown and one of the great wizards - were entangled in this whole Evil Warlock business, a mystery Barston was trying to solve.

One of the descriptions I got was that there was giant footprints found in the forest. I took that a step further and made them GIANT footsteps. In fact, this whole HQ2 realm was not only an island in that upcoming-but-never-happened campaign but its founding wizard was a wargamer: he had made a world full of fantasy miniatures that he played out scenarios with, living miniatures that had been long abandoned and founded entire histories in his absence. Sometimes full sized people from one of the islands comes across the island and they appear as mountain sized giants. Fun, right?

The important change came right at the end of these sessions of track and backtracking through Ick. Barston finally finds Humb and before I roll on some dice to start generating that, I do a Meaning Table: City Descriptors and I get "Bustling" and "Commerce" and I wonder... "Wait, is Humb currently a bustling city full of people going about various merchant shops and such?" and get an Exceptional Yes result.

Suddenly, I decide to drop HQ2 and to effectively drop Troika because I realized what I wanted to do...

Barston Bakersfield got translated into an Advanced Fighting Fantasy character and Humb became a city under siege by at least two warring clans of Warlocks: each thinking they were the true followers of the legendary Malakar Brite. 

-- From One Random Oracle Result Came an Entire Year --

Could I have handled that one question differently? Sure. Humb could have once been a market town and now be just a random collection of ruins. No problem. However, that one question and my needing to stop and retool my whole scope was such a good thing. I "dropped" the immense, slightly pre-plotted conception of the mega-meta-campaign, technically. I worked on honing all the skills I could dealing with oracles, on-the-fly rulings, dungeon and landscape design, adventure tweaks, villain crafting, and detailed NPC interactions. I got a lot better at just playing to the table, ignoring tables when it was time to take the helm, and having lots of fun just doing my thing.

To put it into perspective, a world that essentially started out with three points - a still not really fleshed out "town from the valley," a forest, and a city from generations ago - has turned into, well, this...

In Part 2 of this Big Recap we'll look at how early adventures in the City of Humb led to a host of characters and working out how to actual play a sizeable solo campaign and then in Part 3 I will look at how it developed into its current state of a multi-POV campaign founded on a deep, deep mystery. Will that eventual answer be "TROIKA"? I don't know. I don't need to know. 
Just note that there are now dozens of characters, several towns and cities, some deep mysteries, some loose threads, and recently the start of a whole new religion. 
After these updates, I will return to the Bakersfield Chronicle (I took a month-long break after a campaign shift last session) and start playing again so later this month we should have posts and recaps about it showing up on this blog.
By the way, the above map was generated by HexKit using the Strange Tiles pack. This is not exactly an endorsement. I like it but I feel like the program probably needs an update (the files were last updated in 2019 it seems though the page gets updates more regularly). Still, it works for me.

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