Frage an die Rollenspieler und insbesondere Spielleiter unter euch. Habt ihr immer im Blick, was die Helden so für aktuelle Werte bei Stärke & Co haben? Zum Beispiel kann ein Held ja für eine gewisse Zeit krank sein und dadurch schwächere Werte oder eine Erschwerniszulage bei den Proben bekommen. Oder ein Held hat ein besonderes Item, das ihm spezielle Fähigkeiten verleiht. Mir geht das im Eifer des Spieles ständig unter und die Spieler denken auch nicht immer dran. Gerade, wenn sich Verschlechterungen ergeben, fällt das sehr gern unter den Tisch 😉 Notiert ihr ständig alle geänderten Werte der Helden oder ist das bei euch Aufgabe der Spieler? Wie macht ihr das? Habt ihr Tipps für mich?
Achja, als der Wecker zuschlug, träumte ich gerade. Ich war mit Freunden bei @ErikUden im Haus, der offensichtlich an so ziemlich JEDEM jemals veröffentlichten #DasSchwarzeAuge Produkt mitgearbeitet hatte (Pseudonym: TheRonin), und deswegen einen gigantischen Keller voller Belegexemplare besaß. Alles feinst säuberlich geordnet und strukturiert.
Und, Erik, während du uns von Regal zu Regal geleitetest, liefst du dabei im Stil von Otto in seinen Filmen. O.O
Garhelt: we are outfitting an expedition up the river…
Tronde: Mother…
Garhelt: we need the best of our warriors, the best equipment, the best of our scholars, and we are going to discover the Orkland!
Tronde: Mother sigh Mother I am the hetman now.
Gerhalt not listening: I think we will need 4 dozen horses!
Tronde: you can get a mule.
Gerhalt: And I need the Giant’s Thumb!
Tronde: … tell you what mother, I will let Olaf put up some posters when he’s in Havena next week, deal?
Gerhalt: I knew I could put my trust in you! (exit to right)
Aide: Tronde, is that really wise?
Tronde: I don’t care. Let Olaf put some posters up. Either we get some foolhardy idiots who actually do the trip, or some scammers that are gonna turn back immediately. We can suffer the loss of a mule and some equipment if it gets me the chance to get rid of that disgusting thumb. I’ve wanted to kick it into the sea since I was a kid.
So let’s go through Das Schwarze Auge scenario B15 Im Spinnenwald (In Spiderwood), part of the 3-part campaign Die Entdeckung des Orklandes (The Discovery of Orkland) from 1986.
This should be the first we have from that year.
The Discovery series his is a small starter campaign written by Ulrich Kiesow (again…) and unlike the previous attempts at starter adventures this one wants to be a wilderness adventure.
https://gmkeros.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/mapb15.pngNow when I say a wilderness adventure you might expect a hex crawl, but this is DSA and it was written for a German-speaking audience, so we instead are dealing with squares.
Kiesow did this already with B13. There already was an actual hex map in Werner Fuchs’ B8, but obviously they didn’t like that. So squares it is.
Also: considering this is supposed to be the discovery of the previously undiscovered wilderness, there are quite a lot of roads on that map.
Anyway, the heroes get hired by the former leader of the Thorwal Pirates (and mother of the current leader) Garhelt.
After finding a public notice on a wall somewhere in their hometown.
Which is just up the river from Thorwal. You gotta wonder why they have maps of every other part of the continent but are missing their own neighbourhood.
Ok, there’s orks, but still.
The whole expedition has a homespun pet project feel to it. Oh sure, you are working for the former leader of Thorwal. But not the current one.
So you get a mule. And a few life-saving pills.
And the thumb of a giant.
Have fun.
…
Thumb of a giant?
Yes, some ancient hero of the Thorwalians once brought home a thumb he cut off from a giant and it has been in their hoard ever since.
That sounds like Garhelt just took off with whatever nobody wanted.
Anyway, the fun thing about this thumb is this: it works.
Orcs have a justified phobia of giants, and showing them this thumb will make them run away.
That is until you meet that one village who thinks giants are just ancient superstition.
Har Har.
So we get our characters dropped off as far up the river as the dragon boats can go, and then we and the mule have to make our way to the other side of the country.
Ok, that’s not quite true, we do get whatever we want in equipment. but no ranged weapons except bows, or heavy armor. I guess that would be a bit too much for some people about to die miserably in orc territory. And as I said, only a mule. And this is a starter scenario, maybe if you pool your money you might get a second one.
Fair enough. The giant thumb actually leads to the odd feeling that despite exploring the “Ork”land, there’s not actually that many orcs to be seen. After the first few encounters with them word spreads and they leave us alone. What we have instead are lizardmen, spiders, three-headed dragons, and lots of wildlife.
Now I have to say I actually like this adventure, but despite being a squarecrawl it also is… uhm… heavily railroaded. Or maybe the word is gated. The simplest way is to follow along the roads (well, paths I guess) that already exist. If you try to cross open plains you are bound to get accosted by a bunch of narmy Lindwurms (three-headed dragons) that you have no chance in fighting.
Of interest is maybe the Firun priest who might counter aggressive PCs with a hail storm miracle and dies that way.
Awkward.
Also there’s a unicorn that just looks at them and then goes away (dare I say it? sequel hoooook)
Trolls are quite nice and give valuable information, but if the PCs talk too long with them they get the idea to rob them.
Swamps also have ork gadflies on basically every field, in addition to monsters, nicely keeping the PCs off those as much as possible. and the rest of the denizens (besides the lizardmen) are not much better.
And Kiesow clearly states this is exactly how it is intended: the heroes after all are supposed to reach the Spiderwood and not trot around along the river.
Sigh.
Anyway, lizardmen.
Or lizard folk. Achaz in DSA parlance. By 4th edition they ended up as playable character races (the same as orcs and goblins). But in 1st edition so far we encountered them in some of the earlier scenarios (B1 and B4) on the side of the antagonists.
You most likely read over me mentioning them and assumed that we’d be set to murder our way across a tribe of poor scaled folk living there off the land.
Nothing could be further from the truth, the lizard people are actually quite friendly.
Unless the PCs really fuck up the encounters this is a purely social challenge, with the biggest threat being one of them getting married to a (presumably very attractive) lizard princess.
https://gmkeros.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/b15lizard.pngActually no, there’s also the feast they are served as guests of the Achaz. Not that their hosts intend to hurt, but their cooking is of such a quality one might gain or lose permanent hp.
It seems orkland Achaz cooking is… interesting.
Anyway, it’s not necessary that one of the PCs gets married, but king Azl Azzl is very intent on getting his daughter Tili Tiki hitched.
This is presented as a roleplaying challenge to get out of this predicament, but Kiesow does acknowledge that some players might be totally ok with getting married to a lizardgirl.
For what it’s worth Tili Tiki is deadly afraid of violence, and living in a swamp in the orkland that’s not a good condition. I guess it does make sense the king wants to get her to a place where not every day is a struggle to survive.
I don’t know if this is what was intended, but it’s quite heartwarming
After this and a bit of overland travel we need to get the heroes into the Spiderwood, so there’s two encounters to do that. Technically there are roads that lead around the forest, but to the west is a giant called Orkeater who will also branch out into eating foolhardy adventurers, to the east are the lindwurms Skyflame and Skysparkling, who refuse any attempts of characters to cross the plains. Skyflame is presented as a helicopter parent who doesn’t like humans (or other small folk).
Both encounters are of course much more powerful than the heroes, leaving the forest as the only option.
Sigh. as I said, gated
I mean of course it’s called Im Spinnenwald, so we have to go to the Spiderwood at one point. But it’s kind of pointless to start a wilderness exploration adventure and then railroad people into going where you want them to.
anyway, the main part of the scenario:
The Spiderwood.
Guess what’s all over the place?
If you were thinking “spiders” you’d be wrong. what actually is the most annoying part is a kind of plant (the so called Basilamine) that has nice red flowers and exploding seed pods which destroy equipment and give tenths of damage points and oh my god there’s a whole page of rules for these fucking things I think I need a spreadsheet to track all this garbage. DON’T GO INTO THE FLOWER FIELDS IS WHAT I’M SAYING!
There’s another encounter table here, containing mammoths and boars and wolves… and horny big bugs that fight rival bugs by bumping into them. hmm…
Also red dwarves. which are dwarves with red caps that don’t talk and might go berserk if interacted with.
huh.
These are still canon by the way. I just saw them in the 4e book about dwarves.
One might assume they are supposed to be redcaps, but they more seem to be some variation of wood-dwelling gnomes and dwarves in Germanic mythologies. But that all isn’t quite clear, and unlike everything else besides animals, these guys cannot be talked to. So we don’t really learn what they are about at all.
Considering this is in the middle of the “undiscovered orkland” this forest turns out to be much more human-inhabited than expected. there’s multiple log cabins, one of which can give you a free dog and has a magic artifact that just says “if you can read this you can read’
(it grants you the ability to read if you don’t have it yet, which is necessary later)
we also can meet an invisible human mage (ok, debatable, but the heroes can’t know her current physical form), a bunch of trolls, at least some poor ork villages, and at least one more whole abandoned human village, now full of goblins (and the question what a Nivese tribe was doing that far south to begin with, living in otherwise very standard medieval buildings).
So what about the spiders the forest is named after?
They will kidnap one of the characters at one point. So now we hopefully will try to find that character again. Lets hope the group doesn’t have issues with each other and just decides to leave the character to his fate.
This is the first time the negative attributes are introduced. Grisbart is a dwarf with a Greed for Gold attribute of 8, meaning whenever he sees gold and wins an attribute check HE NEEDS IT RIGHT NOW.
I guess the idea was popular enough to become a standard for 2nd edition DSA. The later editions introduced a rather specific set of negative attributes like this, one of which always was Greed for Gold. Only 4th edition changed this and made this an optional drawback to buy in a point buy system.
He will join us rescuing the other character. well, if the heroes want to. who knows.
Anyway, how about having at least a single Orc NPC?!
I know I can just introduce some, but I might be mentioning it a bit much, this is supposed to be an expedition through a region where orcs are the predominant people.
Lets cut this short. The spiders that kidnapped the PC are not technically a bad sort: They are a colony of intelligent telepathic spiders who discovered that people reading to them gives them interesting telepathic pictures in their head. so they kidnap people, let them read, and then lose them to scurvy.
https://gmkeros.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/b15reader.pngThey aren’t evil, they just don’t understand that this is no way to deal with humans. After a few scenarios by Kiesow I recognize his streak of dark humor again. The spiders just don’t have a clue how humans really work, they just know that they can read to them. And they feed them and try to keep them alive, but humans just can’t survive on a diet of nothing but fish and water. So multiple people have been kidnapped (some maybe from that Nivese village, and some others), used as a reader for the female spiders (the males only know enough to know that the females like those humans for some reason), and then they died of scurvy.
There’s opportunity for some roleplaying here, or just a simple dungeon crawl. It’s not a big dungeon, and Kiesow presents it appropriately alien. In one room we find a couple of spiders post-copulation, the female trying to eat the male one. As one does I guess.
I actually like this adventure. There are some bizarre setpieces in there which I think could be fun. In fact there is a nice actual play by the current publishers of the system which is quite fun and which I enjoyed listening to. I want to play it with people. But damn does it have issues.
It is certainly full of interesting ideas and roleplaying challenges. I think outside some random encounters it doesn’t demand fights anywhere. but it also wastes the possibilities of both the exploration section and the forest section by gating like crazy. This would have to be reworked.
One certainly could introduce something about orc culture here instead of basically everything else.
It occurs to me that there is a good business reason for this particular campaign: up to now most releases have followed along with the levels that could be expected for a normal group. I.e. if you started with B1 and played maybe one official scenario a month you’d end up around the level range for the advanced line of adventures by now.
So how do you sell more? Start over again and tell people this adventure is for experienced players with new characters.
In a way this is the true end of the first phase of DSA adventures. Previous adventures were already mentioning some of the advanced classes, this is the first that places the events on the map from the advanced box. The world soon would start to get filled in with detail.
Both here in the B series and soon in the A series exploration adventures would become more common, with much more social roleplay challenges and less dungeon crawling.
This also received a French version, from what I can see only in the Schmidt trade dress though. No Gallimard version from what I can see for this one.
I might need to point it out, but this and all the other adventures I have been talking about lately recently have been reissued, so they currently can be found in shops again. During my last visit back at my parents’ place I found a whole shelf of them in the local comic store. They are generally near faithful replicas, with only the Schmidt logo replaced.
Let’s go through Das Schwarze Auge adventure B13 Der Streuner Soll Sterben (The Vagrant Shall Die)
It has the secondary title Das Blutgericht von Thalusa (The Blood Court of Thalusa) which is one of the few times when both titles are equally evocative.
Ok, let me preface this: I utterly adore this scenario, even though it has it’s problems (dare I say it? some parts are quite racist). But I would say this is where Ulrich Kiesow shows real promise.
Now at this point MOST (but not all) of the DSA scenarios were written by him, or in cooperation with him. This included A1 which I really liked, and A2 which I found at least ok. But it also included the whole rest of the scenarios which contain some bad railroads, even if their premise might be good.
But this one is one where I really see what he is going for. This is intentionally pulpy, in the way that 19th ct. adventure stories were.
Unfortunately this includes some rather unfortunate tropes that come with such stories. For one the setting is quasi-oriental. And of course it involves arranged marriages, beheadings at the drop of a stone, and an evil looking coal black executioner.
On the other there really aren’t any really bad people involved. The executioner just happens to be coal black from a magical accident and is otherwise doing his job, and the one actual antagonist is coded as German, and even he has reasons to behave like he does.
Lots of bad decisions that come with the choice of setting and NPCs. I guess for the 80s it was fair for its day, but even in the 90s I remember this module as being discussed as “the racist one”.
But anyway, the plot concerns Prince Selo of Khunchom who had the really bad idea to have just a small peek at his fiancée Shenny of Thalusa. [that name tho…]
You see it’s tradition in their culture that enfianced people are not to see each other until the marriage rites are concluded. Which is all fine for Selo, except he HAS seen her parents and now fears his future wife might take after either of them.
So he makes the plan of… sneaking into the palace of Thalusa and having a look at her.
And if it’s really bad, can a life as a vagrant on the roads of Aventuria be quite so bad?
Yes, Prince Selo is an idiot.
In any case he even is successful in sneaking in, and quite enamored with Princess Shenny.
And Princess Shenny for her side is quite enamored with that handsome stranger she just encountered.
Unfortunately while they are both very enthusiastically consenting with each other (at least that discussion we don’t have to touch), he is captured by the guards and immediately sentenced to death by his prospective father in law.
Well, you should accept it, the Prince’s father promises you riches if you manage to make it to Thalusa in time with a document of his hand that can rescue his son.
Unfortunately Thalusa is about 300km away, easily a 10 day trip over land, and the execution is set for in 14 days.
And even if you get there on time with the document (which is not a given), and hand it to the wrong person, then you are back at square one. Well, square whatever Thalusa is in.
The heroes are given the choice of going by sea, which might shorten the journey to three days, but has a problem: it’s a the stormy season right now, and it might make things worse. A single ship is willing to make the passage on the off-chance of arriving in one part at their destination to make a killing selling hard liquor.
(I realized afterwards that I am not quite sure which season it is supposed to be, the text is talking about Frühjahr being a storm season in that part, so the early year. In our world this commonly would be spring. But in Aventuria the early year is autumn. But was this already established at that point? When does this actually take place?)
Despite Kiesow’s known fondness for railroads he does not actually go for them here. With a bit luck of the dice the PCs can indeed reach the halfway point, after which the storms become no problem anymore. It’s not likely, but it’s possible.
https://gmkeros.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/b13game.pngThen they are attacked by pirates though. Which also can be circumnavigated with proper care (the scenario contains a specifically designed boardgame here), and even if they board your ship they only will steal the document.
(they are not actually real pirates)
If luck is not with them, or if they decide to go there from the beginning, they end up having to go by land. But at least they might have gained a day or two.
This would be the place where a DnD scenario would pull out the hexmap. And we saw a hexmap in B8 already. Kiesow instead decides to use squares, for a squarecrawl, basically.
There are also no permanently keyed encounters, all the encounters are on random tables.
This includes meadows which have an encounter on a roll of 7 on a d6.
Oh yes, did you see! Did you see?! He made a joke!
What’s interesting about the encounters is how… stock medieval fantasy they all are. One would assume that with a setting where he uses all kinds of orientalist tropes he would do the same for the wilderness section. Instead it seems like he just took the monster descriptions from the rulebook: wolves, trolls, boars, a tatzelwurm. The closest to the Arabian Nights scenario you might be expecting is an Earth Spirit that can give you some healing.
But it’s really the city adventure part where this scenario shines.
For one: there is an actual city adventure part with an actual map of Thalusa.
For the second: you are given free reign how to actually deal with the situation.
Now you were supposed to deliver a document, but you likely lost it either on the sea journey or over land.
If you didn’t you most likely handed it to the wrong person at the palace and he lost it for you instead.
Springing the prince might not be easy, but can be possible. Sneaking into the palace is possible (it’s worked out), but finding the right person there is difficult. Dealing with the executioner and his tools is also another option (the tools need to be in top order according to tradition).
Here is when the bog standard fantasy scenario all of a sudden turns into a heist. most likely the heroes will have to do something to save the prince, but what and how is their own choice. The scenario gives some valid ideas, but I bet some players would have more.
You could have an infiltration/dungeon crawl through the palace, but you don’t have to.
For what it’s worth if you are breaking into the palace you might encounter a scribe you can blackmail by threatening his favorite calligraphy.
And if you break into the executioners house you might encounter a Ulmenknecht, which seems to be a treant kind of being? I don’t think this being is still canon in DSA. It’s not the proper treant equivalent (that would be a Waldschrat), more like a wood golem?
Which is the result of a rather sinister human sacrifice he and a druid wanted to perform on a magician who managed to hit back with a transformation spell. Which caused him to turn completely black.
For some reason this story is the longest of all the NPC bios, despite being otherwise a rather incidental character.
And one who doesn’t actually do anything bad as such while the PCs are around.
I think Kiesow is very much going very much for the image of Der Schwarze Mann here, a “Kinderschreckfigur” (character to scare kids with? Man, we Germans have weird concepts sometimes) that is quite widespread. I still remember playing both the associated kids game and the card game based on it.
But here it manages to keep all the bad connotations that made this game… inappropriate in polite society.
Dolguruk is I think still an active NPC in current DSA lore, he usurped Shenny’s father at one point and became ruler of Thalusa, and being an elf he also doesn’t seem to be easy to get rid of. He also had his backstory modified to have gained his look from a pact with a demon.
Not sure if that’s better or worse.
So…what do I think about it?
I don’t think Kiesow intended for this to come across as it does, but he nevertheless managed to write some really unfortunate implications in here.
Which might explain why this adventure never got the re-releases that other adventures from him got, despite being, from a design standpoint alone, one of his best so far.
There is considerable freedom of choice both in the wilderness and the city sections, and room for player creativity, all under time pressure. I really like this and I want to play this with people. I might need to prepare people that it was written 40 years ago.
Other languages
This gets into the times when the DSA adventures were no longer translated into many languages. The only translation I can find is the French one, in both the Schmidt and Gallimard version.
Still not sure why there were two versions. According to one commenter on dice.camp one was the Schmidt version, like in German, the other was the same format as the Gallimard gamebook translations and would have been sold in bookstores instead of toy stores.
In any case they used the secondary title for that, Le Bourreau de Thalussa. Not the worst choice.
Meister: In welches Tier willst du dich denn verwandeln?
Spieler: In eine Harpyie!
M: Das geht nicht, das ist kein Tier, sondern ein Ungeheuer.
S: Das ist doch ein Vogel.
M: Einer mit Menschenkopf und Brüsten.
S: Nee, guck hier!
M: Achso 😳
So, und nun die Meisterfrage: Gibt es die Harpyienvögel in #DSA, wenn die mythischen Harpyien auch existieren?
Drawing is not going well today, so have another portrait for #oc_tober.
Bora is a dwarf engineer/ mechanic (also doctor, architect, weapon smith…) that I played in #DasSchwarzeAuge
03:
Sam is under a terrible curse. Oleana knows how to cure it.
It's a flu. It's just a flu. Good thing there are multiple healer and Oleana herself is a pathologist/alchemist... not exactly a doctor you'd ask for medicine but...
(Sam is from an original story)
(ignore the fact that the mattress looks really hard)
okay, today I show you Hafwen Grünkohl. She is a runaway bard turned adventurer, turned wizard, turned school headmaster, mother and the kings advisor. I played her for years until the the adventure ended.
04:
Dione: writing in a group chat Who the fuck added me to a fucking group chat?
Feloki: >:O language
Sam: Yeah watch your fucking language
Oleana: OKAY WHO TAUGHT Sam THE FUCK WORD?
Dione: 'The fuck word'.
Barima: Are you stupid? You guys use the f word all the time
Sam: Oh my god they censored it
Dione: Say fuck, Barima.
Sam: Do it, Barima. Say fuck.
Barima: Trying to fill out legal paperwork stuff Were you guys born AMAB or AFAB?
Oleana: Bold of you to assume I was born at all.
Jora: I personally was created in a lab.
Feloki: I just straight up spawned lol.
Dione: I’ve done a lot of dumb stuff.
Flann: I witnessed the dumb stuff.
Inkaria: I recorded the dumb stuff.
Barima: I joined in on the dumb stuff.
Oleana: I TRIED TO STOP YOU FROM DOING THE DUMB STUFF!!!
Oleana: Now I have to take you into custody.
Natürlich haben sie sich aufgeteilt 🤣 und haben stellenweise mal wieder totale Grütze gewürfelt. Und Phex war dem Elfen leider gar nicht hold, beim Wurf auf die Patzertabelle ist sein Elfenbogen zerbrochen. Und sie sind mitten auf einem Ozean, Ersatz ist leider derzeit schwer zu bekommen... Und die Borongeweihte hat mächtigen Respekt vor der Basaltfaust bekommen, als ihr Schild 17 Trefferpunkte abfangen musste...