Play Report: Hen Horde Horror
After posting my controversy bait to garner attention, I'm finally ready to write about warenunförmig's game from last Sunday.
I'll do my best to keep some semblance of chronological order, but we played fast and furiously that night and it was super beer-and-pretzely. That's why this play report is mainly written from the perspective of my character. This is also only the first part, because I can’t seem to keep things short and to the point.
There were some key differences from our usual crawls.
- We (or rather our treasured DM) set a time limit of two hours of gameplay.
- We therefore crawled through the location at a much higher speed than usual and forewent cartography and most party banter that wasn't necessary.
- We were six players and one DM, which has become a rarity after the pandemic ended.
The system was some kind of odd-like. My guess is Cairn 2e, since the spell that my friend rolled was a foam blast and I can only link that to Cairn.
I started the game as Lester the naturalist and was equipped with a hammock, a rope, a crossbow with a handful of bolts and a telescope. Little did I know that the rope would be our weapon of choice when we drew first blood.
My fellow rapscallions were:
- Jedediah the bell ringer
- Queen Bee the beekeeper
- Willow the witch
- Herold the herald
- Bertilla the hermit
Off to a good start
We began our adventures in the besieged town of Benedict, which was bombarded at regular intervals from a castle atop the nearby hill. All we knew was that the castle was taken by force by some feathery fiends and we were there to stop the bombarding. We couldn't gather much information about the current occupiers of the castle, but we came to know that they raided the town by night and partied all day long. How quaint! We also heard loud noises and a tumultuous cackle emanating from the castle.
Because the main road to the castle's portcullis was in plain sight of the castle's towers, we decided to make a detour into the woods that surrounded the hill in a U-shape. The townsfolk affirmed our suspicion that there was another entrance to be found and after a little sneaking and prying we found it, located beneath the castle outhouse!
We hid in the underbrush until it was dark and under the shadow of a full moon we tore down the cast iron gate of the secret entrance, which lead into a sewer-like tunnel. We didn't crawl far until we came to the end of the tunnel, where a great ladder led to a trapdoor. Queen Bee volunteered to do some climbing and peeping and conferred to us that she smelled the stench of a chicken coop mixed with the odour of decay. She also caught a glimpse of a huge beast in the dark and noticed that the beast was chained. Lester wanted to thread the rope through the chain link and then have all six of us yank as hard as we could, to hopefully break the beast's neck. The rest of the party was skeptical, some even argued that it was immoral: What if the beast was harmless? But time was of the essence, we had to act before the beast took notice. Queen Bee managed to thread the rope through the chain's link and after she descended the ladder we yanked with the fervor of a thousand tugs of war.
We heard the sound of bones snapping and then: silence!
We climbed the ladder and lit a candle. Before us lay the remains of a huge cockatrice. Its beak was bloody and cruel, its claws like sharpened iron and at the end of its tail sprouted the head of a viper. Never again would its crow be heard.
Amfightamines
After catching our breath, we started to explore the area. There was a well close to the trapdoor, but nothing to find in there. To the west was a wine cellar and a storage room, to the east some kind of workshop. There were a few things that seemed off. The wine caskets were dusted with glitter as was the floor of the wine cellar. The casks were engraved with the silhouette of an absinthe fairy. We left the stuff and continued exploring. We took some tools from the workshop and MacGyvered a sling for each of us with the material we found there. In the storage room we found a huge pot of something that smelled and looked like mulled wine. I put a finger in it, nothing happened. Herold the herald drank some of the stuff. Shortly after, her skin turned a reddish hue, her eyes bulged slightly and her facial veins popped like crazy. She was ready to explode! We deduced that they were brewing some kind of drug to enhance their fighting capabilities. But there was no target in sight for Herold, so we kept going.
We opened another door to the south and found ourselves in some kind of dungeon — the kind with prison cells. There were six cells and some of them even had living people inside. One of them was a hapless adventurer, a youth whose appreciation of his own prowess exceeded his actual talents. His name was Hans and he reminded Lester so much of himself that he decided to adopt him as his son. We also found a local farmer that was abducted by the castle's occupiers. We freed him and showed him how to escape through the secret tunnel. In the next cell was the body of the dead prince, the castle's original ruler. One of us kicked him in the crown jewels to check if he was really dead. He was.
There was only one more occupied cell, but its occupant was not very cooperative. Her name was Henrietta and she told us that she used to be part of the horde that took the castle. The leader of the horde was Helga the horrendous, a hen of great renown, and Henrietta had some kind of quarrel with her. What confused us was that Henrietta's cell was full of feathers, but she was human, like us. She insisted that Helga's horde were all poultry and of proper but regular size. We didn't know what to make of that. Henrietta refused to say more, but we convinced her to fight alongside us, in return for her freedom and a share of the treasure, should we find some.
With our new uncanny ally Henrietta and Lester's adoptive son Hans in tow, we walked towards the stairs in the north-east.
Close Encounter of the Absurd Kind
When we reached the foot of the stairs, we noticed that there were two statues with an astounding amount of detail. Suspended above them were vials with an unknown liquid and... two eggs? The vials were also attached to the knightly statues with a very fine thread. Lester, a naturalist in his past life, had the brilliant idea to gather some of the cockatrice's blood. His reasoning was that the statues were proper knights — turned to stone by the cockatrice's gaze. Lester hoped that the blood of the beast could undo the curse. Eagerly he gathered the ghastly ingredient and started applying it to the statues. In that moment the party noticed that the eggs were slowly turning. Not only were they turning, they also started to scream with the most painful sound the party ever heard. Lester shot one of them with his crossbow, the other was killed by Bertilla's sling. But it was too late. The sound the eggs emanated shattered the vials and Lester was doused with searing acid.
The screaming eggs. Artistic representation by my partner in crime and player of Jedediah.
The knights suffered an ever crueler fate. They were indeed slowly turning from stone to flesh, but because the curse seemed to reverse in slow motion, their stony parts were already corroded by acid before they returned to human form.
Lester survived, flesh partly eaten away. Queen Bee bandaged him with honeyed gauze. His party wanted to continue, and his newly adopted son Hans needed a father figure, and so he marched on, to the next floor of the castle.
End of part 1
I have to take a break at this point. Part two will follow. We'll (hopefully) continue our adventure in a fortnight and I should manage to post the second part by then.
The time limit was a very interesting constraint. I didn't think it could work. I remember hearing Luke Gearing talking about how he played D&D over lunch in a one hour time window and thinking: That would never work with my friends. But it did and imho it worked very well. We conquered floor 1 in less than an hour and conquered some more in the remaining time. Decisions were made much faster than usual and people were less risk-averse.
I noticed how much harder it was for me to remember which rooms we tackled in which order. In play that wasn't a problem, but I would have loved to look at a map or some notes while writing this play report.
Thanks for reading!