Bral Noir: A Sonata For A Violin And A Murder

I fell of the Blogosphere for some time, but I'm still here! Bloggin' about a game we played a couple of months ago..

Once again, not everyone from the gaming group could make it, so we played a one night story instead.

Inspired by reading a comic book of the early days of The Beatles by Mauri Kunnas, Terry Pratchett's Soul Music, as well as the (then) recent passing of the great artists David Bowie and the Artist formerly known as Prince, this time it was about rock'n roll. With a healthy dose of political intrigue and murder! Set in a world of wizards and warriors in space!

I offered my 5 players a choice of 6 pre-rolled characters. 4 human bards (a music group representing a radical new style, making their breakthrough), a dwarf fighter-thief (the manager), and a human fighter (the roadie).

The story involved the band waking up in an inn on the morning after a gig only to discover one of them (the character nobody picked) murdered and the local police force hot on their trail with unpleasant questions.

Some of them tried to fight the law (the law won). The rest followed the clues on the murder scene, that suggested that their murdered friend had come chanced across some evidence dangerous to the current regime. Eventually, after a rooftop escape, they found sanctuary with the family of the city's former ruler, presumed murdered by the current prince.

It was a fun game! The best part, at least for me, was just sitting back and listening to the players having fun and acting out clichéd rock star mannerisms. They even came up with full lyrics for a song about their predicament!

The full story can be read here. Sadly, it's incomprehensible gibberish to most people. Not only is it in Finnish, but it's in thick and slightly archaic and very anachronistic Helsinki slang.. What can I say? I loved the language of The Catcher in the Rye. Note: The horizontal line on page four marks the transition from intro to actual gameplay.

Anyhow, some paint jobs related. Below are pictured two examples of the guard of the Rock of Bral. Brave men and women who put their lives on the line on a daily basis to keep the citizens safe from pirates, gangsters, adventurers and popular musics.

The minis are from Wargames Foundry. The fancier sergeant is from their Elizabethan Seadogs and Swashbuclers collection, and the constable from their conquistadors collection named El Dorado Adventurers.

And a close-up of the sergeant's shield. Featured are the arms of the Prince's family, the Crown and Crossed Sabers on the right (top) and the ever-vigilant Owl of the Middle City Watch on the left (bottom).

I promise the next post will be sooner in coming than this one!

Bral Noir: The Squid Sematary

Finding a time for a game for several people is tricky. The more people's calendars you try to fit together, the harder it gets, so it's easily a month between games, at least.

And then some gets sick or unexpectedly has to work a night shift. It happens, it's only to be expected.

If you have a character driven story going on, as I try to have, you don't want anyone to miss out. So what do you do, cancel the game and set a new date, so now it's two months between sessions?

What I tried for a solutions, is to prepare a couple of short, parallel stories. The setting is the same, but with different characters. That way, we could play the same game and perhaps I could show the players different sides of the world and the events that characters of the main story wouldn't even be aware of.

The asteroid city of the Rock of Bral would be great for such short stories. The Rock is a veritable crossroads of the spheres, so anything could end up there. With different criminal organizations getting a lot of room in the sourcebook, I felt like going for some pulp detective story -style scenarios. Nothing too serious, of course. This is, after all, wizards and elves in space. On wooden sail ships.

Bral Noir, or Hard Boiled Tales from the Rock's Underworld.

This is also AD&D, so for the first story, which I originally prepared on a short notice, I just generated a small random dungeon using this very handy random dungeon generator. Then I rolled up a couple of characters pretty much randomly, so we wouldn't spend the whole night rolling up stats and choosing skills and spells, and wrote up a short intro as to why some fighters, mages, clerics and thieves would be stuck in an underground complex full of hostile monsters and traps.

The scenario was, that the characters are members of the city watch (plus their street urchin sidekick), investigating the disappearance of a young woman's fiancé. They have found out that a certain illithid is likely to be involved and are lured to investigate the said octopus-headed creature's town house while the thing is out on business.

But their treacherous informant locks them in the basement and as the game begins, they have one hour of in-world time to get out before the illithid returns and is certain to wipe the floor with a group of 1st level characters.

This being a pulp novel, I did a book cover for it to set the mood:

The Squid Sematary (lit. Sleep, Sleep, My Squid)

So basically, it was a classic dungeon with pit traps and (psycho-surgically mind-controlled) random monsters. Half the group got killed by kobolds with paralytic powers and an owl bear before the rest escaped through the sewers, but they managed to save the kidnapped young man.

Read the full story here, if you can (it's in Finnish again). Note: The horizontal line marks the end of the intro and the beginning of game play.

And here's a picture of the master of the house, whom the PCs fortunately never had to face:

And the title? Taken from the Finnish translation for Stephen King's Pet Sematary: Uinu, uinu lemmikkini (lit. Sleep, Sleep My Pet). Because of that, here's a link to a cover of Pet Sematary by The Ramones, as performed by the finnish band Pojat:

Chorus: "To a bewitched boneyard, I took the best of cats. Tonight he will come back,"