Hemskil Sandbox Playtest: Murder Mystery

While I wrap up the cleric and wizard classes for the Character Creation book for the player's side of Dungeons & Delvers 2nd Edition, Melissa decided to run a kind of murder mystery adventure using her Hemskil campaign setting that we never got around to releasing for Dungeon World despite being like 95% done (oh well).

Our son continued to play the playtest nomad, while the rest of the party was randomly generated (stats, race, and even class). This resulted in a dwarven rogue, a dwarven ranger, and a human bard.

Since the nomad was 2nd-level from previous sessions, we started out there as well. We randomly determined extra cash, which was mostly spent on giving everyone Masterwork +1 weapons and various potions. This game does not assume any sort of wealth-by-level but I will include some sort of table, so that GMs running games at higher levels aren't left on their own to determine what is sufficient or I suppose "balanced".

Melissa had never run a mystery adventure before and it showed in parts, as the kids and I ended up obsessing over various red herrings that she only included because she didn't want to make things too straightforward and obvious (though in my defense I did let our kids mostly take the lead because I want them to improve as gamers instead of relying on Melissa and me to call the shots).

After arriving in a port town called Havefisk, we were roped into investigating a string of disappearances: a dock worker witnessed one of his friends get attacked by something humanoid in the dead of night. Barely anything to go on, and given that he was drunk and exhausted both now and at the time it would be generous to describe his account as merely unreliable.

There were also goats missing from a farm and a caravan was attacked quite a ways out of town, so incidents seemed to literally and figuratively be all over the map. We considered waiting until nightfall to see if anything else would occur but opted to investigate the other scenes in hopes that we'd find some actual evidence and/or identify some sort of pattern.

Alas, it was not to be.

Tackling the farm, next, the ranger and her wolf were able to follow a trail, which led us to some pig burrows and a tree. There was a tattered shirt hanging from the branches, as well as scratch marks on the trunk and hoof prints scattered about the ground. This plus the dock worker's dubious account caused us to immediately suspect a therianthrope of sorts (there's also a stock wereboar in the Delvers book).

None of us could fit into the pig burrow, so we had the bard wait out in a field at night as bait (she drew the short stick). It ended up being some sort of undead zombie pig, which we'd soon learn could transmit some sort of  zombie rage virus via its tusks. While it was certainly a menace, given that it didn't revert to a humanoid form after death it didn't explain whatever happened to the dock worker's friend.

Going back to the farm, while talking to the farmer and his wife their son burst from the floor boards, apparently infected by the aforementioned rage virus. 

In our defense we didn't know that it was their son, nor that he was infected: he just burst from the floor, and we were looking for a humanoid creature that was killing people, so stabbed first and asked questions later. This revealed that he had gotten bitten or gored by the zombie pig, and the wife had tried the classic treatment of locking him in the basement and hoping it all worked out.

Mistakes were made, and insults were slung, but the important thing is that we solved the case. Or rather, we thought we did: upon returning to town and explaining what we'd done (killed a ravenous monster and certainly not a child), the dockworker clarified that the creature was adult-sized. Plus the son had been locked in the basement the entire time, and we hadn't discovered any dead bodies.

That just left the caravan.

The wagons had been ransacked: most of the goods were missing, as were the horses, and nearby we found a few corpses that had been partially devoured. While this didn't invalidate the therianthrope theory things were looking a bit more ghoulish. The ranger once again picked up a trail, though this led us to a group of people that were clearly bandits.

Not wanting to instigate a fight, despite the obvious trail leading straight to them, as well as numerous boxes and barrels of stolen goods we pretended that we didn't know and asked if they just so happened to know anything about the corpses.

The bandits directed us to a nearby cave, which ended up being the lair of a fairly intelligent and spry zombie that was attempting to bring its dead master back to life through the bewildering act of bringing it human victims, and then killing them and dumping their remains in a pit when there was no, ahem,  improvement.

We ended up killing him partially out of mercy and necessity, as well as his undead dire boar (a novelty despite our 10+ years of gaming together). In the end we managed to scrape together enough XP to hit 3rd-level, a few magic items, and a decent chunk of change for having technically solved the mystery.

DESIGN NOTES

From running the adventure Melissa identified various pitfalls and areas for improvement. I also provided some suggestions, which will be implemented when the adventure goes into the Hemskil campaign setting. The main issue is that Melissa doesn't run all that often, and just isn't used to making up shit on the fly. But she did well all things considered and we still enjoyed it.

Infinite magic bard is working quite well. Perform checks aren't too much of a hassle, and there doesn't seem to be any sort of imbalance with allowing the bard to start singing as a Swift Action. The only tricky part is giving various songs instrument kickers, so that there's a reason for a bard to use an instrument in combat (right now all songs get your Song Bonus if you do so).

Ranger was still effective at fighting despite a Dexterity score of -1 and having all attacks rely on Dexterity.

Armor as DR still working as intended.

Adapting to the expanded skill list hasn't been vary difficult.

Masterwork weapons now only grant a bonus to Attack Rolls, since a high Attack Roll adds bonus damage and can often overcome a target's DR. The cap for now is +5.

Didn't try a rule of adding Armor Penetration to Critical Range when the target's armor isn't high enough to soak all of a weapon's AP. I think that might be too damn good given that critical hits use a table. Might have to get rid of the table, or reduce its effects.

The major change I decided to implement was having it so that Constitution only modifies your Wound Point total, as opposed to being applied at every level. This makes Vitality Points more valuable and avoids an astronomical gap between characters with a high Constitution modifier. It is also consistent with how everything else in the game is only modified by an ability score once.

Finally, it will help avoid a slogfest against monsters with a high Constitution and DR.