I've been remiss! It's been a week, and I never circled back here to tell y'all about Chapter 2 of Lair of the Clockwork God, The Little Kingdom. It was a small group, in particular the two heavies (Cownann and Enhur) couldn't make it, but they managed to advance things quite a bit.

When last we left, Our Heroes had discovered that the rear wall of the "Haunted Canyon" was a fake, and that approximately fifty yards of additional canyon were camouflaged behind that wall. The waterfall was fed by a sluice, with water channeled in from the left and right, and the whole thing was covered by an artificial canopy to prevent detection.

It was easy enough to pry open the canopy, cross the water trough running along the edge of the canyon, and climb down into the hidden compound. Behind the wall, the canyon was filled with a riot of structures - several buildings and awnings on the ground, caves dug into the cliff walls, and a maze of catwalks, hoists, rigging, and a complex network of wires filling the space above them. Moving about, apparently each tending to their own private business, were countless odd devices, each unique, and few in any way humanoid. Some are boxy with multiple legs, others look spider-like, some have wheels or treads, all have some sort of arm or arms with various tools at the ends. They're working on crafts, tending to fires, climbing the walls or through the chaos of rigging. They don't seem to pay much mind to the outsiders.

The group was smart enough not to try to mess with anything while they looked around. Entering the main building, they found what looked like a residence, well-furnished in a Satarlan fashion, extending back into the cliff face via an excavated cave. Back further, they can see what look like libraries and workrooms, but right at the cave entrance is a trophy room containing awards, medals, and busts of Satarlan nobles from three to four generations ago, as well as a bust of an old man, labeled "Ooryphas the Master."Â

We had another session last Sunday, the first part of a little something I'm calling "The Lair of the Clockwork God." Trekking across the plains north of the Kasht swamp, our band of escaped prisoners encountered a village, nearly empty, surrounded by untended farms with withered crops. The villagers believed that a haunted canyon upstream from the village was responsible for their sickness and poor crops; it had been an evil place for decades, but recently things had gotten much worse. They believed that a dark god must have awoken there, and its curse was flowing out downstream.

With a little persuading (and an uncut diamond the size of a robin's egg that a foolhardy villager found in the canyon), the group headed into the canyon to check it out, only to discover a group of Bloodless skeleton warriors! A fight broke out, of course, and it was discovered, when one of the skeletons was destroyed, that they were actually elaborate clockworks of some sort, though far beyond the capabilities of anything any of them had heard of.

Once the group knew what they were dealing with, they gained confidence and turned the tide of the battle fairly quickly. Once the skeletons were dispatched, they began to search the canyon for any hidden caves or doors, but instead they discovered something extraordinary - the entire back wall of the canyon was artificial, with the waterfall diverted to come out at the top, and approximately another 150 feet of canyon was covered under a camouflage canopy. I gave them their obvious options for getting inside - they could continue to search the canyon wall in hopes of finding a doorway of some sort, they could try to go upstream through the sluice that feeds the waterfall, or they could probably tear a hole in the canopy - and then we broke for the evening.

I feel I'm starting to get the rhythms of this game better. The big thing I learned this time is that, for lower-powered opponents, armor has a huge effect on their viability. The "skelet

I will say, from my end, things seemed to be going a mile a minute, but in a good way. This session, once they managed to maneuver to a point where an escape was actually feasible, took off like a rocket and didn't stop. I was very happy with the results. Even dealing with Kathulos having to improvise a few spells on the fly (thanks to the players' better-than-expected performance) didn't eat up too much time. I really like this system...

It's called the Action Economy, not Action Monopoly!

As a fan of the stranger ends of UFO literature, I had to name my first BoL campaign "I Remember Lemuria." I may even throw some Deros in there somewhere, eventually...

Anyway, we had our first session last night went... alright I suppose. There were some glitches - I had trouble keeping the Priorities straight, and had a hard time remembering to check in with some characters that were only peripherally involved in the fight. There was what I expect is the usual confusion about damage, recovery, and healing, which wasn't helped by the fact that we're just off of several years of exclusively Fate, which is much more gentle on a PC's health. So, the increased threat level kinda put a fright in folks. But overall, I think it went well.