The first session of the open-table, archipelagic Yoon-Suin campaign Kapuloan Kulon was on Tuesday 15 August 2017.
We played through a thinly reskinned "Something Stinks in Stilton" by Oli Palmer: the PCs (Adjo the ranger, Panya the wizard, Bennu the thief) were hired by a grumpy tea merchant to find out how her brother-in-law, the yak farmer Kuper, was making such amazing cheese. The game began at the Unnamed Teahouse, a hangout for rogues and ne'er-do-wells on a small island south of the God River delta.
After a couple of rolls on the random tea table to determine Panya's regular brew and a special kind that the teahouse owner was trying to get Adjo to invest in (drunk with live whitebait as a chaser), our heroes set off. I had little chance to try out the sailing rules on this one, as the day's weather yielded a light wind blowing in almost the direction they needed to go: 10 hours' close-hauled passage landed them on the coast near the Old Town of the Yellow City.
En route to the village of Sutil Ta'un by ox-cart, they were waylaid by bandits, including one big stupid one, who was strong enough to punch Adjo right in the shield and keep on trucking, but fled in terror from Panya's rat-demon familiar. Bennu handled another of the bandits and the three others fled the scene.
In town, the trio met Kuper and various characters. Panya got addicted to the Sutil Ta'un cheese, wolfing down bowl after bowl of the house special cheesy-soup. After dark, they snuck through the heavy rain to the yak shed, where they discovered a trapdoor, evidence of kidnapping and/or murder, and Kuper butchering yaks that could not seem to die. A grisly scene ensued. Holding Kuper at weapon-point, they cleverly didn't fall for his line that "going through that magical archway will teach you the secret of the cheese" and instead figured out the awful truth.
The episode ended with them collapsing the underground chambers on top of the farmer and his tragic herd of transformed yaks. Quite what they reported to their employer remains a little vague, but they got paid - and Sutil Ta'un cheese has become a real collector's item. They also claimed treasures from Kuper's lair, including a spell scroll which I'll treat as a "bound spirit" per WoD magic rules. It'll most likely dissolve on a 6- result.
The trio had a good team dynamic. You could believe that they were friends, to at least some degree; this was helped by the comic spur of Panya's cheese addiction. WoD seems a good fit for OSR adventures, although chargen for everyone at the start of the session made a one-shot a bit of a tight squeeze in 2+ hours. In future I think we'll probably only be adding 1 person at a time, so that's less of an issue. Or I could just tell people how to make a character in advance... I guess that would work too.
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