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Wednesday, September 6, 2023

Adventurers On Strike!

This is a summary of a play test of my adventure Blood in the Cracks, using my hack of the Cairn RPG Beggar’s Choice. The adventure tries to practice some of the materialist principle I’ve preached in prior blog posts.  I’ll try to highlight some of these connections.

The adventure has some spicy themes around class conflict and striking workers. Here is how I pitched it to players:

Roll for your lunch, ale, former job and starting ailment. Workers at a cinnabar mine are going missing. Your job is to ensure that output rates are not adversely affected!

The PCs responded to a job advert for guards at a cinnabar mine, recently reopened after a mysterious disaster caused 16 miners to go missing. Blame for the disaster had been put on rumoured monsters in the mine known as the Smoke Devils. There’s potential here for PCs to get involved in some radical organising against the mine’s management, but maybe they’ll end up siding with the bosses instead.



The 3 PCs responding to the job advert were:
  • Gluefinger (former ink squeezer)
  • Misty Dew (former star counter)
  • Hellegard (former pike pusher)
The group headed for the boss’s office within the mine at the start of the day shift, resisting distractions amongst the site’s outer ruins. On the way, they met a former miner Papa Bonep, now reduced to carting ore above ground after contracting “red eye”.

Red eye is a fictional ailment caused by prolonged working in the mines, which makes sufferers blind to the colour red. The characters all had their own “starting ailments” linked to their former careers, so it seemed fitting this work environment would have its own. I hadn’t anticipated that one player would take advantage of this effect in quite an ingenious way (more on this later).

Just Following Orders

The scenario’s “quest giver” was the mine manager Negrella, whose office was located within the adventure location. This followed Weird Writer’s advice to keep a unified social context between the surface and underworld portion of an adventure. I figured that ditching the town as a location, and placing “town type” social encounters within the dungeon, was one way to achieve this.

The PCs were thrust into the mine’s social context before even speaking to Negrella. Miners from the night shift were queuing to be searched before ending their shift, then subjected to a degrading cold bath. This was all without payment for the time taken, putting them in a sour mood. While queuing, some mocked the PC’s credentials as guards, incredulous that the consortium would hire such cheap amateurs to protect them.

On meeting Negrella, the PCs' names were checked to ensure they weren’t on her blacklist. Negrella’s “quest” for the PCs was simply to ensure that mine output was sustained at 10 ore carts a shift, with half pay if they fail to achieve this. They were told to report to the guard captain Lipsiss and bring him a barrel of fresh water while doing so.

At this stage, the PCs seemed mainly motivated by following the bosses’ orders, rather than taking an interest in the plight of the miners. Perhaps the miners’ mocking comments had hardened their attitude. They showed little sympathy when an argument between two miners caused one to break down in tears (clearly quite traumatised by the disaster). Misty Dew went so far as to steal an ale bottle hanging from a makeshift memorial, more interested in stocking her provisions than respecting victims of the disaster.

I’ve talked before about a kind of Napoleonic careerism I’ve wanted to incentivise in PCs, by linking character advancement to career progression within an institution. On reporting to the guard captain Lipsiss, Hellegard demonstrated some first class boot licking along these lines. Noticing that Lipsiss was enjoying some sweet pastries, Hellegard offered his own pastry lunch as a gift. As his only food provision, this could easily come back to bite him.

The party came away from Lipsiss a little directionless. His only instruction was to bring a further barrel of water – which they correctly recognised as a Sisyphean labour. They decided to seek out Lipsiss’s lieutenant Romara, in the hope of some clearer guidance. On the way, they opted to investigate a loud argument nearby.

The party stumbled into a stand-off between a mining crew and the foreman Vivian. The crews were working a largely exhausted vein, refusing to venture deeper into the mine without protection. Vivian insisted that the day’s quota could not be met at the current site. The party was able to break the deadlock by agreeing to clear the Smoke Devils from the old section of the mine.

An Aside on Material Conditions and Processes

Instead of the faction play classically associated with Old School adventures, social relations in Blood in the Cracks (BitC) are orientated around class conflict. Perhaps it’s easiest to think of these as two big factions - the exploiting and the exploited classes. The material conditions in BitC are set up as a tinder box, at a point this conflict is poised to escalate. Amongst these conditions are:
  • Barely attainable production quotas
  • Oppressive authoritarian managers
  • Unsafe working conditions
The worsening of any of these conditions could tip existing tensions into open conflict, likely beginning with a strike. I’ve seen other games using clocks to track each individual faction’s progression towards their respective goals. I find this much easier when there is one overarching process to track involving just two groups. Simplicity for me hopefully translates into simplicity for my players, in terms of intuiting how the conflict will develop.

There is also an inbuilt interrelationship between the PCs' actions/motivations and wider game events. The PCs are meant to be mitigating the unsafe work conditions, but are also subject to these conditions themselves. Could a lack of support in the face of formidable monsters foster their own discontentment? Equally, the PCs are subject to authoritarian treatment by managers. But might they inflict such treatment on other workers for the sake of their own advancement?

What Happened Next

Lipsiss’s lieutenant Romara proved not to be the best source for rational guidance. She had holed herself up with makeshift defences in a side room, clearly paranoid after losing a fellow lieutenant in the disaster. The PCs were instead the ones giving direction, persuading Romara to accompany them to seek out the Smoke Devils.

The PCs discovered increasingly hazardous conditions as they ventured deeper into the mine:
  • Solidifying red mists, at risk of blocking passages
  • A combat encounter with a vicious chicken-pig 
  • A nest of red-eye rats
The last of these encounters is where Hellegard suspected the rat’s blindness to red could be taken advantage of. The party covered themselves in dust from the red mist, enabling them to invisibly sneak past their lair (I’ll admit to not anticipating this potential tactic).

We leave the party having just discovered a stash of money in a wall cavity. This was identified as an old strike fund, from when the mine was last worked a generation ago. The party pocketed the loot, but will they pass it on to the present day miners or keep it for their own enrichment?





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