Cauldron: The OSR Euro-con 2026 AAR

If there's a photo you want removed or name changed, please don't hesitate to contact me ASAP and I will get on it.

My report on Cauldron 2025 can be found here.

In October this year I attended my second ever Cauldron Con, a fantastic old-school D&D and adventure gaming convention in Rosenthal, Germany. It was - as expected - absolutely incredible. It’s a truly inspiring event/club/family and was the model for GrellCon. No podcasts, no panels, no experts, no useless lifestyle plastic crap in the shape of Dungeons & Dragons. Just pure love of old-school gaming and an opportunity to do as much of it as time and your mortal frame allows over several days.

If you need an outline of the importance of this kind of convention – or even, this kind of offline event – in the face of a corporate world currently minimising human interaction and creativity as much as it can – please read Blackrazor’s blog post on the subject here.

My notes are already vast and sprawling – I will be astonished if anyone reads all of the play reports I have set down here, but if you do, props to ya.

Every game I played in or ran this year was 1st edition AD&D. Not many conventions you can say that about!


THURSDAY

Describing some big ice. Photo credit: Lenir

Game: The Frozen Wave Satsuma
DM: Me
Level: 3-5
Players: Ken, Niklas, Robin, August, Mie, Joachim, Justin, Ginger


Due to my own misplaced optimism about how early we’d be getting to the con, it came to pass that I missed my first booked slot, as I was initially supposed to run this module in the very first slot. My initial plan for running The Frozen Wave Satsuma was scuppered, somewhat appropriately. In the event, this wasn’t so bad, as it allowed the Brit contingent the chance to sort our rooms out, chill out with a beer and socialise with some friendly faces. It also meant I had the full four hours to run the game instead of the shorter three, and a full complement of well-fed players who had shaken off any first game cobwebs and were ready to go.

The group was enlisted by the wards of Seawatch, a chilly northern coastal town, to eliminate the threat of some raiders from even further north. These brutal brigands had struck multiple times and a nearby monastery had been plundered, the locals enslaved, killed or debased. The fiends appeared to be led by a brutal ogre mage, MER-FLAYER.

Borrowing a crew of ten and a small fishing scow named Silverglide from the village along with some retired mercenaries, the party sailed north into the freezing fogs. The reveal of a bizarrely shaped and grotesquely sized ship seen through the suddenly unnaturally thick atmosphere was interrupted as the Silverglide was rammed by a curious bull orca whale. Two crewmen were flung overboard by the impact, the unluckiest of them instantly being killed by subaqueous mastication. Replete, the beast swam to rejoin its pod and the remaining crewman was hoisted aboard via thrown rope, the hireling morale score having taken a hit already.

They sailed on, and soon the titular Frozen Wave Satsuma loomed large in front of them, a blasphemous combination of iceberg and warship, roughly the size of a WW2 destroyer, built entirely of gnarled ice. Surely this was the hideout of the pirates and their monstrous overlords.

Two small boats were lowered from Silverglide and the party rowed astern, leaving the crew to drop anchor some distance away. The thieves scaled the stern – a climb of over 150’ – and let down rope to ensure everyone else could make their way up. The assassin and the thieves (Mie, Justin and Ken’s PCs) asked the rest of the group to wait just below the rail of the stern, as a pair of guards had been sighted, patrolling in a loop around the upper aft deck clockwise around a structure that would be analogous to the wheelhouse on any normal ship. One of them was swiftly assassinated and cast overboard, then Niklas’ magic-user hopped up to cast Charm Person on the other. He was befriended, questioned, and then ganked just like his crewmate. Bodies were looted and a strange ring of uncold ice was found and taken.

The low visibility as the party looked down upon the vast decks of the ship from their vantage point meant that little could be made out except for some lighted areas shining through the translucent ice walls of the massive structure. This appeared to be present on all decks, and the party reasoned that the most senior members of the crew would be found on the upper decks, nearest to their current location (correct...sort of).

First though, there was the twisted cuboid of ice to investigate aka the wheelhouse. The massive door of ice to this place was opened and a swirling blast of ice wind smashed into the party from inside for 2d6 damage to all in the front two rows, and worse the magical trap showed no signs of ceasing, and was too intense for them to re-close the door.

Abandoning the wheelhouse, the party reasserted their plan, with Niklas’ using the Wand of Magic Detection to find the nearest source of arcane power, which seemed to be directly below their feet, so they descended a staircase one level and opened a door into the cabins, revealing a huge corridor of ice lined with doors. The party skulked forward, with Robin’s elf cleric using his Ring of Invisibility, and the demihumans making the best use of their infravision so as to not give away their own positions via use of light through the walls. August’s PC drank a potion of Clairaudience to scry ahead from his position on guard, to listen through the furthest door ahead – a sound of hurried scribbling as of quill on parchment and the splash of a jabbed inkwell.

The party reformed and kicked this door down, to see the evil mage Kashak or ‘the captain’ as the group then dubbed him, writing furiously in a book. He spun around and readied a Stinking Cloud, but wasn’t quick enough on the draw and Niklas fired off his second Charm Person of the session. Kashak failed his saving throw, and became wary but friendly, inviting them over to view his writings. The book showed a single word written again and again on the page, “Arise, arise, arise, arise, arise, arise….”. He willingly discussed the soon to return raiding party, his hoard of valuables, and his stock of holy symbols stolen from the pathetic holy buildings of the mainlanders.

Seconds later he was DOUBLE DEAD, having been hit with a violent backstab (I can’t remember from which thief or assassin) and a powerful instadeath open hand strike from Joachim’s monk. Finding and looting his treasure room earned the party sacks of gold (approximately 1300gp) and an enchanted bridle. Obtaining these necessitated Ken’s thief removing an odd trap from the interior of the chest, a glass bulb that appeared to be full of some invisible gas or powder.

Vast amounts of other goods – furs, carpets, spices and wines – were valuable, but too heavy to take now.


Further exploration led to a hidden chamber of holy symbols, among them the silver symbol from the monastery which they had been asked to recover. This part of the mission was complete, but the lust for gold and vengeance was still strong, so the party decided to explore further on the same deck.

Picking the lock on another dimly lighted chamber, they entered to find a haunting scene. Five columns of ice were each formed around the corpse of a pirate raider in a restful pose, bedecked with simple jewellery of middling value. Still, it was enough, and they began smashing open the columns.

The plangent tones of a lyre or harp shimmered out of an adjoining doorway, and the door swung open to reveal the player – a huge violet-skinned female ogre hulking in the shadows and hefting a gigantic club studded with walrus tusks. Everyone tried to grab for their weapons, but to their horror several of the group found themselves uselessly stuck in a loop of repeating their own actions, the notes of the lyre bouncing around inside of their heads. For the following two rounds some of the best fighters were stuck chipping away at the ice uselessly as the battle raged.

Laying about herself with the huge club, the ogress was unlucky with her damage rolls and she was eventually felled, but as she bled out she emitted a huge yell, alerting the brigands in the decks below. Shit was about to get chaotic, but the cool-headed tactics on display from my players meant they were able to extricate themselves with aplomb...mostly. There was treasure in the strange ink-splattered chamber from which the violet ogre had emerged from, and they quickly gathered up anything particularly valuable or portable – a narwhal horn set in gold from the ogre herself, an incredibly complex model of a small ship, several other piles of coin, some potions and sundry valuables. Greasy whale-oil smoke hung in the air around them.

August’s MU/Fighter stayed in this cabin, choosing to investigate a bronze shield hanging on the wall more closely. Coiled tentacle motifs adorned the metal. Alas, his curiosity got the better of him as decidedly non-decorative black tentacles shot out from some nether ocean dimension and swiftly dragged him ‘inside’ the shield, despite his party members’ best efforts to grab his legs. He found himself in freezing, lightless depths where no-one heard his lungs burst as he tried to scream.

Outside, the sounds of an angry and alerted crew swarming up from the lower decks was heard, and the rest of the party formed up in a defensive line to try and command the chokepoints of two thin staircases leading up to their level. The disorganised and drunken pirates were soon in a spot of bother, as Slow spells caused a pileup of bodies, over which flew a deadly hail of missile attacks and soon, Ken’s glass sphere pilfered from the trap. When this hit the ground its invisible sleep gas was so powerful it even knocked Ginger’s PC to sleep, but soon they were able to pick up his dozing form and rappel back down to the waiting boats, getting away with only one PC death and a pretty smart haul of treasure.

DMing notes: I missed out a few things as written in the running of this adventure, but overall I thought it went well given it was my first DMing (and gaming) of the con and I’d been up since before 6 am. There’s a couple of things I missed out by accident in the module. There’s supposed to be a frictionless ice effects those that try and fight in melee without stealing ice cleats off the pirates, which I forgot about, but perhaps it was for the best as it can really suck when con games go ‘farcical’ and anyway it used a roll under Dex resolution which I’ve been trying to move away from whenever I can.

Having stripped the OA material out of the adventure was also a little bit of a challenge, but nothing major really. Kashak (an 8th level MU) going down so quickly because he was Charmed made me wonder once again how much I like my consistent ruling of all spells starting on Segment 1 outside of initiative order, which heavily overpowers low level spells for PCs like Sleep and Charm Person. Perhaps a change is in order there.

The company and players were great, props especially to the young Danish players Niklas, Mie and Joaquim, the latter two said if I remember rightly that this was their first AD&D game and they were each playing an Assassin and a Monk respectively, both very much advanced types of play for your first go!


FRIDAY

Dreadlord's game begins. Photo credit: Elderthing

Game: Nightmare Realm of Death (Blackrazor Cup Tournament)
DM: iudex
Level: 7-9
Players: Me, Ken, August, James, Niklas, Justin, Lynchpin, Mike S


I’ll just cut to the chase - we scored 0 and it was a TPK. Honestly I don’t think we did that badly until the end. Some other reviews have already outlined the issues some had with the tournament module, so I won’t say too much more on that until the end. When JB explained at the awards ceremony that this was reworked Dragonlance material with his own evil spin on it, it did make a bit more sense, Nonetheless I did have a great time playing especially given this was my first time playing with the convivial and laconic Iudex as DM.

Selected highlights include seeing once again the arcane wiles of Niklas saving us as his Cones of Cold helped us survive a brutal flanking ambush by treants while my thief successfully fell out of a tree, and a desperate use of Wish to remove two Shambling Mounds “from our immediate environment” and then running for safety as they plummeted down towards us from 300’ up in the air.

Iudex outright told us toward the end that he wasn’t a fan of AD&D, so I have to give him extra props for stepping up to help run the tournament in this ruleset (he’s a skilled and dedicated OD&D guy). My favourite parts of the game were his derision and frustrated eye rolling at some of the more powerful Advanced spells and class abilities.

Apart from a complete bullshit ruling in a world where a Ring of Free Action does nothing in most cases of restraint or being stuck (which I later heard was a divisive issue in other sessions of the same tournament) this was really fun times despite our poor performance. The most treasure we ever had was 15pp I found in a dead elf watchtower. Then we lost that when I was wasted by green dragon breath. We’d used our second Wish bringing Nicklas’ character back to life after he drank from a crystal clear pool, so we had nothing to deal with the scaly bastard after he ESP’d us on our approach and then gassed us as soon as we broke into his lair. There were only three PCs left after the initial breath attack and they soon fell too, though it was a valiant effort for the survivors (I think one of them ended up charmed and enslaved by the dragon, maybe).

I later found out that every location apart from the end fight was just treasureless distraction, which felt really rough given I was already feeling hemmed in by the woods around us and it was all feeling a bit adventure path-y. There was also, unless I am mistaken, no real other way into the dragon’s lair but the front door. Admittedly, it was all set up to be an impregnable fortress by an intelligent dragon so a lot of it is in-world tactics on his part.

(Maybe I wasn’t thinking laterally enough? It’s also very possible that I’m being a pretty useless mid-to-high level player here. We probably had myriad ways to ‘skip to the end’ and didn’t use them. Yet it feels punishing to have everything else be irrelevant for the purposes of scoring apart from the very end BBEG.)

I am no expert on AD&D tournament play but I couldn’t help feeling that a ‘start ‘em at the entrance’ style dungeon is the best medium for competitive play. The boardgamey and bounded nature of a dungeon along with different routes to find treasure and boost your score seems to me would reward different approaches. I suspect that goes a long way to smoothing out jumps in score based on how one DM runs things different to the next.

Perhaps that’s more of a mid-level play thing though, I don’t know. The fact that scores either seemed to be total TPK/0 points or “yeah man I think we got everything” and little in between is telling of something perhaps, but I’m not sure what!

Nitpicking. It was great times and really all we had to blame for failure was ourselves. It's especially fun to play alongside those you normally DM for, like the esteemed Mr James Knight. I’d definitely like to play in another tournament game in future for sure. Or even run one!

Doomed in the Cloudmaze. Photo credit: GoldDigger21 and/or Elderthing

Game: Jewels of the Becursed Cloudmaze (Session 1 of 2)
DM: Me
Level: 5-8
Players: Philipp, Sören, August, Ludwig, Enzo, Darnok, Theo, Kosta

I was looking forward to taking this macrodungeon out for another playtesting spin. It’s been through a lot of playtesting already (three convention sessions and several pub sessions if I recall correctly), but I wanted to pit it against some hardcore Cauldron-heads and see how it stood up. It had been experienced by something like 24 players already, so I was running it with some adjustments and feedback folded in. As one example, I’d expanded the Cloudmaze side elevation diagram to show the upper regions, as people seemed to have been wary of travelling up to heights they couldn’t see, previously.

No such worries in this session of course. It was aerial assault straight from the beginning. All playtests so far I’ve given out the largest sized Carpet of Flying to help them reach directly to where they think they can cope with the challenge (the ‘dungeon levels’ are scaled from roughly 5th to 8th as you ascend). This team of eight maniacs made the most of their ability to fly with it and attack ‘dungeon level’ 6, the ogre fortifications with high walls, corner mounted ballistae and an open killing courtyard between the walls and the glimmering column of red/pink light that formed the core of the whole arrangement, stretching up many hundreds of feet into the sky.

Sören’s fighter used his Boots of Levitation to ascend leisurely up the side of the mountain to the top of the walls, gripping Kosta’s fighter/thief Halfling. The other six kept careful pace on the carpet. The party’s men-at-arms had failed a loyalty check and refused to climb up the vast fortification unless the ogre’s siege engines were dealt with first. As it happens the party ignored their whining, and then the entire men-at-arms troupe from this point onwards.

Sören’s plan was to float up and grab the belt of the nearest ogre (who like all the ballista operators bore a huge clumped crown of massy gold) and then drag him off the wall to die on the rocks below. This was hoped to give more of a chance to the carpet crew as they flew past to disembark onto the wall and charge into melee. Three of the corners of the fortification were manned (ogred) with ballistae, and the fourth was enmeshed in a huge mass of roots and plant matter that grew down from the clouds above.

Unfortunately for the levitating duo they were unable to achieve surprise and so after dropping the halfling on the wall, the levitating fighter had to begin melee, triggering the alarm but at least distracting the creature so it couldn’t hurl a machine powered bolt at the carpet. The ogre began swinging his huge club at the two new arrivals, while the carpet flew at speed parallel to the wall towards the second ballista. Some of the party jumped off and used this momentum towards a charge along the precarious 10’ wide wall towards ogre#2, while Theo and Ludwig’s cleric and illusionist cruised round 90 degrees to deal with ogre#3.

The combat was swift and brutal, though the alarm was raised. They managed to eradicate all three ballista ogres and deal with further ogre reinforcements as they began to spill into the killing courtyard around the shaft of red light. There was a nasty combination of Philipp’s F/Mu casting Fireball down into the reinforcements, while Ludwig waved the Wand of Wonder and caused one of the ogres to simply disappear.

Billy and Kosta made use of their PC’s thiefly abilities to climb down into the courtyard and inspect the doors built into the column of light, managing to unlock them before the ogres managed to recoup. The party joined them and entered the interior of the mysterious towering oblong of ruby coloured light.

Inside, the air was thick with swirling pink mist roiling against the walls as they stretched dizzyingly up and out of view. A spiral staircase led upwards around the interior. Zipping through the air with insectile buzzings were small objects that were quickly revealed to be small chunks of ruby. Most of the party began shamelessly trying to catch as many of the rubies as possible and fill their pockets with the low value gems.

“What would the adventurers guild think of you, this is pathetic!” - Philipp

No time for that! Kosta’s halfling was surprised by the emergence from beneath a stair a huge unfolding creature, an enormous twisted giant with nightmarish features that now attempted to flatten the halfling with blows of its enormous fists! Blow after blow and shot after shot was traded, and the immense monster finally fell after inflicting some terrible damage. The halfling was glad of his enormous pool of HP after seeing the damage totals that were being rolled.

The staircase around the interior was considered as a way up through this strange structure of flickering light. Time was of the essence as through the translucent walls could be seen crowds of jeering ogres, evidently having watched the fight with the giant. Severing its head and throwing it out to the ogres as a mixed gesture of boastfulness and possible solidarity did little. Attempts to communicate with them in their native tongue from Ludwig’s gnome merely granted crystal clarity about how much the ogres despised them - though they still seemed wary of entering the red zone and chasing the party.

The group decided to avoid the staircases and levitate/fly up the direct centre of the light shaft, away from the edges or anywhere they could be surprised. It stretched up,up,up…hundreds more feet were covered as the ever floating rubies in the fog seemed to become heavier and slower. Eventually, they reached the top - the base of the cloud fortification levels, with an elaborately locked trapdoor preventing further travel upwards.

A slick condensation on the staircase and its balconies made much more than a cursory “ruby catching session” inadvisable while the thief types unlocked the trapdoor. They passed up and through staircases and passages of a strange milky grey substance, part kin to both stone and the very clouds in the sky. Surely this was the ancient cloud giant Altandunatus’ fortification proper, or at least what remained of it.

Upstairs, a vast corridor seemingly lit by daylight was seen to the north of the room they were in, running perpendicularly to where they stood. Reaching it would mean crossing through an archway and stepping onto the ‘cloud floor’. Suspicious, the party probed the area beyond the arch with a ten foot pole and saw the space immediately beyond the arch dissolve away into wispy vapour, revealing a sickeningly vertiginous drop to the mountain peaks thousands of feet below. The group decided to head west and stick to the more confined chambers instead.

Soon they came to the chamber that was to be their demise. Navigating around large chunks of rock that filled some of these rooms, they pushed open a door to be confronted with a terrifying sight. A huge armour plated bull, rearing up and preparing to breathe a cloud of magic vapour - a gorgon!

The front two ranks of the party were engulfed in the monster’s breath, petrifying five of them in one go! Almost all the muscle was gone - only Ludwig’s gnome illusionist, Theo’s cleric, and Koasta’s halfling survived!

Thinking quickly, the survivors slammed the door shut to avoid a repeat round of the gorgon’s “favourite” attack and then opened it a crack in order to cast Spectral Forces and summon an enormous apparition of a fire elemental which causes enough phantasmal damage to panic the horrid beast and make it flee. They were left alone with the silent statues that had formerly been their friends and companions, and the rather glaring issue that all of the treasure and their route down (the magic carpet!) had all been petrified along with its carriers.

So out came the gnome’s Wand of Wonder and he started castin’!

19 expended charges and a lot of laughs later, a large proportion of the stoned adventurers had been shattered into fragments by double strength Gusts of Wind, delusional lightning had ricocheted off of the corridors, a torrential rainstorm was pouring out of thin air, and a very confused fully grown elephant regarded a gigantic statue of an adventurer with some attractive ivy growing from it. Needless to say, the 3% chance of Stone to Flesh had not been rolled, leaving the remaining trio empty handed and with no real way to escape.

The session was nearly over and they were a long way from home. I got the guys to outline to me a rough description of what their tactics and route would be for a descent on foot through the ogre tunnels below, and assigned them each a percentile chance to get out based on that. Happily, the trio did manage to escape and leave…The Becursed Cloudmaze! What a session!

DMing notes: This was the highest in the dungeon any playtesters had yet experienced, and I was glad to describe some of the more mind-bending sights. I was very impressed with the initial assault on the ogre wall, fantastic use of abilities, magic items and tactical terrain. I DM’d for a bunch of folks I wanted to play with last year and didn’t get a chance to (Theo, Philipp, Sören, Billy) and some old friends (Darnok and Enzo) and it was also great to play with Kosta and Ludwig. Thanks so much everyone, couldn’t have asked for more. Oh and August, thanks for being a good sport when I killed yet another of your PCs, sorry about that.

Serious business. Photo credit: MicheleJ

Game: Army of Madness
DM: Settembrini
Level: Name level plus (9 and up)
Players: Me, Michel, Lynchpin, LKH, Oli, Svante, Simon, Jan, Danny, Leon, another guy with long hair and also the LG fighter next to me whose names I have forgotten, sorry!

Rarely does a con game live up to its title this well. Twelve players, necessitating a huge amount of table moving and a couple of skull-fracturing-nightmares for the taller guys as their heads interfaced with wooden beams before we started. Ultra-specific situating of the upcoming session on the Greyhawk map. Name level characters chock full of magic items and instructions to choose another one, permissions to roll up whole groups of henchmen and hirelings if you wanted them, 50k in GP to spend and...is that a wargame hexmap with counters??


Yes, this was adventure gaming slammed straight back into its wargame roots, but with the benefit of all the half-century of writing, thinking and playing the hobby has generated since its inception. Total freedom to strategise, plan and fail, turns measured in weeks rather than minutes, and yet another dimensional incursion for the champions of the realm (us) to deal with. Combine that with a DM whose passion and creativity for the game gave us that special feeling that we could do anything we wished, but also that we were totally on our own and I was very quickly playing in the most inspiring game of the convention. Or maybe that was just the chartreuse burning a hole in my brain.

Or both! I won’t really be able to do the feeling of this session justice but here is my attempt to do so.

Our characters - all being at least 9th/10th level or higher - were the local champions of an area near to the Badwall region of Greyhawk (I am not a ‘Greyhawk guy’ so this meant little to me beyond being able to drool over the map). Despite our wildly differing alignments we were loosely gathered together - in some cases (eg mine) due to self-interest, in others with hatred for evil in our hearts. An interdimensional incursion was coming from the south, and we were tasked with stopping or at least slowing it. Supply lines of raw materials from the south had dried up, and the bulk of our investments were tied up, leaving us with ‘only’ a few ten thousand gp each if we were lucky/if our PCs warranted it.

All we knew so far was what we’d gleaned from the babblings of some rescued captives and some scrying - “BamRam”, “sausages” and lots of other cryptic and nasty sounding rumours all pointed towards the setting up of vast slaughterhouses for human flesh in southern towns and cities. Not only were there rumours of giant humanoids (D’Squillans) covered in mind-boggling patterns who had set up these enterprises but worse, there were human collaborators. A lot of them! Not even to touch on the other rumours we heard about frog-beings being sighted (I wonder if these were Slaad, and if we’d have done better if we managed to contact them and perhaps try some batrachian diplomacy. They never made an appearance in the end though.)

Svante was playing a thief and already had a lot of his henchmen embedded in thieves guild cells across the map, so immediately they started gathering information - and in several cases getting caught and killed! It took a few minutes of that explanation before it clicked for me exactly what was happening - the world was moving and we had to keep up!

I decided we needed more information so decided to form a riding party of mounted men-at-arms, my four henchmen, and a Ring of Human Influence. I took them off-road on the map because I could see there were gaps in our military line - not due to any failure on the part of our commanders, but due to terrain. My light force should be able to spot anyone trying to sneak through, so I reasoned (I did spot some of the enemy, spending a couple of weeks patrolling the stretch of wilderness to the west, but I didn’t have the resources to deal directly with them).

My own assassin PC stayed put (off-map) and dipped into the MU Lynchpin’s library (a boon specified on his sheet) to see if I could discover anything about these might-be-Slaad. I also donated the bulk of my 50k gp to the fellow to my left (sorry again for blanking on your name) since he was a fighter and I thought he could use it to raise a proper army. On one condition, that he hand over one of the villages on the map to my rule once this mess was all over and done with (neutral evil lifestyle).

The layout of the table meant that naturally we got ‘pockets’ of collaboration and discussion going on between players, but we soon settled on Leon being our chief of staff, taking down our requested orders for each week after we settled on the decision to break our plans down into Recon/Research/Army Operations. He was using a laptop, which I am sure helped with us all getting our instructions in order. I believe our DM may also have been tracking some hidden movements using VASSAL (I wasn’t peeking I promise!) on his own laptop. 

Army level combat was resolved using a CRT (combat resolution table) and a single d6 roll, as in standard operational/strategic level board wargaming. I’m not sure if the CRT came from the Imperium Romanum II game, but the counters did. The map was a beautiful rendering from our DM (although crazy small for a table of 12 to peer at, especially the 1.5pt town names!) that was like a timewarp from SPI.

Our troops travelling over the map happened upon surprise encounters with columns of the enemy several times, and looking back I think our main failures weren’t getting some guideposts or watchtowers built. At one point I was going to petition Greyhawk for information on the might-be-slaad, but the time wasn’t there. The MU from my bookclub instigated an aerial Cloudkill strike on a village of cultists and then had to battle a balor. Someone had pet blink dogs. Trust me, there was a lot going on.

"So how many thieves are dead??"

Eventually I ended up with my assassin PC meeting up with my henchmen warband, then heading past them deep into enemy territory to see what I could do about the various human abettors in this grisly affair. We already knew there was significant blasphemous bureaucracy in place, and I soon managed to disguise myself and infiltrate one of the more decadent cults that appeared to be aligned with the interdimensionals. It was a disgusting and debased affair, and my attempts to ‘go native’, though successful, did result in an alignment shift from neutral evil to chaotic evil. I did manage to garotte that specific cult’s leader and was planning on offing all of them eventually, but the enemy’s march up the map was incessant and I think I was probably too late. We all were, we ruefully began to realise, as the enemy army counters crept ever north across the countryside. We’d discovered some links between the cults, the interdimensionals and some species of blood-drinking tree. It was fascinatingly deep and convoluted, but we were witnessing a problem slip through our fingers.

In the end I think we managed to play about 6 weeks of the operation. The D’Squillan forces proved to be extremely powerful in the field, easily taking on the hosts of troops we threw at them. I think of the few confrontations in the field, we at most managed to reduce one of their counters to half strength. Many men died in the field, the gp used for their service simple notches on the balance sheets.

I get up for one second and come back to this ...

It was late at this point and our gracious (and exhausted) DM informed us that though we could continue, it would be the beginning of a huge undertaking so we’d reached a natural endpoint. This was a playtest of this scenario/set-up and honestly it was all fascinating to me. The kind of ambient nature of the zoomed out combats taking place on the overland map, and the inclusion of so much of the infrastructure of the higher level PCs (e.g. thief espionage networks, large amounts of gold for purchasing troops, integrating high level magic item abilities like scrying into the military campaign, separate bodies of levelled henchmen to order around, PC libraries etc) really made this come alive. I think it was mainly due to Settembrini’s mastery of the different levels of play that were going on simultaneously. This was a session where Lynchpin was refused a scrying opportunity on a city because his PC didn’t have the recon (yet) and couldn’t name a district within the target. It was also a session where most of the important information was related not to dramatis personae but to supply lines and logistics. The true nature of the problems to the south arose, after all, from us investigating unfulfilled orders of stone and wood.

If the reader will take one thing away from this part of the AAR, I hope it’s the sheer flexibility that old-school D&D has within it. The idea that old-school play is all about going into grey dungeons with orcs in them and everyone’s gonna die because rocks fall - some people do play that way and you can too - it’ll be fun. Yet the SCOPE of what classic fantasy roleplaying games can do, and have been able to do, right from the beginning, can and should be pushed as far as you want to take it. Run your AD&D session involving an underwater siege being broken by subdued dragons on mythical Venus and you’ll find that the systems, the rules and most importantly the players are there.

SATURDAY

Game: Vile Offspring Session 4
DM: Grützi
Level: 8-10
Players: Me, Shibbi, Michelle, Walid, Chris S., August, ???

I was very glad to finally get into a game DMd by my fellow Beneath The Black Pyramid contributor. I’d heard all kinds of great things about his games from last year’s Cauldron and at GrellCon (where he ran Tomb of the Twice-Crowned King among other things).

After this game I remarked that I felt he and I had similar styles of con DMing - root for the players, but fudge nothing, and don’t hold back on the threats. Remove any speedbumps in the way of your own DMing, and likewise make sure everyone’s game materials explicitly outline what their tactics and capabilities might be. Eliminate misunderstandings before they happen and always prioritise clarity!

This was the fourth (and final) of Grützi’s interlinked games at Cauldron ‘26. The success or failure of each group had consequences for the following group(s) across the overarching narrative. This was all centred around a demon princess commanding the hordes of evil to relink her soul with her body. Her physical form was imprisoned somewhere below ground and shards of a magical gem would reactivate it. These shards were integrated into some of her great servants - a black dragon with a fang comprised of a shard, a hill giant with another embedded in his forehead, and so on

In effect, a miniature campaign across the con. A conpaign? You can have that one for free. Anyway as far as I remember all of the preceding groups had either succeeded fully or done a damn good job, meaning that we benefitted from certain advantages. Recovered NPCs became available for play as PCs, more magic items were available and best of all we had reconnaissance in the form of multiple visions and the ability to teleport directly into the site of the final confrontation ‘drop-ship’ style. I found out later that if the other groups had done badly, this session might have started in medias res of our characters having gotten here the hard way, with missing hit points and who knows what else. So thank you to the preceding groups!

We were shown a ruined keep map and told to discuss our approach and to pick a magic item each (very generous as I was already playing a 10th level magic user with a Wand of Enemy Detection). I selected for my extra a Helm of Telepathy, reasoning we’d be working around a not insignificant garrison. I was right.

We chose to teleport to the interior of one of the ruined towers nearest to the keep’s body itself despite the possible danger of the structure collapsing. I had the Dig spell if we did end up buried. Appearing inside of the dark and silent tower, we began to start the listening and recon procedure. My wand indicated there were enemies above us, so Michelle’s Thief/Illusionist (?) clambered up some rubble to see what they were. 6 bugbears on the tower nearest to us and a hefty force of ogres further along the perimeter wall. Other lines of sight were blocked by other towers, trees and the keep. Using the Helm, I projected nervousness and doubt into one of the bugbear sentry’s brain, implanting a suggestion that they go and report to the ogres. They walked off with the rest of the guards and we were safe to progress through the ruined keep without fear of being spied through the many holes in its roof. 

We scouted the interior and heard a cacophonous smashing in a central room of the building. Spying vast bodies shambling around and hearing the sound of breaking armour and wood, we decided to take advantage of the noise and combine it with a Silence 15’ Radius spell cast by Chris’s cleric. The fighters formed up and we kicked in the door, achieving a full 2 segments of surprise on two hill giants and a whole bunch of ogres that appeared to be turning over some type of War Room filled with decorative platemail suits and large tables.

A 10th magic user shooting off two Magic Missile spells in two segments of surprise is not to be fucked with and it was very satisfying when I rolled 48 damage against one of the hill giants before we’d even rolled initiative. After this opening salvo I sat tight in the doorway and watched my party members methodically take down the foul humanoids in melee, even when one of the ogres tried a sneaky maneuver of diving underneath the table to attack the cleric.

Evidently the idiotic humanoids had been looking for something that we now saw with ease. One of the decorative suits of armour stood undamaged, its jutting arm clearly some type of lever. Once the gnome checked for traps and discovered how the mechanism worked, we discovered a secret chamber with stairs leading downwards. We dragged the enormous corpses inside and closed the secret doorway behind us before descending to the next level down.

We found quiet, undisturbed chambers that the enemy clearly wasn’t aware of yet. Michelle showed more diligence in using the gnome to search for secret doors in a corner I was ready to overlook. This effectively allowed us to skip an entire level of dangerous encounters more or less immediately - a loose tile was found concealing a shining ladder leading down even further into clammy darkness.

The map, showing the three chambers leading to the demoness node

On level three, we were struck by another vision of an enormous stone giant shattering a chain with his hammer - the shocks reverberated all the way to where we stood. The chains holding the imprisoning gems around the demoness were being broken by the hordes of evil! It was time to move, and fast.

We discovered a room with a mighty torrent of water gushing across it from an elevated subterranean reservoir, just above us. While the dwarf and the paladin used their great strength to divert the flow temporarily with their shields so the party could pass without being swept away, I cast Fly to swoop in the other direction over the torrent and across the surface of the reservoir, keeping a hidden candle as my light source. Across the reservoir was a huge terraced area of raw stone - and in the centre with one of the restraining mithril chains shattered, stood the figure of the demon princess surrounded by a huge force of ogres!

We found our way via drier, more secretive routes to a balcony leading onto the terrace and soon realised what we had to contend with. Not simply the vast force of ogres but more hill giants and two stone giants, one of which sported the glowing shard to reawaken the demoness in his forehead. All they had to do was breach two more chains and the demoness could be activated by the enemy!

We swiftly moved into action and split the party to hold off a chokepoint from each of the three chambers where the three holy statues stood from which emanated the mithril chains. This felt like the most “AD&D” combat I had at the con - I was still flying (literally and figuratively), blasting the lead stone giant first with a forked Lightning Bolt, then Cone of Cold that I clipped a few ogres with too. Their rush out into the main chamber was stopped by the gnome illusionist/thief who started by hurling a magical jaguar out of their Bag of Tricks, then loosed a perfectly positioned Fear spell. This caused a mass panic and the ogres piled up into a heap in their clumsy attempt to flee. Over on the other wing the other magic user (played by Walid) fired off brutal offensive spells he’d been sitting on up to this point, while on the final wing cleric, paladin and fighter crushed ogre skull after ogre skull. 

Eventually, we were victorious, and that was the end of my first (and hopefully not my last) Grützi game - fucking fantastic stuff. I told him after that this felt like the “well-balanced meal” of AD&D I always hope for at cons, in that I got everything I wanted from a mid-to-high level one shot. We later found out that skipping the second level with the secret hatch meant we’d avoided the possibility of running into the black dragon! I think I can attribute the success of the first few groups, skilful play from my party members, and a bit of luck helped us to ace this one. Thanks to Grützi for an absolute blast of a game, smooth as silk!

Beautiful and useful diagrams!

Game: Thalaňur-Against the Pale Citadel
DM: Dreadlord/Mitch
Level: 7-9ish
Players: Me, Oli, Philipp, Sören, Danny, Agni, Björn, Daniel

You always know you’re in for something epic, fiendish yet somehow ‘classic’ feeling with a Dreadlord game and this was no exception! A somewhat harried Mitch had run 4 hours of AD&D in the morning, spent all of his lunch break playing in the Chainmail tournament finale, and now he was running another 4 hours of AD&D. It was a standard table, with 8 (or 9?) players – a trip into the fiendish halls of his eight level dungeon. There was a huge amount of maps, letters and handouts from previous excursions into the place with other groups for us to pore over, and a rather wistful backstory about an elf who did not shun the ways of men, freely inviting students to learn of his magicks and enjoy his hospitality at the titular vast mountain citadel. Suddenly, the elf had simply vanished. What remained was a maze of death and strangeness ripe for plunder. At least, in theory.

After a brief alignment clash whereby Björn chose a paladin pregen and Agni chose an assassin, and both were too polite to say they’d rather keep their character, Agni ended up with quite a tough position. Not only was she fairly new to the AD&D game, but she was playing an 8th level cleric, meaning she had the entirety of the spell list to check from, and no small amount of decisions to make. Busy as he was getting set up, Mitch asked me to lend a hand, so I did my best attempt to explain with a quick outline of the various spell effects, how spell slots and choices worked, and a lend of a PHB. I wouldn’t be needing it – I’d selected an 8th level dwarven thief and all of my abilities had been handily summarised on the sheet. We were ready to dive in.

Immediately we were presented with one of Mitch’s by now trademark architectural style diagrams of the frontage of the citadel, a genius move that allows for immediate spatial understanding and planning, getting everyone on the same page (literally). I begged an Invisibility spell from Oli’s illusionist (side note- major shoutout to Oli for his diligence in keeping the Klosterbier barrel refilled and operative for the entire con!) and myself and Danny’s fighter/thief (?) began climbing the imposing entrance. I was spiking the bare rock of the mountainside to affix ropes, allowing for my non-thieving colleagues to climb it with ease – I took care not to damage any of the stonework of the elven citadel itself.

Eventually after a couple of mishaps, the two of us managed to climb onto a stonework ledge extending from the frontage over a hundred feet off of the ground. It was fringed with stonework gargoyles and jutted from an upper entrance, almost diving board style. Acting on some intel from the letters and handouts, I made something of a tit out of myself politely bowing to and complimenting the gargoyles – it never pays to be too careful (if I had only followed that particular piece of my own advice later on).

We peered inside to find a strange room (rendered in glorious isometric perspective with another diagram from Dreadlord) which had a magical floating platform in the centre and – more alarmingly – a wyvern scuttling towards us, using the walls to climb on! The fact it was clinging to the walls and not using the floor just seemed like an extremely cool bit of flavour to me, not the crucial bit of information it would turn out to be. An intense fight between Danny and the wyvern began whilst I bravely left them to it and snuck invisibly around the perimeter of the room. Danny’s PC took a couple of stings to the chest but shook off the lethal poison, eventually vanquishing the creature singlehandedly with his gauntlets of ogre power, and gaining our first bit of treasure in the form of its golden collar.

We entered the strange room beyond to see further details, including a slight recession in the floor, a magically darkened cavern full of glinting eyes to the north, a glimmering cube of energy and a tantalising treasure chest. There was a strange mechanical apparatus on the floor, mirrored by another of identical appearance on the ceiling, each with their own hole for a key, crank or some other component. I’m still somewhat mystified as to what those were (I checked for invisible forces of columns running between them but there were none) and await to find out based on further reading of the module.

I was so focussed on avoiding the shallow depression (day in the life of a gamer amirite?) that I managed to walk backwards onto a concealed pit, boldly detecting the trap with my body, and fell over 70 feet to the main entrance hall below for a brutal 7d6 worth of pain. My 8 levels of HD saved me, but my ego as well as my invisible physique were pretty brutalised. My pratfalls had not yet begun – I climbed back to my compatriots and gave them the terribly useful advice that the floor was beset with pit traps. They’d already discovered this via use of a clerical Find Traps spell – the entire room was riddled with the things. Thus solved the mystery of the wall-crawling wyvern. We decided as a party that it was time to investigate the chest, so my thief rolled up his sleeves before I had a thought:

“Hey Philipp, why don’t you use your new Rod of Cancellation to deal with that glowing cube before I open the chest?”

And that’s how we released a Glazrebu demon.

Let’s just say the following fight was in less than ideal circumstances. The party was bunched up together between pit traps and the wall, while the demon’s magical darkness swirled around it, preventing us from getting a clear hit in. I feel that it was only Protection from Evil cast by party members (Philipp? Agni? Maybe both) and the holy field emanating from Björn’s paladin that saved the creature from fully reducing us to mincemeat at the hands of its wickedly sharp pincers. It clearly had it in for the pious crusader, however, as the paladin then had to endure the indignity of forced levitation from the creature’s evil spells. We lacked decent reserves of acid or holy water, so Tom’s ranger had no choice but to lasso Björn’s PC like some sort of paladin balloon. From this vantage point they were able to see atop the magical platform while the rest of us did our best to effect a fighting retreat back to the ledge and run away.

On top of the platform, the paladin and ranger saw some tantalising items atop a velvet cushion, a crystal ball and a metallic scroll case. My third and final genius move came into play:

“Hey Tom, don’t be a wimp, just grab the crystal ball and scroll case before we run! There won’t be any other traps!”

And that’s how we managed to gate in two Erinyes demons as well as the Glazrebu.

By this point I’d decided I’d better stick to the supporting role and keep my bright ideas to myself. The rest of the party fled out to the ledge and thankfully the Glazrebu stepped on one of the pit traps and plummeted downstairs, and I shamefacedly left to grab another beer while the paladin and ranger extricated themselves from this mess with some help from Philipp’s fighter/mu. I still don’t know exactly how they managed it but we were eventually able to return to town with a fancy new crystal ball with some kind of scrying ability and some scrolls. I wanted to sell everything for the XP, scurrilous thief style, but I was out voted and Oli was now the possessor of the ball and Philipp some decent new spells.

A week or two passed back in town while we healed up and rested. Mitch had earlier said he was too knackered to do more than a 3 hour session, but I think we all knew that die-hard motherfucker was talking some bullshit, and we ended up playing all the way to the end! He simply couldn’t help himself, and I’m very glad he couldn’t because there was a lot more cool stuff to come.

Just in case the Glazrebu had decided not to use its freedom to return to whatever infernal realm it hailed from, we took a different route entirely, finding a secret door that led to a vast underground lake in the classical Warlock of Firetop Mountain style – I always love finding these in dungeons. There was a dozing cyclops (or cyclopskin?) in a small guard house by a jetty, which I eliminated with a backstab. I think there was some ESP/scrying from Oli with the new crystal ball of the other shore somehow. The one-eyed guard’s huge stone chest was too weighty for me to even lift the lid by myself, but with the party’s help it was found to contain a couple thou extra GP, and Sören’s campaign character retrieved the monster’s magical trident, finding it to have some sort of mesmerising effect on aquatic life as it called fish flopping up from the depths of the inky black lake.

Harold mocking us, probably

Pushing onwards to explore further in our final hour of adventuring we took boats from the jetty and rowed in the direction of the opposite shore, or at least began to, having to deal with a sudden attack by a quartet of gigantic crayfish erupting from the depths and knocking myself and Agni’s cleric into the freezing waters. One of the invertebrate horrors was dispatched with skilful combat and the others rushed away in fear. We passed a huge column stretching up to the cavern’s ceiling on an isle in the lake, but dismissed the carvings upon it as looking like standard stone with no valuables and eventually made landfall. Further explorations deeper into the pits and corridors of this twisted place revealed further trickery. A stone shaft rattled with the moans of tormented victims, an illusory effect obviously designed to trick intruders into believing they’d found the place’s legendary torture chamber. Descending via rope in any case, I dealt with a nasty trap in the form of a trio of motion-activated dragon statues that cast spells from their mouths. I took the brute force approach of rushing them and stuffing their maws with cloth torn from my garments. Crude but eventually effective, all I had to deal with was the pain of countless homing magic missiles to the dwarven dome and a bunch of lost hit points. I made the way safe for my party like any good thief, and they followed down via abseiling. We explored further and quickly came face-to-face with a brilliant dungeon set piece and some of the best (and funniest) interactions with an NPC at Cauldron 2026: Harold the Wight!

This foul undead creature guarded a mechanism controlling two portcullises either side of a short corridor which we wished to pass through. Not only did he have a sliding hatch on a reinforced door to his control room through which he could peer and viciously berate us, but he had another peering slot between the two portcullises. The putrid self-appointed gatekeeper demanded treasure as a toll, so Philipp handed over some jade treasures he’d acquired in his home campaign. “Not enough!” cried the horrible fiend as he tossed it over his shoulder. We decided to Bend Bars/Lift Gates our way through the obstacle but it was incredibly difficult to do, and we’d eventually split the party either side of the first of the two portcullises.

Harold was handy with his little hatches, slamming them shut to avoid holy symbols then whipping them back open to laugh at us as we struggled to prop open the metal gates. This was the sweet spot where your DM’s mind is coming loose from its moorings due to so many consecutive gaming hours, he gets to RP an absolute POS NPC (if you’ll forgive the wanton abbreviations) and there’s a difficult dungeon trick for the PCs to negotiate. We quickly grew to despise Harold. This was the hardest I laughed at Cauldron ‘26 apart from when I was being told about Das Schwarze Auge’s fantasy melon farming splatbook.

Eventually we’d had enough of Harold’s shit and I ‘backstabbed’ him straight in the eyes through his hatch with my +1 shortsword. I didn’t destroy him but at least he retreated and we got to hear him whimpering about his destroyed face. We got through the second portcullis, retrieved a nice jewelled sceptre (around 3000gp) and the session was at an end.

A superb game, excellent players and needless to say brilliant DMing. You’d never have known Mitch had had no respite so extra kudos for running everything so smoothly. This dungeon was fascinating and is probably my favourite type. It’s unashamedly dungeon-y, slightly surreal yet still very much grounded in the rules and playstyle of AD&D. Ol’ Dreadlord was kind enough to gift me a bound copy of the WIP dungeon and let me tell you from my initial readings it’s the real deal. I’ll be running it at Dragonmeet this year (possibly in an off-the-books unregistered session) and if I have my way this isn’t the last you’ll be hearing of the Pale Citadel.

Blah blah blah blah fuckin' blah Photo credit: Lenir

AUCTION AND SUCH

The auction wasn’t quite as woolly and wild as last year (possibly to its benefit!) although I did manage to score a glorious original copy of Realms of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness from JB aka B/X Blackrazor, who funnily enough was the donor of the only auction win I had last year too (Otus cover Swords & Wizardry Complete).

I also gave a somewhat drunken and probably quite embarrassing spiel in front of the whole con about the importance of keeping AI generated art out of hobbies, specifically gaming. This was in response to a discussion earlier in the day about the surprising inclusion of ugly AI art on a couple of the silent auction lots. 

S.W.A.G. (Some Wicked Adventure Gaming)

This was done to introduce the auctioning off of my artwork for Grenzland zine (with all proceeds donated to the convention) and was unprompted. I really hope it didn’t come across as hectoring or anything other than sincere. Some folks gave me some encouragement later on about it and as I sat down so hopefully I didn’t make too much of a tit out of myself.

Still - apart from all of this I was happy to have Realms of Chaos and in the same lot, a copy of JB’s Come Chaos expansion for B/X, which I had been hoping to get a copy of soon anyway! Thanks JB!

Between my contributor copies of Sarissa (an expert rearranging/restating of Chainmail and its principles of play which I did the front cover art for), the auction score and Dreadlord’s kind gift of his insane dungeon, I made out very happily indeed.

Game: Slay the Minotaur!
DM: Ghoul
Level: 1, and you’ll be grateful for it!
Players: Me, Niko, Sören, Der Oger, Danny

This is a difficult one to talk about without spoilers, so I’ll start simply and say it was a toss-up between this and Settembrini’s Army of Madness as to my favourite game at the con (with Dreadlord’s game as a very close second).

You know the myth – seven youths and seven maidens are delivered into the labyrinth every nine years (had to look that bit up I admit) to satisfy the orders of King Minos – these poor souls are then devoured in its dark halls by the minotaur! In this ‘alternate myth-story’ version, things were even worse, as the only hope for the people of Athens, the mighty hero Theseus, had already been slain in his attempt to kill the beast, his bones mingling with the other remains of the minotaur’s feasts somewhere in these corridors of blood.

Our pregens were selected from the unfortunate fourteen, and the only equipment we had was what we could smuggle about our person. My character sheet (or character slip, in this case) informed me that my 1st level fighter Kyrios had managed to smuggle in a sling by concealing it as a belt. Sören’s character had her hair bound with a dagger – and it will give you some idea of our equipment level when I tell you her character sheet also said her long hair could be cut off and bound into 3’ of rope. Each of us had an invisible tattoo on our backs that would only become visible once massaged (very Greek myth), and those were our magic-user’s ‘spellbooks’ – of course, one cannot read their own back.

After a little bit of excellent scene setting including our DM’s feet/the minotaur’s hooves stamping fearsomely under the table, we heard a bovine bellow in the darkness – the minotaur had scented our blood! We began fumbling around in total darkness, trying to find a bone in the minotaur’s charnel pit big enough for one of us to wrap a cloth around to serve as a torch. I suddenly realised to my horror that even though we weren’t in combat, Ghoul was tracking all of our actions by the round not by the turn. The other 9 members of the sacrificial party were panicking in the darkness whilst we got our makeshift torch together and I gripped the hairpin dagger in my sweaty hands…

...when suddenly, a hidden sliding door opened with a thud and there stood, in all his bestial glory, ASTERION THE MINOTAUR! He lay about himself freely with the gigantic double headed axe, the labrys, slaying several of the NPCs – as I remarked at the time, you know you’re really screwed when the replacement PCs are being killed even before you are.

I can’t say much more without ruining this for anyone else lucky enough to play it, for I believe this was the first playtest of the scenario. If you have the chance to play this with Ghoul DMing, I strongly urge you to do so! True survival horror, and a serious mapping challenge (I am normally a most eager mapper but I had to give up and pass the map to Sören’s capable hands because the classic old-school ‘one line thick’ dungeon walls were screwing with my head) that felt straight out of one of the old-school Might & Magic DOS CRPG games but without the luxury of pause.

After fleeing this initial encounter and later being toyed with in the depths of Asterion’s maze by the beast, we were eventually victorious, but at the cost of several lives. Kyrios remained behind, condemned to the labyrinth via his own choices, but that’s a story for another time.

Honestly, this was just another testament to the many ways that the incredible (A)D&D game can be spun in all types of different ways, and this was all done effectively without any house rules (unless you count the back tattoos, but I’m not sure I would). Mainly it was just an expert change of the standard D&D milieu, combined with a tight environmental challenge and some excellent pacey dungeon mastering. I’ve never been as worried about wasting light source time in a game as I was every time we came to another dead end and heard the foul cry of the horned beast nearby. Superb, ultra-intense stuff, with a real sense of pride that we actually managed to win. 

SUNDAY

An automaton explaining a cloud castle Photo credit: James Knight  

Game: Jewels of the Becursed Cloudmaze (Session 2 of 2)
DM: Me
Level: 5-8
Players: Alex, Shibbi, Michelle, Dreadlord, Lynchpin, Ken, James K, Chris S, other dude who I blanked on their name, sorry mate!

A quick ‘bite-sized’ 2 hour session, necessitated by the Herz overlords holding the mailed fist of extra hire charges over us if we didn’t get the car back to the airport in a timely fashion. I really enjoyed this time slot last year as there was a freewheeling approach to it, and so it proved to be again. New friends had been made, amazing times were had and we all knew we’d be parting soon. It was great to have this last game with all of my UK mates, some new friends, and some friends I had yet to game with.

So, another Cloudmaze session. This time I decided to grant the magic carpet as in the previous session but speed things up by merely having them pick a ‘dungeon entrance’ from the elevation map. They of course went straight for the baller option of the very highest level to find the most treasure. This was the decaying tower that marked the most visible part of the mass of cloud-formed ruins hovering above the range of volcanoes.

So in two trips of the carpet they’d reached the crumbling and hazy merlons atop the tower. Michelle (thief) and Shibbi (fighter) checked all over the cloud battlements for secret doors and traps while Ken’s thief used a Potion of Spider Climb to scuttle down the interior of the vast cloudstone cylinder forming the ruin. He travelled about 150’ before coming to a bank of mist floating 20’ above the floor of the ground level. In amongst the mist could be seen hopping and flapping of grotesque figures - harpies!

He snuck back to the party, and a carpet-based airstrike was planned and executed beautifully with the second illusory elemental of Cauldron 2026 in my games. Dreadlord conjured the elemental as a seething mass of cloud around the flying carpet of death, and everyone got ready to fight, ears well-plugged with wax against the harpy cry. Very quickly the tower was harpy-free after a combination of excellent magic-use, pre-planning, finesse…and Alex’s Javelin of Lightning. Michelle and Shibbi’s characters up the top of the tower were able to mop up the two would-be escapees by bludgeoning them as they flew upward.

Regrouping and descending as a group to the harpy’s lair and checking it for treasure, they found a hitherto unnoticed passage partway up the tower’s interior. They decided to investigate this in preference to gates and staircases seemingly leading to lower areas of the Cloudmaze. Some of the party used the carpet to explore up there, preceded by the continuing illusion of the air elemental. The passage led to a sort of ‘cloud-cave’ strewn with the remains of dead giant bee exoskeletons, and very quickly to a fight with yet more harpies! This was after I had checked and double-checked who had unplugged their ears.

That meant the upcoming melee was interesting. Alex’s extremely strong fighter was scratched and then beguiled by the harpies, falling upon Lynchpin’s Ranger (??) with a terrifying grin, stabbing and stabbing again with a spear into his friend’s gut. Why not exult in the gushing blood and flopping viscera of the enemies of the bird-maidens?

In response to this, Dreadlord suggested resolving the attempt to restrain the charmed fighter by using AD&D’s Grappling rules, a sub-sub-system that I haven’t ever really gotten to grips with (ha ha). He was kind enough to step in and co-DM that short part of the combat, he ran us through the rules perfectly and then afterwards we realised we’d gotten mixed up with who was trying to restrain who! Point is, it worked and the fighter was restrained until the combat was over. The air elemental was struck and dispelled by an exulting harpy, but the rest of the party was up to the task of taking on the creatures once they climbed up to join in.

Soon they stood in the blood-spattered remains of the harpies’ cruel chamber of artistry, with dismembered bees impaled on long wooden spikes sticking from the walls. They left this horrid place behind and explored further to the north, in areas not so much built as seemingly naturally formed by the cloudstone as it shifted or shrank over the centuries since this place was abandoned. 

This part of the Cloudmaze was mostly covered with dead, dry hexagonal chambers. Presumably it was an abandoned giant bee hive, though what caused the die off and abandonment seemed uncertain. Scouting around inside some of the hive’s cells revealed an enormous coiled snake (needing no lengthy explanation or description), clearly poisonous. Michelle and Ken’s sneaky types tried their best for a backstab but failed to land a blow. The shining serpent’s coils had shifted and the monster arranged itself fangs-first, ready to administer the lethal bite to Michelle’s PC when the rest of the party arrived in a perfectly timed charge, destroying the serpent. A look around the nearby chambers showed further beehive type spaces, one of them clogged with hundreds of squirmy grey grubs the size of a man’s forearm. Finding no treasure, they retraced their steps.

For this dungeon level I was relying on the random monster by dungeon level tables in the DMG, so what follows can squarely be blamed on rules-as-written. My d6 indicated a random encounter occurred. I got the table to do my dice-rolling for me so fate could be held accountable. They rolled a black pudding.

Ken’s thief was still scouting ahead up down some ever-narrowing tunnels, looking at curious areas where they seemed to have melted away to closed routes. A churning swishing sound was heard as something massive barrelled down the corridor towards them, before the black sticky mass of horror made itself seen. Some brief discussions as to which Illusions could be used vs a black pudding met with dead ends (in my opinion….most Illusions wouldn’t work on something with intelligence Nil). The party all made their decisions to distract it and throw rations on the ground and flee down the narrow tunnels toward where the thief was.

In front of a black pudding as it rolled over the pile of rations they’d thrown on the ground and pursued them.

Towards….surely not a dead end?

No, this was the point at which they realised the tunnels down which they fled did in fact lead to two dead ends, and right now they were stuck single file in the narrow passage as the huge slime came towards them. Some jostling for position in the column and some thrown oil and attempts to cast spells soon ended with the party crushed up narrowly, Lynchpin’s PC having just had his armour dissolved, been hit and soon to be hit again. Inches away from a black pudding, no manoeuvring room with only a soon-to-be-corpse to hide behind. There were only so many hit points and tactics left available in this situation, and we had to wrap up in the next 5 minutes, so I think not unreasonably this was declared a TPK.

As I say, despite the grisly end (and me musing that I may need to put some more treasure on that level!) I loved the vibe of this last half-sesh, even though it had the feeling of not wanting to wake up from a dream. Props to the party for using their skills to the utmost and doing very well apart from that final choice.

With that, it was time to quickly pack up and make our way back to our own grey isle. 

I look fuckin' dead in this picture Photo credit: James Knight

THE AIRPORT??

Game: Frozen Wave Satsuma
DM: Me
Level: 3-5
Players: Dreadlord, Chris S., James K.

This is the point at which my mind was starting to unravel through fatigue.

Airports being what they are, we had a lot of time to kill (I’ll spare everyone the details of the cartoonishly plodding passport checks). We were sitting around, the lads decided on an airport beer (I was done with the booze for now and chucking back black coffees instead) and I ate some sort of deplorable vegan chicken sandwich thing. We reminisced fondly about all of our experiences and gaming, I thumbed through my Sarissa books, and jotted down notes about dread Carcosa, already planning for Cauldron 2027. There was a while to go. We were all fairly exhausted, I think I’d had about 1hr 45mins sleep and run my game that morning, James had driven us all the way from the con, we’d discussed (read: I’d rambled endlessly in the car about) horrendous mind-scarring Mondo exploitation films, pretentious wannabe game designers/bullies, religion, Crowley’s failure to diverge from Christian coding with Thelema, mental health crises and many other quite normal topics. A brief lull in conversation settled. What should we do now?

We could...play some AD&D? Yeah why not!

As it was, we only managed to get in just under an hour and a half. Three players each took two PCs, not to mention some men-at-arms and a pair of Giant Badgers.The party took a more direct but no less stealthy approach to the ogresses lair, Dreadlord making use of a Potion of Gaseous Form that wore off just in time as he finished his recce and gassed back under the door. They’d returned to the deck to plan their entrance, and one of the NPC guards had frozen to death while waiting (1hp, he was never going to do too well), and then our gate was called and we had to hustle. A rough plan was to play on the other side of our check in experience, but in the event it was not to be. Given the circumstances I think I DMd ok, the players seemed annoyed we couldn’t finish it up. Satsuma is a pretty compelling adventure no matter what happens, due to the strangeness of its environment.

On the way back home I think I became briefly delirious, hearing all English voices around me as being ‘background German’, then trying to read some of Against The Pale Citadel on the train, the science-fantasy elements of which was too much for my addled brain to handle at the time, then I fell asleep. Then a month later I wrote this AAR.

***
Thanks again to the Cauldron organisers so much for this incredible meeting, and to everyone I met, re-met, chatted with and most importantly gamed with. Special thanks to my UK travelling companions James, Mitch/Dreadlord and Chris! See you at GrellCon!

PS Sorry for no beverage report, I wanted to focus hard on the gaming in this writeup because the standard of play was somehow even higher than last year, and yet it was even friendlier. Much of that was aided by the delicious beverages I gave so many lines to in last year's report. Rest assured there was plenty on offer, but my experiences may have to follow as an appendix post!

Some sort of delicious elephant aniseed hard liquor thing

...that's the sort of sincere coverage you're missing in this review.