Khareo's Tale #4 - Yelling a devil down

This session report is a continuation of the previous session: Speaking of the devil. 

Act 2, Scene 3 - The poison apple

The sister decided to head for the Arc society to consult the library. Neither managed to find something about devils, but Mary convinced another member to help. Martha eventually found out that devils are usually insubstantial and invisible. Devils are made of black magic and are motivated purely by malevolence. Interestingly, they are repelled by true faith and white magic.

The following day around lunchtime, Lady Fremton came to talk. She confirmed that they really had been sent by Silvardo Torrens. Reassured, Lady Fremton explained that she was haunted for two years by a devil named Merbaum. He first preyed on her husband for a reason that she did not know, requiring to be fed gold every night. Once that he got on the brink of bankruptcy, her husband attempted to resist. Merbaum use wicked curses to make him sick until he died. Since that day, the devil visits her almost every night, demanding more gold. Lady Fremton obliged under the threat that Merbaum will go after her relatives. Lady Fremton was now penniless and tormented by creditors.

030 - Rebooting Annuminas

Getting fancy with the adventuring gears.

This encounter covers three small bits. A playtest of the probabilistic rules on learning and researching. Some roleplaying around the dining table and a rather abstracted travel overland back to Annuminas. The meat of Session 9 is in the next encounter.

Two weeks in the Shire...

The last two weeks had been fun for the company. Shirefolks still raved about Irina and her friends slaying the wargs in Westfarthing. Arnadil and Sir Galdor were sorry to have missed the encounter with the winter drake. Irina sent the best of her day straining her upper body with a borrowed bow a little too heavy for herself. She religiously practiced for days on end on strength training in hope to be able to shoot well with a more powerful bow [Playtest report #1]. Arnadil looked for a mentor in Bywater to teach him about the North. He found a great storyteller called Tom Herder, but poor old Tom turned out to be a better storyteller than an actual teacher [Playtest report #2]. Finbert begged the grumpy Halin to spar with him at wrestling. Halin, unenthusiastic eventually obliged [Playtest report #3].  Sir Galdor spent the best of his time at the Green Dragon, playing dice and making a bit of silver (10 celebins). Kasper dissapeared in his room at the Green Dragon for most of the time. Spending some time with Araliniel on the Treatise, and reading. 

Notable sources of Information in the Palantir Campaign

I didn't write three posts on books and knowledge without having the intention to subject at least one of my campaign to playtesting this. Here are some stat block for important sources of information in the Palantir Campaign. May these be helpful in the session(s) to come.


For an explanation on the meaning to these stat block, refer to the post on mining for knowledge and learning from sources.

Mining Knowledge in GURPS : Part III. Learning and skill advancement

The previous post looked into extracting information from sources. It also proposed a way to create sources of information such that their content can be generated on the fly. This post is looking into turning information into knowledge. In GURPS' terms: using information to learn and advance skills to higher levels. 

Mining Knowledge in GURPS : Part II. Designing sources of information

In this post, I propose a way to generate the content of sources of information such as books, libraries and collective knowledge within crowds. The GM can plant any information in such source, the rest is randomly generated only as needed.  

Topic Plan

• Part 1 : Character Knowledge
• Part 2 : Designing sources and Research
• Part 3 : Learning from information sources. 

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Mining Knowledge in GURPS : Part 1. Character knowledge

This post is the first part of three on character knowledge, mining for, and designing sources of knowledge. The emphasis of this post is on character knowledge: the skill-based abstracted knowledge that players can invoke to fill in details in an adventure. As a GM, I used these as potential monkey wrench as I leave it up to dice to determine how much PCs really know before they walk into something.