Ur Overdue

Serendipity strikes.  We played double sessions of Ur on Nov. 16th and 17th.  I wrote up the first session already.  But I still haven't written the second.  Well, I was thinking I should as I walked home tonight.  The reason I haven't yet is mostly due to grad school stuff, and a bit to family stuff.  Anyway, Dean sent me a message on Facebook asking if I intended to do it.  I also got an email from a professor telling me that she didn't need me to move up my final presentation to this Wednesday, I can go ahead and do it next week as scheduled.

And now that I've gotten all of that boring stuff that you don't care about out of the way, I can try to piece my fragmented memories of the session together and come up with a boring session report that you don't care about either!*  Huzzah for self-deprecation!

Anyway, our experiment was using Stars Without Number for classes and skills, but playing it in a fantasy setting (Ur, of course).  In the second session, we had Justin of course as the DM, Dean playing Venerable Karl the Cleric, Jeremy playing Burg the Orc pitfighter, myself playing Thomas the Visionary (a Mage using the Dungeons Without Number variant rules from Sine Nomine's blog) from the first session.  We were also joined by two fairly recent members of the Busan Gamers, Derek playing an Expert (thief) Bobdole, and Robert playing Yargrob Elderbob, another Mage (who happens to have the exact same spells as Thomas - Read Languages and Shield, and a similar skill set as well!).  Alexei returned at long last as Maya Culpar the Elf from Beyond the Veil (no Elves in Ur, they're Orc Magi) along with two spearmen and two torchbearers, and a shifty Halfling (also not native to Ur).   Someone had bought another War Beetle as well.  So we had a big group.  [Comments about 20+ member expeditions in Gygax and Arneson's game tables back in the '70s did happen.]

We went back to the bandit fort we'd explored in the previous evening's session.  We went down in the tunnels after a bit of fruitless exploration.  Almost immediately, we had vague impressions of being watched - seeing movement just in the corner of the eye, that sort of thing.  We also got attacked by a pair of zombie-octoapes (one the poor lost chap Karl had spent so much time talking to the previous session) but managed to subdue them.  I believe we lost a red shirt to the apes (maybe two?). 

There was a secret door in the room, and following it we found a room with an altar to the "so uber-Lawful it hurts" deity Starros in it.  Through the next door was a corridor with another door directly facing this one. 

Noticing the shadowy presence again, we raced north only to find nothing, and then sensed it to the south.  We went south next, and after getting trapped behind a portcullis and flinging spears trap (I think it was the Halfling that lost it here, maybe the other red shirt as well?) we found a room  with large glowing crystals on a table and some zombies.  Karl managed to Turn the zombies and keep them at bay long enough for us to loot the crystals and find a side-room with nothing useful inside.

Next, the door in the corridor led us to a room with an ornate suit of armor and a large sarcophagus.  Messing around in the room caused a misty ghost to materialize.  It attacked Karl, who didn't have one of the glowing stones, aging him by five years.  It also possessed our thief Bobdole briefly and tried to get him to don the armor.  Holy water cured him of that.  Not being able to do much, we retreated. 

The crystals apparently are some sort of spell-storage devices.  I missed the session this past weekend, but apparently everyone went back to The Hive.  Dean posted a report of that game.  I'll copy it here later.

Right now, I'm a Beast of the Week late (first one I've missed all year, but hey, grad school takes priority).







*I'm actually continually surprised at the amount of people still reading this blog the past two years, and hope I can at least keep treading water as I transition from being a full-time employee and Masters student with better stuff to do than blog into a full-time employee and Ph.D. student with no time for anything at all.