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Let's Play Hell's Rebels: The Many Steps Monastery, Session 1
Intro
If you’re reading this, it means we’re officially caught up with my solo Hell’s Rebels campaign. This means future updates will be spaced further apart, but they will still happen.
Anyway, in the previous scene, our heroes completed the first level of Adventure 01’s capstone dungeon. In this one, we’ll begin to tackle the second level.
The entire level will be Scene 14 by the standard of Mythic, though I’ll break it apart into multiple posts so as to not keep y’all waiting for new updates. I’ll play my “sessions” as time and whim permit, and post an update once I have a good chunk of text.
To recap, this is the former hideout of the Secret Order of Archivists, which used the abandoned Hocum’s Fantasmagorium on the surface as a cover for the underground Many Steps Monastery. The whole place has been raided by Thrune’s forces in the Night of Ashes several weeks ago, and is currently being occupied by a force of Asmodean redactor-priests who are mopping up the last vestiges of the raid before abandoning the site. Nox is also here, and our PCs will hopefully get to deal with her in this scene.
[GM] Procedure Review
As in the previous scene, I’m preparing each room as the PCs get into it. You can also refer to this link for an overview of the walls and doors in this level, and of the procedure I’m using to conduct the delve.
This is a single delve, so we start counting our turns from where we left off in the previous scene.
There is a minor update here that I forgot to note in the previous scene: Jania got stabbed by one of the redactors in the final fight of the level, and was healed back to full by the expenditure of the healing gem Rosalia was carrying.
[Player] Delving the Many-Steps Monastery
Turn 12
The party descends the spiral staircase that links the levels. It’s quite long! Urist fondly reminisces that this is the reason why they named their hideout the “Many-Steps Monastery”. Most of the party silently groans at the pun, while Rosalia spends the rest of the descent quietly chuckling to herself.
Turns 13-15
The heroes descend from the stairs into a huge, well-lit library that sadly lies mostly ruined (F1 on the map). The floor is decorated with a rune Urist says is sacred to the god Irori, but it’s also marred by dried bloodstains. Most of the shelves have been cleaned out, with the few remaining tomes piled carelessly in a corner.
Before they can further explore this place, one of the books in the pile opens on its own and rises to the air, letting out a noisy cloud of fluttering pages that begins swarming in the rough shape of a humanoid body, with the book covers as the head.
The group begins to ready their weapons, but the creature raises its arms in a conciliatory gesture.
“Greetings, intruders. I am Yiliv,” it says. “I am bound against my will to stop any intruders such as yourselves from getting through that door,” and then it points to the closed door in the west map-west wall. “However, the one who commands me has neglected to provide any instructions on what to do to those who remain on this room. Would you like to talk for a while?”
They catch on to the spirit’s meaning almost immediately, and then fill Arcturus in. The next little while is spent interrogating Yiliv about his history and what he knows of the complex.
Yiliv is a type of spirit known as a scrivenite. They’re all about gathering and preserving knowledge. They also are not averse to sharing that knowledge (“unlike certain other entities”). He was summoned and bound for a limited time by someone whose identity he is forbidden from disclosing. This person bribed him into accepting the binding with the opportunity to read a rare tome, but his tasks up until now have been mostly contrary to his own nature and disposition.
The spirit aided in the raid against the Monastery (“a ghastly affair”), and used his abilities to produce soul tomes on several captives as a form of interrogation. With the main portion of that work done, he is now tasked with guarding the passage into the next room until his binding expires in a a little under two months.
He can tell the complex currently houses four Asmodean redactors in the artifact recovery room, “playing with a defective dimensional gate”. Five more plus a summoned devil are in the common room, redacting documents. Nox and her pet hellhound are also somewhere in the complex, probably at the meditation garden. Yiliv is bound to raise a telepathic alarm as soon as anyone tries to cross the forbidden threshold, but the PCs have free rein of the room until they try to do so. Should he be destroyed in the material world, he will reform in his home dimension, free of the contract.
Most of the party listen pretty closely to what he has to say, though Rosalia wanders off to look around and spots what seems to be a still-locked secret panel. She makes a note of it for future looting, seeing as they’re kinda busy with an upcoming raid at the moment.
Turn 16
When it seems like the heroes and Yyiliv have exhausted all the possible topics of friendly conversation, the spirit again warns that he will have to fight them should they move to cross the threshold, and that his orders force him to telepathically warn the Asmodeans in the rest of the complex about the party’s coming.
With nothing else to say, the party draws their weapons, Jade makes a dueling salute, and the fight is on.
It’s not much of a fight, really. Jade immediately steps forward and slashes at Yiliv’s book-cover “face”, damaging the spirit. He fails the ensuing stunning and knockdown roll, and then Jania runs in with a somewhat uncharacteristic Heroic Charge and whacks the pile of pages with her stick, which was still charged with that Deathtouch scroll from the previous floor. The direct injury from that is enough to destroy Yiliv’s material form and banish him back home.
The spirit did fully intend to fight to the best of his ability, but the dice were not with him this time. Even if he had survived turn 1, he wouldn’t have much chance by himself against the whole party, though he might have inflicted some difficult-to-remove penalties on them.
Jania is glad to be rid of the active spell. That thing was unsafe! She’s also itching to check out that hidden panel which is surely full of goodies, but that will have to wait. Despite not lasting even a second against the party, Yiliv did raise the alarm, so everyone in this level knows they’re coming. Time to go loud.
Turn 17
The party proceeds through the door Yiliv was guarding, going down a long flight of stairs and turning to the left. They keep going down a wide hallway and stop when it branches to their left. The branch is a narrow corridor with three doors, which Urist knows that leads to a couple of closets and one of the sleeping chambers for the higher-ranking archivists (F3a), and he goes down and opens the doors to confirm that the corresponding rooms are empty.
Rosalia does the same with another door on the main corridor (F2), which leads to a smaller bedroom that shows signs of recent use but is currently empty.
Turn 18
The party proceeds down the wide hallway, and turns left again to what Urist tells them is an artifact vault where the Order kept dangerous and cursed items (F4). The scene here is quite grisly. Most of the shelves are empty and smashed, and the room is dominated by a massive web of chains and shadows that emerges from a metal cube at the center of the room. Impaled on some of the chains is a corpse wearing redactor robes, and which is smelling quite ripe.
It looks as though the chains exploded outwards from the artifact, and that this happened quite some time ago given the victim’s advanced state of decomposition.
Jania believes the artifact is a cubic gate, which opened to some chain-themed area of the outer planes - there are several of those. The thing is probably broken now, but even in this state it would be quite valuable to the right collector. Urist confirms it’s a gate.
Carefully, Jania approaches the cube at the center of this mess and by twiddling with the runes on its surface manages to deactivate it. The chains disappear with a poof, causing both the body and the gate to fall to the floor, the artifact’s magic now completley burned out.
And then, suddenly, ninjas!
[GM] Preparing the ninjas
The original adventure places four asmodean redactors hiding around this room, despite their stat blocks having no stealth skills. They wanted to see what the PCs would do with the gate, and they attack once it’s disabled.
I want to spice things up a bit, since standard redactors don’t feel like they’d be a challenge to this group. Let’s replace one of them with an Asmodean Dark Adept that I first used back in Scene 2.
[Player] Back to the Delve
Turn 19
The heroes hear a loud finger snap and suddenly find themselves surrounded by redactor monks! One of them has more elaborate robes, and is the one who snapped his fingers to dispel the invisibility that concealed the enemies. “Get them!” he shouts, and battle is joined!
This lot manages to make a better showing than the ones from the upper level, mostly because they start out surrounding our heroes. The Dark Adept ensnares Urist with his Dark Tendrils spell early on, and most of the other PCs have to turn to engage the redactor closest to them. Art is free, however, and since he has the Move for hit he decides to run all the way across the room and slam into the adept, disrupting his concentration and his spell as well as injuring him.
The rest of the fight is marked by a series of backstab maneuvers of varying effectiveness. A redactor tries it on Art but fails to penetrate his armor. Rosalia stuns a redactor and then Jania kills him with a knock to the skull from behind. Rosalia then runs down and backstabs the Dark Adept, who as a final act of defiance runs to flank her and then backstabs the bard. Urist kills the adept with a Sunbolt spell, and then Jade, having dealt with her initial opponent, approaches the grappled redactor and backstabs him.
This happened over the course of about four rounds in total, and it really underscores the importance of positioning, particularly when we’re doing Lancer-style initiative. If someone walks up behind a character, and then manages to activate again before that character, they’re going to get that free attack from starting their turn behind the opponent. Everyone here was pretty mobile, and the redactors got to use that for once instead of getting bogged down against a solid defense formation.
Urist heals Rosalia back to full health with a Major Healing spell. There’s probably loot to be had here (the ruined gate is still very valuable), but the party presses onward for now.
[GM] Intermission
Our group went through rooms F1 through F4 in this post, and it took me about 8 hours to do everything from drawing the dungeon map to statting up Yiliv to running the combats on Foundry, with a good hour or so of that being dealing with Foundry updates. There’s an incompatibility between the Lancer Initiative module and GURPS Game Aid that forces me to dive into the later’s code and make some hacky edits whenever it’s updated.
We have a couple more big fights coming up on F6 and F7. The F6 fight was against yet more redactors and an ogre, but I thik I’ll spice it up a bit with variant stat blocks. F7 is Nox and her hell hound, and there’s a big chance both fights might blur together as the F6 folks retreat into F7 or Nox comes out to help. I’ll need to “compile” both before I run them.
Our PCs are in raid mode right now so they’re just marking found loot for later retrieval. After we deal with Nox we’ll have a whole scene about collecting and tallying the loot.
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Applying my house rules for combat skills to our Hell's Rebels PCs
A few years back I made a post about merging armed combat skills in GURPS. Much more recently I made another one about merging unarmed combat skills. That one sat on my drafts folder for a long time, but I finally decided to publish it as it was.
If you’re following my Hell’s Rebels Solo Campaign reports, you might have noticed I’m not using either of these house rules in the game. That’s because I started out using GURPS Character Sheet to make my PCs and I found that program to not be very receptive to house rules that aren’t already coded in.
But if I was going to use these rules, how would they have changed my PCs? Let’s take a look at the starter version of their charater sheets and try to figure out the changes.
Rosalia Savory, the Mysterious Satirist
Rosalia basically doesn’t change. Saber becomes Fencing at the same level, and she can use other fencing weapons if needed. She has no other physical combat skills, so we’re done here.
Her new skill line would then be:
- Fencing (A) DX+2 {8} - 15
Jania Moonshadow, The Phantom Thief
Jania is in the exact same situation. Her Smallsword becomes Fencing, and her possible weapon selection broadens a little, and that’s it.
Her new skill is:
- Fencing (A) DX+3 {12} - 17
Urist Stortebeker, The Last Archivist
Urist enjoys the benefits of the new Axe/Mace skill, so he would be able to use flails with that same skill at a small penalty, but his character sheet would not even need to change since the new skill has the same name. However, this would definitely make me buy him a flail and the associated technique as soon as I could, as the benefits over a standard mace are clear.
Jade Irinka, the Sixth Raven
Jade has a “sword and pistol” kind of build but her focus is indubitably on the sword, with a very high Saber skill. She also has minimal training in Wrestling for emergencies. This is a typical DF Swashbuckler setup - she’s deadly when using her chosen weapon, and her greatest weakness is losing that weapon.
As a result, she’s one of the characters who changes the least. Her Saber skill becomes Fencing, her Wrestling becomes Grappling, and there is zero need to shuffle points around as she still needs the Weapon Adaptation perk to use a backsword with Fencing.
She does gain a few advantages with the skill merge, though. She can now pick up an fencing weapon and be effective with it even if her Weapon Master doesn’t apply to the weapon. And she gains access to Judo parries when unarmed, or with an empty off-hand.
Her new skills are:
- Fencing (A) DX+5 {20} - 20
- Grappling (A) DX-1 {1} - 14
Arcturus Pankrator, the Knight of the Deep
Our pal Art changes the most! He has Judo, Karate, Wrestling and Knife, all of which were deeply affected by our house rules. We’re going to have to do some point shuffling.
Wrestling and Judo merge into Grappling, which is DX/Average. We could lump their points together and give Art Grappling-21, but I think 20 is good enough as a starting skill level. So we get 4 free points here, and Art gets excellent Judo parries and throws from his new skill in addition to everything he could already do with it.
Knife becomes… Knife. It’s the new and improved DX/Average version, which means his skill level goes down to 15. He does gain access to those sweet Main-Gauche fencing parries though.
Karate becomes Unarmed Striking, which is DX/Average wth pretty much the same capabilities. I notice the points spent in his original post are wrong, though. He should have either Karate-13 or have spent 2 points on it. But hey, once we replace it with Unarmed Striking the level and cose become correct!
What to do with those 4 points we freed up? How about we put 2 points in Knife to bring it up to its former level of 16, 1 in Unarmed Striking to bring it up to 15, and 1 in Swimming so we don’t have any “hanging” points in the starter character sheet?
Note that increasing Unarmed Striking here doesn’t give him increased damage just yet, as the new breakpoints are DX+1 and DX+2.
So his new skills become:
- Grappling (A) DX+5 {20} - 20
- Knife (A) DX+1 {4} - 16
- Unarmed Striking (A) DX {2} - 15
Conclusion
Arcturus would definitely benefit the most from this merge, though all of the others would also get some benefit in the form of slightly increased capabilities. I’m tempted to eventually enact this change in the game, if I can find a way to program them into CGS.
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Hell's Rebels Bestiary: Raul Azvernathy, Asmodean Cleric
Part of the Bestiary for my solo Hell’s Rebels game.
Raul is a “named miniboss” for Adventure 1’s capstone dungeon, and appeared in Scene 13 of my playthrough. He survived his first appearance, but was still soundly defeated and is unlikely to show up again.
The original book flips the order of his name and surname, but I undid that because it’s silly.
The Lore
All Asmodeans are assholes, of course, but Raul Azvernathy is such an asshole not even his fellow priests tolerate him. He manages to both have an oversized ego and be a cowardly, conniving sycophant. High Priest Grivener was happy at the chance to send him to a dead-end posting far away from the main temple.
The Numbers
Raul looks a bit like a PC cleric, and wears the heavy armor plus mace-and-shield combination you would expect from a D&D cleric. This makes him a bit slow, which meant he arrived late at the fight. Had this not happened, he would have been an interesting threat with a small squad of redactors to distract the party from his spellcasting.
ST 13; DX 11; IQ 14; HT 12;
HP 13; Will 14; Per 12; FP 12; ER 10.
SM 0; Speed 6.00; Move 4.
Dodge: 8; Parry 10 (12); Block 10 (12)
DR 0 (head); 6 (Body); 2 (limbs).
- Dwarven Mace (15): 2d+4 cr; Reach 1.
- Shield Bash (14): 1d cr; Reach 1.
Spells: Flaming Weapon-14; Paralyze Limb-15; Total Paralysis-15; Invisibility-15; Minor Healing-15; Major Healing-15; Command-15; Deathtouch-15
Gear: Balanced Dwarven Mace enchanced with Puissance 1 ($5450; 2.5kg); Medium Shield; Suit of armor (brigandine chest, light cloth limbs, no helmet, Fortity 1 and Lighten 1; $4674, 11.7kg)
Traits: Callous, Coward, Bully.
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GURPS Unarmed Combat Streamlined
Back in 2022 I wrote about merging weapon skills, but I was thinking about merging unarmed combat ones even before that. The reasons are the same: to remove redundancies and simplify skill selection, particularly in games where unarmed combat is not a big focus.
There’s also another “philosophical” reason for me as well: the current spread of unarmed skills is perhaps GURPS’ last vestige of a very Nineties view of martial arts styles. Karate is better than Boxing is better than Brawling, and knowing one of them does not help with learning another one at all. The same goes for the grappling skills.
GURPS 4th Edition tried to move away from this a bit by having more defined niches for each skill, but I think that’s kind of the opposite of what I want to do. Let’s have styles be represented by the actual style rules, and let’s make the skills into a simple set of building blocks whose names are free of baggage.
The Skills
In campaigns where the rules of this post are in effect, I want to use the following list of unarmed combat skills.
None of the skills have a default, but you can still take part in unarmed combat using your unmodified DX. In this case, you have a -3 penalty to parry non-thrusting melee attacks.
Unarmed Striking (DX/Average)
This skill combines Brawling, Boxing, and Karate. It represents training in forcefully hitting people with your appendages. Roll against skill to hit, or against skill -2 for a kick.
If you know this skill at DX level or higher, you can parry up to two attacks per turn without penalty, one per free hand. There is no penalty to parry non-thrusting attacks, and you gain a +3 bonus if you retreat instead of a +1.
If you know this skill at DX+1 level, you get +1 per die to the damage of your unarmed strikes. This increases to +2 per die at DX+2 level or higher.
Any techniques that defaulted to one of the original skills now default to Unarmed Strike instead, using the most favorable among the listed defaults.
Grappling (DX/Average)
This skill combines Judo, Wrestling, and the grappling parts of Sumo Wrestling. It’s training in performing holds, locks, throws and takedowns, and on avoiding the same.
If you know this skill at DX level or higher, you can parry up to two attacks per turn, one per free hand. There is no penalty to parry non-thrusting attacks, and you gain a +3 bonus if you retreat instead of a +1.
If you know this skill at DX+1 level, you get +1 to your ST for all grappling-related rolls. This increases to +2 at DX+2 or higher.
If you use Fantastic Dungeon Grappling, you get a +1 per die bonus to your Control Point rolls at skill level DX+1, and +2 per die at DX+4 or higher.
Any techniques that defaulted to one of the original skills now default to Grappling, using the most favorable among the listed defaults.
Shove (DX/Easy)
This skill is just the “shoves and slams” bits of Sumo Wrestling. Use it instead of DX when performing or resisting these maneuvers.
If you know the skill at DX+1, you get +1 to any related ST rolls, and +1 per die of damage on slams. These bonuses increase to +2 at DX+2 or better.
Notes
Yes, I an essentially taking the best parts of each skill and mashing them together. Yes, this does make unarmed combat skills both cheaper and more appealing. No, I don’t think it makes them better than armed combat.
Unarmed Striking gives you a lot despite being Average, but so does any weapon skill, including the new-and-improved Knife from our post on weapon skills. We’re still in a place where you need to invest plenty of points in support abilities if you want to catch up to weapon users. Without them, you still deal way less damage and have a chance a chance to wreck your limbs by striking someone in armor or failing to parry an armed attack.
The damage bonus progression in Unarmed Striking is slightly nerfed compared to the one from Karate, but that’s balanced by the skill being easier. To get that +2 per die for this skill you end up spending the same amount of points you would for Karate.
Grappling does allow you to perform defensive Judo Throws for a price that’s 4 points cheaper. I don’t see this as a problem.
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Hell's Rebels Bestiary: Asmodean Redactor
Part of the Bestiary for my solo Hell’s Rebels game.
Redactors appear during the capstone delve of Adventure 01, and first show up in our playthrough in Scene 13. In this appearance they’re kinda sitting at the edge of the “fodder” and “worthy” categories, since they’re only dangerous to the party in large numbers. As you might expect, they don’t really show up after this dungeon.
The Lore
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The Chelish government and the Church of Asmodeus take this proverb so seriously they have a whole department dedicated to prevent people from learning anything from history.
Redactors are trained to pore over important documents, particularly those containing historical knowledge, and remove anything that makes their bosses look bad and any hint that they can be defeated. They’re also trained to stab people to death, because sometimes that’s the only way to prevent a bit of incriminating knowledge from spreading, or to get that sweet promotion.
The Numbers
The original had them as level 1 monks who punched people to death, but I decided to give them knives instead. I play them as Worthy opponents, which means they have to be reduced to 0 HP before they’re out, but their crappy gear does put them right on the line between that and fodder.
Still, these murderous librarians have clearly spent a lot more training time on the “murderous” part. You don’t need to be a master scholar to apply thick strips of black ink to paper containing banned words.
Asmodean Redactor
ST 10; DX 14; IQ 11; HT 12.
HP 10; Will 12; Per 11; FP 12;
SM 0; Speed 7.00; Move 7.
Dodge 10; Parry 11F (Judo); 10F (Knife).
DR 0.
- Long Knife (14): 1d-1 cut or imp; Reach C, 1.
- Punch (14): 1d-2 cr; Reach C.
- Kick (14): 1d-1 cr; Reach C-1.
- Judo Grapple (14): 1d-2 ctrl; Reach C.
Relevant traits: Combat Reflexes.
Relevant Skills: Knife-14; Karate-14; Judo-14; History-12; Stealth-14;
Equipment: Robes, long knife.
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