This is the first scene I did for my solo Hell’s Rebels campaign. Initially I wrote stuff into this file as it happened, alternating betweeen Player and GM roles as appropriate. Then I did several editing passes to properly format it for publication, add the correct links, and apply slight retcons resulting from the change to Arcturus’ background.

[GM] Introduction

The background for the adventure here is mostly the same, though I imagine mainland Cheliax is going to be worse than the writers envisioned at handling the Glorious Reclamation.

Barzilai arrived ten days ago, directed the Night of Ashes, instituted martial law, and made seven absurd proclamations so far. Several minor protests were dispersed by dottari or CCG thugs, and this is the largest one yet.

Anyway, our heroes are all at the protest for their varied motives:

Now that she’s back in town Jade will never miss a protest against Thrune if she can help it. It’s also a good way to catch up on the news and figure out what to do from here.
Arcturus is here for pretty much the same reason, though in this case he’s looking for news about Shensen, the missing diva.
Rosalia is here due to rumors that her missing friend Shensen would be present, though they’d probably show up even if that wasn’t the case.
Urist is here to find Rexus Victocora. He was tipped off by Laria Longroad that the man would be here. He is the last surviving family member of some of his former colleagues, and he will save the boy if he can.
Jania is also interested on the news, though in her case she’s worried about how the current political climate might affect her school. Her disposition also makes her inclined to try some pickpocketing here.

[Player] The Aria Park Protest

We’re following the kind-of-skill-challenge laid out in the protest description, so there are these defined actions PCs can take during the initial part of the protest.

Everyone is going to spend their first couple of hours on Watch the Crowd and Listen for Rumors actions. Watching the crowd is a roll on the better of Perception and Observation. Listening for Rumors is either Current Affairs or again the best between Perception and Observation

Watching the Crowd:

Jania lacks Observation, so she’s rolling Perception. Success by 3.
Urist rolls Perception as well, since it’s better than his Observation. Success by 3.
Arcturus fails his Perception roll by 2.
Rosalia makes her Perception roll by 2.
And Jade amazingly makes her Perception roll by 7! Not a critical success, but an excellent margin.

So everyone notices that the crowd is agitated and discontented, but not overly violent. Jade additionally notices a subtle undercurrent there as if there’s a group trying to rile up the crowd without being seen. There might be trouble brewing!

Those who succeeded by any margin also perceive the general layout of the protest, and which groups are part of it: Kintargo loyalists who demand local rule, democratic activists who demand an election for mayor, “economic conservatives” who are upset at the increased taxation, trolls who are in it for the lulz and perhaps a riot, and fascists who are trying to shout the others down in support of Barzilai.

Arcturus is too overwhelmed by the crowd to notice anything except that they’re noisy and kinda fun.

Listening for Rumors:

Everyone uses Perception except for Rosalia, who rolls Current Affairs.

Jania uses Stealth as a complimentary skill and makes her roll by 3. She gets two rolls on the rumor table and hears that a) Shensen is missing, and might have been imprisoned and b) something is killing tieflings in the Devil’s Nursery. Could it be the Temple Hill Slasher returned from the dead?
Urist succeeds by 1. He gets a roll on the rumor table and hears speculation about Mayor Bailinus’ fate. Some say she ran away when Thrune rolled into town, others say she died on an accident.
Rosalia succeeds by 5. She gets three rolls! She hears the same rumor about Shensen, which is very fortuitous since that’s what she came here to learn. She also hears that the prisons are so full Thrune started keeping prisoners in warehouses, or putting them to work in commandeered buildings like the Salix Salt Works. Thrune also plans to bring public excruciations to Kintargo, a practice that’s common in the Chelish heartlands but used to be forbidden here.
Arcturus succeeds by 2. He hears that Thrune’s bodyguard Nox might be a half-devil or something of the sort. Maybe he should wrestle her!
Jade fails by 1. She learns the basic situation of the city, which is useful to her, but fails to turn up any juicy bits of gossip.

Three of the PCs will perform a third action, and after that I’m moving on to the riot.

Jania will pick some pockets! Let’s use the default rules from DF Exploits for it. She makes her Pickpocketing roll by 3 and thus earns 3 silvers… which is actually a mistake on my part (3 silvers is $60, she earned $15). But I’m letting that stand.

This is where it might get fun. Jade will attempt to Rabble-Rouse, and organize the crowd so that they can protest with one voice. Rosalia on the other hand will silence the lulzers and fascists.

The original book says rallying the crowd is a Diplomacy or Perform check, and silencing the assholes is a Bluff or Intimidate check. What about GURPS?

Both of these actions involve addressing large groups of people so Public Speaking should figure into it somehow, if only as a complementary skill to help grab the crowd’s attention. Jade is trying to organize a group of NPCs, which is definitely covered by Leadership. Rosalia is going to try to browbeat the fascists first, using Intimidation

Jade succeeds in her Leadership roll with a margin of 10, which I think it’s enough to get a nice unified chant going and for the crowd to recognize and part for her when shit goes down.

Rosalia makes her roll by 3, which is enough for a regular success too. The “Chelish loyalists” (fascist scum) are silenced.

Then what happens is that the two ladies notice each other’s efforts! The final action before the riot start will be each of them attempting to help the other. So how about we do one more rallying action with Rosalia helping Jade and one more suppression with Jade helping Rosalia?

So Rosalia rolls Singing to help a second Leadership roll from Jade, and Jade rolls Leadership to help a second Intimidation roll from Rosalia, directing the crowd to help shouting the trolls down. Regular successes all around, which are enough.

Each time the characters gain a quest XP reward in the original, I’m giving them 1 character point each. Here, they all gain the maximum of 4, for 4 successful actions.

[Player] The Riot

Things happen more or less as described in the book at this point. Barzilai appears, makes his eighth proclamation forbidding foreign ship captains from leaving their vessels on pain of torture, and gets pelted with horse manure.

I wanted Arcturus to be the one who throws it, since he’s pretty annoyed at Barzilai right now and is impulsive enough to want to start something. This was actually the first roll I made in Foundry, an attack using Throwing Art. I took into account the distance between Arcturus’ position in the map and the balcony (behind and above Nox), as well as its elevation. And he hit!

The horse apple veers off-course at the last minute because Barzilai has a Missile Shield on himself, but he still flinches and spills his wine, ordering Nox and the dottari to move against the crowd. The fight is on!

Now, the original book recommends dealing with the crowd abstractly. It makes most of the map difficult terrain for everyone except those PCs who managed to make a good impression. Most people will do this because it’s faster and more convenient.

I’m not most people.

A map of the Aria Park riot filled with protesters represented by individual tokens.

We’re using the variant of Popcorn Initiative used in Lancer. The first character to act is a PC, chosen by the group. Then the GM and the players alternate, with each one choosing a character on their side to activate that turn. When one side runs out, the other activates their remaining characters. At the end of the round everyone refreshes their activation and we keep the same alternating sequence. If an enemy was the last to act before, a PC acts first in round 2, and vice-versa.

We also have a “neutral” side here: the bystanders. I rule they move 4 hexes on their turn, and they all activate together at the end of each round. Bystanders have a Move of 5 and a Dodge score of 8, and they go down (disabled or dead) upon taking any hits.

The bystanders, obviously, will attempt to run away by moving towards the left or right edges of the map. If they get there, they manage to escape and I remove them from the board.

The CCG thugs start out in the middle of the crowd, and they’ll use Move or Move and Attack maneuvers to close in on bystanders and club them. If a PC is in range they’ll prioritize attacking the PCs instead. These are mooks, and though they can make defense rolls they also go down in one hit.

The dottari will slowly march down the map, moving 1 hex at a time except if they need to turn their formation. If they move into reach of a bystander, they will attack, but they will prioritize keeping their formation over that. Nox and her hellhound pet will keep formation with them. Or at least, that’s the plan. Dottari are regulars, going down automatically at 0 HP. Nox and her hellhound are elites, and use the same rules as PCs.

The PCs can do whatever they want, of course, and with my player hat on I decide that they will try to protect as many bystanders as they can and give them time to run away, and then will attempt to escape themselves. Even Jania finds herself compelled to do that - she’s far from selfless but she’s also no friend of the dottari.

I started writing up detailed actions here, but I found that took too long. This was the exact type of busywork I’m trying to eliminate by using Foundry. So here’s a summary.

Jade starts the proceedings by moving directly northwards to challenge the dottari. If they’re focusing on the tall elf with the sword they will pay less attention to the unarmed civilians. The illustration above is after I had moved her.

The dottari advance according to their plan, and the CCG Thugs manage to club a couple of civilians who were too close when the chaos started. Arcturus charges into them and begins grappling. Rosalia, Urist and Jania move to assist, trying to keep the un-grappled thugs away from both the civilians and Art himself.

Arcturus remains unarmed throughout the fight. Any thug he grabs is more or less defenseless since they have such low stats. In the turn after he grabs them, he can punch them and spend the boatload of Control Points the grab generated to deal a monstrous amount of damage. He gets to do that twice. Jania defeats another grappled thug with a whack of her cane, and Urist knocks one out with a shield bash - he hasn’t drawn his axe yet.

I forgot to move the bystanders at the end of the first round, so in the second one the dottari began reaching them and taking down the upper row of the crowd. I let that stand when I realize my mistake - we can say the crowd was collectively stunned for a round.

Seeing this, Jade decides to up the ante and attack the dottari that’s closing in on her, nearly beheading the guard with a well-aimed horizontal slash to the neck!

This causes Nox to start moving towards her and ordering the other dottari to do the same. They pick up their pace, ignoring the fleeing bystanders to focus on those armed individuals who are actively resisting them.

Fortunately the rest of the PCs manage to defeat the thugs by the time the guards arrive. Jania, who is a bit further away, forms an Ice Dagger and begins to aim it at Nox’s general direction.

Jade stabs a second dottari in the face and begins fencing with two others plus Nox and her dog. She slowly retreats towards the rest of the group, now focused on protecting them.

This whole encounter feels like an even match. It’s likely our heroes could win this and kill all enemies if they stayed to the bitter end like the Dungeon Fantastic party often does. They’d suffer casualties, but I think they might win in the end as long as either Art or Jade stayed up for long enough.

I don’t intend for them to stay that long, however. If Nox gets a single hit in, it’s game over for that PC. And if the dottari from the left flank get close enough to surround them, it might be game over for the whole group. They’re not strong individually, but they can prevent the party from moving and make them easy targets for Nox.

Once Nox is close enough Rosalia hits her with a Song of Humiliation and manages to stun her. Jania takes this opportunity to throw the Ice Dagger she had been holding.

My rule here is that melee attacks with no declared target land on the enemy’s torso, but ranged attacks end up in a random location. Nox fails do dodge this one, so the dagger hits her right leg. Jade follows up with a sword strike to the same leg, crippling it. They all see Nox immediately begins regenerating the damage, though.

Arcturus, Urist, and Jania book it towards “map east” as soon as there are no dottari in the way. Rosalia and Jade end up staying for a bit longer, but the bard quickly finds an alternate escape route and Jade follows soon after now that she doesn’t need to cover anyone’s escape. During this altercation, which took around 8 rounds, the bulk of the bystanders managed to escape unharmed. So were the PCs, for the most part. Urist got bonked by a dottari for 4 HP, but managed to heal himself back to full in short order.

The original Pathfinder encounter had the CCG Thugs appearing first, then a pair of dottari, and then the rest as a “you should run now” message. Putting everyone on the map from Round 1 and increasing the total number of dottari seems to be the right way to make this challenging and exciting for starting DF delvers.

While they technically ran from this fight, that was the goal, so I can consider this a victory. I give them 1 point for it.

This scene was definitely chaotic and though the characters acquitted themselves well, the Chaos Factor rises to 6.