Real life rpging by ME!

Its going to be all about sinister conspiracies and cults and insanity.
Harkovast is kind of high fantasy, where as this will be very much 'muddy-eval.'

Giving the ol' d12 some lovin' I see.

Here is a homemade d20 system that looks pretty simple.

5e is also pretty simple.

Awesome.

Heh, I remember that Renard tried something with a character in a plague doctor's mask. Creepy lot those people.

In the Grim Darkness of a "fuck you, Tolkien was too optimistic" fantasy world... only the noblewomen can afford to be nice!

Edit: And then they all declare her a witch and try to burn her alive.

So the group headed north, following the trail of the missing brother, the paths being the safest way to go through the dark forests...though still not very safe!
They passed a couple of villages, both of which had been utterly destroyed by ravening hordes of beastmen.
Beastmen hate civilisation and all its trappings and had torn, smashed, burn and shit on pretty much everything they could get at.
Scattered bits of mangled bodies, hacked apart and eaten to the point of being unrecognisable, were laid around.

On their travels, the group found notes left by the missing brother, discussing how people were not taking the beastman threat seriously.
They found he wrecked carriage that the brother had been travelling it, which had seemingly gone off the road and broken and axle.
In it they found more notes, suggesting the brother had found that the beastmen were dangerous because they were not just dumb animals, but a sophisticated, rival culture that was locked in a death struggle with the human race. The humans might not have been aware of this fact, but the beastmen clearly were!

Eventually the group reached a large town where the brother had intended to stop off.

This place was intact, and well protected with his stone walls and lots of guards.
The place was getting ready for a spring festival.
The heavily pregnant mayoress explained that they had not heard news of from the other towns, but people rarely travel much so it was unlikely they would hear about attacks nearby.

The leader of the town guards was a big gruff man whose title was Jagermeister (master hunter) who accompanied the Mayoress.

At the city hall, which was decorated with animal skins and heads and other hunt trophies, they met another visitor to the town- a fat obnoxious tax collector. He was stuffing his face and scoffed at the idea that beastmen were a big problem, saying it was probably towns people attacking each other and blaming made up monsters.

The group decided to rest in the town.
There were lots of merchants and new comers in town for the up coming festival. The sorceress took the opportunity to by some expensive wine from her home land...while the mercenary and deathseeker took the opportunity to nick a couple of bottles from the stall (much to the sorceresses irritation!)

They stayed at a quite nice tavern, where they saw a beautiful woman with a strange accent (she sounded like a southern belle) who was singing and entertaining the locals.
The woman came over to talk to them, but they became suspicious as she seemed to be asking a lot of questions about their mission and giving evasive answers back.
She seemed friendly, though she kept refering to the mercenary warrior as a troll or a creature.

After the woman left to return to singing, the plague doctor started examining some lipstick the woman had left on the edge of a wine cup.

Meanwhile , the mercenary and deathseeker headed up stairs to try to get into the woman's room to see if there were clues.
The roped the sorceress into helping, at first trying to BS that it was the death seekers room and they had got locked out, but eventually admitting that they wanted to investigate the strange singing woman.
The sorceress agreed and used her magic to open the lock.
Inside, after a bit of searching, they found strange armour, swords and a elaborate crossbow. The crossbow was made of an ivory like substance and had vials of a weird magical seeming poison with it.

Realising the woman was some kind of dangerous foreign assassin, they put the stuff back as best they could and took a small sample of poison for the plague doctor to look at.

That night, the death seeker stood guard in case the strange woman came after them....but an altogether different danger appeared....

They heard screams from in the street.
The Deathseeker looked down to see the tax collector being chased and attacked by horrifiying beasts.
These creatures were hideously deformed monsters, that looked rather like the goat headed beastmen, but seemed even more degenerate so they were moving on all fours. It was hard to tell if they were beastmen that had lost the ability to move upright or some kind of animal that was struggling to stand.

The deathseeker responded by laughing and going to get her mercenary friend, asking him if he wanted to see something funny.
After shouting mockingly at the tax collectors plight, they decided to get involved.
The Sorceress was woken by the sound of fighting and used her magic wand to fire bolts of force at the creatures, while the mercerary opened fire with one of his pistols.

The creatures left the injured tax collector and started climbing the side of the tavern to get at their new enemies.
The deathseeker responded with her trade mark subtly by leaping out of the window, striking a creature dead with her axe as she fell to street level.
A mountain person under the oath of death does not skip a chance to hurl themselves into battle against monsters!

The creatures lept to attacker her and she ended up dropping her axes to wrestle one of them.
The sorceress continued to splatter the beasts against the pavement with downward blasts of force, with the mercenary took careful aim and blew the brains out of the one wrestling the deathseeker, putting an end to the last of the creatures.

The town guards, led by the Jagermeister. The guards expressed shock that foul beastman creatures could have got into the town.
The plaguedoctor had stayed up a lot of the night doing experiments on the strange lipstick and poison they had taken from the singing woman. She had found that both were magical in nature.
She wanted to keep the beastman bodies to disect (she had a rather worrying fascination with dead things...she was carrying a dead squirrel up her sleeve for a lot of the adventure...)The towns people intended to burn the bodies but she managed to secure a head and leg from one of them to examine later.

The taxman was very badly injured but the plague doctor could keep him alive. There was a risk of infection from the creatures foul bite, especially a wound on his body. To treat this would require skull root, which the plague doctor had only a small supply of.
The mayoress arrived and said she knew a location nearby in the woods where the root grows.

The adventures found that the singing woman and her equipment appeared to have left in the night through her window.

The group became suspicious of the towns people.
How had the creatures managed to get into the town and why did they target the tax collector?
They decided to go look for the skull root so the tax collector could tell them what he knew.

Fearing they were being set up for an ambush, they decided to sneak up on the area, having the deathseeker use her field craft to try to spot any enemies.

Their fears proved right, as they saw inhuman figures ahead.
They decided to launch a surprise attack of their own, the plague doctor hurling a fire bomb that several of the creatures ablaze.
The beastmen were disgusting, warped creatures, with goat heads and hooves, covered in scars, feces, filth and blood.
They were ferocious, physically powerful and armed with an arrray of stolen or improvised weapons, crudely fashioned from what the beastmen could lay their hands on. This included crude spears, an axe made from kitchen knives fixed to a lump of wood, heavy clubs and various other nasty implements.

The first wave of them came under attack from throw axes, pistol fire and magic bolts that helped thin their ranks before they reached close combat.
The plague doctor drew a sword and dagger to fight and started cutting down enemies.
The mercenary grabbed the spear away from a smaller beastman and proceeded to brutally beat the creature to death with its own weapon.
The sorceress tried to climb up a tree to get a better vantage point, but a beastman grabbed her and pulled her back down. Fortunately she managed to slay the creature with her sword before it could finish her.
The deathseeker rushed right into the enemies swinging her axes furiously.
During the fighting, some of the beastmen started getting hit with arrows fired from above.
These darts caused the wounds to turn green and decaying almost immediately, with veins standing out in green as the venom spread. One beastman that was struck in the arm was so over come with the agony that it hacked off its own arm for relief.
The singing woman from the tavern leapt down into the mids of the beastmen, dressed in a black cloak and armour and wielding two swords. She had great agility, and she cutting down any beastmen that came near her with her superior speed and agility.

The beastmen realised they had bitten off more than they could chew, and began to flee.
The deathseeker was rather frustrated as she hurled an axe after one but missed and then lept to tackle another, that managed to evade her, leaving her picking herself up angrily from the undergrowth.

The cloaked woman was still evasive about her purpose, but stated that her job was to hunt beastmen, and so their goals over lapped.
The group wanted to keep looking for skull root, but the strange woman (who said her real name was Shadowsilk) advised they should chase the beastmen, as this was a chance to track them to their camp and deal them a heavier blow.
The group agreed and gave chase, finding a large beastman camp around a big bonfire.
Many beastmen seemed to be drunk and/or squabbling with each other.
The group prepared to launch a surprise attack...
And that's where the session ended.