Basements and Braunsteins

Session 118: The Great Mandingostein

The Purpose

The “Mandingostein” can be conceptualized as a mixture of gladiatorial battle-braunstein. It was my answer to a few lingering details I wanted to tie up and game mechanics I wanted to more incorporate into our game.

This “stein” was to resolve a game-state where the players were running into a situation of having an abundance of player characters, and from this arose some other things, like: character sheets going missing, player upkeep not being paid, and characters not being played routinely while also not taking any downtime measures.

The Mandingostein was the natural progression of events caused by the players in our previous sessions. That is, the players introduced “mandingos” to the goblins and it quickly (within the course of a few weeks) became their national pastime. Another thing that fueled the creation of the Mandingostein was a few characters getting enslaved by goblins in a previous session. Lastly, I requested all players to send me all their character names, with their attributes and if they’ve paid their downtime. The characters that didn’t have any info sent to me were also considered enslaved. Note, when requesting player upkeep, if the character can’t make the payment he is allowed (and this will happen automatically if there is no response) to take out a loan. If the loan isn’t paid then the assassins guild, or some other bounty hunting faction, will hunt down that character and enslave them.

All-in-all, there were more than two dozen characters enslaved for the Mandingostein.

Now that the contestants were enslaved and ready for combat, I needed to get a Goblin King to host the event. One of my prime candidates was the player of Jolly Green (our main character). Unfortunately for him, Jolly was enslaved but if he accepted the Goblin King role he could have an inside into keeping his legendary character alive. Probably what the Goblin King looks like

He liked the idea, and took up the gig. He was fairly unfamiliar with the idea of a braunstein et large, and had less than a dozen sessions of 1e under his belt but we were all confident in his goblin abilities. I sent him some minor instruction, about a couple paragraphs of info on the Goblin King’s forces, domain, etc. I gave him some ideas on what rounds for a tournament could be but ultimately I told him the king does what the king wants. The Setup & Draft Night

The Mandingostein was set to be five teams of five fighters. Each player participating got to pick one of their characters to be their team’s leader and shot caller. From there we used a snake draft team members from the remaining character pool. Players were allowed to select any character, even ones they didn’t create. Any character that didn’t have a character sheet was attributed to the lowest stats possible for their class.

Another point of the setup was having two playing spaces with the ‘arena” as one main area, and the “cells” as another. The goal was to create environments where different combinations would be present in the cells and see if they could come up with, and execute a plan to jail-break or assassinate the Goblin King. When a match started the players that were involved in that match would stay at the table while the other players would go into another room, outside, etc. just separate themselves from the table in some way. In between rounds all the players would be reassembled in the dungeon to recover. During this time period they could politic with others in the cells. Meanwhile the Goblin King could pull individuals away and interrogate them, give them in-ring goals, etc. Modeled off of this phase from Diplomacy

The Teams

Team 1: Dirty Rob & the Heel’s team

Team 2: Nate Dogg & the Warren G’s

Team 3: The Fighting Cocks

Team 4: Breezy & the Platinum Dragons

Team 5: Team Babyface

The First Mandingostein

Before the games began the Goblin King gave a speech and promised that which ever team won the Mandingostein would be granted their freedom and a small group of goblins to command.

He then called all non-humans to the center of the arena.

Round 0: Non-humans to the arena

In this round two of the non-human contestants belonged to the same character. One of the characters, Gonad, was actually human but he identified as a Mandingo, which aren’t considered human. There was one dagger placed in the center of the arena, the three of them would have to fight over it and only one would be allowed to survive.

Myself, and the characters that were not participating in the fight left the room. I don’t fully know what happened, but you will need to check Gonad’s player log to find out the specifics. All I now is Arctus won, and both Gonad and Gorlock were slain.

Outside, but in the dungeon, we began to plot different ways of escape. A lot of them were far-fetched and not plausible but one would likely work. Jolly Green was the player of the Goblin King’s character. We planned to emotionally extort him by taking Jolly Green “hostage” and threatening to kill him if our demands weren’t met.

Unfortunately, this was the only time the players separated into smaller pods to negotiate and scheme. After this point, players just wrote on note-cards and passed them around the table. This led to less intrigue overall, but did stream line some processes for better or worse. One instance is when the Goblin King asked each prisoner what they could promise him if he decided to let them go. Players were just writing anything to the Goblin King to earn their freedom (which is to be expected) and he seemingly accepted them all on face value — no further demands (for whatever reason). But this would have taken a while if everyone had to get interviewed one on one.

Promises such as:

Another thing that led to the players not being able to separate into private negotiation was the Goblin King sending the miscreants (the characters that didn’t get added to anyone’s team) into the tournament. Instead of complete PvP, the Goblin King added one PvE round and one round that didn’t involve any of the Mandingo teams at all, only miscreants and monsters. This is how the Goblin King wanted it so it is what it is. I am not sure if this was related to some of the lore the Goblin King gave me, or if he was feeling tame and didn’t want the players to all kill each other (this is what I wanted – the players ALWAYS deserve less, but it was still very fun.)

Before the next round, the Goblin King separates Lexus King, Napoleon, and Badman into a cell together. (All characters that made a some kind of deal to live, with the Goblin King). The he puts Jolly Green in solitary confinement.

Additionally, the Goblin King provides some provisions for magic users to be able to use their spells.

Round 1: Miscreants vs Joe Hendry

Miscreant Team:

Joe Hendry’s team had to fight against a group of miscreants, but the combat was not to end until only 3 contestants remained. The Goblin King decreed that the remainder of the players take up miscreant characters to play for this round. We still tried to plot though, we began passing around note cards of different information we had gathered from the dungeons, possible methods of escape, etc.

Two members of Joe’s team were clerics and wouldn’t fight. This would put him at a huge disadvantage to say the least. As the we (the miscreants) advanced toward Joe Hendry and his team, they pleaded with us to take favor on their humanity and work together against the Goblin King. We didn’t listen.

All of Joe Hendry’s team was quickly slain as they stood defenseless. Except for one man: Domonik Mysterio.

While the others were engaged in mortal combat he made his move. He noticed that the Goblin King was not paying attention and his own guards were not in position (probably because this was a bathroom break fight — half the contestants were not even fighting!) and darted for the arena wall. He pass his climbing check and made it into the stands.

The king, slow to react, had his goblin archers shoot a few volleys of arrows at Domonik. All of the arrows missed him, but met their unfortunate targets somewhere in the crowd.

The remainder of the crowd thought this was an amazing spectacle, some may have even thought of it was part of the the ‘stein. Without saying much more, Domonik was able to evade the guards in the crowds of people. (Not everyone in the crowd was a goblin, this was a very diverse crowd as the Goblin King figured he could make more money with more rake and inviting humans, as well as “civilized” goblins.

As the fight was near its close, and the miscreants were going to execute the the other fallen mandingos, David Blaine, a miscreant that was allowed to use magic scrolls, unleashed “Color Spray” onto the remaining miscreants and slayed them, his own “team” until there were only 3 contestants remaining.

Round 2: Tigers vs Top Miscreants

Top Miscreants:

It was now nearing sunset. This round was set to be between four tigers, and the top three miscreants.

Luckily for the miscreants, one of the tigers rolled nearly the lowest possible HP they could have.

As the round starts, a scroll is used to talk to the tigers, and convince them to climb the arena walls. They do so, but the Goblin King is ready with archers this time and they shoot a volley at the tigers. Tigers that were hit by arrows return to the fight immediately, but this still caught them a few moments of time.

Next, David Blaine uses some illusions to throw an Acme hole onto the arena floor — the tigers fall for the illusion and believe they are perpetually falling to a hole. All but one tiger is slain. The ease of which the miscreants defeated the tigers enraged the Goblin King. Even more-so because they were doing it with spell scrolls he gave them.

The Goblin King sent in two of his prized possessions: saber-tooth tigers.

As a side note, this is another point where the Goblin King deviated from some basic ideas I sent to him. My suggestion for the Monster fight was to have each team select one member to fight alongside members from other teams, to defeat the monsters. I thought this would have played into the negotiations that players were making (they weren’t making any, but I had hoped the Goblin King would have ordered them to betray each other to prove their loyalty to him, or something.) And again, instead of getting selected members of a team to fight the monsters, the miscreants were used. These were already the neglected characters so there wasn’t really any “drama” (aside from Arctus).

The saber-tooth tigers, the fight was very close but Arctus is able to hold off the saber-toothed tigers long enough for the Goblin King to call the fight off. (I am not totally sure we did the unarmed combat vs a monster like a tiger properly but maybe they were famished or something. Not too sure how a half-elf would wrassle them down but Arctus did it!)

Also during this round it was noted that the prisoners in the dungeon underneath the arena were starting to hear ghastly voices, screams without a point of origin, and other “demonic shit”. They are still uncertain as to why? Maybe the arena was built on an ancient, tribal, burial grounds.

Round 3: Miscreant Hide and Seek

This final round I thought was pretty innovative — all from the mind of the Goblin King.

It was now completely night and the remaining living characters we instructed to hide some where in the arena. The Goblin King had set various furnishings in the arena to hide in: barrels, carts, crates, etc. The characters had a turn to hide, and then miscreants were released. There were 10 miscreants in total. They were grouped in groups of two. One equipped with a torch and one with daggers.

While this was a cool idea, as soon as the players discovered they had the upper hand on the miscreants they just charged at them, overpowered them, and won the round fairly easily. Maybe only one character died at this portion.

While cool, it didn’t provide the bite that I was hoping for.

Retrospective

Overall I think the Mandingostein went great, but as you have read, some of my issues came from Goblin King making some changes that I believe caused the whole event to be less deadly. I am not sure if this was a conscious decision by him, or not.

One thing that may have caused the Goblin King to act a certain way was written down on a page or two of lore he gave me (something I did not intend to happen, or ask for but will come in handy for a future adventure).

I also would have liked for more negotiations to happen, backstabbing, demands by the Goblin King, etc.

I can’t complain though, I told to Goblin King to do whatever he wanted to do, and I don’t think anyone else at my table has played a game of Diplomacy proper, which is were the idea to break off into small groups to make secret plans came from.

Winners

Leave a comment below.

#1e #braunsteins #brosr #broxt #goblins #mandingo #pvp #session report