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| The Cauldron Crew |
It was already 19:30, a mere thirty
minutes before I was supposed to GM my first session, and we were not yet in Hohenroda.
We had come far and we had come fast on Hungarian State Railways, the Austrian
Federal Railways, and finally Germany’s Autobahns, racking up a speeding ticket
in the process while rain was beginning to fall in earnest, but we were just
not there yet. The staff at the car rental agency were out for lunch at the
checkout time, and would not show up for a nerve-wracking forty minutes, nor be
accessible by phone. On our way North, we were caught in the congested traffic
of München’s ring roads, and later rural Bavaria’s labyrinth of third-class
roads. Stuck among barns and church steeples, we pressed on to the great
Autobahns, heavy with traffic, and mired in cars due to a massive automobile
accident. From a rest stop, we proceeded along an agricultural road, hoping the
BMW’s state-of-the-art nav software would not lead us into an ambush by
Bavaria’s backwoods cannibals (these, we would later learn, are organised and
numerous beyond the Autobahn system). In the end, though, in Stygian darkness
and incessant rain, the timber-framed houses of Hohenroda appeared in view,
and, on a side-road, the central bulk and side-wings of an ominous structure: Schloß
Hohenroda.
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| World's Least Surly Hungarians |
We travelled to the uttermost fringes of
civilisation to participate in the events of Cauldron
Con 2023,
organised by the secretive German game club only referred to as “the Nexus”.
Indeed, many brethren had gathered at the venue from the far-flung corners of
Germany, the mercantile lands of the Dutch, the sinking island of Hibernia (at
the time of the convention, just barely above the waterline), the icy wastes of
Finland, and the barbarous wilderness of Skåne. From across the sea came
Jonathan Becker, a slayer of men. All these, and the Hungarian delegation of
five, would spend the next two days gaming, drinking excellent beers, feasting
on suckling pig roast and the Settembrini clan’s bio-apples, and meeting people
we had mostly only interacted with virtually.
It is often easy to overlook the work
behind good organisation when everything goes smoothly. But things were so
tight that it became noticeable: all the background effort translated into an
experience where everything went without a hitch, and we could focus on the
actual gaming. For being a first-time event, people organising mini-conventions
could do well to learn from Cauldron. A lot of the larger gaming events are
flabby affairs with plenty of idling, questionable seminars, and filler content.
This con was all killer, no filler, with sitting down and playing at its
forefront. A concentrated dose of dice-rolling over two days with local signup
and a focus on the action. In the end, not only was the time spent well, there
was still enough slack in the system to sit down for discussion by dinner, a
bottle beer, or the miniatures table.
I ended up running three sessions and
playing in two more with old friends and recent acquaintances. Only brief
descriptions are provided here:
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| The Mysterious Estate |
I GMed Urmalk the
Boundless, an expedition to the Pentastadion Necropolis to recover the
abundant treasures of a decadent magnate. A series of surface mausoleums were
plundered, including one of the most dangerous ones (another was wisely avoided
once the risks were calculated). While the adventurers did not make it down
into the underground catacombs, nor find a way into Urmalk’s tomb, they made
off with decent treasure, and avoided a costly confrontation with a bandit gang
by bribing them with a valuable piece of loot coated with contact poison. Devin,
4th-level Cleric (Caelin), died in an assassination
attempt after the session, failing to secure a valuable shield he was tasked to
recover from one of the tombs to settle a debt. (I mix things up a little by
letting players draw from a deck of random items, missions and curses before
session if they so please.)
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The Convention's Winner Claims
the Cup of Demise Best Player Award |
I also GMed Catacombs of
the Pariahs, one of the dungeon complexes from the City of Vultures.
Transported to the depth of the catacombs by the sorcerer Padog Miir, the
adventurers had four hours to emerge alive from the labyrinth. An undead lord
and his entourage of concubines were defeated, the tomb of a powerful
magic-user looted, cultists fought, an enigmatic device of the ancients messed
with (successful saving throws helped out here), and a band of pariahs press-ganged
into the party’s service. The players made it back up to the upper level
reasonably quickly, avoiding the dangerous depths visited in a much earlier playtest.
Morrill, 4th-level Magic-User (Patrick) was strangled by an
invisible apparition who snuck up on the party. The company emerged from the
depths with moderate but adequate treasure, and a magic sword. |
| Dr. Becker Racks Up the Kills |
I played in Storming the
Forbidden City III, run by Jonathan Becker. This was a series of three
self-contained adventures developing sites in the classic TSR module. Having
suffered heavy casualties in the previous round in a humanoid lair assault, the
Hungarian team was augmented with new reinforcements to seek the treasures of
the yuan-ti in their most ancient pyramid-temple. The adventure started with
careful reconnaissance (probably overly cautious for truly effective play, but the
second round made the veterans cautious), and followed with dungeon-crawling
beneath the pyramid. We saw one of the adventure’s three levels, and found one
of the major treasure-caches, where got embroiled in a fight against a well of
water weirds. The half-orc Cleric who could immediately dispatch them with purify
food and water was the first to be dragged under, and while he could
survive effectively with his helm of underwater action, this made the
battle into a much more perilous affair. The adventure thus produced Cauldron
Con’s signature casualty for Marcella, 7th-level Ranger
(Max), who was drowned, revived, and subsequently fireballed by Chomy’s
careless use of a wand of wonder. Another character, Thomas Peacock,
a Thief-Bard, drowned ingloriously. Grabbing the bounty of the chamber
and fending off the enormous giant spider that tagged along in the catacombs on
the way back to ambush us from the rear, we emerged rich and victorious. |
| The Slyth Never Saw It Coming |
I also played in Slyth
Hive II, a high-level deathfest of a module by Prince of Nothing (now available on DriveThruRPG). This is kind of a scenario
where you bring your best to fight the worst: the finest champions of multiple
dimensions were called to face a world-ending menace. When your convention pregen
is named Oberon, the Old Man of the Mountain, Jacques de Molay, Sir Giselher,
Solomon the Magician, Brandoch Daha, or The Master of Summer, you’d better
start paying attention (the most mighty of them all, the elusive “Kent”, was
too powerful to handle by our group). Since this was a night session, we
unfortunately had limited time to explore what is an enormous multi-level
module, but we tore through two high-end setpiece battles, one with a horde of
howling caveman in a cyclopean cavern passage, and a second with several
hundred insectile slyth and their psionic overseers in a cavern littered with
prehistoric bones. This is a tier of play where high and versatile player
capabilities can be used individually or in combination, giving rise to
unexpected hacks to regular AD&D procedures. We were somewhat constrained without
a steady supply of mass killing powers that’d turn these confrontations into
simple massacres, but ended up steamrolling the foe nevertheless with crowd
control and targeted action. The session also featured gaming history’s laziest
Djinn, whose expertise in avoiding having to do useful work impressed even this
team of hardened adventurers.  |
| An Expedition to Hohenwart |
Finally, I ran The Saint
in Hohenwart, a Helvéczia scenario, where the group was tasked with saving
their friend, the young mercenary captain Konrad Göttlinger, from the influence
of a strange and ominous saint in the high valley of Hohenwart. Travelling
through a mountain wilderness, a grotesque recluse engaging in deviltry was
captured, tried and lawfully executed by James Raggi; a duel was fought between
two Italian clerics who turned out to be life-long mortal enemies (the affair
was settled in a tense card game, eventually won with the devil’s assistance);
and Konrad rescued from his predicament. Willem, 2nd-level Dutch
Vagabond (David), an agent of the Dutch East Indies Company not at all
modelled on Prince of Nothing, was dashed on the rocks of a waterfall after
trying to climb a slippery rock surface with a rope, and assuring everyone he
had abundant practice in these matters on the high seas.
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| The Battle for Safeton Rages On |
It cannot be emphasised enough how well
things can go if players are focused on getting things done, and having a
common interest. There was a lot of creative play demonstrated over the
sessions, from clever spell use to bold and smart decision-making, and
sometimes just pure on-the-spot improvisation. It helped that Cauldron Con
was deliberately targeted at a specific kind of experience, and set up to
deliver on that promise. But there was also the energy brought by the players,
who all gave their best over two days. It was good to see that the con spoke
not only to the grognards among us, but also a younger cohort; some recently
acquainted with old-school gaming, and some entirely new to it, who came to Hohenroda
to check out what this all meant. It was all focused, with a good fighting
spirit and high cheer, and that’s the best thing.
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| The Revievers' Conclave Meets... Again! |
Beyond the games, the convention also
hosted a surprise star guest in the person of Mr. Bryce Lynch, reviewer
extraordinaire. It has been a long four years since our first meeting in Athens, Ohio, so when we
heard Bryce was in the general area, steps were taken to arrange what was,
truly, a random encounter. Unfortunately, Bryce was on a tight schedule – he
was travelling “to take care of family business”, and the way he stressed the phrase,
we decided not to probe further – so most people at the con missed him due to
ongoing sessions, but it was an excellent opportunity to catch up on things and
shoot the breeze for half an hour or so. It may be too early to reveal details
about Bryce’s new OSRIC module line, but we can all be sure it will be a “No
Regerts”. Tentative plans of a Crusade to get rid of the sub-par creators
littering the “OSR” with irrelevant junk were outlined, and we can promise with
some confidence that the response to this particular “problem” will be highly
effective, even if it has to rely on Mr. Lynch’s “business associates”.
Unfortunately, Bryce had to leave early in his black BMW, so the fine details
are still to be elaborated.
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| Extra-Fabulous Collectibles |
Finally, Cauldron Con featured an
auction of riches from the community: treasures from 1980s German comic books
to uncommon old-school publications went to lucky buyers, some after an
energetic bidding war. Settembrini proved a skilled auctioneer at introducing
the titles and their context, and generous lucre was gained by the sellers, as
well as various charity organisations. On the final day, an award ceremony was
also held: hand-engraved copper cauldrons went to the convention’s best player,
most effective looter, the player who died most (“the Cup of Demise”), and the
best GM – the mighty Jonathan Becker, who will no doubt fill it with the skulls
of his enemies back in the U.S. of A. And that was Cauldron Con 2023.
With the pace and energy, it felt a day short, although that may be asking for
too much from the hard-working hosts. There was just a lot crammed into it, and
there were things you’d inevitably miss – an ongoing multi-day Chainmail
battle to determine the fate of empires in the German old-school scene’s shared
Greyhawk campaign, an OD&D hex-crawl, the classily named Don’t Fuck the
Priest, The Smorgasbord of Adventure, and many more. As always, you
can’t come away with everything, but it felt like coming away with a lot. We
also saw a pizza vending machine, which proves, once and for all, that
greatness is still within mankind’s reach. 2024 sounds like a nice
number. Appetites were whetted. Spielen wir AD&D!
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| An Assortment of Excellence |
Until then, stay tuned for part II of
the convention report, where we will present the Handshake Firmness
Evaluation Chart. Strict records have been kept! |
Vorsprung Durch Technik:
The Pizza Vending Machine |
