Actual Play - Social Depth Crawl

Actual play of how the 'party depth crawl' worked. Each paragraph after the second reflects a new roll on the table.

The players arrive in a swirl through the snow in the third best carriage; turning in front of the hosts manor - a set of houses that have been knocked together. Fire pans flare before the doors of the centre house and a canopy to keep the snow off welcomes the cousins. Other fine carriages are lined up ahead and behind them and bundled up servants scuttle out into the snows to welcome them.

Within the entry hall the servants take their cloaks, inform them that tonights revel will be a masquerade and direct them to one of a series of partitions made across the hall. Arrays of masks are available for the choosing and our party picks a half-moon, a domino and a tragedy mask. On the far side of the partitions they look around the great house. Here they see the clan has expanded by acquiring and knocking through the row of houses into one large dwelling that takes up the street. The wall in front of them bears wide paintings of boats on raging seas.

A priest of Gregorio, the god of revels, nudges them to move on out of the way, tells them that he is looking forward to the gourmet delights of this feast. Beyond that he does not know where anyone they seek could be.

The party makes their way to the library, passing through a curtain of steam in the passageway between two buildings and finding a great orrery in the middle of a room with many shelves. Crowded with guests and hot from the blazing fires on one side of the room, they notice the time-faded portraits of the hosts ancestors on the walls. Crossing the room they meet minor dragonblooded siblings they had met once before - at the thank-you celebration thrown by the nobles they rescued from a carriage ambush. These impart city gossip of the day and the social view of the hosts. The party moves on.

Remaining in the same location first they find their cousin and his wife, an elf mage, and one of the host family. Here they get background on the event from their host - that this is an annual gathering of the hosts hunters and associates. The family business is the procurement of magical animals and this feast is to bring together everyone usually scattered on expeditions. They also learn that their cousin-in-law has been visiting often seeking to learn from this family to improve her magical prowess.

Next they encounter a trio of Iounian acolytes - these are abuzz with the rumour that the party is hosting an extra-planar art exhibit and they want invites. There is some to-and-fro before the party agrees to get them invitations in light of the services the Temple of Ioun has stood them over the winter.

The players move on to the next room, a cooler ballroom with great windows facing out to the inner yards. Here they find lots of guildsmen from the alchemist and smiths guilds discussing the fine year they have been having supplying equipment and war-forged for the conflict in the North. They pump the players for information on the conflict and are pleased to hear that it looks like it will not calm any time soon.

The great gong sounds and everyone makes their way to the great hall for dining. Here they find blazing fires on one side and cool windows on the other, the crowd filling the tables according to their comfort. Another member of the host family, one they had encountered guarding the royal ambassador, appears and guides them to a seat beside the royal ambassador themselves. The players have been connecting the ambassador to the local social scene. Already cheerfully in his cups he asks after his distant cousin (who recently turned up on the arm of one of the players brothers and was at that time missing) - the players dodge the question until the food arrives.

Great platters are brought in by the liveried horde of weaselfolk servants. The head of the house gives a benediction welcoming their guests and thanking the staff. Cheers ring out among the house associates - noble folk and odd-aspected hunters and adventurers. Platters of whale crackling, crocodile-in-rice and manta-ray are served along the table, delicacies for this inland realm. These starters are sampled and appreciated while also questioning their table neighbours - their host and one of the house servants - an elf introduced as their 'navigator' - who figures out where to send their hunting parties.

The next course comes, a dark meat brisket, a platter of cracked giant scorpion and a third dish served as slivers of meat on long skewers. These exotic meats turn out to be giant scorpion, the extremely spicy flesh of a bulette and slivers of the heart of a chimera. The scorpion and bulette taste exotic but the chimera flesh imbues magical effects - each of the party discovering a different one. The sorceror gains hyper-awareness as of the goats-head. The bard gains the drive and energy of the lions-head. The cleric gains the fiery breath of the dragons-head - quick thinking after a failed con save managed to avoid incinerating the table.

While they juggle these strange effects, the meal passes and the bard nearly misses their chance to eat bulette - asking the weaselfolk to bring her back some she finds a new platter brought to her along with sauces by a thrilled group of weaselfolk who have been among her biggest fans since a striking opening performance in front of them when the party first gathered. They demand to know when her next performance will be and are pleased to hear promises of 'soon'.

Once all dishes were cleared away the party returned to the library with the ambassador in tow. They encountered some students of the magical university who informed them of the new fashion for having pet imps that they had heard about. The party realised this probably sprang from the day before when the players needed to stash an imp they had somewhere warm while they went into a cathedral of Bahamut and left it in the brazier of a helpful tiefling nut-seller*.

The bard, fired up on her slice of chimera heart, decided to grace the room with a poem for the evening, aided in flashy effects by her sorceror cousin. Building off the seeds they had planted at the previous grand tourney, they spun a tale about the Lady Ironwill, a greatly exaggerated version of their cousin the cleric gaining fire breath from the chimeras heart.

While this performance holds the audience rapt, the cleric fades back to the wall and begins to look around for the head of the house to conduct their mission for the evening - to request support in watching for an enemy spy network. The players had received a note from the hosts in the past week stating that this network had approached the hosts and been cold shouldered. As the cleric lurks, they find the head of the house at their elbow. They confirm that they had spurned the spy network after recognising its seals and sigils as the marks of an archmage they disliked. The head of house condemned this archmage so venomously the cleric decided to ask directly for support at the wedding of their eldest cousin the next day. The head of house agreed cheerfully, bids them goodnight and steps back into the shadows on the wall.

Mission for the night accomplished, the players regroup. The bard and sorceror ask for the chance to go dance, saying just two songs, and hare off. The cleric tracks down the royal ambassador to a group by the fire. Approaching they find a motley collection of grim looking folk; a great blue-skinned goblinoid with a giant wolf, a pair in hell-trooper uniforms and a handful of officers from the Marchlords, the Duchys mountain penal legions. A few cautious introductions established that these all play host to the families hunting parties when they venture far afield. The party had collected a handful of clues by this point that pointed to the hosts ranging very far in their hunting expeditions, 'fishers of the styx' being one phrase they had heard used.

Conversation continues to be stilted until the Marchlords pass over a tray of the hot sauce dips they had been testing one another with before the cleric arrived. The ambassador tries some and begins to suffer immediately. The cleric makes their con check for this and another special sauce the barghest pulls from their cloak. Keeping their cool and using their chimeric dragon-breath to crack a joke wins the cleric grudging respect from the assembled hard cases and a round of tall tales of hunts across the lower planes. Eventually, noting that they have to help the ambassador home the cleric starts to excuse them. The guests note that 'royal blood' fetches good prices in the right markets but the cleric fends off the suggestions and makes their excuses.

Meanwhile the bard and sorceror found their way back to the ball room where a folk dance is underway. They spot and exchange pleasantries with a foreign mage they had encountered during another adventure where they rescued his daughters guardian from a well then join the dances.

After dancing for a very broad interpretation of 'two' songs the bard and sorceror decide to duck outside into the outer yard. They see a warm pool with piers and boats and some of the younger house members and servants splashing about as the snow falls overhead. Figuring that some sort of mechanism connects this pool to waters elsewhere by magical means they take a look around. A lucky glance from the bard spots a shape across the yards - a pair of servants being pushed back out of the carriage-house-style buildings on the other side of the pool. The figure pushing them is larger than what they expected; apparently one of the 'wrong kind' of dragon-born that all the dragonblooded noble houses shun. Puzzling over this they question the servants who had been ejected, intercepting them as they made their way towards the garden labyrinth on the other side of the pool. The servants evade their questions, becoming suspicious at the prying before the cousins decide to set it aside for now.

Returning towards the library they encounter the cleric with the royal ambassador in tow, find a senior member of the house and make their excuses and leave.

/ End Crawl

Mechanically it worked like I hoped it would; not everything was used, not every part of every seed came to light, others were run much deeper than I might have thought. It was great to give a 'guided improv' set up. I would particularly recommend this as allowing a lot to happen in just a few venues (entry hall, library, dining hall, yards).

* The dice gods smiled and out of 72 possibilities that the nut-seller could have been, he turned out to be one of the few that could speak infernal to the imp they were lugging around.