We've come a long way and this is now my longest running game as well as my first proper OSR game save for Tower of the Stargazer and Death Frost Doom that I've ran for people, but those have been pre-written and rather contained modules, whereas the current game here I'm trying to do in as sandboxy way as I can.
Last session, first session.
Now, our current party line-up looks something like this as everyone was able to make it to the session:
Angelo, an amnesiac magic-user who last time stood witness to a trial of two of his companions.
Blue, a magic-user who was caught translating forbidden texts and has now six months left to procure a miracle or be executed.
Claude, a fighter who initially had joined the crew to investigate the disappearance of a hunter and their daughter from Talen but seems to now be growing curious about the forest itself.
Thrallmar, a dwarven cleric with a strict belief that the forest the group is currently exploring is cursed and with a wish to destroy it.
Camp by the swamp
We began the session with a small retelling of the last session by the players as I like to do with my games, partially to see what they've payed the most attention to but also to ease them back into the headspace of the fiction, at the end of which I asked for the decisions that had lead to the decision of camping next to the swamp for a second time after how well the first time went for them and we did clarify that the party likely did make some way away from the swamp before actually setting up their camp.
Having setlled down to camp the watches were divided out, but the dreams of just about everyone except for Blue were occupied my images and feelings of burning, of heat and of their skins boiling off. Thrallmar was further tormented by nightmares of his sides being hacked away with something sharp and cold and his skin being slowly peeled off from his legs.
During the second watch where Claude was the designated watchman, a rustling could be heard from within the tents of the sleeping party members as well as the little tent occupied by Thackerey as soon after their occupants started to slowly tumble out into the wilderness with most of them still in their smallclothes and all of them seemingly in a daze as they slowly and unsteadily headed towards the swamp in the distance.
Claude, being quick to realize that this was what had been happening last time as well, ran up to Thrallmar to wake up the sleepwalking dwarf and the two further spread out to start waking up the rest of the sleepwalkers.
Having evaded any possible harm from this situation, the party decided to try and get what little restless sleep they might be able to get before the morning rather than wander into the woods at night.
Throughout all this Blue slept like a baby, completely oblivious to anything that the others experienced during the night.
Hike to the witch's house
The following day after an early wake up, the party decided to continue heading deeper into the forest in their search of possible treasures in the deepest parts where even the children living here said that they don't go to.
The swamp they decided to walk around even though it might throw them slightly off course for a bit. Skirting around the edge of it for few hours they passed through the same area where a bunch of bones were hung in the air suspended from a mass of vines and with the threes having even grown around some of them to keep them suspended almost like someone had buried a bunch of animal bodies only for trees to have sprouted from beneath them and raising the entire animal graveyard several metres up in the air.
Other than being a peculiar sight and being able to observe the dimensions of this weird patch of land now that they were going through in in sunlight, nothing noteworthy happened as the group pushed forwards through the area.
Going further along the campsite the group had found atop a cliffside on their first outing into the forest had been cleaned up and put back together from it's absolutely trashed state, as well as deciding to check the dried out hollow tree they had picked up on last time to see if there are supplies stashed away in it again. And sure enough, there in the hollow of the tree under a deer pelt, a handful of arrows as well as dried vegetables was found.
Claude decided to look around a bit for any possible tracks that might give hints as to who had left them here as the party had at first thought the earlier stash of supplies to have been prepared by the now-dead hunter. Nothing immediately obvious was found, but a bit more throrough search revealed some child-sized footprints in the bushes.
After this, the party spent a good while by the tree to discuss how they would handle going back to the witch's house where the children in the woods live or if they should just completely go past and around it since they now had Thackerey tagging along with them. Talking this kind of stuff out lout would of course have had them simply overheard by Thackerey himself, so Blue and Thrallmar took turns distracting the inquisitor as they were the two he had been specifically ordered to follow and watch over.
Eventually the choice they arrived at was to trust Thackerey to do nothing stupid and go meet the kids as Blue was interested in seeing what all trinkets and possible magic items the kids might still have at the house. There was also much interest in having another pair of eyes take a look at the red book that Angelo had not been able to read the last time they were there.
Back at the house and with the children
This caused bit of rustling from the tent set up in front of the house and a moment later the leather flap posing as the door of the tent was tossed aside and a kid clad in furs and wearing a deer skull with no antlers over their head poked their skull-mask out of the tent.
"You can't go deeper into the forest, things get weird there. Weird and dangerous, so you can't go."
Following this was a short exchange between the party and the kid about why it's dangerous out there that they didn't really learn much other than that Jaceb, the leader of the kids, had told them not to go deeper into the forest than where the house was situated and that when they had initially went there things started to get weird.
Trying to call for Jacob whom the group had surmised to be hiding in some nearby bushes away from the clearing where the house stood due to occasional rustling they had been hearing, Thrallmar tried to lure the kid out by offering him food as well as asking for a permission to go through the contents of the alledged witch's house that the kids were occupying. This offer was met with bear growls from somewhere beyond the treeline and were interpreted as being a "no".
Seeing as it was a bit past 3pm, a conversation about where to set up the camp was had as that choice would have to be made when the sun would start to slowly set within the next three or so hours.
On one hand, camping here with the children the group might stay safe from whatever's out there in the deeper parts of the forest, but ot the other hand the current running theory is that the kids turn into animals at night and thus the possibility of getting attacked and how should they deal with that was also weighing on the decision making.
Eventually it was decided (with the new hex crawl map in front of them) that they would push deeper into the forest some ways away from the camp the children had made.
Into the forest crawl
After deciding to head deeper into the forest came the question of "okay, we've got a whole hexmap to explore. Where we going?"
Pondering a moment about the possible ways to approach this, it was decided that they now want to push deeper into the forest, heading north west from their current position.
Roughly three hours of a hike later as the mixed forest slowly shifted to consist mostly of just pines and spruces and with a faint fog starting to cover the ground the party arrived at a clearing where a ton of trees had fallen down and were laying there haphazardly leaning over each other and slowly rotting away. From somewhere underneath the trees a small squeaking sound could be heard.
Being wary of just about everything since the kids had warned them about the deeper part of the woods, a decision was made that rather than personally investigate the sound they threw a rope with grappling hook onto the pile of trees in order to reel some of the off from where they lay and hopefully reveal what was making the noise.
The grappling hook landed among the rotting wood with a *thud* and practically fell the rotten wood apart under it's impact and as it got dragged across them and revealed a squirming pile of what appeared to be squirrels. The poor animals were covered in filth and bird droppings and were missing spots of their fur almost as if they'd been coverred in tar that had been then attmpted to be plucked off of them. Their tails were mixed together in a tangled mess, and as each squirrel tried to go their separate way they couldn't really get anywhere from where they were.
Some discussion was had as to what to do with the squirrels. Suggestions ranged from letting them out of their misery to doing just that and making further rations out of them.
Further investigation of the surroundings for any tracks revealed a bunch of criss-crossing prints likely belonging to some sort of rodents or small birds hopping around the place. A Detect Magic spell from Angelo however revealed something else entirely. While his original intent was to see if there's anything magical about or a spell on the squirrels, what he ended up discovering was that while the squirrels didn't detect magical in any way the entirety of the forest floor was teeming with thin inter-crossing lines almost like a haphazardly laid out spider's web shooting absolutely everywhere he looked.
Altar by the hill
Choosing to continue further in the light of the slowly setting sun the party pushed onwards through the forest for roughly three more hours before happening by another clearing in the woods. This one was a small hill with no trees growing on it save for one fat and lone birch growing at the very top of the hill, sheltering a stone slab by it's roots.
There very understandably was a lot of distrust among the group for finding random altars in the woods which is why it was approached with healthy doze of caution. Thrallmar prayed for Detect Evil, and as he opened his eyes from prayer what he saw was not anything evil looming by the altar site, but rather a delicate web of miniscule traces running all across the landscape much in the same manner that Angelo had seen at the previous location. The worrying part was that they seemed to make sense in some bizarre way, there was a pattern to be seen here! A method the the madness accroding to which the lines were intercrossing and zigzagging across the entirety of the hill and extending into the forest as far as Thrallmar's eyes could see.
While the dwarf decided to walk around the hill, mayhaps muttering to himself as he tried to make sense of these lines, Blue, Claude and Dylan walked up the hill to get a better look at the stone slab laying at the feet of the lone birch. Judging by the size of it the slab was very obviously some form of an altar, and further cementing this assumption was the handiwork that had been put into it. Running along and around the edge of the altar was a stone relief.
Inspecting the relief, it depicted a human standing upright, followed by successive depictions of a human slowly hunching over before turning into a wolf that then in turn would start to lay down and- and then it disappeared behind a corner as it looped around the entire altar.
Thinking that reading the whole relief might have some ill effects, Blue instructed Dylan to stay there at the front of it while he and Claude followed the rest of the relief around the altar. A wolf slowly laying down against the ground and turning into a snake with the snake then slowly leaning backwards and standing up, growing limbs and turning into the human depicted at the start(?) of the relief and the artwork looping in on itself.
As the others were finishing inspecting the altar, Thrallmar had wracked his brain and finally managed to make larger sense of the shapes these lines were making. They were symbols, runes, pictures and words, and what this particular word said was "Bury".
Deciding to make camp some way into the treeline so that if the group gets attacked they can flee into the open hill instead of getting lost in the woods, a camp is set up and watches are assigned as pairs rather than single person at a time in favor of being more prepared for whatever the night might bring but much to everyone's relief the night passes without an incident and as the sun starts to lazily creep up in the horizon everyone is likewise getting up and ready to be on the move yet again.
Deep forest - Day two
Deciding to keep to the same course that they had already been following, the party chose to keep heading north west and deeper into the woods.
After a few hours hike the terrain started to lead downwards into a small valley within the forest, but as they went down they also started to hear a buzzing sound from somewhere in front of them. Bees.
Looking for flammables that would not burn on a pure flame and thus produce a lot of smoke was not at all difficult in what was mainly a spruce forest, and Blue also had packed some lard with him which when combined with a bundle of spruce branches burned a foul flame that dispersed thick smoke as it burned. Several bundles of this kind were procured and the party kept on moving forwards with the people holding the smoking bundles surrounding the rest of the group to form a small wall of thick black smoke that would hopefully keep any bees away.
Continuing their descent down to the bottom of the valley they started to see the bees themselves zigzagging between a small patch of birch trees that were practically sweating out honey, the golden liquid pouring out of cracks in the trees suggesting that the beehives had been built inside their trunks.
While most of the party harvested any honey they could gather up withoutdisturbing the hives too badly, Angelo decided to try to see if he could make sense of the lines he had seen when he used Detect Magic in the forest much like how Thrallmar had by the hillside.
Sure enough, after casting his spell Angelo could again see these delicate strands of blue shimmers dancing across the landscape and now armed with the knowledge that these lines have made sense before in the form of a word he set out to find out what they contained.
Some fifteen minutes of walking all over the valley to get better looks and not have his view obstructed by trees from whatever angle he happened to be approaching his deciphering process from he too managed to get the lines to click in his head. The word he found was "Anoint".
Having now gathered four containers worth of honey and a new word from whatever this web covering the forest floor was, they decided to keep heading the way they had been going for the past day already, further north east.
Climbing back up from the small valley, the sound of bees slowly vanishing behind them and again going through the somewhat thick forest of spruces and occasional pine, maybe rarely coming across a birch or two huddled together, it took another three hours untill anything remarkable happened or was sighted.
What stopped tha party on their tracks for a moment however was the discovery of a corpse hung several metres up a nearby pines, impaled through it's chest and suspended by the very same tree branch that had pierced through it. The branch was nearly two metres in length and nearly four metres up in the air. The corpse itself seemed to be starting to decompose, it's gear it tatters, but hang haphazardly from one of it's shoulders was a backpack that seemed to have gone through a lot.
Grabbing a bow and arrow and fastening a rope onto the arrow, it took the group a few tries to get the backpack down. What they found inside was a glass jar of lamp oil, a ceramic jar containing pickled onions and carrots, as well as a tiny thumb-sized clay vial with no corck or end-cap. The tiny vial seemingly had nothing inside it but still somehow kept slowly dripping out a blackened red substance smelling of rot and salt.
Thrallmar had an idea of first wrapping the vial in some leaves and whatnot but the liquid quickly started to seep through, and thus he decided to put the vial within one of his empty lantern oil jars.
The forest crawl hexmap with the current progress on it, the brown mark is the witch's house
And that is where we left off for the night after dishing out some xp for things like hexes explored, uses found for the hexes, peculiar sights found, things learned about the world, spells cast and various other bonuses.
