Ashes Under the Feet of Titans

To Death, Frost, and Doom; A Retrospective on Hilt's Quest

Since January I have had the pleasure of playing in Sahh's campaign following the adventure of a woman named Hilt, and last month this campaign came to an end. This was a pretty incredible experience for me, representing the first long-form OSR campaign I've played in, and what a journey it was. Hilt, a Fighter cursed with an arm that tried to kill her and bound by a promise to Saint Gacis to seal an ancient evil within Pale Tooth Mountain, gathered our party together to aid her in this quest.

Before I go any further, here's a couple stats, for those interested in such things:

- Character Deaths: 6 during the sessions proper, increasing to 7 in the epilogue.

- Highest Level: 4

- Total Characters: 9

- Promises Made to Saints: 4 (I think)

Overview

The journey to the mountain was harrowing, hounded by undead and constantly fighting for survival against scarce food and bitter cold. Sahh did a great job of keeping that travel interesting and genuinely enjoyable despite the abject misery of the fiction. Part of this was the tarot card based encounters and scenes she employed, it gave us a degree of choice and control over the tone of the journey while still surprising us along the way. The major arcana represented significant encounters, while the minor arcana served as prompts for us to describe small vignettes or talk about how our characters are doing.

We ended up taking a couple of stabs at the dungeon on the mountain. The first time, Hilt almost died from growing millions upon millions of teeth, prompting a retreat to heal up and come back better prepared. We scoured the region for resources, saved some innocents from the clutches of the undead army we were trying to thwart, and eventually returned for our final, ill-fated foray into the mountain.

The dungeon had been delved once before by another party, who inadvertently unsealed the horde of undead who'd been laid to rest there, along with most of its leaders. Faced with one of the remaining leaders of the death cult, we overcame them at the cost of 2 more party members. At this point, defeat was admitted. There was no chance of us truly resealing what had been unleashed, we weren't nearly strong enough and it was clear that throwing more bodies at this damned thing wasn't going to help.

We retreated once more from the dungeon, gathered up what explosives we could with the treasure we had acquired, and sealed the mountain physically. If we couldn't return the horde to the mountain, then we could at least stop the last remaining leader from escaping into the world. Hilt spent the last of her days seeking out the Inquisitor who had hounded us along our journey and trying to bring him and his army down. The 2 of them tore each other to shreds, and so ended Hilt's Quest.

Thoughts

When Sahh presented us with the choice of accepting failure as the end of our adventure, I don't think any of us argued against it. It felt like such an appropriate end to the story that had unfolded at the table, and it didn't feel like it was needlessly nihilistic. In the face of numerous character deaths and seemingly insurmountable peril, it very much felt like the natural conclusion of the adventure.

If I had to choose a favourite element of the adventure, it was watching Hilt's descent over the course of the quest. When we began in Schwarzfus she was hardened, true, but relatively speaking she was in OK shape, if a little beaten up. By the end of the adventure she was a walking callous, more scar than skin. Her injuries were as follows:

On top of all this, she was cursed, made promises to many saints to try and prolong her life to see out this quest, and pledged to a mighty sky serpent, establishing a new pagan deity in the process. The sheer determination and singular force of will that was Hilt will forever be staggering to me. A truly incredible campaign, and one I'm so grateful to have played in.

May you at last find peace, Hilt. You've earned it.