The Foot of Blue Mountain

Decree Session Reports, 1-4

I've been playing in a Decree open table and writing session reports for the game. It's run by the author and has been a load of fun. Below you can find the first four session reports and at the very end my largely positive thoughts about Decree as a whole!

Players: Séamus, Katt, spookyrusty Date of Game: 4-10-2025 Session: 1st, Mostly just Shooting the Shit

Dramatis Personae

The Story

We start in the Boathole, a legendary alehouse in the city of Rayma. Our fixer, Meryn, offers us a job for 6,000cr for a job a couple of days walk south. Gwynyvar, unhappy with that sum for such a vague job, bargains her way up to 8,000cr. Meryn's a bit tight-lipped about the whole affair; Apparently, there's an Artifact in some ruins the forests to the south that some rich folk want us to grab.

After a quick shopping spree, we set out to the forests in the south to track down these ruins!

Sometime late afternoon we hit the treeline and start to do a more thorough search of the area. I'm pretty certain at this point that Meryn's directions are pretty shoddy, but some regional knowledge on Kyriil's part tells us that there are a few larger ruins to the rest. So off we go!

Eventually, we find a large ruins in the distance due southwest. It's getting night by this point, so we set up camp and have a peaceful night under the trees and stars.

The next morning, we arrive at the ruins discovered yesterday evening. The structure is big and brutalist, a dual tower configuration and a small building in between the two towers. A single rusted door, locked, sits in between these two tower-ruins. Gwynyvar listens at the door and doesn't hear anything, so she fires up her laser cutter and cuts through the lock.

The door swings open and into darkness. The floor is covered in plant matter and dirt near the entrance, and the room at large appears to be some sort of antechamber. There are 3 passageways in front of us, we elect to take the east passageway and travel through a small corridor before opening into another room full of stainless steel cutting implements reminiscent of a slaughterhouse.

From the slaughterhouse room, there is a door on the eastern side of the southern wall and another passageway that heads west. The door on the eastern side of the room appears stuck.

We proceed down the unexplored passageway and open into a storage room. The storage room connects back to the Anteroom. Gwynyvar searches the detritus of the storeroom and finds some valuable circuitry. While this is happening, Gwynyvar disturbs a nest of creatures, translucent wiry ghoul-like creatures that bristle and intimidate us out of the room.

We head back into the slaughterhouse room and Kyriil is able to hack open the stuck door to the southeast using his cyberdeck. We enter into a flooded room with three pillars of water getting sucked up into the ceiling. There are trellises with dead plant matter and LED lights illuminating the walls here. As we're pushing our way through the pillars of water, Sweden gets drawn into one of the water pillars. Kyriil, being a master wrestler, easily yanks Sweden up and out of the pillar of water. Beyond the pillars, on the western wall of the room, is a closed door.

Gwynyvar, wisely, listens at the door and hears labored breathing on the other side. We decide to go for a quiet entry, Gwynyvar on point, Kyriil close behind, and Sweden on door and light duty. We open up into a hallway with three unaware humanoid figures. In a moment of American pride, we open up with our ranged weapons and quickly mow two of them down. The survivor turns and sees the face of its killers before being shot down.

Down the hallway on the left is a large blast door. Across from it is a vent, which, after some investigation, leads to a small room with a Drifter's Cache. The contents of the cache:

Another vent on the other side of the room leads back into the store room we came across before.

layers: Séamus, Katt, spookyrusty Date of Game: 5-1-2025 Session: 2nd, where we explore the dungeon

Picking up where we left up with the same group, we start in the antechamber room and head south, entering an L-shaped room with a large nest in the corner. Our setting knowledge tells us that this is a Grek nest, a large pest common enough in large cities to warrant exterminators.

After some debate, we decide to leave well enough alone and go open the blast door. We check it first, then open it all the way and enter.

The whole room is bathed in golden light and overgrown plants. There are a few artificial light generators, still functional despite the years. Like a greenhouse! After some exploring, we find a service door which leads to a ladder. I love ladders, so down we go!

The second floor begins with a small waiting room with a door and a passageway. We take the door and come into a computer lab with strange humanoid figures with one eye, pale skin, and oversized heads (Thinking Adventurers, if I've ever heard of them). They're chill though, so we mosey on by and head into a hallway on the far end of the room.

We enter a small room at the north end of the hallway full of ossified honeycomb and dead bees (like a carpet). A single corpse(?) is sealed in a hexagonal niche and entombed in royal jelly. We decide to check out some of the other doors in the room, breaking into someone's camp? There are 3 sleeping bags and some lanterns, which we promptly loot. A more thorough search of the room reveals a wireless communication set and a sick bedroll. Looting completed, we return to the bee room and open up the bee locker with a laser cutter, revealing the decaying corpse of a Thinking Adventurer. We perform a field autopsy and search the room at the same time, revealing a hunk of plasteel in the stomach of the Thinking Adventurer and an SMG with a smart attachment embedded in the honeycomb.

Emboldened by our new arms, Sweden kicks down a door in the bee room to reveal a swarm of butterflies in an apiary. Four humanoid figures kneel in prayer(?) in a semicircle. So anyway, we start blasting. Three go down in our surprise round, the last charges Sweden and knocks them to the ground with a few swipes of its claws. The other two decree this creature to be dead with a hail of bullets. Sweden gets picked back up with the application of some Deus Ex Branded medical patches. Deus Ex: Don't forget to write them down on your inventory!

We explore a bit more after merking the nerds, discovering a computer bank and a service elevator which descends deeper into the complex...

Players: Séamus, Feir Date of Game: 08-28-2025 Session: 3rd, going deeper into the dungeon

Dramatis Personae

The Story

The service elevator descends a floor and reveals a locked door to the west and an unlocked door to the east at the foot of the elevator shaft. Some quick handywork from Hylock, the 27th century's greatest cybersecurity expert, turns that locked door into an unlocked one. We travel through to discover an industrial storage room, mostly empty save for the musty industry air that lingers. Hylock rummages through the room and discovers 6 plasteel sheets! We keep two and throw the rest onto the service elevator. A single corridor to the south is the only exit.

Stepping over the threshold of the corridor opens up into a large observation room which wraps around a circular room. There's a big plant lady-thing holding a glowing translucent orb. A large blind monitor lizard, stark white, guards his queen. Oh boy. Across the observation room is a locked door.

After some deliberation and some gentle taps on the reinforced glass separating this room from the lizard cuck room (I have taken the authorial liberty of calling it the lizard cuck) we pop a hush grenade to mask the noise of Hylock's shotgun, blowing open the door to reveal a cramped dressing room. A large hole is the only thing of interest in the room, which leads into the impossibly dark recesses of Haven'tmappedityet. Hylock drops a sheet of plasteel down the hole, which is silent due to both members of the party still being within range of the hush grenade. Whoops.

After some more investigating, we decide to double back to the service elevator room and pursue the other door. This leads into the ruins of a room destroyed by large root growths that lead, as you probably imagined, into the room with the lizard cuck and his queen. After some evaluation of the lizard and its tendencies, we decide it better to tackle the fight on a day when more people are present, and so double back to the 2nd floor to scope out a previously unexplored room.

This room is at the end of a corridor, inscribed with a simple message: "Don't Go In Here". There is a distinct smell of rot behind the door which, after opening it with the sharp end of a glaive, we discover is due to a Grek nest. We're willing to break and enter but destruction of wildlife habitat is a bridge too far, so we devise to head back to town and regroup before we fight the Devourer.

Players: Séamus, Katt Date of Game: 09-4-2025 Session: 4th, Wherein we retrieve the Heart of the Earth

Dramatis Personae

The Story

We started off our session with some quick shopping. Kyriil had originally wanted to get some more bodies and some more firepower to take out the lizard monster at the bottom of the ruins he'd been exploring, but as evidenced by the roster it was a pretty small session. To counteract this, Kyriil decided to sell his spellbook (stolen, truthfully, and full of some very high level spells he would never use) to buy some grenades. There are a few grenades worth talking about here since they come up later and are key tools that help us navigate challenges.

Hush Grenades: They're basically the silence spell, but sound can neither enter nor exit (and thus pass through) the affected area.

Slime-Mold Grenade: These spawn a thick slime-mold that releases a noxious gas and a loud noise whenever it comes into contact with a living creature. They're like tripwires or aerosol molotovs, since the gas denies space to any breathing creature.

Swarm Grenades: These are kinda busted, basically they trigger 6 attack rolls per grenade and each attack does 1d6 damage. I imagine them as like small missiles.

I purchased 2 Swarm Grenades, a Slime-Mold grenade, and a flare gun (a contingency plan that never got used) with the stolen spellbook money and we set out.

The trip back to the ruins was uneventful, as was the descent to the bottom lair of the ruins. The plan was essentially to get visual confirmation that the Devourer (the aforementioned lizard cuck in the previous session report) was still within its lair, then throw the hush grenade to mask our movements, throw 2 swarm grenades to hopefully kill the cuck, and then use the slime-mold grenade as a backup in case it was quick enough/durable enough to get out of the swarm grenades and come looking for trouble.

There was a bit of concern about the Swarm grenades not locking onto the lizard cuck if there were extra missiles left after it died, so we decided to shoot a flare gun in that case to try and light the cuck corpse aflame to ensure we wouldn't get friendly fired by our own grenade.

After about 10 minutes of planning this, we execute the plan and it goes off flawlessly. The devourer explodes like the gib effect in an early 3D FPS game and the mysterious vine lady holding an orb is intact. We enter the room to take the orb and the vine lady starts to speak to us in a chittering language, but Gwynavar, in her infinite wisdom, mag dumps the creature, quipping "the time for diplomacy was three grenades ago." Kyriil uses his glaive to sever the arms of this vine lady and collect the orb (which appears to be full of water and glowing) and we depart.

As we leave the vine mommy room, several creatures emerge from deeper in the room and attempt to harass us, almost as if we stole MAKO from the earth spirit. Kyriil throws his slime-mold grenade while Gwynavar lays down some surpressing fire and we sprint past them, arriving safely back to the service elevator and exiting the dungeon without further issues.

The trip back to Rayma (the name of the town) is mostly uneventful; a single Son of Helios (Roman Empire larpers) tries to take our new orb until he realizes that he's the only one of his legion still in the area. Gwynavar makes sure he vacates the premises (and the mortal coil) with two quick shots to the body.

We arrive in Rayma and collect our 8,000cr, getting scooped up for a more serious job by Meryn's boss Dera. We're given some coordinates and told to rendezvous with her in three days.

Thoughts on Decree

I think there's a lot to like in the Rules and there's certainly a ton of cool equipment shit to buy and use. The real juice in Decree comes from the factions and the artefacts, basically magic things you have to delve and find buried in the precursor ruins. There's a lot to like there and I'm looking forward to more adventure content etc. published for it (and I'm working on my own Decree adventure to help fill that void), since that's what I'm looking at most these days in RPG land.

In terms of system, it Just Works, which is good enough for me. I'm a pretty anal player when it comes to asking about rules interactions and little details about how stuff works, and everything that's been talked about in that regard so far has been thought over and considered, which is nice. I'm looking forward to the next iteration of the game so I have more things to ask questions about!

I'm not a particularly eloquent or insightful reviewer, to be completely honest. Decree is fun, the setting is distinct and drips with interesting things to do and see, the rules get out of the way so you can do that, and the typeface is cool. Check it out.