Monday 27 July 2009

Final Session: Mirescythe

After three weeks away we got back to some D&D 4e and the final encounter of the (somewhat wayward) campaign.

I wanted a boss monster but my experience with solos had been a mixed bag. What I really wanted to do was give them an encounter in which would tax them on a tactical level and also push the party. Their opponent was the shade beneath Zendicon; Mirescythe.

Mirescythe was a solo-lurker with some nasty tricks behind him, he was accompanied by 3 Urn Minions who constantly buffed him with various effects and occasionally attacked the party. They took on Mirescythe in a room on many levels which made the most of their crafty opponents ability to teleport around and generally make life difficult for them.

The Urns were marked with symbolsthe p[arty recognised: Vigour, Unhallowing and Onslaught. Vigour stored temporary Hp for Mirescythe (leeched by his Vampiric Scythe on a critical), Unhollowing blocked the Channel Divinity class feature (Specifically to stop Katarakis from nullifying my criticals, as he had done all campaign) and Onslaught recharged Mirescythes powers one at a time.

Mirescythe himself had lots of tricks. Being undead he had Vulnerability 5 to Radiant Damage, however the Pattern Shift power would swap his Radiant Vulnerability and his Necrotic Resistance for a turn. However as a minor action this competed with Mirescythe's ability to revive an urn and so was little used. Apart from this Mirescythe had an evil 'channel divinity' power (Golghezel's Pillar) along with a burst daze attack, a ranged attack and his nasty hit-teleport which he employed to brutal effect.

In the opening round he teleported across the room and his Skurmesh Anklebiter with a critical, at this point Katarakis realised he couldn't channel divinity and the strike dropped Skurmesh to just under his bloodied value. The players looked on aghast as Mirescythe teleported away to safety, and thus began a cagey few rounds as the party tried to draw a bead on the errant monster and his urns, during this time Mirescythe threw out a few nasty tricks including using his hit-teleport to perform hit and run attacks whilst the Urn of Onslaught kept recharging the power, he also tossed in a few action points to teleport, hit-teleport and then launch his ranged attack.

The party to their credit did well, with a Warlord and two Paladins they are exceptionally resilient and as ever Caradoc's ability to draw the worst of the damage onto himself (Absorbing most of Golghezel's Pillar, for example) eased the worst of the party's sufferring. The big problem was their enemy's mobility but Celavorn and Du'nn'o's ranged attacks kept the damage ticking over, Skurmesh also made great use of his ability to grant his allies extra attacks (the Helm of Heroes turning them from base attacks into standard actions, this helm is a must for any Warlord!) and stayed in the middle for the occasional buff or heal.

Katarakis also deserves mention for granting most of the party a +4 to all damage rolls at the start of the encounter and then making Mirescythe even more vulnerable to Radiant damage.

All in all this party's ability to weather massive amounts of damage and then recover from it has been the bane of my life in this campaign. All attempts to kill the party have failed simply because no matter how much damage I do, no matter how hard I hit them they just turn around and manage to get healed. I was more threatening with Goblins during Keep on the Shadowfell. All in all though I must say the party works well, far better than my monsters fare, and this is down to teamwork.

So now we say goodbye to our party for the meantime whilst I attempt to concoct some strange new adventure for them to take on.

Monday 20 July 2009

Uncle Joe's Quizzical Murder Mystery

It is the dead of night in frozen Stretford, part of the communist super state, and comerade Joseph Stalin lies dead in a greenhouse of the Stretford Hydroponic Research Centre...

I asked each of my four players (sans the absent Hair Dave) for an genre, an object, an authority figure and a place, in some kind of off the cuff mad-lib session and the results were... Well...

Giz decided that it should be a murder mystery.
Amanda decided it should be set in Stretford.
Medium Dave decided it should involve Joseph Stalin.
Rachael decided is should include a dart board.

Hence our steam-punk communist dystopia was born. I decided the party should be KRU agents sent as investigators into Comerade Stalin's death and they arrived via their zeppelin (The Red Oktober) and were wisked away to the scene of the crime.

What followed was a couple of hours of some of the most interesting roleplaying I've seen. We barely touched the dice as Giz and Rachel went off performing interrogations and Dave and Amanda went to Stalin's holiday home (in Stretford) and ended up involved in a Steam-Car chase (oh yes) in a blizzard, at the end of which they found Stalin's Steam Car and his driver slumped over the wheel having been shot in the head.

It was a delight to see the characters who emerged from this session and the quirkyness that emerged; Amanda's character wore a Cosmonaut's outfit because she dislikes contact and Giz's M-U had all 'psychic' powers and wore a gas mask alá Psycho Mantis.

In the end through a series of interrogations and a raid on a suspects house they discovered that Stalin in fact wasn't dead and that the body in the Greenhouse was a double killed to fake Stalin's death so that he could escape an assassination by the KRU. What I thought was a simple enough switch turned out to be quite difficult and in the end whilst the party found out what happened I had to fill in the 'why' which I had made a wee bit too difficult to uncover.

All in all despite the fact that it was entirely ad-libbed and much of the stuff I prepped in the 5 minutes the players were making their characters never got into the session, (Zombie Stalin!) including all the possible combat encounters, it worked quite well. Microlite sat unobtrusively in the back during all this and it was nice to know it was there but that we didn't feel obliged to use it but that it was there in case I needed it.

Some players are clamouring for a sequel knowing Stalin is now heading back to Russia via Zeppelin (The Stalingrad) and that they have their own Zeppelin with which to chase him down. This may not be the last we've seen of our communist steam-punk world!

Saturday 18 July 2009

Microlite and the City

So today I am faced with the possibility of having to run a session with zero prep, however given that this is the way I like to roll anyway I have no problem with that. If we do decide to do some roleplaying I'll probably crack out Microlite74 and start the players in generic city #16.

I've got a cool idea to run something steampunk/victorian using Microlite and some home-brew rules to turn it into a Microlite/Warhammer Quest/Jeff Rients mash-up. I'd be ruling in Jeff's rules for escaping the dungeon and WQ's rule that if you end up more than a certain distance away from your light source (defined as 2 boards away in WQ) you become lost in the dark and are never found again.

The other thing I'm doing is toning down Microlite's Hp values (From STR+1d6 back to either STR or 1d6) and reinstating Vancian Magic. This is partly because Vancian magic has been 'sold' to me in a way that Player's Handbooks failed to do over the years. In the past I found it to be a mechanic that seemed clumsy and annoying, with the context behind the mechanics (and some choice quotings from Vance's stories) I've gained a deeper appreciation for it.

Partly the reason for the Steampunk setting is that we've been considering trying to run Iron Kingdoms under Microlite and that has given me something of a taste. The other reason is that the park quite close to my parents did, at one point, have an old victorian greenhouse; a magnificent thing of iron and glass that was sadly vandalized over the years. However the memory remains, and has given me a rather tasty idea: consider if you will an arboretum infested with myconids and triffids! (and anything else plant related) That must be killed by the slaying of their hive mind through either brute force or razor sharp wit!

Well I think it's a good idea.

What to Run?

Tomorrow is another no-show with Hair Dave off running a store in Altringham and thus unable to return in time for our D&D game. So, I am faced with the possibility of running an alternative game. There are several possibilities:

Rogue Trader I've had a hankering to run since I read the introductory adventure. We all know the system well and it looks like a solid adventure. The problem is I know Hair Dave wanted to be in on our test run.

My as yet unnamed RPG which I've been plugging away at in the background (and started to discuss here) although this is far from a playable system as yet.

FATE is another possibility, quick and easy with a kind of versatility that is instantly endearing, and of course the FATE point mechanic which appeals to the co-operative storyteller in me.

Finally we have Microlite74 with which we ran Stonehell and found it to be damn good fun. I've been homebrewing some rules to make it a little more fatal (and so the party can't just spam 'Sleep') and I think I could run it 'off the cuff' and just let hijinks ensue.

This of course assumes anyone wants to roleplay at all and wouldn't be happier just taking a week off from rolling dice and speaking in silly voices.

Thursday 9 July 2009

Rogue Trader and Forsaken Bounty

So I’ve downloaded the ‘Forsaken Bounty’ adventure that showcases the new Warhammer 40,000 RPG ‘Rogue Trader’, which seems to be a combination of 40K and classic role-playing profiteering. The idea is that Rogue Traders travel on the fringes of Imperial Space with a license to plunder anything they find. The objective of Rogue Trader as opposed to Dark Heresy, from which it takes its (compatible) system, is to accrue profit and prestige.

One of the big differences seems to be the idea that the party are the head staff of an Imperial vessel and as anyone who knows the 40K background can tell you this means being in command of a vessel that is at the very least colossal and will have a crew of thousands. This means, in theory at least, that players can always call upon teams from their crew and fire support from their vessel and this has provoked fears that parties will pursue a ‘strike-from-orbit’ strategy to cleanse all resistance before they even set foot on world, indeed the designer’s even mention this is an entirely acceptable option.

The trick here seems to be to appeal to the player’s greed. Greed is a natural by-product of RPGs; we all want bigger and better stuff. The reason the Imperium still performs assaults on worlds instead of simply nuking them from orbit is because of the valuable infrastructure and resources on a planet that might be lost if it is reduced to glass by an orbital bombardment and there’s no reason that this can’t be true of Rogue Traders too, compelling them to raid planets rather than simply destroy them.

I’m also intrigued by the ship-to-ship combat that has been touted in the book. If it is a simple and manageable system that allows all players to participate then I think it will be a mainstay of any campaign I’m likely to run; however if it’s clunky I may just be tempted to abstract battles or use the wonderful Battlefleet Gothic rules instead.

All in all the idea of Rogue Trader has piqued my interest and I have the hankering to run the adventure, perhaps as a one-shot for my group before or after our Dark Heresy campaign. There’s an eerie feel to it that appeals to me and the ‘ship-in-the-void’ setting is quite different to the planetary based adventures we’ve enjoyed so far.

Tuesday 7 July 2009

Nobody expects the Holy Ordos of the Emperor's Inquisition

So D&D is slowly wrapping up and everyone's eyes are turned to things to come; Giz's freeform Space RPG is next up and after that we've all been stung by the Dark Heresy bug.

Dark Heresy has got to be one of my favourite games to play and the idea of running it intrigues me aswell. The grim darkness of the 41st milennium is a rich and (not so) vibrant setting with endless opportunities for adventure. It also has combat that is frequently quick, brutal and deadly and with Medium Dave's recent acquisition of the Inquisitor's Handbook; equipment lists that would satisfy even the most ravenous of equipment junkies.

It's shaping up to be quite a campaign, a sandbox world of interesting locales through which to perform our investigation and no doubt have shoot-outs and speeder chases in the best tradition of Ravenor and Eisenhorn.

What is better than this though is the thought and effort people have been putting into their characters. I thought I had put some effort in, but a quick brainstorm after D&D on sunday left us with a solid cadre of characters each with their own motivations and goals. In retrospect my own character seem a little bland by comparison.

Here's the run down of what we have:

Amanda- Playing Alessa, an alpha level psyker with a specialization in Biomancy who runs a brothel and houses some minor mutants to cater for her clients more exotic tastes.

Rachel- Reprises Nik, her assassin from our previous game who has gone on to have three kids and started her own Death Cult beneath a hospital.

Giz- Playing the bastard son of a noble household he is forming a web of spies and finding the secrets of his family so he can blackmail his way into a position of inheritence.

Medium Dave- Playing Tech-Magos Tiresius Kepplar, formerly of an explorator fleet he came into contact with tainted technology and has developed a penchent for the forbidden art of artificial intelligence. His goal is to create a machine with a sentient mind and he carts around with him he very realistic Janus Simulcra with him.

Myself- Inquisitor Eisen Alon Garvel, Ordo Hereticus. Operating under special exemption Garvel has fled to this planet to seek those who destroyed his apartments on Machaevo Primus and bring them to justice. A radical Oblationist he seeks forbidden knowledge knowing it damns him and turns the secrets within against the foes of the Imperium.

As you can see there's a fair bit of meat on these bones and it's given Hair Dave (who is running the damn thing) alot to think about. Having discussed it with him we did decide on a sand-box as being the best way to run the game and upon further thought I think a sandbox might be the best way to run Dark Heresy.

A sandbox with its multiple paths and 'on the fly' gaming gives the players a kind of universe without limits. Consider starting your game amongst the frozen spires and vent-gardens of Machaevo Primus investigating obscura smuggling that is funding a Pleasure Cult dedicated to Slaanesh; you could go many ways about this, interrogating the dealers, looking through manifests, kidnapping and interrogating cult members or just storming the place with a Flamer and a loud-hailer declaring yourself the Emperor's will incarnate. Even better, if the cult leaders break and run you can then persue them off world, possibly chasing them back to their dark masters.

The whole point is that it gives the players options, rather than relying on them to take the bait and get hooked into the story. If they ever slow down and become frustrated at their lack of progress do what Hollywood does and drop the plot on them. Maybe there's an assassination attempt on a party member's life? Perhaps they ump into their target by chance and get involved in a speeder chase amongst the huddled towers of the hive? The options are endless.

I think the sandbox method has also addressed a problem we had with our previous Dark Heresy sessions; the fact that the party felt like a glorified detective agency. A sandbox allows us to control the ebb and flo of the investigation and it feels lass like a static mystery that needs to be solved and more like a war of feint and counter feint as we try and prove our suspicions about our target.

In this case our target is the planetary governor who may or may not have been consorting with the powers of Chaos and from the way Dave has been cackling things could end up being very bad indeed.

Thursday 2 July 2009

A Realization

I don't know how to write adventures.

I've been a DM for a while now, indeed with our current group and most of the others ones I've been involved in I have spent the most time in the DM's chair, steering our ship towards adventure, but in retrospect I actually have no idea of how to write an adventure.

The reason: I've never read one.

Well I suppose technically that's not true, but compared to other bloggers involved with writing about role playing I feel terribly inadequet. They're all busy talking about old Moldvay and B/x modules (The Lost City etc) and I have no frame of reference.

Lets be honest I never played D&D as a kid, in most cases I'm younger than the majority of role playing bloggers and I only got into D&D at 3rd. Ed when WotC decided they'd let somebody else write the adventures for them. Consequently I know bugger all about writing adventures simply because I've spent next to no time with them, eading them, understand the structure of them and how to incorporate that structure into my own endevours.

This feels like the same thing I did with Conan, where I saw a gap in my knowledge and took the time to plug it. I need to lay my hands on some old adventures or failing that some of the great stuff that's coming out of publications like Fight On! in order to increase my knowledge base.

Actually, speaking of Fight On! they're running a literature competition at the moment that will keep going until October 31st and I'm giving serious thought to entering. I'm not entirely sure I'd win, indeed I doubt I would, but I hope for an honourable mention, perhaps.

Saturday 27 June 2009

Of Sanboxes and Imperial Worlds

Recently Hair Dave and I have been talking about running a high level campaign in Dark Heresy, and Dave expressed an eagerness to avoid the events of the previous campaign. This is not to say the last campaign was poor by any means; there were some good characters there and some suitably memorable events, however it did seem at times that our band of Inquisitorial Acolytes were less bearers of the Emperor’s wroth and more paranormal detective agency.

The other difficulty would be to run a campaign with such powerful characters, especially since the rules were never intended to allow players to be Inquisitors. Inquisitors cannot be questioned by any agency; they carry a Rosette that allows them to get their way in any situation and combine the two worst boons in role-playing Excessive Wealth with Status. In short it would be very dull to play as there would be no challenge in getting what we wanted.

To this end some compromises needed to be made by myself. I agreed with Dave that I would operate my Inquisitor under Special Exemption, meaning that whilst I had all my status and power I would essentially be on the fringes of the Inquisition, operating as a rogue. As such I would be keen to avoid drawing attention to myself I would try and avoid using my assets as much as possible and make a covert investigation. This is the best kind of compromise as it doesn’t remove something from the character but gives me a reason to explore other avenues first rather than just flashing my ‘Fix-It’ badge; which would make things exceptionally dull for all involved.

We also agreed to a Sandbox style game, which I think Dark Heresy is actually quite suited to. Slap a few stat blocks for menials, guards and the like on some record cards, generate a few places with ‘gothic’ names (I hear of something skulking over by the Generatorum, let’s check it out!) that seem like interesting locales, then decide on a mission. The mission can be very vague, just decide who’s at the centre and what they’re doing and then work outwards; who do they need? Who would be involved with their plans? What materiel will be needed to complete their plans? Each one is a clue (or red herring) that slowly allows the characters to rein the plot in. Drop in some chase scenes and combat when you feel it’s appropriate or the investigation starts to sag and it should lead to an interesting campaign.

The reason I think Dark Heresy really works for this kind of game is that it owes a lot to Dan Abnett’s Eisenhorn and Ravenor Trilogies, which are full of interfering Inquisitors, dangerous Psykers and traitorous governors. Whilst you can include all of these elements in an event based game quite comfortably a sand box gives an impression that the locale you are in, be it an Imperial City a Ministorum Shrine or an alien world, is more of a living breathing entity that exists beyond the preview of the game. Certainly there are soft boundaries there, but you’ll hit them less often than with an event based game and they will be less obtrusive.

More and more I’m finding Sandboxes to be a preferable way to play role-playing games. Some people like detailed plots and a more cinematic play style with carefully planned scenes and set pieces, and I certainly won’t argue against that as a style of play. However a sandbox with a good GM can have all this and more, memorable NPCs can leap out of a random roll and a funny voice, interesting locations can just spring to mind as you’re playing and when you want an intense scene or an epic encounter atop a cable car in a hail storm you can have it because there’s no plan that says you can’t.

Tuesday 16 June 2009

On Top of the World: Session 7

In which the party gains a new member, massacre an encounter and leave Zendicon.

Two rounds. That'll make more sense in a paragraph or two.

So the party started where they left off last week, in the bottom of the Deeping Well with Lord Lofang cackling maniacally; yet there was hope! Oh yes, with a sunrod tied to an arrow the signal had been sent for Lady Jazelle's troops to assault Lord Lofang's stronghold and the first of her warriors had arrived in the form of Celavorn, Elven Ranger, played ably by 4th Ed. Neophyte Medium Dave. The party now looked like this:

Caradoc Burrows, Halfling Paladin of the Raven Queen (Giz)
Katarakis, Dragonborn Paladin of Bahamut (Hair Dave)
Skurmesh Anklebiter, Dwarven Warlord (Amanda)
Du'nn'o Me'name, Eladrin Rogue (Rachel)
Celavorn, Elf Ranger (Medium Dave)
Cael, Elf Barbarian (NPC)

Admittedly Rachel was absent from this session but with Giz playing her character we ploughed on regardless and started by adding Celavorn to the initiative order and then let them loose on Lord Lofang. Between Du'nn'o and Celavorn (and some action points) Lofang took over 100 damage in the first round of combat and a round later was very, very dead.

I am fine with this, Lofang wasn't underwhelming as a monster, he wasn't a one trick pony who couldn't hurt the party; it was just that the party came together and tore the encounter to pieces. Celavorn was horrific and Du'nn'o had a revelation to cause massive damage. Lofang's guards didn't do much better and an encounter that might have taxed the party was over relatively quickly.

A good thing too as after divvying up the spoils, looting the place and deciding to abandon Zendicon it was already time for Amanda to hit the hay (damnable 5am starts) and I didn't want to run without her. Furthermore whilst I did have some more encounters planned I wanted to spend some time really planning things out so that the Zendicon Caverns will have entertaining and interesting encounters and a memorable finish to this leg of the campaign.

Monday 8 June 2009

On Top of the World: Session 6

In which the party go trading, meet a beautiful women, become assassins and finally get a cliff hanger.

Woo.

Like Kirk in Star Trek II I'm back in the chair and being chased chased around a nebula by Ricardo Montalban... Well, maybe not. Finally after our three week hiatus we're back in Zendicon and rapidly approaching some variety of ending for the current campaign.

In a breief recap last time Du'nn'o had managed to climb up into the tower above Gaol Zendicon, borked her sneak roll across and empty room and got carved up by the wardens. When this session began the party were considering the possibility of escape by going through the caverns beneath Zendicon and escaping that way. They left Du'nn'o to rest following her ordeal and pressed on.

Realising quickly that they would need provisions for the trip the party decided to head to the Dust Market once again and eventually found the trader Avazan, a man who at first was happy to trade for what supplies the party had, but would not trade for gold. However he did mention his 'mistress' was rumoured to have some need of such precious things and directed one of his Ogre guards; Venerable Terry, to take the party to her.

The party came through many chambers to the ruined temple where the Lady Jazelle made her home, the party entered between drapes of precious fabrics into a room where an empty throne made of weapons sat unattended. As they waited Lady Jazelle seemed to appear from nowhere, a beautiful woman with almost luminous green eyes. The party traded with her for goods (15 trail rations, 10 flasks of water, and they managed to guess the price bang on) losing a quantity of gold and some sun rods for their trouble. Lady Jezelle for her part seemed interested in the Dwarf and bade them return to discuss a favour over dinner.

At dinner the Lady described her desire to control the trade of the market uncontested and solicited the party to remove her rival; the secretive Lord Lofang whose priests Caradoc and Du'nn'o had recently butchered. Caradoc was resistant to the idea of becoming an assassin but the party swayed him and in return Lady Jazelle promised to get her troops in the caverns below to allow them passage. Having agreed the party went to check her story out and found the cavern reinforced on both sides by a great many troops who barred the path with hails of arrows.

(Skurmesh also promised to make an army for the Lady, with whom he seemed infatuated. To this end, and given Dwarves unique biology in the Hearthlands, he was to impregnate the stone with his 'seed' thus giving rise to new Dwarves who must bear the sigil of his clan. Thus Skurmesh Anklebiter, last of the Anklebiters, has founded a new clan within this place.)

And so the party went to assassinate Lord Lofang, with a promise of aid from Lady Jazelle once the deed was done. To this end they took Caradoc and Du'nn'o bound and entered the 'Deeping Well' under the pretense that they had been captured by Katarakis and Skurmesh. The party were brought before Lord Lorfang, a grey skinned humanoid, and Talvil the priest Caradoc had maimed earlier. Words were bandied and eventually Caradoc head-butted Lord Lofang and the party jumped their collective adversaries.

The party aren't idiots and when Lofang went down they suspected he was a decoy, Skurmesh decided his manservent was in fact the real Lord Lofang, but he turned out to be a minion. Then with a terrible noise within his mind Caradoc was hit for a great deal of damage and upon the balcony above a voice entreated them and, coweled and robed, his face purple and festooned with tentacles; the Illithid Lord Lofang made himself known to the party.

Dun-dun-dunnnnn!

Monday 1 June 2009

The Game of Houses

The default assumption with an adventuring party is that they have no family, in this regard they are considered to be blank slates with no origin close enough to themselves to warrant any mention. Perhaps they are orphaned farmers sons who have headed off to learn the ways of the world and become embroiled in a desperate mission. Rarely do we even give it this much thought.

However surely we’re missing a trick here. A character with family is a character that has dramatic tension; there are questions to be asked. Do they like their family? Are there old grudges held? Are there obligations passed down from father to son?

Even better is a character that comes from a noble house who might be embroiled in some kind of clandestine power struggle for the throne/princesses hand in marriage/spice. Consider Paul Atredies in Dune who by the very fact of his birth has been involved in not one but several power struggles and must constantly calibrate his position as the sharks circle around him.

As you might guess it is nobles I want to talk about today.

Playing a member of a noble house does have several potent hooks for a character, both in terms of their family and their own personal agenda. If we consider the aristocracy of Europe throughout the ages we see a variety of different agendas and personalities; from the hedonist who thinks only of their own pleasure, to the moralist who seeks to improve himself and those around him.

Any campaign in which the PCs were nobles would have to run heavily upon a conflict between the private, the personal agenda, and the public, loyalty to their house and ruler. To run it in an interesting manner the GM would allow the players to pick their house and perhaps their agenda, but then would have to impress upon them the rules of the court, whereby they would have to show deference to those around them, even those whom they might seek to usurp.

I imagine this would end up being a clandestine game where the PCs would be innately paranoid of capture, especially if the consequences were dire, and would allow players to come at their problems from different angles. Even better would be to run it in something like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay where not only would they have to avoid exposing their agenda but be wary of witch hunters and the like who believe there is the taint of chaos in the court!

Here’s how I would do this: Allow the character to come up with their ambitions in secret, they must write it down but need not show the other players. Next come up with some ideas of how their houses would like them to act, such as upholding the honour of their house, negotiating for a trade route or the like. Finally give them some kind of directive from their ruler, who has a task for them or considers them a favourite, perhaps they are to perform some task on their behalf. Let the players draw their house and liege directives in secret but make a note of them. Finally chuck them into a feast with a few NPCs and allow the whole thing to come to the boil.

I would be wary of the competitive nature of such a game, players competing for the same outcome might be tempted to ‘dispose’ of their rivals and this can lead to ill will in the group, which is undesirable. You could try and reinforce the idea of using more subtle, Machiavellian ways of disposing of them (dishonour, getting them assigned to a far off war etc) or allow the murdered player to come back as some kind of court investigator with a directive from the ruler to discover the culprit of this heinous crime.

Sunday 31 May 2009

So, six hours later...

[Warning: Possible Stonehell spoilers below]

The Stonehell party consisted of 3 players with 2 characters each, one was their primary and the other would be their secondary, in some cases this ended up with a master servant thing going on. The party was:

Boris, Human Fighter (Female, played by Amanda)
Ms. Gentleman, Human Magic-User (aka Ms. G, played by Amanda)
Jesus, Human Cleric (Played by Dave)
Tarquin, Elf (Played by Dave as a MU)
Agent Smith, Human Paranormal Effects Administrator (MU played by Giz)
Manservant, Halfling (Played by Giz)

The players had heard about how fatal older editions of D&D (and its retro clones) could be, and armed with this knowledge were incredibly cautious.... Ish. Manservant insisted on crowbar-ing every door he came across and Boris was a bit of a bimbo but they bumbled on quite well; meeting Dwarves, sleeping Orcs and generally performing a bit of murder whilst their enemies were sleeping.

At one point Boris found a rat with a name tag (which read: 'Precious'), instead of killing it she took the sleeping rodent and muzzled/hogtied it, runing it into her unofficial pet/mascot. Later the party surprised me by being ambushed by a group of orcs and wisely running away, back to their Dwarven 'allies' who took care of the mess.

There was a long period of exploration in which we discovered that I could roll more than a 1 when it came to rolling for the Hp of some cobras and the party eventually made it to the caves section killed some kobolds and took their precious guano.

Their next encounter with kobolds was random and was another work crew carrying mops and buckets, there was a brief roleplay encounter that left Giz twitching with the urge to kill everything in the room and put their eyes out. I obliged him when he fiddled with the cracks in the same room and lost his 10' pole for his trouble. Giant Centipedes were by far the most dangerous foes the party encountered with Agent Smith hitting the deck unconscious before the party fled into the fountain room.

They rested and then headed down and around to reach the entrance and then went back to the fountain room with the intention of heading through to the centipede room. Then Boris decided to touch the fountain (perhaps because I pointed out that whilst they had been in this room they hadn't 'explored' it) and activated the poison gas trap. She survived by Manservant and Jesus bought it.

Fortunately Jesus would return d3 days later, assuming we don't get smote for blasphemy.

The party (deciding against the centipedes) then went to the wheel of fortune room, which was always going to be a giggle. Ms. Gentleman pulled the lever first, I rolled up 'Wisdom' which I had dubbed the Exp bonus and went straight up to level 2. Agent Smith pulled the lever next, got the Bloody Eye and was instantly struck blind.

The last room dealt with was the crypts which the party raided in style, hacking down the few monsters there were (including no less than 2 ghouls) and finally gaining some good treasure for their troubles (about 600 gold and a magic item, which I ruled was an elven sword +1) and most of them reached level 2.

The party then fled the dungeon and went back to the town to spend some time carousing, healing and getting the sword identified. Due to their carousing several characters went up to level 3, in no small part due to the large sums of gold they had randomly acquired.

All in all it was a good session, and now that I have a handle on the rules I think it's time to do a little 'brewing' with them; I'd like to expand the spells list a little so that characters can have a few more interesting spells at level 1, especially for the cleric, who was relegated to doing very little. I'm also tempted to use Jeff Rient's carousing rules and I could also do with some reaction tables (given that I just fudged it this time).

All in all though, given we started character gen at 2.30pm and finished at about 9pm it was a damn good session and one of the longest I have ever run, so in short, it will be occuring again.

Next week is World Top; involving the party's stint in Zendicon and possibly the arrival of a new ally.

Saturday 30 May 2009

Zen and the Art of Dungeon Structure

I had to write Stonehell 1A out by hand for today's session, which was fine, Amityville Mike used only two pages and whilst there's alot to get down on paper (39 rooms) its simple, concise and still has flavour. I slipped on the reggae stylings of Dub Side of the Moon and took a couple of hours to work through it.

This also has the advantage of making me more familiar with the dungeon, I'd read Stonehell 1A but hadn't really absorbed it until I wrote it out myself. There's something about the process that just made it make more sense to me in my head and I think it's given me a little more appreciation for the way the encounters come together in some areas (specifically around room 16) to create an implied narrative.

So the encounters are ready, the traps are primed, the monsters are recieving their final pep talk and Stonehell is go. A report will be filed laterz.

Monday 25 May 2009

Session? No Luck

This is usually where my session write up would go, but since Dave (our erstwhile Dragonborn Paladin) was captured by The Evil Empire and forced to work until gone 9 (on... something, details are vague) we decided to do something else. We played 'Burn In Hell' and then decided that the game could for it's raw tedium; we have a love hate relationship with Steve Jackson Games; Munchkin and Munchkin Cthulhu are awesome, Ninja Burger is divisive (although I love it for the roleplaying alone) and Munchkin Bites and Burn in Hell were truly yawn inducing.

Apart from this we watched Read or Die and then went to bed; hardly the stuff of heroic legends.

World Top has been plagued by these interruptions; although I won't blame anyone because when work comes knocking its difficult to tell them to sod off cos you've got some ogres to kill; but it does end up stealing some momentum from the campaign. I'm tempted at this point, with next week being cancelled aswell, to just trap the players in Zendicon for a year and come back to it when our schedules re-align.

So whilst Dave is sunning himself in Barcelona and Rachel is off doing... something; I am going to spend next sunday afternoon running a few people through Stonehell, even if it's just Gareth and Amanda, and hopefully I'll get a few ideas for making my own dungeons in the process.

Saturday 23 May 2009

Tomorrow's Session and Stonehell

So another week and we wind up for our sunday session and the players continuation through Zendicon, which may this week involve heading into the depths to look for a way out. Personally I'm looking forward to it, but I think this will be the last 'module' (for want of a better word) in the World Top Campaign for a while given that Gareth is foaming at the bit to run his space campaign and I'm all psyched up to run something 'old school'.

However it should be noted that I have never ran anything older than 3rd edition when it comes to D&D and whilst I'm picking up Microlite74 for the endevour, a system that seems to bridge the gap between OD&D and 3rd ed. quite adequetly (and simplifies encumberance; thank god), I'm not really in tune with a system which relys so heavily on my ability to make a ruling instantaneously, and so I think I need practice.

Help is on hand though.

Amityville Mike's Stonehell dungeon comes highly rated by people who know what they're talking about and seems like an interesting old school adventure that I'd like to run, and given that Rachel will be absent from next weeks session; it might be a good idea to run Stonehell 1A and give me and the players some experience of what old school gaming is really like.

Saturday 16 May 2009

No Session and The Final Frontier

This week our D&D session has been cancelled due to one of our number being secvonded by the 'Evil Empire' to do a stock take. As such this week we shall be playing poker, perudo and possibly some Munchkin Cthulu. This of course leaves me with nothing to talk about concerning my own game and so I'm going to have a look at the future and Gareth's space opera.

We were sat downstairs after a successful session discussing what we could possibly run next so that I could perhaps have a break from running our sessions. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy running the sessions, but it's always nice to actually play a game rather than run it. Gareth too has been itching to run something spacey and we sat down with the intention of coming up with a functioning system that would be light and easy to learn, fatal in combat and allows us to be whatever we'd like.

It took us a good 15 minutes but we came up with something that seems like a bastard child of Risus and FATE, stealing liberally from different sources and employing a 2d6 roll for that delightful bell curve that apparently we should all aspire to. Add into that FATE's evoking of character 'aspects' to gain an extra dice (Up to a max of 4d4, pick the 2 youn like) and margins of success and it begins to look like a half way acceptable system.

It's going to be fatal, with somewhere between 6-10Hp per character and every margin of success on the opposed combat roll causing an extra point damage (in addition to the 1 for just hitting) it won't take long to kill a PC, but then again we're not supposed to be getting into fights. Hopefully we can shift gears from the stabby-stabby-kill-kill(TM) to something a little more sedate without too much trouble.

Thursday 14 May 2009

Alignment and Resolve

Alignment is one of those things that has never really worked for me in role playing games, indeed they seem somewhat antithetical to the whole experience. Attempting to define an individual’s moral code into one of nine groups seems to defeat the entire purpose of playing the role, and whilst it can be a useful guideline for players who don’t have a well defined character in mind, the rest of the time it just comes off as arbitrary and obtrusive.

In Fourth Edition D&D this is compounded by reducing the number of alignments to five and making ‘unaligned’ a catch all group for almost every character in my group. In short it is irrelevant to us and has little impact upon the game, and this is beginning to bother me.

On Sunday when our group encountered Taluil there was, in my mind, a certain kind of conflict going on for the characters. Half the party are dedicated to the Raven Queen, and here was a cleric of the Raven Queen euthanizing the desperate and needy in order to aid those who still had the will to live. The lack of information on the Raven Queen means you could interpret this many ways, certainly he claimed to be administering her will. So was he an evil character who was killing innocents or a desperate priest making use of what few resources there were to keep himself and his followers arrive? Perhaps that’s a little sanitized since when I say ‘resources’ you have to substitute ‘corpses’.

Caradoc and Du’nn’o clearly took the high ground, albeit in an overtly violent way and clearly they saw this as an evil act, but what if they’re wrong? What if they killed a cleric and mutilated a priest on a false assumption? I cannot penalise the characters for acting out of alignment because their alignment is ‘Unaligned’ and thus provides no framework within which to interpret their actions.

I’m tempted to replace the alignment system with something a little more useful to our group, which will still have relevance within role playing encounters but won’t chain them to a single course. Vampire had a good system for managing this, granting willpower to characters who would act with their chosen conducts. This is a simple enough system to adapt for 4th Ed, granting either an unlimited action point (which persists beyond an extended rest) or a point which grants some other kind of bonus (shrug off an ongoing effect, automatically pass a death save etc). In game this would represent some kind of self belief, or ‘Resolve’*, which allows them to push beyond their limit.

I’ll put this to the masses and see what we come up with, largely characters already seem to have certain conducts to which they adhere, though I’d be tempted to give Du’nn’o and Caradoc one involving punishing ‘Heretics’ after their latest debacle.

*The idea of ‘Resolve’ is specifically stolen from Gareth/Caradoc’s now defunct Bleach RPG, where characters regularly endure beyond the limits of the body by strength of will alone.

Monday 11 May 2009

On Top of the World: Session 5

This week was a chance to change things up for the characters and introduce some of the dreaded role playing to proceedings. It seemed to work quite well.

The party’s attempt to beat a hasty retreat from the Malboro Forest was thwarted by the arrival of a mysterious figure clad in armour as black as night and swathed in dark robes. He appeared to them stood in a tree and dropped down when spotted by Skurmesh and instantly began accusing the party of ‘transgressions’ by trespassing and awakening the huge Malboro (Malthulu?). The party were none too pleased about the possibility of going to prison for the prescribed 25 years and Du’nn’o snuck off into the long grass to take a shot at the ‘Judge’ with her new Blingtastic Crossbow (The first item in the campaign to get the much coveted +4 Enhancement bonus, largely because I felt guilty for losing her character sheet before the session).

Suffice to say there is a time to shoot and a time not to, specifically it is a poor idea to shoot a man in the head when he is in the middle of exposition, and even worse when he’s in the middle of delivering the DM’s railroad. Generally I try to avoid railroading the party, but this once I wanted them to be somewhere so that the work I had actually done wouldn’t be wasted. Suffice to say the Judge was struck squarely by a sneaky bolt and instantly disappeared.

Du’nn’o felt burning and cold and the distinct sensation of having been cut open. Twice. Frankly she took a ridiculous amount of damage, which was fine by me as it instantly made the party realise I wasn’t about to let them just run away, and begrudgingly they followed the judge through a rift to the Gaol Zendicon.

I pulled a couple of ‘dick moves’ here, intended solely to make the party’s life difficult. One was to remove all of their food and water, including their much coveted ‘Horn(s) of Plenty’. These items I didn’t rule out near the start of the campaign, but given that I want Zendicon to be tough for reasons other than monsters and the like, they had to go. Mercifully I concocted a reason that was acceptable to the internal mechanics of the world and yet wouldn’t rob them of their other precious magic items.

The party awoke to the sound of a lean looking elf by the name of Cael who seemed to act as their guide; letting them know where they were and what travails they would encounter within the walls of Zendicon. Caradoc was very upset to find out that he had lost his Horn of Plenty and 40 Waybread Rations, it would not be the last time he would be upset this night.

The party having recovered themselves began to get a general lay of the land; to the South lay Dust Market, there were the East and West wings and to the north was a hall where a temple of the Raven Queen was holed up. Additionally in the ceiling of this chamber were two portals set into the carved ceiling from which, at irregular intervals, food and water would be deposited. Cael mentioned it was a kind of control; the food and water was never enough to sustain all the inmates, forcing them to fight for what resources there are.

Caradoc instructed Katarakis and Skurmesh to stay in the main chamber whilst he and Du’nn’o (The two party members dedicated to the Raven Queen) went to check out the temple. I get the inkling that Caradoc was well aware of what would be going on when I said: ‘They administer the Raven Queen’s Blessing’ and I was not one to disappoint.

Within they found Taluil and his brother clerics with rows upon rows of the dead and it didn’t take long for Caradoc to go on the offensive as Taluil explained quite plainly about how he euthanized the poor souls who came here and justified his actions as a blessing granted by the Raven Queen.* The exhumation and consumption of the organs post mortem was treated quite matter of fact-ly by the cleric who claimed that the dead allowed the living to survive; but Caradoc saw this as a clear sign of murder and kicked the Cleric.

Caradoc is 2 feet 9 inches tall, the minimum size for a Halfling in Third Edition, we assumed he either got a stepladder or has an exceptionally strong boot.

Suffice to say that as Skurmesh and Katarakis arrived the entire place went crazy; the Dragonborn threatened everyone in the room whilst Skurmesh played good cop and squeezed some of the more terrified clerics for information before loaning his axe to Caradoc who tied up the now whimpering Taluil and lopped his hands off. Katarakis prevented him from dealing the fatal blow although Du’nn’o managed to kill a cleric before Skurmesh could stop her (by hitting her in the face with the haft of his axe) and the others including Taluil made a dash for it. Du’nn’o, apparently not enamoured with having her nose broken by an irate Dwarf ran after the fleeing cleric and into Dust Market.

The Dust Market is a market ostensibly for Dust, a kind of narcotic which represents the only ‘escape’ from the Gaol Zendicon. Here and there merchants were plying wares for trinkets, jerked rat meat and weapons made of sharpened pieces of metal. As a symbol of status those merchants who were particularly wealthy wore cloaks made out of strips of faded precious fabrics; the more gaudy the more up market they were and probably the closer affiliated with the gangs.

Du’nn’o didn’t find Taluil before the rest of the party tracked her down (with Cael’s help) and led her back to the area with the two ceiling hatches. Caradoc stated plainly his disgust for the place and his desire to be rid of it by the end of the day. His plan was simple and relied upon Du’nn’o’s skills of athletics and thievery to open one of ceiling hatches and find a route up into the higher reaches. Cael had warned them of the darkness clad warders he had heard about higher up the gaol and the beasts that existed in the lower reaches, but Caradoc felt confident they could at least assess the risk.

Du’nn’o shimmied up the wall and set to work hanging from the ceiling. Her Aevis Sandals she had gained a while back protected her from falling damage so she was a good candidate for the task at hand. It took her some time but eventually she managed to open the iris hatch and climb into the room above in which shafts of light caught the dust from the floor and a pair of tall wooden doors stood in the wall like proud guards.

Speaking of proud guards it was at this point Du’nn’o attempted a stealth check in an empty room and true to form rolled a 1.

We have an unspoken rule in these parts that when Rachel (Du’nn’o’s Player) rolls a stealth check on ‘anything but a critical failure’ she will instantly roll a 1 (Or 100 in her fabled Dark Heresy bork) and we are obliged to then hurt her character. Specifically at this juncture three wardens crept out of the shadows, immobilized her and began to wail on her. They had greatswords. They did extra damage when she was immobilized.

Now she could still teleport down the shaft that she had just come up and didn’t risk falling damage but Du’nn’o apparently wanted to cause as much damage as possible and being a trickster rogue managed to toss two of them down the shaft (and they had teleported by the time they reached the floor and Katarakis got to bat at them) although in the process was hit so hard she lost almost all of her Hit Points in 3 hits.

Eventually she beat a hasty retreat and teleported down the shaft, which was fortunate as one more roll probably would have killed her with no way for the party to get up there and save her. The hatch in the ceiling closed and the wedges Du’nn’o had put in to keep the hatch open were reduced to splinters.

The party were, at the end, reunited and currently have some much needed info; primarily don’t go up alone, and given it was midnight at this point we elected to reconvene in a fortnight and continue from there; possibly with a journey down into the depths of Gaol Zendicon.

*This is perhaps a point of contention, technically Taluil kills only those who seek him out and it was never stated nor implied that he went out into Gaol Zendicon and hunted people down. Certainly his other crimes are severe but we are talking about a place with little or no food or water and given that a corpse is rich in (or at least possesses) both, the dead can be considered to be one of the few resources that the Gaol has in rich supply. Currenlty the party see this as black or white and Caradoc was certainly not impressed with Taluil’s reasoning.

Saturday 9 May 2009

Sunday Prep and Playing Roles

So another Sunday session of D&D is upon us and after the washout that was last week I’ve been spending some time with the players wish list I’ve come up with a suitable plan for getting everyone back into the swing of things.

Next up comes a site based adventure which is quite simple, it resorts to tried and tested techniques and will hopefully allow the players to do some of the roleplaying which has gone by the way side in recent sessions but was so prevalent in the first.

We’ve encountered this problem which I’m certain many other parties have encountered before where the role playing takes a back seat to combat mechanics and adventuring. This is especially jarring after the first session was so strong with this particular aspect. One could blame the players for not playing their characters but that’s unfair when they’ve been in the wilderness for weeks and have been given no opportunity to interact with creatures who didn’t instantly try to bite their faces off.

I’m fortuitous in this respect since I’ve been running World Top largely adlibbed and that means dungeons and the like only go on as long as I really want them to. It also allows me to drop things in at the last minute; such as the Malboro forest, which I only had a vague idea about before the session began; and then these adventures need only go on as long as the PC’s are interested. Since the Malboro forest was a bust this Sunday the party will be leaving it for Zendicon.
In other news with the Monster Manual II coming out soon we may soon be fighting a new swathe of nasties. Personally I’m hoping for a Paragon level Rust Monster or something that steals magic items so that I can get rid of the party’s annoying ‘Horns of Plenty’.

Monday 4 May 2009

On Top of the World: Session 4

This was by far the worst of our sessions in terms of combat and the blame for that falls squarely at my feet. Our party having beaten Melgoroth of the Eternal Blight finally got a weapon for Katarakis (The Smith's Hammer) which Du'nn'o fished out of the lava with her face given that she took 45 damage (12d6 Fire damage) because I was still annoyed about not killing her character a fortnight ago.

At the top of the ridge on the far side of the lava river was a great crater of glamoured forest in which dancing multicoloured lights weaved between the gret deciduous boughs. In the centre of the forest a massive oak rose out of the canopy and dominated the area around. Perhaps not the most original of glamoured forests to be sure but it worked quite well and for a while the party were wandering in circles. Eventually they reached the great oak* and decided to wander in opposite directions around it to reach the far side in a direction that was roughly north.

Halfway around Caradoc and Du'nn'o noticed they were being followed by dryads and a few minutes later realized they were no dryads. These were the deadly Malboro's we had been building for a week and I was quite pleased with how tough they were; as it turned out they were too tough. Here's three thing I learned:

1) Stunning is brutal and takes people out of the game and should not be given to 4 monsters in an encounter.

2) Stunning should most certainly not be a rechargable power with a 1/3 chance and auto-recharge at bloodied.

3) Taking people out of the game for near enough 5 rounds can be classed as a 'dick move'.

My lust for tough monsters made the Malboro's overly powerful and I was forced to give them a raft of 'on the spot' changes; lowering some defences, giving them the fire vulnerability they sould always have had and amending their bad breath to 'dazed' instead of Stunned.

All in all it was a bit of an underwhelming session, I think in order to make it up to the players next week might have to involve a trip into the 'awesome' bucket for encounters. At the end I polled some of the players for things they'd like to see and will use some of that feedback. Next week will be a session as normal although hopefully with more roleplaying and less unkillable monsters.

*Katarakis is officially insane. Our journey to the centre was a skills challenge and I was eager for a little bit of 'out of the box' thinking. To this end I told the players they could use any skills as long as they justified it. Given that the party were under the impression they were being watched Katarakis attempted to intimidate the hidden parties into revealing themselves... By shouting at the trees.

Tuesday 28 April 2009

Sculpting and the Like

I can be classed as a fairly lazy DM, perhaps this is the reason why all the sessions of World Top have been ad libbed so far, but this week I am making an extra special effort, the kind of effort I've never made before.

I am making models for the game.

Now I'm no sculptor by any means and my first complete attempt that sits beside me as I write this looks decidedly amateurish, however there is something quite fun about using sculpty. It's like plasticine that you cook in the oven until hard and just using the stuff is cathartic. The model itself might be a bit rubbish but I like it despite that and hopefully my group won't mind fighting it on the night.

Amanda's attempt is on the other side of the room and is far better; she's much better at sculpting than she gives herself credit for and I reckon the party will take one look at her monster and head for the hills... Y'know, if they weren't already in the mountains.

I'll try and grab some pics on sunday so you can see the finished results.

Monday 27 April 2009

No Session This Week

With Hair Dave off fighting at the Black Gate this week we decided not to plunge on without Katarakis and so myself and Amanda enjoyed a day entertaining small children and having the occasional pint of Becks. However since I'm trying to post something every monday I felt obliged to drag myself from bed and put something up here. For a week I've had nothing at all to write about but yesterday following a conversation between myself, Dave and Amanda I got all excited. The reason: I finally get to play a game!

Huzzah

Finally I get to play Vendreth the Barbarian (Vendreth; warrior without fear!) and spend some time cracking skulls and investing in more d12's. Amanda, my long sufferring girlfriend has been elected to run a session or two at some point (Probably after Giz's Fudge Bleach), this promises to be alot of fun since last night I got to watch her tear into my Monster Manual in search of all manner of nasty critters to unleash on our unsusupecting party.

This promises to be alot of fun, Amanda is really starting to get to grips with D&D and its been a pleasure to watch her Dwarf Warlord (Skurmesh Anklebiter) come into his own in the encounters we've fought; saving Du'nn'o from certain death, granting Katarakis all manner of nasty bonus attacks and just generally keeping the party in shape. I'm hoping that she can carry that enthusiasm into her DMing and just have fun with it.

Our party itself seems to be taking shape, aside from my Barbarian Mr. Dave is talking excitedly about an Avenger with a double-bladed sword who looks like Darth Maul and I feel certain Giz will arrive with something musical and leader-ish. That just leaves Rachel who we intend to corrupt into becoming a Defender of some flavour; I personally am voting for Warden.

Now I'm off to go do some planning for next week; here's your sneak peek: It starts with M and ends with -alboro.

Monday 20 April 2009

On Top of the World: Session 3

Easter delayed the next part of our Paragon Tier campaign, with over half the party (and I) sat on a hill drinking cider and watching the sunset rather than trawling the Undermanse in search of treasure. That said we are finally resuming as normal and this week promised some interesting combat.

Or at least that was the plan.

Originally the party were destined to get ambushed by a Lich and its friends when they followed the path after their battle with the (underwhelming) Hydra. Now Liches are usually tough opponents but with two Paladins in the party (Caradoc the Paladin of Redirect and Katarakis the Astral Weapon) I was looking forward to seeing the party take one down ‘old-school’.

Instead Caradoc in a bout of meta-gaming declared that since the cowled figure (read: Lich) had gone through a portal there then there must be a way of opening it through hand signals, gestures, using bits of detritus and the like. In a retcon roll we discerned that Katarakis had seen the moves that the Lich had made before opening the portal.

Dungeon Masters of old will be remembered by the faithful as hateful architects fuelled by malice, every thread and sinew of their being toiling ceaselessly to forge mazes of agony for their friends to stumble through. Fourth Edition tones this down by removing level drain, statistic loss and instant death and you might suspect that this means an age of party friendly Dungeon Masters. I refute this with a single line:

“The figure appears to have made a series of arcane gestures and then ended with some word of arcane power, from your vantage point you could hear something that sounded like... Macarena.”

I am still grinning.

The portal opened and the party wandered through a dreamlike wilderness unique to each of them (with one consistent theme; a dead Peter Andre) until they came out on a ledge far above the Undermanse. The party were stood upon one of the Stalactites mentioned in the last session and below them could see the strange geometric patterns of the Neminoan barrows. Before them is an irregular archway surrounded by mosaics made of irregular tiles (called ‘tessera’ as Katarakis informed me) and beyond a room in which they found a pillar of metal with copper cables coming from the top of it. Blue light pulsed along the cables and was carried along cables bordering a ramp on the far side of the room that led out from this stalactite to another one. From within the pillar came the sound of distant thunder and a dull throbbing.

This room was to be the resting place of the ‘Lord of Thunder’; a maul that was rather good at knocking things down; hence the rumble of distant thunder. I was counting on my party’s natural curiosity (along with the greed that grips all adventurers) to cause them to crack this open and get the aforementioned magical item. The trade off being that doing this would take power that was being bled through the cables to a room further on in which there were sarcophagi containing all manner of nastiness.

As it was after some debate and some ‘advice’ from Caradoc about greed (this being the same player who carved his name onto the family tree in a crypt near Winterhaven and declared himself the lost son of Lord Padraig) the party decided to leave it and I watched my shiny magic item disappear off into the sunset.

After some more walking they came upon the sarcophagus room in which they found a flesh golem (in actuality 2 flesh golems squeezed) in the aforementioned sarcophagus. Again in a fit of common sense they decided to leave well enough alone and walked away without releasing the deadly monstrosities.

I was feeling defeated. The party had evaded 2 combat encounters and the treasure for this week; that said Skurmesh Anklebiter was spoiling for a fight and I didn’t want to end a session of D&D without some actual combat. I toyed with the idea of throwing the Lich back in but that felt a bit cheap especially since the party had been lucky and avoided that encounter.

Instead I decided to let the party out of the mountain in a valley with a river of fire and gave them an encounter worth fighting: a green dragon, specifically Melgoroth of the Eternal Blight. I was wary of running another solo, especially since the hydra was soundly beaten and didn’t provide much entertainment. Mercifully Melgoroth provided much more entertainment.

Now you might be wondering what a green dragon, a race of dragon that commonly makes its home in forests, would be doing in a blasted volcanic waste. Indeed my players were likewise interested in how I planned to dig myself out of this hole. Luckily in the first session Caradoc asked about dragons and I had mentioned they were driven into the north; Melgoroth specifically was driven north by the Knights of the Order Rosenkavalier after it killed the other dragons in the area and gorged itself on one too many local towns.

The party opened poorly, the rogue squandered her surprise round destroying the nearby rock face and everybody else got close enough to cause some damage before it unleashed its breath weapon. Then came Du’nn’o’s (!?) moment of glory as she used her Close Quarters ability to leap on the dragons back and stab it for some reasonable damage. Melgoroth however was having none of this and flew high above the lava and shrugged Du’nn’o off ditching her into the lava.

I wussed out on the lava damage and Du’nn’o actually ended up taking very little damage from the lava and Skurmesh used Knight’s Move to allow her to fey step out of ‘Firey Flamey Death(tm)’. If I should ditch someone into lava again the damage will be colossal; I’m thinking damage, healing surge damage and ongoing damage.

The rest of the fight was a tough affair that consumed most of the party’s resources (the way a good solo should), fortunately Melgoroth’s breath weapon refused to recharge and with Caradoc being a Hospitalier and Skurmesh on healing duty the party was rarely in danger. Melgoroth eventually was felled by Du’nn’o when I forgot about an ability she had in play that dealt damage when it attacked her and it claimed the last of its hit points as she met its incoming attack with her dagger.

Overall this session had a much more satisfying fight and I think I’ve learned what makes a good solo (ready for making my own ‘Hydra 2.0’). However given that I was a little strung out the colour and roleplaying seemed to suffer. The players were all willing but I wasn’t as enthused as session 2; hopefully for next time (a fortnight away as Katarakis is fighting the ‘Black Gate’ at work next Sunday) I’ll be a little more enthusiastic and have some interesting encounters planned out.

Until next time; add parting witticism here.

Monday 6 April 2009

On Top of the World: Session 1 & 2

Long time no see, but lets see if we can get this back on track.

We've just started a new campaign in my current poison of choice Dungeons & Dragons 4th ed. Having scrabbled around a couple of times coming from level 1 (including an extremely brief stint actually playing as a Modron Fighter) I decided I wanted to run a game at Paragon Tier.

For Those of you going 'Para-wha!?' let me explain.

4th Edition is split into 3 tiers of play, 1st to 10th level is heroic tier where you fight goblins and humans and generally faily natural stuff. Next us is Paragon tier from 11th to 20th level where you'll spend alot of time beating up really Harry Housen shit like cyclopses, demons, hydras and the interesting dragons. Essentially Paragon is where you fight big monsters and smite their ruin on the mountain side. Abover this from level 21 to level 30 is Epic tier where you graduate from the school of monsters bashing and start crunching your way through greater demons, elder dragons and occasionally demon princes and gods.

We were part way through our Planar game when I pitched the idea for running a Harry Housen wilderness journey 'Into the frozen north!' and everyone loved it so much that we almost immediately dropped the campaign we were doing so that I could run this one.

I'm a little bitter that since buying the core books on release day I have thus far managed to play only once. Still, looking on the bright side this was a great opportunity to use some of the cooler magic items and monsters on offer and to unleash all manner of nastiness on the party.

Now I'm a bit of a pain for writing things down so I decided to try something with this campaign and adlibbed the first session. I wrote down all the encounters and some basic guidelines to keep things moving but everything else I made up on the fly, just letting my imagination inspire me whenever a question was asked. Thus far its worked quite well and it's helped that a stint playing Dark Heresy seems to have given everyone a bit of impetus to roleplay rather than just move their minis around the battle-mat. Our party then looks something like this:

Dave- Katarakis, the garrulous (and often grumpy) Draganborn Paladin of Bahamut.

Gareth- Caradoc Burrows, Halfling Paladin of the Raven Queen (Aka the Halfling Tank)

Amanda- Skurmesh Anklebiter, Last of the Anklebiters, Dwarf Warlord

Rachel- Du'nn'o Me'name, Eladrin Rogue 'Hassassin' of the Raven Queen

Gareth's Halfling Paladin took me aback when I saw it turn up (and the only mini we had that got close to looking appropriate was the plastic citadel Samwise, which lessens the overall effect) but as you will see its actually quite strong.

Our heroes gathered at the northernmost Dwarven citadel of Farpont, a distant spire of rock (172ft 3in because they always want to know) upon which sits a great temple to Moradin within which the foremost heroes of the Hearthlands now sit around a great octagonal table. They were summoned by Caradoc Burrows an aging Paladin of the Raven Queen to answer his call to arms and he details an audacious plot to travel into the north to seal the Gods Gate and put an end to the threat of an invasion by the gods.

I was shocked, they were roleplaying. Katarakis was garrulous, Skurmesh was possibly drunken and quite hilarious and even Caradoc, played by our resident munchkin, was having a good turn detailing his fears and his reasons for this final jaunt into the north. They interacted well with my NPCs they didn't try to loot anyone who stab someone up just because they were bored. I was pleased.

The party, having spent two days preparing probed King Raminos' Alchemist; Caspian, for information and he advised them upon three known routes into the mountains. The party elected not to go over the mountains (no cyclopses and hill giants for me) and not to go through the Ashfall Forest (Caradoc wisely deciding that nopthing good could come from a place where is rained ash from the sky constantly; they annoyingly missed my Beholder and Basilisk) instead they elected to 'pull a Frodo' and headed through the Neminoan Barrows beneath the mountain.

'It's a barrows, with two paladins undead dont stand a chance!'

I had intended for them to then enjoy a skills challenge, something I'd never really got to do running Keep on the Shadowfell. Now I'd heard that some DM's aren't big fans of the way Skills Challenges work but I was determined to find out for myself and so decided they should wander the wilderness for a while and how well they did would determine whether they found their chosen path or strayed into one of the other ones.

It was at this point, having had the game run far too smoothly that Gareth threw a huge gold-plated spanner into the workings of my mental process: 'Does this place have a library?'

Bugger, I hadn't considered that they might not just womble off into the wilderness and might actually research the location of these fabled barrows. In the past I might have said no but I wanted the players to shape the world with their questions and actions and so taking a bit of advice from the Dungeon Masters Guide I said yes. I retooled my skills challenge and let the players decide what there characters would do in a library that sprung up full of tightly packed shelves with brass bound tomes, dwarven librarians sleeping on some small stacks pipes still in mouths and low slung passageways in what evolved into an almost labyrinthine library. The haracters eventually found their map after Katarakis leafed through a tome and found it quite by accident.

Finally the party was off.

Borrowing horses from the Thane of Farpont, an old ally in their past exploits our heroes rode out to the Neminoan Barrow and found it in the shadow of the northen mountains a long path into darkness overgrown with moss and tall grass. The party were cautious, almost annoyingly so; but I won't blame them since they've met me before*.

Eventually we got going down a long corridor onto which graven images of a god from the beyond Sholonoth the Unnamable were carved representing a journey from life to death and Du'nn'o scouted ahead using her low light vision to discover a chamber in which two skeletal figures stood with some hunched, bloated creature. For the first time ever the party got to launch an ambush instead of being on the back foot and set about their foes with gusto.

Du'nn'o was particularly deadly in the opening rounds and the party spent most of the battle getting her combat advantage to get the most mileage from her frankly rediculous +3d8 sneak attack bonus. Skurmesh was batterred repreatedly by four armed monstrosities that only eventually his by rolling a critical; which Katarakis instantly dismissed by channelling the will of Bahamut.

Caradoc didn't fare quite so well.

The hulking figure seemed to take exception to the champion of the Raven Queen and spent the entire battle enveloping him within black tendrils and imprisoning him in a zone of darkness within his exposed ribcage. This was the Soul Devourer which my party seemed to have some difficulty getting to grips with. That said Caradoc is built as a redirect Paladin, he has four different ways of redirecting an attack onto himself to spare his party members. With a Constitution of 19 and an AC of 28 he's quite difficult to hit and can only get tougher as I found out later.

It took some time for the party to slay the monsters but for their troubles they recieved an ancient ring of dwarven design (which wound up in the hands of Caradoc; not the Dwarf) and got to venture deeper into the Barrow.

The next session saw the party venture deeper into what I've dubbed 'The Undermanse' and came out of the passageway onto a platform with a string of Lord of the Rings quotes. In the darkness the party could see only echoes caught in torchlight of distant buildings; until we remembered that Skurmesh is a dwarf and so has Darkvision. Skurmesh saw distant towers of irregular shapes and relaying it Katarakis and Caradoc managed to work out that they were arranged in a formation that spoke of some sinister mathematics. Hanging from the ceiling of the hollowed mountain were great stalegmites (stalegtites?) between which walkways of stone had been constructed.

The party took a staircase and headed down, stopping only to examine the decayed remnants of a mural which had crumbled into dust of many colours including an 'unnatural' pink which offends Katarakis for reasons he cannot explain. Skurmesh decides to taste the chalk to try and discern its make up and finds it tangy and metallic, although not in a manner like blood. D&D veterans might childe Skurmesh for doing this and rightly so; I decided to give Skurmesh a disease the next time he woke up partly as a warning (It ended up being the non-fatal Cackle Fever) and partly because I wanted to see how they worked; forgetting that Caradoc knew Cure Disease.

The party continued on until they reached a brazier which lit as they approached casting a sickly yellow light; though no device or magic seemed to have activated it. In the distance to the north Skurmesh sees something move in one of the towers and despite Katarakis' grumbling the party head east into a series of passageways and walked for many hours; eventually becoming weary.

They found a room after some searching that was irregular in shape (they didn't ask me how many sides it had, but lets say 17), it had one entryway and spigots of wood were laid about. At one end growing out of the wall was a thick boughed tree that seemed to be made from the stone itself and loomed over the room. On its greyed stony branches buds that glowed with black light hung and the party decided (and their respective rolls confirmed) that this was no tree they'd ever seen.

The party rested for several hours Caradoc shirking his guard duties since Du'nn'o only requires four hours meditation and it was during her watch that she heard the singing, a voice high pitched and distant that at first seemed to echo from outside before coming closer and finally resting in the room with them. A golden light came brom the trunk of the tree and Caradoc identified the singing as being Supernal the language of the gods.

Fortunately Caradoc knows Supernal (along with Common and Halfling) and so heard the voice speaking of plains of forests and trees and of marching at the head of armies and of the slaying of its enemies. Caradoc interrogated it and it answered in more strains of past heroes and of a longing to march once more at the heads of armies and speaking of the breaking down of walls. Katarakis, growing impatiant (and still sulking over the party's decision to not head north and 'crack some heads'), decided the best course of action was to heat the stone with his breath and then hit it with his hammer to release whatever was inside; however at the last moment Caradoc plunged his hand into the tree and pulled out a sword of golden steel which cast a glow about them.

Katarakis went back to sulk in a corner over not getting to hit something.

In the morn, or at least when the party woke up in their twilight underworld, they pressed on and the path began to head north until they came upon a path that opened upon a ledge. Du'nn'o crept forwards and spied a being coweled in a dark robe; which might have been significant had the figure not been stood next to a HYDRA. The figure disappeared into a dimension door and the party prepared themselves for battle.

Now the Hydra is a Solo Brute a level above the characters and can do a ton of attacks per turn; which I expected to put it in relatively good stead and having seen how long encounters usually take my party I decided to adjust its Hit Points down. This was a good idea but not for the reason I thought it would be.

In this session the party really came into its own; the two Paladins set about the beast with gusto; Katarakis making it vulnerable to radiant damage and Caradoc putting his new sword to good use and directing the beasts attacks against himself to force damage on it from Katarakis' divine challenge. Du'nn'o spent the entirety of the fight flanking it as the creature was boxed in between her and the ledge the two paladins were stood on. Meanwhile Skurmesh, despite falling on his face stood tall as a warlord using a clever combination of powers and feats to grant a string of standard actions to Katarakis who smote the beast with holy flame.

I'm glad I reduced the things health as the extra Hit Points could only have dragged the fight out with what was an underwhelming Solo. The Hydra was menacing when it was put on the table, but any party that can heal like mine can soak up the damage it does with ease and after that the Hydra doesn't have that many tricks. That said we were using Dave's converted citadel Hydra (out of a carnosaur no less) which is frankly quite beautiful so I'm glad we got to use it.

I was feeling generous at the end of this session so I handed out two more magic items: Aevis Sandals for Du'nn'o who can now fly, albeit briefly, and the Shield of God's Breath for Skurmesh which wards away arrows with a divine wind.

Katarakis then sulked about not getting any shiny stuff; I now have him down on my sheet as 'Katarakis the Grumpy'.

*I and some of my party had listened to the Podcast of Mike Krahulik, Jerry Holkins and Scott Kurtz taking on the Keep on the Shadowfell so I decided to mix it up a little. In the first room where the false floor put was I replaced it with a poison needle trap (Level 6 Blaster) which almost killed some of the party. Since then they have become suitably wary of a DM who thinks things aren't quite fatal enough.