Night Below: Murder Below

We are finally in the home stretch of this Night Below campaign, which is getting close to the two year mark. I’m guessing we have about two games to go. I could easily have stretched this out. The Derro town urban location I created as a last stopping point before the City of the Glass Pool could have provided a ton of role-playing opportunity, with its marketplace and slave trade and all. All sorts of humanoid types mixing it up there. But with the previous game more or less being one giant waste of time (taking place almost entirely in a small cave two characters were recovering from going into the negatives), I feel I should not dilly dally. Personally, I am starting to feel a bit burnt out on running AD&D. Not for good mind you, I just want to spend the upcoming year focusing on a Knights of the Old Republic campaign, and maybe a bit more Metamorphosis Alpha and some Champions. I need some quality time with a game where players cannot argue with me on every point.

I’m going to do a long post with my final thoughts for posterity on this setting when the campaign is over, but for now I’ll say that it is not just challenging and often brutal in terms of combat, but is also a bit of mental grinder. Besides the oppressive underground setting, there are around half a dozen mostly neutrally aligned tribal forces that have to be dealt with, either through some kind of appeasement or with a huge fight. I see online that there have been groups that have had campaigns go for the better part of a decade with this module. Sheesh, good thing I am stopping with book 2.

So in this game the party carried on, meeting and counseling with the group of Derro Renegades who oppose the Mind Flayers who have enslaved many of their people. Jump ahead to the party going into the Derro Town, meeting the few allies they have there, and making an assault on the Mind Flayer tower where the Crown of Derro Domination is supposedly held by an Illithids. If it is there or not, the group decided that if they were going to assault the City of the Glass Pool, they didn’t need this place at their backs with evil reinforcements. So we ended the game with them beginning assaulting the tower, and the giant Derro cavern rocking with explosions from the Renegade Derro causing distractions for the party.

OK, but the most significant thing that happened this game was while among the Renegades. The Renegade leader had offered to purchase the party captive, Prentyss, the young female thief member of the slaver group from the previous couple of games (and a group that, with the exception of the added NPC Xavier, was a set encounter in book 2 of the module). Yet another argy bargy started (see last game for an example of such) over what to do with Prentyss, but Krysantha the Drow put an end to debate about the teen girl by taking her scimitars and murdering the helpless thief in front of all. It was kind of a chilling moment. I tried to give the other players a chance to do something, but with the Githyanki ally I had Paul (of Lily fame) running also ready to kill Prentyss to end arguments, there was not much they could do.

Let’s talk about big Dan and his drow character Krysantha for a minute. Dan is a big beefy dude from South Africa (white guy) who has also lived in Australia for a long period. He is an international businessman with his own internet-related company (and he lives up on Mulholland in a big house with a view and a hot wife, so I’m guessing rich or on his way to it). He has also worked in the past with some kind of mountain rescue, and you can for sure picture him coming down a mountain with a fucked-up hiker over each shoulder. Dan was one of our group’s original players along with me, Andy, and Terry. He is a funny guy, with a great enthusiasm for the game. Dan also justifies what I would call “powergaming” as just letting off stress and getting some escapism, which I truly believe. He is by no means a problem player as a person, but his character Kryantha has gotten my goat a few times in the past.

When we started this group I was just off of a more or less 7 or 8 year gaming hiatus. The year or so leading up the formation I was dying to do some gaming, but didn’t want to seek out other groups because I wanted to run my own games (plus I wanted to pick and chose the type of people I would sit for hours with and pretend – you know what I mean). So when we got together and my players base turned out to be pretty cool I was tickled pink. One of those side effects of the pink tickle was that I was pretty open with what I was going to allow for characters. Thus came Krysantha.

Krysantha is a female drow, and a fighter/druid. I didn’t really look up drow in the Unearthed Arcana to refresh myself on them before I said “OK, you can have one”, nor did I think of the power gaming ramifications of a female drow (females being the more powerful of the species) combined with fighter prowess and druid spell ability. Ultimately, this turned out to be a powerful character. How much of this did Dan count on? I dunno. See, in the 90’s I ran tons of games of all kinds for a couple of different long-term groups. Most of these people had at most a little bit of gaming experience. So they took what I had to offer without much complaint. Sure, somebody would occasionally point out an inconsistency or something, or ask for something for a character that was out of line. But for the most part, as long as they were having fun they didn’t care how the sausage was made. This is how I got in the heavy (and lazy) habit of house ruling so many things.

Well, as it turned out, when I got these much more experiences players for this latest group, I had house ruled myself into a corner. Both Dan and Andy had a lot of gaming background, and had played under different kinds of DM’s. This did not fully gel with my laid back style, but over time they mostly acclimated. Andy especially has stopped being a pain for me almost completely with this stuff. I think he now gets how I do things, and approaches things a bit more in a way that is more enjoyable to me. Dan as well to a degree, but there is still a side of me that sees the big guy as a shamelessly powergaming bastard. And I made it all possible.

But hell, Dan is fun and really into roleplaying and I would not give him up for anything. But his actions are still a bit frustrating. Before this last game, he emailed me saying he would like to change Krysantha from lawful neutral to neutral. “Oh brother” I said, “he wants to be more difficult with the character now.” That hasn’t panned out yet, but to avoid more argument against his characters wishes, he committed murder on a helpless (and not fully evil) captive and his neutral status prevents any kind of forced alignment change. My call, because Krysantha claimed to have done it for the good of the group (whereas I think Dan just wanted to kill something).

Anyway, it sets up an interesting dynamic. Big Ben’s Lumarin the high elf is lawful/good. Terry is neutral/good (actually, I think neutral with good tendencies), as is little Ben’s Ormac the gnome. Andy’s bard Vaidno is staunchly chaotic/good. I think the shock of this murderous act was palpable for a minute or two. Personally, I had more I would have liked to do with the Prentyss character in the future, but a part of me was glad because her death made a couple of things easier on me (like I didn’t have to have her boyfriend Xavier and friends try to bargain for her release).

But what next? These basically good characters could not really do much about Krysantha, even the lawful Lumarin. I mean, Krysantha is a deadly character with her two magical scimitars and all the rest. Plus they are in the “belly of the beast”, so to speak. More dissension in the group at this juncture could result in a total party kill. But considering this was a basically evil act, the good PC’s are unlikely to associate with the drow once this is all over. Also there is the party NPC, neutral/good ranger Dia to consider. She was obviously miffed at Krysantha for the blatant murder, and she carries the sword Finslayer. Finslayer, besides being and anti-Kuo Toa weapon, is also anti-drow.

The “epilogue game” after this adventure is going to be a hoot. That is, if they all survive the next couple of games.