The Tragedy of The Drunken Troll

 Alright, game 2 of the new Roll20 campaign "Trade and Turpitude," taking place in the last caravan season of the year in the Southern Shires of the kingdom. 

Everybody showed up. Good sign. Though I won't usually consider it a campaign until after game three. Law of averages dictate somebody will drop out by then, but everybody seems to be having a good time and are interacting with the material in the ways I like them too. I think I come up with some interesting ideas here and there, along with lots of trope stuff. Something like 40 years of GMing will give you that. And my old experiences with "out in the weeds" stuff in the deep past; Arduin and Judges Guild and such, lets me interject some more wacky elements, but mostly keeping it D&D. I look to more modern sources for ideas, random tables and such, but usually if I think the hell out of something various angles and hooks emerge that I think will be interesting to an encounter. Hey, there is plenty to brag about when you pluck most of the ideas you integrate into play out of your own head. 

Haha, really, a DM's ideas should come from all over the place. Anyway, I was sort of having trouble coming up with some things. The first few games of this campaign will be travelling around with a small caravan of high-end merchants from the big city up north. Besides some village and town encounters already in my head, I need to come up with some incidental encounters that can occur along the way. Things to fit in here and there along the way when I need some filler. 

I look at various random tables online, road and country encounters. Most of them aren't very filling. Things like "you meet an old man who is not what he seems," or "You see a coffin up against a tree with the lid closed. Do you investigate?" OK, these are meant to be filled in, but are hardly things you can't think up with nice creamy filling on your own. I wish these examples were a little deeper. 

But if I mull on it a bit (couple refreshing adult beverages never hurt) I usually hit on something. For this game it was "..hmmm, what if the caravan comes across a troll laying across the road, passed out from drinking barrels of powerful whiskey." 

We were still in the tavern with the party meeting the caravan master, having finished the previous games encounters there. But off to the caravan grounds to meet the merchants. 

A wine merchant, a weapon seller/trainer, a music teacher and instrument seller, a bookseller, and a clothier. It was night, but the wineseller still had a few local lords tasting some wine. The party immediately noticed a heavy set, traveler shoplifting a couple bottles of expensive cabernet. "Fat Mike the Traveler," a professional thief and con man. 

Size increased to show texture.

It was an amusing little encounter, and the long and short of it was the PC's got a few gold richer by getting the wine back and extorting Fat Mike for some coin. A typical "give you my wallet? No, give me YOUR wallet" situation. 

Next day when the caravan got on the road for a couple hours, it was second encounter time. This time it was the caravan coming around the corner on a country road and almost running into a bit old troll passed out drunk and blocking the way. 

Size NOT increased to show texture. Nobody
wants to get too close a look at this. 

Clearly it as a troll who stole a cart of big whiskey barrels and he was passed out snoring in the road. Even had a nice big puddle of whiskey puke next to him. Ew. 

Turning the caravan around in the smallish area to do it would have been time consuming and noisy. Plus at least one character didn't want it on his conscious to have a hungover troll around for others to bump into. But what to do? 

Slit his throat and roll him out of the way? No way, man. He's a troll. You can cut a trolls head off and it will still be active, the head still alive and controlling the body. Trolls are very coup de gras resistant. Get some fires going? Well, everything was wet from light rain. 

Everybody, character and players, knew that they were no match for the thing if it got up and started laying into them. As they moved around trying to figure it all out, the troll seemed to almost wake up a time or two. The shadow elf ranger was a monster hunter, and he just wanted to start chopping into it. But the cooler heads gathered, torches and lanterns fetched from the wagons, and lantern oil was spread over the blacked out beast.  

With the wetness, and me not going old school napalm with the oil (I have always said; oil is for keeping lanterns lit, not for going all Apocalypse Now like so many neckbeards from times bygone like it too). But with the troll waking up, they had to go on the attack with what they had. 

In 5th edition any fire damage will keep the regeneration from working for that round. That combined with the characters getting some licks in before it could even stand up (with some advantage) helped. I mean, they were scared. My number one new player "M" sounded a little annoyed that I was hitting them with such a strong creature. But I certainly gave it disadvantage that first round. It all helps out. Because one solid blow could kill a 1st level PC. I did explain that I am old school and that characters need to be over their head now and again. At any rate, after the fact she apologized for doubting me when the encounter was won (though it's not really over even though they think it is). 

But they did alright. I mean, this was kind of a puzzle encounter, where the trick was to attack while you had as much advantages as possible. They did alright with that, and its hit points were plummeting down. "Zip" the commoner fighter made the spectacular move. There was still a full barrel on the cart. He opened it, set it aflame (I had it be strong dwarvish stuff), and the cart became an instant fireball. He turned it around and ran it right into the suffering troll. Woosh! That roll went up like an old dry Xmas tree. It was pretty cool. That took it right down, and as we were going late we had to end right there. 

This "trade roads" portion of the campaign seems to be going well, and the theme feels like it will remain even after they are off the road. But what was going to be a couple of game portion of the campaign is probably going to be more like a 5 or 6 game portion before I get them to my version of Apple Lane and Gringles Pawnshop. It's going so well and there is great character development here. 

I don't plan to post about every session. Who needs that, right? And there are other aspects to the Roll20 experience I want to write about. I'm loving it, and in all honestly it may be my format for good. Player M said she is done with the face to face group experience, and I kind of feel the same way. I don't really like having people who are not close friends in my place, and I don't always like to schlep to another persons house, especially as you cannot really control the gaming environment in that. But online I have all the control. Its awesome. 

But however I do it, it feels great having a full group. My besties B and L, my boardgame buddies I talk about all the time here, are wanting in on some Roll20 as well, so my player pool is for sure deepening. I'm so glad I took another chance on getting a group going from that sketchy Roll20 forum area. I finally lucked out! 

Cheers

Don’t rush the campaign, bro

After several years without so much as a cold (good times wherein I got to use almost all of my sick days for fun things), I got hit hard by this flu that is going around late last week, and am still trying to shake off its evil grip. So last night instead of getting back into the heat of things with the assault on The City of The Glass Pool, I had Big Ben do a session of his elf-centric campaign since I wasn’t really feeling on-point. In a couple of weeks we’ll get back to my campaign, but this has given me a chance to rethink some things about how I am letting myself feel about my now high-level campaign.

In the last few months I feel I have been thinking a bit too feverishly about finishing the current Night Below campaign, which has been going on strong for around two and a half years now (the actual underground portion being about two years). I have enjoyed the epic nature of the adventure, but I think I have let my desire to run other things make me too obsessed with the end of this thing. I keep saying “two or so games to go,” but the fact is that I don’t really know how much more there is too do. The party has taken care of one or two goals that are required to cause the breakdown of the Kuo Toan society in TCOTGP, but there are still a couple of big things to be accomplished to bring it all home. Plus, who knows what other plans the party might have in terms of some looting and other activities they might engage in after the fall of the nasty little city. And of course a long campaign like this will require at least a full session of epilogue for the characters after all is said and done (the return to the surface world, personal affairs, etc). So although I judge that the immediate adventure should take 2-4 more sessions, I’m not going to rush it anymore.

The fact is I’m having much more fun running for higher level characters than I thought it would. It’s been many a harvest moon since I did regular games for characters over 7th level. I’m usually ending a campaign after about a year and moving on to do new characters. Not that the higher characters careers end or anything like that; but their presence in the game world in the past has often been relegated to cameos.

So, even thought I will be starting some Knights of the Old Republic sometime in the next couple of months (the gang seems to have come up with some interesting characters for that – most of them have downloaded PDF’s of the rules). I’m going to go ahead and let book 2 of NB play out, without any sort of imposed ending by me. Does this mean I’ll go right into them going into the lowest depths and into The Sunless Sea of book 3 of Night Below right away? Maybe not. Book 3 ends in an assault on an evil underground city as well. So I think I may have some mods to make, and will probably want some time to pass so the players don’t get bored. Judging from my online research on NB, the majority of campaigns barely make it to the end of book 2 before all involved are fed-up.

But it has been a fun campaign, challenging and rewarding to run, so I’m not going to be in such a rush to put a stopper in it any more. Let it go where it goes.

Reconsidered: Night Below Campaign

Reconsidered: Night Below Campaign

During the 90’s, I hardly ever bought D&D supplementary material. I mean, I had so many seeds of ideas in my head when it came to gaming, I never felt I needed to buy other people’s ideas. Plus as a Scotsman, I’m notoriously cheap (and yet can never seem to save any money).

But when I got back into gaming after several years off, I had a hankering to purchase some of the interesting sounding items that I passed on many years before. So some time around winter of last year I got great deals from Ebay on the Dark Sun boxed set, and the Night Below boxed set.

By then I had a nice little campaign going, running countryside adventures to build up PC’s for an eventual dungeon crawl. Although they were interesting reads, Dark Sun and Night Below didn’t seem to have any immediate use in my current games. Actually, I had mulled over making a gateway in the dungeon that would transport the party to the Dark Sun world, that would be sort of a post-apocalypse version of my regular game world. But that was just a thought.

The party is getting up there in levels, most around 6th or 7th, and it is starting to seem like they will be at least 3 levels higher than I had planned them to be for the dungeon. So this last weekend I broke out my copy of Night Below, wondering if it might just make a decent alternative to the dungeon players were heading to. I took a good look at the first two of the three books of NB. I started to see the events of book 2 would be easily adapted to my current scenarios.

Book 1 features little adventures in a populated area of towns, villages, and farms. Much like my games have been so far, these little Mickey Mouse outdoor adventures are designed to beef up the party for eventual underground adventuring. Many little situations in book 1 are meant to give motivations for the Underdark adventures in book 2, but I should have no problem using what has already happened in my games to tie this in. For one thing, in the last couple of games the party has explored a gnomish “Safechamber,” a secret pad under the human frontier town of Overtown built long ago as a place for gnomes to hide from the monsters that once roamed the surface world in greater numbers. The party found a hidden trap door within, and that one appears to lead to an even larger gnomish area around a half mile under the town. I didn’t plan to have them go much deeper than that, but seeing as the underground gnome town (apparently abandoned) had passages to the Underdark, why not switch gears a bit and give the party good reason to go deeper (waaaaay deeper) below?

In the last few games I’ve had party members running afoul of a group of Drow who are in the area, secretly planning to eventually go to the same dungeon the players are going. But no problem, I can now have them coming to the area to meet up with Mind Flayers (from book 2) and working out a deal to capture spellcasters for them. So I can change the human slavers the party eventually encounters near the Derro area underground to these drow no problem. The players deserve a real face-off with these pesky dark elves anyway.

In the next game the party will explore the little abandoned sub-surface gnomish town, and they will discover gnome historians (and their infant daughter) from the gnome areas up north. They will have been spending years here studying and restoring this once bustling little community. The gnome family will be getting bothered by gnolls who have moved into upper caves near the abandoned gnome town of “Southgem”. These gnolls in turn will have been displaced from lower caverns by the troop of orcs that are working for the Mind Flayers who have been moving back and forth between the surface area and the City of the Glass Pool far below in the deeper underdark.

So all this, with a bit of prodding, should get the adventurer’s on their way to the Deep Gnome city, and eventually to the Kou-Toa.

There is a lot I don’t like in the Night Below material, and it will take a lot of my personal tweaking. But it has always been thus when I use modules or adventures created by others. You have personal taste, and you have to take that into account and make mods if you are a creative DM.

So in a later posts I will detail some of the changes, for good or better, that I plan to make in Night Below. If you have used the NB material in your games, I’d love to hear what kind of changes you might have made, and how the adventures panned out. If you have only read the material, I’d still love to hear what you think about it.