DM’s Jollies

Here ChicagoWiz discusses more or less standing his ground on doing in his game what is appealing to him, and not giving in to player demands for what they find fun.

Although I think I am philosophically with him in that, historically I have tried to present things in my games towards player enjoyment. I’ve never really been a “killer DM” or gotten my jollies from “threatening” characters with my bag of DM tricks as is often prevalent among our kind . I think my focus has been on giving players the means to have a good time within the game context, because player’s enjoying my games is probably most of the fun for me. If they feel generally challenged by things, and are also feeling their character is “doing what he does best” and moving towards some as-yet formed destiny, it tends to be fun for them.

The game just sort of happens without a lot of conscious thought during the process of “I’m really enjoying myself!” (Although there have been exceptional in-game moments where I have allowed myself to savor some true bliss). It’s after the game, and during prep for the next one, that I let my mind wander to what I really enjoyed about it. But I can’t expect players to get that same feel. Players need to be palpably enjoying the experience during the game more than any other time. Otherwise it seems like a long time to be sitting at a table together.

Over the decades I have not experienced a lot of player complaints about not getting enough of some thing or another in games. I very rarely hear “we are in the wilderness too much” or “we are in the city too much” or things like that. I present what I am going to present, and players interact with whatever it is. Not necessarily because I “am that good,” but maybe because I am comfortable with any type of location or situation that might pop up in games. I’ve run entire campaigns in the wilderness (ranger and druid focused parties) and in civilization (thieves’ guilds). It’s all good.

Also, because I don’t often enjoy being a player myself, I try not to include things in my own game that I find a turn-off in others. Killer DMing, excruciating and fun-sapping overlong initiative and declaration rounds, and challenges beyond the group’s level are all peeves as a player that I keep in mind as a DM.

But as far as my own enjoyment as DM, it has been tested a bit here and there in my current gaming incarnation. My balls-up with an established Star Wars Saga group the other year is a perfect example of players expecting that the GM is “working for them,” to the point that they even patiently waited for me to leave at the end of a session so they could discuss my performance as a group (can you imagine?).

And in my regular group I have “Power Game Dan” and “Gimmi Gimmi Andy” (great foes of a player-friendly GM) to tussle with on a regular basis. But I get a lot of laughs out of these guys as well, so I don’t feel fully tested as far as an “overworked game master” for the most part. It’s become part of the game dynamic to successfully deal with sharks who go after a fairly easy DM. One hand has “hate” tattooed on the knuckles, and the other has “love” on it.

But bottom line, a GM/DM needs to look to what is fun for him. And if he has no fun whatsoever with games set in towns or whatever, it’s his prerogative to avoid those settings in his games. For the better part of the 90’s I barely had any true dungeons in my games because I had become so tired of them in the 80’s. And this freaking game is called “Dungeons and Dragons.”

Night Below Modifications

Now that the long campaign is over, I can talk about some changes I made to the adventure as presented in the module, and some of the reasons I made the changes. I doubt many people are going to take up a super-long campaign with this (one campaign I read about started in the 90’s and well into the current decade – something like 8 years including all the book in the module) at this point, but you never know.

Some of the things I read online when I started the campaign were how players were pretty sick of the oppression and the simple hack and slash of the adventure as it proceeds to the City of The Glass Pool. By that point, role-playing was mostly confined to interacting with a variety of evil and neutral tribes of creatures in the Underwilderness. But in reality, it was I who was getting a bit tired of throwing things at the party in the same setting again and again for two years. So some of my change-ups were not just to save time, but to give me a little variety. Here are some of the things I did, for posterities sake if nothing else.

*Time saving: I think this is key in TNB. This campaign takes people years and years to finish, if they don’t get fed up with it by then. I didn’t want to make a lifetime commitment out of The Night Below. So I cut corners as much as I could even though this particular campaign did not include Book 1 or Book 3. Even with an eye towards time management, this campaign has gone on for a bit over two years. We play for around 3-4 hours twice a month, so if you play a lot more than that then time is not that much of an issue for you. Many of the changes I made in this module cut down on some of the challenges, but they saved months worth of sessions. Where I did remove or tone-down foes, I tried to compensate with other, less time-consuming challenges.

A Sketchy Timeline of Changes

*I bought a used Night Below boxed set on Ebay several months into a casual campaign that had PC’s working for a caravan from the big city of Tanmoor. This caravan was travelling to the southernmost frontier towns of the Tanmoor Kingdom. Ultimately, the players planned (through the urgings of the young ranger NPC “Dia”) to go to a classic dungeon crawl further south in the Hobbit lands. I switched things over then to a Night Below campaign instead. Because much adventure had been experienced in the villages and towns of the south, I completely skipped the Book 1 portion of the module. I literally used nothing from that book. I just had the party come to the largest town in the area, and discover that spell casters and others were being kidnapped wholesale and taken to caverns down below. Two of those kidnapped spellcasters would be new players Big Ben and Paul’s characters, who appeared in the clutches of hungry, stew-making Gnolls in the upper tunnels when it was time for them to join our group.

For little Ben, a player who had played a bit more than Big B and Paul, I came up with some cool stuff for his gnome to get him involved. Mainly, a sub-surface sort of panic room below town that his great uncle had built hundreds of years ago, and below this was found “SouthGem,” an old abandoned surface gnome town from ancient times that a family of gnomes from up north, The Toolos, were living in and studying and restoring. This not only gave the gnome character some gravitas, but having some things in the sub-surface area before the underdark as a buffer to the isolation below added a little color, and possible places to retreat to and rest without having to go all the way up to town.

* I added in surface town encounters with a party of drow (travelling incognito). This party, led by a drow city ex-pat named Avatara (is an NPC I have used on and off for decades) encountered a couple of the characters a bunch of games ago. They are still around the area, and have been on a mission to explore the ruins of the drow city at the Sunless Sea in Book 3. With the PC Krysantha being a drow, and The Night Below lacking in the presence of dark elves, I thought it would be interesting to have this group lurking around.

*I totally threw out the Rockseer Elf part of the adventure. Yes, I know they are a big part of it as written, but I just did not want them and their baggage involved in the game, nor did I want them to become a part of the surface world as the end of Book 3 would tell you to do. So Rockseers, including their magic items, artifacts, and bickering NPC’s are nowhere to be found. Sure, they could be around as they are, but I just don’t involve them. This saves a bunch of time (at the point in the module you encounter the Rockseers, you need to backtrack many days to go to their area), though not using them deprives the players of an opportunity to have an 11th level MU, with an enhanced set of boots and cloak of elvinkind, assist in the attack on the City of the Glass Pool.

*Deep Gnomes – I named their city Blingdenblang, and I gave them a much larger role than depicted in the module (to make up for removing Rockseer Elf involvement). They are a little more helpful, and Queen Carmenaran friendlier to them (though no less paranoid about being invaded by the evil below). They provide the usage of a flux point, and also offer up a certain amount of hospitality. I had the party save a royal engineer of Carmenaran’s from certain death at the hands of gnolls (they ate his legs), so his influence helped the party be accepted as well. I still had the gnomes a bit afraid of giving themselves away to the deadlier races down below, so they offered very limited access to the flux point (the party could only use it two or three times). I had to expand the city a bit one night when Paul’s thief/MU Lily went out to burgle a building. She snuck into a building and climbed some walls, filching from a chest in a room some gold and gems.

*I played down the big troll tribe encounter near the gnome city, and instead just had it be a small encounter with several trolls. Cutting back on this encounter probably saved at least one game session, while still providing a nice troll fight and a favor being done for the gnomes.

*No Grell! I threw out this encounter in its entirety. I really don’t like the Grell as a race or as a monster. For some reason the Grell also seemed sort of out of place and alien even for the Underdark. I really wanted the Illithid, Aboleth, and even the Kuo Toa to be the weirdest races down there. I substituted this place as a Dire Corby hunting ground, where at certain times intruders could expect to fight a “murder” (as flocks of crows are called) of them upwards of 100 at a time. As the PC’s slew around 80 of the beasts, they would cease to be a problem for anyone who passed by for some months.

*There are two encounter areas that I used almost completely as-is by the book. The first was the hook horror/quaggoth and Rakshasa areas, and the second was the Roper/Xorn areas. As usual I did fudge treasure a bit, plus I also decided these areas would have been outpost areas for the drow city on the Sunless Sea left over from its doom several hundred years ago. I included some faded drow artwork and writing on some walls, including a magical portrait of Pajarafane that had the illusion of movement and realism cast upon it (similar to the portraits in Hogwarts).

*Pajarafan/Finslayer: The only thing I changed about the historical ranger personality of Pajarafan was to make him instead a female from the past named Pajarafane. Finslayer was looking for a neutral good ranger over any other kind of owner, and the only individual that fit the bill best was the young NPC ranger Dia. I did not make Pajarafane a female to coincide with this, but it all made sense once Dia got her hands on the sword. The drow Krysantha at one point declared that Dia was the spirit of Pajarafane returned, but that was not my intention, and still might not be the case.

*Clovis the Underdark Ranger: I included this NPC as a sort of appearing/reappearing guide who could give guidance and information when I needed such things given to the players. I had thought about Underdark Rangers for a long time, so this was a chance to use one. Clovis turned out to be the son of famous ranger and Woodlord Arcturus Grimm who lived in the southern lands above currently. Both Clovis and Dia are children of Grimm (Dia only recently learned all this. Could Grimm be a descendant of Pajarafane?) Clovis was never meant to fight in the City of The Glass Pool. Instead, I have him mainly being concerned with trying to save slaves during the chaos of the city assault. His entire purpose as set up by Arcturus Grimm is as a friendly observer who can offer aid when possible, but otherwise sits on the sidelines.

*The party encountered a raiding party of Minotaur’s (from my using The Old School Encounter Reference for encounters instead of the books). When Krysantha the drow druid changed into a bat to go see where they came from, I went ahead and included a Minotaur maze city hidden a few miles off of the main passage. Krysantha did not look into it further, so I did not have to wing further encounters off of that. That would make a nice mini-campaign sometime in the future (because I think the maze city idea is hellacool).

*Book 2 really plays up the Jubilex shrine area, and seems to think it is an obligatory encounter. It isn’t. The party fought the Rakshasa (actually, they left him alone for ownership of the Deck of Many Things), the high level deranged magic-user, and some of the jelly/ooze overflow, but had no intention of going into the temple. I suspect a lot of players would avoid it, even if they suspect there is treasure. Nobody likes dealing with oozes. I think knowing about it, and hearing some lore about it, was more interesting than actually having the players go in there. The party bypassing it probably cut down on yet another session.

*Mixing up the Slaver attackers near the purple worm area: the diverse party of high level Slavers is a cool encounter and a brutal fight. On top of that, I added the character Xavier as leader. A high level fighter/thief, Xavier was created by Paul so his character Lily could have a bad man in her past. The module had this group attacking to kill in very brutal fashion. I found that silly considering these were slavers looking for more slaves to sell for top dollar. So I held off of the major killing attacks at first. That made the encounter less dangerous, but it was still a big challenge. Two characters were left in negative hit points (fighter Helena and MU elf Lumarin) when this fight ended (more or less in a draw, as the roof collapsed from all the powerful spells going off), forcing the party to find a side cave to rest in for a week (they had no access to high level cleric heals and such).

*Derro Town - Adding an urban location in the derro area, whatever the size, is a must. I like that this part of the Underdark (the southern Underdark in my world) is a wild wilderness compared to the northern Drow/Illithid/Cloaker empires, but the long-term isolation and oppressive surroundings are a bit much for player and DM alike. The module would have players travelling to the surface world again and again to restock supplies (and train, which I don’t really require) and rest, but I figure that an underground trading town near the City of The Glass Pool provides some shelter and stocking of equipment and scrolls and such when they need them the most, assuming the party does not just attack all the evil things. So I had a small mind flayer tower on a hill at the center of town, and several hundred derro (some of whom are under the control of the Crown of Domination) run the towns establishments.

Besides the Illithid tower (usually manned by a couple of mind flayers plus Zanticor the main mind flayer visits often. Also, a troop of ogre and troll guards are on the first level), there is a derro tavern (a large building open to all races who can pay), a brothel made up of various slave girls, a road house with rooms for rent, and a street market with food, supplies, animals, water, and even a group of derro dealing in scrolls and magic supplies. As long as a party of adventurers doesn’t draw undo attention, this is a great place to rest and resupply. Also, characters may just want to assault the tower and kill the mind flayers, which would cause some chaos in the town. In my game the party negotiated with the derro renegades so they would cause various distractions (cave-ins and explosions) on the outskirts of town so they could assault the tower with little interference. After all that, the party used the tower as an HQ, and a place for freed slaves to be safe while the party attacked the City of The Glass Pool.

*The Froghemoth – I never really got to use this behemoth that originally appeared in the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Nope, there is no Froghemoth in the Night Below material. But I thought it would be nice to have one around in case I needed just one last dose of possible death to hurl at the party. I decided that Kuo Toan priests could control its actions through special flutes (made from fish bones). They would keep it under the Glass Pool in a large water chamber, to be released under one of two circumstances: Either when the statue of Blipdoolpoolp was defeated (which they didn’t think would ever happen), or if I needed another big encounter and could have priests lead the Froghemoth into the next big cavern to attack the players tower, which would have been a cool set-piece. As it was, I had the creature appear after the fight with the statue, and the players booked right out of there. So never got to use it (although it will still be down there amidst the chaos of the broken Kuo Toan city).

If you’re a DM planning to use The Night Below (either for 1st edition as I did, or for it’s intended 2nd edition) and want more details, just search my blog for “Night Below.” My players discovered my blog late last year, so around then I’m a bit less open about my inner thoughts, but still there is a lot of good detail and ideas within those posts.

"That porn chick slew my elf!"

I said "slew," right? Whew!

Zak Sabbath, an avant garde artist, activist, and performer in several “alternative” adult videos (I’m not sure “porn star” should apply to Zak, but I guess that is subjective) has a blog page hit on his hands with his Playing D&D with Porn Stars site. How could he not with a title like that? Not to take anything from Zak; he seems intelligent and capable when it comes to the usual niche talk about gaming. But there can be no doubt that his blogs popularity has more to do with the fact that he knows porn girls, strippers, tattoo artists, and other alternative types than his post looking at what monsters start with the letter “f”. The fact is, having grown up here in Venice Beach and living in LA my entire life, I have known a pretty good variety of these sorts myself. But for Zak these type of people orbit around the things he is into, and more power to him for getting some of them to game with him.

With the video series I Hit it With My Axe at The Escapist, we get a glimpse into the actual gaming Zak does, namely, Zak’s DM’ing for a motley crew of underground misfits, including a hair dresser, a stripper (who doesn’t look much like the glammed up strippers at most higher end clubs), some punk rock guy you barely get a glimpse of, and a couple of “name” starlets. One is Kimberly Kane, a name I had actually never heard of, but Is apparently the winner of several AVN awards for Gang Bangs and facials and all that great stuff. Also Sasha Grey, a name I have heard of, who I have to admit seems like a gimmicky tack-on to the entire proceedings. I didn’t get the impression she was there because she wanted to play D&D. I kind of doubt she had ever heard of the game before that day. Outside of Sasha (who has a great “girl next door look” similar to that pregnant chick from “Juno”), none of the group are the good looking cutie dolls of mainstream porn, but seem more likely involved in labia piercing and nipple chain goth porn that doesn’t usually show up on shelves next to the latest opus’ from more big name stars. I suppose I shouldn’t say, because I haven’t seen anything with any of these people in them (and believe me I watch my fair share), but as far as my tastes go I like girls with much less of a “hard” street look.

In the background of the very small room that the game takes place in, a sort of wary looking dude sits on a bed and reads Zak’s comic collection, looking up occasionally to scrutinize the proceedings. He is the boyfriend of one of the girls, and his very presence outside of the game seems to indicate to me he is there more like the guy who goes with a stripper to a bachelor party – there to watch out for the girls interests and protect her. His presence there really give me the impression that at least one girl is there more as a publicity thing than as a player. Kimberly, however, does come across as a seasoned player.

We don’t get a ton of idea of the game play, but Zak at least sounds like a capable DM.At one point he starts the game of saying “let’s skip the usual do what you want city stuff, and cut to the chase.” All us DM’s have been there, so you for sure get a “shared experience” vibe from that. But other people’s game are rarely all that interesting to us, so the gimmick here has great importance towards the number of people who have watched and commented on the video. Hopefully we’ll get more detail on the gameplay itself in future eps, or even better some of the girls will start taking their clothes off and making out. Either or.

I have to say the camera work and editing are total shit. No bones about it. Sure, it’s nice to have a Blair Witch thing going on, but the point should be to see more of the gaming and get more of an idea of the characters and situations. But bottom line – this is just another project by a guy with a lot of irons in the fire. Of course this is totally gimmicky, but the truth is Zak does play D&D with some porn-related folk. I’d like to think that Sasha would show up to a game that had no cameras, but I seriously doubt it. But even without Sasha, the whole thing does hold interest for some of us who would like some actual pornie babes at their games. All I get to my games are good girls who only know of “facials” as something you get while you’re getting a pedicure.

Over the last few days there has been some kind of controversy in the old school community regarding this videos presence on The Escapist. I really don’t have time to do all the research, but I guess some folks are up in arms because gaming is a “kids” thing, and sure, that is where most of us start our gaming life. But I for sure have no problem with it (I don’t have kids, nor do I want to game with them), and the video itself has nothing salacious about it (sad to say). It’s just some lower end adult industry people playing D&D. Nothing more.

I want to say finally that from what I understand Zak has a few charities that he is personally involved in, and not just on a “wish I could do something about this” level. He actually donates sizable amounts of money from his endeavors to these charities, so he isn’t just talking the talk. If you give money to a cause, you ain’t no poser.

The elusive all-Tavern game

All DM’s rely heavily on the inns and taverns of their world. These are iconic places where, whether it is in-game time or in-between game time, characters ultimately spend more of their life in these places than anywhere else.

If I had to guess, I’d say that 3 out of 4 of my campaigns from around 1978-1990 began with a bunch of characters who didn’t know each other (actually, I had a habit of having at least a couple of PC’s meet on the road to the tavern, just so there is some role-play back n’ forth right off the bat) hanging out in the boozer when some wizard/cleric/nobleman tripped in with a hammer, nail, and poster advertising for a group of stalwarts to go crawling into the local dungeon jobber for one reason or another.

While these public houses are great places to get adventuring gigs, info, and entertainment, they rarely take up large amounts of actual play time. They are usually just places that keep characters from having to hang out in the street or market squares in between dungeon delves. If things are going slow in the game and the characters are listlessly mooning around the beer hall, you can always have a gang of rakish rogues or barbarians march in as fist-fodder to pass some time. Doesn’t matter if it is some fancy uptown establishment, or some half-orc shit hole, a nice dust-up always gets the juices flowing. I almost can never resist creating a bar fight (it doesn’t help that in my younger, more aggro days I got involved in more than a couple of fights at dive bars here in Venice Beach and other places).

I always wanted to run an entire game set in a tavern. Characters drinking, brawling, wenching, gambling, etc. Recently I played a video game called Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, and in your first levels you are hanging out at an Inn that is haunted by an elvish girl’s ghost, who sings a melancholy tune as you drink your ale and chat to the locals. Eventually you get a job clearing out the rats from the basements, and then deeper below where undead stalk around in the catacombs beneath the establishment. It’s great fun and easy to pull off in a low level game, but it doesn’t really count as a “Tavern Game.”

What I always wanted to see was characters mostly taking it easy, having fun on their time off. Play some cards or dice, chat to the lassies, have a brawl or two. An entire game of just hanging out. But in the past it doesn’t seem to take long for players to get antsy about moving on to big fights and big treasure. I mean, you cannot just force them to play out their roles in a tavern for several hours. A lot of it just seems to depend on their mood. If they have been involved in a lot of violent, life or death combat, it seems to make it easier to get them to take it easy and do some character-developing role-play.

So finally in the last game it just sort of happened. The party is still in a large town on the souther frontier. Having just fought wererats and a gnomish automaton below the town, and an alleyway encounter with the drow party from the previous games, the players decided they wanted to hit the big dive bar for a bit of a rest from the mayhem. So we started the game with them traipsing off to Silvio’s.

I’ve used Silvio’s in games of years past. Formerly a violent den of scum and villainy where a party once attacked it to rescues a child held hostage by gangsters, the place was now run by Silvio’s son, who has made attempts to clean the place up a tad. No longer involved in rackets and gangs, Silvio Jr. just wants to make legit money. So the Tavern now had better booze and food, fair card and dice games (and rat roulette), a small stage for bards, and a cage fighting hall downstairs in the basement.

It was the time of the spring festival, and lots of things were happening in town, but the players seemed content to have their characters relax for a bit. I didn’t mind, I just want the players to have fun and sandbox their own evening. So they decided to spend it at Silvio’s (probably prompted and enticed by a flyer I printed out and had a street kid distributing in the game).

Helena the fighter-girl settled down with some rat roulette, while Ormac the gnome and Dell the elvish monk rattled some dice. After jamming with the house musicians a bit, Vaidno the bard picked up on a dark-haired, doe-eyed serving wench who was sending him smiles. But it wasn’t just quiet gambling: Krysantha the female drow fighter/druid with the double scimitars went down to watch the cage fights, and after seeing the mountain of a man “Creature” whipping ass on all takers, she decided to volunteer to take to the cage. All the other characters came down to watch, and hefty bets where laid on Krysantha. With wooden swords Krysantha and Creature wailed on one another, until finally the big man went down like a sack of bricks. Krysantha took on a couple of more fights before striding out of the cage to collect her winnings.

Other characters were waiting in the wings to assist, like the corner handlers in a boxing match . So even though only one character battled, the other PC’s got to be involved, and some went around making bets. Everyone made money. Betting on herself, Krysantha made a few hundred gold pieces.

Helena was the funniest: the young fighter sat herself down at the rat roulette table, and spent a good chunk of the evening making small, one gold piece bets on the rolls. She was so excited to finally get the right rat, and get 3 gold in winnings (after losing around 6). This is a character who had adventured a bit, and had previously earned hundreds. Ah well, maybe she was just happy to make a little cash without having to steal or kill for it.

OK, my Wednesday night games are only around three hours long. I never could have stretched this encounter out to one of my old 6 hour weekend games. Or could I have?

Anyway, that was fun, and the players all want to go back there for an evening before leaving town. I hope this really fun game where not much happened wasn’t a lucky fluke.