Thinkin’ about campaigns for 2011

November always seems to be the time I start to look towards what will pan out for the game group in the coming year.

I’ve been doing pretty much the same 1st edition campaign for over two years now. So, with maybe three or four games left for my AD&D Night Below campaign (actually, the first few months of gaming in this group had nothing to do with the NB, I hadn’t originally planned for the party to end up in that grinder of a setting) I have to start thinking of what to do next.

A part of me wants to get right into a new D&D campaign. It has now literally been years since I ran for a group of low level characters, and it would be fun to start something fresh after all this time steering the destinies of higher level PC’s. But really, I love running other games besides D&D, and I want to have an opportunity to do more of that without it just being an alternate. So what I will do is take a break from running D&D for the first few months of 2011 (with the exception perhaps of the occasional White Box game) and do something entirely different.

Big Ben has been running his AD&D elf-centric game here and there, but I think for the first couple months of the year we’ll play a bit more of that, plus Terry has expressed interest in revisiting her old 2nd edition game world so we will maybe be doing a bit of that as well. So D&D, which Andy and I basically started the group to play, will be well represented without me actually running it. But run something regularly I will, but what?

As much as I love Call of Cthulhu, I’m still not sure this is the right group for it. Role playing abounds with these guys, but lots of combat also seems to be a big preference. That just don’t happen in CoC. I have done a few street level Champions games with Terry, Andy, and Paul, but I’m not sure that doing that or full blown superheroes will fit the bill for what I want from the group right now (I find Hero System, like all crunchy systems, to be best for small groups).

Basically, I have recently that I would do a space game of some sort for next year’s early months. But what would these guys like? Star Wars? Dune? Aliens/Firefly/Traveller type settings? Anyway, I posted those choices on our Yahoo Groups page, and out of the five who voted so far, Star Wars is the clear favorite. So I think I will do a short SW campaign. This is good for a couple of reasons:

One, I really have a bad attitude about Star Wars. All the Muppets and the childish, unfunny humor. The three prequels that put a bullet in the franchise for me. Sure, I find them watchable on TV here and there, but have zero desire to live in that universe or to know any of the people in it. What, you ask yourself “This is a good reason?” Well, as much as I think much about the films are lame, I love the Knights of The Old Republic setting with a passion, based mostly on my experience with the XBOX game of that same name. 4,000 years before the hubris of George Lucas. And less Muppets because less Outer Rim planets have been discovered. Lots of epic things happening too, like the end of the brutal Madalorian War, and the beginning of the Jedi Civil War. Jedi and Sith are all over the place, and Lightsabers more plentiful than empty beer cans on the floor of a Culver City bus. No stupid “Rule of Two.” Really, there are a million reasons why it is a great Sci Fi setting despite the silly films.

And reason two, well, I had a pretty shitty experience with running this game last year for a group of middle-aged Star Wars freaks who treated me like an employee and stuck around when I left to discuss my game performance at the end of the day (yeah, I know, much more to that tale but I have pretty much moved on from just another negative experience in a fairly overall shitty year). What, you ask yourself “This is a good reason?” Well, yeah. I like my regular group, and I put a lot of work, time, effort, and a certain amount of money (I owned no Star Wars books when I accepted the “assignment”) into the few games I ran for that Hollywood group. I think we can have a lot of fun with it, and light Sci Fi is something I can practically phone in like my D&D games.

So Knights of the Old Republic it is, for the first three or four months of the year, anyway. Besides the KOTOR games, I will of course throw out that odd OD&D White box dungeon crawl as an alternate, as well as some bits of Champions when the group is lacking players on a game night. I’ll alternate my games with whoever does some of their D&D. I’ll let Big Ben and Terry slug it out for those slots.

I just gotta finish up the year, and finish up this damn Night Below campaign. Fun, but jeez, it’s starting to feel like I’ve been walking uphill with this setting over my shoulder forever. Gotta wrap it up (and kill some characters if at all possible). Stay tuned for details on that (finally back to AD&D next week).

Comic Dork Monday: Prez

I’d like to talk today about my Night Below session from last week, where a character in the party ultimately betrayed their trust and turned on them when that characters evil ex-boyfriend showed up with his gang of slavers. But it is just too deep and exciting to have time to post that on a Monday morn, so I’ll have that later in the week. For now, let’s enjoy some comedy filler (or an attempt at comedy anyway) to cheer up our hectic Monday (where it is raining here in Southern California after two week of brutal, record setting heat).

You young punks! You don’t know how good ya got things nowadays! Why, when I was a lad, we had a teenage president! You think Dubbya Bush screwed up this country? You shouda seen what President Prez was up to. Talkin’ to animals instead of balancing the budget. Fightin’ legless vampires instead o’ making peace in the Middle East. Yeah, Prez was what set up on this path of doom.

I’ll get to the Prez comic in a second, but let me admit right off the bat that at one point in my futuristic Champions game world New Haven (based on the setting in Superhero 2044). In the early 80’s, I briefly toyed with the idea of a teenage president getting elected and the ramifications of that (luckily it never happened, keeping me from having to retcon an entire period of time in my game world when I got older and smarter). Of course I was inspired by Prez, one of DC Comics greatest Morts (Mort = in retrospect embarrassing and poorly conceived comic book character) of the early 70’s.

Although admittedly set in an America that was alternate to the ongoing DC comics continuity (even though Prez appeared in an issue of Supergirl at some point), it still seemed like an idea out of the worst fever dreams of a hacky comic book writer. But no hacks worked on this; no less than Jack Kirby collaborator and co-creator of Captain America Joe Simon created this ode to an idiotic decade.

Through some sketchy political wrangling, the age of American President Candidates is lowered to 18 years old. Why not? We knew everything there was to know at 18, right? “Prez Rickard,” called Prez in infancy by his mom who obviously wanted him to be president one day, bust onto the political scene (in his origin story he got all the clocks in his town of “Steadfast” to run on time, making him a hometown hero) and took those unhip, fuddy duddy Washington fat cats by storm, winning the election hands down. Groovy, baby! Do it for the kicks!
A firm believer in nepotism, Prez put both his mommy and his hot teen queen sister in high profile White House positions. Also into this already weird mix came Eagle Free, a sort of a native American Doctor Doolittle. No suit and tie for Eagle Free, please. Even after the sweater and jeans teen president makes Eagle the head of the CIA (!??), ol’ Eagle still runs around with feathers and leathers and no shirt. Even in the white house at press debriefings. No damn shirt.

Eagle Free teaches Prez the ins and outs of animal fighting abilities (which, I shit you not, Eagle Free apparently learned himself from a library of animal books in his humble cave home). So now Prez can fight like…a…bear. And…a…horse. Or…an…elephant. Or…ok, look, for the most part a human who fights like a bear or an elephant is going to be fairly piss poor in your average bar fight and get his ass brutally kicked. His teeth are gonna be flying like popcorn. So for the sake of sanity, let’s just say Prez somehow is bestowed supernatural animal powers by Eagle (although it is clear in the comic Prez is “taught” these techniques as one would learn karate) and call it a beautiful day.

Prez only managed 4 issues. The most interesting storyline featured our Presidential hero battling handicapped, legless vampires. No shit. Let me just say that the truncated undead were about as scary and deadly as you would expect. Which is not at all.

Many yeas later Neil Gaiman would give Prez and appearance in an issue of the acclaimed Sandman series, but otherwise DC has not often thrown him a bone. He didn’t even show up in that multiple realities warping 80’s series Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Although my own “Prez” didn’t happen (thankfully) in my Champions game world, we at least have the original and the best to look back on fondly. Kidding aside, it is a fun idea from a kooky 70’s perspective. But c’mon, legless vampires?

The Deck of Many Things and Me

OK, last week the group actually got back to my Night Below campaign. It had been 4 months and change since the last session of it (we just could not get everybody together and had to do alternates), so it was kind of a big deal. I would have posted this sooner, but besides a little bit of mindless kerfuffling the last couple days I spent the weekend at the Northern Ren Faire as the area sweltered under 112 degree heat. Can you imagine? It was like some kind of post-apocalyptic steam punk Elizabethan England. The platemail dudes seemed to be taking the worst of it, and believe it or not there was a pudgy guy in head to toe black ninja gear walking around (hmmm…wonder if he plays D&D, I said wryly). How he didn’t just burst into flames I’ll never know.


Anyway, before the weekend we played the main AD&D campaign, and I finally sprung the Deck of Many Things on the group. That’s right, an artifact I described as “…the ultimate and impenetrable object of true balance; reward and punishment.


I had printed out some decent graphics of the cards from some old Dragon Magazine pdf, and they turned out pretty nifty. Nothing to write home about, but much better than just using a deck of playing cards.

I know the deck can be a big game changer, and even affect the campaign in a major way. But I thought "why the heck not shake things up a bit?" I feel I was just as brave/foolish by introducing the deck as anyone who would pick from it.


All six players picked (I was kind of thinking nobody would), with Paul, the player of dirty girl Lily, declaring she would pull three! Blew my mind. Lily got all good things, including a fighter who appeared to join up with her, and the Moon. She rolled the max of 4 wishes!


The other female character, Terry’s fighter Helena, chose and also got the Moon - and also rolled for 4 wishes! At this point I was numb; my mind reeling with the possibilities that could pretty much end this campaign (which is getting close to the City of the Glass Pool in book 2).


Another character got a keep and an 18 charisma (Vaidno the bard, so handy for him). The Gnome Illusionist Ormac, run by the returning player Ben 1.0 (little Ben, who took several months off because of his job) nabbed a couple of intelligence points in his pick.


The high elf lawful good party MU Lumarin, run by big Ben, got the Idiot and lost 3 Int points! Yikes! Chose again, and had to radically change alignment (I deemed that to be C/E). Poor Ben. I take back everything I said about him. Mostly.


Oh, but the wishes the wishes. Here was where I feared having to “wing it”. You never know what my players are capable of. But no, nothing was done to affect the main campaign. They could not wish the evil city away, but with 8 wishes total I thought they could call upon earthquakes and floods in the main cavern, or maybe wish for a hoard of vermin to attack it or whatever. But no, it was almost all used for personal stuff. Helena made all of hers in secret (mostly ones to improve her own life, in fairly humble ways.


Lily offered a wish to Krysantha the drow if that character would promise to leave her alone in her thieving and other less savory practices (Krys had been giving her a hard time in some games for selfish thievery and bad attitude). Krysantha used the wish to combine two +2 scimitar swords into one +4 sword (on Krysantha’s own draw she got “the Key”, rolled on the sword table, and got a nice “+ 5 defender” sword which made it three swords total, so she turned the former ones into two. Nice, eh?).


Then MU/Thief girl Lily, much as Helena had done, used the rest of her wishes on a couple of personal things that the party doesn't know what they were (and I won't blab here). Oh, she also used one wish to turn Lumarin back into a lawful good dude (albeit one with only a 13 intelligence).


Phew. This ended up being most of the session, and was big time fun and exciting. Really a high energy night with very little combat. Great role playing by my gang. I was maybe a little easy going with the wishes, but seeing as they weren't being used to nerf my campaign, I was feeling a little generous, even letting a couple of stats get mildly raised.


I had wanted to spring the deck on the group for awhile, and finding those printable cards really got my juices flowing. Still reeling about how lucky the party was in these picks, and thanking God really because I didn't want to end this campaign if some smart strategic wishes were made against my challenges. But in the end, personal greed was sated with most of the wishes.


Just FYI, here was my approach. I had the 22 card deck, and a max of 12 cards could be drawn before it went away (if not for other reasons). I let the magic-users in the group (Lumarin and Lily the MU/TH) and also Vaidno (with his bardic lore ability) know all about the deck because it was a famous artifact. I even went so far as to let them look at the DM Guide entry, which did not seem to take away from the fun and mystery of it. After all the picks, 3 picks still remain. And some bad cards just dying to be picked after all those lucky hits.


This night was maybe one of my top 10 DMing experiences! So much fun to wing it on the draws, and to negotiate Lily and Helena’s dreams with them. I have to admit, it could have turned out quite the opposite. This magic item could bring a campaign to a halt. Especially if they have 8 wishes…Jeez. Dodged some real bullets there.



I'm a man of many wishes
I hope my premonition misses
But what I really feel my eyes won't let me hide
‘Cause they always start to cry
‘Cause this time could mean goodbye
- Lately by Stevie Wonder

Taking off the DM hat (at least a little)

I always preferred GM’ing to being a player. From the mid-80’s through the late 90’s, I was the DM/GM 99% of the time and was the guy who would put the gaming group together. The last time I sat down as a player was around 1998 for a couple of times in some local folks GURPS games. I had no experience with GURPS, and there was nothing special about the games to make me a fan. With a GM who had no real talent and seemed to make it all up as he went along (“notes light” is fine, but I don’t trust any GM who doesn’t even have a notebook to refer to during the game), that didn’t last long for me. I re-resigned myself to GM’ing only.

When I put my current group together a couple of years ago, I had no intention of being a player in it. I had just taken around 6 years off from gaming, and I came back to it with a thousand ideas in my head, pent-up in me like sperm cells in a set of blue balls. Although one new player from last year clearly had joined us to try and get us to let him run his games (he wasn’t at his first game an hour before he started inquiring about anybody wanting to play in his 3.0 D&D – what cajones on the dude), my other players have been happy to go player only.

But since getting involved in the online gaming community the other year, I have started to have a little bit of a hankering to sit down as a player (and it’d be nice to sit down – I run our weeknight games standing up the entire time). Not out of a great love of playing a character. Outside of doing the occasional Champions or Call of Cthulhu campaign, my first and greatest love is my AD&D world setting. I started it out at around age 14 towards the end of the 70’s. It has grown and expanded over the decades, and has seen the coming and going of hundreds of player characters. My love and attachment to it has kept my away from various Forgotten Realms and Grewhawks and Blackmoors since day one (well, I did dabble a good bit in the City State of the Invincible Overlord setting around 1981).

But I feel that perhaps not being a player in D&D has made me jaded, and maybe even a bit out of touch. So I have wanted to get a little player time in, and one of our newer players has offered to step up when I feel like having a little break from DM’ing, or when an important player cancels and I don’t want to do one of my alternates. I plan on wrapping up my Night Below campaign (at least the first half of it) by late July, and I may not want to jump right into DM’ing another campaign. So I’ll need a break at some point.

I had planned for a rare weekend session this coming Saturday, but with a crucial player not being able to make it, and me not wanting to do an extra long Mutant Future alternative (we are doing that Wed night this week) I gave Ben the go ahead to get a game ready for us. I think he is pretty excited about it.

Ben started with us around late fall of last year, and he is an excellent player. He knows 1st edition well, and that is a plus. I actually would like to lose a few of my less necessary house rules and go a bit more by the book when I do my next campaign, and Ben wanting to go by the book for his games will give me a chance to re-familiarize myself with rules I haven’t used as-is in decades (if ever).

So I am looking forward to coming up with a player character for the first time in forever, and about blogging about my player experiences rather than just my GM joys n’ headaches. Ben wants to make it elf-centric (he runs a high elf in my game, so he obviously has an elf fixation), so I think I’ll do up a rakish half-elf Fighter/MU.

Ecology of The Roper

No, I’m not talking about the landlord from Three’s Company who thought Jack was gay. I’m talking about that classic beastie who first graced the pages of the Monster Manual.

In my current 1st ed. Night Below campaign, I am getting a lot of use out of monsters I never used, or rarely used in the past. The Roper is one of those ones I probably have not used since the 80’s. Just wasn’t one of my favorite monsters. Well, the party explored an area of NB with ropers in it, so it was time to buck up and refresh myself on these weirdo underworld horrors.

As you probably know, ropers resemble stalagmites and stalactites, and are otherwise all mouth and ropey tentacles. In the MM, the ropers can reach out and grab a victim from 50 feet away, and drag them 10’ per turn towards the mouth, which does a nice 5D4 in damage (yeah, it’s a pain to roll all those D4’s, cause I only have around two of them). If you come in contact with a rope, you will lose half your strength inside 1-3 turns. That is pretty good, and the monster manual entry mentions no saving throw agaist this. I gave my players a break by allowing a save, but this was probably the closest the party has come to losing a member or two anyway. Even though I allowed the save vs. the tentacles, I did rule that anybody caught by a rope was helpless and could not attack or cast spells. All you could do was attempt your “open doors” roll to break free.

With a great magic resistance, and natural resistance to lightning (which the party MU found out about the hard way), they are pretty much only affected by blows and fire.

I used two of these monsters in the same room, and if you are going to use ropers I would suggest you go carefully with having more than one. The party averages around 8th level now, and two ropers were challenging for them. The rewards for the party a great though, as each roper is worth 10,000 experience points and usually has a belly full of gems or coins. The party for sure earned those treats!

A Sword Named "Finslayer"

Finslayer, the most iconic magic item to be found within the Night Below setting for AD&D 2nd edition, is about to be found by the party in my current 1st edition AD&D run of NB. Located (as indicated in book 2 of the 3 book set) in the treasure trove of a Rakshasa and hook horrors, it is looking to be taken into the possession of a neutral good Ranger.

Finslayer was created a few hundred years ago by an unnamed wizard, for a ranger named “Pajarifan.” Pajarifan had different racial enemies than the typical ranger. Instead of goblins and giants, Pajarifan hated Koa Toa and Drow. Finslayer was made to complement the hatreds of Pajarafan, who, as the greatest hero of the southern settlements, quested into the southern Underdark to defeat his enemies. Finally defeating the drow, Pajarifan unwittingly opened the door for the Aboleth to one day rule this part of the underworld. In the module, Pajarifan’s final fate was unrevealed, but it may be safe to assume he took the fight to the Aboleth eventually, and met his doom somewhere around The Sunless Sea.

Here are Finslayer’s powers and abilities:

-Finslayer is a long sword, +3, +4 vs. aboleth and drow, +5 vs kuo-toa.
-It is of NG alignment, very intelligent and has an ego to match.
-It converses with you via telepathy. It speaks in common with the others. It also speaks Undercommon, Drow, Aboleth, and Kuo-toa.
-At will (or by your request) it can:
o detect invisible objects within 10'
o detect secret doors within 5'
o detect magic within 10'
-It can cast "Strength" on you once per day, but the duration is a full 18 hours. If Finslayer strikes a kuo-toa it will confuse it for 2d6 rounds (they get a ST)
• Finslayer will not stick to kuo-toan armor.
• While holding Finslayer you are immune to kuo-toan Symbols of Insanity.
• Finslayer has extensive knowledge of kuo-toa, drow, and aboleth.
Finslayer will come in very handy at the climax of book 2, “The City of the Glass Pool,” where a Kuo Toa army is one of the obstacles to be faced.

Now, I made a couple of changes to the history of Finslayer. For one thing, I decided for some reason I wanted Pajarifan to be a female, so I added an “e” to the end of the name and made it “Pajarifane.” Nice, eh?

So at the game tomorrow night the party is about to dig in to the treasure trove, and Finslayer will be found. As it turns out (quite by accident, I created her long before deciding to do Night Below), the NPC in the party is a teenager ranger girl from the same area as Pajarifane, named “Dia.” The party had already discovered that she is special. A dozen games ago or so they found out she was the secret daughter of Arcturus Grimm, the most famous ranger in history and occasional benefactor to the characters. So Dia comes along being exactly what Finslayer is looking for – a neutral good ranger. So the weapon will most likely go to the NPC. That is probably going to work out pretty good, because it leaves me free to do what I like with Finslayer without basically controlling a player character.

So we will see how it goes tomorrow night. It is especially going to be a fun night, because it is all around the biggest and best treasure find I am bestowing upon the players in a year and a half of these characters adventures. I’ll hopefully get to kick back most of the night while the players argue out who gets what in all the great stuff, that in addition to Finslayer will include a druidic Scimitar +2, +4 when used outdoors in full sunlight, an elvish +2, +4 vs. goblin types long bow, +2 mace, wand of lightening bolts, and a few other goodies (note: I have heavily modified the treasure trove from what the book indicates).

Night Below - Ecology of the Rakshasa

I really thought that after a year and a half of this campaign, I would finally kill at least one character last night. OK, just from that statement you can tell I am not a “killer DM.” After 50 games or so most groups would have experienced some death. Well, with the party facing a crafty and powerful Rakshasa and its Hook Horror cronies, I thought I would get my kill.

Right now the party is in that area of the Night Below setting where Quaggoth and Hook Horrors engage in almost constant conflict over their territory of caves. I should mention that these creature types, and also the eventual “boss monster” of the area, the Rakshasa, are not monsters I have used much in the past. I don’t find quaggoth and hook horrors all that interesting. But I wanted to run some of the Night Below by the book, and I would do so with this section. Also, the quaggoth, as one-time slaves to the drow who once ruled this area (until the drow civilization here was destroyed by an ancient ranger with a magic sword called “Finslayer) were an interesting clue for the groups one drow character to find out more about the people of the old drow city of Sunkenhome. As for the horrors, they were basically thralls of the rakshasa, and therefore made good fodder to weaken the party for the rakshasa fight.

I should mention that the party had found an old stone ziggurat at the entrance to the complex, with drow writing on it. Turns out this was an old wilderness outpost of the drow city below. With there being a drow PC around, I decided to add a little more drow history for the characters to learn of. If you are familiar with the Night Below setting, then you know that the drow are pretty much long gone in this area. Putting in an outpost with some text and graffiti around would add a little drow flavor for the sake of the drow PC, while at the same time keeping the drow-free feeling (refreshing for an Underdark campaign) of the setting.

After some combat, and then parlay, with the quaggoth, the party went on to fight groups of the hook horrors in order to find a rumored horror leader that was able to cast spells and was said to have a vast treasure. This was indeed the rakshasa, who had been appearing to the monsters as an exceptionally strong and magical leader hook horror. While he had the creatures making trips into the tunnels to search for his estranged and marked for death brother (who, according to the module, would be later found by players in the Jubilex Temple area down the tunnels a bit), the rakshasa stayed in a cave lair with this copious treasure trove.

When the party approached his cave, the rakshasa cast a stinking cloud from hiding, and much of the group was temporarily incapacitated. The rakshasa immediately sent in several more horrors to attack the disrupted party, and I had them worried for awhile. But they managed to regroup and destroy the attackers. The party has two magic-users, and they help a lot by casting growth and strength spells on the fighters.

Rushing into the rakshasa lair, they saw three more hook horrors, seemingly guarding a tied and prone female figure. The rakshasa had taken on the appearance of a former party member named “Nutriciia.” The party was none the wiser, and as they attacked the horrors so they could save the girl, she revealed herself as the rakshasa, and snuck up behind a character to sink in claw and fang.

Outside of being a bit weak in melee (claw/claw/bite for 1-3/1-3/2-5) 1st edition rakshasa have killer defenses. Besides ESP and the ability to appear as somebody they see in a victims mind, rakshasa have -4 AC, and are completely immune to any spell below 8th level! Normal weapons do no harm to them, and any magic weapons below +3 only do half damage. They also have access to MU and cleric spells, and in addition to the stinking cloud this rakshasa had a fireball cocked and ready to use. I really thought that 7 dice fireball had a good chance of taking out at least one already wounded character, maybe more.

But he never got to use it. OK, here is the deal. I have my own version of the bard class in my game world. They really are not much like the standard D&D bard, where you have to experience several character classes to truly be called a bard. My class is sort of a thief subclass, but with a set of musical abilities that begin to act like MU spells as they get higher level. The group’s bard, the half elf Vaidno, is one such bard, and he is now getting high level. He recently accessed the “dance” music/spell ability. It is very much like a somewhat powered down version of the 8th level Otto’s Irresistible Dance spell. For one thing, it allows a saving throw. Well, Vaidno got on his mandolin, started playing a serenade for the rakshasa, and even though I gave it a bonus to its save for being a demonic being it failed. There ya go, my boss monster is pretty much helpless for the next 4 rounds. The characters moved in, and even though their magic weapons are modest, they took him down in 3 rounds. Good for them, because he would have blasted the entire area he stood in with his own fireball. That would have for sure killed somebody (pending save).

So my rakshasa didn’t really get to shine, but the party was pretty happy with themselves. They could tell overall that between the hook horrors and the rakshasa, I had finally thrown a possibly deadly fight their way. No more mucking around and running roughshod over my challenges. They are in The Night Below, and they know now that things are really heating up. And as any of you who know Night Below can attest, there are much worse things than rakshasa in this underworld. I’ll get one of those pesky characters next time!

Ecology of the Dire Corby

Yeah, it’s not normally all that exciting a creature. It was one of those morts that first appeared in White Dwarf magazine, then found it’s way into the Fiend Folio. The Fiend Folio is a book mostly known as being filled with monsters that seemed to be randomly rolled off of a bunch of charts, with art by Hieronymus Bosch. The Dire Corby is no exception.

But, it is always possible to make lemonade from the many lemons in the book. The Hook Horror is one of those monsters that has evolved over time away from the terrible depiction in the Folio into a fairly cool beastie. Both the Horrors and the Corbies were featured at some point in those Salvatore Drizzt books, and that probably has a lot to do with them being upgraded, at least in appearance.

I never dreamed of using the Corby. With so many cool monsters around, why bother with the various page-filler scrub creatures that litter game material? But I had a big change of heart about this particular monster some months ago when I bought a cheap copy of a Drizzt graphic novel. I wasn’t a big fan of the books or the character, but I was getting ready to do a campaign set in Night Below, and most of the comic took place in The Underdark. I got it for inspiration.

In the graphic novel, Drizzt and his little deep gnome companion get jumped by a flock of Dire Corbies while they are travelling in the Underdark. They are scary and cool here. They even give the cry of “doom!” It’s sounds stupid in the Folio description, but in the graphic novel it is comes off as chilling. These Corbies are black and sinewy, kind of like the creature from the Alien movies. They have nasty claws, and their heads are those of crows, but with tiny, glowing eyes (unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find them online as depicted in the graphic novel. The crude picture above was the best I could find).

So last night in my Night Below game, the party left the kingdom of the deep gnomes to head to the deeper caverns. They encountered a human ranger of the Underdark, and he told them more about the horrors below, including that they might need to go through Corby territory. Choosing that path over the more hazardous and treacherous tunnel, they found themselves swarmed by flocks of hundreds of Corbies. Not too worry – unbeknownst to them the Corbies would flee when 80 of them were slain (note: I was replacing the Grell encounter area in NB book 2 with this encounter).

The players put the tougher fighter types into a circle, with the couple of magic users in the middle. They wanted to protect the low hit point MU’s, but they didn’t really do a good enough of a job making a tight circle, and the Corbies just swarmed on everybody. I didn’t use figs for the Dire Corbies, I just said they were on everyone. Each person was on the average getting attacks from at least 3 of the creatures, and the Corbies have two D6 attacks, so it started adding up pretty damn quick. The elvish MU, Lumarin, used levitate to float above the melee, but the MU/Thief named Lily was not so lucky. Lily had a fairly poor AC, and if I had not made lots of poor rolls on her attackers, she would have been ripped apart. Still, when the battle was over, Lily was at negative 5, but Kayla the hobbit cleric did a good job of getting heals on people.

It was nice to run a huge battle without having to move lots of miniatures around. It took the party a while to kill 80 of the Dire Corbies, but nobody got killed. It was a nice long battle, and I was sweating from the bookkeeping and the dice rolling workout. I must have made over two hundred rolls in that hour and a half. Phew!

DM bites off more than he can chew – film at 11

When I started this new gaming group over a year ago, my intention was to run a few games of the characters travelling the countryside with an artisan caravan, having little adventures, and eventually heading into a classic dungeon setting. The type of adventure I can phone-in by now. Easy peasy.

The dungeon destination plan ended when I got a complete box set of The Night Below setting (with a Dark Sun box set as well, that I might never use). I hadn’t really done a full on epic underworld adventure for many years, so I thought “what the hell, why not use the set I bought?”

And so there they are. After a few set-up games, I was able to get the party chasing slavers into the underworld (that I try to refer to as “The Great Beneath” in my games, but always end up calling “Underdark” ayway). When we start the game tonight, they will be in the midst of destroying the trolls for the deep gnomes, as put forth in the early parts of book 2 of the set.

So, after tonight they should be informed of the horrible abominations deep below who plan to conquer the above world. They will more than likely be well on their way to the most dangerous and difficult parts of this adventure module. Those dangers include whole tribes of hostile creatures, and whole cities of aberrations with armies of guards and slaves. Also, there are close to a dozen possible major allies in the depths, all of them with personalities and motivations all kinds of things that make them unique. The characters will be facing tons of hack and slash no doubt, but there is plenty of opportunity for parlay with the entities who have the same enemies as the PC’s.

Multiple parlay, wandering monsters opportunities galore, slow travel, and assaults on cities. Hooboy, this might take a long time. I checked out a few adventure logs about Night Below gamers have posted online, and one of the campaigns seems to have been going on for 8 years! Daaaaaaaaaamnnnnnn.

OK, I have already set-up ideas to move things along a bit faster. For one thing, I’ve reduced the scale of this underworld. In the adventure, the party is expected to move back and forth on foot between locations that are hundreds of miles apart. Again and again they would have to trudge the same endless tunnels. The module makes it very important that you travel to the surface a lot. So anyway, what would be 20 miles on the maps are now 5 miles. That smalling down of the scale will help a bit. The players will still have to travel a main tunnel 150 miles long (which seems a long way to me underground), but I am also having greater use of “flux points,” sort of teleport spots. I’m going to make those a tiny bit more handy so characters don’t have to travel the same ground constantly. I want this adventure to take months in both the real world and the game world, not years.

So, I can cut down on the travel time. But where I fear I have bitten off a lot is the city assaults. First the City of the Glass Pool at the end of the second book, then the battle royal at the end of the third book at the Aboleth city. Hooboy, it’s going to be a lot of work. Not that I haven’t had giant city battles in games of yore, but those usually had the players helping out a large army or something, so the party could be fighting in a certain contained area. But in both city assaults in The Night Below, you are expected to do it in drips and draps. Guerrilla tactics of hit and run, usually including long-ass treks to the surface world, are recommended again and again. Not only can it go on forever, but there is a lot of logistical stuff for DM’s to keep track off. Different races and groups in the cities will react different ways. And in the City of the Glass Pool, you make multiple assaults in order to rack up unique “points” that, if you eventually get enough, cause the collapse of that city. And shit, this isn’t even the biggest city assault of the module.

Can I handle it? I think so? Is it going to be a lot of work soon? Hells yeah. Do I want to do all that work? I…don’t know. We only play for three hours on a weeknight. Some of these battles will be hours and hours long. Again, can I even do this and get it finished before the end of 2010 so I can start a new campaign? Stay tuned…

Tweaking The Night Below continues

As I mentioned in previous posts, I decided that in this second year of our 1st ed. Campaign I would send the characters down into the epic Night Below setting.

With the campaign on hiatus during the holidays, it was nice to get back to it. But I am a bit nervous having committed to this. It’s a big adventure. Besides all the wandering monsters and natural dangers, there are a lot of set encounters on the way to the Sunless Sea of book three. Warring Quaggoths and Hook Horrors, Temple of Jubilex area, Derro colonies, and then the assault on the City of The Glass Pool itself. I rarely run city assaults in my D&D. It’s usually pretty small scale.

Tweaking things in the books is going to continue for two reasons. One, I don’t want this to take another two years of game time. I want to finish this by some time in Summer. Two, these characters are not going to be the suggested level several games from now when they have to assault the Aboleth city in the Sunless Sea. The books recommend being somewhere between 11-15th by the final battles, and the highest characters are around 8th right now. They’ll hit 9th or 10th by then no problem, but that’s about it. So the importance of allies, treasure, etc. will need to be tweaked.

I haven’t exactly memorized the stuff to come (especially in the 3rd book), so I am taking it “one day at a time” as they say, with a bit of an eye on the future. I have completely eliminated the Rockseer Elves, and I am putting more importance in the help from the Deep Gnomes. Though they don’t offer a ton of help in the books, I am making them a little more open to being a safe place during the players adventures. The gnome city has a flux point, so that when the players get to deeper areas they can come back for a rest if necessary, plus have access to the surface if they need an extended rest.

One problem in this last week’s game was that the guy running a gnome character has had to leave our game group, and his character was a lot of the inspiration for taking this direction in the campaign. Carmeneran, the deep gnome queen, was going to give him the Gnome Champion weapon and everything. Now that is a no-go. So here are the characters remaining to carry on the quest.

Krysantha: female drow fighter/druid raised by the druids of the Northern Forest. Self-righteous with a vengeful sense of justice.
Vaidno: half-elf Bard from Tanmoor. A city boy who seems at home in dungeons and dangerous places. Never met a girl he didn’t try to “nail.”
Helena: young girl fighter, raised by her soldier brothers in River City. Sword and shield is her passon. Recently fallen in love with local soldier, who is tagging along on the adventure.
Lumarin: Grey elf magic-user from far north.
Lily: a local girl, magic-user and thief. Reputation as a ho’.
Dia: NPC and teenager ranger girl. Some characters recently discovered she is the daughter of famous Woodlord Arcturus Grimm, though have not told her yet.

So in this week’s game the group enjoyed a party thrown by the gnome they saved in the caves above, before being sent to destroy some local trolls (lead by an Ettin) by queen Carmeneran. Just as in book 2, she wants to test them and their power before agreeing to be more help in their quest.

Mind you, the troll caves are way more complex and populated in book 2 than what I am doing with that section. Instead of two or three actual tribes of trolls, I just have a band of a half dozen of them, lead by an Ettin named “Two Mug.”

By the time they got to the first large cave, we had less than an hour of game time left, so we only did a fight with the first three trolls, who were hanging around that first cave. They had actually planned to use a bunch of oil to burn any trolls who they found, but they cave was way to damp to actually try Molotov action with the oil flasks (which I always resist anyway), so it was more or less a straight up fight. The party was more than a match, as Lumarin cast enlarge spells on Helena and Dia (making for a pair of 10 foot tall broadsword girls), and Krystantha managed to catch one troll in a Snare spell, basically making it helpless for slaughterin’.

They killed the trolls, and managed to get enough oil lit to stop the regeneration. We ended right there. I will pretty much start the next game with the Ettin and the rest of the trolls charging in from the adjacent cavern. With little time for player advance strategy, that should be a pretty decent fight. By the end of that game, the group should be on the “road” to The City of the Glass Pool.

Leveling up? Call me "Captain Generous"

If it is a problem, it has been with me since I was a kid. We played a lot in the 80's, but using D&D's experience rules just took too damn long for a PC to go up. Didn't matter if we played every week or every day; it just seemed to take too long to me.

I've always done my best to go by the book where characters are concerned, but I was never able to resist fudging experience. Even though I always gave copious amounts for things like role-playing and entertaining me, it just never seemed like enough.

When I started a new group last year (after several years off to pursue more interest in my lint collection), we decided that three to three and a half hours on a Wednesday night would be best for our adult schedules. So now it was going to take forever and a day for a character to go up, right? Screw that.

First off, since the mid-90's I have let 1st level PC's go up to 2nd level in their first game. Didn't matter if we play for three hours or half that. Your weakling went out, looked in a hole, and swung a sword at whatever lurked inside, then *wham* you are now second level as the chairs are being folded up and the beer bottles hauled out to the bin. Nobody spent more than one session at 1st level.

I fudge the hell out of exp. after that 1st level. I usually take a look at how much a PC needs to go up, think about all that they did in the game and what challenged them and what life experiences they had, then jot down a number I think is right. I don't look in a book. Sometimes it's big, sometimes it's small. In the last game a 5th level female PC lost her virginity. I gave her almost 5 grand for that (a guy would get twice that. C'mon, it's tougher for guys).

Some of the estimates I see online indicate around 13 - 15 game sessions to go up. Man, if only there was that kind of free time in the world. Right now saying I run 24 session a year would be a generous number. In the better part of the 90's, when I ran 5-8 hour sessions once a month at most, people would almost never go up in a campaign unless I fudged it.

I like for it to take 3-6 game to go up after 1st level. Getting a level around every 2-3 months or thereabouts doesn't seem like overkill to me. After about 24 or so sessions since we started late last year, the highest character is at 8th level. 8th level after one year...no crime has been committed, has it?

I think a trade-off in my games is that I tend to end a campaign at around 8th or 9th level, then those guys go into "semi-retirement" and a new campaign with new characters gets started. I have no "end game." Very often, "retired" PC's get dragged into the current campaign at a certain point. The exception to that may be my current campaigns change of direction into a second year. I'm sending those now high level dudes into the Night Below adventure. Imagine how fast they will go up now!

Night Below: The Tweaking of Book Two

OK, in my last post I talked about changing gears in my campaign, and having players go into the Night Below setting instead of the dungeon they have been preparing for (leveling up) for around 20 games and one year of play.

One reason for this is that I have been dilly dallying a bit. I wanted them to be hitting the dungeon around 4th level, but I have had so much fun with adventures around villages and towns that I just let time fly. Now they are closing in on 7th level. I also felt that at least a couple of characters were running a bit roughshod over my world and NPC’s. As they got to higher levels without any major opposition outside of orcs, Kobolds, and trolls, they have become a bit cocky. Night Below is enough of a meat grinder to make them see the error of their ways (and possibly have to roll up newer, more humble characters when these ones get decimated in the Derro battle, heh heh heh).

I’m going for it, and starting with the material in Book 2. But in my more focused reading of the material, and in some of the things I’ve read online, I think I need to make a few changes for this to work for me.

The major thing bugging me right off the bat is the scale. Say the characters travel from the Deep Gnome city down to the Glass Pool area. According to the miles given in the map key, this is something like 400 miles! Yeesh. I rarely make characters trek 400 miles on foot in the surface world, so this is kind of a big deal. The adventure books suggest making multiple trips to the surface world, which makes this journey around an 800 mile round trip. So screw that, I’m going to half that (at least). That should still be enough travelling to get across the “underground wilderness” nature of the Underdark (which surface dwellers in my world call “The Great Beneath”) without the characters having to effectively travel half the length of my gameworld continent.

On the same coin, I’m also thinking of making more flux points for the players to use, and therefore be able to get around a little faster (after the initial foot traveling – each flux point would need to be physically seen in order to be able to travel to it). I’m not real sure about the flux’s though. I want this setting to have all that great oppressiveness that should be felt deep below the ground, and making it easier and faster for players to travel may take away from that. Still, I think I would maybe have a Flux Point that is well guarded in the Gnome City, and another one around the Derro area. As you need to first be in the presence of one in order to travel to it (the way I would do it), the Mind Flayer can’t appear in that one, and the player could not get back to the Gnome Flux without traveling on foot first to one in the Derro area. This addition of Flux would seriously cut back on travel and game time spent in dreary travel later in the game.

I also don’t want this to be a 2-5 year campaign (I have heard from various sources that have taken various amounts of time, but the fact that I am skipping Book 1 should cut back at least a few months). My games are a little less than three hours on a Wed night around twice a month, and should remain so into next year. So I don’t exactly have a plethora of time-stuff to do this. I’d like to cover the entire two books-worth of material, from the Deep Gnomes to the assault on the Aboleth city, between now and Fall of next year. Yep, I gots the next 12 months of games covered here. I’m getting kind of tired of all the above ground village and town encounters anyway. It’s time for a real bloodbath in an alien setting.

One thing I think I will cut out entirely is the Rockseer Elves. That should save a game session or two. I’m not a big fan of them here. Not only are they a major distraction and long journey to deal with, but the campaign is meant for them to go to the surface at the end of it all, and reveal themselves to surface elves. Big whoop. Also, the encounter with them requires that some player characters be kidnapped for a bit, and I have found through decades of experience that not only do players hate this, but it requires a bit of railroading on the part of the DM. Players are usually so resistant to being captured in any way; it is often difficult to pull off without some Deux ex Machina involved.

So I think I will increase both the quantity and quality of the Deep Gnome involvement in the adventure. In the next game I’m going to have the party save a Deep Gnome scout from Gnolls in upper caves. The Gnoll shaman will have fed the Gnomes legs to his pet ghouls, so the party will hopefully escort the crippled Svirfneblin down to his people. Not only will they be rewarded with part of the legless gnomes trove, but he Queen will be more disposed towards liking them than in the original material. As the party currently contains a gnome illusionist, the queen will give him the special treatment as described in book 2 (make him a champion, offer the gnome home as a place of safety and succor). The gnomes will also provide far more info on the goings on down here than book 2 wants you to know early on. They will know about the comings and goings of mind flayers between the Glass Pool and the subsurface world, that they have been coveting spellcasters, and that deep below in the Sunless Sea ancient monsters contemplate the subjugation of the underworld and beyond.

I think I will leave in the Troll caves, though I may not have the Deep Gnome queen ask specifically for them to be eradicated. If they prove a problem for the players, it can be up to them to deal with them if they want (which will still end up getting props from the Gnomes). I want to have a lot of wandering monster type encounters in the first long journey to the Derro area, so trolls can be met on the fly.

I like the idea of the Sunken Drow city in the Sunless Sea, and to tie into that a bit more, I am thinking of creating a long-abandoned Drow outpost up here, maybe in the area where the tunnel to the Rockseer Elves starts. It could be nice and haunted, filled with giant spiders, or whatever. As it is mostly undisturbed in the last 700 years, it can contain some clues about the Sunken Drow City and the ancient Drow presence in the Southern Underdark. There is a Drow in the player party, so she should have some interest here.

The Grell don’t really appeal to me. Even as a kid reading about them in White Dwarf (including an article on how to make minis of them from scratch), I thought they were kind of lame. So I am going to replace that Grell community with Dire Corbys. Yeah, you heard me. In all honesty they seemed just as lame or lamer than Grell. They looked crappy in the MM2, and their shouting “Doom” as they attacked sounded pretty cheesy. But recently I got a cheap copy of the Drizzt Du’orden Omnibus Graphic novel (I never read the novels based on Drizzt), and I loved the chilling portrayal of a mass Corby attack within. Even the shouts of “Doom!” seemed pretty cool in that context. So I’m going to use them as a nice hack n’ slash encounter.

The Quaggoth and Hook Horrors seemed pretty dumb to me as well, but upon deeper reading it kind of grew on me. When I learned that the shaggy bear-men were left over from the ancient Drow presence here, I kind of liked it. Their reaction to the Drow PC might be interesting as well. The Hook Horrors being led by a shape-shifted Rakshasa is kind of cool. I haven’t used one of those since my last Isle of Dread campaign around 20 years ago. So that whole area, including the sword Finslayer, stays in the picture.

I need to study the Derro encounter areas a bit better, but from what I can tell that is the true bloodbath of Book Two. With both fighting ability and magic, they seem like a nice challenge. I also need to look more closely at the City of the Glass Pool, because so far I have been more into tweaking the areas leading up to the climax of Book Two. One thing I don’t like on cursory inspection is the Ixians. I think that between the Mind Flayers, Kou-Toa, Aboleth, and all the intelligent races and creatures that support them/oppose them, there are already more than enough evil main villains to deal with. But who knows, like the Hook Horror area they may grow on me. For all I know they are integral to the story. It’s a nice long weekend coming up, so I’ll be taking a better look at the end of that chapter of the adventure.

The Glass Pool area requires multiple assaults, because it is so large in scope and has a lot going on. I haven’t looked real closely a the Aboleth city in Book 3 all that much, but Glass Pool seems to be a more complicated war. I’m really not a fan of assault/go rest/assault some more game play. I really do prefer large battles like this to play out more cinematically. For this I would probably have to cut out a lot of stuff and change a lot of others, especially if I am to do it in one setting. But I don’t want to change the entire philosophy of the Night Below campaign, so I need to tread carefully with things I leave out. But I really want to do a lot with the Sunless Sea area, and to do that in a year (of short, three hour games) will for sure require the leaving out of a lot of Book 2.

So, what do you think of these tweaks? I’d also love to hear from anybody who ran the adventure as is with little in the way of changes.

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.