Showing posts with label underground. Show all posts
Showing posts with label underground. Show all posts

Thursday, February 10, 2011

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.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

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!