Burning out on the game

Interesting post by a guy on Dragonsfoot known as “Prespos.”

A lot of the older (both in terms of age and amount of years spent on DF) posters there seem to have a very embittered attitude about other people and their gaming habits. No matter how friendly or sunny a new person might come off as with their innocent inquiry about this or that topic related to D&D, there is always a long-timer on DF ready to tell them they “are cheating” for using house rules or “are having fun wrong” in some way or another. Some come off with portents of gaming doom (“that campaign will be doomed to fail because…”) over very simple things. It really verges on parody sometimes. It seems to me a lot of these people are past their time of gaming fun and greatness (and often haven’ t actually played in many years), and just seem to lurk around like ghosts for the sake of their own sad egos trying to warn the living about making mistakes that can ruin the experience. You can read a lot of hurt in some of the negatives that show up in place like DF.
If you don’t check the link, here’s what Prespos had to say in part:

“…Been quite badly depressed the last few days,
and i have been thinking of quitting AD&D again, and again ....

Really, i look at the tabletop AD&D (1E) scene, and i really have to wonder ... if i ever want to be part of that scene ever again,
the tabletop scene, the convention scene.

Really, i look at the AD&D community ... what i see : confusion, a waste of time/life, degeneration, and, what is worst of all ...
some kind of a mediocrity, a nostalgic mediocrity that feeds upon itself ... perhaps, by worshiping the words of the dead.

Really, it is the mediocrity, the lack of excellence, that, perhaps, distresses me the most about the AD&D 1E scene.

Really, if i had the choice of being at the lejendary TSR building, or the lejendary SSI building, Now, really: i think that i would go with the latter…”

The thing is, of many of the old timers do, Prespos never struck me as particularly negative or embittered by his years of gaming experience. He often offers helpful advice on DF, and is working on big old school projects of the types that are popular in the OSR crowd. But it is obvious that both his time on DF, and in all things gaming related, has eaten away at him in some way. I think you would have to feel pretty strongly to go on a public forum and open yourself up like this. But really, when you read what is bugging him, it makes some sense. Conventions, game shops, forums; the gaming world is full of true cretins and creepos of every color and kind. It’s one of the big reasons I don’t venture outside my own group more often. Sure, I’ve had some good experiences in the last couple years of my return to gaming after several years off, but any regular readers of my blog know full well that I have had some really major balls-ups when trying to get more involved in the outer scene.

From nit-picky, overly entitled middle-aged Star Wars fanatics, to a geektard regular player of a session I sat in on killing my character in the first 45 minutes of games start, I personally have plenty to be depressed about such as Prespos gives voice too. I think a couple of things give me hope though, besides my great public OD&D experiences of late. One, I have this blog as a place to vent, and hoo boy have I vented. But two, and most importantly, I have a regular group of people to play with who are decent and only marginally piss me off from time to time.

I think that is key to gaming happiness among old schoolers who hold unto much of the old way. Actually playing the dead editions you grew up with and loved goes a long way to keep the bitters away. So many of the negative or depressed voices in the OSR community seem to come out of a place of “the best years are behind us.” I tend to see the 90’s as my Golden Age of gaming, but really now that my Night Below campaign is finally finished, I look back at how amazing it was. How challenging it was for my player AND me. Maybe this is my true Golden Age. I guess I won’t be able to tell for sure until sometime in the future.

But yeah, for sure if I don’t have a regular group in the future, and I keep blogging, or even working on some thankless OSR project to be part of the gaming zeitgeist along the lines of what Prespos was working on (yeah, right, I’ll get on that right away), I may experience a certain amount of burn out or unhappiness with it. I think that was sort of happening by around 2001 or so for me, and was one of the reasons I went into semi-retirement. And I wasn’t even online then seeing that there are actually some intelligent non-creeps in the gaming community beyond the fields I knew.

But most important in Prespos’ words I think is a warning against putting too much stock in the words of the dead. Being too faithful to poorly edited and sketchy rules from almost 40 years ago.

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.

Campaigns End

Well, there you have it. Last night we finished up my Night Below campaign. At a bit over two years in duration, it is surely the longest campaign I have ever run. It was cause to party, and I was sucking down the brewskies with the satisfaction of a long run concluded.

No combat went down in the session, although towards the end during the final treasure shares, Krysantha the Drow and Vaidno the Bard seemed prepared to whip out there weapons and throw down, specifically over what to do with the Crown of Derro Domination. That would have been cool; finally a character death, at the hands of another character no less. But they managed to table further discussion on it and leave it with Vaidno for now. I have to say, it was really nice to relax and watch the characters, more vocal with each other than ever, pretty much take the ball and run with it. Some great role-playing went down.

Back at the surface and cleaned up, the characters were taken before the Queen of Tanmoor, Libertine, who had secretly come to town with some royal guards to see what all the fuss and kidnappings were all about. Meeting with the characters and hearing their story, she gave them modest rewards, and each a Royal Medal of Valor.

The group all went to Terry’s long-time hobbit character’s castle on the border of the Halfling lands for a party in their honor, with all kind of food, kegs of ale and wine of the finest hobbit make, and musical revelry. Lumarin the high elf MU amused himself by giving Terry’s hobbit’s children Tenser’s Floating disk rides in lieu of a pony.

Although rolling in dough from the adventures (I think most characters ended up each with somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-20 thousand golds worth treasure, not counting magic items), nobody is truly rich, so there will be plenty of reason for them to set out and adventure again in the future. I have a couple of high level modules in mind I might like to use on them.

But for now, the characters can go on with their normal above ground lives. Vaidno can go visit the tower the Deck of Many Things provided him (along with his 18 charisma), and Terry’s fighter Helena can marry the NPC soldier she got hooked up with in the course of the adventures . What the others will do, time will tell. But all characters have earned a deserved time of rest in the sunlight of the surface world.

Considering that three years ago I was on year 4 or so of gaming retirement (and dying to run games), I consider myself fortunate to have had the opportunity to run a fairly intense and complex campaign for such a great group of players. Most of our games were like little parties, and were big fun. I want to give special thanks to Andy for hosting us at his place; his wife’s backroom workshop (thanks to Andy’s wife Kara are in order as well) which, with its kitchen and nice garden backyard patio, was a nice place to play. For Andy, Terry, and Dan who have been there pretty much since the inception of this group over two years ago, I give wide thanks for being there for the whole ride.

Andy and the wife are probably going to be renting out the back room at some point in the near future, so we are losing the space to play most likely. Our best bet after that for our regular games would have been Dan’s spacious house up on Mulholland Drive, but he is still having construction done on the house and his wife is apparently days away from having her baby. So the games I run may lessen for awhile. A break might be nice, but I’m hoping to put AD&D aside for awhile and do a little of the Knights of the Old Republic thing I want to run. Some more Champions would be nice with just three or four players, and you know I’ve always got my precious Call of Cthulhu in the back of my mind, waiting for the right time to strike from the shadows. Game dreams and hopes galore.

But whatever happens in the near or far future, I’m just damn glad to have been able to run a long and fulfilling campaign. Here’s to more gaming goodness to come! “Excelsior,” as that old bastard Stan “The Man” Lee would say.

The Cliched End Game

There are a lot of things that quickly evolved out of my 1st edtion AD&D. Old school concepts such as henchmen and hirelings, endless dungeon crawls, and strictness about character creation are things that got old long before the 80’s where over. I didn’t really mean for my style to take the high fantasy road, but that was where I went. That later editions of D&D did much the same was a coincidence (my non-attendance of cons or other game groups kept me out of the loop more or less of what was going on in later edition core books).

It’s weird I guess, but the end game of classic D&D, that of clearing a hex in the forest, killing it’s monsters, and building a keep (per the DM guide fretting over the cost of every brick and every mook with a shovel) so a village would build around it and you could collect taxes didn’t seem to appeal to my players by around the mid-80’s. Sure, MU’s need to have somewhere to research at later levels, and clerics (maybe) need to set-up a place of worship, but for the most part, it did not tend to go the classic way of becoming some kind of lord over barony.

Maybe it stems from my DMing style and game setting, or perhaps I’ve just had exceptional players, but characters in my games just seemed too cool and colorful for basic stronghold building when they got to higher levels (or “name” level). Things they often chose to do instead were to use their hard-fought wealth to perhaps buy/build a tavern. Some might buy horses and land and start a ranch to raise ponies. Maybe a garden house in the nice part of town with a view from a hill. MU’s in the big city didn’t need to go live in some cobwebby tower to research. There was the Wizard’s Guild where all the proper areas and equipment were available to members. And for clerics, well, the big city already had huge temples to the major god, with high level clerics already in charge. So if a cleric character didn’t want to go to some bumblefuck bumpkin part of the kingdom to start a new temple, they would usually settle in as a respected cleric/troubleshooter for the main temple of their god in the city.

All the manpower that comes at high level, to fighters and clerics and whatever as in the books at name level, were often turned down by the players. Hey, they would only have to house and feed them. If they don't advance as characters with a passle of henchmen and hirelings along for the ride, they don't get into that "gang mentality" where more is merrier. Most of my players don’t seem to find that appealing. Micromanagement. It ain’t always fun. And if you’ve ever read King Conan, you know that heavy is the head that wears the crown, especially if that head lead a life of action, derring-do, and a new wench every night. There was a great Twilight Zone where the guy thought he died and went to heaven because he was getting everything that he ever wanted handed to him on a silver platter. Turns out that was actually hell, bub.

So I don’t really look to the end game by the book, and my players tend not to as well. To them, settling down with a keep and managing a garrison maybe sounds too final to them. I think they would rather tend bar at their tavern telling tall tales of their adventures, or sit on the porch of their hilltop garden house with the ocean view, sipping wine and waiting for that next big adventure to come along. To most characters in my games, it seems like the end of the adventure life might as well be the end of their fun.

My Weakness is Strong - Monks

It seems to be the opinion of many that the Monk as a D&D character class being based on old kung-fu movies is a no-brainer. I don’t think these folks have put much thought into it. For one thing, how many of these old chop socky guys can speak to animals at an early level? Sure, there is the HTH damage (pitifully low at 1-3 points damage for a 1st level monk). Not being able to use swords or some other higher damage weapons, they have to settle for 1D6 staves and spears. Sure, they slowly do more damage in both HTH and weapons as they go up in level, but this is shamefully slow progression. The monk isn’t even doing broadsword damage until the mid-levels. No Dex or strength bonuses seem like a screwjob to be sure. Yeah, it’s hard to imagine a monk who isn’t high level being a kung fu badass per a thousand horrible Asian karate movies. Perhaps if they wander into a tavern full of unarmed, zero level NPC’s. But how often does that happen in D&D?

I played a Monk character for the first time in 25 years recently. Big Ben from the regular group is doing his own side thing with some of the other regulars, and it’s a low level evils campaign. I know from my own experience that evil campaigns are weird (worthy of a post themselves, maybe this week). They usually don’t have long legs, and eventually fall apart under their own hubris. My Monk came in on the second session, and it seems a miracle that the other sarcastic, murderous characters didn’t kill my guy just for showing up (why do people running evil characters always choose to portray them as confrontational, hand-rubbing stereotypes?).

Really, there isn’t much fun to be had running a 1st level monk. They seem like a watered-downed thief class that can run fast. The majority of the other characters could do, and take, more damage than my guy could. So the Monk was sort of relegated to being a humble, helpful coolie, toting fallen characters to safety. This is likely his role for at least a couple more levels, should the campaign go on that long.

By mid-levels and up, Monks can dole out some decent damage, and start to get some decent skills (if you call talking to animals and being resistant to ESP great skills. I don’t). But it’s a long road to have to run a humble character as more or less an MU who can’t cast spells. “I’m a seeker of ancient knowledge…and, uh…a day laborer.” Sheesh.


Edit: I just read at Wikipedia that the D&D monk is based directly from the martial arts in The Destroyer series of novels (of Remo Williams fame). "Sinanju" in The Destroyer was a martial art of ancient assassins, and gives superhuman abilites, such as the ability to rip steel doors down, or destroy automobiles in a single blow, and superhuman falling and jumping abilities. That for sure seems to jibe with higher level monks.

TPK in The Night Below

At least that is what I thought it was going to be. I know, false advertising. But in the previous game two weeks ago, the party went straight from the brutal fight in the Kuo Toan Priest Kings palace in The City of The Glass Pool, and depleted in hit point and vital spells went next door to the very Glass Pool itself, within the huge-domed Temple of The Sea Mother, to try and finish the job.

Not only did it turn out that the newly claimed Crown of Derro Domination would not contact Derro from a distance (the nearest ones were across the city), but on the way into the temple dome a stone giant had thrown a boulder, crushing NPC Dia into the negatives. Still, with all that against them ending last game, Andy’s bard Vaidno took up the sword Finslayer from Dia and led the charge into what was more or less the final fight of the campaign. That last game they had defeated the high priest and some others, but it left a couple of characters under Hold Person. They started this game severly down in manpower. Three strong fighters, including the badly wounded Dia, where unavailable for this combat. I confided to Terry a few days ago on the way to the Pub Session, running the held Helena, that she should not be too shocked if she lost this character and could do nothing about it. It was the decision of Andy and the others to take on the temple straight after another huge fight. I thought it would be the death of them.

So much happened in this fight. So much high level stuff. There was not just a couple of giant lobsters In the pool, but a large water elemental as well. And within a few short rounds the entirety of the Kou Toan army would be busting in. The big challenge was the statue of Blipdoolpoolp that the party came to blow up with the dwarvish bomb (their last). The statue was basically an avatar of the Sea Mother, and it was next to invulnerable to almost everything but weapons +2 or better. It also got a deadly bite if both claws hit you (for 2d8 each); if you were held in both claws and the head bite got a natural 19 or 20 on the hit roll, the victims head is taken clean off, and the body thrown into the pool for the giant lobsters to tear apart. Krysantha the drow druid turned into a bird an bravely flew the bomb over to the statue, but attacks from both the water elemental and the now animated statue made it hard to light a bomb fuse. Krys got grabbed up in those arms, and I made the bite roll in the open, telling them that a 19 or higher was the end of the character. I don’t think I have ever seen a roll watched with more baited breath in my life than Dan watching that dice I got a 15 and it hit, but no head off.

Unfortunately, I would get no more chances at the cool head bite. My rolls for the monster, which are usually notoriously good, were not so great. I think I only hit a 20 crit twice at most, and that was for lobsters and normal Kuo Toa. Man, I coulda used that 20 with the statue, or at least a water elemental attack.

At one point Lumarin the high elf MU broke out his magic gong, and summoned the Asian Gong Warrior, who held off some of the tougher Kuo Toa captains for awhile before succumbing to the hoard that was rushing in. Lumarin also had an Invisible Stalker holding back the hoard from another entrance, so plenty of good magical stuff going on. Vaidno used his gem found long ago in a dwarven forge to summon the fire elemental that had promised to help if ever released from the gem, but the water elemental quickly left the pool to extinguish the fire elemental, and hit some of the characters with some pounding wave actions.

By the time Krysantha fell down at zero hit points, the statue was already badly tore up, and when Vaidno’s final blows from his flashing blades (including Finslayer) broke the statue to bits, the kuo toan mobs fell to madness and the battle was over. Not one damn character death in this fight. Wow. I was so sure this would be at least a near TPK. Perhaps surviving characters taken down to the Sunless Sea as slaves for the Aboleth.

We ended with characters headed back to the tower in the Derro Town they previously claimed from the Mind Flayers. So it’s looking like next time will be the campaign epilogue game. They still have to deal with the slaves they saved, but there are still political groups around, including both the formerly dominated Derro, the Renegade Derro the characters dealt with, Avatara and the other drow who took over the Derro tavern (and their gang of Quaggoths), and a few other random bits. Unless the party heads back into the City of the Glass Pool to try and do some looting (although the city is insane right now, it doesn’t mean they won’t have to fight their way around the city; Kuo Toans are notoriously more dangerous insane than sane), it should be a nice and fun game to run. The campaign finale after more than two years. Wow.

Tegel Manor Dynasty

Tegel Manor is one of those love it or hate it old school items. Even by Judges Guild standards, it was an especially wacky and crazy funhouse dungeon. It’s so chock full of wild shit (a huge undead, demon, and monster population in a relatively small area), it has the almost random feel of something written up on a weekend of heavy marijuana usage. I mean, just the butler in one of the front main rooms is described as a “Balrog Ghost.” That seems so random. And do demons like Balrogs even have ghosts when they die? Don’t they just go crying back to hell when you kill them?

I guess I can’t throw stones. I added even more weird crap to the mix as a very young teen with this. I had Green Warhoon Martians with radium rifles in one of the big rooms off the main ballroom, and pretty sure I had some kind of robot created by a mad scientist roaming around as well. As I got a bit older, I stopped trying to use it as a dungeon to be explored, and used it here and there over the years mostly as a mission based location. Characters arriving to find an item lost in the Wizard Tower or something, and only moving into a small area of the Manor and then leaving.

In these OD&D games I’ve been doing here and there since last year, I’ve thought about Tegel a bit more. I think all those old Dark Shadows episodes I’ve been watching on Netflix have affected me.

I thought of using the super-haunted house for these sessions, but the problem was my OD&D games are set around 200 years prior to the current time period of my 1st edition game setting. So rather than expect that the manor has been around in maximum haunting form for several hundred years, I thought that it might be interesting to check out the manor and the surrounding area before it was taken fully over by evil and the Tegel family (yes, I do not use the name “Rump”) more or less died out. A sort of Tegel supernatural soap opera like Dark Shadows.

I decided that the evil curse on the house/land began very early on in its existence. That even the first few generations knew something was wrong, and minor haunting went down. The house grew in size from additions, and the family carried on, despite certain cries, screams, moans, and whimpers from older parts of the mansion at night. And the people of Tegel Village carried on as well, generation after generation being used to weirdo happenings.

So I took four family members from portraits that were together in the list: Lady Rubianna, Riven, Rotcher, and Ruang. I don’t believe the 1-100 portraits are in fact linear and meant to be taken as having been in order of family members as they came along, but I thought it would be easier to take some who where next to each other in the list. I kind of also went with the description in that entry to some degree, thus “Rotcher the Radiant” is a handsome, charismatic, and fun loving person while alive. Here’s the family members in question and what I did with them for the current, living lords of Tegel.

Lady Rubianna: Mother of Riven, Grandmother to Rotcher and Ruang. Fled the mansion as a young lady 20 year ago, to have her child Riven in the big city of Tanmoor.
Lord Riven: when he reached adulthood, took his mother back with him to Tegel to reclaim the birthright. Brought loyal Tanmoor butler “Slappington” as well. Married a local girl soon after returning, and had two boys, Rotcher and Ruang

Rotcher and Ruang: Riven’s children with his wife Rhian (who has no Tegel Manor portrait). Rotcher is happy and handsome, Ruang is dark and brooding, taking delight in the suffering of things. Rotcher is a hit with the other local teens, and on Friday nights Riven lets a chaperone (in this case Terry’s elvish fighter/MU “Rose”) take them on an outing to the Tegel Tavern.

There are portions of the mansion that are now very haunted, and dangerous for strangers to wander into it. Even for Tegel family members; Lady Rubianna one day wandered into the East Wing, and was possessed by the vampire portrait of an ancestor when she stopped to admire it. Since then she has laired in a nearby sea cave, and has been gathering undead to pester the land.

So with Terry’s Rose character in place working for Lord Riven as a bodyguard to the teens, the rest of the party are a group of adventurers passing through on their way to the big city. This particular one-shot (more or less) is supposed to be telling a story to a degree, so a bit of a railroad job compared to my dungeon sessions for OD&D. So I just thought that a couple of decent role-play situations, combined with some breezy location based fights, would fill up the session and give me some good “phone it in” ease of DM’ing in a semi-public setting. Nothing too complicated for me, or ponderous for the players.

So after camping near some gypsies, and getting their fortunes read (including some semi-vogue warnings of what might be in store in Tegel), the party came up on the village proper. They passed the large monestary that is to the north on the Tegel area map, but alas there was no monk character so didn’t feel compelled to get them to go there. They decended upon the town hollow, and found zombies prowling the town square in the rain. Nice combat (wherin one character almost died, but I decided to go for -10 and die rather than the -5 I had been using for OD&D), and got the party involved in Rose and the Tegel kids who were at the tavern on their Friday outing. So a bit of tavern role-playing, with the happy go lucky teens of Tegel hanging out with Rotcher and Ruang, and the older townsfolk brooding in their beers over strangers and walking dead being afoot.

Lord Riven came with some guards from his manor eventually (the characters learned that the local constabulary were cowardly Keystone Cops who rarely showed up when there was monster trouble) to investigate the zombie fuss, and offered the PC’s a job. In the less-haunted part of Tegel Manor, Riven had butler Slappington serve drinks, while he and his wife skittishly told of the mother possessed, and the need to stop her haunting the area for the sake of the Tegel kids if not the village folk. The party agreed, and went to spend the night at a two-story several room guest house nearby.

The PC’s took up residence in some of the rooms and the lounge, falling asleep to the occasional howl or spooky laughter from the haunted parts of Tegel Manor across the way. The vampiric Lady Rubianna came to Rose in the master bedroom, and offered her info on some of her own family secrets (Rose came to Tegel because her uncle had mysteriously died in service to Riven and the family) if she convinced the party to leave Tegel. She fled the guest house before summoning a hoard of rats to attack all in the house. That was a fun little scramble, with PC’s fighting rat packs as a thief character ran around behind the scenes using secret passages in the walls.

The next morning it was off to the sea cliff, where before the stairs down to the waves they had to pass a local mausoleum. A small hoard of skeletons, led by a couple of wights, came pouring out of the mausoleum to combat the party. The cleric of St. Cuthbert tried a bit of turning here and there, but the battle was ultimately won through cold steel and elbow grease. Fun fight.

Then down into the caves, to first face Rubianna’s Wraith, then on to the lady herself. It was a fairly quick battle, as the cleric used hold person and the save was failed. I know, I would probably not let a hold person work on a full vampire, but Lady Rubianna was still alive and human, just possessed by the vampire spirit. After a bit of treasure looting, the group dragged Lady Rubianna out to the daylight, where the ancestor spirit retreated back to its portrait, and Lady Rubianna was cleansed of evil and returned to her family. Happy little ending to a nice little session.

I’ve really loved this idea of a Dark Shadows inspired Tegel Manor prequel setting, and I’m for sure going to do more with it. Plenty of opportunities for chilling adventures as the current tenants of Tegel Manor try to hold off the encroaching evil; even though we all know how it will eventually turn out in the long run. So more Tegel Manor family fun in the future I hope, with at least some of the same great players.