Party finally faces real challenges – film at 11

In this week’s game taking place in The Night Below, the party finally arrived at one of the deadlier areas – the caverns surrounding the Temple of Jubilex.
Night Below is written as a meat grinder, but after a dozen games or so, the party seems to have made themselves nicely at home in the hellish depths. Couple of near deaths, but no cigar.


Well, in this new area there were some serious dangers to them. First cavern had some piercers and a lurker above, which made for a nice little start to the action. Up next was a cave with a large, intelligent fungus creature, an “Obal,” who just hung out on the ceiling. Even though the creature was not aggressive, Andy’s half elf bard Vaidno shot an arrow at it for fun, and it immediately attacked the half wit and the others with it’s pointy tentacles.

Taking care of the Obal in short order, the party didn’t get time even for a breath as a Black Pudding from the furthest part of the cave rolled in and attacked. It managed to deal a good bit of damage before eventually being reduced to several small and harmless mini-puddings.

In the next cave though was a 12 Level magic-user, a captive of slavers who handed him over to the Mind Flayers, but he managed to escape with his teleport spell just before going beyond the gates of the City of the Glass Pool. Flubbing the spell, he has ended up in this area desperately trying to hold off the beasties within. Insane and desperate, he will do anything to get his hands on a teleport scroll, or anything else to get back to the world above (note: although not done so in the module, I made this guy the same magic shop owner from the town above whom the party knows as having been kidnapped by Drow slavers before the party ventured underground, just to give him a bit of a connection and gravitas).

This guys best item was a very awesome scroll (I took away the portable hole he has in the book, plus a couple of other items I didn’t want players to have). It is a regenerating scroll with Invisible Stalker, Monster Summoning 4, and Fireball on it. Each spell comes back in a few days if you don’t fail a small percentage roll that makes that spell disappear off the scroll for good. Nice, eh? This is a good bit of power to fall into the player’s hands, but with them assaulting the City of the Glass Pool in a few games they need all the help they can get.

The MU had recently cast his fireball and Inviso Stalker spells from the scroll in the last couple of days, so at least those would not be available to the players right away when they got their hands on it. He actually had two Stalkers available as the player come into the area. One to guard the cave entrance, and another to act as bodyguard to him. As the PC’s entered the cave, the first Stalker struck, ringing Vaidno with a powerful blow from out of nowhere. Though invisible, the party managed to defeat it in just a few rounds, just in time for the MU to cast Monster Summoning 4 and bringing a couple of giant wasps unto the battlefield. Unfortunately for me, I never got much fun out of them, because Lumarin the High Elf MU made with his want of lightning and toasted them right up.

Vaidno led the battle against the second Invisible Stalker, and with the help of a couple others took it down. The high level MU didn’t like that, so he unleashed his Polymorph Other upon Vaidno!

OK, here is where I had to make the hard decision regarding System Shock vs. death. I’ve been debating it in relation to the Haste spell. Still wishy washy on this, I decided I needed to go to the book when in doubt. “Andy, do Viadno’s System Shock. Miss and he’s dead.”

I have to admit, despite my doubts about “SS or die” I found the tense drama of that roll to be pretty exhilarating. Here was a PC somebody has been running for more than two years in my game, and his life was dependant on an 80% or less.
Vaidno turned into a small newt. Luckily, he kept his mental facilities, but he was affectively out of combat. Horny as ever, he crawled up Krysantha the female drow’s pants leg to have a look around.

Scorched by a lightning bolt from Lumarin’s wand, and struck by a pair of arrows from Kyrsantha, the MU was put to one hit point, and he went down screaming “I only want to get out of this hell hole!”

Lumarin charmed him (a couple of attempts had already been made by other characters, but they failed), and demanded he change Vaidno back, but unfortunately the MU had used up his dispel magic. Lumarin took pity on the tortured and deranged MU, and traded him a teleport scroll for the awesome regenerating scroll with the cool stuff on it. After being grilled heavily on what little he knew, the MU was allowed to teleport away.

It sure would have been fun for Vaidno to stay a newt for awhile. Too bad Krysantha had dispel magic, and despite being much lower level than the casting MU (who was 12th), managed to turn Vaidno back. Made for an exciting second system shock, however. Vaidno lived to fight another day.

So it turned out to be a pretty brutal game for the party, and luck had a lot to do with nobody getting croaked. They are only half way through the area though, and although they plan to avoid the Temple of Jubilex itself (and passing up some nice treasure) they will trudge through more mayhem before they are out of these particular caverns.

With our D&D games going on hiatus for a bit (couple of players being out of town in June), I’m maybe going to do some change of pace games with some Champions in my old Champions game setting. When we get back to the Night Below in July, I’m gonna kill me some characters!

I played me some AD&D

So last weekend I played in regular player Ben’s game. I won’t lie to you, I was severely hung over. My older bro and I stayed up till almost 5am drinking whiskey and Jager. Ugh. Getting too old for this.

But with a little Sam Adams for “hair of the dog” I was able to participate. We all car pooled from Santa Monica to Dan’s Mulholland abode, a really nice house with a view of various multi-million dollar properties. I got renewed respect for Dan after seeing where he lived and after meeting his girlfriend. The big South African dude (white) is really chasing the American Dream.

So here are my player observations and feelings after sitting down as a D&D player for the first time in almost 20 years. Firstly, it was almost 3 hours into the game before we had any combat or physical stuff of any kind. We were elves and half-elves from Elfland, and a human knight and some troops came to ask for help for their land. It seems some kind of enchantress was charming away soldiers to her dungeons, and they wanted us for our natural charm resistance. So there was meeting humans, parties with humans, then travelling to human land with humans. In a nutshell, with a spattering of role-play, that was almost a full three hours. I went into the game really wanting the release of action, but it took a long time to get to any. I understand Ben wants to set-up his world and so forth, but really I gave up running the previous Wednesday evening game of Mutant Future so we could spend that three hours on character creation and not have to do it Saturday. We should have been treated to some kind of action sooner (travelling with a large company of humans, so there were no wandering monster attacks).

We had maybe an hour and a half left to play, and so Ben hit us with some encounters on the way to the dungeon. There was a Warg attack, a Stirge attack at our camp, and then outside the dungeon we fought a group of ogres. Between Andy’s Cavalier and retainer, and Paul’s fighter and two retainers, the monsters were mopped up pretty easily. So here was my next gripe. Between Andy and Paul there are three retainer-types, so effectively they get to do attacks and rolls for a total of 5 individuals. And for some reason, me and Dan’s cleric/thief went last despite being pretty good in the Dex department (Ben is going by the book, which I guess means go around the table for turns. How this is superior to going by Dex order I will never know).

Me and Dan were both pretty annoyed that not only did it take forever to get a turn, but that two characters and their retainers were mopping up the place with their turns. My fighter/MU did get to shine a bit when he got great rolls and bowshot stirges off a couple of characters backs, but that was about it.

I understand that in D&D there are retainers and henchmen and all that, and it is a part of by the book gaming. And in my current game I let Terry run two characters for a few games (so there would be a cleric) and have an NPC in the party, but still my turns seem to just fly by, and Dex order seems to work out pretty good in my game. I don’t normally work a lot of henchmen and hireling stuff into my games. I like players to mostly focus on their characters, and things seem more heroic to me when it is pretty much just the player characters taking the chances.

All in all, I’d say Ben does a bit better than average DM’ing a game. But just as I recall from the late 80’s and early 90’s when I switched to GM’ing only, I am mostly unsatisfied with the player experience. I just kept wishing that Wednesday night last week and then on Saturday night, that I was running one of my games. It’s just what I prefer. Oh well, I did go into this wanting the player experience to help me be a better DM, and so I can do more of that we’ll let Ben run his game again.

I also went into this because I wanted to experience by the book AD&D again just to have a second look at my own house rules and such. I have to admit, nothing made me want to give up my rules and go by the book. Quite the contrary, with Andy’s cavalier and other fighters with double specializations doing over 20 points of damage at a pop, some characters just seemed too powerful for low level games.

I think that for my future games I’m going to leave the Unearthed Arcana out of it except for the extra spells.

The Painful Character Creation Process

Wednesday night this week I was supposed to run a bit of my Mutant Future campaign, as one of the regulars could not make it for D&D. With regular player Ben doing a session of his D&D this coming weekend, I offered that we should at least do up our stats for his 1st ed. Game so we could have more game time on Saturday. By around 9:00 we were still working on characters, so I offered up that we should just go ahead and finish the characters so we could get right on it this weekend. I was a bit miffed that we put so much time into it that we didn’t actually do any gaming. I mean, I’m giving up a weeknight to run a game, not work on a character. But I originally suggested Ben do some D&D for some of the reasons I gave in this recent post, so I figured I would be supportive of that, and the MF games are just a sort of throwaway when we don’t have the full group. If I was doing my D&D there would have been no other stuff but the game, but I wasn’t so it was OK.

Ben is doing scenarios that are elf-centric. Our only choices for race were elves, half-elves, and human monks. No humans otherwise. I thought this was a bad start, because supposing you don’t like elves, and don’t get the stats for a monk? I know many DM’s like to do things like this, but I never liked doing elf, dwarf, etc. centric games. I like players to be whatever race they want or class they want, so I rarely restrict.

Ben is going by the book 1st ed, a far cry from my methods. When people have asked me if I go fully by the book, I say “as if.” So he let us use any of the methods from the DMG – 4D6 pick best 3 and put where you like: roll each stat on 3D6 in order six times, etc. FYI – my method is 4D6 method, with an elimination roll and possible bit of point switching.

Not everyone had arrived, so I went for it first and did the method that lets you do up 12 characers with the 3D6 method. I got pretty lucky, and ended up with Str. 13, DX 16, Con 16, Int 17, Wis 13, and Chr 13, That was pretty perfect for the half-elf Fighter/MU I was envisioning.

The other guys weren’t all that lucky. Poor Paul, a guy still fairly new to tabletop, decided he would go for the human monk. Nice try, but no stogie. He didn’t near have the stats for monk. I have to admit I could not resist getting in there and saying “aw, give him a break. But no go. Paul would have to settle on a very low wisdom, not that strong nor fast straight fighter full elf.

Andy did good enough to get a Cavalier with the 4D6 method. Daniel arrived a bit late, and he decided on the roll 12 characters method as I did. It took him forever, and it was very painful. Almost all of his stat rolls included a very low number for each possible character. He would have liked a ranger, but it wasn’t happening. Poor Dan, he decided on some kind of cleric/thief or something that he didn’t sound all that happy to pursue, but did anyway.

Long ago in my games I decided that we would do our best to let somebody have a character they wanted. There had to be some decent rolls in order to get a ranger or monk or whatever, and my 4D6 method including an elimination roll would often provide them. Maybe a point or two would have to be moved around. Whatever, as long as I was convinced the player wanted the character for a desire to role-play it, rather than just to be a powerful character, I would do my best. Ben’s strictness reminded me of some bad old game times from the early days, from a character standpoint.

One thing that really chapped my ass was this: In my game Ben is running an MU. When the system shock or die element of using a Haste spell was brought up in my game a couple of weeks ago, Ben vehemently argued against it. I asked him last night about it in his game, and he smilingly said he would be going by the book. As a DM I felt a little manipulated by that in my game, so good old Ben can expect me to lose a little bit of my easy going nature when it comes to his MU and his spells.

Am I too much of a soft touch in my game? Too easy on characters and the character creation process? I don’t tend to have power gamers in my group (for the most part), so it is easy to be more open. If somebody wants a ranger, we will do our best for them to have the stats for it, even if it means moving some points around.

We’ll see how Ben’s game goes Saturday night, but I get a feeling I’m going to be experiencing a lot of things that gave me reason back in the day to start putting in some of my own little rulings.

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 Minotaur Maze City

For many years I often imagined a Minotaur City for my game world. It could be nestled among great mountain inner valleys, or deep underground in a giant cavern. What else did I imagine for this city? Nothing, really. I never gave it much deeper thought. I just thought the idea of a giant maze that made up a city for minotaurs was a great idea. The one constant I had in mind was that it would have tunnels that connected to smaller maze lairs inside various dungeons, where small bands of minotaurs could go from time to time to hunt or just relax on a nice pile of treasure.

Well, a couple of games ago in my campaign where the party is descending deeper and deeper into the night below, I hit on minotaurs as a wandering monster encounter. Several of the bull beasties came charging out of a side tunnel, great axes in hand, and dealt the party a decent little tussle. That was at the end of the game, and we finished things with the group recovering and doing a treasure search (nothing of real value), and imagined them a possible raiding party from somewhere else.

Between that and the next session, I pondered my mythical Minotaur cityscape, and wondered if the party might decide to check deep down that side passage for where the minotaurs had come from. So without actually committing much to the pre-game notebook, I decided that if the party should continue on a few miles down twisting smaller passages tracking the minotaurs, they might indeed encounter such a gigantic maze. In my megadungeon in the subsurface of the southlands above I have a minotaur level, so this would fall in with my dreams of connection to that. So I decided I would wing it as best I could in the next game.

So at the start of the last game, the party went forth into the smaller passage, and after a small amount of time of tracking (they have a ranger with them), they came across the rest of the minotaur raider camp, along with several more minotaur raiders and a shaman. After dispatching them, the party balked at traveling further into that passages, but Krysantha the druid decided she wanted to explore a bit more. Changing into a bat, she flew off to look deeper. So here is where I had to improvise a bit.

After some miles, Krysantha came upon large caves with underground streams that Minotaur fishermen spear-fished, and saw other signs of “civilian” population. Flying yet further, she came into the gigantic cavern. Several miles across and half a mile high, the area was mostly filled with walls of cyclopean ancient stone 100 feet high and 20 thick that created a massive maze. Kryantha spied armored guards at a gate entrance, and concluding that she had indeed found a large community of minotaurs, flew back to the party to inform them of the find. Like any good party of D&D adventurers they discussed the possibility of assaulting the place that was doubtless evil and savage, but in the end decided that they should, for now, stay on the previously chosen path and quest (The City of the Glass Pool far below, ‘natch).

But now that there is actual in-game evidence of my Minotaur Metropolis, my imagination is truly fired up by this. Perhaps the party will one day return to explore it deeper, or perhaps it can be used as part of a separate campaign down the road. But either way, I have to think more how I will handle it, and indeed what sort of nasties and goodies to have within the city. Are there just semi-permanent encampments of tribes within the might maze? Or are there actual buildings, maybe fairly tall ones (all of course with maze-like corridors) in town-like clumps within the various dead ends of the maze? Are there spaces within the maze walls, passage ways for the Minotaurs, a temple section, a palace, a marketplace, etc?

What cool ideas can you come up with for my city maze?

Meanies of the Old School

Although I have been computer savvy since the early 90’s, I never spent any real time looking up the gaming community online. When I returned to gaming after several years off in 2008, I got in touch with most of my players on tha’ internets (before it had always been friends or friends of friends). That worked out well (in the long run), and around that time I started spending more time looking into D&D and other game communities. Damned if I was ever going to a con or hanging out at a store again, but the web seemed to be a great place to hear commentary and stories about gaming so I threw my hat in the ring.

My biggest surprise was the (heavy at the time) huge amount of debate over the various editions. Old School vs. new. I should have foreseen it really, but I was shocked that the community was huge enough to support an edition war. When I returned to gaming, I thought that Magic the Gathering and video games would have all but turned rpg tabletops into a thing of the past, played only in this tiny niche. Who would have thought it was still big enough to support all kinds of argle bargle.

So mostly younger people were arguing for the new editions, while mostly older folk reminisced (and even still played) with the golden days of 1st edition D&D and prior. After getting involved in some online threads and starting my own blog, I have come to realize that there is something even more insidious than edition wars. There are tiny little wars within editions, especially that regarding 1st edition. I think in the past I heard the quote “… bayoneting our own wounded…” in relation to the old school, and I realized better what that meant in the last few days.

I have long since left rpg.net behind. You just could not make a comment or tell an anecdote about your gaming without many of the locals starting arguments about gaming and telling you that you are wrong. That is one of the things I hate to hear the most in gaming from or for anyone – “you are doing it wrong.” If everyone is having fun at the game table, then nobody is doing anything wrong.

I don’t want to mention the names of sites (other than that one already mentioned), because the particular one I am thinking of right now has a ton of great old school resources and I would not want to denigrate that. But I have had some fun posting to the threads of that “site that shall remain nameless,” but realized that it seems to have some of the asshole overflow of rpg.net. Especially in the 1st edition AD&D forum, where I thought I could actually connect with other olds school enthusiasts, there are always a handful of people waiting to poop in the punch bowl. There to tell you that you did this and that wrong, or that your players are taking advantage of you, or that you are cheating as a DM, or whatever. Most shocking to me was one of the creeps telling me I’m a cheater because I have some house rules. I found that to be totally jaw-dropping.

No matter what you did in a game, some arrogant prick drops by with a negative tone to kill your buzz. And unlike rpg.net which seemed to be teeming with snarky younger dorks, the 1st edition forum is mostly older folk, my age or older. Unfortunately many of those older guys seemed to have had a lot of bad game experiences (I suspect due to their people skills), and they pass along their bitterness about it by crapping on other people. It’s maddening, because you go in to share and open up a bit about your gaming, but that is when the sharkes cruise in. Mostly because they have nothing better to do.

If I remember correctly, James at Grognardia used to spend much time at the site I have hinted at here, and stopped spending time in the forums just like I am going to do now. Just like me he talked about it with respect for its resources, but the threads are just full of bile. Let’s face it, the game blogging community is where it’s at, and we have actual presences with our blogs, which makes us at least a little bit more responsible for our words and attitudes. A fellow blogger will call you on the B.S. - and much better that than some 22 year old punk who thinks he plays the game better than you, or some bitter and lonely codger who gets his jollies by projecting his bad gaming past on you. Yep, bayoneting our own wounded.

Outside of the blogs, I am involved in the European folk music community, and in that scene you have these old musos and hippies with grand, happy tales of music past. Everything spoken of with respect and playful glee. I was hoping I’d encounter something like that in relation to the old school gaming community outside of the blogs, but I guess that, ironically, was a true fantasy.

ROLL FOR INITIATIVE

I want to mention up front that it was a gaming podcast that got me involved in the online blogging community. I don’t know the name of it (maybe it was an early episode of RFI), but James from Grognardia was a guest, and listening to his old school talk, then going on to look at his blog, inspired me to start my own blog about a year or so ago.

I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts, but on occasion I like to listen to some chatter on my Ipod while on the computer at work or working out, and my cast of choice is usually the popular Adam Carolla Podcast. But the blurb I saw at Dragonsfoot regarding "issue" 14 of the RFI podcast mentioned that they would be talking about Gnolls, creating adventures, and giving tips on running thieves, and that sounded interesting to me.

I’ve been gaming since I was a kid in the late 70’s. In those days, we loved talking gaming, because a lot of it was still so mysterious. Everybody had their own point of view on particularities of various game related things. Then in my early teens in the 80’s, I spent a lot of time at Aero Hobbies in Santa Monica where lots of older gamers (some who probably should not have been hanging around young people) would philosophize and argue about games over issues of The Dragon and the Alarums and Excursions fanzine. But by the late 80’s and through the 90’s, I didn’t hang out at the store anymore (I actually found the owner and the crowd to be very negative as I grew older) or go to cons, and I culled most of my players from my groups of friends, mostly people with little to no D&D experience. So for the most part my efforts to actually sit and discuss gaming when we weren’t actually gaming usually fell flat. I had the occasional exception, somebody dorky enough to sit around and drink beer and talk about the merits of magic-users and clerics and all the deep stuff with me (one of these in the early 90’s was maybe a little too fond of a certain white, powdery substance), but that was a rarity for me. I would usually just run the game, and afterwards if we talked about anything, it was usually movies or TV shows.

So getting into the blogging community, specifically that involving the OSR, really got my juices flowing again as far as out of game talk goes. Long threads on every possible D&D subject can be looked up at Dragonsfoot.org, and the game blogs are just brimming with invigorating ideas and commentary on gaming. I guess gaming podcasts were kind of a no brainer, but it took me well over a year to have a listen to another one. So it was today with the Roll For Initiative cast, and I have to admit I am glad I gave a listen.

I am sure I will put the hosts names together as I get into further episodes (or go back to the archives to hear some older ones), but for now they seem like pretty good dudes. They don’t come off as any of those annoying, creepy gamer dudes who either smell like sour milk or cat piss. But they do know their 1st edition AD&D, and during the discussions they often actually reference their Monster Manual, Fiend Folios, etc. on the spot, which I found pretty endearing. Combined with the occasional mildly amateurish moment (bumping and fidgeting sounds, microphone thumps, awkward interruptions, etc.), it felt pretty comforting and homey, just as if me and my players were hanging around the game table looking things up as we talked gaming. The guys are fairly comfortable on the mike, so it comes off just like a pre/after game jive session, complete with the type of dopey jokes (they pronounce gnolls, “ga-nolls,” for example) all involved in gaming take part in. It seems like just the right attitude for 1st ed. Talk.

So the guys speak on adventure creation (helpful for new DM’s, but pretty standard stuff for the experienced), do a “creature feature” on the gnoll race (I found interesting because I used these beasts for the first time in decades recently), and give tips for successfully running thieves as characters. Most fun for me was the “Dragon’s Hoard” section, where they discuss a magic item out of the game. I wasn’t particularly interested in their discussion on the Beaker of Plentiful Potions, until to my surprise they dragged out some dice and made the random rolls for potions the beaker actually contained. This was a nice touch, and just the sound of dice hitting the table out of a regular game context was very cool.

All in all, I found this to be a great little podcast, and I’m going to listen to more of them. I’ll praise it more in the future when I know more about the gents on the microphone, and dig a little deeper into the background.