Dale's Campaign - Session #5

Sorry for the late entry, but that tends to happen on busy weeks.

This session was cool because Justin came back for a night. He probably won’t be coming back on a regular basis, maybe once every other month. He really likes the money he gets on Fridays, so he’ll only be showing when he’s not scheduled to work.

He ended up making a temporary gestalt PC, a warlock-ranger. From what I’ve heard of warlocks, they’re only fun when played sporadically, so it’s a good choice on Justin’s part.

Mike couldn’t make it this week. So I played his paladin-fighter (Mark). Well perhaps I overplayed him.

There was a bit of a sad note to this session. Aaron’s wife found a packet of barbeque sauce from Famous Dave’s. So very sad...

While Justin was making his PC, Arriseus, we did something we haven’t had to do in a while; paperwork.

I know it’s a bit odd, but paperwork is needed after any adventure where you get a lot of nice money and loot. You have to go through and split up the treasures, sell the unwanted treasures, craft needed magic items, and then buy more equipment for your character.

So we spent two weeks of game time doing all of the above in the town of Darken Glen. By the end we had: rented a house, scribed several scrolls, bought some masterwork arms and armor for Ian to enchant for us, bought a couple of potions, and crafted a Rope of Climbing.

It was productive and very expensive 2 weeks. In fact Kal only had a single day off the entire time.

Actually that brings up something that kind of bugs me. You can scribe up to 1000gp worth of spells onto a scroll in one day. But to scribe a spell from a scroll into your spellbook, no matter what the level, it takes a full day. I guess it pays off in the later levels, but at low levels it seems wrong to have to spend a day scribing a cantrip into your spellbook. Kal spent 3 days scribing 3 spells, one level 0 spell, one level 1 spell, and one level 2 spell.

But anyway, in that 2 weeks we got to know a few people in town. We found out they had a master innkeeper, a master goldsmith, and a master armorer/weaponsmith. Now I have no idea what a master innkeeper does, but the other two rank high in the to-be-exploited-by-the-PCs factor, especially the armorer.

And boy did we exploit them. Mark got a nice suit of armor and weapon from him (which later was enchanted). And Culan got to know the fellow and worked for and with him. He even helped him with some other things. And thanks to that help, Culan now receives some bonus money every month for his part in a new showering invention.

Kineo, when he wasn’t assisting with item creation, kept a low profile.

Mark, well he was just a warm body this session.

And Kal, well Kal’s a bit of a rake. We refer to it “sewing the seeds”.
We don’t role-play that out, because that’s creepy.

But we did nearly clean out Ian de Magi’s cache of enchanted items for sale.

Ian-de-Magi: “Igor, get back in the shop! We need to make more stuff!”

By the time all of that was done, Justin was done with the creation of Arriseus.

Justin: “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had a character with only 37 hit points. I feel like I need a heal right now.”

Ian had Arriseus contact us at our home. He had been told that we needed a guide through the swamps.

So we took him to the Snorting Boar in at 8am. Yes, I said 8am. And a couple of hours and a platinum piece later, he agreed.

Arriseus had a swamp boat (basically just a fancy raft) and he knew where to take us when Ian de Magi pointed us in the right direction of the plot; an old tower once home to someone name Llewellyn.

Arriseus: “Me and Heath Ledger spent two years out there...”
This probably explained why Arriseus was such a wuss.

Before we left (the next morning) we were warned by Ian that if we met “the hound of the moors” and his pack, we’ve gone too far.

So we left, and had forgotten to check if Ian had some potions of water walking too. That’s a big oops with two tanks on this little raft.

As expected, the trip was not without some encounters.

We spotted a pack of hungry lizardfolk taking to the water. So we pulled up to the nearest solid land we can find.

They try to wait us out. When that doesn’t work they sneak away and wait for us from hiding. But we aren’t fooled. So Arriseus cast Entangle where they were at and then we got back in the boat and continued on our trip.

Well one of them was sneaky. He followed us and snuck under our swamp boat and tried to drill a hole in it. Luckily Kal heard the sounds (nat 20 on a listen check). So he summoned a fiendish octopus and ruined the sneaky little punk’s day.

As we traveled further through the swamp the surroundings got nastier.
Then an evil-looking beast burst from the water.
It was an adult khython from the Book of Vile Darkness.

Round 1:
Culan steps off of the confines of the raft and casts Enlarge Person on himself.
Kineo gets towards the rear of the khython and misses with a Shocking Grasp that would have done 6d6+3 damage (4d6 spell + 2d6 sneak attack +3 warmage int bonus).
Kal casts Magic Missile for 8 points of damage at it and steps off the boat.
The khython gets 5 attacks – 4 claws (doing 1d8+3) and a bite (1d6+3+poison). Dale had some good roles to start off with. It attacks Kineo and hits and crits with several of his attacks. When Kineo falls it attacks Arriseus and rips him up good, but doesn’t drop him.
Arriseus steps off the boat and tosses an eldritch blast at the thing for 2d6 damage.
Mark the paladin, the only one remaining on the boat, charges the khython with his smite evil attack and misses.

Round 2:
Culan misses.
Kineo would have gurgled, but he fell face up, drowning isn’t an immediate issue.
Kal casts Mass Snake’s Strike allowing Mark and Culan to attack once again. Both miss.
The khython attacks Mike and brings him to 60% hit points.
Arriseus throws another arcane blast.
Mark misses again.

Round 3:
Culan misses again and takes a 5’ step back.
Kal casts Melf’s Acid Arrow and hits it for 5 points of damage.
The khython only hits once, but it’s a crit for 12 damage leaving Mark at 30% hit points.
Arriseus arcane blast misses.
Mark misses again and steps back.

Round 4:
Culan casts Bull’s Strength and steps back into combat.
Kal’s acid damage is 8 points. Kal moves to Kineo and heals him.
Khython attacks Culan for 15 damage.
Arriseus hits with an arcane blast for 8.
Mark lays on hands on himself bringing him up to 50%.

Round 5:
Culan finally hits and does 4 damage.
Kineo plays dead; “The old Dalron tactic”.
Kal casts Snake’s Strike on Culan. Culan then does 17 damage with his free swing and drops the thing.

Dale: “Well that was unpleasant for you. I’ll have to use more of those.”
Aaron: “I ain’t getting anywhere near combat next time.”

We attempt to find its lair using “lingering evil” with Detect Evil, but it doesn’t work.

While journeying, and using Detect evil, we noticed a bearded devil on a small island.

Arriseus: “Just so I know, you guys aren’t thinking of attacking it are you?”
Kal: “Yeah.”
Culan: “Well yeah.”
Kineo: “Mmm Hmm.”

When we began casting spells, it began summoning aid – to the tune of 17 lemures. He understood that we were prepping for an attack so he did as well.

We couldn’t take on that much action so we turned around.

The devil tried talking to us, but since we had a paladin with us – no deals could have been made.
Not that the party wasn’t willing to listen, but the paladin wouldn’t even listen to the terms and kept responding with nice little phrases like “Die fiend.”

Brian: “Now we all have to agree that none of us will ever play a paladin again.”

Then we came to a tower in ruins.
On the top of the tower was an unmoving gargoyle. It never moved in spite of us always being wary of it.

We carefully searched the ruins of this tower and found much in the way of “wizard stuff” (broken summoning circles and such).
And, of course, we fought some critters that infested the place; a displacer beast and a greater barghest.

Our searching came up with The Diary of Llewellyn, Forest-mage of Darken Glen. Most of it was rubbish to us, but the parts that of interest to us described to us that he had an otyugh in his basement/larder. He hired an elf to take care of the problem, but the elf failed and was killed by the otyugh. So he summoned a displacer beast, and that backfired on him.

Well we killed a displacer beast in the same room with the summoning circle, but we found no body of a wizard. So either Llewellyn escaped or he was eaten.

While we were searching:
Aaron: “I’ll check the toilet for traps.”
Dale: “You find no traps.”
Justin: “Look out! It’s a bidet!”

On the roof, we found the still motionless gargoyle – and we still couldn’t get the thing to move. Not that we didn’t try. We tried so many things that we probably looked like fools on top of the tower.
So it is either just a statue, or it’s not going to animate without something special happening first. Perhaps he is waiting for his master to return?

Since we could no longer go higher in the tower, we had to go down below.
So we prepped up and went down to kill the otyugh.
And we did.
Then a swarm of centipedes swarmed out from the walls.
Some attacks and spell “friendly fire” fixed that issue.

After we searched the basement, we did what we could to prevent anything else from burrowing into the basement. When that doesn’t go as well as we had expected, we just barred the basement door in your standard “Oh no the zombies are coming!” fashion.

Then we thoroughly searched the tower, and came up with nothing new.

It was late, so we called it a night.

What did we learn this week?
Not much really.
We came to the conclusion that although we still praise the Spell Compendium, it feels like WotC is adopting many things from Magic: the Gathering. For example, if they changed the casting time of a spell from “swift action” to “instant” or “interrupt”, I think everyone would understand.

This coming Friday there won’t be a game. Instead we’re attending a “game day” on Saturday and playing probably all day long. Think of it as a gaming mini-convention.

Sometime next week I’m going to try to post of some information of a campaign world I created several years back and have slowly worked on it.
Yeah I know every DM out there has his own home brew world that he thinks is really cool and is sure everyone would love it if only they gave it a chance.
I’m not going to delude myself into that kind of belief. But I do think I have some ideas that people might like to grab and use in their own games.
And besides, it’s not a whole game world. It is just a valley that has been secluded from the outside world for several hundred years.

And if I’m in the mood, I’ll post the background of rant number three.

I want to rant!

I’ve been in an irritated mood all this week. I’m not 100% sure what started it. Perhaps it never had a start. Maybe I’m just a perpetually irritated kind of guy.

For a while I’ve wanted to make another blog just so I could have a place to go and half-rant and half-joke. But things like that always seem to come back and bite me. Damn shame because I’ve got some interesting, crazy, and funny ideas that I think should be implemented.

Hmmm, I wonder if George Carlin needs some help with writing.

So this blog entry is going to be me letting off some steam before I explode. It’s just some quick thoughts and rants I’ve got.

If you’re easily offended, you should probably stop reading this now.
Even though I’ve cleaned it up a little from what I really want to say.

Number One:
When in a conversation at the game store, if the story about what your character did requires more than a single breath to tell, then don’t bother telling the story. First you give a little starter sentence. If the person you’re talking to responds and asks for more information, then you’ve piqued their interest and you may continue. Otherwise, move along little boy, you’re irritating me.

Number Two:
If you’ve ever cheated while gaming and are 21 years old or more, then you don’t understand the true meaning of the word “challenge”.
A real challenge in D&D is when you’ve had to look at your character sheet in the hopes of finding something, anything that will get you out of the scrape you’re in.
If you’ve ever rolled the dice until you got the number you wanted, then left it there and said you rolled it, or if you’ve ever lied about your hit points, or if you have bought the published module that your GM is using, then accept it – you are a cheater and you are pathetic.

Number Three:
Have you ever taken the time to get a group of people together to game then had the game you planned to run taken away from you?
It happened to me years ago. And I’m still a little irritated by it.
That same person also stole several of my game ideas.
I don’t mind people using my ideas, but give me credit for it. And do it without slamming me personally first.
Want to know more about that story? Ask and I shall tell.

Number Four:
Don’t tell me that reality shows are all 100% faked. I know things are set up to exploit people but most of them aren’t faked. At best they do a sleight-of-mind.
But don’t get mad at me if I respond by picking on something you like.
I’ve got a funny response, but it’s one of those things I can’t put on here.

Number Five:
If you decide to create a bunch of house-rules for D&D because you don’t like the way the game works, then just play another game. There are a ton of them out there to choose from, new and old.

Number Six:
Stop pedaling Intelligent Design as science.
It’s not and never could be.
That stuff just ticks me off.

Number Seven:
Being a gamer does not automatically make you smarter than everyone else. If you honestly think you are that smart then for Christ’s sake put down the gaming books and go cure cancer.
Otherwise shut up before I punch you in the back of the head.
Let’s see how smart you are after that.

Number Eight:
If you want to argue something, like a rules interpretation, don’t expect people to just bow down and accept your idea as golden.
Also, if you’ve ever lost an argument, then accept it and move on. Don’t keep arguing a lost point. It’s both sad and funny to watch.
Now an actual debate is an entirely different thing.
An adult debate to come to a good conclusion is a good thing.
Huffing, puffing, and stomping your feet until people give up and accept your demands is not a good thing. It’s a spoiled brat thing.

Number Nine:
If you think you can do a better game design, go design a new game.
Stop whining about what’s out there now and solve your problem.
Maybe then you’ll see how hard it is to do it.

Number Ten:
If you have one of those machines near you that takes a picture of you speeding while driving in your car and then you receive your ticket by mail, raise some hell.
I hate those machines. I’ve never received a ticket from one, but it feels just plain wrong that those machines are even used.
If I get a ticket, I want it to be from a real live cop. (Yeah, it’s happened twice – expensive too.)

Number Eleven:
Dear Dennis Miller,
You sold out.
You’ve lost every right to tell me jack squat. So shut up and disappear.

Of course that’s just my opinion.
I could be wrong.

Number Twelve:
Did anyone honestly think Britney Spears was going to be the perfect mother?
I have a further argument about stupid people and Natural Selection, but that would be too mean when a baby is involved.

Number Thirteen:
Get a sense of humor.
If you’ve thought that anything I’ve said is just plain wrong and offensive, then go away.
I wrote it all for fun, so let it go.
Besides, I warned you before I started the list.

Dale's Campaign - Session #4

Alright, we are back on track with this session.

Every new campaign usually needs a few sessions to “get its legs”. That is, you need to do through some slow, repetitive, or boring stuff to get to the main storyline.

And tonight was the first session of our new player Mike. And it looks like he is going to work out too.

We’ve had some trouble with potential people in the past. Usually our screening process (talking to them) weeds out the psychos.
And we don’t want any psychos.

As Aaron’s wife told Aaron, who then relayed to us, and now I’m telling you that Oprah said, “If you see crazy coming, cross the street.”
(Hey that sentence made it past the grammar checker.)

It’s not easy finding players that are a good match to us, but we manage.

So Mike and his new character... Mark... a paladin-fighter, joined us tonight.

Mark is surprisingly a suitable name. With Dale’s campaign there is a Gallic group and an Anglo group, with names to match. So Mark is not a bad name, even for a D&D character.

But before he could join up with us, we had to find him.

And it just happened that we found him pretty quickly and irritated the DM in the process.

The entry area to these ruins we are in is basically a circle. And rather than leave one side of the circle unexplored, we decided to check it in case a hasty retreat was needed.

What we found was an irritated grick guarding a chained up man.
Initiative was immediately rolled.
Kineo’s job was to try to help the chained up man.
Culan’s and Kal’s job was to deal with the grick.
Dale’s job was to roll like he usually does.

The grick’s damage resistance was foiling us pretty bad. But luckily, Dale was doing his job.

Sean: “Alright! Dale’s back!” said after Dale rolled 8 misses in a row.
And Said shortly afterwards, Dale said, “Good god! Retire these dice.”

Kal summoned a brown bear. When the bear’s damage didn’t do anything to the grick, Kal summons a scorpion, but that didn’t work either because the scorpion’s attack bonuses were too low.

Culan was forced to step back and cast Magic Weapon on his bastard sword. When he did, the combat was over.

Kineo used some acid spells to free Mark from his chains.
We quickly introduced ourselves and were all quickly the best of friends.
(Ugh, I could never write a light-hearted book.)

Since we were low on resources, we left the ruins to rest.
During Kal’s and Mark’s watch (we didn’t 100% trust Mark just yet) a group of 5 wolves approached. But they never made it closer than 30’ to any of the party.

The moment Kal caught sight of them; he cast Entangle to encase them all.
Of the 5 saves Dale rolled for the wolves, all failed. And four of the rolls were 1, 1, 2, and 3.

Dale: “If I were you guys I would want to play as much as possible with me on this rolling streak.”

Kal used his handle animal skill to impress to the wolves that there was no food for them here. Once the wolves were properly cowed, Kal dismissed the Entangle and the wolves ran off.

The next morning we returned to the ruins and found a knight chained to the wall.
But something wasn’t right about the whole situation and we discovered that the knight was not who he said he was. His story started to fall apart and we eventually knocked him out.
He then turned into a doppelganger.
So we tied him up nice and tight, and left him there until we could come back.

In the same room we found a trap door leading down into a strange area. The make was of a strange wood and stone and had murals and hieroglyphs of a very Egyptian style, with beast-headed men and all.
It was all very alien to us.

There were several rooms to the whole place, all in a row.
We were accosted by several varieties of undead, but we defeated them all, but not without difficulty or worry.

After one such fight, we found an area with many magic weapons and armor. But all of them were made of either brass or bronze. Since those are weaker than steel, we decided to only use them if needed and sell them as soon as possible to a collector replace them more modern weapons.

And in another area we found a small library that was a treasure trove of scrolls. Some were even magical spells that needed translating.

This was all very odd to us. And on a meta-gaming level, I felt that this won’t be the last time we discover an ancient ruin with some Egyptian inspired architecture.

Once we were sure the place was emptied, we left.

After a few more days on the road we finally arrived in Darkenmoor.
We discovered that, in spite of being a cursed city, it was still had a healthy 4000 people inhabiting it.
After searching around we found a nice inn that served our needs, the Snorting Boar, and discovered that there were several wizards in the city.
We only talked to one, Ian de Magi, a good and noble wizard.
He bought all of the magical items we did not keep, mostly to keep them out of the hands of his nemesis Lindepohl.

Ian de Magi also told us that he could not decipher the hieroglyphs, but Lindepohl could.

We aren’t going to check out Lindepohl just yet. So far we’ve heard nothing good about him other than that he knows much about things long forgotten.

We also heard several odd rumors. Some of which were believable; hags come from the south and some hound haunts the area. Other rumors were not believable; such as anyone can turn skeletons and zombies in the swamps.

So then we stopped for the night.

What did we learn this session?
Every session we learn a new rule or find something about a rule we thought we already knew.
Aaron does not like my excessive honesty.
It’s hard being a player after 2 years of DMing. I was almost too much like Joe at a couple points. Time for some electro-shock therapy.
And we’ve learned the value of the spot skill with Dale as DM.

Note to Wizards of the Coast & Hasbro

Dear Wotc,

I really like the Spell Compendium and I suggest it to everyone who plays a class with any spellcasting ability.
Your "Complete" series of books so far have been "Ok", but has some nice new things to work with.
I like the variety of creatures listed in the Monster Manuals.

But please, PLEASE stop it with this Eberron crap.
It's worthless pile of pondscum that smells worse than Al-Qadim, Maztica, and "Sigil" combined.
Stop it with the cross-promotion junk as well. I do not give a rat's ass how I can icorporate monster X from the Monster Manual III into my Eberron campaign.
It's a world that did not need to be created and stop putting out anything for it more than once a year. There are other campaign settings that could use a revival that don't make me want to hit someone.

And as for psionics, stop it!
Please stop trying to make it work.
It's another waste of WotC resources that could be used for something better.

Do you realize how irritating it is to go to my FLGS (Yottaquest) and leave with nothing new because "all that's due out this month is Eberron"?
You can't just leave a game store without having bought something.
It's immoral and it's your fault.

Thank you.

General note to those of you who read this blog regularly: Please don't take my rants too seriously, unless you actually work for WotC. If so, then I'd like to invite you to my house for a night of fun with me, your (smurf)s, and this drawer.
(Thank you Dan Akroyd and Tom Hanks.)

Dale's Campaign - Session #3

We had another nice session. This one was still among the standard low-level stuff, but as long as we move to a little more role-playing later on, I’m quite happy with it. Low level combats go much quicker than what we’ve been used to. Of course, having only 3 PCs probably matters just as much.

In our e-mail discussions to one another, we discussed the how the rules aren’t clear in magic item creation on some things. One thing that always kind of bugged me about the new rules of magic item creation was that if you took the feat, your reward for creating the magic item was to lag behind in XP. And if you were doing this to help your party, the way XP works, you might aid your party in getting more XP because you’re bringing down the party’s average level.

But Aaron pointed out that the rules allow people to help in item creation and that they can offer a needed aspect of the item’s creation. If you have an elf rogue, a wizard with the Invisibility spell, and a cleric with the Craft Wondrous Items feat, and they all spend the time needed to make it, then your group can craft a Boots of Elvenkind.

The rules aren’t clear about where the XP comes from; so we house-ruled it. First, anyone willing to spend the time can be involved in item creation and can offer XP for it, so long as the person isn’t there just as an XP battery.

And to help things out a bit, we decided to start, with the DM’s approval, an XP pool. This allows us to make some needed items without someone having to pay the price. And instead of saying that everyone has to put in x%, we just do what we can to make the value easier to divide. Since there are three of us, if the group’s total XP gained from a session is 700XP, everyone will get 200XP and the pool will get 100XP. And if the pool gets too big, or someone is irritatingly close to leveling, then we split up the pool. Basically it’s just to make it all easier for us.

Towards the end of the night we revised our group treasure policy. The party as a whole now only gets a share, rather than half. The party treasure is used for things like buying pearls for Identify spells, buying Wands of curing, and other things the party needs for its goals.

Dale grabs some figs to be elves we’re supposed to fight, with a wizardly one for an elf wizard;
Aaron: “Hey is that the figure we used for Joe’s character?”
Sean: “I think so.”
Aaron: “Alright!”
Sean: “Target that miniature and fire!”

We last stopped with us being heavily drained for a combat with the “Bonecrushers” (4 orcs) wielding battle-axes, a very nasty weapon, especially against lower level groups.

We still had to go after the “Broken Arrows” (4 elves) and Big Willy, the bugbear. We left the room where we fought the orcs and were ambushed by 4 elves, 3 warriors and 1 caster. We were lucky that there was only a single wizard as he was armed with two Sleep spells. After a couple rounds the elves were defeated and one escaped.

Well the Sleep spell wasn’t totally worthless; Kal had to spend a round waking up the dog so it wouldn’t drown in sewage.

But we couldn’t follow him because Big Willy was coming from the other direction. We were not in the best of shape because one of those thug elves had critted Culan and we were all low on spells. But thanks to being able to concentrate on one target and getting the all important flanking positions, Big Willy was taken down. We then blew our remaining spells to heal up, and still had to use a couple of charges from our Wand of Cure Light Wounds.

Now we still had one stinking elf running around the place. We didn’t want him to get away or worse, doing some hit and run attacks on us. So it was time for a little talking.

Kal yells out that the elf has a couple of options, he can surrender and be put to civil justice or he can be hunted down by some adventurers who are irritated with him. He wanted some conditions put to that and offered (ok, bribed) us a magic wand. So unlike the WLD, where the PCs were chained down by the Charter and exalted status, our PCs are free to make any deals they choose. We originally wanted his bow and sword as proof that we took him out or his ear if he didn’t like that. But the offer of the wand made us decide to let that go.

Later we told the townsfolk that an elf got away, but he probably wouldn’t bother them ever again.

The grateful business owners took up a collection for us and gave us some good deals on selling our loot.

While we talked with the elf, we found a collapsed wall of the sewer that led into a natural cave area. So after we rested up, we returned to the sewer and proceeded to clear out some more bad monsters. We had to re-defeat some zombified orcs and elves, and big zombified Big Willy. So a few more stirges, darkmantles, shocker lizard, and a nasty thoqqua later, we returned to the town and enjoyed our new wealth.

We achieved level three as well as well. Most casters love odd-numbered levels, and Kal is a double caster so I really love them. His deity, Herne, came to him again in a dream and basically said that we was being a good boy and gave him access to more druid spells. Kal’s access to level 2 wizard spells was not all that interesting though, he just took Summon Monster II and Levitate. Later, thanks to that name wizard being around (I was wrong about his name last time though), Kal bought a Melf’s Acid Arrow scroll and scribed it in his spell book. But the cost was a bit high; 150gp for the scroll and 200gp for the ink to put it in his book. Goodbye money!

We stayed in that town for a month while Culan forged himself a masterwork bastard sword and forged a friendship with the weaponsmith. It would have gone quicker, but Brian was sucking at the dice rolls.

Since we had plenty of free time, Kal went ahead and dipped into the XP pool to scribe 2 scrolls of Lesser Restoration and 3 scrolls of Identify. When he was done with that, he got to know the ladies of the town. (That’s about as much role-playing we did with that, because role-playing romantic stuff with a group of guys creeps me out.)

Kineo (Aaron’s PC) just enjoyed some quiet time.

When the time came to move along, someone mentioned to us that there were some ruins of a wizard’s tower not far out of way towards Darkenmoor.

So we continued our ride on the DM’s railroaded plot to the real story.

We rode to the “X” on the map we were given and went into an area of collapsed ruins. We left the horses and Kineo’s dog out front. It’s too dangerous for the dog anymore anyway.

It’s a good thing too. That dog would have been in bad shape had he joined us. The first area we entered contained a solo cockatrice. We should have turned around and went the other way, but I guess we weren’t thinking clearly. We attacked with as much of an “Alpha Strike” as we could.

“Alpha Strike” is a term from the game Star Fleet Battles. In SFB it means you shoot every single available weapon you can at the enemy ship. In the instance of D&D, I use it as a term to throw as much damage at your enemies as you possibly can, as soon as you possibly can.

So on initiative, all of us one. Nerveskitter paid off too.

(Brian had left, so Aaron and I controlled Culan.)

My dice were hot after that.

Round 1:
Culan charges, power attacks, and does some nice damage.
Kineo moves in and blasts it with a damage spell without getting into melee. He’s working towards getting into flanking position.
Kal (me) casts Magic Missile and rolls max damage for both missiles.
The cockatrice attacked Culan and missed by a little. We all exhaled.

Round 2:
I rolled for Culan’s attack. I rolled a natural twenty. That means 2d10+6 damage. For the 2d10 I rolled a 10 and a 10.

We survived! After rejoicing, we moved on.

We had to cross a small body of water. Kal’s skill at knowledge: nature told him that getting in the water would be bad. That’s all the information he was given.

So we chose the slow route of removing armor, moving over the water, and then putting the armor back on. Luckily this worked and we weren’t attacked.

The next room was almost as dangerous. We all made our spot checks and saw the gelatinous cube. It took us a lot of effort and resources, but we brought it down.

Kal even had a chance to use his new spell from the Spell Compendium; Mass Snake’s Swiftness. It allows everyone of your allies within a 20’ burst to take an immediate free attack on your action.

And boy were we rewarded. Between the two combats, we found a wand that turned out to be a Wand of Lightning Bolt and a jeweled horn worth over 10,000gp. Originally we thought the horn was a plot item, but the DM let it slip that it wasn’t.

Time for some new spells baby!

After that we called it a night.

Next week we kill more vile critters and cash in.
And we might even have a new player or three.

Dale's Campaign - Sessions #1 & #2

Well long prior to the actual final session of our WLD campaign we had several sessions where we thought it was going to be our final session. After one such occasion in region J, Dale decided to go ahead and start some hard prepping of his campaign.

It was about half a year before the final WLD session were to hit, so saying Dale was ready to go would be an understatement.

He has supposedly prepped this campaign to take us from level 1 to level 12. And I don’t doubt that either.

And as for Dale’s style of “dungeon mastering” I’d say he and I are opposites in many areas.
My role-playing range of NPCs is limited, and several usually end up as disgruntled and easily irritated types. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run an NPC dwarf that started with a Scottish accent and morphed into an Irish one as I spoke. But Dale’s range of NPC’s is much broader, and usually tend to be much happier and brighter.
Dale is a bit more imaginative and skilled in creating the little role-playing things that I never seem to get right; things like rhyming clues and fortunes. The only thing I can beat Dale with in that area is that I can think of an original name.
While I am a generally restrictive DM, Dale is not. He is usually quite generous. Neither way is good or bad really, they are just different styles of DM’ing.
For paperwork and prepping, I’ve got Dale beat easy. For one campaign I’ve had all kinds of information listed and prepared. It starts off as a barebones setup that gets more filled in as needed. But in campaigns Dale has run before, his notes usually consisted of 2 pages of pencil scribbles.
As for rules knowledge, rules interpretation, and game ideas, we’re probably pretty close.

So when Dale told me that he had it all written down, I was skeptical. He’d said that before only to produce the 2 pages of notes. But this time his plans were quite a bit more planned out.

But something he hadn’t planned on was losing two of our members.
So after some thought and input, he decided to allow us to take Gestalt characters with the proviso that if we became too powerful or we found some new players we would drop the gestalt.

Now prior to all of this, I had been preparing a PC for Dale’s campaign. I had a half-elf druid planned out and ready to go. His abilities would focus around summoning creatures on adventures and the diplomacy skill while in the city. I had played a 3E druid to over level 12 before, but it was my first 3E PC and felt I could do better.

But when the gestalt ruling came down, the day the first game was supposed to be, my entire character concept might be getting thrown out the window.

None of us had played a gestalt PC before. The amount of power they offer is scary. The amount of paperwork they require is scarier still. I was up to the challenge, but I didn’t want to give up on my concept.

So I decided to find a class that would augment my druid’s abilities rather than add a whole new aspect to him. So I took a look at the summoning spells to get my options of cleric, sorcerer, or wizard. For role-playing reasons I removed cleric. A druid-cleric just doesn’t mesh well in my head. So now it’s sorcerer or wizard. So I broke the two down and compared them with what I wanted out of the class in mind. It came down to the extra feats a wizard gets versus the sheer number of spells per day a sorcerer gets. Sorry sorcerer, I’ll be getting enough spells as it is with two classes.

But to boost the summoning power and get some role-playing credibility, I’ll have my wizard-half specialize in the school of conjuration. I dumped necromancy and illusion. Easy decisions really; necromancy is evil and I’ve got elf blood in me and illusion is a pain for the DM to deal with if done properly.

(If you think illusionists are pansies, then try to fight one. Or better yet – who would you rather fight; a high level invoker or high level illusionist? If you said invoker, you’re going to have a bad wake up call some day.)

As I was in the process of finishing this PC, I came to the conclusion that we were already going down the golden-brick road of munchkinism (I think gestalt PCs are the poster children of munchkins), so why keep the self-righteous pretense that I was better than that? So goodbye half-elf side and hello 100% human with your extra feat and skill points who happened to be a little short and has a liking for all things elven. And his name changed from Kaloristheran to Kal Vesh.

Is it pathetic? Yes. Yes it is.
Is it fun and over powered? Oh yeah.

So at first level I have this:
Kal Vesh
Neutral good human
Level 1 Druid-Wizard (Conjurer)
Strength – 11
Dexterity – 11
Constitution – 13
Intelligence – 18
Wisdom – 16
Charisma – 13
Hit points: 9
Armor Class: 12/10/12 (large wooden shield - when expecting danger he casts Mage Armor)
Feats: Spell Focus – Conjuration, Augment Summoning
Animal companion: Heavy Riding Horse named Vriril (Hey, it’s a good way to get a free horse at level 1 and he’s smarter than your average horse.)
No familiar though.
Combined spells: 6 level 0, 5 level 1

Brian’s PC is a Fighter-Cleric who is basically a paladin with a lot more feats and better spells. He also bought a dog that will aid us a little in combat.

Aaron’s PC is a Warmage-Rogue who gets some sneak attack damage with his spells.

Their names elude me at the moment, but all of our names sound the same (a hard “K” sound).

We were introduced to one another by your standard secret organization of good that works behind the scenes to promote your goodly causes.
Then we were given the task to go put an end to evil in this poor town of Darken Moor and given a nice stipend to start with.

We decided as a group that we were kind of sick of “group treasures” but knew that not having one was a bad idea. So we decided that that half of our treasures would be put into a group fund and the rest would be split evenly. The group fund would go towards helping the group as a whole, like a wand of cure light wounds, while our personal funds would be used as we saw fit (new armor and spells for example).

So with our new money we shopped around and looked for some information about our mission. Kal found the local wizard’s guild and joined it with the aid of our benefactors. While Kal did some studying, Aaron’s PC investigated the history library and found that Darken Moor had been previously been called Darken Glen but had been cursed a coven of hags.

The citizens of Darken Glen had offended the hags by the usual “damn you’re ugly” offenses that hags receive. So the angered hags summoned up a great monster to plague the city and slowly turned the surrounding lands into marsh. And thus the names changed to Darken Moor.
The townspeople eventually made a deal with the monster; they would give it their most beautiful maiden once a year (as a sacrificial meal I would assume) in exchange for it to cease its other attacks.
One year a maiden that had been chosen was also betrothed to a would-be-hero. He planned to find and defeat the beast but the hags spoke with the maiden and told her that if he tried and failed, the deal with the town would have been broken and it would resume its attacks on the town. So they convinced her to sacrifice herself before that could happen.
When the would-be-hero found out about this he went into a deep despair. His spirit still haunts his keep this many years later.

So now it is our job to save this poor city from the evil hags and their evil beast.

But first we have to travel there. Our benefactors also gave the other two PCs horses – dangit I could have had a wolf or something. That’s ok though – my horse will be smarter, and I’ve trained him to choose flight over fight.

So we began to travel. On the way we found many of your usual low-level adventuring jobs. You know what I’m talking about; the raided caravan, the farm infested with spiders, and so on.

We found that a fighter-cleric is unfettered by the problems regular fighters have, which is that they have to stay near the cleric.
And we found that warmage-rogue is pretty nasty when a spell hits a goblin and gets to add his sneak attack damage.
Unfortunately Kal was a bit of a weak link, but had his uses. His low armor class was big impediment, so he stayed out of direct combat. But when his summoning was being used, Aaron’s PC was able to do some sneak attack damage thanks to the flanking. Plus my summoned one-round wolves took down a couple of the bad guys.

By the end of the night we had leveled. Well we almost leveled; but Dale awarded us a temporary 50XP. (Having 973xp is kind of cruel don’t you think?) We’ll have to pay that back.

Kal’s new hit point roll sucked. It was a 3 I think. That’s ok so long as he remains out of combat.

He got to pick 2 new wizard spells too. We have access to the Spell Compendium with this campaign, and there are some nice ones in there. Dale allowed me to pick the spell Nerveskitter add to Kal’s spellbook. It’s a simple spell with a lot of long term use. It simply gives you a +5 on your initiative roll. Even at level 20 I see that spell as useful.

But more importantly my summoned buddies stick around a round longer. Soon there will be an army under my control.

And that was the end of our first session.
It had the usual excitement that new campaigns tend to have.

And now we move on to our second session.

This week Brian had to cancel thanks to car problems. Oh we sure do love cars.

But we’re at the point where if one guy misses, it’s pretty noticeable. But I’m not about to cancel a game if just one person has to skip. Having too few players puts a game group in a bad situation. But we will continue to game, even if it means there are just 2 of us and a DM.

Brian did leave us his character sheet from the previous week, so it’s not like we were out a PC. So Aaron and I controlled Brian’s PC. Well actually Aaron did most of that work.

Oh, and Aaron’s dice had it in for him. Usually only DMs roll that bad in our games. It was so bad that I had to loan him some of my dice. It was pretty funny when he didn’t pay attention and rolled his dice again and rolled two successive natural 1’s.

My dice, on the other hand, have a sense of irony. Kal has a great big +0 on his initiative rolls. Whenever there was a combat that going first didn’t matter or I used Nerveskitter, I would roll over 15. But in a combats that mattered my dice would give me 5 or less.

But anyway, this session was basically a continuation of the previous week’s “standard, obligatory, low-level plots and monsters”. The peril of low level games is that they are very similar to other low level games you’ve played before. The trick is to get the party to level three as soon as reasonably possible while still allowing the PCs to “grow into their skin”. But that’s just my opinion.

It’s Dale’s opinion too. He admitted that these low-level quests are just to get us to the right point before the real adventure begins. He compares them, correctly, to the fetch quests you get while playing games like Baldur’s Gate.

So first we had to help a small village, jokingly named Littleton. The innkeeper of Littleton had been arrogant enough to actually think some necromancer was going to pay his tab. So the necromancer skipped out on his tab and stirred up the graveyard.

Kal and friends went into the graveyard and cleaned up that problem. The problem was no more than a few skeletons, zombies, and a ghoul who are all now no more.

Thus began Kal’s rules for “appropriation of goods”:
Rule #1 – Don’t steal from the living unless you’re reasonably assured that the good were already stolen. If you defeat an adversary, all reasonable means must be used to return the money and goods to their proper owner. If no such person can be found, a suitable use must be found. Charity is considered a suitable use. This rule should not be used to extremes as sometimes the reward for the defeat of an adversary is his stuff, and such is the spoils of war.
Rules #2 – Putting wealth on the dead is pointless as they can’t take it with them. All such wealth is considered to be free game.

Ok, so we robbed the mausoleums. We didn’t tell the folks of Littleton though. That would be silly. It sounds all noble-like if you have a list of rules to follow.

As a form of gratitude one of the folks of Littleton told about a small cave that a wizard used to frequent but has long since disappeared. They thought we might be able to dig up something value in there.

So we traveled to the cave and were besieged by a couple of hungry stirges. Well Kal had been summoning a wolf, but his fellow party took down the stirges before the wolf came to be (1 round casting times suck by the way).

So Kal sent his summoned up wolf on a quick run about the cave to lure out anything else or perhaps spring a trap. Well that wolf hit pay dirt. An area of darkness appeared around the wolf and a darkmantle leapt out at the poor wolfie.

I think if Dale had put the Fiendish template on the stirges and darkmantle, he might have been punched. (If you don’t follow that joke, reread the early sessions of our WLD campaign.)

Well Kal’s poor wolf took a beating for the whole 2 rounds it existed. It had 1hp left when it disappeared and left a confused darkmantle crushing thin air and deprived of a meal.

Aaron’s PC almost got his head crushed by the darkmantle too. A lucky natural 20 on his usually unlucky dice saved him there.

But it was killed after that and we set about searching the place from head to toe and came up with a little money, a wand, and some spell scrolls.

We took our greedily gotten gains and headed back to Littleton. Halfway there a vicious little krenshar jumped out and blocked the path and did that freaky face-pealing scream thing. All 3 PCs failed their fear saves, but all 3 horses saved. That’s like the saddest thing ever isn’t it? So we fled back to the now empty cave and plotted revenge on the krenshar. The horses laughed at us and the krenshar had some bragging rights.

Since we needed to kill some time, Kal cast Identify on the wand. It was a pathetic Wand of Acid Splash with only 10 charges. Total value: 75gp. Subtract the cost of a 100gp pearl and that leaves you a poor adventurer. Both of the scrolls were level 1 spells, one of which was from the Spell Compendium, so it was newer and worth more. (Dale has restricted access to spells from the Spell Compendium until some role-playing opens up availability to those spells.)

We also discussed the idea of an experience farm. We could stack up the bodies of the monsters we just killed and hope that other monsters would smell the meat and come looking while you’re gone and doing the same at several other caves. Then one day you get back to where you started and monsters should inhabit the caves where you left meat for them. Then you harvest and repeat the cycle. According to the laws of D&D, it should work. I think it’s ingenious.

Luckily the townsfolk of Littleton cut us a deal on some pearls they had. They were on the coast after all, so pearls were something they had to trade. We bought several for 75gp a piece. That helped a bit.

Oh, the krenshar never bothered us again. He’s out there somewhere laughing at us still.

Then we moved on to Smallton. Yeah, Dale really can think up some good city names can’t he? I remember in this once campaign he ran there was this small thorpe of a village called Thorpe. You’d think someone who has been playing D&D for nearly 30 years could think up something better, but oh well.

In Smallton we found a nice wizard of some power, a wizard of name in fact. For those of you who are too new to D&D to know, or too old and senile to remember, a character of name is a character, PC or NPC, who is of “name level”, which used to mean level nine or higher.

I think this fellow’s name was Twila, the Sunmage. We traded him the two scrolls for some spells that were of more use to us. We also bought some scrolls of Identify because the casting time of that spell is painful. It would be easier to buy or scribe the scrolls than actually memorize the spell and cast it. Basically it gives you the ability to identify an item when you get it – just like in Diablo.

When Kal slept that first night his god, Herne, appeared to him in a dream. He had approved of Kal’s actions and thus rewarded him with a boon. Kal had been given access to the level 1 druid spells in the Spell Compendium. Woohoo, jackpot!

As we were in town we found out that Smallton had a thug problem. A group of orcs, a group of elves, and a bugbear were basically shaking down the town and giving it no end to trouble. (I guess thugs are not worth a name level wizard’s time to hunt down.)

Because of our alignments, stupid-good, we had to track these jerks down and give them what for. Heh, now I sound like someone’s grandfather.

We found out where they hid (the sewers) and entered.

We first encountered the 4 orcs. Since Brian’s PC is a loud tin can, they heard us coming. Four orcs were then added to our kill-list. That almost didn’t happen as Dale suddenly hit his good dice roll streak. He almost killed Brian’s PC with a crit, but missed the confirmation roll by one. Aaron’s PC was at 0hp for a moment until Kal healed him.
Summoned wolves really proved their value as a damage dealer and a damage taker.

Plus all of the noise we made attracted the attention of a swarm of rats. This combat didn’t last long though thanks to a wolf and Aaron’s Burning Hands spells.

We searched the room and healed up. We burned 8 charges from the Wand of Cure Light Wounds too.

Then I noticed the time and had to go because I had some stuff to do early in the morning.

We are now low on spells and still need to fight a bugbear and some elves. This might be a challenge.
We can’t stop and rest because the elves might come for some retribution. And they make take it out on us or Smallton.

So we’re going to have to play a little smarter and sneakier next session, which happens to be tonight.

Our Review of The World's Largest Dungeon

This review has a little bit of everything from the Cincinnati D&D Group’s general consensus and opinions. It’s been cleaned up and such. Since I was the DM for it, certain parts of it will obviously be from me.

Let’s start with the general and obvious.
The World’s Largest Dungeon (WLD) was created by Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG) as the most ambitious dungeon, module, and gaming book created so far. It set about to include every monster from the System Resource Document (SRD) as it existed at the time this project began.
It consisted of an 840-page college-medical-school sized book and 16 glossy maps (22”x17”). And because I bought it the day it came out I received a bonus set of dice, 2 Reaper miniatures, and one of those 16-page character “books”.
And it was all created in a mere eleven months.
That was made possible by splitting up the dungeon into distinct regions and farming it out to a variety of authors with Jim Pinto, the fellow whose name is on the cover, being the project manager of it all. This had the benefit of having several different minds in the creation process without side-effect of “too many cooks”. Each region has its own personality and style, so with every region there would be something new to see and explore and new challenges to defeat.
The regions that my group explored were:
Region A: A barren area with your standard low-level humanoids fighting it out for domination. This region is designed to shock the PCs into life in the WLD. It’s a life full of challenges and virtually no contact with the world outside of the WLD.
Region E (The Celestial Garrison): Long ago, when the prison was new, this area was probably the headquarters of the prison. Now it is nothing but shell of its former self. A skeleton crew of angelic forces holds evil at bay while fighting a battle for control from within.
Region I (The Halls of Flesh): Once a fountain of pristine positive energy, the halls of this region of have been warped by the chaotic magic unleashed by a troupe of careless drow and driders. Now even the walls have skin and give birth to hungry abominations. Cthulu would feel at home here.
Region J (The Pyrefaust): A river of lava cuts through this burnt land. Long ago a great and evil red dragon was imprisoned with his fiery followers. Now they see him as a god and seek to free him.
Region N: This double-sized region has stood as a prison for five millennia. Inside are hordes of undead whose sins have been lost to time. In the center rests a beast so great and foul that it seeks to consume the world.

But as with everything, there are some snags. The developers had come up with reasons why each region existed and why these particular creatures were in it.
They came up with the concept that the whole dungeon was originally designed as a prison by the celestial forces of good, but things went downhill from there. Earthquakes hit the area, dark forces broke free, other forces broke in, and other random chaos occurred. And in time the dungeon was forgotten.
Why wouldn’t the monsters just teleport out? Well teleporting does not work in here, or it is severely handicapped.
What would happen if the monsters summoned their friends in? Then that friend would be in prison as well. You can get in, but not out.
All of these issues affected the PCs as well. This hurt several PC abilities. Without access to the outside world, crafting regular and magical items was limited. Without access to arcane libraries, wizards could not scribe new scrolls into their spellbooks when they gained a level. Nor could they scribe a spell from a scroll into their book without access to that ink that costs them 100gp per level. And summoning was not an option without a price; something that made druids very unhappy.
Now the module does give you advice on ways work around these issues, but I frankly wasn’t happy with them. Taking basic options away from players is not a popular route to take, no matter how experienced they might be.
But this advice was more than just saying “Don’t play a druid.” It was quite helpful in guiding the players with the right decisions with character creation by pointing out which skills and feats would be useful or useless. So it wasn’t all bad, it just suggested some things I wouldn’t have.
Something that probably could not have easily been corrected, but we feel like it should be included in this review because it is an extension of limiting PC abilities, is that each region had a lot of similar creature groupings. A purely undead region or mostly construct region effectively removes the usefulness of a rogue’s sneak attack and a fighter’s critical hits.
Also, if a type of creature can be effectively neutralized with a single spell or action, and there are many of those creatures, then region gets boring fast. Region N is a good example of this. My group, with its two clerics, was able to walk around much of region N with no real danger to themselves thanks to the Death Ward spell. They cast it on everyone in the group and had backups, even quickened backups, just in case it was dispelled. But had they not used the spell, the sheer danger of the region may have guaranteed their deaths.
And is if removing class abilities was not bad enough, some class abilities were made all but useless by the near impossibility of their use. Areas with strong undead and all of region N had enough negative energy to make turning nearly impossible if not 100% impossible. Now I don’t like the way turning works as a game mechanic, but I felt that something better could have been thought up.
And dungeon was quite full of traps. That’s perfectly fine with me. Lots of evil crammed together means lots of dirty little tricks. But the DC required to find and remove many of these traps was simply over the top. One instance I can think of is a Wail of the Banshee trap on a door in region N. The search DC required was 45, and the same to remove it. Now at level 18 a rogue with the maximum ranks in search and disable device and a dexterity score of 18 will have a +25 to those rolls. This means that a natural 20 is required to both find the trap and remove it. And if he fails, the whole party would have to make a saving throw or die. Granted, the area this trap is in is a pretty nasty, high-level area, but there are several traps similar to this all spread around. In order to survive, a party will basically have to “Take 20” almost all of the time, something the module suggests not allowing without a penalty. I’d say the penalty for not doing it would be worse.
Another thing we would have liked some closer attention to: magic item distribution. It was relatively uneven and that kind of problem hurts. My group found a variety of interesting weapons, but very little in the way of armor for a long time. Without some good armor to protect you, that nice big sword you have is a tad less useful if the party’s cleric has to heal you every round.
And this gripe of mine is something that drove me crazy while running the game; the mapping did not line up with the graph. Now granted it’s not realistic to have every dungeon agree to a 5’x5’ per square convention, but it got to be very annoying when drawing maps by hand and trying to convert it to 5’x5’ for ease of use. It would cause a bit of a drift over time as I would incorrectly round up or round down the number of squares to use. So as the party explored the region more and I filled in more of the maps, the maps didn’t always meet up in the right spots. The result was some hallways that were suddenly slanted and an irritated DM.
And our final gripe is the something that has plagued creators and designers since beginning of time; deadlines and double-checking. The WLD was cranked out in 11 months with multiple people involved and several revisions going back and forth. But with the amounts of everything being worked on, some areas paid the price. The price is the occasional missing room description, rooms not matching the map, or your standard typographical error. I feel that a lot of these could have been cleared up had the design crew been given a little more time to do some double-checking, or possibly the hiring of others to find the faults. Think about it, Star Trek geeks notice every little error that show has made, give them a copy of the WLD and let them go to town. But as always companies have deadlines, and every project magically ends up taking all the time it has to be completed by the deadline. That’s true throughout the business world.

Now you probably think we hated our game of the WLD. Come on, I have written one good thing about it. Well that’s because I felt I had to expose all of its flaws to better show off its assets.
First off they wrote the WLD loose enough so that a DM can modify it to his or her liking and it would not hurt the module as a whole. This means that almost every negative thing that I wrote in the above paragraphs can be fixed to your liking.
If you want your party to be able to summon and teleport, then there is not problem with that, just give them a magic pendant that excuses them from those problems or remove those rules entirely.
Don’t like a particular room, or you’ve found one of those rooms that mysteriously lost its description, then you can make something up on the fly. And if you don’t want to do that, well then they have conveniently created several dozen spare rooms that you can drop in just about anywhere.
If you don’t like the hugeness of the WLD and you would rather just run a region or two of it. That is not a problem in the slightest. The entire WLD was written as several separate modules that have their own story. With a few modifications you have given yourself a module that is independent of the WLD.
You don’t like the order that the WLD regions are set up in? Once again the modularity of the regions allows you to mix and match regions to your liking.
Your party wants to craft some items but don’t have a place to do it, well then drop in a little something for them to work with. I gave our group limited access to the outside world in order to make up for their lack of needed equipment.
Is your party sick of fighting fiendish darkmantles in region A? That’s ok, give them a new fiendish creature to fight, perhaps a fiendish dire weasel?
Is your party ripping through the dungeon and they aren’t being challenged? Well each encounter in the book has a suggestion for scaling the encounter to make it more or less of a challenge.

The entire dungeon has a good flavor and a “first edition feel” to it. In my opinion, the era of second edition AD&D was horrible. They threw away the idea of the dungeon in favor of new settings and more role-playing. Now I’m all for role-playing and new settings, but they took it too far. Removing dungeon-delving and the fun of “killing a monster and taking its treasure” was criminal. The WLD brought this back.
It brought back the fun of trashing the Temple of Elemental Evil that I had been part of way back in the mid 1980’s.

Several of the stories we loved. The stories and backgrounds of regions E & I made for perhaps the most memorable sessions we had of the WLD. When I asked my group for their favorite regions I, J, and the conclusion of E were their responses.

As a DM, I have to give my utter appreciation for the layout of the book itself. Every room on the map had a room description for it. If there was an encounter with anything, monster or ally, the stat block was placed right there in the book with the room, not in the back of the book or in a separate and easily losable booklet. And there are many regions that the DM doesn’t even have to read ahead of time. Yes it helps, but it is not always needed. (I would not suggest that with region E though.)

Now this one I know people will disagree with me, but I’m used to that by now. Of the 840 pages of this book, if you took out the artwork you would probably have lost only 10 pages total. Now how is that a good thing? It’s a good thing because the money you shelled out for the WLD was put towards the module itself, not an artist’s rendering of a particular encounter. In other words, this book was not padded with frivolous artwork.
Now I’m not saying art is worthless in a D&D book. It can serve as the ideal aid to spur the imagination. It’s just used a little too often for my tastes.

One thing you see a little more of lately, but is still relatively rare, is the ability to talk with someone who designed the book or module you’ve bought. But both Jim Pinto (the WLD’s “project manager”) and Jim Hague (designer of regions I & M) both made regular appearances in various forums to offer aid the best they could. Jim Pinto even released the 16 maps in electronic format that allowed me to modify them and place them on the blog for all to see. We were even supplied with the design of region E.
Heck, when asked what music would be good for running in the background while the WLD was being played, Jim Pinto had already thought it through and had a list of suggested music for each region.
And Jim Hague even posted a couple of comments on the blog.
You just don’t see that kind of help and enthusiasm from game designers, ever!

In conclusion, if you like dungeon-crawls, this is a dungeon you have to go through at least once in your life. No other module to date has done what the WLD has done. We spent sixteen months of our gaming lives with this one module. How many other D&D modules can give you the opportunity to say that?

Even one fellow in our group said he would be ready to play The World’s Largest Dungeon 2 if it were to be released.
If that is not high praise, I don’t know what is.

And if you’re wondering about the regions I left out, I did that intentionally. Those regions still have use. I could use them in another game, or better yet, maybe someone could run me through them?