The Birth of a World, part 2

Creating a game world on this level won’t be easy.

Lucky for me I have plenty of time until it is going to be used.
I’m not sure how long Dale’s campaign is set to last, but my guess is that we’re nearly 50% of the way through.
Then Aaron is set to run. Since I have never seen Aaron run, I have no idea how long he will take. But I will venture a guess at a minimum of 6 months.
So with some simple math, I have about 10 months or so to prepare a game.

That should be about enough time, but we’ll have to see.
;)

And I want to repeat, I do not want to change D&D. I just want to modify it a little to make it work a little better for this particular campaign.

But that doesn’t mean I won’t do some house rules.

I’m not a big fan of house rules. I usually make a rule, then think about it, and can it. Usually my house rules add more complication than they are worth.

So any house rules I add will need to be worth it.

And in my opinion these following changes are worth it.

Because these spells are both used very often, and are a little more powerful than other spells for their level, I will we upping Haste and Enlarge Person by 1 level. And accordingly, Slow and Reduce Person will have the same fate.

The reasons for this for Haste: the Haste we know now was previously a higher level spell called Mass Haste, the 3E Haste only affected 1 person. But the spell Slow affected more than one. When 3.5 came out, they decided to make sure that Haste and Slow were truly opposite from one another, so Mass Haste replaced Haste on the level 3 spell list. Having seen that a Haste spell can do much more than a Fireball, I think they should have met in the middle, so now Haste and Slow are level 4.

And a similar back-story exists for Enlarge Person: Enlarge Person had level-dependant effectiveness in 3E, but was just changed to a flat change in 3.5. This caused the spell to become a little too powerful for a level 1 spell (approximately it gave you a +2 strength, a -2 dexterity, -1 size penalty to your AC, and a 10’ reach). Although the spell isn’t quite as powerful as other level 2 spells, it still gives too much for a level 1 spell and is used quite often. So it’s been moved to level 2 for any class that could cast it as a level 1 spell. There is an exception to any clerical domain that has it at level 1. I’m not messing with that hornet’s nest.

Inversely, I’ve rarely seen Reduce Person used. But to keep symmetry, it is getting bumped up to level 2. And since no one uses the spell, no one will care.

Now for the next house-rule hornets’ nest; Power Attack combined with two-handed weapons.

A couple months ago I started a thread on ENWorld about the huge disparity in the power of using a two-handed weapon with Power Attack versus a guy using a one-handed weapon and a shield.

It just seemed pointless to use a shield because it would only help you a little, but using a giant sword and swinging with abandon dropped your monster must faster.

The obvious result of this was that front line melee-freaks never used a shield.

I’m not quite sure of my solution yet, but I think it’s going to either changing Power Attack to a multiplier of 1.5 for two-handed weapons (rather than the current 2), or I’ll remove the +5 limit on the Combat Expertise feat.

I’m pretty much open to anything on this as every option I can come up with changes game balance in some way or another.

Next is the Invisibility line of spells. I’m adding components to them. I don’t expect there to be a shortage of money in the game, but I have seen the spell get used way too often. So a simple little cost of 50gp per casting is enough to make sure that the spell only gets used as needed. That cost will probably be a common gem (clear quartz) or something akin to that.

Now I come to the spell Keen Edge. That change is simple and obvious; it is not limited to edged weapons.
It seems a little silly to me that a spell’s name changes the spell itself rather than the spell’s effect determining the name.

The Wind Walk spell has a new sentence added to the spell description:
“The DM will screw over any group who abuses this spell.”

That should pretty much solve any real problem with that spell. The nightmares that players can come up with of what the DM might do to them can sometimes be worse than what the DM actually does.

And finally, Wish, Miracle, and Limited Wish have to go. I don’t like them as is. So for the time being (read that as “So until I think of something better”), those spells are basically not allowed except for item creation that need Wish or Miracle as a component but don’t give Wish or Miracle in return (like a Ring of Three Wishes).

And for my next topic: random encounters and how to make them easier to handle.

Let’s all face it; most random encounters are actually planned encounters. It just gets to be too much work properly setting up a true random encounter and that can bring the whole game to a screeching halt.

This can be fixed if you are willing to put a lot of work into the game ahead of time. But at some point these no longer qualify for random, they are then considered planned.

So what I have done, and am in the process of improving, is I’ve created an Excel spreadsheet that I’ve placed a simple matrix of various random encounters into it.

The matrix shows just enough to get the barest of information: name, which book they’re from, challenge rating, encounter level, number appearing, their environment, gp carried (randomized using d12’s), the number of gems and jewelry carried, the number of mundane items, and the number of magic items carried (broken down into minor, medium, and major categories).

Then I have the tables for what items are held. This will not be rolled until the last minute, or may be chosen on the fly as needed.

The creatures are as low on the CR list as 1/3 to as high as 36.

And that is just so far. I bought my 2nd to last book I’ll need for this list yesterday, and my final one will be from Monster Manual IV when it comes out. I believe that will be a total of 10 books I’ll have taken creatures from.

That almost guarantees that the players will not be able to identify every creature on sight.

Plus they will never have the same encounter twice. They might fight the same monster type more than once, but there will be more of them (to say the least).

So far the list is almost to 1500 encounters. And no, I don’t expect to use them all. I just want to be prepared.

All I have to do is to pick out a handful right before the game, based upon where I think the party is going to explore. Then I put a note in the page from the book and I’m good to go.

I really need to think of a good blog-entry end-tag.

Dale's Campaign - Session #12

Another fun and interesting session this one was.
And thankfully this session was a bit different and more on the intriguing side.

First off, everyone was at this session, and we stopped the game a little early thanks to a good stopping point at about the right time.

Dale will not be around next week thanks to some lame fantasy football NFL draft. But since I’ve cancelled at least one game in the past few years to go play poker, I guess I can’t really complain, even though fantasy football blows and poker rules.

Aaron could have run a one-shot game, but he opted not to because he believes, correctly, that most one-shots can not really be done in one session unless a good chunk of the game is removed in some way. So unless we have two weeks in a row where Dale can’t run, Aaron will not run anytime time soon.

While waiting for everyone to show up, we had our usual “guys who talk about political issues” half-hour.

We discussed things like, the Burger King commercials.
Dale loves them.
Aaron thinks they’re creepy.

I have my own political point of view.
Sean: “Put me in charge. I’ll fix all of the world’s problems and then replace them with a whole batch of new ones.”

When the last of us showed, we got down to business.

Dale, in the interest of speeding up the game, let us breeze past a few inconsequential things that probably would have just taken up time.

Things like, finding the dragon hoard. Aaron realized that although the momma dragon made her save versus Speak with Dead, the juvenile Growlgretch we had not tried the spell on. So a natural 1 later, and we found the dragon hoard (it involved going into an underwater cave).

And before you knew it we were 15,000gp richer (items and money).

Then we returned to town and found a big Mardi gras type of festival going on. It was called Swampfest and everyone seemed to be having a good time.

That seemed odd to us since they were 2 weeks away from having to sacrifice one of their own.

But as we left our boat, we had some problems of our own. The two prominently displayed dragon heads seemed to act like a beacon for pick-pockets rather than as a badge of respect. A few not-so-idle threats and some weapons in hand made us a safe pathway through to our home.

After we stored our newfound gains, we decided to join in the good times of the festival while trying to gain information.

The first and worst thing we found out; no one in town knew a thing about the impending sacrifice.

As we rewound all of the happenings we’ve seen and interacted with in this town, we realized (in a Sixth Sense kind of way) that we had never bothered to ask anyone of the main populace about the whole thing.

So we had to add this new information to what we already knew. The only thing that changed for Kal was that he didn’t blame the whole populace of the town; but he was still very sure that the town leaders were in on it.

But on a role-playing level, Kal taught a local yokel how to properly cook crawfish. Now he’ll earn nearly 1000gp a month from his Bubba-Vesh craw-fishing company. This assumes that Kal lives to see that money.

But hey, he’s got that going for him.

Beyond that, we pretty much missed a lot of information in the town that now we need to get catch up on.

Culan & Mark visited your stereotype gypsy fortune-teller.

We figured that if she was legitimate, her head would explode.

But she gave them some standard hullabaloo that really didn’t tell us anything, it just gave the game some atmosphere.

Otherwise, we all used our own ways to find out as much information as we could.

What we found:
The town mayor’s name is Herkey.
His closest confidant’s name is Javier.
A young girl named Glenda went missing a few days ago, just at the start of the celebration.

It was obvious to us that this celebration was created simply to mask the actions of the hags while they grab the unlucky girl.

Kal, still firmly believing that the town leaders were involved, felt that a coup would fix the problem. But that wouldn’t get the current girl out of it alive, and the town would be thrown into upheaval, and the hags would then just grab the girls even more quietly – if we’re lucky.

Information gathered, we returned home and began planning.

First off, Kineo went to the town hall and tried to speak directly with the mayor. But his days and nights were all booked up until after Swampfest was over.
So Kineo asked to speak with Javier. But this just caused the clerk to turn to become agitated and he asked Kineo where he had heard that name
End result; Kineo left of his free will before anything bad might happen.

So Culan and Mark entered the town hall, but this time with Culan having cast Detect Thoughts & zone of Truth and Mark constantly using his Detect Evil ability.
They told the clerk that they were there to report the disappearance of a girl named Glenda. The clerk responded that they were already aware of the girl’s disappearance. The spells confirmed the statement.

Having not gotten the response they were hoping for, they asked to see the mayor directly. That was denied.
So they asked about Javier, which set off alarms in the clerk’s head.
He was thinking that there were an awful lot of people asking about Javier today, and the mayor wants any further inquiries about this kind of thing to be taken into custody for “questioning”.

End result: The clerk calls for the guards while the thoughts of torture run through his head. So Mark and Culan leave. But not before scanning the area of the mayor’s office and getting a definite point of evil.

The party informed Kal of this all, and then they all went to talk to Ian de Magi to discuss the information and form a plan.

The plan was simple; we would knock out the wall nearest the mayor’s office, immobilize the mayor, grab the mayor, flee to Ian’s tower, and then we would interrogate the mayor.

(Note to self: I need to annunciate my words better when I say that my summoned critters are going to poison him and suck his Dex out of him.)

We might have over planned this whole raid, but that’s ok.

To immobilize the mayor we had several options, all of with we prepared to use. There was dexterity poison from summoned creatures mixed with the Contagion spell, the Hold Person spell, spells that cause fatigue and subdual damage, and simple grappling.

So plan in hand we moved to the town hall/keep in full battle ready regalia. But since we did it at the prime hour for the evening celebrations of Swampfest, we didn’t look all that interesting.

Kineo followed about 50’ behind us while invisible.

Culan, when we were close enough cast Clairvoyance into the mayor’s office had no interesting surprises. (He was alone and doing paperwork.)

And on our cue, the entertainment began with a nice bright diversion.

Ian made a gold and silver dragon while Lindepohl thought he had to compete with this. So Lindepohl made a dark purple dragon to fight Ian’s.
Yes, Lindepohl had been suckered into helping us by providing even more cover.
This all happened simultaneously with Kal’s summoning of earth elementals.

Culan saw, through his Clairvoyance spell, that the mayor was getting up to get away.

So we went on initiative.
The moment the elementals had the wall knocked down, spells flew like wildfire.
Jaxil cast Silence on the door, preventing the mayor from yelling for help.
The mayor was able to get to the door and get on the other side of it, and closed it.
Mark ran towards the front of the building to make sure no one could escape out that way.
Kal’s elementals charged through the wooden walls, all but surrounding the poor mayor.
Kal then began summoning some fiendish huge monstrous centipedes (they deal 1d6 dexterity poison).
Culan cast a successful Hold Person at the mayor.

By the end of it all, we had successfully captured us a mayor with a -30 dexterity score.

We showed the true meaning of Shock and Awe.

Brian: “We went from subdual to sadism.”

In fact, since the mayor was just a low level expert, any real damage would have killed him. Luckily we intentionally pulled our punches.

We quickly ransacked the office for information and searched the mayor for anything of interest. On him was a nice magical cloak, and a ring with a disembodied eye on it that disappeared after we noticed it.

That ring is dust and shrapnel now and Mark now has a nice magical cloak.

After ransacking, Kineo turned everyone invisible, and then we ran off.
Kineo stayed a little while to search more, but found little more of information.

Information we found:
The maiden is taken a week in advance, selected by the council, and is then taken to a safe house.
Swampfest was a simple idea by the hags to create a Mardi gras type of festival that masked the kidnapping.

When we get the mayor to start talking (using the ravage called Golden Ice that Ian supplied), the information he gives us repeats what we know already.

The process for picking the girl is by council choice, Javier then picks 10-12 of his men, 1 of which is chosen by hidden lot to grab the girl and take her away to a safe house, where the hags grab her.

Ian then summoned a celestial creature which took the mayor away to a new place in the heavens for him to be reformed.

Our next step is to search the deep swamp for the hags, and according to Dale, the fight of our lives.

Since we may break our tile to summon the aid of the Brothers Grimm, we decided to warn them. And since Dale wants us to control then during the fight, he handed their character sheets to us to aid us in planning.

After that we called it a night.

Now we have two weeks (real time) to prepare our group for a big fight against a horde of hags, hill giants, and possibly grey renders.

The Birth of a World

A while ago I mentioned something about putting something down here about my home brew campaign world (The Valley).

And even though it never made it to here, I did type it out.

It had information that my players had and had not seen. I had it all down in an inception-to-play design. But then I realized that all of the stuff I never had a chance to use would go to waste if I put it on the blog. I could never use them again with this group, and any possible future group who knew how to use Google.

So I scrapped the idea of telling all of you about my world.
Sorry about that.

Hey what can I say? You got screwed again. Welcome to the real world.

Those who have played in that world either loved it or liked it and were ready for more. I’ve ran the world 3 times. The first time ended in a TPK. The second time ended in a TPK. And the third time ended when the WLD came out.

The third time the game ended at a good stopping point and there has been recent mention of the players wanting to go back to where we left off. But the problem with that is that those PCs are going to be 2 years since those PCs have been played. And for myself, I’m not up for running the world again. I kind ruined my world for me. Because several of the players know a lot of the facts outside of the game, the mystery of it is gone.

And it’s not like I can get that mystery back. Imagine watching Lost or Babylon 5 while you already know all of the main plot hooks and resolutions. If you take the mystery out of Babylon 5 all you have are space battles and over-acting.

Plus my world was better off with fewer players who were totally new to the setting. It allowed for a lot of political role-playing sessions that needed to be one-on-one. That can be done with 6 players, but in a session where only 1 die roll is made and the talking is done by only 1 or 2 people, that’s a lot people getting left out. And that isn’t fun.

I have had problems in the past where I played in a game that involved one person talking, and the rest sitting there waiting for something to happen so they can do something. If it happens occasionally, it’s perfectly fine so long as it’s never on the same person over and over. But if it happens every week, it’s a sign of a bad DM and/or a selfish player.

I would take a Monty Haul DM over a DM who does that or lets that happen.

So that all being said, my home brew world is going dormant. I’m sure I’ll return to it one day, but not today.

But here’s a little secret that every DM uses; we steal ideas and incorporate them into our games. Where we steal them from is limitless; other DMs, books, games, TV, and so on. And I made a sizeable chunk of my homebrew world using a Japanese console role-playing game.

And I didn’t want to just let that go. I really liked that game’s story and how well it was done.

But modifying something like that for D&D isn’t exactly easy. Japanese rpgs don’t exactly match to D&D on a 1-to-1 basis (even though they so very obviously used D&D as a base for their system).

So I would have a lot of things I need to smooth out and hammer into submission.

Also, I will have to modify D&D a bit to get things to work the way I want them too as well. But I can’t go too far because we’re all here to play D&D, not my specialized version of D&D. I’m not trying to improve D&D as a game; I’m trying to make things mesh well and move a little quicker because I have grander plans in mind.

If things go as planned the PCs will level about every 2 game sessions, maybe more often early on (I’ve never liked levels 1-3). But I don’t want the game to take an hour pause every time someone levels. I want you to roll your hit points, pick your feats, skills, and spells, and be ready to continue in 20 minutes. This happened in the WLD a lot, and I had to set it up so that the PCs would level at the most convenient times. And even then it took too long.

And then there was choosing what spells to memorize. That got to be a horrid affair towards the end of the WLD. Between Jeff and Aaron (Valden & Krieg) they spent an hour of time doing that every time the party rested. I don’t want a return to that at higher levels.

Plus I really like the gestalt rules. Unlike many people, I never had a problem with first edition AD&D multi-classing. It had its drawbacks, but it certainly wasn’t horrible. And from what I’ve seen with Dale’s campaign, gestalt is only powerful when it comes to buffing. Otherwise gestalt just gives you more resources than a normal party (translation: more fights before resting is needed).

And the problems with a Japanese rpg are apparent to anyone who has played them. Some of them can be ignored (steam power & “Magi-tech”), but one thing can’t be ignored and has to be paid attention to; the unavoidable plot train. And I think I will have to compromise on this.

Ok, so now I’ve got a list of things I need to fix; leveling time, spell memorizing time, gestalt power, and plot trains. I have several ideas in mind, but they aren’t quite ready for me to list them.

My goal for this game is to achieve a new style of gaming.
I want the combats to run faster than usual.
I want PC levels to go higher than before.
I want an entire story line that the players’ actions will affect the whole game world.
I want epic forces clashing against one another.
I want to give the PCs a chance to find and use magic items of power that you just never get anymore, but while still having to work hard to get those items.
I want to allow the players many more options than I usually give them, while still maintaining control of the campaign.
I want the return of hexagons for outdoor movement.
I want quick and easy access to random encounters.
I want more use out of the d12.
I want a PC death to be a hiccup to the game instead of a brick wall.
I want more dragon fights.
I want different monsters.
And I still want this to all be fast and loose.

I’ve got my work cut out for me.

A little proof/info about my previous post

Just a little bit background information about how Magic: the Gathering was just the last push that was needed to finish off companies.

Tom Meier's autiobiography
He was an owner of Ral Partha and their first fig-designer. It's biased, but reads true to me.

Ryan Dancey's story about his visit to TSR before WotC bought it.

Both are good reads.

Magic: the Gathering did not ruin gaming

A few months ago I got into a 30 second discussion with someone who I already had no respect for. His views continued to justify why I consider him a half-witted dip$#!+).

He honestly believes that Magic: the Gathering and its owner, Wizards of the Coast, ruined role-playing.

He actually believes that all of the games that existed pre-Magic that died when Magic consumed our money, were worth keeping.

I’m sorry, but common sense and the basic ideals of capitalism explain why those games died. I claim no in-depth knowledge of every little detail, but as a consumer I understand why I didn’t buy something (I had no interest or I had tried it and not liked it or the game concept seemed “eh” to me).

Magic was, and still can be, a fun game. Most of the companies and games that died were probably barely treading water. I even have some minor inside view on one company.

In the early 1990’s I worked as a standard factory monkey at Ral Partha (now reborn of sorts as Iron Wind Metals). The company itself didn’t seem that bad to me from where I was. The worst I saw was that hard work got you so far, but ass-kissing got you a little further. I didn’t quite qualify for either (I’m not a physically quick person, and being nice to someone for long term while lying to them is not something I can do).

They gave their employees a lot of perks. Two 20-minute breaks, rather than the usual two 10-minutes breaks I’ve had at other factories. And they let you take home one or two figures a night, or buy them for $2 a pound. That’s a pretty sweet deal to any gamer, even if it was lead.

And their employees were certainly not the upper crust of society. There were a lot of Harley’s in their parking lot and several cars were filled with smoke during breaks. And I’m not talking cigarette smoke. (No, I never joined in. I’m about as anti-drug as you can get.)

But I found out what happened to RP years later. Tom Meier, a part-owner and original sculptor for RP, wrote in his short auto-biography that RP was run by people who basically didn’t know what they were doing but thought they did (not his words exactly, but close enough). And from what I’ve read, TSR had that same dilemma when they were dying.

And this part I know is a fact; Ral Partha’s continued existence was built upon role-player money. A good portion of the money they made was when a gamer had a couple of extra dollars after buying a D&D product. That gamer would buy a mini or two and leave the store with no money in hand.

What do you think happened when Magic entered the scene? You cold spend $3 on a figure that you probably might use once or twice in a year, or you could spend that same $3 on a pack of cards that you might be able to use immediately. For many, including myself, it was a no-brainer.

I was laid off from RP about 6 months before Magic made its debut around here. And it would be an understatement if I were to say that I was not happy with RP at that point. RP had been losing money all along, or were treading water. If anything were to disturb the status-quo, they would be screwed.

Then Magic came out around here. It started off pretty small, but once people started playing it, it was everywhere. On busy days the non-Magic players would sometimes throw fits because there was no space for them.

So now draw a similar picture with TSR. They had been poorly run and had been releasing worthless crap for years. I stilled played D&D, but it was not often and I certainly didn’t buy everything they put on the shelves.

I honestly thought that the emergence of Magic would wake TSR out of its malaise and force it to compete. I thought they would stop releasing the worthless junk they had been making and would then get back to putting something on the shelves I would want to buy.

I mean, seriously, Dark Sun, Al-Qadim, Spelljammer, and others were not something I had any interest in, and I wasn’t alone. Yes, I bought the Dark Sun campaign setting, but I was not impressed with it and didn’t spend another penny on it.

But I was wrong. TSR was in bad shape, just like RP. They both were the king of the mountain for their respective fields of business and they were both mismanaged into ruin.

Magic: the Gathering was just the last push that was needed to knock them both off the mountain. Both companies didn’t die immediately, but they were on borrowed time.

What does this have to do with Magic ruining role-playing?
Pretty simple I think. Draw similar lines for all of the game companies out there that went poof.

I’m not saying that they were all mismanaged or that their games weren’t any fun to those who played them.

I’m saying that Magic cleaned all of the trash off of the game table. Yes it took down some things that might have been worth keeping, but I’m ok with that because the net result was worth much more to me.

Dungeons and Dragons was saved by WotC. WotC bought TSR to save D&D (not to steal the art for Magic illustrations).

They not only saved it from oblivion they remade it and fixed it. And then they allowed other game companies to add on to their revived D&D.

And now some idiot is telling me that Magic ruined the world of gaming.

Puh-lease. Do the world a favor and never breed. It will save nature from selecting your progeny for extinction.

And that brings me to my next argument. There are too many stupid people in this country. Let us all solve this problem by removing warning stickers from lawn mowers, toasters, and hair-dryers.

(Remember, these are my opinions. I might be missing a fact or two in the equation, but I doubt any new revelations could change my opinion.)

Dale's Campaign - Session #11

Well I’m going to make a quick entry for this session.

The reason for that is that the battery on my MP3 player died while recording, and thus saved nothing. That means no good facts of what happened and no interesting and/or funny quotes.

When I was doing entries for our WLD campaign, it was a lot easier to remember what happened without the need to record things. I could just open up the book and take a look at the maps and they would trigger the right memories and would then type them up. After the fight with Kasteoficiss I knew I had to record the sessions because the fights were getting to complicated and long to properly put in written form.

Dale doesn’t use maps (hence no maps recently). He pretty much free-hands everything. It works for him, so it works for me. But the lack of a solid map makes it harder for me to remember the little details.

So no maps and no recording means a short and quick entry.

Mike couldn’t make it to this session, so Aaron played Mark the paladin. When Brian left early I sort of took over Culan; which meant that I was running three characters for about an hour. I haven’t done that since I was in 9th grade.

Let’s see, we stopped the last session having cleared out Dagger Ford.

It was only around 1pm and we were pretty low on resources. We decided that we needed to rest, and then go adventuring during the night because we wanted to find Bauer, the ghost of the warrior who died trying to save his betrothed from the hags.

We rested and were about to move out to the river when Kineo was attacked by something he couldn’t see. No evil was detected by Mark, so we moved on while being wary of the area and building the attack came from.

Then it attacked again and critted Kal. It was a greater shadow who drained Kal for a mere 6 point of strength. That could have been much worse since Kal has an 11 strength and a crit from a greater shadow sucks out 2d8 strength.

The shadow then hid in the building. Kal then filled the building with a Daylight spell. But unlike previous editions of D&D, light now does nothing to shadows.

So when it didn’t come out of the building for us to kill it, Kal summoned an earth elemental and had it level the building. The shadow knew it was in deep smurf, so it flew up and away.

So now we’re cruising on the river once again. Kineo gets a nat 20 on a spot check (probably the only thing that would have worked). That prevents the return of the young adult black dragon from getting surprise on us.

This dragon (a parent of Growlgretch apparently) came in from behind and breathed on all of us (we were nicely lined up for it and all).

None of us dropped from the acid breath and we somehow all saved versus the dragon fear.

Our next actions involved us moving to solid ground and hurting the dragon as best as possible before it returned.

The rounds after went about as usual, while the dragon was maneuvering for a return swoop we buffed up or attacked.

Then Dale did the weirdest thing; he forgot that we had moved to land but the dragon intended to crash through our magic canoe and then swim away without us being able to get it. But instead what happened was that it slammed right into the ground onto the boat.

Several of us (not Kal or Jaxil) took plenty of crushing damage, and the dragon hurt itself nicely too (but not as much as you’d think).

Then Culan and Mark handily finish the poor dragon off.

Note to self: Give all dragons the Hover feat so things like that won’t happen.

After that we rested up yet again (a lot of our spells were designed for undead attack or dragon attack) and the next morning Culan memorized a Speak with Dead spell. But it didn’t work. We wanted to find out where its horde was. Now we have to wait a week to try again. Oh well.

So we cut off its head and moved on to find Bauer’s tower.

And we did. Going through the tower involved fighting your standard nasty and scary evil things and so on. And Kineo had to use his diplomacy to full extent to keep Bauer himself from beating the snot out of us.

Thanks to some good die roles and us having the same goals as Bauer did/does, he helped us out with some information.

But the lack of a recording means I can’t remember more than a few things.

First, Bauer cannot go past a certain point. His spirit is either chained to something, or it is being prevented from entering the area the hags live in.

And more interestingly, Bauer was able to smell his betrothed’s perfume, even after she was supposed to have been fed to the big bad grey render.

These little bits of information started filling in some holes we had.

Take these clues (some may or may not have been written down here before):
Gray renders are usually protectors rather than hunters.
No one has ever seen a maiden attacked or devoured by the gray render.
The hags always come for the maiden to take her away to the render, and they come in force (several hags and other things – like giants).

Now, I don’t think these girls are sacrificed.
They are warped and turned into hags.
I had been thinking this for a few weeks, originally as a bit of a joke, but also it was kind of thinking out loud.

The perfume clue pretty much confirmed it to me.

The idea of it probably came from gaming with Dale before.
:)

We have 16 days until the next sacrifice. And for the time being, we’re ignoring the Holtrus stuff unless something new and important comes up.

That leaves us 2 available options.

Option number one: Hunt down the hags and kill them in their home. That’s the standard way for adventurer’s to do it. But we have no clue as to where they are or how many of them there are. And we can’t forget that they would have the home advantage.

Option number two: This option requires a little more thought/planning and a moral outlook through my eyes.

The town originally was forced to accept the sacrifice as their only means of survival; “Lose a maiden and you won’t be destroyed.” Or in a more modern view “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

And for a while, that is acceptable, but after a deal of time, that one little girl has turned into 20 or more girls. To me, “the needs of the many...” has been perverted from a semi-noble sacrifice to the other townspeople actively working with the hags. They turn their heads so long as it doesn’t happen to them.

I don’t know if that is explicitly evil, but at best it is a neutral aligned thing.

And pardon me if I’ve seen the movie Dragon Slayer too many times, but I would be willing to bet that the leaders of the town are rigging how the maidens are chosen.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them are actually working for the hags, willingly or coerced.

So after having thought about that, I want to have Kal and the group return to town to find out more information about what is going on in the town itself.

Both options are difficult and have their own pros and cons.

And we won’t be playing this coming week thanks to the Easter holiday thing-a-ma-bob.

So that gives us two weeks to meditate on our choices.

Dale's Campaign - Session #10

Well I was kind of bitchy at this session.

Do you know what is really hard for me? It’s being a DM and then not being a DM and letting someone else do it. I have to constantly say to myself “Just because they don’t do it the way you would do it, doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing.”

So I usually try to keep my complaints contained, but with varying success.

Dale has a lot of pros and cons to his style of running a D&D game, which I believe I’ve spelled out before.

What I try to do is to offer my opinion, but without intentionally being a big jerk about it. But thanks my real life charisma of 6, it doesn’t come out that way.

For instance, we had a couple of potions (oils) that we needed to get identified while we were in town during this session. Kal went to the alchemist and asked how much to identify the potion and the oil we had. The cost was 100gp each. So Kal gave the guy a rude gesture and left.

Dale was a little confused by this I think, so I explained to him that an alchemist doesn’t need to cast the Identify spell on a potion, he just needs to test it.

And Dale’s retort was something like “Well how much should it cost?”

I figured 25gp was fair but still a little high, so Dale said 15gp was good.

I would have been fine with it either way. But anything over 25gp seems outrageous for a potion that probably only costs 50gp to buy.

And this is how it usually goes for me. If I’m right, the other players agree. If I’m wrong, they offer counterpoints. And in the end Dale still decides, because of the (in)famous Rule #0 “The DM is always right.”, but he considers what has been said.

Or maybe that’s Rule #1 and Rule #0 is “Have fun.”
Whichever, it doesn’t matter to me.

That’s usually how we work out any disagreements in our group.

In fact from all recent memory, any time we had a heated argument it was because someone wasn’t paying attention and got confused, or because someone was an idiot who wanted to argue for arguments sake.

But anyway, our game went well and everyone was there.

We last stopped at the temple to Mark’s deity (Mahnway I think).

A mysterious voice had told us a new history of the Darken Moor area and how it became what it is today.

Dale kind of did a rewind and basically allowed us to ask the mysterious voice questions, but we had to show the proper respect (translation: we had to make a Diplomacy or Gather Information skill check versus DC30). And a little something in the offering plate couldn’t hurt (translation: 100gp in the offering plate gives us +1 on the roll).

And here is what we asked and the answers:

How do we restore the swamps to their original state?
You must, of course, remove the heart of evil.

What is the heart of evil?
(Failed check – one of many)

Where does Growlgretch live?
It didn’t know.

Where do we find the ghost of the failed hero?
It didn’t know

Any questions about the hags and other more recent events of the area the voice didn’t know. We concluded that it must be too old too know the newer things.

But it did know how to solve the puzzle from the doorway to the building of ancients that the Brothers Grimm were trying to break into all those weeks ago.

Is the ruined village not far from here the epicenter of the evil?
Not likely. The village’s name is Dagger Ford. Find the Heart of Evil. He has drawn all of the evil here.

Where can we find more information about the heart of evil?
Why you are in the place.

How do we get past those clay golems guarding the crypt below?
You have been found worthy. (Translation: You aren’t evil and you’ve shown respect.)

So we prepped up and entered the crypt guarded by the 2 clay golems.

Down there we find 10 sarcophagi and a magically maintained library.

We perused the library to the best of our abilities. And we found the roster and history of the Brotherhood of the Radiant Light.

The Brotherhood of Radiant Light was a group of 10 adventurers, mostly paladins, who fought evil. Their greatest fight was against the dark wizard Holtrus.

(Holtrus is the same fellow from the story last week.)

When Holtrus attempted to achieve lichdom, the Brotherhood collapsed their keep, Radiant’s Rest, on top of him.

But that failed to stop him entirely. Although he did not become a lich, he did become a dark and powerful spirit of some sort.

(I’ll bet you that if I went and bought the Libris Mortis I’d find out what kind of spirit that was.)

Then we had a discussion about whether or not the Brotherhood of the Radiant Light would allow us their magical equipment so long as we used it to fight the causes of evil, especially the same ones that the Brotherhood fought against.

So we returned to ask the voice if it was ok to open the sarcophagi and take or “borrow” any items of interest to our cause.

“Borrow? All we ask is that we not be left weaponless.”
(Translation: Take a penny, leave a penny.)

By the time we left the temple, that 90,000cp we started with became 0cp.
And we were all happy with that.

Sean: “Best use of copper, ever.”

And really, I kind of like the idea of getting a new weapon and having to do something other than selling your old weapon. It’s more of a role-playing thing I guess.

So we opened the sarcophagi of the Brotherhood of the Radiant Light.
And we found some powerful stuff:
- “The Song of Dawn” – a +3 lawful heavy mace of disrupting (taken by Mark)
- A Staff of Illumination (20 charges) (taken by Jaxil)
- A scroll of Ethereal Jaunt (taken by Kineo)
- A scroll of Undeath to Death (taken by Kineo)
- “The Reaper of the Sun” – a Sun Blade (taken by Culan)
- A Rod of Grievous Wounds (not taken)

At the worst we lost a +1 magic item per item taken.

Kal had no want for the 2 scrolls, one was basically of no use to him for several levels (and even then its usefulness is limited) and the other was a necromancy spell (a forbidden school to him).

At this point I wasn’t happy because the scrolls sucked and one of the fighters had just received an item worth 98,000gp and the other was over 50,000gp. And the Rod of Grievous wounds is a horrible magic item.

Heck Kal’s follower received a better item.

After Aaron and I pointed out that our PCs were hosed (Kal had 2 permanent magic items at this point – a vest resistance +1 and a level 2 Pearl of Power).

Dale listened to our complaint and agreed. We didn’t want a powerful magic item, but we did want a useful one.

So Dale pulled out the magic rod chart and let us roll.
We ignored the Rod of Greater Maximize Spell that Aaron rolled, but he did get a Rod of Splendor for Kineo (main bonuses – a Pavilion of Splendor once per week and a +4 bonus to charisma.)
Kal received an item that covered a potential scary tactical hole for a guy that is almost a pure caster; a Rod of Greater Silent Spell.

And Kal left in the sarcophagi a couple wands and his Pearl of Power.

The voice then let us know that we would be allowed to spend just one night’s rest there safely.

So we rested and when we awoke we had an all day Bless spell on us.

Then we headed back to Dagger Ford.
And I would not be surprised if that temple were to never appear to us again.

We didn’t get very far before something happened.

A pair of trolls were hiding underwater and waiting for us to pass over them.

When we did, they burst from the water and tried to knock our magic canoe over (yeah “magic canoe” sounds silly to me too, but the Beatles made a lot of money on something very similar).

We immediately sprang into action.
Kal and Jaxil both cast Fly and got out of there.
Culan cast Water Walking on himself and Mark.

Dale was on another bad rolling night and missed several times, never hitting more than once for each of the trolls.

Kineo was in melee, not something he likes, but he had no option. He used the spell Persistent Blade to give him a free minor attack that also provides flanking – a key thing for him.

Kal summoned a fiendish crocodile to give flanking and to slow any regeneration.

After that there was nothing the trolls could do to stop from being shredded into pieces by the party. Then Kal summoned an octopus to bring their bodies to the shore where we gave the trolls a proper burial in flame (Kineo cast Flaming Sphere and parked it right on top of them).

While everyone was doing that, Kal decided to spend his last couple of rounds of his Fly spell scouting from 250’ up in the air.

He saw, over a mile in the distance, 2 dark flying things in the distance. One of them was large and the other looked familiar.

Kal immediately dropped to the ground and warned everyone (he memorizes a Feather Fall spell almost always – just in case).

We had about 6 rounds before combat began, and we made use of them.

Kal cast Keen Edge on Culan’s and Mark’s weapons, Levitate, Haste, and Barkskin on himself and Kineo.

Jaxil cast Protection from Evil on himself, Remove Fear on Kineo (who has the worst saves of the group and did not stand near the paladin), and Prayer.

Culan cast several spells on himself, including Lesser Holy Transformation to turn himself into a stronger and flying melee-freak. He also gives all of us acid resistance 20 with a Mass Energy Resistance spell.

On the last round of prep time, Kineo made sure they noticed us (it was not needed though). He blasted at the little one with a Lightning Bolt.

We made sure not to all be standing in a nice straight line for the dragon either.

Round 1:
Kineo blasts the juvenile black dragon with a Lightning Bolt. It saves and takes only 12 points of damage.

Round 2:
Mark readies an action in case one of the dragons gets near us.
Kineo cast a Fireball at the 2 of them, and breaks through momma’s spell resistance
Kal, using the DMGII teamwork rules drops a Flame Strike on the 2 dragons, but he doesn’t break through momma’s spell resistance.
The momma dragon fails to bug any of us with her dragon fear but she does go after Kineo with her acid breath since he so conveniently made a target of himself. He ends up only taking 3 points of damage – even though he failed his save.
Culan flies up to the juvenile one and hurts it pretty bad.
The young one, being a flying creature without the ability to hover, continues to fly in a straight line. This gives Kineo an attack of opportunity, which he crits with for 92 points of damage.

The juvenile black dragon drops into the water in 2 separate pieces.

Momma dragon sees this and, being chaotic evil, keeps flying in her current direction and flees.

All of our attempts to track her down fail; including summoning a celestial giant eagle. She notices this and dives into the water far away so we can’t follow her.

So we took out a dragon, and would have gotten the momma had she not ran. But we blew a lot of spells for her and were now quite low on our higher level spells.

But we had enough to move on, it was still early in the day, and several of our spells were still going (10 min/level).

And as if on cue, 2 bearded devils (barbazus) were sitting and conversing on a small island on the river as we floated near.

And combat began when they summoned in a bunch of lemures; 34 of them in fact.

Kineo cast Stinking Cloud that nearly covered the entire island. But then we found out that devils are immune to poison. So that was the waste of a spell and hindered us in combat.

But that’s ok. Thanks to Great Cleave and Lightning Bolt spells, there weren’t enough of them to even worry about afterwards.

The combat took longer than the dragon one, but there was less real danger to any of us.

When that was over we decided to rest on the small island.

While resting we were caught off guard by a specter in the middle of the night.

Kineo, Culan, and Mark tried to do the combat without waking up the casters, Kal & Jaxil, but the specter became too dangerous so the casters had to be woken up.

Not much later it poofed.

But it did leave a scar on Culan who woke up the next morning 1 level lower than before.
That meant we had to head back to town to get the level restored.
The irony here is that had anyone else lost their level, Culan could have restored it.

Since we had another chance for role-playing, we did.

Kineo went back to the evil Lindepohl’s house to learn more dark things. And while there he met up with the Brothers Grimm and chatted with them for awhile.

He also read up on a historical book, which told some stories of ancient battles from an evil point of view.

Kal did some minor chatting with Ian de Magi and as a thanks from Dale (for taking care of the paperwork) he gave Kal a scroll of Summon Lesser Ally to summon a holy deva one time.

Kal asked him a few questions:
How do we stop Growlgretch from getting away?
Set a trap for it. Its lair is probably underwater.

Would using the tiles as a trap against the Brothers Grimm be considered a violation of the rules of hospitality in the eyes the gods?
Most likely, and doing so would get you cursed.

How do the hags know so much about what happens in town?
They most likely have a scrying item or items somewhere in town.
And when they show up to take the maiden, they show up in force.

What do you know of Holtrus?
I know very little.

After all that was said and done we returned to Dagger Ford and continued clearing it out, starting with a ruined temple.

From the outside we saw a very nicely figured lady, but from the back.
Mark’s Detect Evil lit up big time.

Then she tried to turn around and look at us. This is one of those times when everyone knows what this thing could be, but, metagaming being a bad thing, we couldn’t do anything about it.

Round 1:
Jaxil thinks she’s an evil priestess so he casts Silence.
Kal succeeds on his Knowledge: Arcana with a nat 20. “Hide your eyes. She’s a medusa.” Then Kal uses the only charge he had on his Wand of Fireballs (level 8 caster).
Mark then charges her with a smite evil and crits her for more than enough damage to put her deep into negatives.

We cut off her head and hide it in a bag without looking at it, just to be safe.
(And of course we take her loot. We’re still adventurers after all.)

Next we moved to the last standing building in the village; a large building.

From what we could see inside from the outside was a large black mass of something.

We figured it was an ooze of some type, and then it started moving towards us.

Since oozes and jellies and such are know to split apart when hit by some weapons, or even worse – they destroy those weapons, the front line fighters were loathe to fight this thing.

So Kal called in the fire brigade. He used 2 Monster Summoning IV spells to call in 1d3 Monster Summoning III class creatures. In this case, it was small fire elementals (4 in all). They only had 13 hit points, and couldn’t do much damage but they do fire damage and have no weapons to worry about.

And Kineo did his usual. He cast Lesser Sonic Orb at it for a few rounds.

It took out one elemental per round, but it never touched any of us. In fact, Mark, Culan, and Jaxil had a nice conversation about metaphysics while Kal and Kineo were working.

And even though Dale wanted to ignore the fire elementals and come for us, he couldn’t. The elementals were placed to perfectly block its path, and the pudding was utterly non-intelligent.

Gee, I don’t know why Dale has developed a DM versus the players attitude.
;)

And we stopped there for the evening.

Next week we’ll be missing Mike, but unless someone else cancels, we’re still gaming.