Category: Play

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Excellent Vancouver Andventure, II

[Read the other part first, chums!]

Oh, the situation was dire indeed: my character, Ham, was imprisoned in the oubliette for a murder he didn’t commit, and Scott’s character, Benel, couldn’t have cared less! And this had been the adventure where I hoped to demonstrate that not all my thief characters are evil! **sob!**

Fortunately, I was released from my prison by the Dolphin steward’s humongous cousin, who believed I was too stupid to have killed anyone and told me to flee to the lower city. I trudged around underground, making for the docks, and encountered no monsters thanks to a merciful GM.

Benel, meanwhile, looked for employment elsewhere. First he tried the House of Otter, but they were in mourning. Then he tried the House of Octopus, where he was able to convince them to hire him to write a dirge honoring the fallen Otter steward. They said yes, as long as it was also an acrostic. He came up with:

O T T E R
T O W R E
T W I G S
E R G O T
R E S T S

Um. Yeah. His versifying was, amazingly, better.

I reached the docks, had a bath, found an inn, and slept. Benel, working on his acrostic in a tavern, was informed of my escape and my innocence. Gullible as he was, he believed every word (of course, it happened to be true…). Did he set out to look for me? No, he bought himself a drink.

Later, he went looking for the dolphin steward, who wasn’t in. He left the steward a note saying “Ham is not the real killer! If you need me, I’ll be down by the docks, alone!” He went walking by the docks. He was found later, his throat slit.

Upon seeing his corpse, I ran to the steward’s cousin to offer my services finding the real killer. He informed me he didn’t need an imbecile helping him. He gave me some money, and I went back to the inn, where I awaited the arrival of spring…

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Excellent Vancouver Adventure

During his visit to Vancouver, Josh led Rachel and myself on a two-character adventure set in Harmody in the world of Neng. I played Benel the Elder, a 55-year-old bard/storyteller from Loiborra. Rachel played Ham, a thief whom I trustingly hired as my bodyguard. (Gullibility is one of my character’s flaws.) Ham was also a skilled poisoner — think Zekel the Zekarian. Upon entering Harmody, I presented myself to the Great House of Dolphin, where I arranged to perform a 4-night epic ballad to commemorate the mercantile alliance between the Houses of Dolphin, Otter, and Octopus. We received lodging in the visitor’s part of the palace.

One evening as Ham was wandering about, and while I was getting beat up by a jug band in a taverna, someone apparently came into our room and rifled through our stuff without taking anything. Ham took it onto himself to ask around, and to search the room of another house guest, whom he concluded must have been behind this. The guest, who turned out to be the steward’s cousin, discovered Ham in the act, to which Ham responded: “Somebody rifled through my bags, so now I’m here to rifle through yours.” The other guest concluded that Ham was mentally defective, and meant no harm. Ham then went to harass the steward of the House about how our room had been searched. The steward denied that this could have been possible, and he and Ham took a strong dislike to each other. Ham was in fact thrown into the oubliette for the night, but let out the next day. Ham then swore terrible revenge against the steward within hearing of a chambermaid. Foolish Ham.

The steward and I agreed that given what had happened, it would be best if Ham left the House to find other lodging. Ham reluctantly agreed, but secretly decided to sneak around the house and get revenge. To further this peculiar goal, Ham stole a maid’s outfit, dressed as a maid (despite being a man and having no skill in disguise), and was sneaking around the House. I uncovered Ham in my room, and insisted that he leave. He then promptly crawled out a window while still wearing the maid’s outfit.

That evening the performance went splendidly. I actually wrote out my verses. Let me record the first several lines of the poem that Benel actually performed for the assembled dignitaries in the House of Dolphin:

Back when the world was young
Many songs were once sung
Of Krokan of the House of Otter
Who had a lovely daughter
That betrothed once became
To the scion of the house of fame,
Dolphin, a mighty lord
Throughout Harmody adored.
The two houses together ventured
On ships with servants indentured
Across the realm of Harm
To lands where it was warm
Wine-eye Krokan and
Long-thighed Dezeldun
Sailed for many a moon
Trade they made with Goos
Of the House of Octopus
In mercantile ability
Achieved great civility.
The rate of exchange was great
Profitable was the freight
From ships laden with goods
Like rain upon Par-quds
That for long aeons fell
As Harm’s realm did swell.
Tax benefits did accrue
To the Three Houses Great and True
As Pendel-bar’s thunderous shield
Cleaved on watery field,
As Hazaltar slew the marg
So sailed to Harmody carg-
o, rich and true
On Harm’s plain of blue.

I kid you not.

That night, during dinner the visiting steward of the House of Otter was poisoned! The steward of the House of Dolphin immediately proclaimed Ham to be the prime suspect, since he had (1) been caught rifling through belongings in someone else’s room (2) had been thrown in the oubliette overnight (3) had quarrelled with the Dolphin steward, and had been heard threatening revenge, (4) had poison, cheese and extra socks in his bag, and (5) had been seen climbing out a castle window while wearing a maid’s outfit.

The guards searched the town for Ham and found him easily enough — he wasn’t trying to hide, and of course, I wasn’t about to warn him. Now, Ham had in fact done all of the things attributed to him, except for the actual crime of poisoning the Otter steward. In spite of being innocent, you must admit that the circumstantial case was damning. Benel immediately disavowed all knowledge and association with Ham, believing him to be utterly guilty.

(To be continued)

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Like Moths to a Flame

I have just added on to a summary already written by Brian:

The party ran into a rather large ice-golem that seemed to be immune to the pink light. Trust me — the first thing we did was have Merath zorch it, so she
stayed firmly in character (Wendy was absent this session). After that didn’t work, Merath cleverly cursed it so that its ice became rotted and brittle. Nathan found a giant bow in the chamber, but he wasn’t strong enough to draw it. Marath quickly blessed him to increase his strength. This allowed Nathan to shatter the golem with a couple of well-placed arrows, which was a good thing, because Jacob the Mighty (TM) was busy rolling 1’s. We learned an important lesson about ice golems, though — splitting an ice golem in two gets you two full-sized ice golems. So although there was some clever strategy and teamwork in evidence, we required the legendary cunning of Bastriel to get us out of this mess (Editor: This was in Brian’s original version).

After extricating ourselves from the Golem Menace, we wandered about the caverns, finding that they exhibited some odd physical properties. This was quickly dubbed the “Scooby-Doo Effect” as we found that when we left the central room via one passagway, we almost always returned to the central room via another passage.

Trail and error finally worked in our favor and we stumbled upon the a small “city” of humanoid moths (we had run into one such fellow a bit earlier in the evening). Bastriel straining the limits of his diplomatic skill instructed the Mothmen to “Take me to your leader,” and surprisingly enough they complied. Queen Mothra is her name, a blue-skinned beauty (much to Bastriel’s delight), and she informed the party, due in large part to Nathan’s gentle manuevering of the conversation, that all is not right in Moth-ville. Being heroes, the party looks like they are going to help, and there have been knowing glances exchanged about perhaps adding the mothmen to the Rose Kingdom’s faithful subjects.

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Deeper Into The Ice

The Rambling Bumblers (it is the Rambling Bumblers, isn’t it? Are we all agreed?) explored deeper into the Nefari-built ice caverns beneath the Red Keep. Coming to a huge fanged archway carved in the ice, Jacob the mighty sliced it apart with the Thorn Sword….and released an enormous Ice Worm. Unfortunately for the poor fauna of the ice cavern, Jacob’s skill at Giant Killing made short work of the beast. Unfortunately for the party, the carcass of the worm attracted the hungry attention of the cloud beast in the chasm, which poured up out of the chasm towards them. Eleazar quickly hurled some silver crescents and put up a ward to protect the party, and after some hemming and hawing, Merath of Yahar let loose with a full-power blast of the Rose Light to try and destroy the worm carcass, so that the cloud would lose interest. Merath forgot, apparently, that within the Rose Kingdom, the power of the light was nearly unlimited, and ended up vaporizing a 30-yard diameter sphere including the worm, the archway, a goodly chunk of the cliff, and the ice bridge that the party had come in on. Ooops. It did kill or drive off the cloud beast, though.
Buried in the ice they found a new PC, Nathan (played by Brian). Nathan had somehow came to be buried there after severely annoying a curse witch three years before, but he was fuzzy on the details. Seeing no other way out, he elected to follow them, although throughout the evening they gave him cause to wonder at the wisdom of that decision.
A bit of fancy work with the rope later, and the party was in the ice tunnel (twenty yards behind the original entrance); proceeding down the tunnel, lit by Merath. After a while, the tunnel came to be suffused with at first a blue, and then a blue-green glow. Eleazar came to be more and more aware of whispering in Nefari that apparently only he could hear. Spotting shadowy humanoid figures paralleling their line of march, Jacob slashed through the ice, revealing another tunnel, and the polished surface that was reflecting the party’s images. They moved over to the new tunnel, and a fair distance farther came to a big, deep cavern, reminiscent of the cavern of the Rose Light beneath the Rose Tower. In the center of the cavern was an icy platform, and there were 24 ice bridges from the platform to tunnels in the walls; below they could see another such platform, and another beneath that, which was as far as the golden light from the torch ensorcelled by Bastriel could carry. As soon as they stepped onto the bridge, the ambient blue-green glow went out, and Eleazar stopped hearing the whispering.
Merath refused to enter the cavern once she figured out that her precious pink light wouldn’t work there, so the others investigated the platform and discovered a Nefari spiral underneath the undisturbed snow. Unlike certain other PCs, they did not walk right across the hidden spiral, so no unexpected journeys to the Nefari lands for them. Yet.
They decided to explore the tunnels methodically, starting at the immediate left, and once they had gotten to it safely managed, with some difficulty, to persuade Merath to join them. Once in the corridor her light worked again, and she was much relieved.
Down the corridor they were attacked by a horde of tiger-sized Ice Weasels, who attempted to rip their flesh. They dispatched several, but there seemed to be no end to them, and eventually (once they rediscovered the fact that Merath’s pink light worked as a damage shield) they sent Merath out into the pack, and eventually the ravening weasels were reduced to so many cauterized gobbets of flesh. In order to prevent them from being used by spirits to make undead, Merath systematically vaporized the lot of them. In the weasel’s nest they discovered a fancy red stone box with gold trim, in which they found a Nefari magical charm (a ring linked to a bracelet) that they tucked away for future examination. There was a narrow tunnel leading out, but since they would have to slither through it, they elected to ignore it.
In the second corridor they found a barrier of differently colored ice, and when Jacob poked a hole in it, water poured out (presumably from the lake above); Merath used her hedge-wizardry to reseal the hole before the entire lake came in.
In the third corridor they discovered a temple with a Nefari altar of ice (shackles, blood-grooves and everything), which Eleazar ritually defiled–although the process of doing so knocked them all out. Upon recovering, they explored two of the three adjacent rooms, in one finding feathery vestments in iridescent blue and green, and in another many sharp knives and instruments of torture as well as a big black Book O’ Evil. Jacob attempted to set fire to the book, and burst into flames himself. Unable to put out the fire on his leafy form, he raced back to corridor two, cut another hole and doused himself. Merath followed, a little belatedly, and sealed up the hole before too much of the lake came in.
At that point, we broke for the evening.

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The pit of shadows

I GMed a 3rd Hero-Cities adventure with the Sunday group last week. The cast was: Rolly, the invincible dwarven wizard (Paul); Eldor, the slacker elven sorceror (Doug); Sorin of Molosh, swordswoman supreme (Wendy); Bronwyn the priestess who is into personal growth (Josh); and the fighter formerly known as Bob (Mike). Actually, the last got several names Sunday night: Steven, the Eager as he dubs himself, and VeNKi as he was dubbed by the rest of the party (the Very Nearly Killed).

Gillet the merchant was a former adventurer who had retired after running out on the rest of his party in a panic while exploring a ruin they found in Yaga’s Forest. He had been haunted by the episode, and wished to return to the ruin to face his fears, confirm that his friends were dead, and give them a decent burial. Since he was part of the merchant caravan that the PC’s had saved from ghouls a few months back, he wanted to hire them as his escort to the ruins. There was some discussion of what kind of “escort service” he was looking for, but at the end the party accepted. He gave them 2,000 gp to prepare, and went to consult the Ellander cult records for information about the area.

A week or so later, Gillet and the PC’s started out, fully equipped with weapons, a donkey carrying their camping gear and plenty of healing scrolls. The first day was an unevenful cruise down the main road to Newton. The next morning, they crossed the Thornwall into Yaga’s forest. While watched by the usual evil crows, nothing malign occurred until a nasty vine reached down and began strangling Gillet. Steven the Eager chopped him free, but was Very Nearly Killed himself as the vine wrapped itself around his throat. Suddenly, the shrubbery in the area grew and entangled the whole party. Rolly the imperturbable was able to cast a magic missile at it even while tangled, and Bronwyn enlarged herself so that she could rip herself out of the underbrush and pull Steven loose. Sorin lit up a torch, and the tendrils receded before her fiery onslaught. A good blow from Steven and the vine shrivelled, and the shrubbery receded.

The group pulled themselves together, and proceeded quickly to Trollwatch, a safehouse maintained by the cults for spying on Trolltown, an area where a huge troll keeps a crude form of law and order for its motley inhabitants. There they were greeted by Tamar, an avatar of Isthar the sorceress, and Branach, an avatar of Enkidu. Branach’s bear companion got very interested when Eldor suggested that he might have honey to share. Over dinner, Eldor enertained the group by recounting their previous adventure, “An zen I apply a little of ze grease magical, heh? An the gnolls, zey go into ze pit on zere nez, heh heh!” Impressed, Tamar took Eldor off to a quiet spot to try an impromptu initiation ceremony, which left Eldor fatigued but feeling powerful.

The next morning, the group decided to go south of Trolltown, walking along the Haunthold Wall. This was a barrier created by Yaga to keep her undead minions in their place. As they walked, zombies and ghouls accumulated on the other side, craving their flesh but unable to cross the line. They spotted a group of orcs from Trolltown, led by a half-ogre, performing some ritual at the wall. They tried to duck back into the forest, but were spotted and trailed. They decided to set up an ambush in the forest, and the orcs ran into it. Eldor used his new magic gained at his recent initiation to capture the orcs in a web. The half-ogre ripped himself free, and attacked Steven, Very Nearly Killing him. But Big Bronwyn flanked the half-ogre, and Sorin rushed in from the side. Between this mighty trio and Rolly’s magic missiles, the half-ogre soon bit the dust. The orcs, captive in the web, fell to a barrage of arrows.

They proceeded more cautiously, and managed to get past the Trolltown area. Towards evening, Rolly’s toad heard a suspicious noise. “A suspicious toad is a horrible thing!” all agreed, especially when they found themselves surrounded by archers.
“Wait! I recognize them.” cried Lilamir, the druid that had answered their summons on the last adventure. The archers were senior initiates of Ellander, and they and Lilamir hosted the PC’s to a night of dancing and feasting, relatively safe in the heart of enemy territory. They parted ways the next morning, but promised to look for the PCs after completing their own mission.

A few hours later, the party found the ruins. Stones bearing the insignia of the
cauldorn and three fingered claw lay scattered on the forest floor. Rubble had been cleared revealing a pit, the bottom of which was covered in darkness, despite the sun directly overhead. Steven was lowered by a rope into the darkness, where, crawling on a stairway on his hands and knees, he recovered several reverse torches, radiating magical darkness and threw them up to the others. Of course, that plunged the whole area into darkness, and the rest of the group had to crawl on their knees to find the torches. Finally, Rolly realized that putting the torches in a bag stopped their darkness getting out.
“I put them all in my little bag of darkness!” he chortled evilly.

At the bottom of the stairway, the party found the crumpled skeletal remains of
the wizard in Gillet’s party. Bronwyn used her medical training to deduce that he had died from a broken neck. Steven conjectured that he had fallen down the steep stairway while running away in a panic, like Gillet. After looting the body, I mean, gathering remains to be given to his next of kin, the party cautiously continued on to a passageway., where there were a sword and bow. Beyond that, there was a strange swirling effect, as magical light dueled with magical darkness.

Out of the darkness came a terrible howling, sending Eldor and Sorin into panicked flight. Two ferocious hounds burst out of the shadows, one Very Nearly Killing Steven, the other biting the terrified Sorin and pinning her to the ground (ironically, preventing her from fleeing). Steven and Gillet attacked the hounds, while Rolly cast his magic missiles. Bronwyn used her Remove Fear scrolls to calm Eldor as he ran past her, and then Sorin. Once the two were calmed, the brutes were heavily outnumbered and began to take a beating, despite their eerie ability to become almost invisible in shadows. Eldor joined Rolly with more magic missiles, and did his elven victory dance as both shadow mastiffs keeled over.

To be continued next game…

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BESM Dungeon

I tried running a solo game for Russell, using the new Big Eyes, Small Mouth: Dungeon pregenerated adventure. I’d been wanting to try BESM, just to see how the system worked, and this seemed like a good opportunity. As it turns out, BESM isn’t bad–I think a bit better in terms of chargen than actual play (the combat system in particular has the feature that equally good opponents will actually score a hit on eachother at most 25% of the time–which makes for pretty long combats without a lot of decision points); it’s close enough to my homebrew that in the future I’ll probably either swipe some of it for the homebrew (I like the point cost system for buying unique powers), or if I run any BESM tweak it with house rules from my homebrew (e.g. making degree of success matter in combat would fix the problem I mentioned).
That being said, though, the editing in Dungeon was horrible: bad enough that it nearly negates the usefulness of having the adventure written out for you. For instance, it provides templates to make it quick to create a character–but the templates have enough errors and omissions in them that you really have to recalculate them from scratch before using them. Similarly, the random encounter charts helpfully indicate the page numbers for the creatures encountered, but those pages turn out to be templates for creating monsters, not fully-stated monsters. The idea, I suppose, is that you can adjust the difficulty to match the party; in practice it means that you have to spend time building the monsters in advance or try to do it on the fly during the game. I did the latter, and accidentally made the first encounter too tough and it wiped out Russell’s party (timely intervention by an NPC that they had rescued saved them, but still…) Even the monster encounters that are fully worked have problems: one room (that Russell never got to) said it contained a necromancer and twelve zombies. A sentence later it said “Both zombies have swords.” Looking at the description of the necromancer to try and settle whether it’s twelve or two zombies shows that he doesn’t have enough points allocated for twelve unless they are flunkies who can’t attack (but that’s not how their stats look–they have fighting skills and are built on double the points of a flunky), but it’s not enough points for two servants (who can attack) who are a powerful as the zombie description, either. Argh.
The final verdict: BESM, pretty cool rules-light system, but needing some tweaks to make it scale and speed combat. BESM Dungeon: waste of time and effort.

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From Russell

To answer Rachel, I guess the Sunday game was on hiatus for wedding-related reasons the last two weeks. I came back to visit Josh this weekend, and ran a second Hero-Cities adventure.

The group was Eldor, the slacker elf sorceror (Doug); Rolly, the indestructible dwarf wizard (Paul); Bronwyn the Dostoevsky priestess (Josh) [I think he means Tolstoy (War and Peace) — Josh]; and a new fighter who adopted the nom de guerre “Bob” (Mike). We had some important character insights this game. For example, Eldor’s bad French accent is the result of a contagious disease that Bronwyn caught during the course of the adventure, but which mutated into Spanish, probably in Rachel’s honor. Rolly speaks fluent pig Latin. Mike names all his character’s WEAPONS but not his character.

Plot summary: A recon mission sent to spy on the gnolls has gone missing in Yaga’s Forest (aka, a bad place to be after dark). Since Belaphon the naiad couldn’t locate them by scrying, their commander concluded that they were probably in one of the entrances to the Armory, which is magically protected against divination. Our quartet volunteered to be one of several groups, each sent to look at an entrance. In fact, in Bronwyn’s words:
“Ooh! Ooh! Since we’re the PC’s, we volunteer to go to the entrance where they ACTUALLY ARE!”.

Each group is given a supply of healing potions for the people they are saving, and a few other supplies, like a whispering wind scroll to summon help from the officer corps. They go together to a few miles of the Armory, then split up. A wild boar and a few healing potions later, they find that as usual Bronwyn is correct. A trail of blood and consumed healing potions leads them to the entrance to the tunnel. As they are about to reach the tunnel, they are ambushed by two gnoll trackers, but Rolly puts one to sleep and “Bob” and Bronwyn beat up the other.

They find the tunnel, which is marked with the sign of the Hikitami cult in mud fingerprints. Since one of the MIA’s was in that cult, they decide to use the scroll to report success. But it will take up to half an hour for an officer to reach them, so they go inside the tunnel. “Bob” (very luckily) finds a trip-wire, and the group avoids it. A few hundred yards later, he finds a pit-trap, but not so luckily, he finds it by falling inside. A few healing potions later, the group is on the other side,and has reset the trap just in time to hear “Snap! Aaarggh!!!” from back down the corridor. Another group of gnolls has entered the tunnels, and got caught in the arrow trap the PC’s avoided.

Two gnolls appear in view down the corridor. They rush towards the party, just in time for Eldor to summon magical grease, on which they slide right into the pit trap, landing on their heads. But it’s not over. The boss gnoll is behind the cannon-fodder. “Bob” valiantly if not too cleverly jumps over the pit, sliding on the grease [Actually Eldor cancelled the spell — Josh] towards the boss. He takes on the boss in single combat, but gets some magic missile support from the magicians. The boss decides to flee, but is shot full of arrows by Eldor and Bronwyn as he turns to leave.

A few healing potions and a net trap later, they find the missing party. They use up the last of their healing magic getting that group conscious — Rapsel the Hikitami cultist was the only one functional. She had found, disabled and then reset the tunnel traps to ward off the gnolls that had been following their group. The druid officer Lilamir arrived, in the form of an owl, and escorted them back to the rendezvous, where they were congratulated and rewarded for their success.

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Guest GM report

I was guest GM at both last Friday and Sunday’s games. Both games are set
in my fantasy world where adventuring types are organized into hero-cults,
dedicated to deeds worthy of the founding hero (and drawing power from the
said hero). The Friday group consists of Bell the very good-looking paladin (Josh),
Erabod the elven wizard and cook (Mike), Duramir the dwarven warrior (Walter),
Ostiel the uninhibited ranger who speaks many animal languages (Mac), and
Haha al-Ish, a part-Jannii priestess of Rai-Nocturne (sun god, night goddess) (Beth).
They were looking for a worg that was spying on Rurik the Smith and his forge,
but never found it. I blame the drive down. After Philadelphia traffic, I must have
been subconsciously avoiding further confrontations.. I didn’t even know how to
react when Erabod asked an elderly hobbit druidess if he could look at her melons.
Was this an innuendo or did he have a devious plan to lure the worg
with canteloupe?

Anyway, i was about to burn my GM screen when I ran the Sunday game. This
was a blast, even if I didn’t get most of the in-jokes. The group was
Bronwyn, the priestess of Belic-Serene (war and peace, with a heavy
emphasis on WAR) (Josh), Soren of Molosh, a mighty and clever warrior
woman (Wendy), Eldor, an adolescent (very adolescent) elven sorceror
(Doug), and Rally the indestructible dwarven wizard (Paul).

The group encountered ghouls who had followed a path cut through
what is normally a defensive hedge on the border of the Haunted
Lands. After dispatching them, they followed the same path that
the ghouls had been following. They found a group of
merchants who had been robbed by bandits, then attacked
by ghouls, and was currently in sorry state. After bringing
them to safety, and a night of carousing, they hurried on their
way to their original destination, the town of Lillibridge.

In Lillibridge, they were suprised to meet the very same merchant
that they had rescued! The “merchant” acted in a suspicious
manner, and they eventually realized that he was actually a
disguised bandit, who had come to town to fence the stolen
merchandise. After failing to lure the group to his room, the
bandit snuck up behind Rally as he was interogating the bandit’s
assitant Corwin in the stable. The bandit hit Rally by suprise,
(twice!), but didn’t dent his thick skull. Once Eldor and Soren
ran to his aid, they quickly captured the bandit, just as
Bronwyn ran up with a group of guards to capture his accomplice.

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Thrunk goes Klunk

First fatality in the new (Jeff and Andy) campaign: Jeff’s character Thrunk Shillelagh got pinned in a corner by a trio of skeletons and hacked to bits. Andy’s character Link was running pellmell for the exit of the dungeon, and so wasn’t in any position to try first aid or to recover the body. Remember kids: In D&D always bring a Cleric!

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Meanwhile, back at the ranch

Nothing in particular happened Sunday. Wendy and Doug were the only ones who could make it, and Doug had to bail when work paged him, so we ended up watching Teen Titans and Duck Dodgers. Thanks, TiVo!