The Editioning, AD&D 2nd Edition, Part 7

Nostalgia v Nowstalgia

Nostalgia rarely serves you well, I always think. If you let yourself be solely motivated by nostalgia, you’re destined for disappointment. Nostalgia is a feeling; it’s the feeling you get when you yearn for the feelings things in the past stirred in you. It often gets mistaken for the things themselves. I certainly worried that I was making that mistake when I came up with the Editioning, our challenge to play an adventure in every edition of the venerable dragon game over the course of about 24 months. I told myself I had academic motives; I wanted to compare them, see how they changed through time, how the changes in designers affected them, what happened with the emergence of different play styles, character first stories, actual plays. All that. But, I was particularly excited to run AD&D 2nd Edition. There was no doubt this was driven by nostalgia. I played 2E more than any other edition of the game, concocted some of my favourite campaigns with my players, created worlds for their characters, some of whom would live forever in infamy. Those games live large in my memory.

But I’ll give myself credit for going in with my eyes open. I understood that nostalgic feeling in myself from the start and decided to approach the experience almost as if it were a new one. This turned out easy enough. I really did have to reread the books, relearn the rules, refamiliarise myself with the setting and the adventure. I had no concrete memory of any of that. Before diving back in, I couldn’t have told you that initiative was rolled on a d10 and the lowest roll wins. I didn’t realise that paladins only got spells at level 9 and certainly couldn’t have explained the surprise rule to anyone.

Taken from that perspective, here’s what I learned. Character creation in this game is a task to be endured. It might have been less difficult and time-consuming if I had not chosen an adventure in the Planescape setting with its peculiarities of race and place and faction. It might have been easier if I had not insisted on everyone at least considering the kits in the various “complete handbooks.” I did that because it felt like a uniquely 2nd Edition experience that I didn’t want my players to miss out on. If you only allow the races and classes from the Player’s Handbook and you leave out the optional non-weapon proficiency rules, your Session 0 might involve fewer players tearing their hair out, and it might only take two hours instead of four. Whether or not my players appreciated the pure, unadulterated, 2nd char-gen, I’m not sure. I think some got more mileage out of it than others. But here’s what I am sure of, once that process was over with, we all loved those characters and the adventure we went on. Eventually, it became clear that the best way to play it was to embrace the long-winded spell descriptions, the needless crunch, the haystack-like books and the needle-like rules. If you can laugh about those things together at the table, while also using those rules to create cool stories together, then you are doing AD&D 2nd Edition right, I think. I got frustrated with it on occasion, but that was mainly during prep, when I tried to do most of my rule research. I know some of the players struggled with spells, spell slots, spells per day etc. But, importantly, my priority during play was always to try to keep the session moving. So, in some instances, I made rulings that maybe didn’t reflect the rules. But that’s in the spirit of the game in my opinion. Generally, that would be my advice for any GM and any game, to be honest.

The Eternal Boundary Crossed

Dear reader, this is the last instalment! If you are interested to read all the previous ones, go here. If you think, however, that you might be a player in this adventure, The Eternal Boundary, someday, maybe give it a miss.

Last time, our heroes’ investigations brought them to somewhere unexpected. They’d leapt through a portal in the Mortuary that would take them to the Elemental Plane of Fire. There, they found themselves on an asteroid-like rock floating amongst the never-ending inferno, protected, somehow from being burned to cinders. The rock played host to a citadel of sorts. It had platforms with great ballistae to protect it from the more hostile denizens of the plane, a marble-clad temple complex of some sort and guard tower watching over everything. After killing some sentries, the PCs tricked some hobgoblin mercenaries into believing they were new recruits. They’d been advised to report to the high-up men in the temple. To do so, they tried to by-pass that tower, but the guards questioned them and their prisoner, Toranna the Grey, shouted for help. A fight broke out! The paladin ran in to take on the guards at the door while the thief fired some arrows and the cleric used his Spiritual Hammer to attack the archers on the roof. Even the witch’s goat got in on the action. They took some damage but eventually managed to defeat all six guards inside, steal their uniforms and stock up on weapons and supplies before heading on to the temple. During the chaos of the battle, they misplaced Toranna.

It turned out, once they entered the temple, that she had alerted the guards, the priests and the citadel’s commander, Green Marvent, that they were coming, so their clever disguises counted for naught!

It was a long, wide chamber with a series of columns on either side and an altar at the far end. A large, glowing gem hung, suspended in the air above the altar. It seemed to be important. The PCs were outnumbered here. There were just the four of them and they had just been in a couple of fights. They were not at their best. So they had to think laterally. They played a delaying game as they were engaged in combat by the guards inside the door, the human captain of the guard and the head of the hobgoblin mercenaries. They cast Silence on the spell casters gathered near the altar, forcing them to move, and preventing them from casting things like Command and Scare. This helped Trance, the thief to get close to the altar, before being rendered unconscious by Green Marvent. The Githzerai commander of the faction in charge of this place, the Illuminated. I gave the others one round to help Trance before she would die. Devansh came through with a heal just in time as the fight continued. Aurora, the bariaur witch, was down to using her sling-staff and no-one except the paladin was doing well for hit points when Trance managed to grab the gem and threaten to destroy it. This brought the fight to an abrupt end. Green Marvent explained that the gem was all that was preventing the rock from being consumed by the flames. The hobgoblin chief was swayed by Glaermond the paladin’s superior charisma and agreed to switch sides, seeing how the wind had changed direction. He went out and ordered his lads to go after the other Illuminated guards.

Finally, Devansh used Command on Green Marvent to “Explain.” And so she did. The Illuminated, she said was her faction. It was young and still light on power but she had come up with a way to bring the other factions of the Planes down from the inside. The plan was kidnap the barmies off the streets of the Hive, cure them of their madness and then convince them that their very own deities had brought them back from the dead, assigning them with one task, to join the Society of Sensation, or the Governors, or the Dustmen or the Doomguard or any faction, and to do as they were bidden when they had done so. Of course, Green Marvent was the one using illusions and disguises and appropriately fitted out chambers in the citadel to persuade the former barmies of this. And she would be the one giving them their orders, rather than Saint Cuthbert or Bahamut or Gruumsh or whatever deity they worshipped. It was a long game, perhaps, but she was patient. And she would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for these pesky adventurers.

Once the hobgoblins had dealt with he rest of the guards, the PCs rescued the few ex-barmies who were still not eh Rock and delivered them and Green Marvent back to Sigil. The Governors would deal with her treachery, if the Lady of Pain didn’t get to her first.

Meanwhile, Aurora considered the citadel for a new lick of paint and took its measurements for some more witchy decorations…

Conclusion

I had to make some changes to the adventure in the end. “Green Marvent” was the big bad hinted at in the body of the adventure. They were the one issuing orders via messenger and letter. They were the one with the plans for the Illuminated. But, as written, they never appeared in this adventure. I can only assume they were meant to turn up in a sequel to the Eternal Boundary that never happened. So I swapped out the commander of the citadel, Imogen, for Green Marvent. That way, the PCs get a sense of closure to the plot, at least. Other than this, I wouldn’t change too much about this adventure. I do think it was slightly too linear for my liking. I occasionally struggled to fight the text’s efforts to get the party back on the rails. In the end, they got where the adventure needed them to be, but maybe in a different way. As I think I mentioned before, having a member of the Dustmen faction on the team was a shortcut that ensured they did not have to treat the Mortuary section like a dungeon crawl, and that was a significant proportion of the adventure as written! I would imagine, if that hadn’t been the case, or if the PCs couldn’t come up with a clever plan to bypass it, the adventure would have taken at least a session or two longer than the 6 it took us.

In the end, we all agreed that we’d go back to these characters and this campaign and the Planes. I loved the PCs they created and I want to see more. I would like to give them a chance to pursue the original adventure hook given them by Bendon Mawl of the Senstes, the seek out the key to the portal to the Isle of Black Trees, which had been teased several times throughout the game. And I want to see how Devansh’s little temple turns out, not to mention Aurora’s new wizard’s sanctum.

But all that will have to wait. AD&D 1st Edition will continue for a while, but I won’t be running any more D&D until the New Year. I just need little break. I’ll run something else though so be sure to come back, dear reader, and see what that is.