dnd – The Dice Pool

The Lost City Review

Disclaimer: I have only read this adventure. It’s unusual enough for me to review something that I haven’t actually played but I thought it was worth doing anyway.

Quests from the Infinite Staircase

I don’t know at what point WOTC decided that every D&D book they released had to be titled Noun from the Adjective Noun or some derivative thereof but they got deep into it there for quite a while. Anyway, today I’m looking at the first adventure presented in their anthology for D&D 5e, Quests from the Infinite Staircase. This book uses an unlikely framing device known as the Infinite Staircase, along which you can find portals to all sorts of adventuresome and slightly retro locales. It’s a sort of extraplanar locus inhabited by a genie who will send you and your pals to any of these spots for whatever reason. It’s a bit like the Radiant Citadel, which they made up as an extraplanar locus to allow you to easily travel to a bunch of disparate regions on, presumably, different worlds for that other anthology, Journeys through the Radiant Citadel. Come to think of it, it’s a bit like that other famous extraplanar locus, the City of Doors, Sigil, which has been in existence in the D&D universe for decades. So why do they keep inventing new loci? Do you even really need this conceit to join this collection of otherwise standalone adventures together?

The alternate cover of Journeys through the Radiant Citadel. it depicts the crystaline citadel floating in a pastel cloudscape — The alternate cover of Journeys through the Radiant Citadel

The cover of the boxed set of Planescape for AD&D 2e. It depicts a great gate leading into the towering streets of Sigil. — The alternate cover of Journeys through the Radiant Citadel

The Lost City

Disclaimer: I have only read this adventure. It’s unusual enough for me to review something that I haven’t actually played but I thought it was worth doing anyway.

I’ll keep this relatively spoiler free but there may be a few points you’d rather not know in advance if you’re interested in being a player in the Lost City.

This adventure, along with all the adventures collected in this book, is an updated version of a classic one from D&D’s history. The original Lost City was published in 1982 and was written by Tom Moldvay as an introductory adventure for the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set. I confess, I have not read the original so I won’t be comparing the two here.

This is the first adventure in the collection. It’s meant for 1st level characters. It’s a dungeon crawl in the very classic sense with up to six levels to it and a factional element that is close to the heart of the module.

Background

The lost desert city of Cynidicea was once a prosperous and powerful place. but they delved too greedily and too deep when building a ziggurat to honour their deceased monarchs. Oops. This was the downfall of the city of course. As an answer to this, the people split into four disparate sects. None of them got along but one was definitely worse than the others. The worst of these sects led the people underground to rebuild in the darkness beneath the ziggurat as the desert reclaimed their city above.

Getting There

At the start; how to get your PCs here from the Infinite Staircase, where to locate it on three D&D worlds and a couple of adventure hooks to get them to go. The hooks are fine. Get hired by an anthropological expedition or get separated from your desert caravan. If you wanted to incorporate this into an ongoing campaign, I feel like you could do better yourself.

Advancement

There is a handy section that spells out for you at which points you should let the PCs level up if you’re using milestone levelling. By the end of the adventure, your characters should hit level 4.

About the Original

There is a nice little sidebar here and in every adventure in the book, which tells you about the original. It gives you some info on the edition it was meant for, a few details on how it was supposed to be used and the credits. I like that here, they tell you that The Lost City was meant to be used to teach new DMs how to run and design a dungeon, allowing them to come up with the lower levels of the dungeon themselves.

People and Factions

The Cynidiceans all wear masks, usually some sort of animal mask, and they generally don the shabby left-overs of their once glorious past. Also, sometimes, they act like the animal depicted on the mask. Fun!

As I noted above, the factions are often at the heart of the adventure. They are detailed here. Each of them worships a different god, with their own portfolio, of course. Thematically, they are each quite distinct and have a look all their own, exemplified by a particular type of mask that they wear and a tattoo that they sport.

The paragraph or so that each faction gets here leans heavily on the ways they will pursue their goals, which are, unsurprisingly, influenced by the type of god they follow. We are told they all want to preside over the rebuilding of their city in their own way. They all want the same thing but they will not co-operate. This leaves me wanting a bit more, maybe some aim that’s a bit more immediate would help.

Random Encounters

Roll a d6 for every hour spent in the Ziggurat. If you get a 1, it’s encounter time. There’s a d12 table with a preponderance of cultists and other Cynidiceans, which makes sense, and an owlbear, which doesn’t (did I mention it was in a desert?)

The Ziggurat

The PCs have to enter from the top and work their way down. They’ll be sealed in once they enter, like a common hobbit and his eight fellows in a mine. The goal of the entire adventure is basically to survive long enough to find another way out. This might change during the delve, of course, once you meet the factions. But probably not.

I want to point out a cool thing right at the entrance where they can use ladders to either climb down into tier 2 of the ziggurat or up into the hollow interior of a set of statues on the roof of it. They can use levers that allow them to move the statues’ limbs and there’s a speaking tube. I like the idea of this but there is no practical use for this feature. They are not likely to encounter anyone outside on the top of the Ziggurat to impress with this display and it’s not going to do them any good once they’re on the inside so it seems a bit pointless?

Anyway, as I stated above, there are up to six levels to the Ziggurat. To be fair, the first level is just a single room right at the top, and hardly counts. But, as you would expect from a ziggurat, each level gets bigger as you go down. Even level 1 (or tier 1 as it’s called) has a pretty gnarly trap right from the get go. At worst, though, it will result in all of the PCs being rendered unconscious. If this happens, they’ll be taken by the first of the factions, the Guardians of Gorm, who will question them and try to recruit them. There are moments like this for each of the factions, partly because the place is positively riddled with traps and partly because the adventure does not want them to miss out on meeting each of the factions. It also wants them to join one or maybe more than one of them. this will, of course, complicate things for them if and when they try to interact with any of the others.

A magic joining ritual for one of the factions. Five masked individuals gather around an altar, gesturing elaborately. — A magic joining ritual for one of the factions.

Once they meet the leader of a faction, the PCs will generally be judged in some way, and, if they are judged worthy, will be given the option to join the sect. If they do, they’ll get some advice and some kind of reward for it. But, if they refuse, there’s not much of a downside, to be honest. They won’t get to use the factions quarters to rest and they won’t get the aforementioned rewards but that’s it. And the other thing is, you would expect the faction leader to ask something of the new recruits. Maybe an attack on one of the rival factions or a quest to retrieve a sacred relic from the levels beneath, but no, nothing like that. You join and then you go about your business, pretty much. Seems like a missed opportunity.

All of the faction stuff happens on levels two and three of the dungeon. That’s where they will encounter all the sect leaders and probably learn a few things about the levels below that might help them out a bit.

Tier 4 has a bunch of undead encounters. This is where the royals were buried along with members of their court. There is a good variety of undead featured here and a nice through-line of a story involving the king, the queen and a handmaiden. There are zombies, skeletons, a ghost, a banshee and a wight, as well as a mummy (which seems an unusually unbalanced encounter for 5e.) With any luck, the PCs will be able to see the entirety of the story of the royals through. If they don’t, there isn’t much else in the dungeon to satisfy them and it will lead to a bit of an anticlimax.

Tier 5 has a fun encounter with a possessed robe, the main entrance/exit of the ziggurat and a grab-bag of traps and encounters of varying levels of fascination and challenge including a drunk owlbear. As I mentioned above, the main goal of the PCs was probably to find a way out of this crazy dungeon and this is where they will find it. There is a great big door behind which the sands have conveniently shifted to unblock it. There is literally nothing here to prevent them from doing opening it and escaping.

However, there is possibly a plainly visible trapdoor in one corner that leads down to the next level. This, I think is the level that, if you were a DM back in 1982, you would have had the opportunity to create yourself. As it is, WOTC have decided to relieve of that particular creative opportunity/burden and do it for you.

A mosaic depicting the construction of the ziggurat, the rise of the demon lord and the submission of its followers. — Story mosaic

Level 6, also referred to as the Expanded Ziggurat, is an unfinished tier that has been occupied by the demonic force that brought about the ruin of Cynidicea so long ago. I quite like this level, it’s thematically foul with lots of bile and slime and the like. As well as the demon itself, there are lots of its loyal servants, a black pudding and a gibbering mouther to encounter. There is warning at the start of the section that this tier is much more difficult than the others and is meant for higher level characters. The fact is, if the party of 4th level PCs makes it to the demon, they’re not going to survive. Its got a challenge rating of 17 and a set of legendary resistances and actions. I do have to ask why. I am thinking now of the excellent Sailors on the Starless Sea DCC adventure. The 20 or so level-0 peasants who enter that dungeon probably didn’t expect to come across some elder evil at the end of it, but there is was beneath that chaos keep, awakening from an ageless slumber. They killed it. It was statted out so that it could be killed by these peasants. And it gave them such a sense of achievement and heroism to do it! So why can’t the Lost City do that with the big bad at the bottom of the ziggurat?

By way of some sort of explanation, perhaps the idea is to make a much longer campaign of this situation with the factions and the demon lord and the Underground City which is presented very briefly at the end of the adventure. The demon would then be the ultimate BBEG of the piece and the PCs might have had many adventures rated to it and its cultists along the way to gaining the sorts of levels that might allow them to face it. The problems for me are that the factions were not compelling enough in the adventure to start with, the information on the city that you do get is too sparse to be of much use and there is every chance the PCs fucked off home when they found the exit back on tier 5 anyway.

Conclusion

I actually think that, with a bit of work on the factions, the NPCs and some editing for theme, I would enjoy running this dungeon-crawl. As it stands, the factions are underutilised, some of the encounters make no thematic sense and the NPCs are quite one-dimensional. It also feels like it needs more of an ending. But that doesn’t change the fact that there are some fun traps and challenging combat encounters, which is nice in a dungeon.

One of my main reservations is its size. It’s quite long, with over 60 keyed locations in the dungeon. I would worry about maintaining interest in a dungeon crawl of that length. I would imagine it would run for quite a few sessions.

Although it is obviously presented for 5e it could be very easily translated for use with any OSR ruleset, DCC or Dungeon World. I found myself thinking about how to convert it for Trophy as I read through it too.

Throwback Wednesday: Beginnings

Instead of a new post, please enjoy this one from last August. It deals with beginnings and how to manage them in RPGs. Its got some advice I must take into account as I embark on my recently decided upon campaign of Blades in the Dark.

A Short Rest

Once again, dear reader, I find myself a little under the weather. Maybe I just overindulged at the weekend, maybe I have been working too hard, maybe it’s the current wave of ‘rona. Whatever it is, I feel like I’ve been struck by a nasty disease and I failed my resistance check/saving throw etc. etc. So, I’m taking a break today.

Beginnings

See you with a new post soon!

First Anniversary Blogpost: Crying at the Table

Each one of these moments brought tears to my eyes and became a part of the scene itself.

HBD TDP

That’s Happy Birth Day The Dice Pool, in case you’re wondering. Today is the dice pool dot com’s first birthday and I have invited a few friends over to jump in. It’s a pool party and a pot luck. So today, I have something a little different. For the first time ever, I have invited a guest author to the blog. Next week, I’ll have another. I’m hoping this will become a more regular occurrence as the blog grows and changes.

I’ll introduce the guest blogger in a moment but I just wanted to first take the opportunity to thank everyone who has supported this blog in the last year. A few of you have been here since day one and some of you are more recent readers; either way, I appreciate you. If you have only ever read a few words or if you somehow have the patience to peruse every post, you’re a scholar and a gentlebeing, in my book. I am still doing this for me, mainly. If that weren’t the case, I would have packed it in about eleven months ago. I find that, sometimes, when I’m writing for the blog, it focuses my thoughts about certain subjects like in my last post about the Quantum NPC. I refine my opinions while I type, like I did while writing my review of After the Mind the World Again. Doing this has been a challenge but in a good way. Still, it’s nice to feel the love sometimes too.

Now on to today’s special guest blogpost. Tom of the Media Goblin’s Hoard is a great friend and has been a stalwart of my gaming table for the last six years or so. They jumped at the chance to write a special anniversary blogpost for the dice pool dot com and they have chosen a wonderful subject for it, weaving an emotional narrative through retellings of some very memorable gaming moments. I also want to draw your attention to the artwork in this post, all of which was created by the talented and amazing members of our little RPG community, Tables and Tales.

Crying at the Table

by Tom Ball

Every week I will sit around the table with a group of friends, bring out the snacks and drinks, and live out some of the greatest stories I’ve ever heard. It’s in sharing and creating these stories that I feel a most genuine and strong connection with the others around the table, and it grows with each game played. Playing TTRPGs, I feel, has elevated my bond with my friends in a way I previously would not have known. It sounds cheesy but in the moments we play I feel myself step away from my own life and inhabit the life of my characters. Their ambitions, their bonds, their goal on the horizon and their friends and foes, all become real. For an evening we all step out of our lives into the stories of a shared adventure. Like all good things, it eventually comes to an end for the night and we step back into ourselves, the same as before except now with another shared experience together.

There’s a common phrase repeated by players in TTRPGs “never split the party” because we’re all stronger together. Our characters won’t make it to the end without each other no matter what background they come from, what they have done in their past, or even who they are as a person. In the end, they will rely on those closest to them in order to achieve the impossible. I feel this is a good analogy for life itself, I wouldn’t be where I am now without those closest to me and every week I get to see those I hold dear do the most incredible and creative feats.

Throughout the many stories told, there have been cheers of joy where what was thought to be an impossible feat becomes reality, and moments of tension so strong it’s impossible to cut through. Hidden between these are the instances of tender and emotional impacts that shake me to the core and have brought me to tears on multiple occasions. I am quite an emotional person as it is, and in the moments where the story shifts I look around and see everyone else, eyes glistening like a quiet lake on a star-filled night moments before the waters fall over the edge of the eyelid in a wave. We are all there riding that surf together. I’d like to mention below some of these highlights where I have been brought to tears and felt my bond with my friends grow ever stronger still.

A High Elf and his Humans

A High Elf Vermissian Knight, masked, sword by his side. Face unmasked in the top left corner. — Art by Isaac Wilcox @lostpathpublishing

Deep underneath the towering city of Spire is The Heart and an Aelfir, Crowns-Under-Heaven, suited in armour of scavenged trains, steaming and pumping to keep him alive. He was obsessed with the hopes of bringing back the ancient Vermissian transport network and he teamed up with two humans to complete this task. Though he loathed it, it seemed these two were just as close to the brink of insanity as he was. Perhaps they would make handy tools or servants, at least?

The Seeker, an esoteric man who spoke of prophecy in between mad ramblings. Once dead, now back alive dancing between purgatory and the mortal world, his own death now a forever companion, both of them cursed with an intoxicating song sung by The Heart itself beckoning him ever closer.

Riley Rollins, an eccentric person whose pursuit of arcane majesty and wanderlust for the winding deep corridors and depths of The Heart could take them and their companions to the very end, witness the impossible and entangle them with a Queen from another world…

The trio’s companionship was rocky, Crowns-Under-Heaven would expect the other two to act a lot like cannon fodder. Seeker would often vanish into The Gray, abandoning the group. On top of that, Riley had a connection to the Drowned Queen, an ancient and ferocious being hellbent on flooding the depths claiming The Heart as her own domain, becoming ever stronger. The team had a lot of growing to do together.

When the finale came around Riley went to face the Drowned Queen and Seeker went with Crowns-Under-Heaven to reactivate the network. However, he came face to face with his obsession and the truth. The Vermissian Network was doomed to die and fall into ancient myth. In a long forgotten city where the Heart lay just a cave away Crowns was gifted with the Heartseed for his travels, the last source of energy for the doomed network system. This source of wild and limitless power was able to power his armour and by extension himself to a status beyond living. His adventures underground and with his companions had changed his old steam powered heart. He would become an unstoppable force within the cities and tunnels below. travelling the winding depths saving those on the brink of Death and becoming a figure of myth and legend. He looked to his human companion and said his heartfelt goodbyes. Knowing this would be the last time that Crowns-Under-Heaven would lay eyes on his friends.

A Goblin and a Minotaur fall in love

A goblin with big hair and a minotaur seated on a loveseat in a tent under the stars. — Art by @auttieshi (Instagram)

In the early days of her adventures, Vidris Pipp, a bombastic and spontaneous little Goblin, locked eyes for the first time with Birch Burley, a quiet, reserved and dignified Minotaur, and she knew she had fallen in love. The problem? Birch was the daughter of the leader of their town, Undercroft. Worse still, Vidris and her friends discovered that that self-same leader, Bryne Burley, had secrets to hide. He quickly became an adversary in their lives. The hope of a happily ever after between the two was far off. However, after a chance encounter of Vidris falling through the manor’s chimney and landing in Birch’s bedroom, they were able to have a one on one and quickly became close. It did not take long for the Minotaur to find that she shared the same feelings for the Goblin.

From there Birch became a part-time member of the party and ally to the group. However, their love for each other was to be kept secret. Vidris’ mother and grandfather already plotted to revolt against the leader alongside other citizens and Bryne was, at this time, not best pleased with Vidris’ meddling in his town and livelihood.

Months later dangerous secrets, far beyond the leader’s knowledge, of ancient cities were revealed far beneath the town of Undercroft. Birch was there side by side with Vidris as the party delved deep underground to face an ancient wizard that brought death to the world millennia ago. Meanwhile, the town of Undercroft and their new found allies in the peoples of the world around them prepared to face the encroaching wizard’s army of automatons.

Believing this could have been the last time Birch and Vidris might see their parents alive, they approached their parents, hand in hand and revealed their love for each other. Their parents accepted and acknowledged their love. Bryne gave Vidris his blessing and Vidris’s mother and Grandfather buried the hatchet with their leader and pulled them both in for a hug that felt to last a lifetime.

A family brought together

A femme tielfling in her two forms, one blue and aquatic, one red and demonic. — Art by @cheriyuki (Instagram)

Yulla Odasdottir nearly met her death at an incredibly young age when her father and mother wished to escape the forever storm that circled the island of Erlendheim. Believing the storm would destroy the island one day, they fled and were never seen again. Yulla, however, was saved by a mysterious entity from the deep dark depths of the ocean and sent back to the shores of Erlendheim, alongside the wreckage of her family’s boat. Her skin forever changed by this eldritch touch. What was once a rich scarlet topped with little black horns now shone blue, her face glistening with aquamarine scales and a large dorsal fin protruding from her head.

She was accepted by a fisherman and his wife who came across the wreckage and then raised Yulla as their own. Yulla grew up knowing she was not blood bound to her human parents. Her adventure would take place years later and through a series of extraordinary events the party would hear of a portal that lay on the seabed floor. This portal would be able to lead the party to Sigil, the city of doors, where the answers to their mysteries at the time would unravel further.

Once there, Yulla happened to hear the names of her parents. They were alive and were high up in a faction called The Believers of the Source. After a long search she was finally able to lay eyes on them, donned in the robes of The Source. There was a shocked moment of silence and they all slowly stepped forward, all of them in disbelief. Before the family embraced and wept.

Each one of these moments brought tears to my eyes and became a part of the scene itself. If I was crying real tears then my characters certainly were too. I like to think I put my whole heart into my characters and I wear that on my sleeve. I get lost in these stories and love every moment. It’s both a testament to the DMs who bring to life the world and to the players I’m with who build the most believable and real characters. I love being brought to tears by a game and I love sharing that moment with my friends.

I’m so thankful for those I get to share these adventures with.

The Quantum NPC

This works even better through the medium of TTRPGs than TV to be honest, because your imagination simply works around them, never focusing on their details.

Star Trek

I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek the Next Generation lately. I hadn’t seen it in many years, although I watched the whole thing as it came out in the eighties and nineties. I have obviously been watching it with different eyes this time around. I have noticed things in it that I don’t think I could have seen before. I wonder, for instance, about Mr Data. Would he have been such a sympathetic character today, as an AI in humanoid form? I think about how many of the episodes had no action, how many were just talking heads and techno-babble and whether Sci-fi TV shows today could get away with that. I ponder the special effects and make-up and marvel at how well they stand up 35 years later. But I have also been looking at these episodes with TTRPGs in mind. Now, of course, Star Trek has been made into a number of role playing games. I have never played any of them and this post isn’t about them. This post is about the crew of the Enterprise. Not Picard and Riker and Troi and Worf, but the ones who you see occasionally pass the bridge crew on one of the ship’s many lushly carpeted corridors, the ones having their own conversations in the background in Ten Forward, even the ones who so consistently took the con after Wesley Crusher left. They would get names sometimes and every so often, they’d even get lines! There are a couple of those that are recurring characters, such as Ensign McKnight and Robin Lefler. The most iconic of these, Chief O’Brien, went on to enjoy a major role in two Star Trek shows. But when he first appeared on the Enterprise, he was an unnamed bridge officer. Total NPC. He only became someone when the show creators decided he had to be someone.

The Quantum NPC

So this is what I have started doing for crews in my Spelljammer campaign. I think it would work in any game where you have a lot of NPCs that hang around in close proximity to the PCs all the time. So it works particularly well for ship crews.

In the main campaign, the party lost their original crew in the best possible circumstances. The crew, a bunch of spirits who had lost their memories and were not initially aware they were dead at all, finally fulfilled their goals and were able to shuffle off to whichever outer plane would have them. So, the PCs were forced to hire a whole new crew to take care of rigging and swabbing and whatnot. Now, I did not want to spend an entire session where they press-ganged or interviewed eight or nine NPCs that I would then have to name, outline and give voices to. That kind of thing can be fun but I don’t want to spend two full hours at it. Instead I told them that they picked up eight new competent crew members and that we would come up with their characters as and when they were needed.

So this is how that works, you imagine the scene where the PCs are on deck, in the foreground talking about something like how to defeat the weird root creatures that have invaded the ship from some eldritch, otherworldly space. In the background, just like in Star Trek, you have a few crewmembers, maybe they are even in uniform, but they are ill-defined and unremarkable. This works even better through the medium of TTRPGs than TV to be honest, because your imagination simply works around them, never focusing on their details. But then! They need one of the NPCs to be good at something, a specialist, an expert. Or maybe they just need a buddy, someone to talk to, or someone to listen. That’s when the players get to stretch those imagination muscles!

Pulling the NPC Out of Their Quantum State

The NPC existed in theory but not in practice. They were always there as a number, but not as a person, not as a character. Until the players make them up. The GM asks a player who this NPC is, what their name is, their ancestry, their job, what their personality is like. The players generally end up working together to do this but I usually start by asking the player who decided they wanted one of the quantum NPCs to become real for some reason. I ask that particular player the type of character they want in this situation with the understanding that, once they have been defined, they will forever be part of the crew, taking up one of those eight spots. It’s just like Blades in the Dark items. You know how many slots you have to fill when your PC is out on a Score but you don’t define the items until you need them in the narrative. Once you have said you have “A Blade or Two,” though, those blades are filling one of those slots. Same-same but different.

In this manner we got these three NPCs:

Deckhand Dewey – kobold, he/him, spry and wiry and can fit in little places.

Cook – Barry Keoghan (this is the consequence of allowing the players to name NPCs) – orc, he/him, big guy with big arms, beer belly, loves food and loves cooking. His chef hat does not fit very well. Apron always slightly dirty. Has a space rat companion.

Mr Cannon – Halfling he/him – weapon-master.

As you can see some of them got more detailed description than others. Barry Keoghan was described thoroughly partly because of who I asked to describe him and partly because of the moment I asked for his description, i.e. a quiet moment aboard ship where they had some time to talk about provisions and joke about silly Disney movie references. Meanwhile, Mr Cannon was created in the literal heat of battle. But that was ok, because the idea was always to flesh these NPCs out as time went on. We did, for instance, in subsequent sessions, discover that Mr Cannon had a wife waiting for him at home and that Barry Keoghan had some sort of tragic love-affair in his past.

I think, in future I will bring Between the Skies to bear on the Quantum NPCs as they are being birthed by the players, giving them desires, bonuses, hindrances, quirks and all the rest. Time allowing, of course.

The Quantum NPC method has the added advantage of endearing the newly created NPCs to the players from the off. They are, after all, fully their own creations. From the players’ point of view, I believe it was also quite devastating when both Mr Cannon and Deckhand Dewey got breath weaponed into oblivion by a lunar dragon along with the rest of the NPC crew (apart for Barry Keoghan who was in the galley at the time of the attack.) Unforgettable.

Dad-quest

Dad-quest is getting under way tomorrow night. Our resident Giff Fighter-Paladin, Azimuth is rounding up a crew of misfits (the other players with their new characters that I discussed here) and a few more Quantum NPCs and spelljamming out to the Amos Expanse to find his Dad. Can’t wait to see what new crew-members the players come up with this time!

Corkers

I’m off to Cork for the weekend so I won’t have time to come up with anything new today. Instead I thought I would share a couple of posts from last year. I wrote these at a time when I was first experimenting with some homespun rules and borrowed mechanics for our D&D 5E campaign.

This first post is preparatory to introducing a Blades in the Dark style engagement roll to our Spelljammer game.

Forged in the Dungeon

And this one is an update about how it went!

Forged in the Dungeon, Part 2

I’ll be back next week with some new posts. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these re-posts!

Revenge of the Giff

I’m considering an option that harks back to Dark Sun. In 2nd Edition Dark Sun, a player started, not with just one PC, but a whole stable of them, called a character tree.

Mid-season finale

The crew of the Cadabra were going home. After weeks of adventure across Scatterspace and all over the Rock of Bral, they have arrived back at First Home, the asteroid/inn/shipyard that was their first stop after leaving their world behind in the first place. They could justifiably expect a warm welcome since they freed the shipyard from a Neogi infestation last time. But they weren’t expecting to be confronted with a crew of kobolds from their home island to be there. Kobolds who probably thought the PCs had murdered their queen. They also weren’t expecting to find Becky Fullpockets’ personal spelljamming vessel there. They had been struggling against the machinations of the technomagical billionaire ever since they fled their planet. It looked like they were stuck between a rock and a hard place, with no escape!

No better place to end part of a season than on a cliffhanger. And that’s what we did right there. We have been on a break from our Spelljammer campaign for a couple of months now. It’s given me a break from 5E and allowed us to play some other great games in the meantime. But now, it’s time to come back, sort of.

Spin Off

A few months (IRL months, that is) before the crew of the Cadabra reached First Home for the second time, they said goodbye to one of their number. Giff Fighter-Paladin, Azimuth, who had to be rescued from two ship-wrecks in quick succession might have been labelled a Jonah by many crews, but the Cadabra was different. They welcomed him on board with open arms and he adventured with them for a while. But, eventually, he was always going to go back to look for the father who went missing from the first of those two ship-wrecks. Now, while his erstwhile comrades are heading back to their homeworld, Azimuth is armed with a little knowledge about the stretch of Wildspace Papa might be found in and a ship stolen from Becky Fullpockets. He’s preparing an expedition of his own to go find his real dad… Not that gnome who pretended to be his dad during that short period where he’d lost his memory (long story, dear reader.)

The rest of the players are coming back too, but they’ll be playing new characters for this spin-off. Azimuth needs a crew for his ship, after all. We are getting together tomorrow night for a session-0 type thing. I think everyone is looking forward to trying some different classes/backgrounds/species compared to the ones they have been playing for over two years in the main campaign. Although, Azimuth’s player, David, doesn’t get a new character, he does get to pursue his PC’s main drive and its a great welcome back to the group for him.

As for me; I’m looking forward to yet another shake-up in this game. I’m planning to use the progress-based travel rules that I mentioned in my Prep Part 2 post last week. And, as well as that, I have something very special up my sleeve for the meat of the adventure, which I can’t reveal here and now (my players read this blog sometimes.) I’m definitely going to write about it after the fact, though.

Change of Cast?

The introduction of new PCs into the campaign, even though its a spin-off, raises the question of what happens once Azimuth joins back up with the main crew again. I’m considering an option that harks back to Dark Sun. In 2nd Edition Dark Sun, a player started, not with just one PC, but a whole stable of them, called a character tree. I believe you were supposed to begin with four characters. This was to help counter the lethality of the setting, giving a player back-ups in the inevitable event of a PC death. This made a lot of sense, especially considering the amount of time it took to create characters. Go check out my Dark Sun character Creation series to witness exactly how long that took.

So, my thinking is that, once this spin-off is done, if they want, the players will be able to swap PCs in or out as they like. This should have the double benefit of providing the players with a bit of variety and allowing them to almost fully crew their ship with their own characters, rather than just NPCs. I’m currently thinking through how I’ll handle character advancement if I do allow this. In Dark Sun, if I remember correctly, the PC only gained experience when they were actually played. No vicarious levelling. I think this makes a lot of sense, but it might be more difficult to adjudicate with milestone levelling.

What do you think of these ideas, dear reader? Have you ever run a spin-off campaign like this? Would you be happy for your players to switch between active PCs like I’ve described?

Prep Part 2

Still Prepping

This post is part of a blog bandwagon started on the Roll to Doubt blog.

Click on the link above to take in the blogpost that’s piloting this bandwagon. Wagon-jumpers abound. You can find a very nice read on the same topic and a handy list of related blogposts on the Among Cats and Books blog.

And here’s a link to the first post on this topic on the dice pool dot com.

Between the Sessions

I am an unapologetic shill for Huffa’s Between the Skies. It’s one of my most used and most valuable RPG books. I use it constantly in lots of contexts. But I love using it to prepare for sessions. Its approach to random encounters in particular is one I highly recommend. The encounters are built, not just to make your session interesting, but to introduce potential allies and enemies, recurring characters, locations, objects. In short, they help you to truly build your campaign without relying on GM-written plots that the players may or may not want to interact with.

The methods and tables introduced in the book make for interesting, impactful characters and occurrences. And they have depth, too, enough to hook your players and keep them hooked. You know that old story that your players would die for the unnamed goblin you just made up on the spot but won’t give a shit about the NPC you spent two weeks crafting an elaborate back story for? I feel like the techniques in Between the Skies are almost designed to prevent that. Why? Well, firstly because, if used as your main way to drive the game forward, you are not going to be spending so long lovingly hand-crafting those NPCs, you are just going to roll them up on the tables provided and not worry about whether or not the PCs run into them, because whatever they run into will be interesting and fun enough to capture their imaginations. So, all the NPCs are more like the loveable nameless goblin and you don’t feel the need to make sure the PCs interact with any of them in particular. This has the effect of allowing the players to dictate the direction of the game to a large extent. This is a good thing!

Let’s Interact with the Mechanics

So, Huffa’s advice when it comes to travel is that, unless it is going to be interesting or important, skip it. I can get behind this approach. Recently, I have tended towards the idea of the journey being the game, but sometimes, when you know the next scene you need to play is across the city and its a relatively safe place, just skip to it, or montage it if there is something interesting to see along the way or if its a good opportunity for conversation between characters.

If and when you want to play the travel, though, Between the Skies presents you with two options, progress-based travel and route-based travel.

Route-based travel

Using this method, you use a map, just a basic one that includes routes and locations along them. You roll once on the Encounter die between locations and resolve that before arriving at the next place. Simple. The book includes several ways to generate route maps and destinations but I won’t concern myself with that here.

Your route map should have options, different ways of getting from A to B with more locations in between your starting point and the final destination depending on how long you want the journey to last.

This has the feeling of the caravan travel methods used in Ultraviolet Grasslands.

Progress-based travel

This gives me the impression of beating the resistance of a delve in Heart. Before the journey starts, determine the journey length. There is a helpful table that indicates the amount of Progress points required to reach the destination depending on how long the journey is. You record progress through the resolution of Encounter Die rolls.

The Encounter die works as follows:

Encounter
Something Approaches
Environmental hazard
Complication
Hint as to what is nearby
Progress/breakthrough/boon

So you only get progress points on a 6.

What I did

As with everything in Between the Skies, you can take it or leave it. I have used a combination of the two methods, where I decided that a spelljammer ship journey from the Rock of Bral to the First Home asteroid would take three days and I would have them roll on an encounter table once per day. So this is the table I used:

Wildspace encounter table d6

1-2 No encounter
3 Environmental/Ship Hazard
4 Ship Problem
5-6 Encounter

When you only have three days and so, three possible rolls on the table, I felt it was better to increase the chances of actual encounters/problems/hazards occurring. If it was a more exploratory journey, I would use the progress-based method as described in the book.

Now, using the tables in this book, of which there are many, you should be able to create a fascinating encounter on the fly, but, if you can, I think its nice to prepare a few beforehand, at least one of each kind. So let’s do that here.

I thought it would be a good idea to roll up some options on the spark tables in the book and add them to a d4 table for each encounter type (environmental/ship hazard, ship problem and ship travel encounter.)

Environmental/Ship Hazard

We’ll start with the hazards. For each hazard you want to prepare, you roll 1d6 to determine the hazard type and then d66 to generate a hazard keyword on the Environmental Hazards during ship travel table in Between the Skies.

I shared this table in the last post so lets use the results I rolled up on that.

3 Ship Hazards

Roll 1d4

Hazard 1 – Storm, Flood
Hazard 2 – Disorientation, Sphere
Hazard 3 – Obstruction, Cold
Hazard 4 – Trap, Haunting

I then go ahead and prepare a few details of the hazards. Here’s the first one as an example.

Hazard 1

A solar storm rolls in from the direction of the sun.

The gusts of solar winds batter the ship
The deck is flooded in light and other solar radiation
All those on deck risk blindness
There is also a chance of taking radiant damage
- All on deck must make a Dexterity save, DC 15 to avoid blindness
- If they are afflicted with blindness it lasts 1d4-1 days. If you roll a 1, Roll 2d12-1 for the number of hours it lasts
- Even if they saved against blindness they must make a Constitution save, DC 15, against radiant damage. If they fail they take 4d6 radiant damage. If they succeed they take none.
- This goes for the ship too, if the damage roll beats the damage threshold

You can see that I took the hazard type fairly literally but moved it into a wildspace context. A solar storm seemed obvious but also pretty cool. The keyword, “flood,” took me a little while to work out but I thought flooding the deck with light seemed both like a cool, spacey event and something that could present a real problem for the PCs.

Obviously, you can prepare the details for each entry in the table. They don’t have to involve a lot of work but putting a little extra preparation in at this stage can remove the need for it at the table.

Ship Problem

Similar to the hazards, you simply roll up a problem type and a problem keyword on the Ship Problems tables in Between the Skies. I did this four times and created the d4 table below.

4 Ship Problems

Roll 1d4

Problem 1 – Armament, Separation
Problem 2 – Quarters, Shrinkage
Problem 3 – Cargo, Disappearance
Problem 4 – Bridge (spelljammer helm), Error

Here’s the detail on one of these entries:

Problem 2

One of the crew has stowed something large and awkward in the crew quarters. It is limiting the amount of space available to sling hammocks and the rest of the NPC crew is unhappy about it.
This crew member refuses to be parted from their huge steamer chest as it contains something of extreme personal significance.
The PCs will need to resolve the interpersonal issue.

You can see that the details here are left deliberately vague. You Ould ask the players to decide which member of the crew is the problem, what’s in the chest that’s so important and, most importantly, how the resolve the issue.

Encounters

And finally we have encounters.
There are a lot of different encounter tables in the book. You can choose the one that best describes the surroundings of the PCs at the time. There are two space encounter tables, one for known space and one for wildspace. They are d66 tables. Once you have done rolled on them, you can get some more inspiration by rolling on the encounter keyword, detail and related entities tables.
Once you have rolled on the Encounter distance and awareness tables in Between the Skies to determine how far away the encounter is and how much attention they are paying to the PCs you can roll on the d4 table below.

You’ll note that the results on the table below are not all similar. For instance, encounter 2 doesn’t have a related entity. In general, such entities, as generated by the tables in Between the Skies, are sentient NPCs so I didn’t think it necessary for the parasite I rolled up. But mostly each of them includes an encounter keyword, a related entity, and two encounter details.

5-6 Encounters

Isolationists – Confusion, Related Entity – Unknown NPC, Glittering, Prayers
Ship Parasite – Loss, Scales, Experiments
Ruins, Ancient – Mourning, Related Entity – Petty God, Knots, Miscommunications
Stowaway – Battle, Related Entity – Creature, Eggs, Blindspots

Stowaway

Size, substance and form table: Very small biota, piecemeal.
Weakness: True name
Needs: Brains
Characteristics and details: Pacifist, stalks
Behaviour: Social: Family: 5 appearing
Demeanor and current behaviour: Protective, healing
Attacks: Blast – teleporting

For the final example, I’m using the creature generation tables in the Entities chapter of Between the Skies. You can see all the details and keywords that I rolled up above.

Along with the keywords, battle, eggs and blindspots, that came from the original encounter detail rolls, these will make for a fascinating encounter with some sort of very small fungal entity that has escaped a battle to find refuge aboard the PCs’ ship. The mushroom creature has a desperate need for brains to help heal its young but will not take them by force. Perhaps they only consume the brains of dead beings. Perhaps they have a blindspot that means they cannot sense constructs. And maybe, also, they have crawled into the ship’s stores to try to feed on the eggs, mistaking them for heads containing brains. I like the idea of them lashing out with a teleporting blast to deposit attackers some way off the deck of the ship, leaving them to perish in wildspace. If the PCs can figure out the creatures’ true names, they’ll be able to get them off the ship, but how?

Conclusion

I think you can see the fun you can have preparing encounters and encounter tables using Between the Skies. Once again, dear reader, I can only urge you to go and purchase it. It’s so useful and you won’t regret it!

Modular Gaming

Improbable hot-takes

“The Discourse (TM)” has been focusing on running published adventures/modules/campaigns as opposed to custom/homebrew/sandbox games for the last little while. First Quinns reviewed Impossible Landscapes, an epic and almost legendary campaign for the modern Cthulhu-ish game, Delta Green. This is the first time Quinns has reviewed a campaign/published adventure on his RPG review channel, Quinns’ Quest, so it was unusual enough to spark a significant amount of discussion all on its own. And then Thomas Manuel of the Indie RPG Newsletter and Rascal reviewed the same campaign. I believe this was purely coincidental, especially as Impossible Landscapes came out about five years ago now. Both are great reviews in their own right and are based on full play-throughs of the campaign so you know they’re of real value. You should check them both out.

Anyway, on Bluesky, Thomas Manuel went looking for recommendations of other modules to run and this spawned a lot of interesting answers and quote-bleets from RPG luminaries, such as this one, which I found interesting.

I have opinions on the conversation, of course. I have shared a lot of them in other posts from the last year or so, actually. If you want the summary, though, I had a lot of bad experiences running D&D scenarios in the past, especially from the AD&D 2nd edition era. I found they were difficult or impossible to just pick up and run. In fact, they required maybe more preparation time than adventures and campaigns I wrote myself. The one published 5E campaign that I ran, Storm King’s Thunder suffered from the same issues, actually. This made me feel like it was a “me” thing. But, it turns out, a lot of GMs feel the same way, according to Bluesky, at least.

However, I have had my mind changed somewhat by running pre-written adventures for some other games, particularly Free League’s Blade Runner, Dungeon Crawl Classics and, to a lesser extent, the Dragon Age RPG from Green Ronin.

This is a link to my first post on Electric Dreams, the introductory Case File for Blade Runner:

Blade Runner

And this one compares the same module to a 5E murder mystery adventure I played in around the the same time:

Case Closed

Here’s my post about Sailor’s on the Starless Sea for DCC:

Dungeon Crawls are Classic

And this is my post on running Duty Unto Death, a short intro adventure for the Dragon Age RPG:

Dragon Age: Duty Unto Death

And finally, this post, although ostensibly an excuse to discuss DCC adventures, also includes my opinions on the one 5E campaign I ran:

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Individual Modules

I will say that, despite my generally favourable outlook on most of these modules, I still find I have to to do a lot of prep for them. The main fear I have is messing things up so bad that I essentially spoil the rest of the adventure. Although, I should really have more faith in my abilities as a GM at this stage. I feel like I can probably improv my way out of any hole, to be honest. But it does not change the fact that I spend hours rewriting long paragraphs presented in module texts into digestible bite-sized bullet-points. I am running another Dragon Age scenario right now. Amber Rage is from Blood in Ferelden, an anthology of scenarios for the game that came out in 2010. It suffers from verboseness and unnecessary detail and makes for a lot of work from the GM. I’m enjoying the contents of the scenario but its presentation is horrendously dated and needs a sprinkle of OSR magic to tighten it up, in my opinion.

I realise that none of the modules I have mentioned here are anywhere close to having the size and epic scope of something like Impossible Landscapes, but it doesn’t change the fact that they have largely changed my mind about running anything pre-published. The one I have my eye on right now is Dagger in the Heart for Heart: The City Beneath. Actually, I have a post about that right here too:

Dagger in the Heart

OK, I’m off to discuss the discourse on Discord of course!

Between the Ultraviolet Skies

Armadilloid Encounter

At the end of the last post I wrote about my current Ultraviolet Grasslands campaign, I noted that the caravaners were on the cusp of an encounter with some Armadilloids. The section of the book describing the Steppe of the Lime Nomads has a list of random encounters just like all the other sections do. And, just like the other ones, the detail you get about an encounter is minimal, to say the very least. You might get a level for the creatures or NPCs encountered, and maybe a word or two of description. This leaves quite a lot in the hands of the GM and, potentially, the other players at the table. Perhaps the characteristics of the encountered entity would emerge organically in play. Maybe the GM will have prepared specifics for each potential encounter, with regards to physical descriptions, motivations, weaknesses and strengths for instance. In the case of this encounter. I knew I did not want it to be an automatically violent one. I wanted the Armadilloids to be sentient but different enough as to be inscrutable. I could probably have just written a description, but I have Between the Skies, so why should I?

I took to the Entities chapter of the book and started rolling. I started with a roll on the Size, substance and form table. I rolled a 7 for size. That gave me Very large (giant-size.) I liked this. It immediately brought to mind the Armadillo super villain first encountered way back in Marvel Secret Wars II some time in the 80s. So I had a picture in my mind.

Next, I rolled a 6 on the Substance table, meaning they were Animal. That corresponded with my general idea so far, which was cool. On the Form table, I got a 13 on the d66 roll. That made them Bipedal (which is a word, that, when you say it out loud, sounds weird, we discovered.) It was still matching the picture I had in my head at this stage, except for the fact that these bipeds also had wings. For my purposes I thought it best that they be stubby vestigial wings. It’s the Grasslands, it’s not safe to fly there.

This next bit was so good. On the Weaknesses and Needs tables, I started to see the situation emerge. I rolled a 34 on the Weakness table, which meant they were Confined. Now in the previous session the players had rolled on the encounter tables in UVG and we had established already that there were ten or so of them and they were merely silhouettes on the horizon. They could see the Armadilloids so they were not obscured by any sort of physical trap. But a pretty cool phenomenon in UVG is “stuck-force.” These are invisible barriers and shapes and containers of nothing but force. They litter mainly the skies of the UVG, left over from a time long gone, when fantascience and magic dominated and their practitioners left these eternal artefacts dotted all over, making flying an incredibly dangerous prospect (as I hinted at above.) So, I came up with the situation where the Armadilloids had been trapped in a sphere of this stuck-force and had been unable to free themselves. The next table was Needs. I rolled a 62 on that, which gave me Directions. But I didn’t like this one so I opted for 26 instead, Escape. Perfect.

Next was Characteristics and details. These tables round out the looks and important idiosynchacies of these creatures. First I rolled a 21 on the Notable characteristics table. You know those big ol’ Armadilloids are rolling around like Sonic (I know Sonic is a hedgehog, ok? Just roll with it.) On the detail table, I got a 34, Tatooed. Adding a little more to this, we see that they are tattooed all over with the pictographic stories of their lives. I love this detail.

Next come a pair of Behaviour tables. I rolled on the Social behaviour table, which indicates their numbers, even though I already knew how many there were from our roll on the UVG tables. Why? Well, it also suggests the type of groups they habitually congregate in: Couple, Family, Herd, etc. I rolled a 6 and got Pack. This fit perfectly as well. I actually skipped the behaviour and current demeanour tables because I already had a good idea that they would be eager to be freed, some of them going stir crazy, rolling around inside the sphere, some simply sitting in the grass, and one of them standing with his hands raised against the stuck-force sphere trying to will his way out.

This next one was fun: Attacks! I rolled a 6 on the Mechanism of attack table, making it a Blast. The Attack keyword I rolled up was 33, Draining. So, from these words, I decided they would have a Charisma Draining Psychic Blast power. It never came up in play, thankfully. Why? Because the PCs figured out how to free them and then were invited back to their mushroom growing burros where they were rewarded with three sacks of Regular Mushrooms.

They also spent the night there around the Armadilloids fire, despite the fact the big orange guys could only speak in some brand of “meep meep” language. They all consumed copious amounts of magic mushrooms and got high as fuck using the wonderful tables in the appendix of Fungi of the Far Realms.

Since I rarely get much time to prep sessions these days, this method was really valuable. It allowed me to do what I needed to do on the train on the way to work, using the pdf of Between the Skies, an online dice roller and the word processor on my phone. I have been using Between the Skies for some other games too in the last few months, most notably our Spelljammer campaign. It has made for enormously memorable and unique encounters in that case. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Go get it on itchio or on Exalted Funeral!

Final Plug: Shadows Return

I backed a project from Ian Hickey of Gravity Realms last year, The Price of Apocrypha. It was a really successful Kickstarter, especially for a small, indie, Irish creator, and it was fulfilled and delivered incredibly promptly.

Well, Ian has another great project in the works on Kickstarter right now, Shadows Return: House of the Wraith Queen. Its a mega dungeon style adventure for use with Ad&D 2nd Edition, D&D 5E and OSR games. It’s fully funded but there are only a couple of days left of the campaign and you could still help it reach some stretch goals! Go back it!

As a final note, I have recommended a lot of books and products recently and I like to think I always do here on the dice pool dot com. I do this purely because I believe in the books, the products, the creators, not for monetary or other rewards!

April Fools

My dirtiest trick

I’m not really a big fan of “tricks.” The word gives me the feeling of something rather mean. And, as a GM, I would rather not be mean to the PCs. Challenging, sure, occasionally lethal when called for, absolutely. But not mean. The closest I have come in recent years was when I had the corpse of a recently deceased player-character possessed by a demon in order to wreak havoc at their own funeral.

The Death

Merideth, played by Isaac was the sort of tiefling barbarian that every D&D party needs: utterly heedless of danger, first into the fray every time, usually naked with naught but a bevy of rotting heads dangling from her belt. She was one of an intrepid crew of adventurers who had recently turned up on the shores of the great orcish nation of Tír na nOrc. They were convinced by a patron to assault the hideout of one of the capital’s under-city gangs. There, Merideth was murdered, predictably enough, as she charged headlong into the guards in the entrance hall. Slightly less predictably, it was a stray crossbow bolt from one of her own companions that really did for her in the end.

Merideth’s companions continued on regardless and explored the rest of the gang headquarters, as well as the maze of traps below it. There they uncovered a secret pact between the gang, An Fiacla Dubh, and the Demon Lord of the Hunt, Baphomet. This would soon bring the eternal Blood War of the Lower Planes to the streets of the city. While they were at it, they released a dybbuk that had been imprisoned in the burnt and blackened body of a prisoner chained in the maze. It escaped, but that would not be the last they would see of it.

The Funeral

The dungeon over and done with, the next session we agreed that it would be a nice gesture if the PCs, along with a collection of major NPCs from the city of Ráth an Croí gathered at a private dock to bear tearful witness to the funeral of Merideth. A Priest of, Kaigun, God of the Sea, was employed to complete the ceremony. The barbarian was laid out on a raft and pushed off after everyone had said their words of tribute and farewell. Then, viking style they shot flaming arrows at her to send her off in fire and glory to the after life.

But, just before any arrows managed to hit, the dybbuk emerged from the waters of the dock, shadowy and incorporeal. It seized the body of the tiefling and propelled her at her former comrades. Isaac, represented in this scene in his new, bardish guise, was forced to fight off his former character as were her former companions. As moments of surprise and shock go, I have rarely been prouder to present this one to the PCs. It was only improved by the nature of the dybbuk. The demon, (the 5e version can be found in Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes) which appears as a translucent, flying jellyfish in its natural form almost always appears, instead, in possession of a corpse. One of its features is that it can plunder the mind of the dead one for details of its life, memories and bonds to mess with their loved-ones. I used this to good effect, particularly on her long-time adventuring pal, Antoinette, and the poor PC who accidentally killed her, the Outlaw, Josie Wales (yes, really.) Another of its features is that it gets to use the abilities of the body it possesses, meaning they had to face the formidable might of the undead/possessed barbarian as well as a plethora of other enemies who showed up for the fun.

Luckily, they other PCs all survived and they got to kill Merideth all over again. Ah, good times!

What about you, dear reader? What was the dirtiest trick you ever perpetrated in the context of an RPG… or otherwise?