A Cosmology for Erda

After months of running published campaign adventures, the call to create has become too urgent - now is the time to start building a campaign setting and adventures.  When last I got together with my neighborhood group, we had 'The Talk'.  The frank "should we be playing an OSR game or 5E game" talk.  One player was firmly in the OSR camp, one was on the fence, and three were firmly on Team Fifth Edition.  So we're sticking with The Fifth, but we agreed to bring old school gaming elements into it.  Now that's settled, I'm embarking on building a real campaign.

I've got a framework I'm following to build out the sandbox and adventuring region, I'll post about it in the next week or so.  My goal is to make a basic "bog standard" Dark Ages type setting, which has to be high magic to align with the values of the Fifth, and lots of recognizable tropes - Saxons, Vikings, fallen empires, a powerful and omnipresent Church.  The game is less about any unique elements in the setting than it is a few colorful megadungeons.  Which reminds me - the setting is Dark Ages and Vikings so I can ultimately put a version of the Black City there.  Another megadungeon idea that's malingered on my blog for several years was called Harrowhome (now titled Harrowdale) - a haunted ruin out on the moors, cluttered with the detritus of ages past.

My idea for Harrowdale has always involved an artifact from space that plummets to the earth like a meteor, blazing through the atmosphere, burrowing deep into the ground, leaving behind a deep molten shaft.  The thing is a MacGuffin of sorts, a shard of Chaos or seed of primordial evil, a thing that breached our universe from the anti-verse, the egg sack of a nascent Great Old One or future Cthulhu.  A rough beast waiting to be born.  The shaft is discovered by neolithic humans and cave peoples, and rediscovered by the succeeding civilizations that sweep across the land.  There are always death cults, prophets of doom, deranged sorcerers, and similar mad men that discover the ancient shaft on the moors, descend below Harrowdale, and leave their mark on the expanding dungeons.  Meanwhile, the Black Cyst continues to sink into the earth, emanating its dreams of madness and destruction, and growing.  It's been growing in size for more than five millenia.

Church of the Ancient Astronaut

The cosmology of Erda, the world I'm using for Harrowdale and the Black City, is essentially "weird fantasy".  I love 1960's Jack Kirby comics with the Celestials and Eternals, Erich Von Daniken's "ancient astronauts", and HP Lovecraft's Great Old Ones as immortal monsters that plunge from star to star leaving behind ruin and madness.  In recent years I've greatly enjoyed the Thor movies with their science fantasy interpretation of the Nine Realms and Midgard.  Don't they provide a great reference for a D&D cosmology?

Planar Gates don't take you to other dimensions, they open connection points (wormholes) to other planets, folding space and time.  Faerie is a planet that barely spins beneath a green sun; the Unseelie live on the dark side of their planet, haunting icy castles on a hemisphere of eternal night and eternal winter.  Hell is probably a gas giant or some similar massive body, its terrible gravity increasing as a visitor delves deeper into Hell until they reach the 9th circle, a frozen core where movement itself becomes almost impossible due to Hell's unbearable weight.

My equivalent to Rome, an empire I'm tentatively calling Valorum, fell a half millennium ago during an astral conjunction of the planar gates, when the portals to the realms of monsters opened spontaneously and giants of Jotunheim and dragons of Nifleheim freely entered the world of men, wreaking havoc and destruction.  Maybe that's how Elves and Dwarves got into the world, as interlopers.  For the Norse peoples this was Fimbulwinter, the start of Ragnarok and the end times.  For civilization, it was the end of Valorum and the beginning of the Dark Ages.

There are "gods" on some of the other planets that resemble figures of myth and mythology, but they're just powerful monsters.  The angels themselves are a race of space-faring aliens that battle at a breach between our universe and the great beyond (a realm of insanity known as the Tatters).  They act a bit like space cops and fraternal shepherds to the mortal races, although their duties at "the breach" have kept them away from earth for thousands of years.  An early visitation from space established primitive forms of monotheism centered around the Maker, or the Prime, after Aquinas' Prime Mover.

It's an approach to cosmology that well reflects my pop culture interests without doing any lasting harm to D&D's default assumptions.  It's going to be great fun to develop.


*The image is from an actual church in Salamanca, not the fictional planet of Erda

Black City Game 30 - The Fractious Night Approaches

Bad weather and work assignments conspired this past weekend to ensure I had to skip the RPG (game 31 is delayed).  And an upcoming trip mean means we'll probably miss another game, too, so this report is going to have to satiate the Black City fans for a few weeks.  Luckily, there was plenty of action - and not the dice-rolling, monster stabbing action.  Adult entertainment!  Read on for the lurid details.

Last week ended with a hologram of Odin telling the players they'd be safe resting overnight in a control room the deity was protecting, but he left the players with an ominous warning… "the Fractious Night approaches".

The players mused if that meant they were going to have to do math (fractions), or whether computer fractals would assault them, or had I been reading too much Lewis Carroll ("O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!")

Instead, they learned that a great evil would boil out of the foreboding northern tower and pour across a stone bridge, rampaging into the south part of the cavern.  One night a year, on the Fractious Night, the Morlocks pillage and despoil the southern half of the cavern.  The players fought some Morlocks in the upper dungeon and were familiar with their "human wave" battle tactics and ferocity - they didn't care for a rematch!

Odin also pointed out that the controllers in the deeper levels would be sending a replacement detachment of sentinels to take over the control room, stronger than the detachments the party had defeated previously, so the players couldn't stay there indefinitely.  The destruction of the stone walker, a gigantic golem-like guardian that protected the domed building, could open the dome up to Morlock attack.

Injured, depleted, and low on water, they could head for the surface, but instead chose to make their way to the kingdom of the cavemen, in the far south of the sprawling cavern.

The cavemen were in a state of agitation, and after resuming diplomatic ties with the Blue Lady (the cave man's living goddess, a powerful wizardess), the players observed a peculiar lottery ritual, where various Neanderthal women were selected by the goddess to join her in the palace.  They later learned the women would accompany the Blue Lady to the Otherworld where the gods live, and thus escape the Fractious Night.  Over dinner that evening, the players learned that one night each year, one of the Secret Masters from the dungeon depths arises out of a well of sacrifice, flies around the cavern on a sled-like apparatus, and whips the Morlocks into a frenzy of blood lust and rage with promises of gifts and sweets for the taking.  Soon the Morlocks would be pouring over the bridge bearing torches, to pillage and despoil the southern cavern - especially the caveman area.  I pictured them like those boogeymen from the wooden soldiers movie - the old black and white one with Laurel and Hardy.

Maybe if they were given more time, the players would have guided the conversation towards asking the Blue Lady why the Morlocks left the cave people alone the other 364 days of the year.  It would have been a good question.  Instead, they started to notice how there was no pain, they were receding - a distant ship smoke on the horizon - the Blue Lady was only coming through in waves… "Dammit, she slipped us a Micky!", cried Borghild.  "...And now she's doing some kind of spell."  Never trust Blue People, that's all I'm saying.

So while the characters struggled to keep their minds sharp, senses blurred by exotic narcotics, they were assaulted by sultry, dulcet musical tones, the smell of relaxing incense, and a harem full of beautiful women in wispy clothes descended upon them.  A few characters made their saving throws (the Halfing, and one of the Elves) - they were pretty horrified by the [ sanitized redacted described euphemistically ] proceedings that followed - but since the Lady's two gigantic Neanderthal warlords, Krag and Krog were on guard duty to make sure no one left the room, they played it cool.  Timur the Elf was like, "Not listening, not looking, this isn't happening".  But all the time, some of her foreshadowing words from previous conversations echoed in his mind… "The cavemen have such a limited gene pool, I have to carefully arrange marriages to maintain the species.  I've become quite a genealogist you know."  "If only I had access to more breeding stock and an infusion of new DNA".   "Through careful breeding, I've tried to make the cave men smarter, closer to humans".  "I'm so glad men from the surface have found us again, it's been many years since the Romans were here…"

Never trust Blue People.

Ben Underfoot, thinking quickly, avoided the guards with ninja-like Halfling stealth skills, snuck out of the room, and trailed the Blue Lady to a place beyond her private chambers, near her labs, that was kitted out like an underground bunker.  Beds, rations, water supplies, and heavy doors like a bank vault.  Runes and magic inscriptions made him think the door was probably wizard-locked or similar.  His Halfling stealth kept him from being discovered, and he watched as the Blue Lady dressed the room with illusion magic so that the bunker appeared to be the cave entrance to a verdant paradise - the Otherworld she had promised the cave ladies.  He ducked out of the way when a bunch of disheveled cave ladies came by a little later, entered the Blue Lady's Otherworld paradise, and closed the vault.

Let's give the players credit, they took these shenanigans in stride - har har, we got tricked into smooching hairy cave ladies, nice one DM.  All those characters that failed their saving throws got a 'carousing kicker' for getting a chance to forget the stresses of the adventuring life for a bit, with only a mild hangover for their troubles.  We'll see if Timur and Ben tell the others what really happened - otherwise the other characters are blissfully picturing Raquel Welch in the fur bikini.

The next day, the stoic Neanderthals (men and remaining women) were preparing defenses by the walls.  The players weren't sure what to make of the Blue Lady - is she a philanthropist trying to keep the Neanderthal race alive, or a skeevy manipulator?  Should they flee into the recesses of the cavern and leave the Neanderthals to their fate, or stay and fight, helping the cave men to defend the stockade?  The rest of the game session involved the players surveying the deployment of the cave men and their defenses, and figuring out how they could help tilt the coming battle in the Neanderthal's favor.  Good guys to the end, they’re staying and fighting, and they helped plan the defenses to protect the stockade.

A horn blew from the north tower.  A steady stream of orange lights could be seen in the blackness as an unending line of Morlocks bearing torches poured across the bridge to the far north.  If the players could understand cave man, they might have heard the guard say, "The glow worm approaches".

Next game should be pretty awesome, as we undertake the siege of the Cave Man kingdom.

DM Note:
Long term readers may know we game with some kids (sixth graders these days).  I did have them step out for a bit (video game time) during the cave lady romance sequence.  We kept things fairly oblique and clean, but I don't need a mom calling me,  "My son's character did what?  What kind of D&D game are you running over there?"  I think it was the first time I had to balance the content a bit and separate the group.  I look forward to hearing if anyone else has had anything analogous in a game!


*The picture is Raquel Welch from One Million Years BC - the gold standard for cave man fantasies since 1966.

Black City Game 29 - Rub a Dub Dub Two Elves and a Tub

We missed a few weeks of gaming (for reasons) but got the group together last week for one more game before the holidays.  Now I'm hoping for another quorum this weekend, last game of 2013.

When last we were here for a recap, the party had been exploring the sprawling caverns beneath the Black City.  They had performed multiple forays into a free standing building they were calling "the Dome" - a 200' oval structure sitting in the middle of a fungal forest.  Each time they left the dome and returned, a new detachment of plastic-man guardians, alien-like humanoids I call "plasticals", were back on guard duty within the entrance.  We ended the previous game session after the party had breached the Dome's entrance once again and defeated the new set of guards.  This week's session resumed exploration from that point.

East of the entrance chamber was a round tunnel ending in a locked blue door.  The Black City uses a color-coded locking system for many of the powered doors, and the party no longer owns a blue gemstone pass key.  That was a dead end.

To the north of the entrance was a room lit by flickering electricity coursing through a crystalline structure.  The knotted, ropy pillar of clear crystal extended from beneath the floor up through the ceiling of the dome, and the lightning flashed into it from below at irregular intervals.  The crystal column was 10-15' diameter.

A 3' long spider, made of glass, scuttled down the pillar from outside the dome, coming to rest down near the roots of the pillar.  It formed a ball and then merged with the crystal.  All the thousand nodules and lumps that made up the giant crystal column were all glass spiders, detaching and reabsorbing into the mass of crystal.  The players treaded very lightly around that particular room hoping to avoid attention!

One of the doors out of the glass spider room led to the pool caverns near the lair of the Crabstrosity, the villain of last week's game.  The party displayed no interest in exploring anything near the Crabstrosity.

When the opposite door out of the crystal room was opened, the front rank was hit by a wave of oppressive heat.  Beyond was a large dim room, hot like a sauna, and filled with a few heavily shielded tubs and a moveable section of floor.  Some stationary figures near the walls jerked alive and stumbled towards the party, moving ponderously in bulky, oversized armor - heat and radiation shielding.  This was an interesting fight because the armored aliens were tough to hit, and as the fight turned into an attrition battle, the party had to deal with fatigue due to the heat, making it even harder to hit the aliens due to exertion.  They prevailed due to their numbers, but I liked this angle of attack (high armor class creating an attrition battle, and the extreme heat punishing the party for an extended battle).

They ended up guzzling a lot of water rations to rehydrate, and discovered sealed tubs and a capstan-like winch for retracting the floor.   While everyone else retreated outside of the room, the two elves got suited up in the alien heat-shielded armor (the aliens are elf-sized) and the elves began tinkering.  Over the course of a bit of pulling and prodding, they discovered a lead-shielded bin of crystals, glowing white hot and casting off incandescent heat; the winch opened the floor to what a played called "a nuclear reactor" and lowered a heavy duty basket on a chain out of the ceiling - I guess someone could take a ride down into the nuclear reactor.  There were also some blank, non-charged crystals (which they looted).  The elves ended up leaving all the "hot" stuff, ditching the radiation suits, and joining the rest of the party out in the cooler air of the spider column room.

I like big boss style monsters.  In the north of the Dome was a room with these amazing, orb-like balls stuck to the walls in a gooey matrix.  They looked valuable - very valuable.  Hunlaf the Saxon went to work chiseling one off the wall, but the giant crystalline spider queen lurking up near the ceiling swung down overhead and started stabbing at his bodyguards with bladed forelegs.  The same bluish electricity that sparked through the spider column pulsed through the queen, and this monster was able to project it into an electrical field.  Guys were getting fried just by attacking the  giant hanging terror.

Mustafa, their most impervious fighter, took the monster head on and got bitten, stabbed, and paralyzed by spider venom.  Most of the smart people started retreating at that point, and plinked it with arrows (or magic missiles, if applicable).   A few of the tough guys stayed below, jabbing up with spears or otherwise trying to smack it from the ground, like a gigantic piñata.  It was pretty tense, because multiple people were close to dying from the electric field damage, but then they killed it and had to worry about a gigantic alien spider dislodging from the ceiling and crashing down on them.

In the end, the only death was one of the lower level retainers, who died underneath the crushing weight of the spider when it fell out of its perch.

The party rolled the giant spider off of the survivors, dragged the paralyzed Mustafa out from under, and Hunlaf finished looting the amazing grapefruit sized orbs from the walls of the room.  They looked to be worth about 1,000sp each, and they ended up finding nearly a dozen of the spheres - quite a pay day.

The trip out of the dome was harrowing, as a number of smaller glass spiders detached from the central column and chased them out of the structure, circling back to pour out of the hole at the top of the dome and come down across the roof towards the party from outside.  They made a stand near the dome entrance, and one of the wizards used a Phantasmal Force of a dragon to scare most of the glass spiders to death.  Badly injured and out of magic, the party didn't relish a journey through the fungal forest, with its teeming swarms of carnivorous giant insects.  They went back into the dome to find a sealed room they could use for short term rest.

Someone remembered Odin, the alien supercomputer that acts as their patron, had given them a bunch of Odin memory crystals that would allow the Asgardian deity to seize control of new sections of the undercity.  The elves started looking around the entrance chamber for one of the telltale compartments that housed a memory crystal.  Success!  They replaced the original crystal with Odin's, and a glowing hologram of the All-Father began to materialize in front of them, laughing maniacally as his power grew and grew along with his expanding computing power (in game terms, he gets more psionics as the players add more of the city to his collective).

Odin assured the players he'd be able to override and lock the doors, ensuring no patrols or detachments would intrude on them while they rested.  It was just a little hard to sleep underneath the glow of the power-mad hologram chortling with glee.

I had a Christmas themed Black City event all lined up, something I'm calling "The Fractious Night".  Alas, last weekend's game went too long and we didn't get to experience the Fractious Night last week.  But it's still a holiday week and there's time before New Year's eve for us to finish out 2013 with a blast.  As we ended last session, Odin stopped scanning the banks of data in the alien work stations and tilted his head as if listening to a far off voice.  "All grows still and silent in the fungal forests of the sprawling caverns outside.  A great evil stirs.  The Fractious Night approaches".

Black City Game 28 - Don't Bathe in the Crab Pool

We reached a quorum of regulars this past weekend and got in another Black City game.  The players are in the vast fungal caverns of the second level; they had just entered a domed structure, negotiated past an acid bath trap, and finished a tough fight against a handful of rubbery alien servitors (the plasticals).  Some of the servitors were able to shoot electricity out of their arms, and one of the NPC clerics (Bottvild) was slain by an electro blast.

After the session recap, the players looted Bottvild's remains, her sister Borghild sliced off her head (so she doesn't return as a gjenganger) and they discussed the next place to explore.  They didn't experiment much with the control room at this point, other than to study the holographic "sand table" which showed a map of the caverns, with various points of interest highlighted.  Hopefully they took some notes.

Timur the Elf had blasted a new tunnel with the disintegration ray, and Brutok used his dwarven mining experience to determine the diagonal tunnel breached a further chamber, and he could sense water and air currents.  The 30' round tunnel opened about 5' above the surface of a large deep pool of circulating, murky water.  The water swirled slightly, as if fed from below by a rising underwater current.  There was no place else to go without dropping into the deep water and swimming, but craning their necks to the north, the party could see a beach area just at the range of vision.  If they continued regular exploration, there might be another room within the dome that leads to the water cave.

Time out from the game.  Someone is knocking at the door.  It's the son of one of the dads, a neighbor.  We can just barely hear him whisper to his dad, "Dad, someone flushed a whole bunch of toilet paper, and now poop is coming out of the shower.  That's bad, right?"  I'm sure any of the parents (with boys) can relate.

So Adam had to leave the game for a bit.

Returning to the control room, they went down a side passage and found a room with a catwalk overlooking a slow moving sluice of bluish fluid.  Some lights flashed on the wall alongside the catwalk.  Brutok went out to investigate, stumbled back from the wall, and fell backward into the blue goop.  His body went rigid and he begin to drift with the flow of the goop.  (Unbeknownst to the others, the wall had briefly shown a frightening 3-d hologram of a leaping nightmare monster, startling Brutok and causing him to stumble off of the walkway.  Then the blue stuff paralyzed him).

Mustafa jogged out there to fish Brutok out of the goop, while the other characters watched from the safety of the doorway.  They had looped a rope around Mustafa in case he stumbled as well.  He was also startled by the leaping hologram monster, but the other guys kept him from tumbling into the goop, and he was able to fish out the dwarf when he realized the monster was just a mirage.  As they carried Brutok out of the room, it was clear that any exposed flesh touching the blue goop went tingly and numb.  Brutok was covered with the stuff!  It also seemed to be acidic, eating holes in his clothing and raising welts on his flesh.  (It's actually an enzymatic solution that was breaking down proteins, but who's checking?)  The main thing is that Brutok was about to lose his pimp fur cloak and tricked out fur boots.  One of the guys suggested taking him to the pool of water and dunking him a few times to rinse all the blue stuff off.  Off they went.

The last time they visited the pool and leaned out over the murky water with their lantern, I rolled to see if the lurking "Crabstrosity" that lived in the pool noticed them.  Apparently, dipping a nice plump tasty dwarf all the way down into the underwater Crabstrosity lair and jigging it up and down at the end of a rope is enough enticement to lure the monster out of the depths.  (Anyone who's done crabbing in a bay knows the party performed the perfect technique).

"Oh great Cthulhu, please accept our humble sacrifice and grant us great powers…"  That was Adam, who had just returned from his household poop emergency (a plumber was on the way) in time to see the party desperately battling the tentacles of the giant crab monster.  The thing had already sliced Brutok to ribbons with its claws, and was attacking the guys on the ledge with the tentacles and threatening to drag them into the soup too.  The players were furiously trying to chop the tentacles and keep their front line from getting pulled down (and the front liners were pulling on the rope tied around the dwarf).

I can't make this stuff up - dunking the dwarf up and down into the Crabstrosity pool and then trying to fish him out before he was eaten alive was one of the funniest things in recent memory.  Unless you're the dwarf (in which case you have choice words for your compatriots).  Timur the Russian Elf eventually blasted the tentacles with Magic Missiles, and the party safely retreated deeper into the tunnel.

First aid and Cure Light Wounds were applied to the mauled dwarf, who hovered near death's door (-1 hit points).   He's had a number of recent "near death" experiences, provoking the Odin cleric to quip, "Clearly you're too short for Valhalla.  They keep throwing you back to grow some more".

The players figured it was a good time to retreat, and they were near enough the surface elevator that they bushwhacked through the fungal forest and returned to the upper ruins. They spent a bunch of time advancing the calendar on the surface; Halam (a level 1 NPC cleric retainer from their ship's crew) was promoted to the active roster and became a henchman; Zakhar and the Byzantines completed their mission to copy a Disintegration scroll off of one of the dungeon walls; a trip was made to the Tower of Astronomy, where "Odin" had finished crafting a suit of man-sized adamant armor in payment for prior services.  Odin gave them a vague quest about extending his influence to the caverns, and then cast them out of Asgard (in other words, they were instantaneously teleported off the orbital space station and down to the ruined city).

So it was a week or so later in game time when they made a second foray into the caverns, fully healed with XP awards (Ben Underfoot leveled up), and returned to the giant dome in the forest.  The "stone walker" guardian wasn't replaced, and this time they knew the procedure to get through the acid bath air lock trap without injury.  Unfortunately, there was a new detachment of Plasticals operating the control stations in the first room.

This time, the squad of Plasticals was led by a brainy one (a Mark IV in my notes) - a construct capable of dominating humanoid brains with amazing psychic powers.  They had fought one of these before, and it put the whammy on half the party, so the guys prioritized missile fire at the brainy alien.  Its head was blown into green goop like the Martian heads in Mars Attacks, after Timur unleashed the Magic Missiles its way.

The party handled the rest of the fight really well.  The fighters crashed into the meaty guards, and Agnar leaped off a catwalk onto one of the blasty aliens below, impaling it with his spear in a style worthy of a viking hero (one of the guys said he "air assassinated" the alien).  Vitaly the Elf (9 hit points!) made a suicide charge into one of the blasty aliens, and should surely be dead, but he's wearing alien-sculpted adamant plate (the ancients were elf-sized), and Vitaly learned, fortuitously, that adamant provides electrical resistance.  He managed to live.

That was it for game night - we had toilet emergencies, blue goo jokes, and the party almost fed their helpless, paralyzed dwarf to a voracious crab monster.   All in a night's work.

Current Player Characters:
Mustafa of Arabia, a scimitar wielding desert warrior (L4)
Brutok Bearslayer, a dwarf (L4)
Borghild, a Norse cleric of Odin (L4)
Timur, Russian Elf (L3)
Vitaly the Lucky, Russian Elf (L3)
Ben Underfoot, Halfling Scout (L3)

Retainers or NPCs with the party:
Agnar Beigarth, a Northman fighter (L4)
Tribunas, Byzantine magic user (L3)
Visin Thorsteinson, Norse Fighter (L3)
Hunlaf the Saxon, Thief (L2)
Halam (Cleric of Frey L1)

Dungeons with Hexes

Last week's post (megadungeon topology) looked at alternate approaches to laying out your sprawling campaign dungeon.  Inspired by the vastness of Tolkien's Moria, I've been drawn towards creating megadungeons that act more like wilderness adventures than depicting endless 10' corridors across a gigantic sheet of graph paper.

Plus, it was a chance to pay homage to the High Gygaxian way of doing things - Descent into the Depths of the Earth and Vault of the Drow.  Where the old ways are still the best ways.

Below are some examples demonstrating how I've used a hex approach in the home campaign, the Black City.  First up is a look at the Transit Tunnels.  The surface of the ruined city is a hex crawl composed of tumble down blocks, where locations with extant buildings or points of interest are marked by letters.  I used the outline of the city as a foot print for the dungeon level to plot, spatially, where the entrances to the dungeon from the surface city were located.  Continuity is a thing, right?  From there, it made sense to treat the first level like an extensive tunnel system similar to a modern day subway.  The locations of the small "mini dungeons" were plotted as nodes.  I prefer having multiple smaller dungeons, over a large 100+ room level, as it's easier to build strong themes into the distinct spaces.  Can't escape the whole "must be rational" thing.  Let there be a method to the madness, as the classic article once said.

Thus was born the Transit Tunnels.  Here's a view of the map as well as one of the individual dungeons.  It goes to show you don't need any actual, you know, map making talent or mad software skillz, for something to work well at the table.

Scheme for the Transit Tunnels - the Well of Woe was at "A"

 The "Dragon's Den" mini dungeon

The dungeon map is from "The Dragon's Den", listed as node E on the Transit Tunnels.  At the end of the large east-west tunnel in the center of the map was the frozen lair of the white dragon, and the humongous chamber south of that passage was the lair of Zoltan the Welder, one of the alien super intelligences that could manifest a physical form and interact with the world.  Zoltan had enslaved some Svartalfs, and the players took great relish in destroying it (the Assault on Zoltan).  My printed version of that map has all the numbers and hastily scrawled notes.

The players are now exploring the next level down, the voluminous "Warrens of Decay".  Once again, I used the surface of the city as the starting footprint to plot where entrances from above allowed ingress to the warrens, and plotted dead zones for any of the surface structures that extended to the deep levels.  For instance, the Spire of Thaumaturgy (north of the glacier) has an elevator into the deeps - that needed to be carried through the warrens.

Hex map for the Warrens

For folks that read the game reports, the players started near area 28.  The Cairn of the Dead Roman is location 6 in the lower part of the map, and the Kingdom of the Cave Men is area 2.  The domed structure where the players disintegrated the Stone Walker is near areas 9 and 10.  Many of the locales are mapped as small dungeons, making this place exactly like a night-bound wilderness hex crawl with many small lairs.  I won't say more about the Warrens, as this map is currently active in play, and any players reading the blog could pick up inadvertent spoilers.

The impetus for these posts on megadungeon topology was a comment on Death Mountain by Dwimmer Gan; I still need to circle back and talk about my plans for level 1 of Death Mountain!  Both Death Mountain and the structure for Harrow Home show a different take on this node-and-line based approach to top down design.  I'll talk through how they're shaping up in my notebooks.  It's a curious practice, but I design game spaces via text first, moving from notebooks to a text file, and drawing the actual maps as one of the last tasks.  I suppose that makes me an auditory person (rather than kinesthetic or visual).  Or maybe I'm just bad at maps.

Death of a Valkyrie - Black City Game 27

One of the players delivered a fine recap at the top of the session, reminding everyone that we ended last week in the vast dank caverns beneath the city, in the Kingdom of the Cave Men.  The party had made a loose alliance with the nigh immortal Blue Lady, the living goddess of the Neanderthals, joining her for a veggie feast.  Tonight they were planning an excursion into the wild spaces of the caverns to assault a domed building in the fungal forest.

My group is always pretty funny, but when they're on their game, I spend more than half the night laughing.  After the recap, some of the players improvised a bit of "Men At Work".  Older folks from the MTV generation will remember the tune:

Cause we are livin' in a land down under
With blue women and lots of plunder

I met a strange lady, she made me nervous
She just smiled and gave me a vegemite sandwich

One of my table manners is to rotate the party "caller" (I do use the caller role) based on who brought snacks that week.  Keyser was this week's snack person, which meant action.  Dice and carnage.  His hands start to shake if we spend too much time kibitzing at the top of the session, a condition assuaged only by rolling a d20 to smash something.  His character paces anxiously any time there's a long parley (secretly hoping for hostilities, I'm sure).  He changed his name from Brutok the Strong to Brutok Bearslayer after he killed a frickin' polar bear.  His war cry is a monotone "Brutok, smash!"  With Brutok in charge, tonight would be filled with action.

The group was quickly mobilized and set out into the wilds.  The plan was to navigate back to the "cairn of the dead Roman" as a landmark, then head due north into the fungal forest, aiming for a gigantic pillar, and find the elevator on the other side.  It would be a 2 hour hike.  They wanted to return to the surface to the topside camp, switch out some gear, and bring down their BFG (the alien disintegrator used for minig) to see what happened when they shot the stone walker with it.

There was a couple of wandering encounters along the way - scouting, stealth, and careful play guided the party around a swarm of giant carnivorous flies buzzing over a large carcass; in the next hour, a mob of giant bugs (fire beetles) tracked them down and the party formed a fighting formation to fend off the beetles.  Borghild, one of the fierce lady Odin priests, impaled a beetle with a natural 20, which as usual triggered a chorus of Ride of the Valkyries from the player group:  Daa-da-da-da-DAA-da, da-da-da-DAA-da, da-da-da-DAAA-da, da-da-da-daaaaaaa!  I think if we drank beer during gaming, my group would rowdily sing and clank their mugs together most of the night (wearing horned helmets, too).

After a few hours to ascend the elevator, rest, and sort out the equipment, it wasn't long in table time before they were at the clearing of the domed building, waiting for the stone walker to make its circuit.  One odd thing they noticed while staking out the building was a pillar extending from the top of the dome, apparently all the way up to the cavern roof (lost in darkness).  They caught a flash of light where the pillar met the domed roof of the building, and thought they saw a many-legged spider thing quickly scurry around to the back side of the pillar and up towards the cavern ceiling.

Their plan for the stone walker involved using the alien torc as a disguise to get close to it, then blast it at short range with the mining harness.  It would all depend on whether there was some kind of organic brain in there susceptible to the torc's mind magic.  When you need to risk someone, send in the halfling.  Ben Underfoot put on the torc and stepped out of the forest into no-man's land, awaiting the crunch-crunch-crunch of the 6-legged stone juggernaut.  It stopped in front of the halfling, scanned him with its blue eye rays, and then kept walking.  He gave the party a thumbs up and a grin, fell in behind the walker, and followed it around the whole building, scouting the entrance.

The torc makes the wearer look innocuous and harmless to the viewer; to most of the characters, the halfling looked like an unarmed waiflike child.  They had no idea how he might have looked to the alien guardian.  The torc leads to all sorts of jokes between Brutok and Timur the Elf.  Brutok:  "Put on the torc, elf, I want to see how you look when you're harmless.  Wait, there's no difference.  Maybe you broke it.  Put it on again.  Nope, I still don't see any difference".  He's gotten the elf with that one a couple of times.

Once they knew the torc magic worked on the guardian, they gave the torc over to Timur, who lugged the mining harness out into the path of the guardian, waiting for it to get real close before blasting it in the face with the disintegrator.  The party watched from concealment in the fungal trees.  The guardian was either going to miss its saving throw and turn to dust particles, or immediately crush the elf to a pulp with a brutal stomp.  The drama was palpable during the saving throw roll.  The elf is still here, so you know how that turned out.

The entrance to the dome was through a tunnel (like an igloo entrance) and it presented a challenge.  When the first rank used a green passkey gem to open the door, there was an airlock-like area with an opposite door.  Stepping in, the door behind them closed, but the door in front didn't open.  A series of beeps and descending lights on the wall indicated a count-down, and the players needed to decide (quickly) whether to push a button or not.  They didn't push it, and the room doused them with acid!  After the acid bath, the injured front four (all fighters) stumbled out into a dimly lit control room.  It was full of "plasticals", the alien-headed workers that operate some of the functional work stations in the complex, and the four injured fighters were in a battle for their lives.

Over the next few rounds, the succeeding waves of player characters took turns entering the air lock, pressing the button, and avoiding the acid bath.  That left the fighters on their own for a few rounds until reinforcements got through the air lock sequence.

The control room was oval shaped, with an elevated walkway surrounding a sunken area in the center where the aliens had work stations and a holographic map table.  The characters were on the walk way at the south entrance, with guard plasticals on either side attacking them with clubs.  Meanwhile, the two brainy plasticals from the floor got onto the north side of the walkway; one of them ditched down a west side passage, while the other held out it's arm (and braced its wrist) - one of the players described it as "Iron Man getting ready to blast someone with his repulsor."  That seemed apt, since a moment later, he blasted Brutok with a lightning bolt after the dwarf dropped the first guard, giving the electro-plastical a clear shot.   (The electro guys are technically 'Plastical Mark III' in my bestiary notes.)

Visin was dropped to zero hit points, also caught in the electrical blast.  Mustafa was whittling away the other guard plastical (a Mark I model) on the left side of the combat.  The next wave of characters brought the clerics.  Mustafa was the recipient of a Heroism spell for Borghild, boosting him to fight as a 6th level fighter, and he quickly finished the Mark I.  The other cleric, Bottvild, cast a Cure Light Wounds on Visin, getting him off zero hit points for next round.

Unfortunately, that put Bottvild in the line of fire of the next lightning zap, 12 hit points worth!  Brutok made his saving throw, taking 6, but Bottvild only had 6 hp at 3rd level (she's a retainer that's had some seriously unlucky hit point rolls).  An ugly black hole was blasted in her chest, and she died instantly, taking the full 12.  Borghild, the 4th level cleric (and her sister), went berserk, charging the lightning guy with her spear.  She and Brutok finished that guy off, as he wasn't able to get any more lightning blasts off under the flurry of attacks.

The other Mark III returned to the room, bringing a third Mark I guard with it, and the Mark III started revving up its own lightning blast to shoot the party from the west side of the oval.   Timur wasn't having any of it, and lugged the mining harness into position to send a disintegration ray at it.  The Mark III was missed (ie, made its saving throw), but its bodyguard, the Mark I, was vaporized.  Mustafa, still under the Heroism effect, charged into the face of the Mark III, slashing and cutting with dual scimitars.  The Mark III electro guys are plated with metal, making them difficult to injure, so this became an attrition fight.  The Mark III kept retreating down the hallway and blasting the desert warrior at point blank with lightning strikes, while Mustafa whittled its life down.  He would have easily died without the level boosts from the Heroism.  Timur called for Mustafa to dodge, and the fighter stepped aside just as Timur finished the alien off with Magic Missiles, ending the fight.

We had to stop there, because we were 15 minutes over, and we're trying to get folks home on time for work and school Monday.  Overall, it was a strong performance by the players - all the main characters contributed significantly to the successes.  See you guys in another week or so.

Current Player Characters:
Mustafa of Arabia, a scimitar wielding desert warrior (L4)
Brutok Bearslayer, a dwarf (L4)
Borghild, a Norse cleric of Odin (L4)
Timur, Russian Elf (L3)
Vitaly the Lucky, Russian Elf (L3)
Ben Underfoot, Halfling Scout (L2)

Retainers or NPCs with the party:
Agnar Beigarth, a Northman fighter (L4)
Tribunas, Byzantine magic user (L2)
Visin Thorsteinson, Norse Fighter (L3)
Hunlaf the Saxon, Thief (L2)
Bottvild (cleric L3)

Return to the Black City - Game 26

After a 6-7 month break, the Black City campaign is back on.  Overcoming the 'bumps in the road', we fielded a near complete group last weekend (6 out of 7 regulars) and the party made their first foray into the "Warrens of Decay".

It literally took me most of the week last week just to recompile my notes, reestablish where we left off, and build some refresher notes.  I'll put a super-brief campaign recap here to help orient any new readers that enjoy game reports.

The Black City is a ruined, alien city on the frozen shore of the island of Thule, north of Norway (technically, the ruins are on the shore along a fjord, but you get the idea).  A viking raider, Bergfinn the Bold, discovered the ruins several years ago, and progressively larger raiding parties have returned with him each year.  Now the island hosts a temporary trading camp on the shores of the fjord, where dozens of longships and knarrs get hauled onto the beach each season.  The ship crews head south again before the weather turns too poor.

The sprawling remains of the city are divided by a glacier; the ruins north of the glacier are more dangerous and mostly unexplored (the party's only excursion beyond the glacier ended in screaming and many deaths).  Explorers roam the southern ruins, excavating tumbled cyclopean buildings to dig out alien crystals, gemstones, and strange artifacts that command a premium in southern markets.  People that die in the ruins return to life as gjengangers - flesh eating ghouls - and the ruins are also littered with traps, like the giant stone heads (Watchers) that incinerate trespassers, or skewer them with projectiles.  Explorers that spend too much time in the city frequently develop "dungeon madness" and devolve into berserkers, never returning to camp.  But the most dangerous opponent out there is definitely the other crews, since their loyalty is only to their captain and they're all seeking treasure.  The campaign has involved that 'every man for himself' gold rush ethos.

For the first couple dozen sessions, the players primarily explored the vast tunnels under the city, a vast series of arteries I called "the Transit Tunnels", clearing most of the mini dungeons discovered along the way.  At this point of the campaign, a few of the original characters are level 4, and they're ready to delve deeper  than the Transit Tunnels.  All they know about the next level down is that it's cavern-like, dank, humid, and moist.  Their only glimpse below revealed a vast forest of giant toadstools in an endless cavern.

I had considered writing a recap on the political situation back in Trade Town - the party's allies, rivals, current events.  But the thought of relaying all that additional background bored me, so  I can only imagine how it would be to read.  We'll skip that stuff unless it becomes relevant for the narrative.  (You're welcome.)

Long ago, the party had discovered a set of clamshell doors in the ground that concealed a shaft that went right down to the caverns, stopping at level 1 below the city (in a place they called The Mist Dungeon).  They chose to marshal various allies to fortify the area around the doors and set up a secure outpost there - both to block rival adventurers from using the same elevator, and to also ensure they could return (since the elevator needed to be operated from the surface).  There were other ladders and access tunnels throughout the first level dungeons that led to the caverns, but after weighing the options, they decided that establishing firm control of the elevator was the best approach.

The cast of characters that went on the excursion is listed below (at the end).  They took a week's worth of food, and only two days worth of water (due to the weight), so they'd have to find a water source if they were going to spend more than a few days exploring.   The "elevator" is basically an open platform that descends due to an unseen mechanism below the platform; as they dropped the 80 feet into the dark cavern, the characters were completely exposed, and gigantic insects occasionally flittered near the shaft of light up above.

The elevator placed them right in the middle of the fungal forest.  During the descent, they saw lights far to the north and south, indicating structures, and perhaps intelligence.  Lighted windows hinted at a vast mound or tower north of a ravine in the upper half of the cavern.  They estimate the cavern is at least a mile across, with a vaulted roof that seemed to be held up by columns.

Their first destination was a dimly lit clearing east of where they descended - they saw a dim glow and a structure only a few hundred yards away.  Once they knew the landing was secure, they formed a marching order, and sent the halfling up front to lead.  His knowledge of "bushcraft" would help identify dangerous giant fungi and avoid spores and giant molds.  They tromped off through the muck and filth.

(DM's Note:  I have the Warrens of Decay mapped and structured like a hex crawl - I'm essentially treating it like a small scale wilderness adventure).

Before reaching the clearing, the party ran into a war-band of primitive humans (neanderthals) wearing piecemeal armor made from gigantic insect parts.  The neanderthals turned out to be friendly, almost worshipful, and after pantomime and non-verbal communication,  the party allowed the cave men to guide them away from the clearing towards the south side.  The neanderthals had described a large, stomping monster back in the clearing that guarded a place of death; the group's halfling and a thief scouted it out, corroborated the giant 6-legged stone horror was real, and so they decided to follow the cave men.

Along the way, they encountered another group of cave men, gatherers out collecting foodstuff from the edge of the fungal forest.  A swarm of giant flies attacked, and Timur the elf impressed all the primitives by putting the giant bugs to Sleep.  The cave men took special care to point out a Christian burial cairn (complete with grave marker and cross) atop a hill, indicating that someone like them was buried up there from long ago.  They weren't the first people to visit the caverns!

Side note:  early on in the campaign, the party discovered some Latin graffiti in one of the Transit Tunnel dungeons;  they've discovered archaic Roman gear in the dungeons; they even thought they saw living legionnaires through a scrying device that revealed glimpses of the deeper levels.   They fully expect to find living Roman descendants somewhere in the dungeons.

The cave men guided the party to a large palisade fortress made of gigantic lashings, complete with guard towers, gates, and other defensive measures.  The cave men had a remarkable settlement beyond the walls, with crude gardens, animal pens, and a stone palace carved into the cavern wall.  The tribesmen themselves lived in a large series of caves spread across the rock face at different elevations.

The party was brought to the palace to meet "the Blue Lady".

The rest of the night was a roleplaying exercise as the group made contact with the Blue Lady.  She wasn't a neanderthal; she looked nearly human, but with bluish skin and silvery hair.  Tall and lithe, she was draped in gossamer that kept no secrets about her (attractive) figure.  She addressed the players from the balcony, in perfect Latin, and then had her worshipful cave men bring them into the audience hall, to the accompaniment of drums and ceremony.

The palace was filled with wonders and treasures and displays of decadence.  The Lady indicated that she hadn't had surface visitors in hundreds of years, and was pleased to entertain; the players were taken by a cave man chamberlain to a watery grotto in order to wash up and make themselves presentable for dinner.

Over dinner, the Blue Lady plied the players with questions about the surface world, the Vikings, and what brought men back to the city; they asked her lots of questions about the cave men, the caverns, and what she knew about the city.  So far what they've learned is that she's very old, if not immortal; when she came to the caverns, the cave men were barely surviving the depredations of the various predators and parasites out in the caverns.  She guided the early cave men to this spot where her palace was built, and has shepherded them ever since.  They treat her like their goddess.

The Blue Lady has a number of specific projects she's pursuing, which keeps her rooted to the area, and the players didn't get access to the labs or private areas deeper in the palace.  Timur the Elf presented himself as a fellow scientist and wizard, and later that evening learned that she carefully breeds the cave men, arranging births and marriages, keeping meticulous records around their heredity.  It seemed like she had creepy intentions for the characters, and was on the prowl for a consort, someone willing to give up the surface world and the adventuring life and stay as her pet in the palace.

The main thing is that the players negotiated the privilege to use the cave man fortress as a sort of home base - it offered protection, fresh water, and the Blue Lady was knowledgeable about the larger cavern.  The players made inquiries about the forest clearing and the huge "stone walker" that patrolled it, and began to draw up plans on how to assault it for the next game.  Meanwhile, they're fairly aware they're playing into the Blue Lady's clutches, whatever may be her secret agenda and motives.


Current Player Characters:
Mustafa of Arabia, a scimitar wielding desert warrior (L4)
Brutok Bearslayer, a dwarf (L4)
Borghild, a Norse cleric of Odin (L4)
Timur, Russian Elf (L3)
Vitaly the Lucky, Russian Elf (L3)
Ben Underfoot, Halfling Scout (L2)

Retainers or NPCs with the party:
Agnar Beigarth, a Northman fighter (L4)
Tribunas, Byzantine magic user (L2)
Visin Thorsteinson, Norse Fighter (L3)
Hunlaf the Saxon, Thief (L2)
Bottvild (cleric L3)

Game Report 24: The Decapitated Oracle!

Felt's interpretation of the Decapitated Oracle

It's been a few weeks since our last game.  It's "fantasy baseball drafting season" the past few weeks, so that makes it a little harder to keep a weekly gaming schedule, since I've had a couple of drafts to prepare.  However, looks like we'll be good to have another game this weekend.

When last we left the Spitsberg Pirates, they were huddled in an access tunnel that branched off a deep vertical shaft.  They needed to throw grapples up to the top of the shaft and climb up, getting to the first floor of the "Tower of Pain" from the dungeon level.  The overall goal was a rescue mission, hoping to find the captain of another ship and return him for a nice fee (and some favors).

There was a problem: the first level of the tower was inhabited by bizarre, headless creatures, sitting around and stuffing mushroom stalks into their gaping 'belly mouths'.  I'm calling them, prosaically, "headless servitors".

The group's solution was Stinking Cloud; Timur would gas the first level, then the fighters would toss grapples and start climbing like mad once the smell started to clear, hoping the guards were disabled and nauseous enough for the assault to gain a foothold.  The players spent time outlining their order of battle and planning the assault, and away they went.

The Cloud worked, and the servitors were off-balance enough that only a few responded when the first two fighters clambered over the side of the shaft.  They quickly formed a defensive front that let other party members climb over the lip behind them.  The servitors had a vicious bite attack that triggered whenever their hooked claw scored a hit and pulled someone towards the yawning belly-mouth, but beyond that, they were just big piles of hit points and assembled parts.  The group beat them down.

There was an elevator to the second floor of the tower, and this presented another tactical challenge - only 4-5 characters could fit on the small elevator platform at a time.  Without knowing what was on the second floor, this would create a blind assault.  Undeterred, the players again selected an assault squad, while everyone else would await the elevator below and send up a second wave.

The second floor was a gigantic operating theater, where one of the floating "winged terrors" hovered above a test subject on an illuminated platform, mid-surgery.  A handful of headless servitors shambled forward to attack, while the party streamed off the elevator - well, most of them.  Timur the Russian Elf elected to cast a Magic Missile, and because a caster can't move and throw a spell, he was still on the elevator when the guys on the first floor jammed on the down button.  That stranded the four melee attackers on the second floor without any magical backup.  The players didn't exactly think that one through.

The Magic Missile blew a hole in the unearthly material of the winged terror, and this was followed by a vicious spear thrust from the cleric Borghild, who charged it.  The other 3 fighter types (Agnar, Mustafa, and Brutok) were bogged down battling the Headless Servitors.  The terror floated toward the high ceiling, where the elevator shaft provided an escape route to level 3.  Along the way, the monster "droned"; it has the power to vibrate and create a wave of soporific sound that puts humans to sleep.  This could have been really bad for the players - 4 dead main characters, if the saves were missed - but everyone made their saving throw but the cleric, and the fight continued.

Meanwhile, the elevator was now making its way from the first floor with the next wave of characters - and one of them was the magic user, Tribunas, who was carrying a lighting guns scavenged off a winged terror from a previous dungeon encounter.  Seeing the injured monster high above in the elevator shaft, he fired on it up the shaft, scoring a direct hit and blowing it into pieces.  Slimy monster parts rained down on their heads.

Once the second floor was secure, they found the kidnapped captain in a holding tank - it was like a metal coffin, filled with a paralytic gas that kept the captain asleep and inert.  Reaching into the tank made your arms go numb.  The other tanks were filled with vivisection victims that were being harvested for servitor body parts - apes, morlocks, even a neanderthal, all missing things.  One of them was even missing their head.

A strike crew decided to head up to level 3 - at this point, the group surmises the tower has 4 levels.  Here they encountered the Decapitated Oracle - a choir of disembodied heads, resting in tiered troughs surrounding a small platform where a supplicant can place their hands (or clawed appendages, as the case may be) upon a pair of silver globes to activate the oracle.  The heads floated in some kind of nutrient bath that kept them somewhat alive, eyes rolling and mouths opening and closing aimlessly in perpetual horror.  Some were aging and in rough shape - perhaps "burning out" like overused light bulbs - thus creating the need for replacements.  The players now understood why the servitor golems had no heads!

The intrepid cleric stepped forward and touched the silver spheres - because that's what players do.  Immediately, all the brainpower (computing power) of those hundred heads flowed into the cleric, and her mind expanded  beyond the mortal realm.  In game terms, it was like reaching out to the higher planes via a Contact Other Plane spell.  What would she ask of the universe with her heightened, godlike awareness?

Alas, the experience of the other four characters present was not so uplifting.  From their perspective, a hundred alien voices started yelling, babbling, gibbering, and tumbling out of the mouths of the disembodied heads in an overwhelming cacaphony, and in game terms, it was like being assaulted by a Confusion spell.

Time was getting late and some guys had a hard stop, so we deferred the Saving Throw rolls until this week.  What fun awaits!

As usual, here is our Cast of Characters:

Agnar Beigarth, a Northman fighter (L4)
Mustafa of Arabia, a scimitar wielding desert warrior (L4)
Brutok the Strong, a dwarf (L4)
Borghild, a Norse cleric of Odin (L4)
Timur, Russian Elf (L3)
Vitaly, Russian Elf (L3)
Ben Underfoot, Halfling (L2)

Retainers traveling with the party:
Tribunas, Byzantine magic user (L2)
Bottvild (cleric L3)
Visin Thorsteinson (fighter 3)
Hunlaf the Saxon (specialist 3)
Ivar the Bow-bender (specialist 1)

Game Report 23: To the Tower of Pain

After a few weeks hiatus, it's time to reconnect with my ongoing campaign, The Black City, in time for tonight's game session.  In the interim, I've been traveling for work; on another night, we couldn't get a quorum of gamers; on the next game night, we organized an at-home Magic the Gathering draft to teach all the kids how to draft a deck.  One of my side projects has become helping to get a Magic scene at the local comic store kick-started, as they hope to add more gaming and becoming more of a game club.

Here's a quick campaign primer on the Black City:  The Black City is a ruined alien city, on the frozen island of Thule far to the north of the Viking lands (I'm using real-world Spitsbergen for the island map, thus the players call themselves "the Spitsberg Pirates", tongue-in-cheek).  A seasonal trade town sits on the shore of a fjord near the alien ruins, supporting the numerous knarrs and longships that arrive each season to explore the ruins and dungeons.

At this point, the players are mostly 3rd and 4th level.  They've explored a few ruined structures on the surface, and most of the sprawling first dungeon level, the Transit Tunnels.  They're allied with an alien intelligence calling itself "Odin", and they've spent the last few game sessions exploiting resources discovered in the dungeons to gear themselves for deeper delving.  For instance, they used an alien plasma forge and a skilled craftsman from town to craft a few adamant blades for themselves.

The players had a logistical challenge to solve last game session; the captain who brought them to the island died in a tragic fire back at camp, their ship was damaged in the fire, and many of the crewmen abandoned them for other ships (along with about a quarter of the loot).  They returned to camp amidst the chaos.

Over the course of the campaign, the group has been building an impressive resume with the local jarl, performing progressively more dangerous services as opportunities arise; Agnar, the party leader, approached the jarl for help with their ship problem.  In return for an oath of loyalty, the party agreed to serve the jarl directly, and gain the protection of the jarl's hall (and a safe place to store treasure).  The jarl has an impressive fleet, and there's the chance to get a ship before the end of summer through salvage rights - it's not uncommon for entire crews to disappear in the misty ruined city, leaving behind an empty camp and vessel.

Dealing with all the roleplaying options and potential allies in camp, and finally settling on appealing to the jarl, took about half the game night; the second half began with the Mid-Summer Thing - a gathering of all the captains to hear disputes and grievances, vote on policy, and enjoy some of the jarl's hospitality.  The relevant bit that was revealed at the Thing was the abduction of a captain in the ruins by "winged terrors", and the helpless crew unable to get past the great glacier to the distant tower where he was taken.  The party plotted it out on the hex map, and saw that the location of the tower was above a dungeon tunnel that went beneath the glacier; they were calling the side tunnel that led to the place, "the winged terror lair".  The players had some previous success against winged terrors, and thought that this mission complimented their previous plan, which involved more scouting of the surface ruins.

It's a long journey across the ruins, to the "private" dungeon entrance the party uses to get underground, and then it's a few hours through the giant transit tunnels underground to the smooth-bored side tunnel that led to the winged terror lair.  Dank, hot, misty air wafts out of the smooth tunnel, pooling condensation and slime onto the floor and making the stone slick.  There's a sense the tunnel was cut through the rock wall through unnatural means.

The smooth tunnel leads about 30' into the rock wall before connecting to a large shaft vertical shaft.  The hot, dank, cavern air wafts up from below.  The party knows that a tropic, mushroom-filled cavern lies down in the darkness, but they haven't explored it yet.  Looking up, they saw a dim light about 20' up, just beyond the lip of the shaft - in other words, the shaft lead upwards into a structure on the surface, north of the glacier.  The Tower of Pain!

No one wanted to climb the slick walls of the shaft, so one of the characters hooked up a grappling hook and rope and tossed it up the shaft, trying a few times until the grappled grabbed onto the stone floor above.  The party also tied a safety rope around the character attempting the first climb, in case the grappled slipped.  The new halfling, Mr Ben Underfoot, made the climb.

The first floor of the tower was not vacant.

Sitting around the perimeter wall were a half dozen "things"… they looked like cobbled-together corpses, stitched and mismatched body parts of humans, apes, and other humanoids, without any heads.  An chitinous knob and a pair of antennae twitched in the place where a head should have sprouted.  Various metallic grafts were embedded into the flesh of the arms and shoulders as weaponry and armor.

Each body had a large, toothy mouth opening directly into the distended belly.  The things were lazily reaching to the side, to stacked piles of mushroom stems, and casually feeding mushroom bits into their own drooling belly-mouths.  They appeared oblivious to the grapple hook and the curious halfling peering over the lip of the shaft.  Nearby, cool air drafted into the room from a doorway leading outside of the tower, creating a bit of fog.

Mr Underfoot shimmied his way down the rope to the side tunnel, and conferred with the rest of the party.  Assaulting the shaft up a rope presented an unusual tactical challenge, so we ended the game session there so they could plan their assault with fresh minds.  Tonight.

BTW, would any aspiring artists out there care to take a stab at "headless servitors of the winged terrors"?  It's a strange enough monster to warrant a picture and could be fun to sketch - cobbled body parts, mutant grafts, and toothsome belly mouths.

Edit - here's an excellent sketch by Mr Nelson of the headless servitor, feeding mushrooms into the stomach belly.  Thanks!

Time Flies - Days and Weeks Roll Along in the Black City

Keeping a good calendar is fundamental to how I run the long term campaign.  One of the boss's popular quotes:    "You can not have a meaningful campaign if strict time records are not kept".*  Okay, that's a bit over the top - I'm sure some folks have run meaningful campaigns sans-calendar - but I take the importance of keeping a calendar to heart.  A few years ago I posted some basic notes on putting together an annual campaign calendar:  Happy New Year, Greyhawk.  I typically mark off holidays, generate weather, and seed a series of campaign events at the start of each game year.  In this way, you start to put the larger world outside the dungeon, "in motion".

As the campaign moves to mid-level play, and the characters begin to execute strategic plans requiring the passage of time, the calendar becomes important for mapping out when these activities will conclude and what kind of interruptions happen.  I'm raising these points now, as days and weeks have been rolling by in the Black City campaign, and the calendar is proving its value.  When we resume play next game session, 25 days have passed.

So where did the time go?  First, the players needed to spend about a week back in town, receiving a daily Cure Disease spell from the Jarl's cleric, to remove their radiation sicknesses.  They used the interim time to recruit various resources to help in their upcoming ventures.  Those ventures involved re-entering the dungeon with a large party of hired retainers, to exploit some of the opportunities left behind - to copy the alien Disintegration spell onto a scroll, to recover the remaining dragon's hoard, and to teach a trained blacksmith how to use the alien plasma forge to craft the adamant blanks owned by the party into adamant weaponry.  These activities took about 10 days in the dungeon, and the players returned to Trade Town with enough experience for a few stragglers to level up.  Now the elves and magic users need additional time to add 2nd level spells to their spell books.  This is how it all added up to 25 days.

The great thing about the table top form is the ability to count through the days quickly when appropriate, zooming down to the tactical level as necessary.

Part of recruiting resources was negotiation and horse trading.  Valens Lascarius, the Byzantine commander from across the fjord, hired out a party of Varangian soldiers along with another Russian elf, Zakhar, to form a camp in the dungeon and scribe the Disintegration scroll - allowing the PC's to go elsewhere.  The two party elves, and the surviving magic user, all came to Thule with Valens, and joined the party as new player characters to replace fallen characters; in other words, the players have a relationship with the Byzantines.  Those player characters are ostensibly apprentices of a wizard in Constantinople, with the over-arching mission of identifying new magic to bring back to their master.  Since their goals aligned with Valens, they were lent the services of a 5 Varangians, 10 Byzantine soldiers, and Zakhar.  (They still have to pay wage day-rates).  Valens also wanted to make sure his boss, the High Hermite of Constantinople, got a piece of adamant.

Bergfinn was willing to lend them the use of his blacksmith, in return for a gift of one of the adamant weapons they made.  They also needed to pay the smith's daily rate, and take an oath to keep him alive.

Along their travels, they ran into an excursion of Dokkalvir from the fairy realm.  The queen of the Dokkalvir has a strong interest in obtaining her own piece of adamant, and the elves set right to bargaining.  That makes three groups trying to chisel some adamant away from the players.  Historically, the players had a series of previous interactions with the Dokkalvir; Agnar was abducted by the elf queen and given terrifying visions of the future; Dokkalvir guided them past a dangerous monster lair at one point; another group of Dokkalvir was enslaved by Zoltan, a demon intelligence, and threw in with the players to help them overturn Zoltan's reign of terror just a few weeks ago.

No need to recount the detailed play-by-play of this session.  It's going to take Zakhar and the Varangians about 30 days to create the Disintegration scroll, so they fortified a series of rooms in the dungeon and loaded up a ton of supplies.  Most of level 1 is "pacified" at this point, but there's no guarantee it will stay so.

The players had acquired enough Thulium energy discs and pure adamant for the smith to create a pair of hand weapons - a scimitar and broadsword, three spear heads, and two daggers.   Then it took the smith some time to finish the hilts, mount the spear heads on hafts, and so forth.

Chaos and tragedy awaited the players back in Trade Town.  While they were gone, an accident happened in camp, and the tent of their ship captain, Paulson, burned to the ground, killing the captain and damaging the ship.  Was it an accident, falling asleep drunk and knocking over a candle, or was it murder?  Much of the crew abandoned the ship, after looting handfuls of the party treasure, before loyal henchmen left behind were able to take control of the camp and secure the party treasure.  (The henchmen had to pass their own loyalty checks, but none of them deserted - those retainers need a raise!)

That's about where we ended.  The party returned, triumphant with their new forged adamant weaponry, only to learn about a quarter of their treasure was robbed, and many ordinary sailors had abandoned them.  They've got some things to figure out - they'll need a captain and a navigator and repairs to the ship, as well as a new crew.  No one is happy about the disloyal sailors - those sailor oaths were to Paulson, not the players - but some of the guys are spoiling for payback and trying to search for the deserters among the other crews.

It's now mid-July in-game - the month of Midsummer by Norse reckoning - and it's almost time for the island's Thing - an assembly of the captains.

Should be interesting to see what the players do next.  Incidentally, some of these events have represented the convergence of calendar events and prophecy, returning us full circle to how I started this post and the value of a calendar.  Back when I generated the annual calendar, one of the events that was set on the calendar was a fire (June 28th); when Agnar dallied with the Queen of Air and Darkness and saw visions of the future, he learned of a fire that would strike the player's camp in the summer; when it came time for the fire to happen, I made simple chart with various possibilities, chucked some dice, and the rest is history.  So far, two of the Queen's prophecies have come to pass, though the players failed to identify the first one.  Suddenly, the remaining prophecies are much more concerning.  Here's the queen's vision (from Black City game 9, last October):

First would come the fish men, men wearing large scales like the sides of a fish; the player's ship, the Isgerd's Fury, would burn to the ground.  A great king would die, dark clouds would obscure the horizon, and then a massive fleet of viking raiders from a far off land would arrive on the island.

We are now firmly moving into mid-level play.  Here is the current disposition of the party:

Cast of Characters
Agnar Beigarth, a Northman fighter (L4)
Mustafa of Arabia, a scimitar wielding desert warrior (L4)
Brutok the Strong, a dwarf (L4)
Borghild, a Norse cleric of Odin (L4)
Timur, Russian Elf (L3)
Vitaly, Russian Elf (L3)
Mr. Underfoot, Halfling (L2)

Retainers with the party:
Tribunas, Byzantine magic user (L2)
Bottvild (cleric L3)
Visin Thorsteinson (fighter 3)
Hunlaf the Saxon (specialist 3)

Level 1 Retainers that stay with the camp:
Skoldig (specialist), Fafnir (fighter), Halam (cleric), Ivar the Bow-Bender (specialist), and Grimson (fighter)


*The quote is Gary Gygax, of course, from the DUNGEON MASTER'S GUIDE.

Extracting Value from the Megadungeon

Earlier this week, an article at Hack and Slash pointed out how megadungeon play should really be divided into 3 activities; exploration, encounters, and extraction.  I'm due to write a game report before this weekend, so rather than do a usual recap, I'm going to focus on extraction - why it's such a key part of the megadungeon experience, and how it has influenced play in the Black City.

Extraction is all about exploitation of the player's discoveries.  The characters are exploring the environment, discovering new things, and now the players need to figure out what they want to do with them.  In some cases,  the problem is treasure related - how do we get it out of the dungeon to bank some experience?  Other times, it's a resource or enabler that's going to support the player's long term objectives, or send the campaign in an unusual direction.

From a game play perspective, what's important is that the dungeon discoveries force the players to plan and choose their next steps; ignoring the resource is a choice.  Each delve into the dungeon starts with the players deciding a new course of action; over time, many of these goals will revolve around exploiting things that were previously discovered, but put on the shelf.  One of the powerful levers in the DM's arsenal is NPC adventurers; the players should constantly be worried about leaving a valuable resource behind, risking that a resource is discovered and exploited by rivals.  The Black City has a gold-rush and Wild West atmosphere, (but with vikings).  The opportunity costs of decisions are ever-present.  You don’t want a pan-handler jumping your claim!

This is one of the biggest differences between how my megadungeon works versus a traditional dungeon; the megadungeon is dynamic, changing, and influenced by forces outside the players; the players are not exploring a static area at their leisure, which goes into stasis when they leave.

So how have these concepts played out in the Black City?

Last game session was all about dealing with a dragon's hoard.  A mountainous pile of coins is perhaps the archetypical "problematic treasure".  Much of last game session was spent organizing the party, and some of their prisoners, into work crews, to separate silver from copper, to drag the silver, gems, and jewels, to a secure area, and then plan how they could dump equipment and encumbrance to carry out the most loot.  It's a dangerous overnight journey from the Ice Cave dungeon, through the dim Transit Tunnels, and eventually to the surface and Trade Town, so they needed to plan well.

Along the way, there were plenty of wandering monster opportunities, but not too many materialized.  They had another encounter with a "living rock" and caught a rare glimpse of the 'Servant of the Impresario'.  There have been a few encounters where it seemed like someone was spying on them - in this case, they caught a cloaked figure in the distance, with what appeared to be a large video camera for a face, observing the remains of the dragon, before eluding them.  A taste of things to come, perhaps.

The players have left numerous exploitable resources scattered across the miles of Transit Tunnels.  Scrawled into a wall near the "polar bear junction", they discovered an alien version of the Disintegration spell, written in alien glyphs (and deciphered at one point with Read Magic).  Shafat, the wizard of the tower, pays 1,000sp (1,000xp) per spell level for new magic, so transcribing it off the dungeon wall onto a scroll would net them 5,000xp (or their own Disintegration spell scroll).  But it would be an undertaking to secure a remote series of rooms for an encampment that might require weeks of transcription.  What would you do?

There's the Jotun's head frozen in the frost gremlin cave ceiling, and knowledge that the Jotun's body is somewhere in the glacier.  Jotuns are like the titans of old, immortal proto-giants with the powers of a god.  Apparently the blood (ichor) from the Jotun's head turns creatures into bestial lizard monsters like the frost gremlins.  Of course, one of the kids wants to use the ichor to create combatants for a gladiatorial arena back at Trade Town, to compliment the gambling ring the party is sponsoring.  Because it would be cool to make your own fighting lizard-man-gladiators.

They have a couple blanks of pure adamantite, which can be used to craft unbreakable adamantite weaponry in the alien forge - but they need to be able to find a weaponsmith, teach the smith how to use the plasma forges, and secure the forge area (which was near some morlock lairs); they already have one or two "thulium discs" to power the forge equipment.  But seriously - who wouldn't want some unbreakable adamantite weapons?  Don’t leave home without them.

Meanwhile, the next areas they're considering exploring include surveying more of the surface ruins - closer to the glacier - or finally descending beyond the Transit Tunnels to the fetid, swampy mushroom-choked caverns below - the level I'm calling the "Warrens of Decay".

Exploiting these resources requires planning, manpower, and time - and time is the biggest opportunity cost.  Summer passes quickly on Thule - the game-calendar is approaching July (Midsummer month by Norse reckoning) and later in August, crews begin to leave the island and sail south before the winter storms.  Spending days or weeks on extraction reduces exploration time, unless the party divides and conquers, appoints henchmen, hires other crew from Trade Town, and so on - all viable strategies, with different risks.

Since I said this post would double as a game report, let me conclude with more notes from last week.  After moving the most valuable bits of the dragon hoard, and loading appropriately for the long trek, the party returned to Trade Town.  The Jarl's officers collecting tariffs had never seen such a haul of coins, and news spread throughout the camp that the players had slain a wyrm and laid hold of a vast treasure.  They were feasted in the Jarl's hall that evening, regaled him with tales of their great deeds, and the honor and acclaim of the Spitsberg Pirates continues to grow.  I'm beginning to think their leader, Agnar, must be a fighter-skald, with his ability to weave a tale of glory to dazzle eager listeners.

Despite the session being heavily focused on logistics, the players had a good time - the efforts of many weeks of gameplay came to fruition with experience points, recognition by their peers, and the respect of the Jarl.  It helped that they made some generous gifts - politically astute.  The Jarl's advisor, Falki the Odin Priest, will arrange Cure Disease for all the members infected with the radiation sickness after the tussle with the radioactive zombies, though this will cost them a few weeks back in camp (and some money).

When we resume this week, I'm sure they're going to be mulling their options regarding many of the situations I've outlined above - do they plunge right into more exploration, or take time to exploit recent discoveries?  Either way, I'm sure it will be challenging - and fun.

My Name is Beedo, You Killed My Dragon, Prepare to Die

I feel like the Rancor-handler in that Star Wars movie, watching his man-eating pet get crushed under the door, or the guys in the Conan movie that get all bent out of shape because Conan hacked the head off their giant pet snake.  You read the monster books carefully, looking for that special critter you just need to have, "I choose you, White Dragon", and then you make it a special home in the dungeon, plenty of food, water, you arrange for all the necessary comforts - like a giant pile of soft coins for nesting - and then *they* come along, and wreck it all.  Adventurers.

It's the day after the carnage; now the coffee tastes too bitter, the sunlight is weak, and I have this hollow feeling that used to be filled with joy knowing a monstrous white dragon was lurking in the dungeon ready to spring a TPK at any moment.  Now it's dead.  Sure, there will be other monsters, other boss fights.   There's more fish in the sea.  I get it.  The monster books are full of hideous travesties to challenge even the doughtiest adventurers.  I even told myself I wouldn't cry.  It's just hard to say goodbye, White Dragon.

So what did *they* do, to bring me to this low point?  I'm glad you asked.

Things started out well enough last game - the party was exploring some new areas in the southeast of the current dungeon, they stumbled on some rooms filled with Black City Radium (a glowing green poisonous rock), they fought a group of green, glowing, radiation zombies, and got exposed to a heavy dose of the green stuff - in fact, over half the group is going to start suffering from a wasting disease that will be fatal in like 1-6 months, losing charisma and the ability to heal, along the way.

The Patriarch of Constantinople, in far away Byzantium, has been at war with Himerius, the High Hermite of Constantinople, a known arcane dabbler and summoner, such that the Patriarch sent a higher level witch hunter (Andronicus Priscian) with a party of hand-picked clerics and a troop of Byzantine spearmen to track the party's Russian elves and magic users, who were all known associates and disciples of Himerius… these trackers followed them to Thule, and have been closing in on the party for a while, and finally accosted them deep in the dungeon.  Last night.  Then the party killed them.  (I should have called it a night then).

The players decided it was time to mess with the Ice Cave itself - besides, most of them were infected with radiation sickness, anyway, and that made them feel like taking risks.  The Ice Cave is down a long, 20' wide tunnel,  growing progressively colder and blocked with giant icicles and stalactites along the way.  Beyond these barriers is a misty cave with walls of solid ice, and an unimaginable pile of coins.  One of the recent items the party had recovered was a "wand of telekinesis" and they hoped one of the magic users (Dominicus) could weave his way through the obstacles, get close to the cave, and use the TK wand to surreptitiously lift a chunk of treasure out of the cave without breaking the giant icicles blocking the way.

It was a good plan, except that that they had a dozen characters tromping along with armor in their group, along with an over-sized robot that rolls forward on noisy treads which grind against the stone floor.  In other words, they're not exactly quiet.  The inhabitant of the ice cave, an adult white dragon, was awake.  The rest of the party stood a good 50' behind the barriers of ice, unable to see Dominicus, but they did see a horrible blast of cold spray plume out of the area.  Dominicus was flash frozen, brought to -40 hit points or so instantly.  The robot was sent to smash through the icicles and pillars of ice and engage the dragon, while most of the fighters and other characters ditched into a side passage, to be out of the line of effect of any more ice blasts.  A few (foolhardy) range-attack characters stayed in the main hall, waiting for a chance to shoot into the cave once the robot had cleared the way.

A dragon fighting a big robot is pretty cool.  I queued up Godzilla sound effects, and had the Godzilla theme music playing in the background.  90% of our fights are the quick and abstract variety, but for something like this, we'll put out the vinyl battle mat and get out the minis - using the "elder white dragon" miniature (pictured) was perhaps too dramatic, but the kiddo wanted it.

The dragon and robot smashed their way through the ice, and the dragon started tearing the robot apart with claw and tooth, while the robot punched it a couple of times.  It had the makings of a drawn-out heavyweight prize fight.  And then the players did something totally unexpected… they charged.

It went like this - Brutok:  "I'm charging the dragon.  Who's with me?"  Visin (who adores Agnar):  "I'll charge if Agnar charges."  Agnar:  "Hey, Agnar's not my character, I'm just running him for Mike, who had to miss tonight, so of course I'm with you, Brutok.  Let's go!"

The dwarf and two of the fighters rolled high initiative, and sprinted out from around the corner, taking up positions on either side of the robot and laying into the dragon with axes and spears.  In the LOTFP rules, a charge does double damage, and the players got it down into a manageable hit point range with a few fortuitous strikes.  Once it started using its last two breath attacks, it was far enough down that the breaths were no longer instantly fatal to everyone.  The robot was frozen and destroyed, two of the fighters (Agnar and Visin) were dropped to zero hit points, the dwarf is made of hit points and managed to weather a breath attack, Tribunas the magic user made a saving throw and dropped unconscious (but not dead) from half damage, but poor Brick the Halfling was in the line of fire down the hallway, and took a blast directly.  He died.

Then the next wave of characters charged, including the two female Norse clerics (queue Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries) and Mustafa.  Again, the dragon rolled a 1 for initiative and took a round of beats, dying when Mustafa landed a killing blow.  I was… stunned.

I have to give some props to the players, the idea to hide around the corner and charge out at a surprising moment was inspired.

I may need to go back to DM school, to refresh on how to play dragons well as opponents… on a serious note, I do have some observations on the fight I'll put together later this week, a regular post-mortem.  Good job fellas, they took down a dragon, losing their uber-Robot and a pair of characters.  The clerics had enough healing after the fight to save the three characters that were between zero and -2 hit points (-3 hit points and lower is irrevocably dead in the game).  We had to end there as we were already an hour past our targeted end time.

That was Black City Game 21, below is the new and updated "dead list".  Hopefully the players can figure out a way to get a half dozen or more Cure Disease spells before too much game time passes, or a lot of folks will get added to the list in the near future when the radiation sickness catches up to them.

• Dominicus:  Tried to steal a dragon's treasure… alone.  RIP.
• Brick Bunnycracker:  Shot in the face with dragon's breath.
• Robbie the Robot:  Torn, crushed, and frozen by a dragon.  You served them well.
• Bjorn:  Shot in the face during an ambush.
• Gareth Bellringer:  Possessed by a ghost and marched into a death trap.
• Seamus the Gallic Mage:  Died fiddling with the unstable Hyperborean artifact.
• Dag the Unwashed:  Blown up by Seamus.
• Uther the Orphan-Poet:  Shot in the neck by a bandit.
• Falki Auldason:  Killed by a gjenganger.
• Kolfina Ian Svarti:  Killed by a gjenganger.
• Irena Edvards:  Killed by a gjenganger.
• Molnar the cleric:  Lost his grip on a rope and fell into the abyss.
• Arthur the Thief:  Killed by a gjenganger.
• Hring the Twig-belly:  Covered in oil, burned alive while rats were eating him.
• Herap:  Killed by a gjenganger
• Agdi:  Possessed by the ghost and marched into the death trap.
• Galm:  Infested by a devil wasp and turned into a villain, ultimately dropped down an 80' hole.

A few guys left when they failed morale checks in between adventures:

• Ulf Skullcrusher
• Visin Thorolfson