Making Karameikos Great Again

I started a second game a month or so back with one of my older gaming groups running Shadowdark.  We had all ended up at the same end-of-summer barbeque, started talking about games, and realized several folks in the old guard wanted to give Shadowdark a try.  I had recently become enamored of the rules as well, and so the idea for a new campaign was formed.  This is basically our first game report.

Shadowdark reminds me a lot of Moldvay BX.  Maybe because it's like what a BX version of 5E should have been?  The game embraces simple classes, simple action resolution, and dungeon crawling.  The Shadowdark community claims you can run classic BX style modules with the system mostly as is, only adjusting the treasure down a factor.  I was drawn to the idea of seeing how it handled classic modules from the 1980's that we haven't run before.  Thus germinated the idea of running B5 Horror on the Hill in my favorite setting from that era, the Grand Duchy of Karameikos*.

One other thing we talked about was running a "gauntlet".  Shadowdark borrows some ideas from Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC), including starting with a pile of 0-level characters, putting them through a horrendous situation, and the survivors get to pick classes as level 1 characters.  In DCC it's called a funnel, in Shadowdark it's a gauntlet, but the concepts are similar.  One difference seems to be in DCC, each player will run all 4 of their zero-level characters at once, so a 5-person table will have 20 peasants trying to survive the funnel.  There aren't a lot of published Shadowdark gauntlets, but the mind-set seems to be each player runs a single character at a time, and the back-up zero level guys are off-camera in reserve (depending on the fiction of the gauntlet).

I decided to use the gauntlet as the lead-in to Horror on the Hill and make it part of the same nexus of events.  In B5 Horror on the Hill, a remote outpost (Guido's Fort) sits on the near side of the River Shrill; across the river sits an ominous fog-shrouded hill with the rising threat of the goblin king in the dungeons below.  I took a gauntlet called Cry of the Stingbat and hacked it up.  In my version, goblins are sneaking across the river at night to kidnap traders and homesteaders and throw them down a huge hole to feed a colony of "stingbats" (stirges) which assail the inhabitants of the fort at night.  The players start as a group of such victims, needing to escape a fairly linear dungeon before dawn when the flocks of stingbats return home and kill them.  They also found and killed a few goblins hiding out near the entrance; the goblins were carrying foul-smelling smudge sticks and stink bombs that immobilize the stingbats and let them manage the horde.

I can see the appeal of running a zero-level gauntlet.  Characters die left and right, which allows for some gallows humor, and story quickly emerges around the exploits of the plucky survivors.  We ran a strict time clock on the gauntlet night, and the added pressure kept things moving briskly.  Finally, there's a useful community generator at shadowdarklings.net that quickly makes a page of zero-level characters fully equipped for game night.  It's all very convenient.  My players had doubts, but now they're believers - I'm sure we'll do a gauntlet every chance we can when starting a Shadowdark campaign.

Ultimately, the zero-level traders, soldiers, and homesteaders returned to Fort Guido after their ordeal in the stingbat hole; they let the fort commander know about the stingbat horde and turned over the stink bombs and smudge sticks so the garrison could take care of the monsters in the daylight.  Having tasted dungeon adventuring, the group promised to reform back at the Fort as level 1 adventurers and take the fight over the river to the goblins - and hopefully get rich and powerful along the way.  Game 2 involved poking around the Fort, collecting rumors from the tavern and talking to the local "old timer", and finally hiring a boatman to ferry them across the river.  They agreed the boatman would return in two-days time at the agreed upon spot for a pick-up, so the players are carrying just enough food and water.  We honestly didn't get too far in their exploration of the hill after game 2.

I have a range of opinions on Shadowdark - I want to give it a few more game sessions (and maybe even try it with the other gamer group) before rendering official judgment.  It's definitely a vibes game that is laser focused on evoking an old school dungeon crawling vibe, while embracing a lot of modern mechanics from 5E and DCC.  I've had great fun; I don't know if it will displace BX (or even needs to).  I also signed up to run a few convention games as Shadowdark in a couple of months to get more drive time with the rules.  More to come on that front.

I still need to build a map for Guido's Fort, it's not provided in B5.  However, I did put together a new map for Karameikos.  This will sound a bit sacrilegious to fellow Mystarans (?), Mystara-philes(?), but the old 8-mile-per-hex style of the Trail Guides was leaving me a bit cold so I made a custom map (above).  Halloween is coming up, and Karameikos is described as a misty, wild land with dark forests, haunted moors, and foreboding mountains, like something out of Eastern Europe.  Maybe I could put the hidden valley of Barovia in the Black Peaks or Cruth Mountains in time for a Halloween one-shot?  It seems like it could work.

* Apologies for the lame title, when your country's politics are as ridiculous as ours, you've got to find a way to laugh about it.

The Pillories in Death Frost Doom - The Crypt isn't Empty

Our cast of characters continues to explore Death Frost Doom (DFD), but the ending of last game session was perhaps one of my favorites.  First - about Death Frost Doom.  In the early OSR period (pre-2010), this stood out to me as an adventure that took D&D style gaming in a new direction.  Once I started running a game with my old high school friends, I knew this was an adventure that we'd work into the campaign, especially because they like the horror genre. In DFD, the players explore an ominous dungeon full of catacombs and the creepy trappings of a long defunct death cult.  The tension builds as they continue to loot crypts but aren't finding any monsters - but they know something bad is going to happen at some point, they just don't know how and when.  Last game ended with the first bad thing.

The players were in a kitchen in an area of the dungeon dedicated to priest quarters.  They found a hidden air duct in the ceiling that led to a 3' square crawl-space.  The party's halfling, Remi, asked for a boost - he felt some cold air coming down the shaft and wanted to see where it went.  He lit a candle and crawled through the duct, discovering a long vertical shaft that seemed to go up and out - cold air was coming down the shaft from the surface.  But the duct kept going forward, so he kept going.  The other characters called for him to come back, but Remi said he'd be fine.  In the dim light of his candle, he could see the duct opened into the ceiling of another chamber, and it looked like some kind of crypt was down below.

He yelled back at everyone to hang tight while he dropped down to check out the room.  (Mind you, he had no rope or similar gear - once he dropped himself down into the next room, he had no way to get back into the duct).  "It'll be fine", he said, "I'll find my way back one way or another".

The lid of the stone crypt was carved with a relief of a gruesome tyrant standing on the skulls of victims; he passed by the sarcophagus to see if there was a way out of the room before looking into it any further.  Yes!  There was a door out.  Unfortunately, it was barred from the outside.  Why would someone put a bar on the outside of a crypt, as if to keep something in?  That's when he heard the grinding of stone behind him, as something with a grip of iron slid aside the lid of the sarcophagus from the inside and sat upright.  That was the cliffhanger ending of the game night, with the mummified remains of the cult's "grand inquisitor" jerkily lurching towards the trapped halfling and his little candle.  The mummified inquisitor began to interrogate him with a sepulchral voice from beyond the grave, while the other players watched on in horror.

It turns out Remi has been carrying a potion of gaseous form with him since very early in the campaign, so he's confident he'll escape the crypt of the undead horror if he wins initiative, and that's why he was so nonchalant about the risks.  The tension at the table eased a little in anticipation of next game.  But the players are now boggled with the idea that the sprawling dungeon is not entirely quiescent, and there are dark horrors waiting for them, lurking in undiscovered tombs.

By way of reminder, here is our cast of characters, The Pillories:

• Reverend Blackburn - L4 cleric
• Remi Knotwise - L4 halfling
• Allister - L3 magic-user
• Yuri - L3 elf
• Henchmen - Wood (fighter), Toby (specialist), Geoff (fighter)

Other events since last game report included discovery of endless catacombs, filled with thousands of mummified cult members - warriors, priests, commoners, and even children.  There have been traps and curses, including the cleric, who fell victim to a spell that saw him inscribing a tattoo of the death cult on his own forearm while caught in a mindless frenzy; he learned to his horror that he can longer receive the benefits of his own healing magic.  They also discovered the source of the ominous susurrus sound that permeates the dungeon, but quickly retreated when an ooze-like monster crawled out of a well to defend the spikey plant growth that was producing the sound.  They know they'll need to defeat the ooze monster and hack through the spike growth to reach their goal, but decided to double back and finish exploring some other areas and confirm there wasn't another way around it first.  This is how Remi ended up crawling through an air duct to the tomb of the inquisitor.

I had great fun running it, and I'm looking forward to the next installment.