Gothic Greyhawk Game 45 - Firebombed Again

Cast of Characters:
Mordecai, a Cleric-6: Adam
Forlorn, an Elf-5 (1): Bo
Mister Moore, Magic User-6: Mike
Shy, a Fighter-6 (3):  JR
Leonidas the Paladin-5:  Nogal
Digit, the Elf Thief-6:  Z

Henchmen:
Phat Kobra, a Dwarf-5
Grumble the Smug, Halfling-5 (3)
Donavich, Cleric-4
=========================================
AD&D 1E, I6 Ravenloft
=========================================

Life expectancy of henchmen in the group has continued to decline.  The group rode back to town, disheartened by the recent death of Serge, who was smashed by an Iron Golem's fist.  These days, they use a pair of horses and a wagon to haul stuff around, like corpses, and the paladin rides a war horse (though not his special paladin-friend horse).  It beats walking.

Zeke, a henchman who had died in the cave-in by the creek-side a few days ago, was excavated by some peasants, and they returned his body and belongings to the players, including Zeke's Deck of Many Things.  (The peasants might have pocketed quite a bit of electrum, but who's counting?)  The temptation of using the Deck of Many Things, now that it's back in the limelight, was a bit high; I might have had something to do with it.  "I wonder if one of the cards would lead to something like Wishes.  You guys sure could use some wishes to get some of these dead henchmen back to life."

Note:  There's a poll on the right if you have any experience with the Deck of Many Things in your own campaigns.

Other than that, the rest of the game session was taken up by a massive vampire ambush in town that night.  You'd think after being attacked while sleeping last week, the group would take some counter measures; sleep in a guarded place, post some watches, something.  They sprawled across 3 nearby abandoned cottages in the north part of town, not far from the church, and sacked out.  Mordecai was awakened by a heavy knocking on the door to his home; looking out of the 2nd floor window, he saw a vampire chick on the cobble stone street looking up at him.  "C'mon out, we want to have a talk with you!"  He pulled the shutter closed and started waking the others.

A second later, the roof was doused by a Molotov cocktail from atop a nearby cottage, and Mordecai's companions (Grumble, Leonidas, and Donavich) were running down the stairs to the back exit, dragging armor and backpacks.  They ran smack into a pair of dire wolves in the alley, and had to drop gear and start defending themselves sans armor.

Mister Moore heard the ruckus from across the street, woke up, and looked out the window himself; he saw the house on fire, vampires fluttering in the air (there were three of them), huge night wolves loping into the alley behind the burning house, and the din of combat.

Mordecai turned the first vampire into the alley, a new female vampire they hadn't seen before (Helga).  A few rounds later, Top-Hat Man and Gertrude dropped into the alley as well.  Questionable Ruling:  I gave Mordecai a second turn attempt when the other vampires arrived, since his first was successful and these vampires weren't present when the combat started; I see now it was too generous. As it happened, he turned Gertrude with his second attempt, and they were able to fend off Top-Hat Man with magic weapons and the Sunsword; unfortunately, all three vampires escaped safely into the darkness for the next skirmish.  They'll be back.  The other two contingents of player characters slowly joined the fray, blasting dire wolves with spells and quickly reinforcing the guys pinned down in the alley.

The next morning, they learned there was a massacre at the tavern earlier the night before; the vampires had killed the bar keep and some villagers, perhaps to find where the characters were staying.  After a quick meal of grubby peasants, the three vamps went and firebombed Mordecai's house.

"No place in town is safe for us until those guys are all staked", was the popular opinion amongst the players.  "They level drain us, then they head off to regenerate and attack again; we don't regenerate.  They're just going to keep up the hit and run."  The group made plans for an extended stay at the castle - here on out, they would camp right in the dungeon.  "Either we walk out of there alive, with three more dead vampires to our names, or we don't come back at all".

It'll be like Thunderdome.

The Deck of Many Things , Beneficial and Baneful

My players have been hauling around a Deck of Many Things for months and months now; long ago, they wrapped it in a cloth, tied it up with string, and threw it in the bottom of Zeke's  backpack, promptly forgetting about it.  Zeke got killed in a cave-in a few weeks ago, and just last game the peasant workers that have been toiling for days to clear the rubble, returned to the village with his corpse.  Amongst the belongings were Zeke's Deck of Many Things.

The reemergence of the Deck into the forefront of people's minds has them reconsidering the temptation.  The character Mordecai is 59 years old after being on the wrong end of a ghost attack, and is considering retirement.  He's thinking about going out with a blaze of glory and pulling a few cards.  One of the fighters sees the other 4 fighters in the group and wonders if he'd be missed.  "Weren't you saying we could use another magic user, or perhaps a druid?"  And then there's the guy in the corner, "Don't do it; the DM is using the jedi mind trick on you by reminding us about the Deck."

I have to give my players some credit; they don't go snooping in the Dungeon Master's Guide.  That one guy remembered something about "picking a card and getting trapped forever by a demon" from an AD&D game 20 years ago, and that was enough for him.  "I will never draw a card from one of those things, ever."

If the players peeked, they'd know the 12 or so awesome things are ridiculously good, most of the bad things are manageable, but the 2 or 3 really bad things means it's time to roll up a new character.  For a single pull the odds are like 54% for something great, 33% for something bad but manageable, and 13% for a fate worse than death.

How many of you have drawn from the Deck of Many Things?  It seems like a device that is tailor made for memorable events, malevolent and benign - earn a castle, get all buffed out, pick up some wishes, gain an enemy for life.  I've posted a new poll to get a sense on how risk averse is the community of players out there.

Mosaics and Impressionist Paintings: An Alternate Setting Metaphor

Middle Earth vs Newhon

The post on white space the other day highlighted some differences between bottom-up and top-down setting design, and how bottom-up allows room for more dramatic changes as you go along;  by starting small and developing the micro-setting, the DM can plug in emergent ideas without violating the big-picture aesthetic, because there is no big picture aesthetic. Bottom up is a way to mitigate the gamer ADD.

Anyway, I struck on a different metaphor - top-down is like an impressionist painting, and bottom-up is a mosaic.  The picture caption refers to the different setting approaches taking by Professor Tolkien for Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings, and Fritz Leiber's approach to Newhon in the stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

Folks that sketch out the world, provide the history, and define an aesthetic that unifies the setting are painters - they cover the available canvass when creating that overarching picture.  It looks great when you squint or view it from a distance, but when you get close you realize it's just broad brush strokes without a lot of detail.

The bottom-up approach is like building a mosaic out of tiles.  Each tile is highly detailed and colorful, and you can zoom in real close to see the details.  One tile doesn't define the color, size or style of the next.  A similar metaphor for creation could be a quilt; everyone has seen those quilts with highly detailed squares, each with a unique pattern; the pattern on one square exerts no influence on the next square over, and the end result might be fairly discordant, but it was fun to put together along the way.

Many of the high concept worlds that TSR and WOTC created are clearly top-down, and it's not hard to think of something an old school gamer might want to put in one of those worlds that would be fairly discordant.  The one TSR setting I can think of that's clearly a bottom-up mosaic is Mystara - the Known World from BX and then the BECMI era.  Each new Gazetteer extended the setting in a modular and unusual new way; I could probably write an "ode to gonzo" just based on the Mystara sprawl.  It's the ultimate D&D kitchen sink setting.

Mythic Monday: All Hallow's Eve

The dead are on the  move!  That's the excellent story behind the Halloween holiday, and certainly something that can be pulled whole cloth into your D&D game.  The distance between the mortal world and the realm of the dead narrows precipitously on this day, allowing the souls of the departed to roam the night for a brief time and offer up warnings, omens, and glimpses of the future (plot hooks).

First, a brief survey of Halloween.  The Halloween holiday here in the US is a "complex", an amalgamation of various traditions, some ancient, some not so much.  The jack-o-lantern tradition comes from turnip carving in Ireland, brought to America in the middle of the 19th century (the story of Stingy Jack and the Devil, an Irish story, is a tale for another Monday).  I can't imagine turnip-carving would be as enjoyable as pumpkin carving.  Mummery (costumes) is an English tradition, along with the practice of children begging door-to-door on certain days of the year.

But the reason Halloween is associated with all the spooky imagery is the most interesting.  The Celtic season of Samhain was a time when the world of the dead were closer to the mortal world, and bonfires were lit in the night to ward off spirits.  I grew up associating Samhain with metal albums and Michael Meyers, but alas, there's nothing Satanic about Halloween's Celtic origins.  In the early church, the holiday was All Souls Day (also called All Hallows Day) and it's easy to see how the night before became All Hallows Eve / Evening, contracted to Halloween.  It's still celebrated as the Feast of All Saints on Nov 1 and All Souls Day on Nov 2 in Catholic areas.  I had a rigorous Catholic upbringing myself, and was indoctrinated in all that ritual and mysticism as a youth.

The reasoning behind the Catholic tradition for All Souls Day is a day to honor the deceased and departed; one of the Medieval ideas behind the feast is that souls in purgatory have a shot at slipping out and moving on to a better or worse place on this day (and a bunch of prayers from the still living folks can nudge them the right way).  The dead are on the move!  You've got to like how Mexico celebrates it as the Day of the Dead, with parties in the graveyards.

I'm sure if we did a survey of ancient traditions, we'd find lots of these days for honoring the dead when old souls can come back and mess with folks that are still alive.  The other one I'm familiar with is the May holiday of Lemuria, the Roman time for exorcising malicious ghosts and the restless dead.  The Catholic feasts themselves were originally in May, strongly associated with the feast of Lemuria, and were moved to November in the early Middle Ages.

The point of all this Halloween blather is to get you thinking about putting this kind of holiday in your game world.  Holidays are markers in the calendar year and identify the changing seasons.  They're important signposts.  If you have kids, you know how important upcoming holidays are to their worldview - when one holiday gets done, they start asking about the next one.  For gaming, I suggest looking at the underlying origins for real world holidays and creating a similar celebration for the folks of your game world.

Implications for Gaming
Have you given any thought to what happens to souls in your game world, after the people die?  I never liked the AD&D approach of the outer planes - each person's soul heads out to the proper outer plane after death, speeding through the Astral Plane to the Happy Hunting Grounds or Nirvana or Limbo or wherever all the like-aligned souls can chill out together in that nutty nine-fold alignment system.

The official 4E cosmology was a big improvement here; we may laugh at the name "Shadowfell", but having an entire plane of existence filled with the gloomy dead milling about in ruined mirrors of the real world is pretty dang cool, and much closer to the classic view of the Underworld you see in Greek myth, with all those depressed souls in drab funeral-wear trudging around the plains of Asphodel and groaning.  My approach to making this work without much effort in AD&D is to recast the Ethereal Plane as that  gloomy land of the dead, populated by lost souls and the occasional undead terror, sent back from Hell or the Abyss.

Most dead spend an indeterminate time malingering in the underworld before moving on to a final reward.  Some souls that are strongly aligned with the values of an outer plane do pass right into the Astral plane en route to a divine destination, be it the planes of ultimate good or evil.  (Even the Greek underworld had the Elysian Fields and Tarterus).

In the annual cycle of the mortal world, the Day of the Dead is that point of the year where the mortal world and the gloomy underworld are nearly coterminous.  The restless dead can sometimes be seen by the living through the veil.  There are many traditions across the mortal game world to honor this time; the holy church engages in prayer and ritual, believing that ceremony, prayer, and remembrance can encourage the departed to move on to a final reward beyond the underworld.

In places following the old faith, bonfires are lit to drive away the night time shadows and ward against haunts and spirits; in other areas, costumes and masks are donned to confuse the dead souls and avoid an unsettling encounter with a wronged ancestor.  Offerings, gifts, and adornment are brought to the graveyards during the day, to pacify the departed.

Conversely, if one wants the chance to speak to a deceased soul, this is the night to visit the grave or cemetery and hold a lonely vigil late into the wee hours.  But this practice of meeting a departed shade is not without danger, for just as the benign or indifferent haunts of departed souls can interact with the world of man on All Hallow's Eve, certainly undead terrors returned by the lords of ultimate evil can slip through the barriers easier as well.  Ghosts and apparitions are naturally ethereal, and All Hallow's Eve is the night when wraiths and specters are also sent back from Hell (if you've followed this column the past few weeks, you'll recall that most undead are either Abyssal or Hellish in origin, and most undead shades and spirits come from Hell).  Even visit from haunts are not without risk; statistically I would model the restless departed souls using the Fiend Folio Haunt, a neutral undead that can temporarily possess a living host to carry out some unfinished business.  The wise dead-speaker takes precautions before setting a lonely vigil in a graveyard on All Hallow's Eve.

For the Dungeon Master, this would be an excellent time to have the shade of a departed NPC or henchman come back and harass the PC's about something in the campaign, a wrong or slight that went unaddressed, or even a chance to give your players a vague omen or prophecy (ie, a plot hook) delivered in a suitably ominous or dramatic fashion.  Per Jacob Marley:

How it is that I appear before you in a shape that you can see, I may not tell. I have sat invisible beside you many and many a day.  That is no light part of my penance.  I am here tonight to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer.
--A Christmas Carol

Summary:
Use a calendar, and put holidays on it.  Use the underlying beliefs from real world holidays as ideas for your fantasy holidays, but "Fantasy" them up to make them real - give them some teeth.  Go forth with these ideas, and be excellent.

Saturday Sage Advice: White Space

The emergence of the high concept setting was a natural evolution in our hobby.  1970's settings like Greyhawk or the Wilderlands, that previously covered less than a continent, were replaced by globe-spanning affairs tied to a strong aesthetic concept.  This post-apocalyptic world over here is about a pivotal war with the evil dragons.  In this other one, magic has turned the planet into a barren desert ruled by sorcerer kings, and there are no clerics or gods.  That world is all about gothic horror; this one over here is like pulp noir where magic has taken the place of high technology.

I used to love the high concept worlds; one of my favorites is still the 3.x era setting "Midnight".  The elevator pitch could have been something like this "What if Sauron had captured Frodo, regained the One Ring, conquered the world and enslaved the lands of man?  Players take on the role of survivors in a world where evil rules."

The problem with these high concept settings is the lack of design space to do something new.  The lack of space could be aesthetic - you can't have a story about divine intrigue, inspired by The Iliad, in a world with no gods.  Or the constraint could be physical - the whole world is already mapped, and there's no place to drop a new continent.

This version of myself that's been blogging for a year is (hopefully) wiser, and is beginning to value that white space beyond the edges of the current campaign.  Those undefined areas give you the freedom to put in something new.  When the wilderness hex crawl through the fallen lands is growing stale, it's nice to know there's space on the map to put your island of dinosaurs, or introduce a new continent with sophisticated cities where magic has replaced technology.  What you sacrifice in coherence, you gain in reuse and flexibility.

The popular image of fantasy authors is that they have reams of notes about their world; as they're writing, they're referring back to these meticulously developed histories.  Professor Tolkien really set the bar high.  Game setting designers soon followed, emulating the techniques in the fiction.  But consider how incongruent an island with a crashed space ship and a handful of alien technological artifacts would seem if it were placed just off the shore of Middle Earth?  Gandalf with a laser rifle and a few grenades would be totally awesome in a D&D campaign, not so much in The Lord of the Rings.  Even though the map is open, the aesthetic fills all the space.

Chris over at Hill Cantons had a fascinating quote last month from Fritz Leiber:  Making a World Up as You Go Along.  Mr. Leiber claims, tongue in cheek, that he only knows about the world of Newhon as his two protagonists tell him about it.  The first time he hears about new lands, distant islands, or undiscovered continents is when they first appear in the next tale, entering the setting as modular, but fully realized, new places.  The lands have always been there, the author just didn't know about them yet.

It's a powerful endorsement of "bottom-up" design.  Top down involves starting with an overarching vision, and decomposing the whole into the details; bottom-up involves creating those compartmental details first, and assembling them into the whole organically.  In top-down, you already know how big is the final solution, the boundaries are set.  There's no limit when starting from the bottom up.

There's valuable wisdom in bottom-up design for game worlds, particularly the old school approach of starting with a small sandbox area and slowly growing the circumference of the game world as necessary.   It's nice to see the author of one of D&D's most important early inspirations had the same idea.

Coda:
Yesterday's post on mortal thoughts came out on the side of listening to your Gamer ADD once in a while; maybe that restlessness you're feeling is because the stuff you're currently playing is 'suckish' (it's my kid's word) and you know, deep down, you're wasting your time.

Gamer ADD is a risk that the work you've invested in a campaign is going to get tossed when a new idea comes along.  Borrowing from classic risk management strategy, I had laid out some ideas on managing Gamer ADD (Winter is Coming):  mitigation, acceptance, avoidance and transference.

Bottom-up design and "white space" is a powerful tool for mitigating your Gamer ADD by giving you the freedom to do something different without starting a new canvas.  When you absolutely need your group to go to the desert and explore a pyramid because you just saw The Mummy and immediately built a pyramid dungeon and desert area, it's nice to be able to add that desert realm to the bottom of the map.

Gamer's Carpe Diem

Food for worms!

Seize the day while you're young, see that you make use of your time... Because we're food for worms, lads!
--Robin Williams, Dead Poets Society

I had the chance to see The Dead Poets Society again recently; I love that scene before the school trophy case - Robin Williams is like, What's the difference between you and all those faces looking out at you in the trophy case?  They're all dead, pushing up daffodils.  Now get out there and do something extraordinary before you're in the trophy case, too.

I'm one of those English and classics majors that backed into the information technology world from the other way, management first, technology later.  But I have that liberal arts background just under the covers, permeating my brain with two thousand years of thought.  And quotes.  There are many on this theme.  Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.  Had we but world enough, and time.  But lest you get deluded into believing the answer is to build something lasting, there are the words on the base of  Shelley's statue in the desert to remind us of the futility:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

If you could only play one more game, what would it be?

My concern with the carpe diem train of thought is drawing the right conclusion.  I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, so why am I worried about a mortgage, going to work, credit card payments, or anything that plans for a long term future?  Hmmm.  That doesn't seem very practical.

I don't know that going out there and being a conqueror in your chosen arena is so worthwhile, either; impermanence is the order of the day.  Poor Ozymandias now rules a barren desert.  We are such stuff as dreams are made on, our little life is rounded with a sleep.

But the idea that time is precious - don't waste it because you're not going to live forever;  I can get behind that sentiment.  Sitting down to play your favorite game with your regular group of players, that's something to cherish.  Make the most of it.  There will be a day when not everyone will make it back to the table, right?

Why are you playing a game system you hate, or a boring campaign, or putting up with mediocrity?  Don't wait for the future to try something new.  Maybe the Gamer Attention Deficit Disorder that keeps derailing your ideas and pushing you to change up your campaign is generated out of these subconscious mortal thoughts:  My time is wasting.

My opinion of the Gamer ADD might be changing;  rather than unruly thoughts to be mastered, it could all be intimations of transience.  For myself, I've sold off tons of games the past few years, systems that I'd never run, niches that no longer appealed, or games that just weren't as good as original D&D.  You start to wonder as a DM, just how many more campaigns will I actually run?

This is why I'll never play an MMO, and gave up playing any kind of video game.  If I'm going to play something, it's going to be around a table, surrounded by friends, munching on chips, having a few laughs, a few scares, building a story together, and rolling some dice.  Making memories, transient though they be.

This is a good time for thoughts of the "Memento Mori".  The air is growing chill, the leaves are turning, horror movies are on the TV, and everywhere we see cemeteries, ghosts, ghouls, and the signs of Halloween and preparations for Hallowmas.

Happy Halloween!  Make sure your next game is excellent.

Gothic Greyhawk, Game 44 - The Top Hat Man's Trap

Cast of Characters:
Mordecai, a Cleric-6: Adam
Forlorn, an Elf-5 (1): Bo
Mister Moore, Magic User-6: Mike
Shy, a Fighter-6 (3):  JR
Leonidas the Paladin-4:  Nogal
Digit, the Elf Thief-5:  Z

Henchmen:
Phat Kobra, a Dwarf-5
Grumble the Smug, Halfling-5 (3)
Serge, a Fighter-4
Donavich, Cleric-4

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AD&D 1E, I6 Ravenloft
=========================================

As forewarned, this week has a two-fer on game reports.  Last Saturday's game started auspiciously; we had a new guy sit in for the night, and Adam had to miss.  Adam has missed only a few game nights in the past four years; as players rolled in, they looked with surprise at the corner of the table where Adam usually sits and shook their heads in disbelief.  Nothing to worry about, dear readers, it was only a case of being under the weather.  The rest of the group soldiered on, Adam-less.

Play resumed in the crypts where the two halves of the party reunited after the defeat of the ghost; everyone was still in shock over Mordecai's grey hair and aged features.

With the defeat of the ghost, they had cleared all the northern crypts of evil dead; the paladin's evil detection allowed them to home in on evil presences, skipping crypts that seemed empty.  They spent the next few hours looking for loot in the empty crypts, found some small monetary treasures here and there, then returned to the main corridor.

Sitting in the middle of the main passage was a sheet of parchment surrounded by a couple of guttering candles.  The candles weren't there a few hours ago when the group first entered the crypts.

Leonidas read the writing on the parchment, scrawled in blackish blood.  "If you want the child back, you will come."  A simple map was drawn on the sheet; it showed a way out of the northern crypts.

Intense discussion followed; had the vampires abducted someone from the village?  Or was it a trap? I try not to listen too much during this type of table talk; I just know we had 5 players, and when the vote was resolved, they chose to follow the map to see where it was leading them.

They found a long passage out of the crypts to the northwest; Kobra noted it was newer construction with his dwarven aptitude.  The castle itself predated the reign of Strahd, but this passage was built sometime in the past century.  The group theorized the tunnel was built under Strahd's rule, and probably led to his crypt or a personal area.  Naturally, a vampire that sought to usurp Strahd's place would move into Strahd's demesne; they had it all figured out.

Halfway down the passage, a chute opened up beneath two of the fighters, dropping Leonidas and Shy down the slide.  There was a loud splash somewhere deep below, and then the lid closed.

The topside characters spent time tying ropes together, feeding Serge a Potion of Levitation, and coming up with a reasonable plan to keep the trap lid open, when Serge triggered the trap anew and slipped down the chute himself.  Armed with the coin coated in Continual Light, he descended the 80' chute and found Shy and Leonidas in a tight spot.

They were standing in neck deep, murky water, desperately trying to keep a wooden cell door closed - they were inside the cell, and monsters were trying to push the door open from outside.  Shy's crowbar was wedged into the door jamb creating pressure; Shy has 18 strength.  Leonidas was desperately jabbing the tip of his magic spear through the barred view window to drive the monsters back; a mass of undead things were outside of the cell, throwing their weight against the door and reaching through with clawed hands to touch any stray flesh.  The air was chill, and the evil red pinpoints of light in their skull's eye sockets convinced everyone the monsters were wights - a dozen or more.  One lucky swipe meant a level drain.

Leonidas was rescued first, while Shy kept the crow bar wedged in place.  The door burst open shortly after Shy disappeared up the chute, as Serge hauled him upwards with the levitation spell (they were further aided by compatriots at the top of the chute hauling on the rope tied to Serge).  Dungeons are fun.

Lestat's cameo in Ravenloft?

After clearing the chute trap, the passage ended at a stair case down; beyond a stone slab door was a chamber lit by a flickering fire set in a huge brazier.  On each side of the chamber were large alcoves; there was the impression of giant statues standing watch from within the shadows of the alcoves.  Standing on the other side of the room was the tittering vampire they called "Top-Hat Man".  Top-Hat Man had previously attacked them when Forlorn the Elf had used the ring of invisibility in the catacombs (the ring had the unfortunate side effect of attracting and enraging nearby undead).

Top-Hat Man was holding a child, hostage-style, across the neck, tittering and laughing in his squealing, lisping speech.  The child's features were hidden by a cloak.  "You're not welcome here, you've meddled too much, someone needs to step up and take care of you, it is I who will lead the night kin now", that was the kind of drivel he spouted.  But once the last party member entered the room, the door behind them slammed shut (magically) and metal screeched to life as the pair of iron statues stepped forward from the alcoves.  Top-Hat giggled.

Top-Hat threw aside the corpse of the child (for now they could see she was already dead and drained of life) and he made for the door out; Mister Moore was having none of it, and blasted him with the wand of fireballs.  Top-Hat hissed in rage, beating the flames off his singed cape and hat before giving  a slight bow, a wicked smile, and dissipating into mist form.

The fight with the pair of Iron Golems was violent.  The party quickly learned that only their +3 weapons could hurt the golems; they were in possession of three +3 maces from earlier in Ravenloft, so these were quickly redistributed to the front rank fighters.  Fire had no effect on the golems, but the group slowed them down slightly with a Web spell on one, and Lightning Bolts to each (which also had the effect of a Slow Spell).  Prayers and Blesses were piled on the group, and the clerics did their best behind the front lines to keep the fighters on their feet with healing; Kobra and Leonidas teamed up on one golem, while Grumble, Serge and Shy battled the other.

More Protection from Evil ambiguity:  A few weeks ago, I noted how PFE changed over time to block Magic Jar and possession; similarly, editions are inconsistent whether PFE hedges out golems or not - some versions explicitly include "created" creatures like golems and animated statues (BX, Rules Cyclopedia), whereas AD&D 1E doesn't explicitly identify golems as warded.  AD&D does mention "enchanted" creatures, however, and BX identifies enchanted creatures to include golems (I couldn't find an AD&D definition for enchanted).  Ah, the 70's, when you just had to make it up as you went along.  A feature, not a bug.  It didn't actually matter here, because the party started swinging at the golems first, which neutralized any PFE hedge, but I'll need to set a ruling for next week if they test it with the Paladin's 10' radius and don't initiate hostilities.

Iron Golems are dangerous; each smash dishes out 4d10 of hurt.  Serge was dropped to -14 hit points by a crushing blow, and died instantly.  The death toll continues to climb.  The adventure text explicitly mentioned that these versions didn't have the poison breath attack, or it would have been much worse.

Deciding they had enough, Mister Moore used Knock to reopen the same door the party entered.  They carefully retreated during a round when the golems were slowed by webbing and the lightning, escaping Top-Hat's putative death trap.  But the room was intriguing; there was an hour glass chandelier that counted out a certain number of rounds for the golems to attack, and there was an alluring brass chest in the room that the group wasn't able to investigate.

We had a new person sit in on this session (Mike S) and another new guy reached out to me just this week; we may be integrating a few new folks into the weekly game.  Our empire grows.