Game Viet Nam

So far the Bronze Skull gang has shown a lot of unity and esprit de corps, acting as a group.  The Blueboy gang seems to be going with an alternative approach, as the lumpy headed kid arrives at the Blueboys' table, the redbearded dude goes at him but lumpy manages to ward off most of the force of the blow with a timely block.  The kid manages to connect with a sloppy counter-punch.  The third Blueboy present, who seems to be the leader of the group, grabs both of their heads and conks them together Three Stooges style.

The barkeep does not like all these monstrous weirdos coming at his supply of hard liquor and goes after Von the Koopa Troopa.  As he turns Bobo the Flying Monkey snatches the bottle of Auntie Grodd's Banana Schnapps sitting on the counter.  The barkeep grabs the turtlish duder but doesn't take account his grip on a high shelf and brings the whole shelving unit crashing down on both of them! Dozens of bottles of high end hooch are shattered, their contents never to be drunk by man nor mutant.  Oh the humanity!  The barkeep is down for the count, but Von crawls to his feet and, with a triumphant grin, proceeds to take a long pull from the bottle in his hand.  Too bad the bottom half of it is gone and nothing comes out.

The really hairy dude is only inches away from the spot where the top shelf crashed into the bar, but he's too busy beating up the cigar-smoking troll-baby to notice.  They mix it up and the kid comes out the better for the exchange, delivering a vicious kick to the hairy guy's shin.  He howls in agony.

Back over on the other side of the joint Bumphrey the Mutant Mole goes all Sonic the Hedgehog for a moment and in a burst of speed throws himself bodily at the Bronze Skuller with the big Mario Mustache.  Rhadamantus  takes a swing at Bumphrey as he goes past, but fails to connect.  The mole hits with a ramming speed headbutt to the groin!  Mario crumples to the floor, wishing he was unconscious.  He looks stupid, but not stupid enough to get back up before the fight is over.  His buddy in the filthy smock sees an opportunity to kick Darf the Dwarf and carpes the crap out of that diem with a solid strike to the dwarf's gut.  The wind is knocked out of him for a moment, but Darf is still looking to fight.

Nearby Sir Grover of Sesame goes all karate high kick on Harold the Adequate, landing his furry blue foot to the back of Harold's head!  It's one of those blows that is shrugged off for the moment, but damn will he feel that tomorrow morning.  Harold meanwhile climbs onto the table, which is probably too rickety for these sorts of shenanigans, but he's not on it long as he leaps off the table and over the banister at Quartle the Frogman.  It's a beautiful aerial maneuver.  Witnesses will tell their grandkids about it some day. The two brawlers end up in a tangled ball of brawl among the shattered timbers where table 20 used to be.

Over at table 10 the Wilt Chamberlain looking dude with the iron hand and the fighting woman with the grey eyes exchange a meaningful glance, cease hostilities, and proceed to double stomp the bejeesus out of Weird Merlin, who is already on the floor.  Dude is tough as leather; he continues to curse like a congressman even under this brutal barrage.

Meanwhile, KISS girl goes after Mr. Mister but he deftly counters, grabbing her and pulling her close.  "I was made for loving you, baby" he sings, but he's so drunk the words comes out slurred beyond recognition and way louder than necessary, not to mention completely off key.

Back at the bar, Daddy Troll has finished off his pitcher of mead.  He sloppily wipes off his mouth with  scabrous arm, wheels about and silently slouches towards the brawlers at tables 6 and 7, casting a long, long shadow across the room.  A fangy grin stretches far too widely across his hideous face.  As all eyes are turned on this development Man Rider tentacles up into the rafters, out of sight.

TURN 2 casualties: barkeep, eye-patch guy, mario dude

Of all the drinking establishments in the Snail Quarter, why come to the Tanglebones Tavern?  The location is terrible, unless you happen to run out of the back door of a nearby gambling den or boxing pit and need a place to duck into quickly.  The interior is drafty and the food is terrible, unless you favor burnt trout served with a mug of alligator milk (I honestly don't know).  Because the doors and ceiling are higher than for most gin joints in the area, the Tanglebones has become the favored venue for trolls to get their drink on.  Once the owner realized this trend, he started hiring trollish barmaids.

So unless you like the shivering by the fireplace and inhaling the funk of up to a dozen trolls, there's only two things that recommend the Tanglebones to most patrons.  The first is nightly performances of a rather good belly dancer.  The other is the cheap drinks.  No one quite knows how, but the owner can sell fairly good mead for 3 coppers a pint when every other place in the quarter charges five.



No dice are rolled for these attacks.  If you get a '0' you missed.  1/4 and 1/2 are glancing hits, while 1 and 2 are solid hits.  A, B, and C are special results that really lay the smack down.

Every time you use this chart you are hoping that your attack lands before the foe changes defense on their move.  If you have a substantially higher Dex than your foe, you ought to pound the snot out of them.  But your Dex may be lower than you think, depending on how drunk you are.

(Ignore the penciled-in numbers.  That's from a previous owner.)

Any questions?

Most D&D characters are disposable.  They start out life as six throws of 3d6 and then die in the first encounter of their miserable lives.  I've got a buddy whose original group interpreted the term "name level" to mean that your PC doesn't need a personal name until they're a full-ranked Wizard, Lord, etc.  The last time I ran a campaign set in Mystara one player went through so many PCs that he started numbering replacements.  He went through several incarnations of a few different names.  The first couple were fairly ordinary monikers but I think 'Niantic Sphinctre' went into the teens.  If the sample page of the DM Adventure Log can be believed, Dave Cook went through quite a few dwarves named Fred.  (Click to embiggen.)

DM: "Black Dougal, you find out that you missed a tiny discolored needle in the latch.  Roll saving throw vs. Poison, please!"
Dougal (rolling): "Missed it!"
DM: "Black Dougal gasps 'Poison!' and falls to the floor.  He looks dead."
Fredrik: "I'm grabbing his pack to carry treasure in."

But there's a couple of other things going on here.  One is the DM (and therefore Moldvay) undermining player agency by stealing Black Dougal's last words.  What if Kevin Hendryx wanted to say something else? I think PC death would matter a lot more if we made an effort to have some decent final words ready for our death.  I've often thought that Khan's/Ahab's curse would be useful to quote if your death was the fault of another PC.

So this morning Anthony, Mike and C Huth played a little adventure that I borrowed from Simon of and the sky full of dust and hacked up a bit.  I don't have my notes with me, but the party consisted of a nameless fighter, a ranger whose name I couldn't pronounce and then promptly forgot, and Farley the Dwarf, a Wessex veteran.  Too bad Farley was way over the level range for the adventure and showed up to the crawl with two diseases and two curses, as per the rules of Article 4 of the original FLAILSNAILS Conventions.  I'm trying to imagine how one ends up like that, and all I can come up with is a rather distrurbing scenario involving unspeakable acts with a witch's favorite goat.  Probably the best part was the one curse that shrunk him to just one foot in height.

The party followed a rumor that a certain set of centuries-old tombs, long pillaged, contained a secret area below a slab of stone.  This secret second set of tombs reputedly contained three magical weapons: a black sword, a trident, and a warhammer.  Okay, they weren't really after Blackrazor, Whelm and Wave, but three magic weapons is three magic weapons.  Our hardy hereos braved perfectly ordinary spiders, tacky religious iconography, and several annoyingly unkillable skeletal undeaders.  The ranger and the fighter escaped with one of the three magic weapons, the Holy Axe of the Knight-Marshal, and some miscellaneous loot.  Poor tiny Farley was punched right in the heart by the Three-Armed Skeleton Knight of Wessex-119 and died instantly, Arduin critical style.  Too bad he was carrying the Legendary Magical Beard of Wessex.  (Actually, being tiny, he was wearing it as a cloak.)  Pour a forty on the curb for a character that Mike has been playing since December of 2011.  He got to sixth level in the FLAILSNAILS multiverse and that ain't shabby, my friends.

Running a FLAILSNAILS game again was a hoot.  I really ought to get back into it regular-like.  Unfortunately, my family and I have moved since the last time and our new place doesn't work as well as the old one for running in the wee hours.  I woke my wife up early, which is something I don't want to repeat.  But I've got an office here in the English department now, so maybe I could run some games later in the day.  That ought to amuse the folks in my hallway.

Okay, so some folks here and on Google+ have convinced me to let folks peek behind the screen just a bit at the Caves of Myrddin campaign.  I'm going to start with the original caves levels.  I was in a big hurry to start DMing this campaign, but the upper levels of the ruined castle weren't ready to go so we started with these nearby caves.

Castle Dundagel is vaguely based upon the real Cornish ruins of Tintagel, which really does have a nearby Cave of Merlin.  I picked Tintagel as my model because of its Arthurian associations. It's the castle Uther besieges in the first part of Excalibur, where Arthur is conceived.  But the ruins there today were actually built in the 13th century, the century after the Wessex campaign is set, almost as an early example of a lord's architectural folly.  Key changes I made to Tintagel when I made Dundagel:

• I put the whole thing on a spit of land, rather than an island just yards off the coast.  I didn't want to deal with boats every single expedition.
• Based upon this photo of Tintagel I decided I needed three 'Merlin caves' rather than the single one I'd read about.
• Since the modern understanding of Arthur and all that stuff only begins to congeal with Geoffrey of Monmouth, who is alive during the campaign, I decided that much of what we know as the standard Arthur narrative is just plain wrong.
• To whit, Arthur and Merlin weren't contemporaries.  Merlin (a.k.a. Myrddin) is a generation or two later, as is Morgan le Fay, queen of Tintagel.
• Also key: Myrddin was an evil wizard and Morgan a benevolent queen.  This got flip-flopped in later legend mostly because the only thing everyone clearly remembers from the period is how the queen used to dress like a tart.

The Caves became named after Myrddin because he used them to tunnel a backdoor into the family crypts below the castle.  The original monsters to move into the dungeons were part of Myrddin's army of evil.  For a time the good guys beat back these creatures and sealed them below, but they only dug more dungeons.  Eventually they dug so deep they reached the uppermost level of Hell.

The dragon moved in three or four generations after all this muck.  The House of Fay had spent its energies and lost many of its bravest sons and daughters trying to contain Myrddin's mess. (That guy was long dead, thanks to a vorpal sword to the neck.  Neither head nor sword have been recovered from the dungeons.)  So the dragon didn't have to do much to seize control and set up shop in a hidden lava-filled cavern just slightly above Hell.  But it got lazy and sleepy and soon it only ruled the monsters in name only.

Later, a trandimensional meteor crashed into Goblin Land so hard that it punched a hole through straight through to level 1 of Dundagel.  But that's not what we're talking about today.  Here's some maps.

And here's the Big Cave, a.k.a. level 3.  Monsters here were mostly unintelligent beetles, slimes, wobras (winged cobras), etc., with the notable exception of a couple appearances by Joe Mama, the trollish psycho with a chainsaw.  The corkscrew/sprial/whatever of the main corridor really made mapping this level a giant pain in the ass.  The criss-crossing in area 10 is spider webs.  No giant spiders though, just a zillion regular sized ones.  No one knows where the the corridor at the top of the map leads.

I think I got all these maps from Paratime Design.?  The Caves/Dungeons complex is a Frankenstein of stitched stuff.  Some levels are entirely swiped from published modules.  Others I just used the map.  One level I use the map from one module with the key from another.  A lot of Dave's Mapper brand geomorphs get used all over as well.

Riffing off of other people's work is great for several reasons:

• I can recombine stuff for interesting new effects.
• I enjoy the challenge of presenting old material in a fresh way.
• I like secretly daring the players to blurt out "Hey, this is level 3 of the Temple of Elemental Evil, you fraud!" So far I've gotten away with a LOT with no one calling me on it.
• I'm a lazy ass.
• Besides, there's a lot of good stuff out there.  Why not use it?

Next installment I'll talk about the big vertical geomorph.  I'll even show you some of it.

So Carl (Bishop Aethelred), Louis (Sonoma the Psycho Elf), Tom (Lankii the Diabolic Elf) and Nick (Vithujin the Necromantic Elf) were discussing a plan of action at the beginning of the session last night.  There was a bit of himming and hawing over what to do with this, the last run of the campaign, when in walks Chris (Fred the Dwarf).  He announces that he had a shitty day at work and that he intends to take it out on the Vampire Lord of Crows.  Everybody agrees that icing that particular mofo would be sweet.  And they have someone who can guide them to his lair: Billy White-Paw, the Bishop's cat.  Aethelred can communicate with Billy and once asked him to tail a couple vampires back to their lair.

So after stocking up on holy water and other provisions and Aethelred using the spell commune to get some intel from God hisself, they follow Billy into a section of the vertical map that no previous party has penetrated.  They end up spelunking like you wouldn't believe, pounding in stakes and attaching ropes, climbing mysterious chains, falling in pits that are at the bottom of other pits, abandoning their hopeless losers when they become a burden and generally clanging about the dungeons.  Billy is just leaping from ledge to ledge effortlessly, smugly waiting for the rest of the party two or three dooms ahead of them.

Meanwhile I'm throwing dice to see how many of the remaining vampires are in their lair and how active they are.  Turns out Billy is leading the party to all seven of the bloodsuckers and six of them are resting in their coffins.  So when they arrive in Coffin Central they quickly dispatch Alice Cooper's Vampire Snake.  Thanks to careful planning, casting a ton of spells (including haste), bringing along a bag full of sunshine and my crappy rolls they manage to kill every single fangy bastard in the place with no casualties.  I almost laid vampiric hands on the throat of Fred the dwarf, but then somebody remembered that Fred's henchmen hadn't acted yet and one of them put a magic crossbow bolt right through the vampire's heart.  Sweet.

It was neat how hard the party whupped up on the bad guys.  We had discussed anti-climactic boss fights in D&D earlier in the evening.  I offered my opinion that the fight against a big boss should be totally one-sided: if the PCs do their homework, they ought to win.  I didn't mention the corollary out loud.

For the record, here's the list of the vampires they murdered:

Alice Cooper (treasure: Hat of Protection +2)
Alice Cooper's Snake
The Skipper from Gilligan's Island (Gilligan was staked in a previous expedition)
Zed Zardoz (treasure: Zardoz mask of protection from gaze attacks)
Vampire Donkey (poor beast was left behind by a previous expedition)
The headless body of Spiro Agnew (treasure: iron collar of no head required)
Trevor, the Vampire Lord of Crows (treasure: unholy crystal ball that allows two-way communication with another unholy crystal ball)

After the fight in Coffin Central they located a secret door that they hoped would lead to more vampire treasure.  ("Where are these jerks' gold?")  Billy White-Paw was sent in to scout the area.  He came running back very quickly.  "There's a huge fucking spider in there!"  Sonoma wanted to throw a fireball into the room to kill it, but was talked out of it.  That's too bad.  The fireball would have blasted back into the PCs' faces and the spider, being one of those metallic Arduin jobbies I like to use, probably would have come out unscathed.

After getting their items identified the party pitches in a crapload of gold they've been saving up to build a kick-ass stone castle in Goblin Land.  Carl is leaving for an intership at the University of Versailles, so in a fit of sentimentality I decide that papal legate Alberic of Ostia makes Aethelred the legit Bishop to the Goblins.  Lankii and Fred declare themselves the elvish and dwarvish Moses respectively and lead bands of their fellow demihumans out of the realms of men into a new life under the twin suns of Goblin Land.  They seal up most of the routes between Goblin Land and Wessex, but leave one way open for those future adventurers who might want to join the good fight against the monsters of their adopted homeworld.

All in all, not a bad way to end things.  After the run is over, I pull out my vertical map and we compare it to the one Chris has made.  He did a pretty dang good job, as have several other online cartographers.  At the urging of several folks on Google+, I'll be scanning a few of the better-known parts of the dungeon and doing a sort of designer's notes thingy with them, maybe starting tomorrow.

Tonight's tabletop game is going to be the last Wessex game for a while.  I don't know if anybody has noticed or not, but I haven't run my Monday morning game for a couple weeks now.  School has gotten kinda hectic and I've needed my Monday mornings for homework.  I don't know when I will next run an online game.  It may be a spontaneous thing, with those of you on Google+ at 4:30am my time getting a "Hey, anyone want to play a game of ______?"

Meanwhile, I'm going to pitch to my Wednesday group a few session of Traveller.  I've long wanted to run Adventure 4: Leviathan, which involves giving the party command of a big merchant explorer and sending them into an unknown subsector.  Since it's a commercial interest providing the ship the scenario is an interesting hybrid of Star Trek's exploration/first contact ethos with Traveller's more grubby economic bent.

Thanks to all the super-cool players who made the Caves of Myrddin/Dungeons of Dundagel a hoot.  That dungeon still has a crapload of unexplored nooks and crannies (whole levels, in fact), so I will probably return to it some day.

Fred the Dwarf, the elvish trio (Lankii, Senoma and Vithujin) and the cleric Aethelred the Unsteady have returned from an expedition to the dungeons below Dundagel.  Most folks in the area assumed they were dead, because they were last seen heading to the ruins several weeks ago.  But today they return and buys many rounds of drinks for the folks staying in the Abbey guesthouse.  Though tight-lipped at first, eventually a few details of their expedition begin to slip out.

• These guys have built some sort of permanent outpost in Goblin Land, which can be accessed via a portal somewhere in the dungeons.
• Their ally the fighting man Will Die Too is now chieftain of the Tricloptic Vikings, having defeated the previous chief in single combat.  He's sorta gone native and doesn't seem to show much interest in coming back.  That may have something to do with his two new beautiful triclops wives.
• The party may or may not have started a war with these total jerkward four-armed humanoids that ride pterodactyls.  These guys have some serious mad science mojo going on in this grand canyon-esque hell-rift.
• Aethelred has declared himself Bishop to the Goblin Lands.
• A coldalisk works just like a basilisk, except you freeze solid.
• One of the party members traded away an interesting item to Dremelza the Witch: a little four-armed fetus-mutant in a jar.  Not like pickled or anything, a live specimen that bangs on the glass and seems to really want to be let out!
• You know how Blixa the Thief likes to travel with a magic doggy?  He has apparently set a trend of sorts.  Lankii has a pet bat-winged cobra and Bishop Aethelred is often seen talking to his cat.  Of course, Aethelred may just be off his rocker.  Dude thinks he's the Bishop of Goblins, after all.

What happened this morning in +Jeff Rients' Wessex campaign?

Roll 1d20
1 - Ool the Dandy, loyal henchman to +Taurus Hell's Heart, was imprisoned.
2 - No one is quite sure, but +Philip the Bloody has a new hydrocephalitic goblin mounted outside his cabin.
3 - +Sir Hugo le B�tard now bears a hideous scar on his back from one of +Philip the Bloody's infamous phaser blasts.
4 - The party returned with a huge pirate-style chest filled with treasure. Some of it even had the mark of King Arthur.
5 - There are now two less vampires in the dungeon (both were pro-wrestlers).
6 - Several of the party members have horrible acid scars covering their face. They don't want to talk about it.
7 - +Philip the Bloody's new tattoo reads "True Stanist" under a picture of a golden orb spider.
8 - The party encountered strange, mummy-like creatures encased in glass.
9 - The party did battle with a mighty dung-golem. There were no survivors.
10 - Ooluu tested the power of Dagon over the undead. The results were inconclusive.
11 - The dragon has returned, and he is angry.
12 - Rakshasas were actually encountered on the Rakshasa level.
13 - +Philip the Bloody's trusty phaser ran out of batteries.
14 - The goblin henchmen of +Sir Hugo le B�tard now possess strange, steel gloves mounted with dental equipment.
15 - They party actually entered the caves deep below the castle. There they encountered hideous crabmen.
16 - The party killed a gargoyle using a clever trick.
17 - The things without a face are highly susceptible to fire.
18 - A magic item was discovered (1-3 Excalibur itself 4-5 Merlin's wand 6 something far more stange)
19 - Add moving rocks to St. Serpentor's list of posthumous miracles.
20 - Roll twice, disbelieving both results.

Evan Elkins wrote this in lieu of a standard session report.  Some of it is even true!