Running and Hacking the Lantern of Wyv

At London's one-day convention Dragonmeet last weekend I ran one of the One Page Dungeon Contest winners from this year, "The Lantern of Wyv" by Michael Prescott. As usual, I find one-page adventures near perfect time-wise for four-hour convention slots (though this slot was more like 3 1/2), but can't resist tinkering with the adventure as written.

The pregenerated characters were all based on rock stars from the 60's, mostly associated with the Rolling Stones, in homage to the song "Lantern." Each one had a secret goal - to use the Lantern to get back home; to gather white "moon pebbles" or wyvern venom for, um, alchemical purposes; to experience new sensations; to rid the Bay of the wyverns that had taken over since the owner of the Lantern died; to scrounge spells; to make sure the wizard buried there is resting easily. Some changes were:

1. The adventurers start from a village a half day's walk away from the bay,populated by refugees from the wyvern plague. They had 1/6 chances of encountering a wyvern and a human hunting party from the survivors in the bay, and got the latter. These gave useful information that the wyverns are attracted to shiny and colorful things, and traded a dose of anti-venom for some food and equipment.

2. More detail about the tower where the flying barge "docks" (25 feet above the top). The wizard Radomenus has only been dead 20 years and the tower was the site of her funeral and wake. It's a three-floor octagonal construction some 20' wide and rises 25' with its top levels blasted away (the stone appears melted, which wizards may know is the signature effect of a high-level white fireball). All around the tower in the long grass are melted chunks of stone and the pieces of a dismantled spiral stair.

Also in the grass and leaves by the tilting wooden door is a small iron figurine of a cricket-bodied man in the act of playing the fiddle and bow. If brought within 5' of a place where Radomenus has lain (the biers in the tower and the barge, the black table in the Lantern) the residual radiation will inspire the figure to chirp out a slow rhythm, which gets more hectic with proximity to the white sand or to Radomenus herself.

Inside on the ground floor are scattered, decaying folding chairs (the wizards at the wake quarreled on leaving and the place was never properly cleaned up) surrounding a bare wooden bier with few surprises. A few balled-up scraps of paper when put together reveal a neatly scribed program for the funeral. In the game I prepared this prop on the train up and threw wadded-up pieces of the puzzle at the players as they scoured the floor. This gave such clues as "shrouding and shielding of the body", the hymn "that is not dead which doth eternal lie,"and the conclusion of the wake with an "abolition of the tower."

Using rope to go up past the middle level, with some uninteresting long-spoiled food and drink left over from the wake, the adventurers found themselves on the melted stump-roof of the tower and waited until the flying barge came to stop there, 25' up. A levitate spell from the gnome and some ropework had everyone up there quickly, although the healer fell and broke her ribs.

Using the information from the hunters, everyone lay low and covered up their armor for the ride and survived without a wyvern attack (1/6 chance, up to a certainty if showing bright or shiny objects).

3. There had been a lot of ropework getting up the stairless tower and onto the barge, and rather than go through all that again I decided to make the central shaft of the Lantern different. The levitating magics that allowed people to move between levels are still in place, but have become unstable. For each level in space, each 5' area around the rim of the shaft and each minute in time roll a d6, where 6 = "going up quickly" and 1 ="going down quickly." Various ways to navigate were tried, including trial and error, rope, and throwing flour into the air to see which way the currents go (adventuring use #2,407 for flour). The slight chaos thus caused had the gnome on the third level and the rest of the party on the first.

4. The first level, along with the radioactive "new flesh" healing slab, had the addition of some formless lumps of flesh that used to be servants. I was ready to use them in a fight (as lemures) but seeing no need to kill time I instead had them just be features in an empty room, that protested and asked to be returned to oblivion when put on the resurrection slab.

5. The second level was mostly unexplored, although the shaft room was the venue for the final fight. I had prepared a map of my campaign world with crossing ley lines for the players to find, as well as a kind of a game where a wizard could piece together torn up and incomplete spell names and descriptions to create unreliable new magics.

6. The third level was pretty much as described. The gnome tiptoed past the bulk of the transformed Radomenus (sleeping, by my dice) and messed around a bit with steering crystals and the pit of radioactive sand before filling a wineskin with the stuff and, casting it into the flux currents, found one to gently go back down.

At that time, looking at the less than 30 minutes remaining, I decided that Radomenus would wake up and crawl down for the final boss fight. Well, 8 hit dice of blob don't last long against eight level 4 characters, and the one lightning bolt she licked off before Hideous Mirth and a hail of arrows got to her only critically injured a henchman. I didn't even think to have her summon wyverns before descending, so the party got cheated out of that experience as well. Next time she will be better prepared...

Resolution 1: Prep without mercy. These are one-shot characters and there's no need to be gentle.

Resolution 2: The one-page format lends itself to four hours pretty easily, so any padding added at the front will detract from the meaty, cool stuff at the end.

Dragonmeet 2015: Carry the Lantern High

Dragonmeet, London's one-day gaming convention, is coming up on the 5th December and unlike last year I can actually attend. It is my tradition to run an adventure from the one page dungeon contest, using the 52 Pages system, and name it after a rock song. This year is no exception, as I run Michael Prescott's winning adventure.

In which you have to get to that octahedron in the sky and wrestle forth its secrets. And now the theme will extend to the pre-generated characters, viz.

Well, there isn't much of a schedule visible yet because hey, Dragonmeet. But I am looking forward to it!

Megadungeon Playtest Without the Dungeon

Last Saturday in London we had a small meetup of variously 8-10 Old School gamers who couldn't wait for Dragonmeet (wait, Dragonmeet has an updated website and schedule in early October? Surely these are the last days and times...)

In the corner of a pub near Euston Station, it was decided that I should run the first game, an encounter with pregenerated 52 Pages first-levels going after the low-level bandits holed up in caves near the entrance of my megadungeon project, Manden Gouge.

A rough idea of the style

I haven't talked much about this project - preferring to show rather than tell, perhaps overcorrecting for the tendency of gamers to hype vaporware.  As of now I have about 120 areas written up, enough for the first installment, which now lacks only a bunch of connecting material. The design goals are:

• Emphasis on exploration, finding out the history of the nearly abandoned castle Karthew's Legacy and the warrens beneath.
• Setting-neutral - can be dropped into almost any pseudo-European fantasy world with few assumptions about the universe
• Subverting cliches -- few things, be they monsters or treasure, are "by the book"
• Detailed rather than general descriptions -- but detail for a purpose.
• "Gormenghast" feel to the upper rooms and cellars of the castle -- a society of eccentric inhabitants, with mad and dangerous things lurking in the corners, left by a long line of previous weirdos
• Run-friendly, with detail maps and monster stats on the same page as descriptions
• Lots of goodies -- a menu table, social relations map, reference illustrations for the player, a dream dungeon-within-the-dungeon, family tree and heraldry

And that's all folks - no Kickstarter, no hype, no set date. You'll see it when it's here.

Anyway, following up a mission hook to deal with some bandits with the advantage of night-vision, the party decided to set a counter-ambush for the bandits and then lure them out of their cave, managing to bag the leader under a dropped goods cart thanks to Barry's creative abuse of the Featherweight spell. So the megadungeon playtest never entered the megadungeon. But I'll be damned if I railroad.

Eggs on a Plate Without the Plate - Salvador Dali

Then Barry took the reins for an adventure in Tekumel using Lamentations rules -- a really nice introduction to that exotic and hierarchical setting that had the party carrying out a tenement eviction, with rainy, moldy atmospherics that brought to mind a cross between The Raid and Se7en.

It was a great day with the opportunity to put faces to a lot of names across the British blogosphere and G+alaxy. I hope there's another such one of these days.

Convention Game Sharkpocalypse

The Dragonmeet session was a lot of fun. I've found that a good formula for a one-shot game is to make sure that you have some sort of ticking bomb, relentless final guardian, or monsterpocalypse at the end of a fairly short adventure. Without the slow build that a campaign gives, you do well to build fun off the cheap heat, with CLIMAX written in broad strokes and bright colors.

With that in mind, I framed the original one-page adventure by Daniel O' Donnell thus: the Crown Prince of Crime in the town of Ushralec hired the party to sack the Fane of Drowned Men, sacred to the demon-gods Dagon and Charybdis, ostensibly because of a grudge he had long held before recently coming to power. There were some very subtle clues to his ultimate intent - through a crack in the door, Alinor the sea elf saw some minions of crime pouring barrels of salt water into a big vat, tapping the floor below in some sort of code and receiving taps from below in turn. The Crown Prince's audience room, also, had been stripped of all furniture and valuables.

Anyway, heedless of this, the party -- a rogue, a brawling sailor, a prophet of hoary Nodens, the sea elf, a somewhat out-of-place dwarf, and of course Gnaro the multidimensional gnome -- set off in a longboat at high tide to make a beeline for the back end of the shrine. Through incredible luck and bad rolls by the defenders they were not spotted by any of the people doing business at the front of the shrine or on the causeway.  Floating right over the deep-submerged tethered zombies, they were soon on the roof, interrupting a treasure donation ritual with arrows, spears and a Sleep spell cast through a grating.

After the high priest fought back with a successful hold person, the fight soon moved to the front of the shrine, where the sea elf cast a net to trap some of the defenders. The high priest, escaping the net, backed into the rogue's waiting stab around the corner, and having been the target of much of the previous damage, soon expired, cursing his fate to die on land.

Meanwhile, some of the surviving acolytes inside the shrine had wakened their sleeping companions and were ready to defend the doorway. But the resourceful sea elf had meantime clad himself in the high priest's sharkskin robe and triple-shark-mouth tiara, and using a Disguise spell, convinced the acolytes that he had sent these invaders to test them and that they had all better surrender. The one acolyte who had saved and disbelieved the disguise was bludgeoned to death by the others at the orders of the fake high-priest.

That out of the way, the explorers noticed a dark line on the horizon and an ominous rushing sound. The sailor recognized it as a tsunami and estimated that they had little more than an hour before it hit. Looting the fane, which consisted of a few cabins of a shipwreck atop a rocky islet pierced by a well, they came away with the jewelry of a nobleman preserved in a cask of sherry and some valuable books. But the same high tide that had eased their passage over the drowned zombies now filled up the well and access to the passages below, filled with the donations of the faithful. Gnaro threw some gnomish sausage into the water and quickly attracted one of the guardian seawolves, who provided enough deterrent for the party to gather up their spoils and head for the hills. A wise move, for when the tidal wave hit it was ridden by a giant sharktopus, unholy spawn of Dagon and Charybdis.

In the aftermath of the disaster, the party heard some strange stories circulating. Merchants and jewelers who had rushed back to their strongholds in the city, ahead of anyone else, had found emptied cellars and strongrooms they thought secure, their broken doors not wholly convincing as tsunami damage. Could the party have been set up to trigger the wrath of Dagon, God of Tides, King of Watery Death, as part of some larger, astoundingly callous caper? Best not to think about it, or the treasures you left behind in the passages underneath the Fane ...

In the afternoon we played a fun, short scenario in Paolo's Cthonic Codex world, with themes of goats, moss, and a ghost dragon whose fossilized ribcage was a bridge in a canyon. The AFG system is about as simple as it gets and I recommend it for anyone who wants to prioritize ideas and creativity over rules and process, plus it has one of the coolest magic systems out there. Paolo and I then played in a demo of Lords of War, a card-battling game with simple rules but very deep strategic play.

Dragonmeet lives up to the second part of its compound. It is a great place to meet people with all kinds of ad-hoc gaming going on, and you tend to run into a lot of people you know from the gaming scene if you have lived in Southeast England for a while. This time it continued till 11 with open gaming, which was a great improvement, even though I had to get dinner with some old L5R cronies and run off to catch the last train.

Dragonmeet 2013

This coming Saturday I'll be at Dragonmeet 2013 in London, running the below adventure in the morning and most likely playing in Paolo's game in the afternoon.

Dragonmeet is a very enjoyable one-day convention with more punch than you'd think, in terms of attendant luminaries. The adventure will be run in 52 Pages rules and is basically an adaptation (with some twists) of a recent One Page Dungeon Contest winner, so if you're coming down, don't delve into the spoilers...

And yes, I am continuing the tradition of prog-rock/metal influence after last year's Heart of the Sunrise.

Oh, one more thing. Here's part of the town map I'm using, adapted from one of Dyson Logos' creations.

Considerations of a Con Game

A little more aftermath from Dragonmeet:

1. The players felt the lethal fury as I made all rolls in the open (except for sensing rolls) and fudged nothing dangerous about the adventure. However, as I had stocked it there was one puzzle-trick involving a massive sliding block intervening between them and the climactic encounter. With less than 30 minutes to go in the session I decided to remove the block trick and show a straight path to the climax. I strongly believe that at a con game, fun takes precedent. Challenge is part of that fun - so no fudging combat - but having a memorable and dangerous climax is also part of that fun.

The trick was not super-dangerous, although the previous lot of players had found it quite anxiety-provoking. Look at area 9 on Dyson's map. Now imagine a 10' stone cube that starts in the north-east niche. It moves at the equivalent of a 30' /round move according to these rules:

* If no living thing is in any square of room 9 it makes its way back to its niche.
* If a living thing is in room 9 it focuses on the northernmost of these, then the westernmost of these if there is a tie. It will try to move immediately to the north of its focus first, stopped only by a wall. If it cannot move any further to the north, it will try to move to the west of its focus. This means, for example, that it will appear to "chase" a character in the top two squares of the room, and will crush anyone who stays there. If he or she darts by and stands by the south door, it will move down but stop just short of crushing.
* Being crushed against a wall is not pleasant; it does 2d6 damage a round with no saving throw.
* If you are particularly cruel, all doors to the room open inwards.
* Behind the cube is a niche with a small purple worm tooth inside, worth 250 $ to the right buyer.

2. I was considering a reward system for the con that would add a competitive element without tedious and gamesmanlike point-scoring. I didn't implement it, but offer it here for your consideration.

Arranged below from lowest to highest, like poker hands, is a series of individual outcome goals for your character. Each player secretly selects a goal before the game begins. After the game, see who achieved their goal. The one(s) who achieved the highest ranking goal win(s).

* Survive, with a share of loot worth at least 250$.
* Survive with a share of loot worth at least 250$ without being incapacitated at the end (having gone to 0 or fewer hp but not dead).
* Gaze on the Heart of the Sunrise (the gem in area 11).
* Survive, having gazed on the Heart of the Sunrise.
* Survive, having gazed on the Heart of the Sunrise without being incapacitated at the end.
* Alive or dead, ensure that the party eventually carries forth the Heart of the Sunrise from the dungeon successfully.
* Survive, as part of a party that carries forth the Heart of the Sunrise from the dungeon successfully.
* Survive without being incapacitated at the end, as part of a party that carries forth the Heart of the Sunrise from the dungeon successfully.
* Be the surviving, non-incapacitated, hero who personally carries forth the Heart from the dungeon!

Having written this all out I now keenly want to put this kind of goal setting in action for the next one-shot I run.

3. For the information of the players: The haul of xp from monster killing is 608, and from sale of treasure brought in on the back of Bill the Mountain Camel, who had fled and was only located after an arduous search (dwarven mail shirts and mirror frame) is 458; total then is 1066. If you are not a spellcaster and have INT or WIS > 12, add 10%, so you get 1173. The gnome and rogue also get 300 xp each for cooperating to get the gem out of the dungeon. It would have been more if you had been able to sell it, but ...

Gnarro the Gnome knew that he had only one hour until the pixie dust ran out, and guessed that the elemental could only track the giant gem if he touched the ground. He put the gem in a waterskin, tied it to the rock and float it in a nearby mountain stream. Unfortunately, the elemental was capable of following the tenuous scent  from the rock, through the rope, through the leather, to the gem.  When Gnarro returned to the scene he found only a large, hemispherical hole in the river bed....

Dragonmeet 2012: Heart of the Sunrise

Dragonmeet is a one-day small gaming con that's held in London around this time each year. Having been there as a player last year, this year I vowed to return as a gamemaster.

The table ended up filled with fans of the blog, including two folks from the L5R days and Paolo of Tsojcanth fame. Paolo brought his 52 Pages gnome, Gnaro, who had last been sighted in Mittellus-Prime and had somehow moved sideways in time to Mittellus-15087, which featured an alternate, rebooted version of the dungeon I had restocked using Dyson Logo's Purple Worm's Gullet map.

Memorable events in this run, entitled Heart of the Sunrise in true prognard fashion, included:

The party tarrying to collect the valuable claws of the hopping piercers not far inside the gullet, and interrupted by the appearance of the wyvern who had been nesting above the dungeon entrance. It wasn't long before the wyvern fell victim to an astounding series of events. It fumbled with its stinger (natural 1, 1/20 chance), went on to roll a fumble of 5 on the lower of 2d6, hit self for 1/2 damage (1/12 chance, increasing the odds to 1/240), lost my 50-50 determination roll of whether it was immune to its own poison (1/480), failed the first save vs. incapacitation I give victims of poison, which it would have made on a d20 8+ (1/1200) and the second save against death (1/3000) - both by one point, rolling a 7! So the wyvern arched around and, being clumsy in such confined quarters, stung itself in the eye and expired on the spot ......

Losing 3 party members to incapacitation and maiming. Tip: When making jokes about two suspicious-looking lizard statues possibly coming to life, interpose someone solid between them and the squishy characters!

An encounter with a mirror hidden in the room under the vertically rotating door under the dwarf youth hostel, which the Mittellus-Prime party had missed. This one will deserve a post of its own - the mirror was a special creation and it played out really well.

The final encounter with the shrine of the titular glowing ruby. The Band of Iron, being campaign characters with something to lose, were content to merely revere the fabulous gem. Not so these one-shot scoundrels! The party rogue used his Oil of Invisibility, lassoed the gem successfully, and then the altar turned into this and all hell broke loose:

What followed was the first time I have used the new chase rules and they worked like a charm. The rogue and gnome, who used pixie dust from a previous campaign to fly,  could double the creature's speed ... but they had to thread the dungeon, while it could move through stone at no penalty. It cut them off and the rogue only barely slipped past with a lucky roll of 2 from a quite-likely-to-hit rockhead. Still, a grim pursuit from a relentless, untiring opponent who seemed an infallible tracker seemed likely, so the rogue threw the gem to the flying gnome ... and the rock-thing stopped in confusion.

How long can our "garden-variety gnome" hero keep the gem aloft and away from the senses of the elemental guardian? That, alas, must await another chapter of his dimension-hopping saga. I want to thank all my excellent players for a truly memorable game with a rousing climax!

Going to Dragonmeet

I'll be at the Dragonmeet convention in London tomorrow. See here. I know James Raggi will be on hand and I'll be meeting a friend there who is curious about the old school.

If you'll be there as well this is what I look like:

A little squashed horizontally, not sure why

I haven't registered anything but I might be persuaded to do a pickup Mad Archmage run. I've figured I can bring some pre-made characters, a few tokens and figures, and we're set. Who knows, if Raggi loans me some character sheets I might even do it LotFP style.