Helgacon 12 - The Peach Orchard

Friday night brought the opening of Helgacon proper, and I ran the first of my full scale games, the second set in my new feudal Japanese Labyrinth Lord/Oriental Adventures milieu.

Here's the whole razzle dazzle. I like to really put on a grand show for convention games.

Every thousand years, in the remote, fortified mountain monastery known as Momotakara, a certain blessed peach tree brings forth a single, magically supercharged fruit that is capable of working great wonders in the lives of those who partake of it. If only it had appeared a year ago, when the conquering forces of the Akai clan laid siege to the monastery and defeated the rebellious warrior monks who dwelt within, putting those who failed to escape to the sword. Shortly after their victory, the Akai army themselves fled the mountaintop fortress, sealing the heavy doors behind them in fear of the ingenious and deadly traps laid within' by the wily abbot, as well as the supernatural creatures said to dwell in the caves below. The players took on the roles of a ragtag band of outcasts and wanderers who'd joined together to find the Thousand Year Peach and transform their lives.

  I had twelve pre-generated player characters to choose from, ranging from samurai to kensai to wily spellcasters and ninja, with several hengeyokai shapeshifters as well as strange creatures such as tengu or kamejin. I had five excellent players, who chose the following heroes to make up their band of nakama.

L to R: Takenoko the kitsune hengeyokai kensai, Genzo the human shugenja, Shirokaze the human mahotsukai, Zenimon the human yakuza, and Hotaro the human kensai. 

My setting was based on two of Dyson Logos' wonderful maps: The Monastery of Electrum Flowers for the upper structure and The Travellers Caves for the underground caverns beneath. I keyed these up with lots of twists, traps, and encounters, and gave the players these two simplified maps as handouts. (I've learned from years of doing convention games that the sooner you get the players some basic knowledge of the stakes, setting, and layout, the easier it is to have a satisfying adventure in the allotted 4 hour timeslot. You don't have to spell everything out, just give 'em enough info to go on.)

(Actually, I didn't initially give them the cave map. I'd hidden it on the back of one of the paintings in the hall of paintings, but it was running toward the end of the session and once they got down into the caves it was easier to just hand them this than try to get them to map it. Caves are too non-euclidian for graph paper mapping, I've often found.)

I gave all the players a roll on a specially prepared rumor table. They gleaned these bits of info: 

Beware the wrath of the thunder god when invading the Monastery’s precincts, for he defends the sohei’s path. Bid him be still if you would pass safely. (This one didn't really figure in their explorations. It referred to a trapped hallway where a statue of Raijin would shoot a lightning bolt if they didn't say a password to deactivate it.)

A sacred scroll dedicated to the Goddess of War hangs among the Monastery’s collection of sumi-e. If a holy man or warrior reads what is inscribed on the back they can invoke the Goddess’ aid. 

There is a waterfall to the North of the Monastery. In a hollow behind it there is a secret door leading inside.  

Four sacred tablets, enchanted to summon and control mighty elemental forces, are hidden throughout the monastery. They are concealed among their elements.  

While the Akai claim to have sealed the doors of the Monastery, in truth they have converted it into a secret stronghold for their ninja assassins.  (This one was a false rumor, but they didn't know that.)

I gave the players a similar speech to the one I gave to my players for Red Petals on the Road, about what my expectations were for this game. I had laid out a setting and given them resources, and now it was up to them to decide what to do. Armed with their information from the rumor table, the players made their plan and set forth to infiltrate the monastery and retrieve the legendary peach. 

Acting on the rumor about a secret entry, they made their way around the north side of the monastery, where they found the waterfall as promised cascading down from a high cliff into a mountain stream. There was a hollow behind it that contained a stone lantern with a lock mechanism cleverly hidden inside. They opened the latch and discovered the secret door, which led them to the shaft of the monastery's well. There were cleverly hidden handholds leading up to the wellhead, and the shaft disappeared down into the darkness 50' below. (A fact the party rather stubbornly ignored later on when they figured out that to find the Peach they'd have to get into the caves below the monastery. But I'm getting ahead of myself. :-\) From above the tunnel was concealed by a trompe d'oiel that made it impossible to spot. 

Finding themselves in a well room where stacks of rotting firewood was stowed, they crept into the next room, which turned out to be the monastery's kitchen. Prodding among the kamado stoves and the rotting bales of rice hidden in the corner, the party disturbed a nest of hideous 5' long centipedes, which sprang forth to attack them. 

Hotaro chopped one to pieces while Shirokaze pinned one to the floor with one of his arrows. Takenoko rolled a critical fail and fell to the ground with a twisted ankle, with a vicious centipede bearing down on her with mandibles clacking. Thinking quickly, she opened her magic purse that could swallow up to 500 lbs. and sucked the horrible thing inside. The final one was slain and the party took stock, hoping that they'd not alerted any Akai ninja who might be lurking about. 

Taking a tentative foray down the hallway outside, they heard a commotion in the direction where their map said the monastery's famed peach orchard was. There was the sound of thrashing branches and a large booming voice lording over a gaggle of smaller, sniveling voices, all speaking in obake, the language of bakemono and oni. From what they could glean from Shirokaze's translations as the only one among them who could speak the language, it was a band of marauding yokai searching for the Thousand Year Peach. 

Seized by strategic inspiration, the wizard called out "We've found the peach!" in obake, hoping to lure the rival invaders into range so that they might be defeated in piecemeal, and it worked splendidly for them. A hush fell over the monstrous brigands in the orchard, and the booming voice commanded some scouts to go see who'd said they'd found the sought after treasure.The party braced themselves in the adjacent archways of the kitchen as a pair of obakenezu, horrible goblin rats, came loping down the corridor. A cowardly bunch of bakemono peeked out the window, waiting to see how their beastly comrades did. Takenoko held fast but got a sprained wrist for her troubles, as Hotaro was bowled over by the slavering spirit beast despite his magical Sandals of Steadiness. 

With a furious exchange of slashing blades and slavering bites, the obakenezu were slain, but the party had barely any time to catch their breath before the bakemono attacked. These too were dispatched with the two kensai's whirling katana and naginata. 

Hearing the death shreiks of his minions, the horrible oni Gongoro finally decided to see what was going on with his own three eyes, and so he came stomping around the corner at the far east end of the corridor with a crew of bakemono archers in tow. He bellowed threats and taunts as he came, but was knocked ingloriously on his behind when Shirokaze cast an Elemental Burst spell that hit the lumbering yokai right between the horns with an explosion of air. He fell back, smashing his smaller minions beneath him.

Seizing their opportunity, the party leaped to the attack. Zenimon slew several of the bakemono with a barrage of shuriken, while Takenoko and Hotaro strode forth and put an end to the oni with their flashing blades. In the melee Hotaro had slashed off one of the ogre's horns, which he kept as a trophy. The surviving bakemono of Gongoro's entourage, peering fearfully out the windows to the orchard, realized that their master was slain and fled screaming and scattered to the winds. 

Searching the bodies, they retrieved a gourd full of magic potion hanging from the oni's belt, and Shirokaze discovered a beautiful child's plaything, a silken temari ball doubtless stolen from a nursery tucked into one of the sleeves of the bakemono's filthy, ragged kimonos. 

 

The party then proceeded to search the orchard, finding the mess that the yokai had made knocking down branches, leaves, and fruit with long sticks. They'd piled the fallen peaches on moldering straw mats next to a stone bench beneath a particularly profound looking old tree, where the oni had been appraising the fruits and sorting out the ones that seemed magical. The Momotakara orchard had been reknowned for other sorts of magical peaches besides the legendary Thousand Year Peach. In a cracked porcelain bowl was a pile of rosy blushing peaches that were enchanted with healing magic, making them equal to a Potion of Healing if you ate one. The party divided these up among themselves. There was also a tree bearing fruit that would instantly destroy bakemono if it touched them, as evidenced by an exploded wretch whose remains lay at the tree's foot. (The players gave this one a wide berth, not knowing how specific its effects were.) 

Finally, there was a tree that at first glance seemed dead, with bare branches surrounded by a tenuous fog. Upon closer examination, led by the rotting straw ropes and sacred charms that hung around its trunk, they realized that what seemed like dead branches was in fact an upside down root system, and that this strange tree was quite alive. Surely its leaves, and its fruit, were below in the underground caves. They were getting closer to their main objective. 

Exploring further, they investigated the overgrown rock garden to the south end of the orchard. They discovered a couple of the large stones, laid out in the spiral patterns of carefully raked gravel, had been uprooted and taken. They reasoned that perhaps this was where one of the four elemental tablets they'd heard rumors about was hidden, and were proved right as they discovered a stone chest under one of the large boulders, which contained the tablet. 

Deciding to search for the abbot's quarters, they went back down the hall toward the kitchen. Beyond to the west they found the monastery's dining hall, where Zenimon accidentally knocked over long tabletops and trestles stacked against the back wall. The party held their breath, hoping no ninja had been alerted, then continued their search. 

They discovered rot and water damage coming from a swollen shut sliding door to the north that felt hot to the touch. Carefully shoving it open with the butt of Takenoko's naginata and Genzo's staff, they avoided a gout of scalding steam that billowed forth. 

Inside, they discovered a sweltering bath chamber. Everything inside was warped and melted by the heat and moisture. There were two pools to the east end of the room, one empty, and one occupied by a pool of water in which a bronze Daruma figure sat, glowing red with internally generated heat and boiling the water around it.

The figure was scalding hot, and damaged the party if they approached it. In one eye, the kanji for "heaven" had been painted. The other was blank. 

What proceeded here, if I may drop out of narrative into DM analysis, was one of those points where you present a puzzle to the players and they proceed to spiral into ever more elaborate blind alleys to solve it, completely mis-interpreting or ignoring the clues to the solution.

I'll bear more than a little responsibility for this, because they latched on to certain parts of my explanation of what a Daruma signified in Japanese culture and ran with it. I'd informed them that Daruma dolls were often used as good luck charms by people who wanted to complete a task. The person would paint in one of the figure's blank eyes at the start of their task, and then paint in the other when they'd finished it. This is what the party grabbed onto, convinced that they had to complete a task to solve the puzzle. I probably should have left all that "complete a task" stuff out, 'cos honestly all they had to do is write something in the other eye.

So they proceeded to laboriously fill up the other bath tub by drawing bucket after bucket of water from the well over a span of a couple in game hours. Hotaro stripped down and took a bath, which didn't really help, and he got kinda scalded while he was doing it due to being so close to the boiling daruma. 

What I'd failed to make clear to them was that the bronze Daruma's task was to heat the bathwater, and that since it had done that all they needed to do is write something to match "heaven". Since he was scalding hot, I was hoping that they'd take the hint and write "hell" in the other blank eye. Or they could wipe out the writing in the first eye, that would have shut him down too. (This was doubly frustrating as Genzo's player had blurted out that they should write "hell" in the other eye at the start of it all and nobody twigged to it. :-\)

Anyway, they eventually figured it out after eating up several minutes of game time. Happily, they were rewarded with the Fire Elemental tablet, which they discovered in a hidden compartment in the bronze figure's base. So all's well that eventually ends well.

Continuing their search, they decided to head southward toward the monks quarters on the west side of the monastery. They were nearly trapped by an insidious spell that caused the hallway to seem endless, forever extending ahead and behind them no matter how long or fast they walked. Shirokaze's player figured out the way to foil this spell, by not depending on vision. He backed toward the tablet inscribed with the spell and removed it without looking, freeing his comrades from its effects. They found the stricken corpses of some Akai ashigaru who'd failed to escape this trap. One had starved to death in one of the monks' cells. The other, who's hair had gone stark white, had been run thru by a blade of some sort as he cowered by a wall. The hole the blade had left was uncannily cold to the touch.

Ominous...

Proceeding further, they came to a darkened room that had been the monastery's meditation chamber. Inside, they were confronted with the terrifying specter of the Akai general who'd led the assault on the monastery, condemned in death to drive off any other interlopers. 

Hotaro rose to the challenge and drew his woodcutter's blade, the Mokuzaiken, and stood in combat against the vengeful spirit, slashing its naginata's shaft in two. The yurei cast its bisected polearm aside and prepared to draw its sword. Knowing that there was no honor in a restless ghost, Shirokaze read the chant on the back of the Fire Elemental tablet, and summoned a mighty spirit of flames, which burned the Akai general's ghost away in its purifying fire and banished it from this world.

Searching the room after releasing the Flame Spirit and stamping out some of the fires it had left, they found two large, ornate gold incense burners on the meditation leader's platform. After a bit of fox mischief where Takenoko released the giant centipede at Zenimon, causing a bit of minor panic as they slew it before it poisoned him, they sucked the two censers into the purse where they could easily carry it off. 

Working from the map, they found their way to the hall where the monastery kept its trove of sumi-e paintings, seeking to find the scroll of the War Goddess. They found a hall that had been long ago drenched in blood, with a victim slashed to ribbons and dragged away, and the two stones missing from the rock garden laid against the door. The only painting not marred with old dried blood was a magnificent painting of a tiger. This they decided to give a wide berth, especially after figuring out that its eyes seemed to follow them. They found an separate alcove where the goddess scroll was hanging, and reverently plucked it from the wall and rolled it up, another trophy from their sortie, and then slipped out again. 

Remembering that their goal was to find the Thousand Year Peach, they did some figuring and some divining. Among Zenimon's many trademark coins, he had one that he could flip for a truthful yes/no answer 3 times a day. This they used to ascertain where the entrance to the underground caverns, which turned out to be a set of bronze doors decorated by carvings of tortoises in the northeast corner of the fortress. After failing to pick the bronze padlock, Hotaro chopped it off the door with his Kikorido woodcutter technique.

They proceeded past the door and were confronted with two animated wooden guardian figures that blocked their way. After a brief combat, and a haphazard stumble down the mossy stairs beyond, they were down in the deep mountain caves.

In the depths they discovered a stone turtle hung with sacred ropes and charms, with a flat spot atop its dome-like shell. Meditating atop it, Shirokaze heard whispering voices from the deep earth asking what offering he would leave. He carefully placed the temari ball and climbed down.

The group came to a crossroads, and here, the mahotsukai decided to cast his Smoky Form spell, turning himself into a figure of smoke so that he could safely scout ahead. He went down a tunnel to the southwest, where the party could faintly hear the sound of a woman singing and weeping. It was hung with large cobwebs and bones, and eventually he came to the lair of a huge spider who had been the source of the singing, which told him to go away, as it was seeking to lure something with warm blood to it.

The party instead decided to head to the tunnel to the south, which was full of fog that was suffused with a golden glow. There, they found a lush, pristine peach tree growing from the ceiling, its bright leaves floating on the calm surface of a shallow subterranean pool. Hanging about a man's height from the floor of the cave, perfect and jewel like, was the Thousand Year Peach.

Hotaro reverently stepped forward and grasped it, but no amount of pulling or twisting could get it loose. The party turned as a creature that seemed as if it had been worn into shape from the stone of the mountain stepped forth from one of the side caverns. It had the shell of a tortoise, and held the bright silken temari ball in its large, clawed hands. It smiled, and said "You must ask before you can pluck the sacred peach, mortals." With that it turned, and withdrew back into the deep caverns.

After a deep bow and a humble request, the fruit dropped effortlessly into the kensai's hands. And thus the brave nakama acquired the Thousand Year Peach, whose every morsel if eaten could bestow a Wish, and at whose center in place of a pit was a priceless emerald of wondrous size and clarity.

They had succeeded!

ANALYSIS:

This was definitely a successful session all the way around. The players played smart and very in character. (The player who played Shirokaze spent the whole session with a plastic bowl on his head.☺) Aside from getting a little hung up on the bronze Daruma puzzle they made good tactical decisions and worked out things for themselves really well. 

I think the biggest tactical win was changing the context of the confrontation with the oni and his minions in the actual peach orchard. I'd intended it to be a big battleground, but by their subterfuge they siphoned off the bakemono and obakenezu so that they could be dealt with in piecemeal, and left the oni open to attack without his henchlings covering for him. 

So well done, players. I'm definitely looking forward to more adventures in this setting. 

Omedetou! Kampai!

Some Comments and Cogitations on Clerics

This is a boiled down version of some responses I gave to my gaming muchachos Paul & Dan's Wandering DMs discussion of Clerics from a couple weeks ago.

1: I tried to think about magical healing from whatever pulp literature/cinema I've encountered, and the only example I can think of is the scene in the 1st. Conan movie where the wizard played by Mako healed Conan up in some kind of special effects laden ritual after the disastrous raid on James Earl Jones' snake temple. (Although I think that was also more about curing some pretty heavy poisoning problems. Snake cults... whattayagonnado?) So that's a data point towards maybe just handing a couple healing spells to wizards and being done with it.

I think one of the over-arching issues with finding historical or fictional precedents to the concept of healing magic is that D&D's conceit of health as a numerated commodity just doesn't jibe with reality or fiction. Hit Points are an extreme abstraction of a very complex state/process, a very game based vital resource with healing spells and potions being a very game based solution for replenishing that resource.

In other words the fictions that we base the game on don't turn up with a lot of healing magic because the authors weren't thinking in terms of the characters having some kind of abstract number tied to their health that needs topping up. Generally, a character is either fine until they receive a dramatic enough wound, or any reference to damage they've taken is just there to magnify their courage and determination or heighten dramatic tension.

Often, I think, the literary trope for wounds and healing is the hero gets so roughed up they can't continue, and wind up holing up in some out of the way hideout and getting nursed back to health under the care of a sidekick or sympathetic, otherwise powerless ally, and then coming back healed up and determined to clean house. A prime example of that trope is Yojimbo/Fistful of Dollars/Last Man Standing, or when Darkwolf heals up Larn in Fire & Ice, or Lupin III's dramatic (and perhaps ridiculous) injury and comeback in Castle of Cagliostro. A lot of other examples abound.

The problem being that what works for a single protagonist doesn't really do the same for a large group of protagonists, and spending days or weeks out of commission under the care of a kindly old man or sympathetic schoolmarm isn't really what the game is about.

The fact that a player has a number on the sheet that kind of gives them a meter for how healthy their character is at once a help and a hindrance. A lot has been said about how abstract the system really is, and I think HP is a big part of it, but I also think it leads to questions that don't get asked in the fictive examples above. The biggest one being "How can I make this number go back up?"

Having the HP number there in black and white means that it's harder for the player to accept the literary hand waving and drama building that allows characters in books or movies to play on at full force through terrible punishment. Long story short, I think this is a prime example of game mechanics grinding gears with narrative.

2: I heartily agree with the whole world building aspect that clerics engender, and actually I find it slightly problematic from the viewpoint of a practicing Christian. Since, as you point out, most of the cleric spells are cribbed from the Bible, the general commodification of the miracles performed, combined with having to make up other sources of those miracles to stand in for the big guy upstairs, is a little hard to reconcile. It would still be a problem just declaring capital G God as the functional religion in a D&D game, 'cos the Lord isn't a vending machine in the way that D&D clerics require their deities to be, and so that doesn't work for me either. (I mean, I'm all right enough with coming up with pantheons and such, since you can approach it as an exercise in creative mythology, but still, it's a little sticky.)

The miracles described in the Bible are all meant as teaching metaphors as well as demonstrations of the Almighty's power, in fact there's one passage in the Old Testament where Moses gets in trouble with God for performing a miracle wrong. He strikes a rock to produce water in the desert, rather then simply waving his staff over it, essentially messing up the Lord's demonstration of how faith works. Miracles are always granted with a greater purpose, and the personal convenience of a bunch of jumped up looters is kinda pushing it.

Long story short, I'm kinda in agreement that just letting the matter of pantheons and patron deities not be so front and center is the way to go, if you're still gonna include clerics. I'm okay suspending my belief for a game of make believe, as long as theology, or pseudo-theology, isn't the main thing.

3: I'm kinda unsure about Turning Undead being that big a problem. You guys both talk about it nerfing an entire class of foes, but on the other hand those foes are particularly dire, with the higher level types' immunity to conventional weapons and paralysis and level drain if you're playing them by the book. Sure you can't just turn orcs to dust, but you can stab 'em, which doesn't work for higher level undead unless you got magic items.You can also Sleep, Charm, and Hold Person 'em, which you can't do for any type of undead.

I think here's a point where a happy medium could be reached where on one side turning isn't an automatic kill switch and on the other the undead are more survivable. (I know Paul has a couple of lists of alternative undead powers that he uses instead of bog standard level drain.) Having tactical ways to drive the unquiet dead back or escape their notice is deeply ingrained in folklore and literature. The idea of a Van Helsing like figure (NOT the Hugh Jackman version, tho. Oy...) in the group is still kinda appealing.

I actually very much like that interpretation of clerics, and it informed my cleric character Deacon Silver in Paul's B/X campaign. I think one of the advantages I had in taking that approach was that I was the most knowledgeable about the lore of the game itself among that particular group of players, so it was a natural thing for the rest of the party to turn to me and ask "So what are we dealing with here, Deacon?" It was one of my favorite parts of playing in that campaign in that role.

That being said, you could still have the aspect of exorcism/turning and cut player character clerics out of your game. Relegate the experts to sage status, and allow them to pass knowledge for combating evil monsters on to the party. (In "Dracula" for example, I believe it was Lucy Westenra's suitors who were the ones who drove the stake into the "Bloofer Lady" while Van Helsing merely stood by and advised.)

Maybe, like finding traps, turning undead is a thing any party member can do, as long as they're properly prepared and equipped. Make it a power attached to certain relics, for example, and have those relics operate at a certain level of clerical powers. i.e.: St. Hieronymus' knuckle bone in its silver case can turn undead using the 5th. level column on the table, vs. a small folk charm given to you by a babushka in the village that only turns on the 1st. level column. It's essentially taking the ubiquitous healing potion solution and applying it to turning. There's a piece of equipment for that.

I went into this a bit a while ago here on the Sandbox, when Jeff Rients was talking about monsters that required plussed weapons to hit.

4: In a related point, Paul mentions "Speak With Dead". This to me seems like an ideal spell to swap over to the Magic User's list. That, essentially, is where the term "Necromancer" came from, after all. 

Grownup Shapeshifting Ninja Critters

So I got my HeroForge minis all painted up and I'm pretty happy with how they came out.

Appearing here with some of Reaper's Asian themed offerings.

The kitty is a Reaper Bones familiar, slightly modified to turn her into a Japanese bobtail.

Elemental journey!

Back in January I was showing off my Reaper Bones elementals, lamenting the lack of an Air Elemental to complete the set.

Well, my elemental lamenting is over. Behold!

  

 So now I got the whole set!

Miniature Madness has kicked in early on me this year, and now that the snow has started to fall here in Western PA, I've been hunched over my painting station working on a whole new genre of minis, who'll be making their debut in one of my games at next year's Helgacon.

Kampai!

Happy Halloween!

Have a spooky one!

And while you're at it, there's still time to run a Creepy Crawl, so download the .pdf and terrorize your players until the wee hours of the night!

Stay sick, group!

The Creepy Crawl Chronicles - Session 58

Session 58
FULL HOUSE
Greed – Lvl 5 Homanculus
Tao – Lvl 5 Druid
Vlad Draculastein – Lvl 5 Dampyr
Ritzy – Lvl 5 Homanculus
Tysis – Lvl 5 Fighter
Tarvinir – Lvl 5 Magic User
Arongoth of Hogendaus – Lvl 6 Cleric/Vegetable

Monsters mashed:
1 of Baron Ünterlöb’s landsharks: Stabbed, magic missiled, and pinned to a rock with an awesome sword strike.
1000 EXP/7 players = 142 EXP apiece

Madmen met:
The Von Himmel brothers’ great great great great great great great Grand Uncle Nukus. He’s a spry old bird.

Commentary:

On the journey back to Von Himmel Manor, the players were confronted with the sight of a scrawny little old man clad in a nightshirt and furry hat, pelting furiously toward them up the trail with something huge and horrible burrowing hot on his heels.

As the sprightly senior citizen rushed past them, giggling madly to himself, the party were suddenly thrust into battle with a bulette that burst up from the road and attacked.

After defeating the creature with a measure of difficulty interspersed with a couple natural 20's, by the look of it, they headed on toward the mansion. The old man didn't speak beyond gleeful cackling and rude gestures, but they allowed him to follow them as they continued on their way.

They were met at the edge of the estate by Alexi Von Himmel, who introduced them to his Great Uncle Nukus. Mad as a bucket of beetles, but also a 20th. Level Fighter, Uncle Nukus liked nothing better than to seek out the biggest, scariest monsters infesting the woods and mountainsides and getting them to chase him.

The aggro he'd pulled when he'd met up with the party was the product of one of Dieter Von Himmel's rivals in the mad science biz, one Baron Ünterlöb. Whether this was a random encounter, or the beginning of a new subterranian assault, was yet to be seen.

Tune in Friday to see...

Note: The picture above is the monster Gabora from episode 9 of the original Ultraman TV series. I am firmly convinced that it was the original model for the little plastic toy monster that Gygax & co. turned into the bulette back in the early days of AD&D.

Jeff Rients covered the history of this monster pretty well in his classic 2005 article on the subject. Look at the picture he's got of the first bulette, look at Gabora up there, and tell me I'm wrong.

Shuwatch!

Helgacon XI - The Resplendent Palace of the Sultan

The Sultan, The Sultana, and the Sultan's Bodyguard, the half-djinn Zephyra.

I've been running an Arabian Nights themed campaign called The Thousand Year Sandglass for several years now, such that they've become a regular feature at Helgacon since Helgacon III. This year I decided that it's time to put the Sandglass on the shelf for a while, so I figured I'd give it a proper finale.

Last year's game "The Black Heart of the Burning Lich" featured a siege of the party's base of operations, the grand capital city of Kalabad, by the eponymous Burning Lich, a fiery undead sorcerer king from ancient times that they'd unleashed from his captivity in a bronze sarcophagus held by an evil sha'ir two years prior in "The Tower of Amashazzar". Long story (and neglected blog posts of yesteryear) short, they took him down and saved the town.

So I figured it was time for a celebration.

Hence the setting, the opulent palace of the Sultan of Kalabad. I posted the game's title on Paul's Helgacon Game listing and a brief flowery description, then had to sit down and figure out what I could do with that. Had to cash that check that I wrote with my big mouth.

I started with an elaborate map of the palace. This was the highest seat of power in a wondrous, mythical middle eastern empire, so it had to be at once fancy and fantastical. Here is the main level. I used it as sort of a game board, with player minis noting where they would wind up each night. I had a random roll for where the Sultan and the Sultana might end up as well, which could double the rewards or penalties if the characters' antics took place while they were there.

If you want to see more, watch this space for when I eventually get a campaign book together and up on one of the .pdf/print on demand sites. (I'm putting a pin in that idea here so that I can generate the gumption to actually do it. I gotta do it now that I've said I would. That's how the cowboys do.)

Next, I decided that since the theme of the game was a grand party at the palace, that its focus would be on Carousing. Taking the example of Jeff Reints' mighty and mischievous Carousing Rules, I made up my own custom tables for both failures and successes.

As an example, here's the top level mishaps table, for when the players failed their poison saves to see if their characters could handle all the exotic liquors and other heady amusements they were plied with. Each entry here had a series of elaborate sub tables for dicing out how each mishap would go down.

The Resplendent Palace of the Sultan Carousing Mishaps (d20)

01) Make a fool of yourself with an egregious social gaffe.
02) Insult a member of one of the four Guard corps. 
03) Awaken in one of the Administrative Offices or Halls of Government.
04) Member of Court has fallen in love with you.
05) Suffer a gambling loss to Member of the Court.
06) Tell such an excellent story at the feast that you now must top it the next evening.
07) Insult a Member of the Court.
08) Discover that some Member of Court isn’t who they seem.
09) Awaken in one of the Gardens
10) Mess with something in the Chamber of Wonders and experience a magical transformation.
11) Overhear conspirators discussing an assassination of a Member of the Court.
12) Awaken in Sultan’s personal Yacht.
13) Insult a Disguised Genie
14) Inducted into Secret Society or Cult
15) Accidentally destroy some precious art object.
16) Awaken in one of the Baths, Oasis’, or Fountains.
17) Awaken in Private Chamber of Member of the Court
18) You fall in love with a Member of the Court
19) Become privy to affair between two Members of the Court.
20) Drunkenly release a tiger from the Garden of Exotic Beasts into the palace.

Now, I've noticed in the past when playing and/or running games with the Carousing Rules in play that players will sometimes have a tendency to turtle up and avoid rolling on them. The risks tend to scare the naturally cautious side folks have more than the potential rewards (and potential for hilarious roleplay opportunities) entice them.

To ameliorate this, I came up with a mechanic I called "The Sultan's Favor".

Oooh! Shiny!

I got a bag of plastic gemstones as tokens. Players started with three each, and could spend them to get out of trouble, or earn them when they did something impressive. At the end, they could cash them in for tangible rewards like commissions in the guard or fiefdoms or even wishes granted by the jinni negotiated by the royal family. The colors of the gems had significance, both in what might be demanded in certain situations and what rewards they could bring.

Of course, all of this is kinda high concept for a D&D game, so I hedged my bets and put several unknown dungeon levels under the palace, in case all the carousing shenanigans didn't gel as a worthwhile experience. I spent a lot of time spinning the wheels of doubt about this thing. I planted a lot of ins to the underpalace throughout the carousing section, and made a handout of a mysterious tablet that contained maps of the palace both above and below that I handed to the players almost immediately.



(Partly this was also to account for the complexity and non-angularity of the palace map itself. I figured it was better to just hand the map to the players than drive both myself and a mapper mad trying to accurately depict the interlocking mandala of the Sultan's palace on a sheet of graph paper.)

How it went down:

So seven worthies and saviors of Kalabad dressed in their finest finery and hied themselves to the palace. For three days and nights, they partook of the delights of the Sultan's hospitality. Spies, thieves, and assassination plots were uncovered. A tiger was released from the Garden of Exotic Beasts, but quickly pacified thanks to a Ring of Animal Control. A shark was evaded in the Garden of Luminous Coral. The Sultan's private yacht was sunk in its berth. (Those Imperial Marines really know how to party.) A wizard was cursed with inverted gravity, forcing him to walk on the ceilings and avoid areas of the palace that were open to the sky. The party discovered a secret door in the Grand Library that led down to a hidden underground cache of ancient and magical tomes, scrolls, and tablets.

From there they explored the upside down palace beneath the Sultan's premises. They fled from a swarm of undead, flesh eating beetles. They discovered a throne room guarded by an avatar of Sekmet, lion headed goddess of war. They discovered a roiling cistern supplying water to the palace above, fed by a spinning, careening Decanter of Endless Water set on "geyser". They climbed down the inverted towers hanging in a vast underground dome, the field of sand at its lowest peak littered with fallen architecture and toppled statues. All of these wonders they reported to the Sultan and his Vizier, and were well rewarded and regarded for their discoveries.

Analysis:

Bottom line, I think I had a lot of good stuff and fun ideas here, but it was all too much. If I don't watch myself, I have a tendency to overstuff a convention game, preparing a campaign's worth of material for a four hour session. I'd intended the carousing/consequences of said carousing segment to last for 7 nights, but we broke it off at 3 goes 'round the table by mutual agreement between the GM and players as it was all getting too complex for any of us to manage. (One of my players said they could almost see smoke coming out of my ears as I furiously tried to roll up and adjudicate each intricate situation.)

I think if I were to do this again, I'd cut out the results on the mishaps table that required a who/what/when/and where along with needing evidence to be gathered (For which I used a version of my Dodecahedrons of Detective Work.) and just have results be immediate, like the ones where a character is magically transformed or inducted into a secret society or something. Too many wheels within wheels within wheels here to work out for such a short term game.

I think I also made a mistake in making the carousing mandatory. It would have been better, as Miz. K suggested, that it be a discretionary/wagering mechanic with the Sultan's favor, closer to how the original rules were intended.

So anyway, it was fun enough, and I think despite the furious flailing about my players enjoyed themselves, but could have been better. I think the stuff I developed will fit nicely in a Thousand Year Sandglass book, so watch for that. I will make myself make it happen.

And thus, we bid farewell, for now, to the desert lands of Sanduk Ramul, the Empire of the East with its glittering capitol of Kalabad on the coast of the Crescent Sea.

Sim sim salabim!

The Sandglass shall return. So it shall be!

Gaze inside the Cabinet of Mystery!

Still coming down from Helgacon XI and getting stuff put away. Today I re-organized my minis in the ol' Cabinet O' Mystery, arranging the different departments much more sensibly, I think.

It is as I'd feared some time ago. I no longer collect miniatures, but genres of miniatures. Ah well...

The Creepy Crawl Chronicles - Session 5

Attendants:
Vlad Draculastein – Lvl 4 Dampyr
Greed – Lvl 5 Homanculus
Arongoth of Hogendaus – Lvl 5 Cleric
               Gruff, Snuff, & Squeeky, 3 zombified rat creature minions, 1 economy sized
Rael – Lvl 6 Thief

Henching:
Richard Darkmagic – Lvl 5 Magic User

Monsters Encountered (but not defeated):
1 Gray Ooze – Shot by arrows and clawed, struck by sword, last seen sinking back into flooded chamber whilst dissolving Squeeky. Still a menace.

Character Corpses and Casualties:
Squeeky the zombified rat ogre thing – Dissolved by a dredged up Gray Ooze and left to its fate in the flooded room.
Greed – Head severed by half corroded scimitar embedded in the Gray Ooze’s noisome mass. Later revived by cure spell & Lightning Bolt from Arongoth & Richard. Sometimes it’s good to be a homanculus.

Also lost: Vlad’s sword, padded armor, and bits of his pretty face.

No exp earned. Lesson learned: Oozes, Slimes, and Jellies ain’t no picnic.

Commentary:

The party worked their way eastward through the catacombs, and came across a flooded room with an empty coffin floating in it. I think they took some 10' poles and tried poking around the floor for treasure. Unfortunately for them, instead of riches beneath the murky water there lurked a protean menace that surged to the surface and thoroughly traumatized the poor lambs. 

After a brutal, boneless beatdown, the party beat feet toute suite, leaving Squeeky to his final fate as a jumbo sized portion of rat flavored slime chow. In addition to the pseudopod slamming and general dissolving that was going on, Greed took a critical hit and wound up temporarily separated from his head thanks to my deadly Dodecahedrons of Doom tables. Luckily for him, homanculi bounce back pretty easily after a little first aid and a few thousand volts. The party, however, never quite got over this encounter, and they were genuinely terrified of oozes, slimes, and jellies for the rest of the campaign. Heh heh heh.

Beware of the Blob!

Little Big Score

While we're on the subject of the history of my mini-collection, I suppose I ought to talk about the foundation of my fearsome (and perhaps farcical) force of figurines. Most folks who know me and have gamed with me have heard this one a few times. I might have even talked about it here on the blog before.

Well, long story short (pun intended), in the last post I talked about seeking a "DM's Set" of minis, a bunch of placeholder goons that players with their unique and personally chosen minis could go up against in my games. I got that modest boxed set of skaven for that purpose. And eventually I bought that one undead expansion for HeroQuest, which gave me a nice selection of skellies, zombies, and mummies to throw at them. (I'll pull those out and post a shot of 'em here eventually.)

But my big score, as it were, was acquiring a copy of the Battle Masters game just as it was getting remaindered at KayBee Toys at the local mall. I paid all of $10 bux for it. My memory is vague as of the time frame, but I wanna say it was around 1994-95. I remember setting about painting 'em all up over the subsequent summer break from college, with a bit of help from my brother. I spent an additional $10 on individual bases from the hobby store, so all told that adds up to 100 miniatures for around 20 cents per guy, which is good value any way you slice it. (Especially considering the ogre, all the mounted figs, and the cannon crew.)

I painted most of them, with the exception of the orcs with the skulls on their shields and the good guy knights, which were my brother's handiwork.

The human soldiers made a pretty good contingent of town guards, with a crossbow auxiliary to boot. The cannon crew pretty much hung out on top of the tower as tchotchkes on various shelves thru the years. As you can see we kinda ran out of steam before we got the main force of knights painted up, and I have no idea where the other two mounted human lords got to. The archers' faces were kinda flat and featureless, and I never really liked 'em too much, so while I painted 'em, they wound up in storage without bases. I dug 'em up for this shot and stuck 'em down with fun tack.

On the monsters' side, you'll note we left the riders off the wolves, because they were more useful to me as just dire wolves without goblins on 'em. I often wish that I'd just painted 'em up all black like I did #5 in the middle there, but since they're pretty much relics now there's no goin' back. No idea what became of the gobbo riders. I did the chaos archers up in those kaleidoscopic colors and have always called 'em "dragon men". Never used 'em much 'cos I don't tend to have a lot of use for archer figures in a dungeon setting. The beast men I did up in animal skin patterns and have always used them for gnolls. As I've said, the standard Games Workshop green skin on goblinoids and their ilk kinda bores me stupid, so with the orcs and goblins my brother and I went with skin tones reminiscent of shrunken heads or bog mummies, so that the eyes and teeth would really pop. The shields on the orcs and the doom guards were originally drawn on with fine point marker, but that faded over time, so recently (around last year or so) I dug up a bunch of WH shield decorations I had in my bits box, painted 'em up, and glued them on to gussy the old goons up a bit.

And of course, most of the massed marchers got their own rub on numbers so I could keep 'em straight in combat. 

So that's pretty much been the backbone of my mini collection for a while now.

Skaven and Me.

Waaay back in the day, back when I was a fledgeling DM just out of high school in the early 1990's and running games for friends in college, miniatures were kind of scarce, and I was kinda growing frustrated with the vagueness of "I attack the nearest one" when running combats in the dungeon. Most players could scrounge up a figure to represent their character, but massed mobs of monsters were a tough thing to conjure on the tabletop.

So to rectify this situation I purchased a box set with the idea of having them be general purpose dungeon goons. This was back when Games Workshop was just getting into plastics. Even back then goblins and orcs bored me to tears, so I decided to go with this old box set of GW skaven, since I liked their look and there were 10 of them which is a serviceable number for not a lot of money. (How times have changed. Games Workshop's products and "not a lot of money" don't tend to wind up in the same sentence these days. Bah.)

The way things were at most hobby shops, you just couldn't cheaply or easily get a large number of the same thing if you were buying blister packs of metal minis. (I think by now you've noticed that I've perennially been reluctant to spend a lot of money on minis. Well, to be clear, I mean not a lot of money PER mini. I still buy enough minis for it to be a minor material vice. Say what you will, buying toys makes me happy. My sweet spot right now is between $2-$4 dollars per dude, unless they're especially large or unusual.)

I wasn't quite the ultra-literalist mini-user I am now, so I figured they could do duty as anything from goblins to orcs to gnolls to whatever the encounter tables coughed up. As long as I had some consistent baddies to act as tactical tokens, I was satisfied.

These guys are some of the oldest minis in my collection. Alas, poor #2 got cronched by a friend's parents' hyperactive Australian shepherd when my minis case was left open on the floor of their house in a moment of inattention. (His mom felt so bad about it she got me a gift certificate to a local restaurant as a weregeld, which was totally unnecessary but still greatly appreciated.)

I have a bunch of these old style Warhammer Quest skaven in my copious unpainted pile. I could do up a replacement for him. But I dunno. He'd stand out. My techniques have evolved a lot since I painted these guys. (I think they were actually painted with my art school acrylic paints out of tubes, rather than the bottled craft store paint I work with these days.)

Actually, the one thing about these guys that was truly irreplaceable were those rub down numbers. They're really hard to find these days. (At least for cheap. :-\) A lot of art supply and hobby stores just don't stock 'em in that size. I dearly wish I still had that sheet. It was lost in the endless shuffle of papers I've always been surrounded with long, long ago.

The numbers were my big solution to "I hit the nearest one." Now I could have my players tell me what number they were aiming for.

A lot later, I bought a box set of Rat Ogres and Giant Rats, when I was filling out my assortment of dungeon dangers. I blogged about it a while ago here. I was inspired by Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition when I painted up the Clan WhateverblahblahWHFluff handlers. Because if I'm anything at all, I'm a huge nerd.

And that's that about my rats.

Fantasy Furniture

Been doin' a little recreational painting the past couple days. Nothin' too dramatic, just workin' on my backlog.

Yesterday I decided to have a go at getting a bunch of dungeon set pieces I'd accumulated painted up. The treasure piles were my most recent acquisition, gotten with the idea that I ought to have some metaphorical carrots to go with all the monsters wielding their sharp, pointy sticks.

Although I think when you've moved from collecting characters and monsters to collecting set pieces you've kinda turned a corner. Ah well. C'est la donjon.

Here's a couple more shots:

This one's a real looker...

This guy got painted up over the past week while I was working on other stuff. Another pretty iconic D&D critter a la Reaper. He was an impulse purchase, once again driven by the fact that Bones are so wonderfully cheap, and has been sitting in my backlog box for a long time.

I've never run a game with a Beholder in it, although I guess I'm more than adequately equipped to do so now. I tend to reserve those rounded bases for more science fiction themed minis, but I think this guy could play in a variety of sandboxes, depending on the situation.

 

I do wonder what initial games with the Beholder must have been like, back in the days when the Greyhawk Supplement was just a twinkle in Robert Kuntz & Gary Gygax's eye, so to speak. (From my reading on the 'net, I gather that Kuntz's older brother Terry came up with the Beholder, and it caught Gygax's eye, again so to speak, as a good candidate to add to the monster roster.)

Beholders are very much a D&D monster, something more out of a pulp science fiction story than folklore or fairy tales. They feel almost like a pen & paper prototype for a video game sprite, a list of game effects with a cursory personality (they're mean and bad and want to kill you) and a thin veneer of monster colored paint wrapping the whole thing up.

Of course as 40+ years of D&D have passed they've been fleshed out and riffed upon. (They got a big boost to their backstory in Spelljammer, which I still have a fondness for, even though it could have been a lot better than it was.)

If you're, like, 80% eyeball, do you really want to get within arm's reach of somebody with a dagger?

I may sound like I'm being critical, but actually I kinda like how semi-abstract they are in earlier editions. They're a product of the rising creative tempo of the game, back when there weren't any boundaries on ideas and anything strange and memorable could take root.

So here's lookin' at you, Beholders.

Talkin' testudines

A.K.A. Turtles, tortoises, terrapins.

My lady riding the sea turtle from yesterday isn't the only rock ribbed reptile in my collection. Here are a few more hard shelled horrors to contemplate.

First off, a buncha what Reaper calls Spikeshells. I painted 'em up for "Island on the Crescent Sea" but they never saw action. Still good to have as heavy support for lizard men or other scaly scaries.

Note the blue, purple, orange & red markings.

They haunted a domed temple on their island where you were bound to encounter this guy.

He's a custom job, built from a Schleich giant tortoise and a bunch of GW lizard man heads I had on hand. A little glue, a little paint, and I've got a heavily armored hydra-esque behemoth to keep your hapless adventurers hopping. 

Plus this guy can pull double (or triple, or as many heads as he's got) duty as either a magical monster in a fantasy game or a massive mutant in a sci-fi or Gamma World game. 

I originally cooked up the idea for this beastie a while ago when I was making up swamp monsters for the Southern fried follow up to my original Mutant Bastards game. Behold, and beware, the Snag. 

If you ran into one of these in the river, you'd be in trouble. Hopefully as this year rolls on I'll be able to dredge up some more mutant mayhem. We'll see.

What the shell ?