Minicon Recap

• Last weekend at Manhattan Minicon, I ran and completed The Redoubt of Hades over two play sessions.

Players were Greg, who I met for a pickup game of GURPS Infinite World, and who has played through two of my other con games, Beneath the Fallen Tower, and Shame of the Deepguard. He played Jelani the halberdier, and made great use of called shots to the neck

Next was Andre, who has played several characters in my online game, Northport, including the goblin priest of the Erl King, Zeelzeel Shadowspear.  He was torn between Marlo, the thief of indeterminate gender, and Zeelzeel’s necromancer cousin, longtime NPC Razakeel Shadowcloak , who had some zombie allies. He ended up settling on Marlo, due to his love of knives.

Mark, enthusiastic and new to GURPS, was also attracted to Razakeel, became torn between Ofelia, the Sleep centric mage from Shame of the Deepguard, and Thornstripe, a movement and missile mage, equipped with both fireball, and the now off-book Winged Knife. He succumbed to the sweet lure of pyromania, which worked well against the undead being faced.

Nick briefly contemplated an adventurer, but decided to complete the classic quartet and wonderfully played the cleric Sister Clarissa

(Note: her will is 13, not 11)

Nick is French, and my campaign is set in a caricature of medieval France, so there were some awkward moments as I mangled the names of some of my NPCs. He took everything in stride and was hilarious in his depiction of the charitable but severe priestess.

“Good morning Heretic, we are here to enter the Undercity.”

The adventure started in the common room of the Adventurers Guild, which is my conceit for accommodating a West Marches style of play.  They were called upstairs by Bellarius (high elf Agent from DF15), the secretary of Camilla the Quest Coordinator (Agent+Adept) who brought them to her, where they also met with Plutocrat Remulos of the Hadereum (cleric+a couple of social lenses with rank and wealth), Margeaux le Manifique (the apparent sole survivor of that poorly managed expedition by a bad player), and Karlow the orc working for the Department of Acueducts and Sewers.

Due to increased cult activity in the Undercity, several members of the hadereum (12 cultists and 2 initiates) had entered to rededicate a long abandoned temple of Hades in order to strengthen the presence of law amid the chaos below. Two weeks ago (a week before Margeaux returned) they went dark, and a guarded caravan of food and supplies sent to them disappeared.

The route from the Hadereum has been blocked, as something large (the bhole {super dire Rotworm} that came through the Ymid’s Bone Gate) collapsed part of the tunnels. Margeaux’s story suggests another route, and Karlow will be their guide.

Margeaux is accompanied by the ghost  dof her dead husband Claude, who really wishes their wedding vows had included “to death do we part”, and she talks to him, suggesting he keeps himself hidden with the Plutocrat present. (The Hadereum likes everyone to stay dead where they belong)

Claude spells out something in water drops from a glass nearby “Anything to get away from you!” Which is spotted by Thornstripe on a critical perception roll, allowing the mage to see the shimmering form of the spirit.

Sister Clarissa, having higher purpose: slay undead starts chanting an exorcism, which is interrupted by Remulos, who asks her to refrain from her non-pagan ways in his presence (Sister Clarissa is a Triunist, and comes from the Bishop of Sonne, who is currently paying Adventurers to fight wights in the abandoned Monastery).

They proceed to Ashbury’s Abattoir , meet the crew their, and find their way to the ladder well left unsecured when Margeaux’s group had lowered their dwarf sized iron golem down it. This caused grumbling from Karlow, who closed the hatch. Now on the second level, they ran into the terribly hungry and frightened young speaking Otyugh (IQ6) in a catchment room, trying to keep out a handful of horde zombies who fell to fireballs, thrown knives, halberd work, and True Faith. (The zeds had been released from impromptu burial chambers by evil cultists with the Brotherhood of the Dead perk).

Karlow grumbled some more, fed and locked it in its pen and the catchment room., And they determined that the local Sewer employee had been killed by a member of  Margeaux’s group…

They dove into a room that recently held dead to avoid a horde of plague zombies, and Jelani rolled a critical strength failure trying to push the door closed, and instead pushed something out…

Just the TiP

After this encounter, they entered the pool room, where Margeaux’s party met their demise, (along with a crowd of undead whose corpses were  the scattered about)  along with the reanimated remains of her party. The guild was paying them to recover their guild badges, so they collected all but Timeon’s. When confronted with the puzzle of lighting fires atop the pylons, the mage fireballed one, and critically failed another, stunning himself.

Lighting both pylons (in a very Legend of Zelda way) caused the fountain to spill gold coins into the mildly caustic water (the golem had rusted through in a week). Unfortunately, not lighting them simultaneously (which two people with torches could have done) released The Thing in the Pool, or as my players called it, “just the TiP”. It was a multi-tentacled elder thing that had a fear aura, and laid heavily into the party. We even used a bit of Gaming Ballistic’s Fantastic Dungeon Grappling when dealing with the TiP wrapping tentacles around Jelani before it could eat her.

After it was defeated, with both haste and great haste being cast, and both the gold and the golem’s orichalcum maul, which Sister Clarissa took despite lacking the requisite strength.

They exited the pool room into a nearby storage room where Timeon was holding out, using one ancient barrel of rations for food, and another for used foods, and he shot Marlo with his crossbow, and the tribe accepted him as a member, finding out while resting and healing that he had been unwilling to re-enter the pool room for fear of the Void Brute that Frer Noe had summoned to kill the previous party, and  because he broke his lockpicks on the outer door. Once some fatigue was recovered (including some from Lend Energy) they exited the anteroom by means of Karlow’s key, and ran into a horde of plague zombies

True faith and great haste again ruled the day, as they cleaved,  mauled, stabbed, shot, and fireballed their way through the fleeing horde, and ended up Fantastically Grappling a cultist who had been herding the dead.

The second cultist ran ahead and opened a door, releasing three New and Improved Wights.

Unlike my previous versions, which were unkillable with an Achilles heel of Silver or Magical Weapons, these had Injury Resistance (50%) to attack forms other than fire and silver or enchanted weapons. Skeletal undead take 2x from crushing weapons, which cancel out the injury resistance, allowing Sister Clarissa to pound the wights, which is good, because two out of three resisted true faith.  Jelani was closed with after missing a neck shot with her halberd, and was the first to suffer energy drain (FP) from the wights. Marlow made a head shot count, and Karlow stepped in, and was eventually overrun, losing enough FP to end up in a HP lowering Death spiral.

Weakened and afraid of Karlow turning, they took out the wights.

Soon after, they rescued the worshipers trapped in the Redoubt, and headed home.

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The Redoubt of Hades at Manhattan Minicon

Today I ran my first Face to face DF game set in my home campaign setting of Northport!

Cultists, Horde Zombies, New and Improved Wights! Critical Hits! Critical Failures! Energy Drain! Just the TiP!

 

Recovering from bad players

In my long running pbp Dungeon Fantasy game, Northport, I have had a number of troublesome players. Most of the time, this only amounts to people leaving unexpectedly after I have put in work to integrate them into a group, and wrote out stats for the projected likely course of adventure, incorporation of backstory into the setting, and even assistance with the character builds.

I have several players running multiple characters that were abandoned by their creators because they left in the middle. Life happens, and the speed of pbp is not for everyone.

When I was running a version of this game on playbyweb, I did have characters left hanging because their behavior on other forae got them booted by the admins.

I have had some players abrasive enough that other players quit in frustration after attempting pvp actions that were so disruptive I had to ban them.

This player was different, and had played for a while, rubbing other players the wrong way, and eventually being banned for a time; his characters were always complaining to guild authorities for maltreatment, when they had deliberately witheld information from the party, including party members who held guild rank.He also continuously demanded to be in charge, and was generally a real pain, and were so disruptive I had them removed.

After a year or more they came back, wanting to play a character with guild rank who had a loyal ally group. As had been previously discovered, characters built mostly on allies tended to be weaker than their base template; most of the juniors group I run had started as allies of a character, who while 250 points, was effectively only a 150 point character with a ton of allies. This one ended up being an agent with about 40 points extra.

I had another character, a wizard who had a golem servant, built as expensive property on the $500 to one point ratio, and with all of the prerequisite enchantment spells, a while before enchantment was officially written out of DF.

So this new player wanted a golem as well, and suggested that it colud be built as a dwarf sized iron golem, as suggested in a pyramid article. This was fairly pricy, and I explained that the character would be built from a much lower pool or resources.

Fine, it was not much worse than an ogre barbarian another player had, so it was permitted. I had plans for weak flooring and ladders that would not support its 600lb weight, and pentagrams embedded in the floor, and no-mana areas it couldn’t enter, so there were suitable checks and balances.

Eventually, his group, which had been dealing with other guild interests that resulted in points in secondary guild businesses, like my assorted underground tavern schemes, needed more party members for exploration. (A lot of the senior guild folk get their income from interest in caravan guard companies, gambling houses and taverns instead of doing adventuring; that kind of work is for player characters.)

Several of my standard hireling NPC’s joined for brief excursions; Ludlow and Razakeel,  Molag, and Dolpho, a cutpurse who originally worked for the same PC who had the rest of tne juniors as his ally group.

Because of another player’s intolerance of thugs, ruffians, and other lowlifes (i.e. half of the guild membership) that player and his friend had their characters join his group instead of one that included some of the above sorts of miscreants after seeing him recruiting retainers in the guild common area, and after a very short period dealing with his abrasiveness, they walked out and abandoned him. They later spoke down about him in the common areas, and when he next looked for hirelings, he got some very dubious characters. Most of these questionable types were built using the suggestions for unreliable hirelings in DF 15 . Unlike other recruiters in the guild, he made no attempt to vett them in any way, such as reading the character descriptions, or making use of Area Knowledge: guild, a skill the character actually had…

Here are four of them:

Frer Noe, who was presented with the same avatar portrait as all of the other cultists encountered in this game. To be fair, I have used that picture to represent pilgrims of good gods, but I hadn’t done so at the time Frer Noe joined the party, and this image had been used for years for the evil cultists.

Frer Noe is a cultist from DF 15, buffed up to 125 points, but no true initiate.
Att:90
Adv:47
D/q:-54
Sk:18
Sp:20
Total:125

ST:11 DX:11 IQ:12: HT:12
Hp:11 will:13 per:12 FP:16
Bs:5.50 MV: 5 D: 8
Adv:
5 clerical investment
20 power investiture 2,
1 natural elder cultist
(variant of natural demonologist,
allows planar summons without prerequisite)
3 knows the words (planar summons)
5 Will+1
12 energy reserve 4
1 Adventurer’s guild membership
Dis
-5 Voices
-15 Fanatic
-10 delusions
-5 disciplines of faith
-10 struggling
-5 reduced move
mumbles his prayers constantly,
not particularly hygenic,
Has scratches on his face
Fingernails stained black

Theology (elder) 1 10
religious ritual 2 11
occultism 2 12
Meditation 2 11
demon lore 2 12
Elder lore 2 12
undead lore 1 11
Knife 2 12
Ax/mace 4 12

and the following spells:
Lend Energy 2 13
Share Energy 2 13
Lend Vitality 2 13
Steal Health 4 14
Decay 2 13
Planar Summons 8 15

The next up was Gaspard the pseudo swashbuckler, built on only 72 points

Guard with a little extra
Att:70
Adv:21
D/q:-55
Sk:36
Total:72

St: 12 dx: 12 iq:10 ht:11
Hp: 12 will: 10 per: 10 fp: 11
BS: 6.75 MV: 6 dodge: 10 parry: 11
Adv:
15 Combat reflexes
5 Rapier wit
1 guild membership
-5 compulsive carousing,
-5 compulsive gambling,
-15 greed,
-5 Overconfidence
-10 Impulsive,
-10 Bully
Quirks:
Lecherous,
dishonest face,
vain,
sarcastic,
disloyal

Skills
Rapier 8 14
Main gauche 8 14
Throw knife 1 12
Crossbow 1 12
Brawling 2 13
Sex appeal 2 11
Gambling 2 10
Carousing 2 13
Climbing 1 11
Dancing 1 11
Fast talk 8 12

Equipment
Cheap Rapier
Main gauche
Cloth gambeson armor DR1 overall
Jack of plates torso armor DR 4

Then came Timeon, a killer posing as a thief:

Timeon is a killer (125pt)
At: 110
Adv:31
D/q:-55
Sk: 39
Total:125
St 11 dx 14 iq 10 ht 12
Hp 11 per 12 will 9 fp 12
T/s 1d-1/1d+1 (1d+1/2d+1)
Bs:7.5 mv:6 dodge:7 parry:12
Adv:
15 combat reflexes
5 Resistant to poison+3
2 night vision 2
8 surprise striking ST+4
1 guild membership
Dis:
-5Callous
-10 bloodlust
-15 greedy
-10 Struggling
-10 no sense of humor
Q always dresses dark,
smokes his blades black (immediately post combat)
Will only eat what he has seen prepared
Mildly paranoid
Aspires to the torturers guild, practices when he can

Skills:
Knife 4 16
Fast draw knife 1 14
Garrotte 1 14
Stealth 4 15
Crossbow 4 16
Brawling 1 14
Poisons 4 10
Streetwise 2 10
Urban survival 2 11
Wrestling 2 13
Broadsword 4 15
Traps 2 10
Lockpick 2 14
Intimidation 2 10
First aid 1 10
Climbing 1 13
Shadowing -12
Proffessional skill: torturer 1 9

Wears a gambeson (DR 1) with an anti garrote collar
He carries three vials of monster drool
A cheap thrusting broadsword, crossbow, quarrels,
About 5 assorted knives, a garrotte and a tallow candle for blacking.

The final member of the quartet was Margeaux le Manifique, a charlatan allied with her husband’s ghost, at 187 points:

Mageaux is a charlatan.

ST 10 DX 12 IQ 13 HT 11
hp 10 per 13 will 13 fp 11
Bs:5.75 mv: 5 dodge: 8

Advantages 41
Magery 0 5
charisma+1 5
Attractive 4
Ally 16, appears on a 12 (her former husband Claude)
Spirit empathy 10
Spirit Talker 2 10
guild membership 1

disadvantages-50
Voices -5
overconfidence -5
greed -15
selfish -5
struggling -10
Q
Acts mysterious,
argues with Claude,
acts as if she has real access to oracular abilities
Wears layers of scarves and many bangles,
Avoids real mages
She has most of the skills of an apprentice, and magery 0.

Skills: 42
Occultism 4 14
fortune telling 6 15
thaumatology 1 10
alchemy 1 10
fast talk 4 13+
Performance 2 12
Acting 2 12
Current affairs, Guild 2 14
magical ritual 2 11
sleight of hand 8 12
streetwise 1 12
knife 4 13
throw knife 4 13
Sex appeal 2 14
Theology 1 12
Hidden lore: spirits 1 13
Meditation 1 12
spells:24

Light 1 11
ignite fire 1 11
simple illusion 8 15
Sense foes 1 11
Sense emotion 1 11
Persuasion 8 15
Foolishness 4 13

She does have a variety of low rent spells,
Along with performance and fortune telling.
She also has a ghostly ally with aportation, for 8 pts.
Medium, spirit empathy,
delusional, voices, wierdness magnet

Her ghost is Claude, a bog standard ghost from DF9, he has magery 1 (affects substantial)For 30 points, and the spells apportation, poltergeist, complex illusion, all  at 15,
And has a habit of writing angry things on damp mirrors,
(Which she also fakes with sleight of hand.)

ATT 110
ad 51
dis 50
q5
sk 44
spells 24
187 pts

 

The bad behavior got worse from there. The player kept adding orichalcum items to his characters, (the enchantress had the requisite spell chain, but the process involves an immense amount of energy as per Dr.Krom’s rules, and needs to be played through) and started inflating the points and rewriting the characters until they were completely blown out of proportion.  I offered him the chance to fix them, and he couldn’t even do that, so out he went, booted and banned from returning.

The one advantage to this mess, is that I will be running a tabletop game using 187 point characters at the next Manhattan Minicon, and will use the same adventure,  with the addition of the undead forms of most of these characters.  In my timeline, only Margeaux and Timeon escaped, along with a young otyugh (they unlocked it from its cage in the sewers, to which it returned.) The others were slain by a void brute summoned by Frer Noe, and the golem was left to rust in a pool.

Recent play and more

A few weeks ago I had an opportunity to run Shame of the Deepguard at Manhattan Minicon V . Thanks again to Lydia, Devin, Dan and Greg!.

The game was a 125pt Dungeon Fantasy objective oriented adventure. It started off in a bar, operated by a couple of the rescued NPC’s from Beneath the Fallen Tower; Wade the merchant (now a mere minstrel after his last venture was robbed by hobgoblins), Ebbet the halfling, and Valdor the dwarf. Playing were Marlo the thief, played by  Lydia, Ofelia the Mage, played by Dan, and an unnamed fighter played by Devin, along with Greg’s returning even archer, Griff. They were met in the tavern by Gillen Whitmore, a one eyed veteran guard and crossbowman, who they all immediately began referring to as Rooster Cogburn.

Originally Noah was supposed to reprise Erik the Cleric of Nodens, but he was at another gaming event at a new FLGS. We need more of those things! As a result, I gave everyone an extra healing potion.

Once Gillen laid out what he needed (brave adventurers to help him retrieve more silver than he could carry) they suspiciously signed on.  As the pregens were already kitted out, they left immediately.  Unlike BTFT, this was to be more dungeon, less hex, so that had one encounter along the way: a hunting party of Hobgoblins, carrying a deer and a boar on two spears.  They got a few shots in, failed to Sleep the 13 HT hobgoblins, and cut them down swiftly, partly enabled by a critical miss that self-disarmed a glaive wielder, and by the combination of the overseer wasting attacks whipping his men forward, and the hobgoblins all out attacking due to a combination of bloodlust and intolerance of elves.

This gave them a taste of what to expect, and when they arrived near the abandoned mines, mostly played out, but still workable buy the goblin slaves of the hobgoblins, they quickly saw the wisdom of going into the mine by way of the hidden back door rather than the front, which was a fortified gatehouse full of archers and a murder hole with boiling lead.

From the back door, which Gillen opened with a meteoric iron key folded up behind his eye patch, thoroughly grossing them out, they fairly quickly dispatched the hobs at the guardpost, taking a little longer to bring down the squad leader. The hobgoblins again tried to dogpile the elf, and he needed two sets of healing potions by the end of the next fight.

The reinforcements from area 4 came after them, and Gillen used his key to open the locked and dusty armory, and they left by the back way and ambushed the hobs.  At this point, Griff’s luck ran out. What a difference better armor makes! This time, a couple hobs were put to sleep.

I passed Gillen’s sheet over to Griff’s player, and let him know about the ulterior motives of that character.

The next move was toward the bridge, where they ran afoul of some foul bats. These were dispersed by sleep and a couple of crossbow bolts and sword swipes, but for some reason they decided to run across in the near dark, and first the fighter, then Marlo fell off the side. He snagged a grip on the edge of the bridge, and then they caught each other’s hand and he made a strength roll to get them both up to the bridge, where they proceeded a little more carefully.

In a cavern across the bridge, they parleyed with some gargoyles, thank’s to Ofelia’s diplomacy skill and the offering of Marlo’s wheel of cheese, and they got some intel on the local heavy, a fire slorn grown from an egg left behind by the departing Deepguard who had cached several one pound ingots of coin grade silver. The hope was that the mine had enough silver in it would deflect Detect Earth Spells, much as the back door was fronted with a thin sheet of meteoric iron to make it undetectable.

Unfortunately at the time, I forgot about the trace silver in the mine and let them detect it.

They beat the slorn by stabbing it in the eyes and dodging its fiery breath just in time for the rest of Gillen’s crew to ride up on them as the con came to a close and the Jersey street library kicked everyone out, so we didn’t get to play through the attack of the Deepguard.

 

Similarly, they never headed south into the mines, where they would have found the goblins slaving away at smelting silver out of lead-alloy, and seen the extravagance of the Hobgoblin women.  and their bears. Bears? Usually AD&D hobs are encountered with Flesh eating apes, but as I made my Hobs to be Hussars, I thought bears would suit better. I hadn’t populated the place with the hobgoblin young,  and if I get around to an OSR release (because I am not a licensed 3rd party DFRPG content producer like Doug Cole (Hey! go pledge his kickstarter. Right now. I will wait)), I will probably flesh that out a bit.

I got to learn a few interesting things aboutsmelting and silver mining from wikipedia, and the addition of a dwarf as one of the pregens was going to help spread some of that out, but the dwarf player backed out along with a few others.

 

right here, you can snatch up my con documents, which should only make you want to go and buy a copy of DFRPG right now, and while you are at it, pick up DF 15 Henchmen while you are at it, if you like 125 point play. If you want to see my templates for 75 point play, check here.

The material presented here is my original creation, intended for use with the GURPS system from Steve Jackson Games. This material is not official and is not endorsed by Steve Jackson Games.

 

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My Hobgoblins

 

As I mentioned on my recent podcast

I have a slight issue with the depiction of Hobgoblins as samurai, which , while cool, and based a little on the images of the battle masks found in some kits,

There is something a little racist about that, and there is also a cool European tradition of scale armor worn by raiders

Vikings, and other warriors of northern and northeastern Europe had some really cool looking armor. I think the blank looking mail mask and pointy helmet combo evokes something menacing, like these psychos from Frostgrave.

There is nothing that says “Bad Guys” who need to get murdered by your Adventurers like a good pointy mask.

 

While in Northport, Hobgoblins are a player character option, and most of their tribe is involved in the hemp and rope making trades, as well as in the local jugga league, I am going to be running a sequel adventure to Beneath the Fallen Tower.

The hobgoblins in this scenario are pretty much the AD&D ones, as I am dealing with a table of mostly non-GURPS players, I wanted some simplified tropes. The women of this tribe, which has claimed ownership of an abandoned silver mine, are pretty tough as well, although they wear a lot of embroidered clothing that is more central European than the kimonos that would go with samurai style hobgoblins ala Sutherland.

The adventure will feature a heist, betrayal, fire breathing lizards, hobgoblins and enslaved goblins.

 

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Malign or Misunderstood?

It is a common point of contention between tabletop gamers as to whether or not monstrous non humans in games are aligned with fell forces, and therefore inherently evil, or if theyare simply ‘other’ and victims of a bad rap.

I grew up with AD&D, after starting with the magenta box. When we played B2, we slaughtered everyone. The damn hobgoblins had a larder full of human heads, and the DMG had that whole “nits make lice” essay about orcs.

Some of this stems from the fiction in Appendix N, like the extremely anti-human nature of the creatures of Faerie and Chaos in The Broken Sword, or the origin story of Orcs in LotR.

My preferred game system doesn’t have alignments, except for specialty characters that recieve powers from extraplanar entities, like clerics, and holy/unholy warriors, and half -infernals and half-celestials. On the other hand, even someone with demonic heritage can be forgiven by the gods, but they still detect as evil.

So, in a game where only the card carrying servants of hell actually detect as evil, the moral circumstances of inhuman creatures are subject to question.  Now, that said, there are creatures that (at least in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, my preferred game) have severely negative character traits, like bully, bloodlust, intolerance, and sadism. The kind of people you can’t win an argument with, or negotiate a lasting peace with.

In my personal game, goblins and orcs are members of society, although there are regional territorial disputes and percieved political slights that become protracted wars with atrocities committed by both sides, human and inhuman, largely because of the nature of mercenary soldiers, as opposed to the overall moral or amoral nature of entire species.

In my convention game, where I am demonstrating DF to an audience more familiar with D&D, my hobgoblins are devil worshipping slave takers that delight in torture, as opposed to the hemp growing sports fanatics and rope makers that they are in my home game.

Will they detect as evil? They will certainly detect as foes, although the priest may, as he is empowered by demons, but the bulk of the tribe will not. Are they villains who must be stopped? Yes. Is it possible that the young may be innocent? Perhaps. In this case, they were raised in a society that believes strongly in corporal punishment, reveres cruelty and revenge, and respect for their elders, (or at least those who hold positions of rank in the tribe). The young who are old enough to know the members of their group will certainly resent whoever murders their family, without seeing their personal exclusion from slaughter as an act of mercy.

Just the same,  adventurers with personal codes of honor or a sense of duty that extends beyond their friends and community (not entirely common in this game system, and actually lacking amongst the pre-gens for the con game, who are mostly murder-hobos) would feel some qualms about putting them to the sword. Those with bloodlust, callousness or the dwarven code of honor will not.

My home game is not so cut and dried, as seen here.

How do you treat the foes of mankind? Are they hellspawn, aligned spiritually with the lower planes, or are they a people with their own agendas and culture?

Divergence and Parallel Thinking

One of the blogs I follow is Bloodof Prokopius, written by a gamer who , like me, started questioning aspects of his spirituality around the same time he started playing D&D. Also like me, he sees that some form of mildly oppressive and ubiquitous religion is essential to the medeival mindset, and therefore to the implied setting of AD&D.

My questioning of spirituality and study of religions led me along the path from a Catholic to a Neopagan spiritual identity. This blogger, on the other hand, went from an agnostic to an Orthodox Christian.

We do agree on many points, particularly in the depth religions bring to games. I personally favor a L. Sprague de Camp style of polytheism in my game, however there are some truly innovative ideas in his exploration of Monotheism vs Demonic cults, one of which, while specifically derived from scripture in this post lead to a description of an oppressive empire ruled by ghasts, the same idea came about independently over here, in a more secular manner, a couple years ago on the RPG Knights blog. The adventure in question, Tomb of the Ghast Queen, is a DCC funnel sort of adventure where the PC’s are competing with a couple dozen rivals to escape imprisonment by beating a dungeon that is part puzzle, part gladiator pit.

I would expect that player death would be handled by playing the other survivors, which I imagine would lead to fairly random characters loaded with the spoils (particularly healing potions) of the defeated. I can see the adventure being run for a number of systems, (it is written for 5e, where survivability is kinda high) with different results based on expected lethality of systems.

On another topic, I am preparing to run another low point DF game at Manhattan Minicon, this time for 125 point “leveled up” versions of the 75 point characters I ran through Beath the Fallen Tower at the last minicon. The builds are similar, but not identical to those of DF15, and the adventure will feature an abandoned mine overrun by hobgoblins, and some hidden treasure, and is called Shame of the DeepGuard. You can find more about the DeepGuard on this blog, although I have made some modifications to the equipment of Nether Flight, based on my perusal of common armor types worn by 14th century mercenaries on Pintrest.

In addition to various projects I am working on for Gabor Lux, John Stater just released Nod 35, which explores a Greek mythology themed area of his neverending hexcrawl, including art by me and maps by Dyson.

Additionally, Malrex and Merciless Merchants released Tar Pits of the Bone Toilers, a level 5-8 adventure for Labyrinth Lord and featuring a piece of art from one of my earliest stock art packs, currently on sale for a mere $0.75 , and they used my Xorn!

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Session Play Report for Manhattan Minicon Beneath the Fallen Tower using 75pt GURPS Dungeon Fantasy

I cut down on startup time by assembling a stack of illustrated pregens using my stock art. We had seven players, one of whom was in the InfiWorlds game I participated in earlier this summer. He built an elf using my template (I will be eventually attaching a pdf of the pregens and his character) and there were a couple of people with prior DF experience.

Noah Green, who had played a cleric of Nodens for the prior playtest using Swords and Wizardry Continual Light, did so again, using a custom character; igave him the off-template characteristics of Weirdness Magnet and the perk Weird Dreams from DF14, and Dreaming Skill as his patron deity is the god of the Dreamlands. I outfitted him with an Errol Otus grade horned helmet, a shield emblazoned with a Nightgaunt, and an Elder sign as a holy symbol. The others played a brigandine clad halberdier, who was excellent in the few combats we had, an apprentice wizard who served as a powerhouse with both Mass Sleep and Diplomacy. Our oversize barbarian woman managed to avoid going berserk, and employed her size enhanced intimidation more than her gigantic greataxe. We rounded out with a knife weilding thief, who did a fair amount of climbing, an adventurer character who used her double dose of luck to shoot up goblins with her crossbow, and sadly, the low strength of the elf made some of his attacks less than effective.

Their primary opponents, wolves and SM-2 goblins were largely cut down by the halberdier (who took out the wolves and a giant centipede) and by the use of Mass Sleep boosted in frequency of use by paut and Lend Strength from the cleric.

Along the way, they encountered the tinker, and glommed some information about the woods from him. they met the patrol, and directed them towards a purported campsite of the bandits, met the Death Vision addled bandit who had run afoul of the necromantrix, and hastened him on toward his envisioned death at the hands of Mama ogre. They actively sought her out after finding her lost son, and reunited the family, much as the first group had, although they did that before getting to the ruins, instead of taking him along to bash wolves with. They ran into the elves, had a neutral engagement with them, and almost headed to the lost shrine in search of pilgrims, but were working on rescuing Wyatt for the reward money.

After knocking out goblins and slaying wolves, they negotiated for the release of Wyatt and the other prisoners, offering a trade of the only treasure they had found, magic arrows and a silver knife.

Like the previous group, they frequently showed people the wanted poster, while covering up the part about the reward.

They also found the bugbear’s well entrance, but instead of coming in the back way, they used Magelock on it and went in the front door. (Someone must have played Rappan Athuk). They saw the skeletons, and like the goblins, did not engage them.

Lost of scrounging, search, some cartography, diplomacy and intimidation used.

Spells used: detect magic, detect illusion, mass sleep, magelock, lend energy, and lend health.

Not a bad run for four hours. If we had had six, they might have gotten to the south end of the map.

The alchemy room has a no mana area, as demonstrated by the “broken” continual light object, and can be used to open the magelocked chest.

The lab has an assortment if potions, and books (primers) typically worth $50 on Alchemy, Thaumatology, and Thanatology. The actual spellbooks are worth several times that amount.

The skeletons are programmed to ignore those wearing amulets, which all have Melchiir’s mystic mark.

 

Get Beneath the Fallen Tower Here for 2.99

Get the DF lite templates

Get the conversion notes, and the actual pregens Used and prepared here

Like any of this? Support my Patreon!

I had originally intended to run a second session, using leveled up 125 pt versions of the pregens – get that here

 

 

Crypts of Doom and recent play of low level GURPS DF

I just got these (minus the paint, and the Crypt of the Sorcerer box. These Heritage Dungeon Dwellers Paint ‘n’Play sets were where I started back in 1979, although I only had the Crypt of tne Sorcerer and the Level 2 Monsters and Treasures assortment. Due to lead content and small children in my house, and a fifteen year hiatus from D&D, and a lack of ability to keep up my storage unit, all of my minis and 1e books went to a friend, and I fear they were all lost forever when he and his wife divorced. Things happen, and my midlife gaming is nostalgic driven for the abe of wonder when I was reading Lieber and Moorcock and painting minis without an actual gaming group. These were my grail to acquire, and I will be paying for it for some time to come (Nostalgic ain’t cheap). Some unboxing/ painting pists should be forthcoming in the months ahead.

I also got to run Beneath the Fallen Tower using 75pt GURPS Dungeon Fantasy characters as originally intended. No casualties, lots of scrounging, search, diplomacy, and lore rolls! Slaughter of centipedes and wolves, some goblins, and effective double teaming of Mass Sleep and lend energy. More to follow!

Disasters with Lidocaine and an upcoming Con

So, earlier this spring, I developed a pinched nerve in my shoulder, which caused me to have shooting pains and numbness in my left arm. I had about six weeks of physical therapy, and was pretty well cured… until last Saturday evening, when a sudden Spasm in my shoulder set it off again, only worse. This led to an urgicare visit, where they shot me full of Toradol and sent me home with a hit of Valium, and a script for lidocaine cream.  I was working on something for one of my patrons, Tim Shorts of Gothridge Manor. (join my patreon too and I might do the same for you!). So I was preparing to scan it, and went to erase some pencil lines.  Who knew that the lidocaine I had just applied to my arm would make the gel pen run like that?  I was able to scan the image in, but got it a little canted,  which I did not realize until I was halfway through my usual Photoshop and MS paint cleaning combo,so I rescanned it. I then went to do this again, and accidentally opened up the tilted image, and worked on it for about an hour before I caught on.  After a good long break, I went in and did the same edits on the non tilted image.  My methods for drawing are particular; Pencil, followed by G2 0.38 and 1.0 gels, usually on copy paper. I will try to avoid making contact  to my art with analgesics from this point.

Coming up this August 25, at the Same Con where I ran my adventure for SWCL, I will be running my adventure Beneath the Fallen Tower using my  Low Level Dungeon Fantasy rules, which I am going to build some pregens from.  I discuss the development of this adventure on a number of posts, just click on the tags below.

My art strives to be inclusive in representation, and as I had planned on including my character art on the pregen characters, I realized I needed to step it up, so I am working on more. This will probably be in a bundle soon…