Sycarion Diversions

Home of the Odd Duk

Tag: 30 Days (Page 4 of 7)

On Tsojcanth, On Guido, On X6 and X1

September 11, 2013 /

On B5, On Greyhawk, On Spelljammer fun...

Not really feeling well, so this will be shorter. After yesterday, you may think my favorite adventure to run was Caves of Tsojcanth. It is fun looking back on it, but in my 12 year old mind at the time, I was just annoyed.

My favorite thing to run was our various homebrew hexcrawls. We started with Greyhawk and marched through Iuz, found the Forgotten City, ventured off the map for some OA fun, and then off the world entirely to brave the phlogiston. I didn't use the Rock of Braal at all, but instead used various asteroids as a home base.

We went to Space 1889 briefly, but spent a lot of time in Greyspace, Mystaraspace (it's what I called it), and parts of Realmspace. We invented our own planets and generally attempted to be Han Solo in various worlds.

Yes, we shot first.

The neogi were the perennial bad guys always chasing the party from sphere to sphere. There were some beholders, but the guys never ventured to some of the really bad stuff. I have formorian ships (giant ant-people), yet another githyanki civil war, ghost ships that drag you into the deep ethereal to make you lost and various other villains.

I had an ancient mariner that was revived after floating in the phlogiston for hundreds of years. (Yes, someone wasted a wish on him.) I had various alternate earths with a Marvelspace complete with Dr. Strange's spelljammer ship.

Awesome stuff.

I had the most fun running the homebrew because of things the players may have found depending on their whim, the dice and whatever notes I had with me. There's something about the possibility of the game that excites me, even in a traditional dungeon crawl. Finding a red dragon in the bottom of a dungeon (Horror on the Hill) was a surprise to me. Later, I was just as excited as the two-way portal to an ancient moon base locked somewhere in the second level of a dungeon since lost to time.

You never know what's over the next hill. Maybe they'll find the flying ship, the rakasta colonies, Star Frontiers aliens or even a hovertank from Centurion Legion.

It all comes back to hoping that the party will find something odd, but more importantly, having fun doing it. I didn't experience this with various college groups, but I always did with the high school group. It was fun times all the way around, even when I got annoyed and tried to kill them on purpose.

Not to sounds cliche, but really, the most fun adventure is always the next one.

Oh Yeah, Well Now You’ve Stumbled Upon A Grey Giant Furry Something Else

September 10, 2013 /

We decided that we were going to play for 24 hours straight. This sounded like a lot of fun and it really was.

Everything about the adventure was a blur, especially when they started wandering around the wilderness and walked completely off the map.

Let me back up a little bit. We decided to play the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth that I picked up from somewhere. It was big and had lots of neat stuff in it. It seemed perfect for the 24 hour marathon. We assembled our five or six boxes of sugary cereal as snacks as well as an equal number of two liter Cokes. (Being from the south, you understand that this could have been Pepsi, various root beer, Fanta or anything else.)

Everyone had their characters. Since there was just Bill and Scott, they had two or three characters each. Scott had Thomas the thief and his sister the Mage. (I can never remember her name). Bill had the Cleric and the Fighter. Somewhere in there was an elf. I had all my notes (half page) and proceeded to read the setup information as the module instructed the DM to do.

Of course, they followed the road dutifully and I don't remember if I gave them the player's map or not. I have a feeling I didn't as they continued a march to the North and West. I'm sure I mentioned something about East and South being good choices, but they felt that going East or South was backtracking, so off they went. After five or six encounters (I added a couple in that weren't dots on the GM map), they finally decided to go NE.

If you own the module, they basically made a B-line straight to variable encounter four on the NW corner of the map. Once there I made a fateful roll that will forever live in infamy:

gfgsnake

 

I read it to them as:

You have encountered a Gray Furry Giant Snake.

How it came out was a caffeine-fueled giggle fit where I barely managed to get out the word snake before breaking down into outright laughter. I was crying and they were laughing so hard they didn't hear me squeak out a request for an initiative roll. They kept saying Gray Furry Giant Snake in a sing-songy voice that sounded a bit like Bullwinkle.

Inspired, I went right along with them. We made it through combat and I suggested that the local meatshields wanted to skin the thing.

Exactly how many grey furry giant snakes are there that they know that skinning them makes good pelts?

They decided that whatever great treasure the caverns held was nothing compared to a quest for rare reptilian pelts.

Of course, this quest continued North or West, never East. Heaven forbid they go South. Going that way would lead them back to town where they could possibly sell these blasted pelts.

I admit that I was upset that they were bound and determined to walk off the map. So when I rolled the Furred Snake again, I called an audible.

You have encountered a gray giant furry um.. er.. bumblebee. Yeah, sure, a Gray Giant Furry Bumblebee. ROLL FOR INITIATIVE!

This produced more laughter and eventually another pelt for their new found careers as trappers. The thief wanted the stinger and the poison gland. The magic user wanted the wings and the eyes. They could barely say what parts each character wanted as they stopped off the side of the road and butchered a giant bumblebee. In retrospect, I should have forced a skill roll or something, but alas, they trudged on.

They continued North and West.

I threw a blue dragon (I rolled a 19, honest!) at them that said "GO SOUTH!" over and over as he bled to death. I amassed stone giants (I really didn't roll a 20)  to hurl boulders at them to block off all passage North and West. And yet they pressed on to the North and the West.

After that I rolled an 8 again. They encountered a gray furry giant mouse this time, which brought the inevitable comment:

Aren't mice already furry?

More laughter and snorts. Nice. It's 3 am and these fools are nowhere near the cavern will all the details I had worked out. No, I'm pulling out some homemade stuff and changing up the descriptions on the fly hoping that they don't recognize them. They're having a good time, so I just decided to relax and roll with it.

I rolled another 8. (I did, I swear!) They encountered a gray furry giant man.

Yes, they skinned it for the pelt. At 4 am, they were a little bloodthirsty.

After rolling another 8, I declared that there was a cave in the mountainside nearby. I said that they could see the sunlight glinting off the gold from 200 yards away. It looks like there could be an Awesome Staff of Ultimate Magery just inside the entrance.

This didn't phase them.

There are 20 pelts of giant gray-furred skins already cleaned and neatly stacked just outside the entrance.

They walked into a trap that teleported them to the Great Caverns. One of the meatshields died of some awful poison that I remember describing in horrid detail. I didn't care. The sun was about to rise and there was a vampire awaiting them. It was my turn to be a bit bloodthirsty, if not a bit railroad-y.

The rest of the adventure went dangerously, but the group was successful, despite losing just about everyone but the mage, thief and cleric. They got the treasure and went back to town and haggled, cajoled and threatened the highest price for their pelts. The thief kept one pelt claiming it as leather armor. The mage took her jars of body parts and squirreled them off to her lab. The cleric went to pray for some reason.

It was 7 am and we were exhausted. We didn't make it 24 hours, but we had a really good time.

I never ever had a gray furry giant anything encounter ever again.

What’s Next to Play

September 9, 2013 /

After my last post, I remarked on the Swords & Wizardry G+ group that this just shows that I need to get into a game soon. An offer soon came, and hopefully I'll be playing in a game on Wednesdays. I might even get up the confidence to run a game on G+, but time will tell.

In one sense, I'm up for playing anything in the next game I play, except an Assassin. I want to be a Lawful or Neutral character.

  • Fighter? Okay, I can solve problems with my sword and shield. Rabbit stew, comin' up!
  • Cleric? By the sacred bones of Skienwald, I shall purge this evil by my faith and large hammer. (Not necessarily in that order, mind you.)
  • Magic-User? Bug Shub-Niggurath naflron nnnR'lyeh Hasturor h'ah phlegeth, Nyarlathotep s'uhn Yoggoth shagg Dagon nnnch' ph'Nyarlathotep, ebunma shagg nafluh'e ehye f'mg.  (Did it work?)
  • Thief? Sure I can get it, but it'll cost ya. Double if you ask me where I got it.
  • Druid? All I'm saying is that those can be some really mean vegetables.
  • Hewcaster? If I can just study this things' essence back at the lab... Wgah'n Hastur shoggnyth throd. Okay, we got one minute to run from that thing before it comes to. No, I got only two more times I can cast that spell, why do you ask?

Yeah, I can have fun being any class, when it comes down to it. I tend to play by thinking just enough to avoid being stupid, but not enough to avoid a chance at the epic.

In another sense, I enjoy doing having the character do some things they tend to do between sessions. One of the reasons I love ACKS, is that at 9th level, Magic-Users can do some serious stuff. They can make crossbreeds, they can make some crazy magic items, they can do spell research and so on. Just once, it would be fun to ask the rest of the party if they wouldn't mind swinging by my tower before we go back to the dungeon. Seems that one of my experiments escaped and this one might get close enough to town...

I'm also working on a spell wielding class that makes a skill roll to cast. The link points to a post using the USR system, but I am porting it over to my S&W based system. This same skill roll is used to do spell research. The interesting thing about this class, though, is that they gain new descriptors every third level in order to develop a set of specialties unique to them. Added to this is that they can perform spell research from the 1st level, not the ninth.

From the example, the spellcaster could have a bonus to cast Healing spells and Fire based spells. When this character does spell research, the player will tend to invent ways to use on or both bonuses. So instead of a Cure Serious Wounds spell, a character with Healing and Fire bonuses might invent a spell called The Fire that Heals. I let the player write the spell description that is that. The same system also helps me to provide unique spells for scrolls in future adventures.

The research system sets the difficulty based on effect, which in this case would be heal 2d8 hit points. The fact that the player incorporated fire into it somehow, is just his or her creativity at work.

If someone would GM my house rules or if they would allow this spellcaster classes into their world, I would love to play either one, especially between adventures. I'd email the GM and ask if there were a couple of months between adventures in game time (not real life) to see if I could invent something crazy and possibly useful. The GM could totally ban me from taking it with me, just seeing if I could make it is fun enough.

I also like being able to do stuff between sessions, because it gives me things to look for, during sessions. I can totally see something like this happening:

Hey, that myconid is valuable. Let me cut off a small piece before we barge into the next room. I can use this back at the lab.

So what character would I like to play next? I'll have fun playing any character, but I'd really like to play some alternate spell casters that can do things between sessions at lower levels. Maybe I should get my house rules in a form to download for free so that you can tell me whether or not I'm totally nuts.

Oh, and One More Thing

Outside of D&D and its clones, I'd also really like to play a gun mage in Warrior, Rogue, Mage, by Stargazer Games. It's like being Gandalf and Clint Eastwood at the same time. 🙂

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