Blasting out of Vesta: Stars Without Number

Today we fired up our first session of a new Stars Without Number sandbox game. The idea is to play super-fast sessions weekly on a Wednesday afternoon. I was super nervous about it all day and sure it was going to be a failure. First of all, short sessions on a weekday afternoon while normal people are at work? Crazy. Setting up a game by just inviting everyone you can think of then telling them they don't have to show up? Nuts. But we had a great time anyway. Jon, John, and Jobe came by, made up some characters, invited a bit of backstory,and galvanized the team in a single half-hour encounter. Some folks made up two characters because, you know, space is deadly. So Dex is a down-on-his luck space trucker. He's been playing it by the book, but now his flight status has been revoked, the company's repossessing his ship, and his appeal is being ignored. And he doesn't even know why! So he gets his hands on some launch codes and books a "no questions asked" cargo run. He's hired some losers and outcasts to crew for him! He's going to steal his own ship and make some cash to pay his lawyers! But first he has to get out Vesta. Session one saw a gun battle with Confed Trade Authority goons in a backwoods asteroid port. Dex and his engineer Stan got perforated with needler rounds, but fortunately the 16 year old runaway on the crew is also a (technically) unlicensed bio-psionic. In game terms, this means they didn't just die outright. Now the guy who hired them is dead, but they've got the advance on the delivery and the cargo itself. Dex and Stan need desperate medical attention, but that OK, because Chet kidnapped a surgeon before they blasted out of Vesta on their (technically) stolen starship.

Custom Moves: Now I am your Master

The basic mechanic of Dungeon World (currently on Kickstarter) is so simple: roll 2d6, add your attribute modifier; on a 10+ you hit it hard, on a 7-9 you get a partial hit or complications, on a 6- bad stuff happens. As a DM, it makes it very easy for me to come up with custom ruling on the fly by creating moves for the current situation.

In one of our recent sessions, Ysolde the Wizard agreed to become the apprentice of Hi Xaphon, a wizard the party ran afould of a couple of sessions ago. Ysolde's player, Phil, and I chatted for a bit about what being an apprentice means. Then Phil took a bathroom break. As the other players were still planning their upcoming Goblin raid, I quickly jotted down a custom move:

When you exchange blood and power with your new master and bind as their apprentice, roll 2d6 plus your Wisdom modifier:

10+ hold 3 7-9 hold 1

You can spend your hold, 1 for 1 at any time for one of the following:
Privacy your master can't scry you, doesn't know what your up to, or sees your preferred version of events.
Help appeal to your master for aid through your magical bond and they will help you in some way appropriate to the situation and their powers
Turnabout turn your apprenticeship bond against your master in some way


Ysolde rolled a 9 or so, gaining one precious hold on her master.

It's funny how moves snowball, though. Later in the same adventure, Terek, the Paladin, laid hands on Ysolde to heal her numerous wounds. On a 7-9 with Lay on Hands, the Paladin takes the subjects wounds onto himself. I briefly described Ysolde's wounds and asked which one Terek wanted to take. "Oh, I'll take that small cut on the arm, since I'm only healing one HP". Of course that was the cut Ysolde received on the apprenticeship bonding. So now our Paladin has some kind of psychic connection with Ysolde's arcane master...

Where have all the Hit Points Gone?

We’re playing Dungeonworld, which is still going through the various stages of beta: pupae, chrysalis, and so on. In the latest phase, character hit points were dropped to about a quarter. So there’s our party, burning the corpses of the vanquished rat man, when suddenly everyone has one quarter of the hit points they used to have.

And I have to say that if the intent of this rule change was to inject some low-level anxiety into higher-level play, it worked. Soon everyone’s scrambling around, trying to decide how they’re going to live in a low-hit-point world.

Magnus loots the rat mens’ cache of stolen trade goods and ties a wooden throne to his back so he can carry it back to town and sell it for enough to hire a bodyguard. Leman takes a similar tactic, but instead she bribes three of the rat mens’ prisoners to carry the stuff for her. They only rip her off a little bit. Ebag dips into the private stash of treasure that nobody else in the party seems to know he has and uses it to buy some mithral chain from the Thieves Guild. Karl… well Karl seems to think this stuff is all beneath him. He almost gets killed next encounter, but that still lies in the future.

Other than the hit point shuffle, this session is mostly about getting safely back to town, checking the job board, and dealing with some overdue town stuff.

Next session–a surprise wedding!

Mines of Khunmar: of Minotaurs and Mazes

We’ve played a lot of my Mines of Khunmar megadungeon game since I last wrote. The spring and early summer is the busy time of work for me, because it’s when Microsoft teams are trying to finish up all their projects for the end of the financial year, which is why the blog hasn’t seen so much action lately. When we last left the party, they had cleared a substantial area at the center of level 4, the former laboratory of the mad wizard Lukas Ravenswood, fighter Karl’s grandfather. The current party consists of Karl Ravenswood, fighter; Ebag the thief, Velmar Magnus, wizard; and Leman Desall, death cleric. They are accompanied by an acquisitive man at arms named Rumsfeld. We had a short session exploring some more of the current level. Mystified by some apparently automatically resetting traps, the party spied some wererats leading an ogre prisoner through the dungeon. The ambushed the rats in a wizardly meditation chamber, where the ogre at one point swung Ebag through the air like a club. Fortunately, Ebag survived the ordeal.

I was kicking myself after this session. You see, when Magnus joined the party, he specified that he was searching for a particular artifact of ancient lore. Having a very similar artifact in my notes for the level (the Eye of Truth, a sort of true seeing gem), I handed it to Magnus straightaway as treasure then patted myself on the back for being so clever. But after the session I started feeling really stupid for giving the character his heart’s desire so fast. After all, don’t players *like* having things to aspire for? Was I ruining the game for him? Luckily, I have amazing players, and Jonathan rose to the challenge like a champion, as we’ll see.

Enter a new session. The rats had been making for a particular secret door. Also, Karl had a quest to slay the Rat King, given him by a curiously gregarious Ilithid some sessions ago, so the party decided to continue on in hopes of finding the rumored Rat King on level 3.

Beyond the door they found a series of broad, well-lit, clean, safe seeming corridors. Amazingly this didn’t send them running in fear, so they entered what was in fact a horrific dimensional pocket maze full of illusions and twisting hallways enchanted to trap the unwary for eternity (the rats have their own way of navigating through this natural barrier).

Now in my campaign, the Minotaurs as a race were confined to an extra dimensional prison by a vengeful god. The few Minotaurs not in the prison wander the planes seeking out labyrinths and magical mazes because of a legend that the key to opening their prison maze lies hidden in one. It’s just a thing I daydreamed when I was prepping the level. But when I rolled Minotaurs on the wandering monster table, I had no idea that Velmar Magnus would attempt to parlay, whipping out the Eye of Truth (which could have guided them through the maze quite easily) and offering it to them as a gift.

So to make a long story short, the party gained some Minotaur mercenaries to help them eradicate the Rat King and his minions. Magnus was named Minotaur-friend. They liberated Toe Snap their one-time goblin guide who the rats had in bonds. They fought and almost killed the Ilithid who was playing Wormtongue to the Rat King. And they liberated more stolen trade goods than they could reasonably carry back to town. The surviving Minotaurs returned to the plane of existence and used the Eye of Truth to free the Minotaur race from bondage.

Interesting side note: in my game Ilithids have the custom move “cast any spell in the game.” They are a foe to be respected.

We Played Metamorphosis Alpha

Metamorphosis Alpha! MA is the legendary first ever Science Fiction RPG that I've longed to play since I first heard of it in about 1985. Now James Ward, the original writer, is offering Metamorphosis Alpha through Lulu. It's a fabulous bargain.

Clyde-Bob is a human with a bricked iPhone and a mutant slave. Plunge Bob is also human. Quazzar is a winged horse with two brains. Chump is a huge mutated rabbit with armored plates and telekentic powers. They are off to the world of the gods to bring back an artifact and thus enter full adulthood as members of the tribe.

In the frozen mud plain in the center of the Great Habitation Complex beneath the 120' tall pile of shopping cards, Clyde-Bob convinces the lord of the talking chameleon crow people to become his vassal (in exchange for certain favors and shiny objects) and sets up a potentially lucrative scrap metal mining operation. He then convinces a working domestic robot to become his personal chef.

Plunge-Bob and Quazzar flee the crows by flying down the giant radioactive slag aqueduct and penetrate the lost medical facility beyond. There they defeat the security lockdown console, decipher the mutagenic purge chamber, and transform Plunge-Bob into a genetically perfect specific of humanity.

Chump investigates the complex of endless apartment units, narrowly defeats the massive metal-skinned badger, and finds a functioning laser rifle for her new toy.

The tribesfolk return to the scrapheap, but are dismayed to discover that the teleport device that brought them hence has failed, and needs complex repairs!

Metamorphosis Alph is rife with weirdness and coolness in equal amounts. Every character had ample opportunity to be killed horribly, but they all pulled through and garnered great rewards in the process. At one point I explained calmly to Clyde-Bob that if his attempt to convince the crow people to parlay with him failed, he would certainly be torn apart by the flock. He decided to take the chance.

The ability of humans to gain mutants as followers is very strange. I'm reasonably sure that John Ward did not intend the first roll of the game to happen when the humans turn to the mutant PCs and attempt to take them as followers so they can ride into battle on their backs. I can totally see shying away from this aspect of the game and limiting it in play, but we decided to take it on and embrace it fully.

Deeper into the Mines

Our Mines of Khunmar Dungeon World game has suddenly picked up momentum and two new players after a many month hiatus. Some months ago we left Karl von Ravenswood (intent up enforcing his family's erstwhile claim to rule the megadungeon, Ebag (refugee from a vengeful Thieves Guild) and Rumsfled (covetous hireling) leaping into a magical one-way portal deeper into the dungeon pursuing the displacer beast thief who had stolen the object of their current quest, The Eye of the Cyclops.

The cunning displacer beast led Karl on a chase through several blade traps (ouch), into an ancient hall where the beast got the better of Karl. By the time the rest of the party caught up (joined my Magnus, a friendly wandering mage), the displacer had Karl in a jam, knife to throat. The ensuing melee nearly cost Karl his life with numerous failed roles, culminating in the Displacer Beast escaping with the Eye after announcing many future badnesses for the party.

The brave crew decided their first order of business was to determine the path back to a place of safety, as they were now two levels deeper than their previous locale. Instead, they ran into a pair of battle-hardened orcs, trying to deduce how to get a treasure from a cursed statue. The ensuing melee nearly cost Karl his life, with Ebag suffering the effects of the curse and the surprisingly tough orcs escaping through a ghoul-infested level with the treasure.

Collecting their wits (and another fellow traveller, a cleric of evil disposition), they determined that the current level was once a wizards domicile and lab belonging to Karl's great-grandfather. Strangely, the family history says nothing of his experimentations. The party decided to clear the level and use it as a headquarters in their explorations after the escaped Displacer Beast.

Further exploration revealed a lab of unspeakable experiments, one of which took quite a bit of killing to dispatch. A trap was found which was mysteriously re-set as soon as the party left the room.

The tomb section of the level revealed a number of Ravenswood ancestors, doomed to eternal undead combat (though strangely, the wights did not view it as a curse). Declining their offer of undead torment, the party dispatched them to the realm of death with some difficulty, obtaining several great treasures.

So the mines is a big fat PDF of a megadungeon Stefan Poag wrote some time back. Now he's working on polishing it up and releasing it as a complete megadungeon! Also, there is a cool T-shirt you can buy of it.

Death Frost Doom

Ran James Raggi's notorious Death Frost Doom adventure tonight using Ben Lehman's High Quality Role Playing. By the time they got to the dungeon, the PCs were so spooked that they burned the book in the first room and fled. Then they came back, removed all the panes of glass from the building and took them home to sell. With practically no encounters to speak of we had a blast.

Then just as we were wrapping up, they allowed as to how their characters might go back just one more time... you know, to get more glass. So I guess we're playing next week. :)

Of Chaos Gods and Hirelings

I’m running a (Apocalypse) D&D game for Phil, sometimes in person, sometimes over email. It’s a solo game and he’s playing a wizard, so that means he’s been employing a number of hirelings to help buff out his chances of survival.

I always try to make a game with hirelings interesting. I don’t know how this matches the way other people run things, but I generally make my hirelings simple but dynamic people. I think of them as an interesting sub-plot that may occasionally take center stage. I don’t want to give the players too much grief via their hirelings, but I don’t want hirelings to be faceless minions either. Apocalypse D&D helps, because I’ve added in a couple of moves about working with hirelings (that’s another post, though).

So in his first foray, Suten Anu, the mysterious foreign wizard, engaged Mandle, a good-hearted farm boy, Tanga, a tough-yet-vulnerable fighting woman, and Roberto, a rather acquisitive thief. In the first adventure, Tanga emerged as a fearless warrior, Roberto grumbled continually about wanting more money, and Roberto Mandle died unceremoniously when a crossbow quarrel pierced his breastbone.

Back in town, Suten Anu spent considerable time and expense trying to make good with Mandle’s family (above and beyond the call of duty for a mere hireling), showing some of his better qualities. In town, we also got a glimpse of Roberto’s rather high-living lifestyle. No wonder he’s always after more money!

Suten Anu also hired Tartarus the Cleric, an old friend of Tangas. Tartarus finds the idleness of temple work a burden, and wants to escape his rather acrimonious marriage, giving him the perfect reason to go adventuring.

In their second Foray, Tanga discovered the dark lure of Chaos magic, which she embraced rather wholeheartedly, alarming Suten Anu extremely (also, it resulting in him growing a third eye in his forehead). The second foray ended rather abruptly, with Tartarus dragging Suten’s nigh-lifeless body back to town, but at least everyone survived and the undead were put down permanently.

Now Suten is getting ready for his third adventure. He’s gotten Tanga to foreswear chaos magic, but he had to promise to retrieve her father’s bones to get her to do it. They’re also joined by Rhackam, a rather shady Ranger character with a few secrets to tell.

Back from GPNW and Fully Recovered!

Vacation, work, and Go Play NW conspired to keep me from my dungeons for a couple weeks, but I'm back now.

Go Play NW was a real blast. I'll probably post a lengthlier writeup some time in the near future. Microdungeons figured large in my convention. I brought three microdungeon adventures with me to GPNW and got to run all of them using Apocalypse D&D. Plus the generous Sage offered to take one of them and run it for a couple of groups as well. That was a pretty amazing experience.

Apocalypse D&D fared very well at GPNW, despite the fact that Apoc D&D wizards are crazy. After each game I gathered up the pre-gens and handed them off to the next group to keep playing. The mage got to fifth level and blew up most of his buddies in a nasty fireball mishap. The Dwarven fighter went evil and ran off with a professional vampire slayer, while the theif was turned into a lesser wraith by one of the bad guys and later ran off with a risen saint to start a new undead religion.

I also got to run some Poison'd and played in a spectacular game of Fiasco and Brandon A's Minions hack for Apocalypse World. What a great con!

The Mines of Ravenswood

Session three of the Apocalypse D&D game started out at Happy Harry’s Ogre tavern in the underground. Karl Ravenswood and Ebag the thief spent some carousing time trying to gather information for the road ahead (which also gave me a chance to try out the new town moves for ApocD&D).

Ebag befriended a rather stuck up wizard. He had an opportunity to befriend the fellow, but chose to wheedle some of his secrets out of him instead, gathering the location of a hidden horde of gems guarded by a Dwarven ghost of some sort. Karl was both less and more fortunate, finding himself in an unexpected an unwelcome interview with an Illithid who mockingly challenged Karl to take on a wererat King on the fourth level of the dungeon. The Illithid also got a real kick out of the fact that Karl's father, the local lord, technically claims sovereignty over the dungeon itself (a claim that Karl would love to enforce).

But our heroes are only second level at present, so they chose to pursue the Antlion king who they knew had taken refuge with the Kobolds. The Kobolds on the level 2 of the mines are a rather dirty “back to nature” lot, though not lacking in swords and pointy sticks. Down a dirty tunnel, the PCs and their retainers encountered a lone sentry, which quickly turned into a pitched battle with a sizable guard contingent. The on-again-off-again fight spanned a few rooms, ending in a huge cavern with an underground waterfall that marked the edge of Kobold territory. A hasty interrogation of prisoners turned into a full retreat when some sort of bat-winged cave Roc tore their best prisoner in half. Ebag also lost his backpack full of gear (which was better than losing his head).

In some confusion as to the Kobold’s true location, the PCs followed a narrow ledge, discovering the entrance to an abandoned Dwarven temple. It wasn’t Kobolds, but their curiosity got the best of them (plus Ston, their Dwarf cleric *really* wanted to check the place out).

There was an iron statue with gem eyes that they wisely left alone, as well as a fount of some sort full of coins, which they also avoided. The mirror-polished room with the dead adventurers was too intriguing to pass up, however, and Ebag and Karl soon had to do battle with mirror-images of themselves. Karl’s might saved the day, however, and the party decided to take a rest and bind up their wounds before continuing on.

Deeper into the Mines

Last night, Gabe, Phil, and I fired up Apocalypse D&D again to continue our adventure in the mines of Khunmar.

When we last left them, the party was trapped in a flooding room with the Antlion King. Ebag the Thief was unable to disable the trap, but with his enormous strength, Karl was able to bust down the door before Ston the Dwarf started to seriously drown. The Antlion King got away in the fracas, however.

Beyond the flooding room, behind a secret door, the party found the Antlions’ real treasure, a horde of coins and some minor magic items. As they were counting it out, however, a group of goblins entered through the *other* secret door. Seems they’d been skimming Antlion treasure for weeks. There was a tense standoff, and one of the frightened goblins shot Ebag with a crossbow (dropping him to -1 HP) before fleeing for their lives.

Some time later, in their search for the escaped King, the party discovered a large cavern where a group of ogres had set up a sort of bar where the various monster groups met in relative neutrality. Since several goblins were already there (including the party’s escaped prisoner Toe Snap), there followed a tense dinner discussion. The goblins ended by handing the party a couple of tasty adventure hooks, then slipping away into the gloom.

But here’s the thing. The goblins definitely got the better of the discussion, thanks to some failed rolls, and ended up handing the party a potentially deadly mission to a lost secret library haunted by a ghost. I was a little nervous that I might have set them up for a TPK, but their native caution served them well. Not only did they get out with the book the goblins wanted, but they avoided the ghost. They did leave behind a potential trove of good loot, however, so I have a hunch they may come back some day.

The adventure ended back at Happy Harry’s underground bar, where the party contemplated their next move, and heard rumors of a horrible creature from another dimension.

The Apocalypse D&D hack functioned very well, with only a couple of head-scratching moments (which can be addressed by fixing up the moves some more). The new trap hunting move worked pretty well. On a good roll, the party can pretty quickly traverse a decent expanse of dungeon safely, but there are still important choices to be made regarding where and how to hunt for traps.

In the Mines of Khunmar

Tuesday night, Phil and Gabe and I decided to throw off our monthly pool game and kick back at the pub for a game of D&D instead, and we were joined briefly by Brandon. I was psyched because I was itching to run an old-style dungeon crawl. Because I had some ideas I wanted to try out, we played a homebrew mashup of AD&D and Apocalypse World.* I also got to pull out the Mines of Khunmar, a pdf megadungeon I’ve been wanting to try out for a long time. *Spoilers Follow*

Phil made a fighting man named Karl, Gabe rolled up a thief named Ebag, and Brandon created a Dwarf Cleric named Stön. These three foolhardy souls were joined by two retainers named Rumsfeld and Griswold.

After circumventing a pit, they stumbled into an ambush of Antlions, cunning ant-like humanoids with a penchant for ambushes and trickery (turns out they can also stick to the ceiling, as Ebag discovered to his chagrin). The antlions underestimated their foes, however, and after a short fight, the party had a clear passage across the plank bridge over the raging underground river chasm to the Antlions hideout. Stön had heard that the Antlions had an illusionary treasure horde to fool interlopers, but that a real stash could be found a secret room nearby so they forged onward.

After the obligatory humanoid slaughter (where Griswold met his demise), there followed a tense struggle where Ebag surprised the Antlion king on his spinning secret door throne, pinning the king’s hand to the throne controls with a dagger at a crucial moment. The heroes extorted the king into revealing his true treasure horde. They failed, however, to extract a promise of safe passage, and the king sprung the treasure’s protective trap on the adventurers, a flooding room. The evening ended with the party trapped in a rapidly flooding room with the King mocking them with mad laughter as they all prepared for an evening of drowning. I do like a cliffhanger.

Hopefuly we’ll get to pick this game up again, because I really had a blast running it, and I think the players got into it too. We might play somewhere quieter next time, though, because the ambient sound at the pub really made it hard to get my DM-ing mojo on. Writing this blog has given me a real desire to play more D&D, and I rarely do, so this was a very nice treat.

* Apocalypse World is a game of Vincent Baker’s that I’ve been playtesting. It’s got some stuff that seems very unusual, but at its core it’s more old-school than anything else. I found it surprisingly easy to mash it together with AD&D.