Marriage!

As a dungeon master, I kind of lose my shit a bit when I have a quiet player. I want to make sure they’re having fun. I do this by interjecting more and more of myself into their play when what I really need to do is be patient and ask questions.

Karen (playing Leman DeSall, the eminently creepy death cleric) is sometimes a quiet player. This is not because she’s not having fun, although my paranoid brain sometimes tries to convince me that’s what’s going on.

So this session I remembered to ask questions. I did this immediately after Leman triggered a carousing mishap back at the tavern. The result is “Romantic entanglement. Roll Wisdom check to avoid nuptials. Otherwise 1-3 scorned lover, 4-6 angered parents.” So I ask Karen what kind of person Leman would be most likely to be romantically interested in. She thinks for a minute and says “someone kind of dead.”

So bang, next morning Leman Desall has entered into impetuous matrimony with one of the sentient ghouls on level three of the dungeon.

This actually solves some problems, since every time the party has put their nose onto level three they’ve fled in horror and fear, leaving a big unexplored area in the middle of the dungeon.

So next day finds the party setting off with a good guide to the main area of level three which they need to traverse to get to their destination on level four.

The party now includes: Karl von Ravenswood, fighter; Leman DeSall, cleric; Ebag the thief; and Magnus the magician.

They are joined by a small army of NPCs: Toe Snap the goblin guide, Rumsfeld the man at arms (who has somehow survived the entire dungeon thus far), a wizard named Ramseses that was hired by Ebag, Magnus’ new bodyguard Hawk (an impressive barbarian warrior), three Antlions that Leman managed to convert to her religion of death and suffering, and Dragna, Leman’s new amorous ghoul bride.

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.

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.

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.

The Goblin Back Door

There’s always a back door… This little dungeon trick revolves around an ancient stone throne with a secret catch that causes the entire seat to spin, placing the occupant in a natural cave behind the throne room. There’s just one catch–the cave has become the den of a pack of fierce wolves.

There are a lot of ways your players could encounter a room like this. As part of a greater dungeon, it could provide an escape route for a hated nemesis NPC. If the NPC isn’t ready to handle the wolves, however, the escape could easily be one-way. Going the other way, the presence of an ornate throne in an apparently natural cave could be a party’s way into the dungeon proper.

I used a similar room in a megadungeon adventure using the Moldvay Basic rules a couple of years ago. A pack of starving wolves found their way into the dungeon, but couldn’t find their way out, making a surprising encounter for a party of PC (and, given the deadliness of wolves in that edition, the death of more than one adventurer [sorry, Ben]).

Oh yeah! Also, the original encounter was inspired by a room in Stefan Poag's epic Mines of Khunmar megadungeon!