Down the Rabbit Hole

 Our intrepid band found themselves sliding along the tunnel beneath the plagued fort as if the ground had turned sideways, yet behind them their views was still of the far off crypts. Walls became rounded and slicker than glass as the adventurers plummeted into a web-filled room.

(Were a bard to have accompanied them, they might have learned these were "rabbit holes," tubular rips puncturing the very fabric of the multi-verse thought to be byprodects from interplanar passage of  powerful beings...)

Inside the webbing the party joined with a dwarven fighter with magic pony and half-efreet sorcerer who also befell the same cluster of rabbit holes. Denizens of the webs were wasp-like spider creatures with extremely nasty venom which the heroes were able to dispense with thanks to the sorcerer's fireballs.

Going on, caverns of gelatinous cubes and oozes were discovered, as well as an underground river, but no intelligent locals until four two-headed trolls arguing over meager treasure. The newly met dwarf kept the two trolls not slain as unwilling henchmen.

 When the party was attacked by an angry momma-purple-worm Anu'Barak, rejuvinated by a cure disease from Anton the Paladin, bore his way out from the worm's gullet stabbing down through hardened skull to slay it.

Treasure was accumulated, but no sign of any civilization, so the group followed down a narrow stair, being at least a sign of civilized works.

Nearly 100' down a small throne was found, a disguised secret door in actuality. When the half-efreet entered (the door barring the remainder of his companions), he was grappled by hideous blood-wights who essentially water-boarded him with their blood.

The party dragged the throne-door from it's rods and peppered the blood-spewing wights with fireballs until they succumbed leaving a vast, columned temple-area. The elf discovered a secret door leading to another narrow stair heading still further downward.

Here, our heroes search revealed a still vaster temple, that of the kobold lich-cleric of orcus and his rawbones minions (terrifying, flayed folk, in life tortured to death). A ferocious battle ensued with paladin, fighters, sorcerer, and elven mage-thief all steeped in combat against the undead squad while avoiding a humungous vampire-ooze filling a 30' pool in the chamber.

Whilst the party was victorious, even the elf mage-thief who survived several rounds entombed by and with the cleric-lich, the undead kobold's treasure went unfound, as was also not found the lich's phylactery...

Escape to/from Fort Plague

The adventurers appeared in a relatively barren scrub waste, the afternoon sky approximately what would have been in Blackmoor, albeit colder.

Nearby was a half-eaten horse corpse and somewhat further away a smallish manor-fort flying a flag indicating plague.

The party spied what appeared to be zombies, but they moved faster and were unsusceptible to clerical turning - juju zombies!

Although the juju zombies could not attack the party thanks to the paladin's protection from evil, there was a movement in the wooded hilltops and a colossal, grey, slug-like creature moved through the hills towards the heroes who then retreated inside the fort.

Inside the fort looked abandoned in haste except for an insane person who kept warning about going into the basement. Two bodies were discovered of men who committed suicide, one of which was horribly mutated.

Going into the basement adventurers discovered the mutant denizens of the fort and defeated them, but not before Anu'Barak was infected (and struck deaf and blind trying to affect a cure). The party retreated down a long, narrow tunnel heading south as the probing tendrils of the grey slug reached into the basement vault...

DunDraCon XXXIX "Borshak's Lair"!

 

I put in to run a 5th Edition game using the Basic Rules at DunDraCon, "The West Coast's Premier Game Convention," next February. It should be quite fun with this short, interesting scenario...

BORSHAK'S LAIR

A goblin bandit leader converts a hero's tomb into a hide-out. Still some things are best left alone. What was old is new again as a classic scenario from the OD&D era receives 5th edition treatment. This small dungeon was perpetrated on the unsuspecting by Jennell (Paul) Jaquays, J. Mark Hendricks, Randy Cox & Dave Marbry, and published December 1976 in The Dungeoneer #3 (a Dungeons and Dragons fanzine that later merged with Judges Guild Journal). Create a new band of adventurers to see how they fare against a first level or thereabouts adventure from the really-old school era. Can 5e unite the editions? You be the judge!

*** UPDATE *** It's on! My game has been pre-scheduled for 8 pm Friday, February 13th (?!). That is day one of DunDraCon, buttercups! 5 players, and we'll be rolling new cha's for the whole 5e intro experience.  :~)

D&D 5e Starter Set Trial Preview

A-ha, so Tuesday I duly received my D&D 5e Starter Set via Amazon and after the standard* passionate unveiling of the shrink-wrap set down to digest the material.

Now, next week we are taking the kids (ha, all in their twenties) up to the Sierra Mountains for a couple nights, so I figure I can finagle a couple or more to join in a game with the new edition.

My plan is to use just what came in the box (which means sharing dice), and I realized the lack of miniatures/tokens/tactical maps is actually pretty old school.

We video-taped to varying degrees 26 sessions of our D&D gaming group from 1990 through 1996. I've been going through the process of transferring the decaying (& decedent) tapes to digital. At least through early '93 tapes I was amazed to see that we rarely used miniatures! We had a decent collection of lead minis since probably the early 80s which grew exponentially when our FLGS (Pleasanton Hobbies in Mission Plaza) went out of business in 1986 and sold their supplies at liquidation rates. But even though we had the miniatures available, we tended to combat based on verbal descriptions and the occasional hastily-scrawled map.

In the days of Holmes Basic and the earliest iterations of our AD&D we played exactly the same way.

My brain was all pickled from '95 up to '04, so I had this epiphany that perhaps we really didn't use miniatures all that much until I got sober and started the v.3.5 Wilderlands campaign in November 2005. I had been away from my friends and the game for about two years and in the lead up to Wilderlands I kind of reconstructed what I "thought" was the style we played, picking up oodles of the pre-painted plastic D&D brand miniatures (mostly by using 30%-40%-50% off Borders coupons multiple times which I don't think the company intended, but they worked and I probably wasn't the only one re-printing them ergo didn't help their bottom line any...).

I purchased a set of 12 Tact-Tiles in the original iteration which we used for the Wilderlands campaign (strangely enough, there is a current Kickstarter going on to produce dungeon "Tact-Tiles" again), the effect of being able to modularly expand forever the tactical/mini-scaled map meant that entire dungeons we progressed through via miniatures. I remember toward the end of that campaign going back to mapping on paper unless there was an encounter, and definitely that is my process for our current campaign.

Thus that brings me to the new 5e Starter Set lacking minis/tokens/tactical maps. I am not going to add them. I decided to just use pencil and paper (not even graph paper!) and run the module just as it is out of the box. Could be interesting! I will post a follow up after the game...



* This is in actuality only the second starter set I've purchased for myself at release. Holmes Basic Set ('78) we first gamed with was a birthday/X-mas gift to our DM, I skipped the Moldvay ('81), Mentzer ('83), and Denning/Brown ('91) versions altogether, purchased the Tweet ('04) version for my son, missed the simplified Tweet ('06), bought and ran the 4e Starter Set ('08, a banner year for me), and purchased the 4e Red Box ('10) for my niece - although technically that is mine because my brother forbade me to gift it to her so I eventually opened the box, but long after the release date.

The Chess Piece

Verily a great & wondrous artifact of yore...

The RIPON Band

Rgp'ing, jamming, & intoxicants pretty much summed up extra-familial (we were raising three kids) pursuits during my twenties.

Ripon was musically very good and occurred during an rpg & intoxicant ebb.

Go figure.

5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons

Over on EN World there is a nice ongoing compilation of news about the forthcoming 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons (formerly D&D Next). The rules will be released one product at a time beginning this summer with the D&D Starter Set.

I am very interested in how these rules play out, especially in the areas of cross edition dungeon module scenarios. Developing exciting and suspenseful campaigns typically can be the most time-consuming part of being a game judge. However, it is rare that I have come across something prepackaged that is uniformly satisfying.

The "OSR revival" stuff has usually been on track with products that seem to appeal to my gaming group. The new edition will likely draw back many fans who went all "old-school" in response to 4e, but with anemic, sluggish, or (at least in my opinion) over-balanced adventures then there still may be a market for chaotic gonzo home brew.

Never be able to match the big guy's artwork though, it's very nice.