What's He On About Now?

***SPOILER ALERT***

I’m running Tomb of Horrors for this leg of the Storm Point campaign – indeed, for the rest of the campaign. You may not want to read on if you’re playing the game yourself.

***SPOILER ALERT***

This past session of the Storm Point game, we started on the penultimate adventure in the Tomb of Horrors series. The plan is to use this series to wrap up the Storm Point campaign – the series finishes with the characters in the early Epic tier, and at that point the whole group thinks they’ll have had enough¹ of D&D for a while. We’ll take a look at other games at that point, and decide what we want to do next².

In the downtime between sessions, I had the players level their characters up to 18th level, the recommended level for this adventure. This is my way of speeding us along to the conclusion of the adventure and the campaign; by just levelling up to the appropriate level at the start of the new adventure, we get to focus more on the adventure, and have a fighting chance of wrapping things up in the next year or so. I think I was a little too generous with the way I let them pick new magic items, but what the hell.

We started the session with a recap, focusing on the big picture of the previous adventures: someone was using strange necromantic devices to steal the energy of death that rightly belonged to the Raven Queen. This energy was being collected and used to power Acererak’s bid for godhood, and our heroes had messed up two of his devices, so he was going to start gunning for them soon enough. The only chance the party had was to take the fight to him, and put him down before he put them down.

To that end, I started things with skill challenge, letting them try and figure out how to get at Acererak. It was also a way for the players to flesh out what the characters had done during the downtime – each character got to tell a little story about how they had tracked down information. I decided that, when they got to Skull City and the abandoned tomb, they would have to face one encounter before getting to the tomb, plus one more encounter for each failure on the skill challenge, as the various gangs in the city got word from their contacts that the group was coming.

There were no failures in the initial skill challenge, nor in the follow-up to actually get through the city safely, so they only ran into the Brothers of the Black Academy right at the entry to the abandoned tomb. Our heroes, in their own inimitable fashion³ decided not to talk to the folks whose home they were invading, but instead threatened them and tried to scare them off. The Black Academy mages and their wrath spirits were having none of that⁴ and attacked.

We didn’t make it all through the combat before we had to quit for the evening. Part of that is the fact that it’s a pretty tough fight, and part of it is that the players aren’t completely familiar with their new powers yet, and part of it is that higher level fights tend to be a bit more of a grind. But I was able to dish out a gratifying amount of damage, almost dropping a couple of the characters, and only having one of the monsters drop.

But we were getting tired, so I took a picture of the positions of everyone, and we retired until the next session.

1. About three or four years’ worth of 4E, and about five years of 3E before that. [↩]
2. Some of the ideas on the table include Ashen Stars, Night’s Black Agents, Dungeon World, 13th Age, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, and some sort of Fate game. [↩]
3. That is, as bullying dicks. [↩]
4. After all, they dealt with bullying dicks all the time. [↩]

***SPOILER ALERT***

I’m running Tomb of Horrors for this leg of the Storm Point campaign. You may not want to read on if you’re playing the game yourself.

***SPOILER ALERT***

Last session of the Storm Point campaign, we wrapped up the second installment of the Tomb of Horrors adventures, called The Tomb of Shadows. We had almost a full house – missing just one player – and the group decided that one of the other players would play his character, just to make sure that Thrun the Anvil, defender supreme, would be there helping them out against what they assumed would be their toughest fight yet.

We picked up right after the fight that ended the last session, and they immediately took an extended rest. As mentioned in previous posts, resting in Moil¹ is not as effective, thanks to the numbing necromantic cold. Characters do not regain all their healing surges – one less for each extended rest they’ve taken here, plus they get to make an Endurance check against a rising DC or lose another surge.

So, the gang had had about enough of that sort of thing², and wanted to wrap things up and get out while they could. They continued into a maze of rough passages, many dead-ending in little alcoves filled with sarcophagi. A little investigation revealed that the alcoves were all trapped, and fiddling with the sarcophagi would drop the whole mess down into a pit.

Eventually, they found a place where the trap had been tripped, and saw a passage off the bottom of the pit. They climbed down and found a chamber where a squad of shadar-kai had triggered some sort of necromantic trap and been slain. They were suspicious of this, having not had the best of experiences with the shadar-kai in the past, but Milo was able to identify these ones as faithful servants of the Raven Queen³, and they figured out that these must have been sent to figure out who was screwing around with the flow of death energies that should be flowing to the Raven Queen.

Of course they looted the bodies. What did you expect from adventurers? But the cleric also said some blessings over the bodies.

The next challenge was finding the way out of the maze of trapped passages. They finally found it by tripping a trap and dropping down one of the pits, then noticing the trap door in the ceiling above when Soren climbed back up.  This led them to another “Screw you, adventurer!” room, with four of the demon faces that had done them so much damage the previous session. These ones were not trapped, and had real trap doors in the mouths, so once the gang got over their⁴ paranoia, they dropped down into the passage that led to the final encounter.

This last room contained the mystical engine that was channeling the death energy for Acererak. They started trying to dismantle it⁵, but failed on the first roll, which triggered the defenses. Said defenses being the summoning of a skull with jewels for eyes and teeth that tried to eat their souls⁶. Our heroes immediately stopped trying to dismantle the engine⁷ and turned their attention to smashing the skull.

It was a tough fight. The thing managed to steal Soren’s soul early on⁸, and got to heal himself twice – once by consuming a previously stolen soul, and then by consuming Soren’s soul, killing him dead. It almost managed to get Milo and Faran the same way, but they were luckier with their saving throws.

In the end, they managed to take the construct down, and destroyed the arcane machine. Then they used the teleport circle to head back to Belys to get Soren raised from the dead.

We’re half-way through the Tomb of Horrors, now, and I’m letting the characters advance to level 18 before we jump into the next adventure. I just need to decide how to handle getting them appropriate magic items for their level without giving away the store or being too stingy. I think I’ve got a plan, but I need to run the numbers.

Anyway, next game won’t be for a few weeks, due to other demands on my time. We’ll be ready by then.

1. Well, the way I do it, anyway. [↩]
2. Also, they’d had about enough of the “Screw you, adventurers!” nature of the Shadow Tomb. They accept it, now that they’ve realized that it’s the nature of the adventure, and no longer blame it on me. So, win. [↩]
3. Unlike the rebel shadar-kai they had previously dealt with, who had sworn allegiance to Vecna. [↩]
4. Very well-earned. [↩]
5. A skill challenge – and not an easy one. [↩]
6. Actually, it wasn’t a demi-lich, but instead a construct that did almost the same things, just not as well. But it scared the crap out of the players. [↩]
7. Dunno if that was the best course of action, as dismantling the engine would have seriously weakened the construct. But their motto is “Get ‘em!” so I can’t say I’m really surprised. [↩]
8. Good thing his player had Thrun’s character sheet to run, otherwise he would have had very little to do all encounter. [↩]

***SPOILER ALERT***

I’m running Tomb of Horrors for this leg of the Storm Point campaign. You may not want to read on if you’re playing the game yourself.

***SPOILER ALERT***

The last session of my Storm Point campaign was the first session with our new quorum rules – only three players need to be there for me to run the game. Previously, it was four, but with a total of five players, that was resulting in a lot of canceled games. We only had three players show for this game, but we ran with it.

I had spent some time between sessions looking at the current stage of the adventure¹ paring things down so that there would be a reasonable chance of getting through the adventure in two or three sessions. This phase of the adventure is a dungeon crawl, with some interesting battles, some nasty traps, and some really tricky puzzles. I wanted to give the characters the full-on Tomb of Horrors experience, so I kept a few of the traps/puzzles and a couple of the combats, and discarded the rest. The mix I have left will give them² enough variety to keep them interested and the game moving along, as well as giving them enough danger to let them know that they’ve accomplished something when they get to the end.

So, we started out with the characters dropping through the portal from those annoying archways³ and finding themselves in a room filled with piles of skulls. A search discovered no traps, only a bit of treasure. From there, they went on to a cavern that dropped away in a cascade of necrotic rain, with a stone platform floating at the bottom, decorated with four of the ubiquitous demon faces. This room was an elaborate and vicious trap that took up a lot of the session. The heavy misdirection kept the group fixated on the wrong things for some time, damaging them repeatedly as they tried different things. Eventually⁴, they found the way onward.

Next up was a corridor that screamed “Trap!” It had one of the big demon faces at the far end, and the entire floor was covered with tiles marked with magical glyphs, saying things like fire, ice, gender swap, lightning, teleport, and other threatening things. Our heroes displayed some admirable caution in advancing into this corridor, but in the end, discovered that the magic that had powered the various traps was gone, and they could cross the room with impunity⁵.

After this room, they found the site where they’re missing magic item⁶ had been teleported when Milo went through one of the arches and were able to recover it, along with a number of other pretty nice magic items. Then they reached a bridge of bones over an ossuary pit, guarded by the spirits of dead warriors. This encounter had a method for talking your way past these dead-but-once-noble defenders, but our boys didn’t care much about that, and proceeded to destroy them with great effectiveness⁷. That was where we stopped things for the evening.

I was surprised how much we got through, and I think that’s largely an effect of only a single combat right at the end of the evening. I think that next session should see this section of the adventure – and this adventure in the larger Tomb of Horrors collection of adventures – wrapped up. Then, everyone levels up a couple levels, and we start the third⁸ adventure.

Should be fun.

1. The abandoned Fortress of Conclusion, in the second installment of the campaign. [↩]
2. I think. [↩]
3. See last session. [↩]
4. After a fair bit of whining: “Well, fine, then. We’ll just sit down here and die.” [↩]
5. Like the original Tomb of Horrors, the modern adventure relies on a lot of misdirection to basically say, “Screw you, adventurer!” You can’t trust things that look safe to be safe, and you can’t trust things that look dangerous to be dangerous. So, the adventurers have to treat everything like a serious threat, and feel like idiots when there’s no actual danger. Like I say, “Screw you, adventurer!” [↩]
6. A box of eternal provisions. [↩]
7. A combination of some good initiative rolls, lacks of other combats this evening, and a cleric tooled up for healing and radiant damage made this a really short fight. [↩]
8. And second-last. [↩]

***SPOILER ALERT***

I’m running Tomb of Horrors for this leg of the Storm Point campaign. You may not want to read on if you’re playing the game yourself.

***SPOILER ALERT***

When we got together for the latest Storm Point session, it had been over two months since the previous session. Scheduling is always difficult over the holiday season, and it spilled over a fair bit into the new year this year. But we finally got everyone together, and last Sunday, we had a full house for the return to the game.

We picked things up right where we had left them, with our heroes continuing to explore the dead city of Moil, searching for the epicentre of the funnelled death energy¹. They had just slain a massive undead creature made of bones and the rubble of the city’s towers, and took the opportunity for an extended rest. I’ve been making the characters make Endurance checks every now and then to avoid losing a healing surge to the necrotic cold of the Shadowfell, and I decided that, after an extended rest, each character would recover one fewer healing surge than usual, as well as having to make an Endurance check to avoid losing a second surge.

The reason for these checks and the loss of healing surges is twofold. First, I want to emphasize the fact that the characters are on a different plane, one inimical to life, and they need to realize the danger of that. Second, I want to put a clock on the game – if the characters stay too long, their life-energy will drain away.

I decided that this session, I wanted to get the characters into the final dungeon area at the end of the adventure. So, I routed them to the gate puzzle. I let them spot the Vestige² coming at them a fair ways off, making the threat of its presence obvious enough that the characters were motivated to unscramble the puzzle of the gate. They failed the skill challenge, and took the damage from the misfiring gate as they passed through.

Two of the party didn’t make it through the gate before the Vestige arrived, and they took some nasty damage – and were set up to take quite a bit more – before they were able to escape through the gate. It nicely put the fear of (dead) god in them. The fact that they landed in a room with bodies hanging from chains, a big demon face is the middle of the floor, and two nasty sword wraiths waiting for them helped accentuate the point.

The fight went fairly quickly, though the gang seemed well-threatened by them. When they wrapped it up, they were faced with the puzzle of the archways.

The whole thing with the arches struck me as nicely retro, with the silly, nasty effects of the arches, and the hidden exit guarded by a sphere of annihilation. The characters spent a fair bit of time monkeying around with the arches, winding up variously shrunk, donkey-headed, half-disintegrated, and stripped of magic items. They finally figured things out through the clever use of the hand of fate and speak with dead rituals to gather information, and made their way through the exit to the next room.

That’s where we stopped for the evening.

Between this session and next, I’m planning to take a hard look at the rest of the dungeon, to pare it down to two to three sessions of play, while still getting the best of the cool, nasty, fun stuff in the game. That way, we can get through the last two adventures in Tomb of Horrors and wrap up the Storm Point game in the epic tier and end on a high note.

Or, y’know, TPK. Whichever.

1. Yeah, it’s a whole thing… [↩]
2. Player: “What’s a Vestige?” Me: “Well, when a god loses worshippers and fades away, it leaves an impression on the world. That’s a Vestige.” Player: “So… you’re telling us this is the negative space of a dead god?” Me: “Pretty much.” Group: “Well, crap.” [↩]

***SPOILER ALERT***

I’m running Tomb of Horrors for this leg of the Storm Point campaign. You may not want to read on if you’re playing the game yourself.

***SPOILER ALERT***

I’m a little behind on this post – the last Storm Point game was about three weeks ago. I’ve put the game on hiatus until after the New Year, just because everyone¹ is so busy, and scheduling, which is always a challenge, is even worse this time of year.

Anyway.

We’re continuing with the Tomb of Horrors adventure. The gang are on the second leg of the adventure, making their way through the city of Moil in the Shadowfell, looking for the centre of badness. This phase of the adventure has a couple of fights, some wandering around, some random encounters, and a fairly complicated set of skill challenges to get through one of the towers along the way. When I sat down to prep for the game, I looked things over, and decided that was far too much stuff for this group – we’re lucky if we get through two encounters in a session.

So, I kept a bit of the exploration, but cut out the random encounters. I also scaled back the skill challenge tower significantly – originally, it was a layered death trap, with shifting metal spires, whirling blades of force, and sonic mind disruptors, laced with a few banshees if the group was taking too long to navigate it. That thing alone would have taken at least one session for us to plow through. On the other hand, I liked the idea of a section of the city that the heroes needed to navigate carefully as a skill challenge, so I threw in a half-collapsed tower that they needed to find their way through.

They had some interesting times finding their way where they wanted to go, especially when they ran into a long, deep gap in the walkway. I used their various attempts to cross this gap to highlight the dangerous nature of the Shadowfell². I also had them making Endurance checks every hour or two to deal with the necromantic cold of the place. Failure meant losing a healing surge.

I capped off the evening with the fight against the Moil Barrow. In the adventure-as-written, this is an eminently avoidable³ fight, but I plopped it down right on the pathway to throw an exciting battle into the evening.

Well, it was meant to be exciting. I rolled so consistently poorly that this big, nasty solo soldier wasn’t much of a threat at all. It took them some time to wear it down, but its low initiative roll, plus all the conditions people placed⁴ on it meant that it just wasn’t the death machine it was designed to be. Oh, well. Sometimes the dice just don’t co-operate.

After that fight, the gang decided to take an extended rest. I sprang the other nasty environmental surprise on them at that point: resting in the Shadowfell meant that they recovered one fewer healing surge, plus they had to make an Endurance check or lose another healing surge. They’ve decided they don’t like that.

After the New Year, the gang will get back to Moil, and find the center of evil that they’ve come seeking. I’m hoping to wrap up this leg of the adventure in another three to four sessions. Then, we’ll advance the characters up to be tough enough to take on the next episode of the Tomb of Horrors.

If they survive, of course.

1. And by everyone, I mainly mean me. Don’t care so much about the other yahoos. [↩]
2. For example, the cleric fired a radiant bolt down into the darkness, and I made an attack against his Will. They don’t know what that was, and I’m not telling. [↩]
3. Also, pretty nasty. [↩]
4. And maintained. [↩]

***SPOILER ALERT***

I’m running Tomb of Horrors for this leg of the Storm Point campaign. You may not want to read on if you’re playing the game yourself.

***SPOILER ALERT***

We had a full house at the last Storm Point game¹ , which was nice, as we were heading into the next phase of the campaign. I had let the characters advance up to 14th level, with the idea that we were going to start on the next adventure int he Tomb of Horrors book.

The reason for going this way is that the majority of us are getting tired of D&D. We’ve been playing it for a long time, and are starting to be ready for a different system. On the other hand, we’re liking this campaign and these characters, and don’t want to just end it without some sort of resolution. So, what we’re planning is that we will run through the Tomb of Horrors book² , which will take the characters up into the Epic tier, and provide a nice, memorable conclusion to the campaign.

What then? Well, we’ve been talking over some of the options. If we want to stay with the fantasy style game, maybe Dungeon World. Apocalypse World and Night’s Black Agents also got some interest, and I forgot to even bring up Ashen Stars, which I think this group would really dig. But that’s a good year or so away, so I’m not sweating it right now. We’ll make the decision when the time comes.

Anyway.

I started the session asking how the characters had kept busy during the downtime, and let each player tell a short story about something cool they had done in the time between the last session and the current one. Then, I told them that they were getting bored, with nothing big and exciting going on, and asked them what they planned to do about it.

They decided to go ask Bitaryut the Blind – the seer that they’ve had some dealings with previously³ – if he knew of anything that they might be interested in. He had a parchment covered in runes and sigils that looked very much like the markings that our heroes had seen in theGarden of Graves, designed to funnel the energy of death to a collection point. That intrigued them enough to go looking for the stone portal in the desert where a merchant had copied down the markings.

After some investigation of the portal, they discovered that it opened with a small sacrifice of blood rubbed on the stone, leading to the Shadowfell – specifically, to the dark, ruined city of Moil. They dithered and bickered for long enough that Thrun, the dwarf fighter, just jumped through the portal.

On the far side of it, Thrun was immediately attacked by some very powerful zombies and wights. The rest of the gang followed him as they were able⁴ and joined the fray, but the fact that they had started the combat separated meant that it was a tougher fight than it had initially appeared. The terrain didn’t help them much, as I had overlooked the bit of the description that talked about how the floor of the tower on which they were fighting was tilted, so I had the floor shift and tilt during the combat, showing how the building was unstable and teetering on the edge of collapse.

They did triumph, however, after a tough fight, and took stock of their surroundings. I described the dilapidated towers and crumbling bridges, the dark and the cold, and let them get the idea of what a bad place they were in. But it was late by that time, so we called it for the evening.

Next session, they need to figure out where the runes are in this place, and what they’re meant to do.

1. The previous session, I had run out of prep time, so we ran a session of D&D Next playtest, using the Caves of Chaos adventure again. The big thing from that playtest: we really liked the new fighter mechanic. [↩]
2. Well, I may collapse some of the adventures in the interests of shortening the amount of time it takes us to get through things. You may have noticed that we don’t get a whole lot done in a session. [↩]
3. And, because he had tried to use them to further his own plots, they had something to hold over his head. [↩]
4. In initiative order, of course. [↩]

*** Potential Spoilers ***

The adventure described below is loosely based on the great sword-and-sorcery novel Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed. I think what happens in the game is probably different enough from what happens in the novel that nothing’s gonna get ruined, but things change in play, and I might end up using some plot point from the book that reveals a little too much. I’ll try not to let that happen, but you have been warned.

Oh, and you should also go read Throne of the Crescent Moon, because it’s a fantastic book.

Last Sunday, after a lenghty hiatus¹, we managed to get the gang together to wrap up the Throne of the Crescent Moon inspired adventure I’ve been running. It looked – right up to the last minute – like we might have a full house, but then someone had to cancel², so we had four out of five players.

Because of the long stretch between the last game and this one, everyone was kind of fuzzy on what was going on and why the characters were doing stuff, so we opened with a pretty in-depth recap. I had been completely unsure about what the group would plan to do with the information they had uncovered last time, so I was pretty much flying by the seat of my pants on this session. I had a stack of stats, and some half-formed ideas about various options, but nothing really solid, because I didn’t know which way the group would jump.

After some discussion³, he gang decided that the main goal was killing Mouw Awa, because he had pissed them off the most. Oh, and they also figured that they should probably stop Dhamsawaat from staging a ghul-backed coup of Belys. Investigation of the sewers, where they had last encountered Dhamsawaat, located the entry to the crypt where they had faced him previously. Unfortunately, that entry was a rectangle of runes carved in the bricks, similar to a teleport circle.

This entry seemed to open an actual physical passage to a remote location, rather than teleporting people there. And it was closed with some sort of key or passphrase that the group didn’t know. So, they set up a blind in the sewers, and decided to camp there until the next night without moonlight⁴. When the gate opened, they went charging down into the crypt, which was once again full of ghuls.

Mouw Awa was there, of course, and he did his level best to mess the crew up. The ghuls were are minions, so were an annoyance but not much more. And in behind them all, Dhamsawaat was working some strange ritual that the players didn’t even notice until about three rounds in.

Because of their history with him, our heroes concentrated everything on Mouw Awa, dropping him to about 8 hp in the first round. Then he possessed the team’s tank and went to town on the others. Things got kinda messy after that, but the group finally realized that, under cover of Mouw Awa and the ghuls, Dhamsawaat had been steadily channeling power into a huge mound of skulls, and that couldn’t possibly be good.

The way I had set up the ritual was that Dhamsawaat could use a move action each turn to power it. After he had powered it seven times (and he was able to power it twice in one round, because he couldn’t see the characters to attack them), a huge bone ghul was going to rise from the skulls and hand the heroes their heads before going on to rampage through Belys. The power was at four or five when someone finally attacked Dhamsawaat and pulled him out of the magic circle.

This broke the ritual⁵ and released a blast of energy⁶ that finished of Mouw Awa, dropped the characters’ main tank⁷, and fried all the ghuls. It also caused the crypt to start to collapse, in best action movie style.

Dhamsawaat⁸ fell into the cracks forming in the earth, and our heroes made a panicky escape⁹.

By that time, we were about two and a half hours overtime, so we called it a night. Before the next game, I think I’m going to have the characters take some downtime and level up to about level 14. Gotta look at the numbers before I commit to that, but that’s my plan.

In closing, I just want to say thank you to Saladin Ahmed, author of Throne of the Crescent Moon for writing the book that served as inspiration for this adventure, and for being cool and encouraging about me running it and writing about it. Thank you, sir. You are a scholar and a gentleman.

I’m looking forward to book two.

1. Caused by the fact that it’s hard to schedule people for a casual game during the summer months, especially when the majority of the players have kids. Also, it’s been a pretty busy summer for me. [↩]
2. We missed you, Br. Linton! [↩]
3. Which, of course, ran pretty far afield from the game for a bit. [↩]
4. I rolled a d8 to get the number of nights they’d have to weight, and got a 7. After two nights, they said, “Screw this,” and went and paid a seer to tell them when the next moonless night would be. [↩]
5. Initially, I mistyped broke as borke, which also fits, because the ritual was well and truly borked. [↩]
6. 2d6 per point of power in the ritual, so 8d6 or 10d6; I forget which. [↩]
7. Though with his triggered actions, he wound up with more hit points than he had before the blast went off. Stupid dwarf fighters. [↩]
8. Who, at this point, was barely scratched. [↩]
9. The warlord almost fell to his death a couple of times, saved once by a lightning lure and once by someone grabbing his arm. And one of the others who went to save the warlord almost fell to his doom, as well. It was lovely. [↩]

*** Potential Spoilers ***

The adventure described below is loosely based on the great sword-and-sorcery novel Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed. I think what happens in the game is probably different enough from what happens in the novel that nothing’s gonna get ruined, but things change in play, and I might end up using some plot point from the book that reveals a little too much. I’ll try not to let that happen, but you have been warned.

Oh, and you should also go read Throne of the Crescent Moon, because it’s a fantastic book.

We had a full house for the lastStorm Point game, which was nice. Of course, as always happens, we lost a good chunk of the game session to socializing, because we hadn’t all been together for a while. Still, I managed to wrangle the group into game mode and push them into some plot, which was good.

I want to note that this entire session was improvised – I had no idea what way the players were going to go with this, so I just statted up some different ghouls, and waited to see what happened.

The game picked up shortly after the action in the last session, when our heroes lost Mouw Awa and his “beloved friend” in the sewer crypt underneath Belys. Mouw Awa made a pretty strong impression on the gang, and they took some time to describe how much they hated him to the player who had missed out on meeting him. Then they got down to business.

Investigation took up a good chunk of time in this session¹, with everyone hitting up their resources to see if they could discover anything significant about Mouw Awa. They even called in a favour from Bitaryut the Blind, who owed them one after they had recovered his shewstone. At the end of their investigation, they came up with a few pieces of information² :

• Mouw Awa was a convicted child-killer several hundred years ago.
• When he was caught, he was found to be sacrificing the children to an unspecified dark god³.
• As punishment, he was entombed alive.
• His tomb was woven with powerful curses to keep him imprisoned but alive – forever.
• The tomb in question was about thirty miles from Belys, out in the desert, and had a jackal statue on top of it.

Armed with this information, they saddled up the hippogriffs⁴ and flew off to Mouw Awa’s tomb to see if they could find out anything there that would let them track the fiend down.

They managed to bypass the mystical trap on the door that would have fried their souls, but opening the tomb woke the storm ghuls and simoom ghuls that were guarding the place. The monsters got the drop on the heroes, and really layered the hurt on them in the first couple of rounds, but the good guys⁵ rallied and eventually defeated them.

Inside the tomb, they found a pile of dust that seemed to be the mortal remains of Mouw Awa. They also saw that the interior walls were covered in glyphs and sigils, similar to what they had encountered in the Garden of Graves, but focused on keeping the death-energy confined and controlled within the tomb. In the middle was a large stone block, about the size of bier⁶. And nowhere did they find any sign of Mouw Awa, or any information that could help them.

Until, that is, one of them had the bright idea of flipping the bier to look underneath it. There, they found a contract between Mouw Awa and his beloved friend, Dhamsawaat⁷. The bargain between the two was simple: Dhamsawaat would free Mouw Awa⁸ from his eternal imprisonment and, in return, Mouw Awa would aid Dhamsawaat in his planned coup – taking out one of the genasi pashas of Belys, and seizing control of one section of the city.

They broke the stone, hoping that this might damage the relationship between Mouw Awa and his beloved friend, but it didn’t seem to have any effect⁹, so they headed back to the city. Now they have a better idea of what’s going on, and a decent idea about where Dhamsawaat plans to strike. They also know his name, and a little bit more about Mouw Awa.

Next session, we’ll have to see what they do with it.

1. Well, investigation and socializing. [↩]
2. The basis of these things are pulled from Throne of the Crescent Moon, simplified and twisted a bit to fit them into what I’m trying to do with this adventure. [↩]
3. I know who the dark god is; the players do not. [↩]
4. DAMN those hippogriffs! [↩]
5. Well, the characters, at least. To be fair, they’re mostly trying to be good guys. [↩]
6. Good thing, too, because that’s what it was. [↩]
7. Okay. I gotta explain that one. See, as I mentioned above, I was improvising this session, and didn’t have enough prep done. One of the things that’s hardest to come up with on the fly is a name, especially one from a culture that I’m not familiar enough with. When I tried to remember the name of the big bad in the book, the only name that came to mind was the name of the city – Dhamsawaat. I panicked, and there ya go. Failure of imagination led me to filch this name and misapply it. Happy now? [↩]
8. Who was a twisted shadow creature, now that his body has rotted away. The curse kept him alive; it didn’t keep him whole. [↩]
9. After all, if Mouw Awa agreed willingly to the bargain, Dhamsawaat may not need the stone to control him. [↩]

*** Potential Spoilers ***

The adventure described below is loosely based on the great sword-and-sorcery novel Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed. I think what happens in the game is probably different enough from what happens in the novel that nothing’s gonna get ruined, but things change in play, and I might end up using some plot point from the book that reveals a little too much. I’ll try not to let that happen, but you have been warned.

Oh, and you should also go read Throne of the Crescent Moon, because it’s a fantastic book.

There’s some stuff going on in real life that’s been making it hard to get quorum to play the Storm Point game, so for the next little while, we’re relaxing the quorum rules a bit to make sure the game doesn’t die from lack of momentum. Normally, we play as long as four out of five players can make it, and have one of the players double-up on running a character. But doubling up on a character is a pain, and we’re more likely to get three than four players these days, so I dropped the quorum requirement to three, said no one needs to double up, and decided to keep the entire adventure within the city of Belys to allow a little bit of verisimilitude for changing party composition based on player attendance¹.

This sort of ties in with some other meta-changes to our regular game. One of the reasons we had players doubling up on characters was to keep the experience point and treasure distribution even, and so limit the amount of fiddly bookkeeping I was having to do as GM. I’ve decided to move a couple of steps farther in the direction of eliminating fiddly bookkeeping, in the interests of making the game do what the group wants it to do. A few sessions back, we had a discussion about the direction of the game, wherein we decided that we would use campaign downtime to be able to advance the characters without it taking another six years to get to 3oth level². I’ve decided to do away with handing out experience points³ – instead, I’m just going to tell the characters when they advance in level, and use downtime for bigger level jumps.

As for treasure, I’m still working on that, but I’m leaning towards abstracting that more, and letting characters gain and swap magic items in the downtime. We’ll see how that goes.

Anyway.

I had just finished reading Throne of the Crescent Moon, so when I was looking for a city-centric adventure idea set in a vaguely Arabic city⁴ , I had a good model right in front of me. I took the main idea of an evil necromancer summoning ghuls for a nefarious purpose and came up with my own nefarious purpose and version of the necromancer. Then, I started reskinning ghouls to serve as my ghuls.

In the book, there are a number of different types of ghul, and I wanted to reflect that, but Belys is all about the Genasi noble families controlling the elements, so I decided that my flavours of ghul were all going to be elementally linked – earth ghuls, sand ghuls, wind ghuls, fire ghuls, storm ghuls, water ghuls, etc. I started with the earth ghuls, using the horde ghoul stat block, and just describing them and their paralysis attack differently – they looked more like putrescent corpses with burning eyes, long claws, and sharp fangs, and their paralysis felt like the earth trying to draw the victim down into a grave.

I’m not going to talk about the other flavours of ghul I’ve come up with, because the party hasn’t met any of them, yet.

So, armed with the ghul stats and the necromancer stats, we started the game.

The characters had become moderately famous in their quarter of the city after their elimination of Channah and their favour for Bitaryut the Blind, not to mention their popular feasts and their ties to a few merchant concerns. When they heard reports of poor families disappearing from the labyrinthine alleys of their neighbourhood, they decided to take a look.

Investigation found that the missing families had all lived in homes on cul-de-sac alleyways, and each had had a symbol drawn on their doors in blood. These symbols, according to the priest and the swordmage, were sigils of dark magic designed to call the corrupted dead to their location. Our heroes found evidence specifically of ghuls – and the priest was able to fill his comrades in on the difference between ghuls and the more common ghouls. The primary difference was that ghuls were created by necromancy, and didn’t propagate themselves the way ghouls did, which meant that someone was creating and using them.

The gang trooped up to the main temple of the Raven Queen, who handles the official graveyards of the city, and managed to only insult the honour of their priests a moderate amount when they asked if anyone had been robbing the graves under their care. The Raven Queen priests huffily informed them that none of the graves they oversaw had been desecrated, but that some in the city performed private burials for their family members, either for religious or financial reasons, and they couldn’t be expected to watch over them.

Putting things together, the party began to speculate that they might have someone trying to build an army of ghuls in the city, starting with some of the non-consecrated graves, and then using those ghuls to fetch fresh materials from the poor living in the alleys of the city. This was somewhat worrisome to them.

Given that their investigation had revealed that the attacks had all occurred on nights when the moon was either new or hidden by heavy clouds, the group decided to set up a watch to try and stop the next attack and, hopefully, gain some more information about where the mastermind was located. They hired a few mercenaries and paid a number of vendors and other street people to keep an eye on things⁵ and, when a dark night came, they used the hand of fate ritual to narrow down the probable location of the next attack.

They took to the air on their hippogriffs⁶ to be able to get to any of the three or four alleyways they thought were the targets. And, sure enough, one was. The ghuls were mainly minions, with one tough ghul seeded in the middle, and they took them out pretty quickly. They also spent a fair bit of time looking around for the necromancer they were sure must be on the scene to control the ghuls, but didn’t find him⁷. They then followed the ghuls’ back trail down into a sewer and another huge mob of ghuls. Again, they were minions, and the gang managed to wipe them out in short order.

That’s where we left things. Tomorrow is the next installment, as they see if they can find out where these ghuls are coming from, and what vile plan is behind their creation.

We’ll see how that goes.

1. That is, only the characters of the players who attend get to go on the adventure, so no one has to play two characters. [↩]
2. Check out the link for more details about the discussion and the decision. [↩]
3. I’m still using experience points to build encounters, because it’s a pretty handy way of balancing things. [↩]
4. My game city, Belys, is vaguely Arabic. Dhamsawaat, the city in the novel, is much more than vaguely Arabic. This comes from the author having done actual research, and me having based my Arabic city on hazy memories of 1001 Arabian Nights. [↩]
5. And, of course, they pointed out that, if they had become crime bosses after ousting Channah, they’d already have these operatives on the payroll. I just sighed and rolled my eyes. [↩]
6. I will never live that down. [↩]
7. Was he even there? I’m not telling. [↩]

This latest session of the Storm Point game was a little different. First of all, one of the players has left the game after many years¹, so the group is down to five. Second, we had a request to wrap up extra early, so I didn’t have much time to stretch things out. Given both those things, I decided to take a bit of a chance to see how things would fall out if I tried something the group wasn’t expecting.

As you may have gleaned from these posts, the group for this game is very much of the beer-and-pretzels, kick-in-the-door-and-get-’em style of play. We use the game primarily as a way to socialize with each other, and attentions are such that we play a pretty bare-bones flavour of 4E – we have combats, and we have the scenes that move you between combats. I try to weave enough of a story that the group genuinely cares about what they’re doing when they get into a fight, but not much more than that².

This session, though, I decided to send up a test balloon to see if they’d be open to something with a little more complication to it. I figured that, if it worked, I could make some changes to the campaign to fill it out a bit. If it didn’t, well, we had a short session to suffer through.

I started the evening talking about the effects of the heroes taking out crime boss Channah the previous session, and letting the players talk a bit about how their characters were fitting into Belys. Then I had Bitaryut the Blind, whom they had met at their feast a few weeks back³, ask them for some help. According to Bitaryut, the scion of one of the genasi families who rule Belys had been disowned by his parents based on information provided by Bitaryut. In revenge, this genasi had stolen Bitaryut’s scrying crystal.

Bitaryut was somewhat reluctant to come out with a lot of details about what this genasi had done that got him disowned, hinting that there were children involved, but not going into specifics. He was able to provide the location of the thief, and offered the group a favour as a reward for returning his crystal. When pressed, he provided some backstory on the family and the thief they were chasing – they were a family who had manufactured war machines in the war which had destroyed the Empire of Nerath, and the thief was holed up in the old war machine foundry outside the city.

So, our heroes schlepped out to the old foundry and found the genasi and a bunch of war machines that he had managed to repair. And this is when things started to go a different direction.

I had managed to instill enough doubt in Bitaryut’s honesty that, for once, the gang didn’t shout, “Get ‘em!” and charge. They actually⁴ tried talking. After a little while and some tentative maneuvering, they got a different side of the story Bitaryut had told them⁵. In this version, the thief was a victim of politics and Bitaryut’s machinations, and he had stolen the scrying crystal both as revenge and as a stake now that he had to leave Belys.

It was an interesting and gratifying moment for me. I had statted everything up for a fight if it came to that⁶, but I was very interested in seeing the players take a different tactic. I ran the whole thing as a conversation, with very few rolls – no one tried to intimidate anyone, and I think there was one Insight check to see if he was lying, but everything else came down to straight roleplaying.

In the end, the group convinced the thief to trade them back the scrying crystal in return for a teleport to Storm Point and an introduction to the leaders of the town. Their idea is that he, with his war machines and the texts he’s discovered on repairing and manufacturing them, may be a valuable addition to their old hometown. There was a little bit of threatening here, of the “We’ll kill you if you mess with our town” style, but generally it went without a hitch.

And, of course, I awarded them full XP for solving the problem without resorting to violence.

So, why did I do it this way?

As I’ve said, this campaign tends to focus on creatures to fight and challenges to overcome⁷. Part of the reason for that is the dynamic and attention span of our group, as I noted above, and part of it is that combat is the thing that D&D 4E does best. I’ve been reading the little bit of information being released about D&D Next, and it’s been causing me to re-evaluate some of the things I’m doing in my current D&D game.

It occurred to me that I was being lazy. I had tried some more elaborate storylines earlier in the campaign, and they had quickly got lost or ignored, so I stopped working on them, instead putting all my prep time into coming up with interesting combat encounters, along with just a few linking elements. And the group seemed to like that.

But we were feeding into each others’ assumptions. I assumed that they weren’t interested in anything besides combat, and they assumed that all I was interested in giving them in this game system was combat. The playtest reports from D&D Next talk about how much freedom of action there is in the game⁸, and how it emphasizes interaction and exploration as well as combat.

Hell, it inspired me. I figured I’d throw some options in, and we’d see how things went.

What do I take away from this? Just because the game is working doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be improved if I change things up a bit. I can be a bit daring and, it seems, my players will follow. And that’s awesome.

I’ve got to think about how to keep this up in the game. I count it as a great success.

1. Bye, Pedro! Thanks for playing! [↩]
2. This is different from other groups and other games I run. It’s just the style that fits the needs of the Storm Point game best. [↩]
3. And whom they don’t trust. At all. He’s a fortuneteller, and they know I have a deck of many things from The Madness at Gardmore Abbey, so they’re just waiting for him to make them draw a card. [↩]
4. If I sound somewhat incredulous, it’s only because I’ve been gaming with these guys for many years. [↩]
5. Well, not really told them. More like hinted at and implied. [↩]
6. It usually does, after all. [↩]
7. Said challenges usually involving fighting creatures. [↩]
8. Understanding, of course, that this is very early days, and the game is in active development. Judgment must be reserved until the final product is available. But it looks really promising. [↩]