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***

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. [↩]

So, a couple of weeks ago, my friend Michael wrapped up a campaign that had been running for a number of years¹. It was set in the Iron Kingdoms, which world really had Michael pumped to run a game.

I will admit that, after reading the game books, I wasn’t all that impressed with the world, but I figured I’d give it a try. I had some problems with the whole steampunk² thing, and I didn’t much care for some of the rule changes that had been made to de-emphasize non-mechanical magic and emphasize fighters, rogues, and mechanical magic.

On the other hand, I quite liked their take on elves, for example, and the way they made non-human races quite rare in comparison to all the different flavours of humans. And I tend to enjoy the games Michael runs, so I opted in.

And thus Ladimir Csabor was created.

Ladimir started out as a very basic soldier, with some good general weapon skills both for ranged and hand-to-hand. He was a former sergeant, and thus had some experience making people do what he wanted them to. He was also the old man of the group. Over time, he turned intoLadimir Csabor, Man of ACTION! I boosted a lot of his physical skills to let him pull off interesting stunts in combat³, many of which were rather surprising, given his massive size.

The campaign wound down at one point, when we had completed the initial mission we had banded together for⁴, but restarted after a hiatus to move us into a second, then third phase of the campaign.

And then, near the end of the third phase, we trailed off. Sessions became less frequent, until it seemed like the game had died. It was less than ideal, but that’s the way it goes sometimes with games. Interest wanes – either in the players or the GM⁵ – and the game just dies.

But Michael didn’t want to let things end that way, so he scheduled one more session to wrap everything up. I thought it was a good idea, but I worried about how he’d pull it off. No sleight is meant to Michael; it’s just that the inertia of a stopped game is hard to overcome. It’s tough to get people back into character after too long, tough to make them care about the game again, and tough to wrap things up in a way that makes it feel worthwhile.

Man, did he come through.

He got us back into character and caring about things through a quick, interactive recap of events up to this point. He let us roleplay for a little while, fleshing out plans, but didn’t let us get mired down over-anazlyzing the situation⁶. He got us into some wonderful cinematic action that moved fast and kept us on the edge of our seats. He gave us the victory we fought for⁷.

And then he did something that was absolute genius, as far as I’m concerned. He gave us each three poker chips, and had us use them to narrate the end of our characters’ stories, a la Fiasco. I wouldn’t have thought of it, myself, and it worked gloriously.

So, I got to tell the tale of Ladimir returning to his family’s farm, taking his place among the uncles working there, turning into a crotchety old man, and finally dying and being laid to rest.

It was awesome.

So, thank you, Michael for the game. I may not have liked the world, but I really enjoyed the game. And thanks for showing me how to end a game properly.

Now.

What are you running next?

1. About eight years, in fact. We started shortly after the first Iron Kingdoms books came out. [↩]
2. No, you won’t persuade me that IK is not steampunk. No, you won’t persuade me that steampunk is cool. [↩]
3. Things like leaping over opponents, swinging on chandeliers, and, in one memorable scene, charging his horse up a wooden ziggurat to disrupt a ghostly sacrifice. [↩]
4. The group was made of characters from several different nations – some of them almost at war – so we needed strong reasons not to shoot each other. It almost happened a couple of times, anyway. The shooting each other thing, I mean. [↩]
5. Sometimes both. [↩]
6. I don’t know about your group, but my friends and I can create more problems for ourselves through overplanning than the GM can conceive of to throw at us. [↩]
7. I really didn’t think Ladimir would survive the final battle. He did, but it was a near thing. [↩]

***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.

Last Sunday saw us return to Belys, and the matter of ghuls stealing families from their homes. When we last left our heroes, they were wandering the sewers, trying to find the source of the ghuls. They overheard a whining, sycophantic voice in one sewer byway that seemed to be making excuses to another person, trying to explain why he had failed his blessed friend.

When the group charged into the room, they found that it had changed between one breath and the next, from a narrow, dark sewer to a vast, decaying necropolis. A pile of skulls sat in front of them, a number of shattered stone sarcophagi lay off to one side, and the floor was split in a number of places with deep chasms. Amid the sarcophagi was a tall, defaced statue, and a figure in red and black robes sat at its feet, conversing with a being that looked like a disembodies shadow and called itself Mouw Awa¹.

There was also a whole bunch of earth ghuls and fire ghuls. And everyone rushed to attack.

My plan was to have the fellow in red and black escape the fight, and Mouw Awa and the ghuls keep the characters busy while that happened. It started out pretty well but on the first turn, Thrun managed to make his way all the way across the battlefield and knock the boss on his butt. All of a sudden, his great defensive position was much less great. I managed to get Thrun off him², and he made his ignoble escape, but it was a much closer call than I might have liked.

Once he was out of the way, Mouw Awa proved to be just the kind of pain-in-the-ass nasty villain I wanted – he kept possessing whoever looked most interesting and attacking party members, all the while keeping up a running commentary on how he was going to feast on the souls of the characters for daring to threaten Mouw Awa’s blessed friend. The ghuls – a mix of minions and standard ghuls – proved to be effective in the large numbers³ to keep the PCs from using their mobility to best effect, and I actually had the fighter to within 30 points of being dead. That’s the closest I’ve got him in many a session.

But we were approaching the hard stop time of the evening, so I had Mouw Awa declare that his blessed friend was safe, and then he fled. All the ghuls collapsed into dirt and maggots and cinders, and we called it an evening.

The purpose of this encounter was two-fold: first, to show them that they’re dealing with something of larger scope than they had first thought, and second, to make them hate Mouw Awa, because he’s one of the coolest villains I’ve read in some time. Success on both counts.

Next, they’re going to need to figure out where they are, and what’s really going on.

1. I had statted up Mouw Awa, starting from a shadow demon I found in the Compendium, and tweaking his powers and abilities. He’s not the Mouw Awa from the books – different origin, and different powers – but I loved the fauning, venomous nature of his character from the book, and the wonderful, wheedling voice and speech patterns from the audiobook, so I kept those. [↩]
2. No easy feat. Thrun is a Dwarf Fighter, and is built to stick and hold to any bad guy he gets up against. [↩]
3. Since I’ve decided to forgo the experience and advancement system, I’m worrying less about building “balanced” encounters for the game. I eyeball the encounter, think about what purpose it serves in the narrative, and then fill it with what looks cool. So far, it’s working. [↩]

*** 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. [↩]

My buddy Clint has been running a D&D 3.5 campaign for about four and a half years, now, and I’ve been playing a warlock named Dunael¹. Tonight, Dunael died, and I want to take a moment to talk about how it was handled, because Clint did pretty much everything right. I want to remember how he did things, because I want to follow his example if I’m ever in his position².

You need a little background³ to understand why what happened was good, so here we go.

Clint’s game is full of home-brewed races and metaphysics and monsters and pretty much everything else. Dunael was a Blood Elf, a race of elves who believe that they help keep the world ticking by offering their blood in special sacrifices every day. Over time, this has made their blood stronger than that of other races⁴, and this in turn has made them a little arrogant and superior to the other people in the world.

Dunael took that arrogance a step further, deciding that, instead of just sacrificing his blood to the world as a whole, and let the benefits trickle down to the minor spirits, he would sacrifice his blood to the minor spirits, and strengthen the world from the foundation up. This put him at odds with the rest of his family and his people, but he had more than the usual share of arrogance⁵ and set out to prove them wrong.

Over the years of play, Dunael became more and more shamanic about the whole approach, dealing more with the various spirits, making short-term bargains with them, and generally becoming one of the world’s experts on the Waking Dream, as the Blood Elves called the spirit world. He learned a number of the secrets of the world, traveled to the underworld, brought back children stolen centuries before, freed a bound demon, became one of the people entrusted with the power of the Light, rescued a companion from eternal imprisonment inside a shadow creature, traveled up the Dragonspire⁶ to learn the secrets of Truenaming from a sphinx, bluffed a powerful and ancient vampire out of attacking an army, and been made a minor noble in a land that’s not his own⁷.

Well, tonight Dunael and his companions were engaged in an aerial battle around a castle with a group of manticores. Manticores in this world are much smarter, nastier, and bigger than in standard D&D, and are an entire group of powerful, dangerous species that have their own kingdom and take slaves from other races. We were hopelessly outmatched, having just come from a confrontation with the rest of the manticore army⁸ and being low on resources. We were able to do some damage to the manticores and their twisted elven riders, but then two of them started escaping with hostages.

Between us, we managed to stop one of the hostage-takers, not killing it, but distracting it long enough that a companion could snatch the hostage away, leaving Dunael floating there in front of the angry manticore with the rest of the manticores circling above, ready to pelt him with spikes. The manticore blustered, and Dunael blustered; the manticore threatened, and Dunael threatened back; the manticore spelled out very carefully what would happen to Dunael if he didn’t back down, and Dunael scoffed. The manticores attacked, and Dunael died.

Riddled with manticore spikes, at -14 hit points, I looked at Clint and said, “Can I use this sacrifice of blood for something?” Knowing me as he does, Clint was wary, but agreed to hear me out. I told him that I wanted to use it to wake the spirit of the Bleak Citadel, the castle we were defending, to defend it’s people. It was a famous, ancient castle that had been possessed by one noble family its entire existence, and I figured it must have some strong feelings about the kidnappings, etc.

Clint thought for a bit, then said, “Put it in words. What do you say as you try to wake the spirit?” So, I came up with an impassioned plea, and it was heard. Not by the Citadel, though.

By the Dragon of the Spire.

You see, we were on its lower slopes, and I had made enough spiritual noise to wake it. It agreed to save the people of the Citadel if Dunael gave his heart’s blood – his spirit, soul, blood, and power – to the Dragon. Dunael agreed.

Thus, a great stone dragon raised up out of the mountain and slew the manticores, rescuing the hostages. And Dunael died.

More stuff happened after that, but it doesn’t really touch on what I want to talk about. Here are the salient points about how Clint handled this:

• Clint was very clear that, if I didn’t let the manticores leave, they would all attack me, and I would probably die.
• He made sure I understood what was at stake, and gave me a chance to back out.
• Once he saw that this was something Dunael was willing to die for, he didn’t pull any punches. He filled him full of manticore spikes, and let the dice fall as they would.
• When I asked to do something that would give my death a little extra meaning, he not only allowed it, he took it a step farther, turning the event into the stuff of legend. Dunael died defending the Citadel⁹, and woke the Dragon of the Spire¹⁰.
• He made it obvious to everyone that Dunael’s death was meaningful and not in vain.

There was some talk after the fact about how to resurrect Dunael, but I told the other players that this was a good, fitting end for the character. His story is done, and ended on a good note. He died being himself as hard as he could be, bluffing a tremendously powerful creature with nothing to back up his threats, and he still managed to do what he set out to do.

I’m going to miss him, but that’s the way his story should end. Thanks, Clint, for giving him the ending he deserved.

Now I’ve got to dig out my 3.5 books and make a new character.

1. I talk a little about him in this post. [↩]
2. I have been in his position before, you see, and haven’t handled it nearly as well. In fact, I completely bobbled one occasion when Clint’s character was killed, and I’m still kicking myself. [↩]
3. And yes, I’m sorry, that means I’m going to tell you about my character. [↩]
4. For example, the vampires we’ve met have really liked trying to bite Dunael. Except for one who was the wife of another party member. Well, ex-wife, I guess. [↩]
5. He viewed it as passion, and couldn’t understand why other people didn’t feel it the same way. [↩]
6. Which is actually the physical body of a dragon god, as well as a volcano – Dunael has done his best to avoid waking the Dragon of the Spire. [↩]
7. Of course, all the rest of the party were along for most of this stuff. [↩]
8. Wherein I made the ancient vampire, the Sallow Man, back down. Yeah, I’m kinda pleased with that. [↩]
9. The Lord of the Citadel, by the way, didn’t like Dunael and his friends much. There was a whole thing, there. [↩]
10. This is not necessarily a good thing. When the Dragon wakes, there are usually earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that follow. [↩]