Dragonmeet 2012: Heart of the Sunrise

Dragonmeet is a one-day small gaming con that's held in London around this time each year. Having been there as a player last year, this year I vowed to return as a gamemaster.

The table ended up filled with fans of the blog, including two folks from the L5R days and Paolo of Tsojcanth fame. Paolo brought his 52 Pages gnome, Gnaro, who had last been sighted in Mittellus-Prime and had somehow moved sideways in time to Mittellus-15087, which featured an alternate, rebooted version of the dungeon I had restocked using Dyson Logo's Purple Worm's Gullet map.

Memorable events in this run, entitled Heart of the Sunrise in true prognard fashion, included:

The party tarrying to collect the valuable claws of the hopping piercers not far inside the gullet, and interrupted by the appearance of the wyvern who had been nesting above the dungeon entrance. It wasn't long before the wyvern fell victim to an astounding series of events. It fumbled with its stinger (natural 1, 1/20 chance), went on to roll a fumble of 5 on the lower of 2d6, hit self for 1/2 damage (1/12 chance, increasing the odds to 1/240), lost my 50-50 determination roll of whether it was immune to its own poison (1/480), failed the first save vs. incapacitation I give victims of poison, which it would have made on a d20 8+ (1/1200) and the second save against death (1/3000) - both by one point, rolling a 7! So the wyvern arched around and, being clumsy in such confined quarters, stung itself in the eye and expired on the spot ......

Losing 3 party members to incapacitation and maiming. Tip: When making jokes about two suspicious-looking lizard statues possibly coming to life, interpose someone solid between them and the squishy characters!

An encounter with a mirror hidden in the room under the vertically rotating door under the dwarf youth hostel, which the Mittellus-Prime party had missed. This one will deserve a post of its own - the mirror was a special creation and it played out really well.

The final encounter with the shrine of the titular glowing ruby. The Band of Iron, being campaign characters with something to lose, were content to merely revere the fabulous gem. Not so these one-shot scoundrels! The party rogue used his Oil of Invisibility, lassoed the gem successfully, and then the altar turned into this and all hell broke loose:

What followed was the first time I have used the new chase rules and they worked like a charm. The rogue and gnome, who used pixie dust from a previous campaign to fly,  could double the creature's speed ... but they had to thread the dungeon, while it could move through stone at no penalty. It cut them off and the rogue only barely slipped past with a lucky roll of 2 from a quite-likely-to-hit rockhead. Still, a grim pursuit from a relentless, untiring opponent who seemed an infallible tracker seemed likely, so the rogue threw the gem to the flying gnome ... and the rock-thing stopped in confusion.

How long can our "garden-variety gnome" hero keep the gem aloft and away from the senses of the elemental guardian? That, alas, must await another chapter of his dimension-hopping saga. I want to thank all my excellent players for a truly memorable game with a rousing climax!

Another Simpler DCC Idea: Wild & Critical Spells

So it seems the Mighty Deeds (why did I think Feats?) commentary and replacement rule was well received. Here's another idea for taking a complex rule from Goodman's Dungeon Crawl Classics game, and making it more modular and compatible with the standard run of D&D clones and variants.

Via LevinLight Wiki

Instead of having a separate table for wacky results for each spell, why not have the wacky results be ... other spells?

You can get more extreme with this, in terms of abandoning the spell slot system, but I want to work this out sticking as closely to the classic fire-and-forget casting system as possible. Another insight: "no result" is boring and frustrating for spellcasters. So I'm just excluding it as a possibility.

Whenever a magic-user is going to cast a spell, before the player has stated the targeting and area of the spell, roll d20.

The spell goes wild on a 1 if the caster can use spells of a higher level than the one being cast, or a 1-2 if the spell is of the caster's highest level. Add 1 to this wild range for every 2 points the caster's Wisdom is below 9, and subtract 1 if the caster's Wisdom is 13 or above.

The spell goes critical on a 20, a 19-20 if the caster's Wisdom is below 9, and 18-20 if it is below 5. There is no chance to go critical if Wisdom is 13 or above. Yes, magic-users may want to lose Wisdom to become more powerful and random, which is why some spend so much time delving into secrets of forbidden knowledge (insert sanity loss=wisdom loss system here).

Wild Spell: Roll at random on the list of magic-user spells for that level. The magic-user casts that spell instead, whether or not he or she knows it, but may target it at will. If you rolled by chance the spell the magic-user was trying to cast in the first place, the spell escalates; go to the next highest level, the magic-user picks a spell that will not be cast, and roll on that spell level table to find out the spell that is cast. If the spell picked is rolled, escalate to the next highest level, and so on.

A creative DM may have some of the spell's effect or style influenced by the spell originally cast. For example, a magic-user trying to cast Web who casts ESP instead may find that cobwebs appear on the walls, that shout out and echo the thoughts of the closest sentient being.

Critical Spell: Roll 2d6 and take the lower:
1: The spell is cast with double range, double duration, + 1 to each damage die, and -2 to saving throw.
2: The spell, once cast, is replaced in memory by a random spell of the same level.
3: The spell is cast with double effect (area or damage, for example) or with -4 to saving throw.
4: The spell is cast without using it up in memory.
5: The spell has its usual effect plus the effect of a spell the caster chooses of the same level or 1 level higher.
6: Roll twice, and 6 has no effect.

I think this system has a good chance to walk the line between player boredom and total player screwage. Instead of "you fail" it's more like "hey, make the most of Rope Trick right now."

One-Page Crits & Fumbles

I realized that since the first of my one-page graphic play aids got posted here, I'd developed a couple more we use in the Trossley game that I hadn't shared with the class. Both are based on a rough mapping of 2d6, take the lower, to anatomical results. Here's the first one: crits and fumbles, a further working-out of the system I shared previously.

The point of 1 page, 18 point is you shouldn't have to click to enlarge...

I find that neither natural 1's nor natural 20's should be apocalyptic in their results. If they add some craziness and unpredictability to combat, that's good.

The only dangling end is what happens when a missile weapon fumbles. I've been applying the results but it's clear that some of them don't make sense. It's hard to see how a fumbled bowshot could stun you about the head, for instance - leaving aside the incident last night where a notably hapless henchman had a fumbled sling wrap around his head and spent the next round untying it. Any ideas from those of you who use fumbles?