Running and Hacking the Lantern of Wyv

At London's one-day convention Dragonmeet last weekend I ran one of the One Page Dungeon Contest winners from this year, "The Lantern of Wyv" by Michael Prescott. As usual, I find one-page adventures near perfect time-wise for four-hour convention slots (though this slot was more like 3 1/2), but can't resist tinkering with the adventure as written.

The pregenerated characters were all based on rock stars from the 60's, mostly associated with the Rolling Stones, in homage to the song "Lantern." Each one had a secret goal - to use the Lantern to get back home; to gather white "moon pebbles" or wyvern venom for, um, alchemical purposes; to experience new sensations; to rid the Bay of the wyverns that had taken over since the owner of the Lantern died; to scrounge spells; to make sure the wizard buried there is resting easily. Some changes were:

1. The adventurers start from a village a half day's walk away from the bay,populated by refugees from the wyvern plague. They had 1/6 chances of encountering a wyvern and a human hunting party from the survivors in the bay, and got the latter. These gave useful information that the wyverns are attracted to shiny and colorful things, and traded a dose of anti-venom for some food and equipment.

2. More detail about the tower where the flying barge "docks" (25 feet above the top). The wizard Radomenus has only been dead 20 years and the tower was the site of her funeral and wake. It's a three-floor octagonal construction some 20' wide and rises 25' with its top levels blasted away (the stone appears melted, which wizards may know is the signature effect of a high-level white fireball). All around the tower in the long grass are melted chunks of stone and the pieces of a dismantled spiral stair.

Also in the grass and leaves by the tilting wooden door is a small iron figurine of a cricket-bodied man in the act of playing the fiddle and bow. If brought within 5' of a place where Radomenus has lain (the biers in the tower and the barge, the black table in the Lantern) the residual radiation will inspire the figure to chirp out a slow rhythm, which gets more hectic with proximity to the white sand or to Radomenus herself.

Inside on the ground floor are scattered, decaying folding chairs (the wizards at the wake quarreled on leaving and the place was never properly cleaned up) surrounding a bare wooden bier with few surprises. A few balled-up scraps of paper when put together reveal a neatly scribed program for the funeral. In the game I prepared this prop on the train up and threw wadded-up pieces of the puzzle at the players as they scoured the floor. This gave such clues as "shrouding and shielding of the body", the hymn "that is not dead which doth eternal lie,"and the conclusion of the wake with an "abolition of the tower."

Using rope to go up past the middle level, with some uninteresting long-spoiled food and drink left over from the wake, the adventurers found themselves on the melted stump-roof of the tower and waited until the flying barge came to stop there, 25' up. A levitate spell from the gnome and some ropework had everyone up there quickly, although the healer fell and broke her ribs.

Using the information from the hunters, everyone lay low and covered up their armor for the ride and survived without a wyvern attack (1/6 chance, up to a certainty if showing bright or shiny objects).

3. There had been a lot of ropework getting up the stairless tower and onto the barge, and rather than go through all that again I decided to make the central shaft of the Lantern different. The levitating magics that allowed people to move between levels are still in place, but have become unstable. For each level in space, each 5' area around the rim of the shaft and each minute in time roll a d6, where 6 = "going up quickly" and 1 ="going down quickly." Various ways to navigate were tried, including trial and error, rope, and throwing flour into the air to see which way the currents go (adventuring use #2,407 for flour). The slight chaos thus caused had the gnome on the third level and the rest of the party on the first.

4. The first level, along with the radioactive "new flesh" healing slab, had the addition of some formless lumps of flesh that used to be servants. I was ready to use them in a fight (as lemures) but seeing no need to kill time I instead had them just be features in an empty room, that protested and asked to be returned to oblivion when put on the resurrection slab.

5. The second level was mostly unexplored, although the shaft room was the venue for the final fight. I had prepared a map of my campaign world with crossing ley lines for the players to find, as well as a kind of a game where a wizard could piece together torn up and incomplete spell names and descriptions to create unreliable new magics.

6. The third level was pretty much as described. The gnome tiptoed past the bulk of the transformed Radomenus (sleeping, by my dice) and messed around a bit with steering crystals and the pit of radioactive sand before filling a wineskin with the stuff and, casting it into the flux currents, found one to gently go back down.

At that time, looking at the less than 30 minutes remaining, I decided that Radomenus would wake up and crawl down for the final boss fight. Well, 8 hit dice of blob don't last long against eight level 4 characters, and the one lightning bolt she licked off before Hideous Mirth and a hail of arrows got to her only critically injured a henchman. I didn't even think to have her summon wyverns before descending, so the party got cheated out of that experience as well. Next time she will be better prepared...

Resolution 1: Prep without mercy. These are one-shot characters and there's no need to be gentle.

Resolution 2: The one-page format lends itself to four hours pretty easily, so any padding added at the front will detract from the meaty, cool stuff at the end.

Two-word Setting Seeds

Here's a simple idea inspired by noisms' observation that having a basic idea about your setting is key to improvisation. I would add that at the same time, you have to come up with ideas that fit the setting but stay fresh, because the imagination under pressure reverts to mediocrity. So how do you turn the stale into the fresh, without veering off the deep and and having encounters with toasters and snuffleupagi?

One answer is to take the elements of your familiar setting and combine them in new ways. Let's say your party has decided to flip the bird to your carefully prepared plans, and heads to a village of adventure you haven't prepared, in hex 2049, the genre being medieval European fantasy. You quickly fill the hexes around with the first ideas that come off the top of your head, in adjective-noun format. Then to your dismay you realize they're all old-hat cliches:

So, just switch the adjectives across the middle, and you're left with this set of encounters that really crackles and challenges:

This works with as few as two cliches - if the party goes off the track and has to choose, make it a choice between frost giants and Skull Castle. Oh, I mean skull giants and Frost Castle. Better now.

The Lichway My Way, and Diorama Encounters

The Lichway (previously) belongs to that admirable class of adventure writing, where engaging ideas are presented with just enough detail for a DM to improve and improvise. As a low-level dungeon with a one-page map, and yes, as a tomb, I rank it up there with Tomb of the Iron God.

Here are some of the hacks and improvisations I did for my GenCon run:

1. Why are people suddenly interested in this abandoned tomb? Well, it turns out that linguistic pedantry is responsible. For years, adventurers kept out because they thought "lichway" was a warning that a skeletal super-sorcerer was in residence. Only recently did some tavern busybody point out that "lich" as an old English word simply refers to a corpse. This started a wave of exploration involving the party as at least the third human group to enter the dungeon.

(British audiences, perhaps, were clearer on this linguistic point due to the common usage of "lich-gate" to refer to a church's cemetery gate, and the general deeper history grounding of UK vs. US gaming circles.)

2. The map uses architectural notation for door hingeing, not Elvis notation. At first I interpreted this as the doors all being ajar, with some weird results (intelligent creatures that should have been hearing each other were ignoring each other instead). As always, discretion and situation awareness are key.

3. I thought people might recognize the susurrus from the Fiend Folio, so I transformed it into a pan flute golem. Yes, a pan flute golem. That meant it had to keep pacing within its cage to keep the undead-sleeping sound up, which meant that when the adventurers lassoed it and brought it to its feet ... party over.

I also really appreciated that a few key encounters were described as diorama-like tableaux - rival adventurers getting set to bash in a door, goblins torturing a stirge, xvarts telling jokes among eaach other, that kind of thing. I've tend to avoid these in my own writing - they seemed stagey and set-piece - but they really work in practice, and one of my adventures was criticized on tenfootpole.org for not having more of them, or as Bryce put it, "Hex encounters need lots of active things." 

It's even possible that the traditional surprise roll can be replaced by a more descriptive "what are the monsters doing?" roll, which together with the manner of the party's approach would determine surprise in a more natural way. If written into the scenario, this roll can be replaced with whatever the creatures are said to be doing. I might approach this sometime soon as a partial replacement for my more complex-looking 52 Pages surprise system.

D&D's Modular Bounty

Last night the players met the Three Fine Gentlemen, who in the Dragonsfoot module "Red Tam's Bones" are set to bedevil the players as they go about the quest of recovering the bones for the good of the Holy Church and the erotically haunted Duke's daughter.

In the course of conversing with these foes, my players realized they liked them and the roguish, departed Tam better than they did the sourpusses of the Church and State, their ostensible employers. Avoiding a donnybrook, they still got experience from the encounter, and a new tip - perhaps the spirit of Red Tam could be found elsewhere, placated by other means?

"Yes, but ..."

So off the railroad and on to  the Faerie Road to a certain Market, from where it should be possible to find the Winter Court wherein Red Tam's spirit might be found ...

Oh YEAH. The thing about D&D is that, over nearly 40 years of this game, there is an insane amount of material that is more or less compatible with whatever version you're playing. Need a Faerie Court? There's Ravenloft stuff and 3rd edition stuff  and even a tasty-looking module from the renowned Wolfgang Baur which comes wrapped in a 4th edition crust ...

Well, despite the wrong turn in later editions, D&D's basic simplicity makes it ideal for improvised, free-running campaigns like the one I run. And sure, there are plenty of other simple systems. But what I appreciate about D&D is the ready availability of material - to be modified and hacked and hijacked to be sure, like my players hijacked "Red Tam's Bones," but that's part of the fun, and having the D&D corpus at my beck and call means I only have to put in a fraction of the work.

When Your Party Teleports

The intrepid Band of Iron ought to be wearing their knees ragged and knocking their foreheads blue, thanking the hell out of Mr. Tony Dowler for his gonzo foresight in designing the Purple Worm Graveyard (spoilers follow).

Another expedition into the great worm roads beneath the earth hit what they were looking for ... the cavernous Graveyard, carpeted with a fortune in purple worm teeth, illuminated by a hole in the ceiling. Fortunately, this came at a time when one worm-guard was distracted picking at a purple worm carcass and two were behind an illusionary wall (I rolled d6 3 times which put them in those locations, possibly the best ones possible for the party's sneaking advance.)

What a worm guard looks like, by Ilvj. Wish I still had the mini.

In the ensuing rumble, the party quickly realized it would not be a good thing at all if the guards were to reach the bronze gong, etched with wormsigns, atop the stepped dais. An unearthly metallic humming, growing louder, emanated from the going, reinforcing their anxieties. This led to some tense tactical moments as various worms, seeing themselves outmatched, made a dash for the gong.

Eventually, the worms were dispatched and the party fell to looting the piles of tusks. But the noise had attracted attention from topside and soon a fully armored knight, riding a great metallic butterfly and wielding one of the Fire Lances of the Ancient Hyperzephyrians, dropped through the hole. This combatant, which by report lived in the towers of the town Parmentell, confirmed the party's suspicion - the Graveyard actually lay right beneath the tight-fisted and evasive settlement itself, rather than somewhere in the hinterlands, as the town elders had wished it to be believed. Running from the fearsome 3d6 blasts of the lance, the party ducked into a spiraling tunnel that led upwards and upwards ... apparently another worm trail.

Going far enough up, they had a confrontation with Parmentell's town guards that went well at first, then poorly, and ran into the "dungeon" area of the Purple Worm Graveyard. Avoiding several dangerous-looking rooms, they found a secret door, and behind it ... a magical window offering a one-way trip to a peaceful meadow in "a far-away kingdom."

This is a perfect example of what I was saying about improvisation. Had I invented that window on the fly or even planned the dungeon that way, it would have stuck out like a candy-assed deus ex machina. But, being the unassailable writ of a published module, the players were overjoyed to see it as the enormous gift of providence that it was. After casting a fortuitous detection spell that gave them confidence that they'd at least heard of the place, without hesitation they leapt through.

In the noble tradition of Castle Greyhawk, I now have to deal with a party getting dropped into a completely unprepared area hundreds of miles from home. Fortunately, for now I have scraped up enough stuff from the internet and my own fervid imagination to tide over the next session. I look forward to sharing some of the process and product on a future occasion.

Teleportation is a common enough device that I'm sure other referees out there have dealt with this situation before. I wonder, though, if anyone else has felt the exhilaration among both game runner and players, of casting aside the tired and entangled old adventure setting and embarking into a new, strange and maybe perilous world ...

The Mediocrity of Improvisation

As much as I've enjoyed improvising content in game sessions, I've come to see some drawbacks to the practice. In short, while improvised content can be wildly fun and creative, it usually also tends toward a middle ground of risk and reward. This can sap a campaign of its sense of danger, challenge and achievement.

Consider the extreme case - a campaign where the DM makes up everything on the spot, under the eyes of the players. Assuming the DM is in possession of a full complement of social skills and mirror neurons, he or she will constantly, unconsciously be self-interrogating about the experience the players are having. Are they having fun? Do they see this as fair? Does the world make sense?

As sole authority, there is a strong pull toward the middle ground - to mitigate challenges, to clip rewards. The lurking spectre in the background is that of the juvenile, "mad god" style of DMing, where party-killing traps and mind-numbing treasures are handed out, "just because." Avoiding this spectre, you veer towards the safe and average. Giving out nasty surprises or extraordinary treasure would just feel wrong.


Another factor: the limitations of your mental co-processor when coming up with stuff in real time. Several times I have looked back on a combat that was improvised and seen how the party's enemies could have made a better go of it. The worms could have started tunneling when coming under arrowshot; the tribesmen could have been smarter about their ambush, doing hit-and-run rather than hit-and-fight. I don't discount the possibility of an unconscious sympathy for the players that makes it hard for monsters to do their worst, unless countered with a devious playbook, either written down or mulled over aforethought.


Committing plans to writing is one way to overcome the mediocrity of improvisation. Extensive thought, too, on the structure of a lair, the plans of villains and monsters, the likely action behind the scenes, often pays off with great results. With time alone, thinking, it's easier to convince yourself that the best-laid plans of that goblin horde necessarily involves putting the players in a near-deathtrap situation. Which in turn led to one of the best, tensest sessions of the campaign, where only ingenuity and tactical sense spelled the difference between a narrow victory and a TPK.


Another way to cope is to submit responsibility to the rule of the dice - also requiring written material, but this time a comprehensive table of encounters, traps, or treasures. It was with such a great sense of relief, several weeks ago, that I finally came up with my own treasure table, a task I'd been resisting partly just out of incredulity that there wasn't one out there I could use. So much more satisfying to leave treasure up to the whims of the dice than to create this little gold-star token world where "oh yes, you're 4th level now, you should be getting a nice little +1 sword..."


In a way, these admissions are uncomfortable. One main justification for using a simple and level-based rule system is to make improvisation easier, right? But maybe the best thing is to see it the same way as improvisation in music - great material for a cadenza or a solo, but ultimately dry and flaky without support the rest of the concerto or the rhythm section's steady groove.


(This just out: Entirely by coincidence, noisms has posted some very nicely complementary thoughts on the inadequacy of a preparation-free environment.)

Flattering Waters and Wriggling Worms: An Annotated Player Report

My wife is one of the players in my ongoing campaign and wanted to write this play report, to which I have added my GM-ly notes. This example also leads in to something I want to discuss next couple of posts, about how improvisation often leans toward the mediocre and what to do about it. I'll get there, strangely enough, by way of the advantages of flying and burrowing creatures in combat.

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The second session in the new overland campaign found the Band of Iron trundling east from Wonderbridge.  The dwarven road continued along the rim of a deep river canyon stuffed with exotic flora and fauna. 

Courtesy of Jim Pacek's Wilderness Alphabet. I stocked the 5 mile hexes two deep on either side of the road with a 1/12 chance of each one having an unusual feature. This misty canyon will be very interesting to descend into, if adventurers will it ... already a strange lizard-bird has been spotted and mighty bellowing heard from within.

No exploring, though - the Band had already signed on as guards for Orm's trade caravan out of Kaserolle, duty called, the wagons rolled on.

The caravan has been camping overnight, usually at handy farm villages. Next stop after Wonderbridge was Castle Gneissburg, home to a certain Lord Hugo and the ex-bandit men at arms gathered about him.  Former Kaserolle city guard and part-time dungeon chaperone Urbach decided to try his ever-unpredictable luck there, signing on as a member of Hugo's company.. but why did Urbach pay them money?...

A fairly logical ending place for this NPC's character arc. And who knows, there is always the crazy coincidence die to bring him back ...

Heavy rains swelled the River of Flattery along the caravan route, notorious for its magical reflective properties.  After unloading the caravan to cross a rickety bridge, the party investigated a basin at nearby Bonny Facholie village that collected the magical water.

At this point the party had already received fair warning via a legend of a maiden already beautiful who looked at the waters of flattery and pined away Narcissus-fashion. The River of Flattery was a random Wilderness Alphabet feature - a  reflective river - but everything else was my own improvisation, If the river gave a flattering reflection, which was dangerous if the gazer was already good-looking, then ugly people would settle by choice near it, and handsome ones far away. The road went through the handsome people's village, and so they've set up a basin with water from the river as a tourist trap, charging admission to look within.

Shakira looked at his reflection  - and saw a handsome dwarf who could have been his brother.  However the reflection's expressions and movements did not match his own.

In fact, they were disgusted and contemptuous ... the reflection gazes also ...

The often self-effacing Sivir looked - miraculously, she didn't taste the water - and gained new and lasting confidence in her appearance.  (Permanent +1 Charisma, from 7 to 8)  Shea, quite handsome for a fellow who used to live on a mountainside with goats, looked as well - and had quite a different experience.  The compelling face he saw in the basin's water was bewitching, mesmerizing.. he was loath to admit it was not himself!  Slim drew forth a small mirror from her pack, showing it to the prophet in an attempt to strengthen his grasp on reality.  Alas, this aid backfired - Shea was horrified at the mirror's truth and could not shake the disturbed feeling.  (mirror granted 2nd saving throw which was a critical failure, permanent -1 Wisdom, fortunately no effects on his bonuses)

I don't feel too bad about this because there was fair warning about the effects of the gazing. All in all this was a new experience for the party, an outdoor implementation of a "dungeon trick" style encounter.

After passing a second castle flying the colors of Goran's Anvil, the party encountered panicked refugees from the nearby sheepfarming hamlet of Rosemary.   Horrified rambling about hypnosis, unnatural bleeding, sheep savaged by unseen forces from beneath the earth, a mad piper's eerie music luring the villagers on to their doom ensued - the Band had heard enough and charged to the rescue, promising to meet Orm's caravan at a village passed earlier. 

A Wilderness Alphabet ruin, a village, and yes the table rolled "worms" as a form of corruption. This led me to prepare a whole mini-adventure, reinforcing the theme of artifacts made from purple worm teeth - the party is on the trail of a treasure map found in a scroll case made from one, the piper's flute is similarly made, and more clues may be forthcoming ...

The Band encountered a dazed, hypnotized villager, then crested the nearby hill to find the Piper and his music charming not only the villagers but a collection of unnaturally large worms, several burrowing through the fields, one massive specimen sloshing through a nearby bog.  The madman and his worms battled the party, who took him down in relatively short order, loosening his sorcerous grip on the beasts and rendering them nonhostile.

A combination of good tactics, circling around to get bowshots at the piper; the piper's own madness, sitting in the doorway of his hut when he should have taken cover; and a few other issues which I will discuss in the next post.

Then Sivir decided to "experiment" with the piper's exotic flute... Her far from melodious playing drew the immediate attention of all four worms, who renewed their attack.  The party felled the three smaller worms and tried unsuccessfully to lure the huge mottled swamp worm onto dry land.  The worm instead grasped the fallen body of the Piper (and its prized leather armor) and dragged it back into the bog.


Actually, a bloodworm, from the Fiend Folio. I used giant leech stats for the lesser worms.

From Zak Smith's FF series.

Slim then tried to skulk into the bog in pursuit of the armor, provoking the mottled worm AGAIN.  The party was lucky (or blessed by Invictus?) as the worm was out of commission for two rounds in the resulting fight, one from a shrewd stunning blow dealt by the dwarf, another from its own confusion.  Courting disaster the Band was victorious once again, acquiring some worthy loot and leaving unanswered questions.  How could they shake the sorcerous hypnosis gripping the village of Rosemary?  What was the import of the Piper's strange items?  Could they make off with key bits of the mottled worm's remains?  What were those bits worth?  When would they meet up with Orm's caravan?  And most importantly, did Shea's dog Grigio still love him after the magic basin incident?

Of course he does, dogs are not that shallow. As an aside, we found email a good venue to do mopping-up and investigation interactions in between sessions.

Iron God: Should All Dungeons Have a Climax?

To close out my play report/review of Matt Finch's Tomb of the Iron God, here are some of the changes I made in actual play, in line with my last post about dungeon story. Spoilers follow.

The goblins had smart leadership, and I played it that way. After their group took about 50% casualties  in one epic battle, I had them leave the dungeon. In a later session they snuck back while the party was in the dungeon and blocked their exit with a large rock. Although the party eventually moved the rock by chipping away at the doorway (soft limestone), the tactical situation they walked into, fighting up on a stair surrounded by enemies, was almost suicidal for the party. They only prevailed by  luring the overly enthusiastic goblin troops back downstairs into a much less favorable position while their leaders were still under a sleep spell.

I also thought it wasn't realistic to have the animated iron statue of Ardarus just stomping around the same area as the goblins. I decided that the goblins had confined him to his room by stopping the door with an iron brace, but that when they left the dungeon they threw the bar into the storage room. The clues were the notches still carved into the wood of the door and the stone of the ground. The party picked up on the clues and found the abandoned brace. So they approached the room with extreme caution and were able to block the door again when the statue came to life.

The second level raises the question: should all dungeons have a climax? Tomb of the Iron God is interesting that way.  Its "goal" area - the caverns of the Iron God -  comes on the first level. The second level is a series of strongly themed rooms, where undead stalk, and treasures and other things are hidden in the burial niches carved in almost every wall. In hindsight this arrangement was fine, because it helped preserve naturalism by defying the conventional expectations.

Also, in play it turned out there were a couple of strong concentrations of dangers and treasure on the second level which created climaxes of their own.

The climax I helped to juice up was the three-sarcophagi room. Here, I added a lone ghast living in the secret chamber under the middle tomb. The ghast, it turned out, while still human, had been a mastermind behind the priests' turn to necromancy, and left a diary behind for the players to puzzle out. The poison gas trap in that room, I moved to the left tomb (realism again - if the middle tomb had been disturbed, why was the gas trap still working?), and signaled it with the effigy on the tomb: an alchemist surrounded by toads, snakes and spiders.

The other was the room with an army of skeletons. This proved a tactical challenge on par with the goblins, and this time everything came from the module, which explicitly details their maneuvers. To their credit, the party saw groups of skeletons peeling off into the side corridors, and decided to fight a retreating battle rather than be outflanked. Eventually they found a strong position behind an opened pit and emerged victorious.

All the same, more could have been done with the story behind the undead. Having skeletons and zombies detailed into guard duty and menial tasks ... finding the necromancy lab where they were raised ... having some clue of why the decision was made to raise them (from town and some documents in the dungeon, I let the party conclude that it was part of the extortion of funeral customers ... pay up more or your loved ones are consigned to a walking hell) ... and how the much more evil switch was decided on from mindless undead to creating actual ghouls (this, I revealed through the ghast's diary, was his doing,  connected to the cult of Orcus.)

Another realistic consideration I added: what the families who buried their dead in the catacombs would have done once they found out that corpses were walking around in there. This created a number of missions for the party, where long-dead loved ones identified by particular personal items were sitting in one niche or other, and a bounty would be paid for the return of their bones. This kind of issue marked a larger opportunity for dungeon-story development that I mostly missed this time around. Are there haves and have-nots in the burial places? Did one group of people get singled out to be turned into skeletons and zombies? Is there a special section where the monks themselves are buried?

If you're running the module, I found that the second level tends to drag on a bit. I would recommend you trim anywhere from 4 to 8 of the rooms, or replace them with a different styled area ... perhaps a necromancy lab and makeshift shrine to darker gods.

And again, just because I'm pointing out how the module could have been better, doesn't mean I'm slamming it. It is a great setup, and it's probably more fun to work out these details yourself than to get them store-bought. If I run the Tomb of the Iron God again I will certainly take some of these ideas into account and make it a dungeon with a much stronger story behind it. Not a story with an artificial climax like the level boss of a computer game, but one that's woven all through the dungeon. I want to leave players with the impression that their exploration has been about more than filling in a sheet of graph paper.

Three Improvisations

Took the Castle of the Mad Archmage to the mini-convention at the uni Saturday, two new players and one veteran adventurer braving the upper works.

Of course they mostly ignored the thin trail of plot crumbs that would have sent them to keyed areas, and went exploring around the upper works of the castle, treading into decidedly unkeyed territory.

What to do? Push them with the railroad tender's stick back onto the yellow brick road? Hell no!

This is ... OLDSCHOOL!
 

After this game I realized that my system preparing content for an adventure on the fly takes about as much time during play as does preparing it in downtime, and is almost as quick as looking it up in notes. The downside is that you can't really join things up sensibly ... or can't you? It's kind of amazing what emerges after the fact as you connect the dots.

Spoilers follow!

Obstacles and Openings

Zak S had a really cool idea that never got finished up: to have tables where you could roll a quick entrance feature or encounter as the players start to explore a ruin you haven't got prepared, together with a purpose and history for that thing that would give you something to latch onto in improvising further content in that adventure. He also suggested that it might work well as a deck of cards.

The main way I want to tweak this is to break the purposes down into Openings and Obstacles. That way, you could take each card straight as it reads, or add variety by drawing one card and then drawing others until you found a matching card so that the purpose can be mixed-and-matched with the description. I also am going with more detailed descriptions of the features to make it easier to use as a "quick, need ideas" generator.

As with the original idea, the texts assume you have determined by some other means who the original Architects and current Inhabitants of the ruin are. Monsters, Vermin and Intruders may also make an appearance ... perhaps to be determined by some other deck?

A couple of examples below. Don't know if it'll amount to anything, but I figured I'd test the waters and see if there is an interest for this.

Birth of a Gamer: Amazon on a Train

Last weekend we took in a play and a couple of meals up in London with some fellow Americans, a visiting prof at our department and his social worker spouse. These folks are somewhat older than we are, close to retirement age, but only are around at my university in the spring and were about to head back stateside.

Because the spouse had expressed some interest in roleplaying in one of our earlier meetings, I'd surreptitiously bought some dice (six siders) in Covent Garden market. The train ride back out of London was the scene for her gaming initiation, and the four of us were lucky to have grabbed table seats. It takes one hour but the time fairly flew as I had her roll 3d6 in order - 13 strength, 5 charisma - creating a warrior. When I gave the chance for one descriptive word, she came up with "Amazon."

Our Amazon approached the gates of a walled town. For some reason, interacting with the guards, she spun a story that the chainmail and spear weren't hers, but she'd just found them - a story she would repeat later. In any event, her social awkwardness led to a less than friendly reaction roll, but they let her in for the usual toll.

Three streets led away from the gate. I was completely winging this, with only four dice and no written material at all. I came up with rough ideas of what each street would lead to, and gave her the choice. She took the left-hand path, leading to an industrial district, where she came upon a group of tannery workers getting their supper slops. The cook rolled a great reaction - 11 on 2d6, friendly even toward her terrible charisma - so I had him greet her warmly, offer the last of the slops and a job feeding the pigs out back. But she didn't know that ... and though she took the job up, it was with some fear and a little ribbing from the rest of us as to the decidedly non-heroic turn of our adventure.

The workmen left and the cook showed our Amazon to her quarters, in the butcher shop of this all-in-one hog processing operation. Feeling wary by now, she decided to sneak out in the fading light and see if anyone else was about. I had her run into some women who worked in a weaving and dyeing establishment, but their reaction was negative and they called their menfolk to give dire threats to the Amazon (hostile reaction, but not a strong morale result that would have led to a fight).

She went back to the butcher shop, where there was an ominous trapdoor. She had the idea to use her strength to try and open it, at which she succeeded (roll low, 3d6). There were claw marks on the inside of the door and a series of rungs going down. Her eventual security plan was to sleep atop the door, so that anything coming up would both be blocked and wake her.

Of course, the underground has to intrude into the first adventure, right? So in the middle of the night, she's awakened by a thumping and scratching on the trapdoor. She gets up and runs out of the butcher shop, round a corner, waits and listens. In the darkness, something is shambling and snuffling toward her ...

And then the train reached its stop and the session was over.

Thinking back to our earlier discussions about the different selves in a game, our friend showed excellent adventuring caution. She put herself into the dangerous situation with great conviction and intensity. But, she did very little immersion into the role of the Amazon. In a sense, the "Amazon" was herself -a modern woman in medieval times, thrust into a strange town with strange goings-on.

We hope to pick up again next year!