Random conversation that lead to this blog post.

I was discussing with one of my friends about our "out of the abyss" campaign the other day.  Eventually we will be going back to it, probably after we finish up killing strahd.  He had mentioned that he feels he is going to need to do some subtle rail roading to get us back on track.  As well he plans to level us up, hand wave to eighth level.  I think we are currently at 5th or something.  The gist is "we have been adventuring on and off, and have since leveled up".

I have no idea if he is going to read this post, but I have a few thoughts on it, some of which are personal and some of which are more straight and to the point (common practices).  Obviously it's his game, and he can run it exactly the way he wants.

First off, I've done a bit of hand waving as far as levels are concerned, but honestly it takes away player agency, the reward of having survived and a job well done. In my next fifth edition campaign I won't be doing that at all.  (that goes for old school games as well).  The players will level as they collect enough experience, end of story.  I don't much care for CR levels, but I'll obviously not throw super scary monsters at them.  Of course the world is a big place and not all monsters are at your level.

This practice of the hand wave rubbed off on another player.  After having played a few sessions of "abyss" and got leveled up by a hand wave.  The player played in a old school session with me, and after 2 sessions he was looking for the hand wave from me.  Obviously different DM, different game entirely.  That said it should not be an expected thing. And honestly though what is the rush? It's D&D campaigns go on for years.

Now onto rail-roading.  As most of you know railroading isn't a practice that happens often in old school games, (mostly because the game is different).  We all know that despite how much you plan and prep, nine times out of ten the players will blow holes in that plan anyways.  Which is why attempting to run a module exactly as written probably rarely works.

For me if there are encounters that I would like to see happen to keep the game going, I will figure out a way to work them in.  Or if I had a cool dungeon I wrote up and the players don't take the bait, it's relatively easy to work it in.  Bearing in mind that the players don't have access to behind the screen, the world map were you carefully placed the dungeon miles away from the players current location.

I can say though, that I've honestly rail-roaded players before and probably will do it again.  The last time it happened I honestly couldn't think of any other way to get them into the dungeon, so I forced a weirdness on them.  The players were standing over a portal leading to a alternate dimensions.  They hadn't quite decided what they were going to do.  I didn't have a lot else prepped.  So the one hireling npc with them jumped into the portal!  Yup that's a lot of hand holding.  Looking back on it now, what could have worked was a demon coming thru the portal and grabbing someone, maybe they got pulled in, maybe not.  Maybe the demon pulled the npc in? Who knows, but that would have been better.

That being said it's pretty easy to just re-write bits and make it work, as long as your creativity is clicking that day.  As well I think that more you play, the more you DM, the better you get at it.  You get comfy and just figure it out.  I have personally been wanting to run a big open sandbox, while it can be a bit overwhelming if you do some reasonable prep it's not that bad.  As stated before I'd love to run black marsh, and there is no end to modules & adventures you can find out there to pop into a open sandbox world.

Just came to a random conclusion

That the Blue Baron is in fact Billy Corgan (well the on stage persona he plays).  Actually I may have come to this conclusion previously.

If you watch the video for Zero and Stand inside your love there are elements of masquerade in them.  As well "ava adore" posted below.  The song and album (adore) pull some inspiration from the movie "crash".

I intentionally used a font from Mellon Collie and the infinite sadness within the book because it A. looked cool, and B. I guess for a bit of throw back, head nodding inspiration.

I find it mildly interesting that the influence happened almost subconsciously.  Another project I was working on (which I still need to finish) I quoted a line from a pumpkins song.  As well the whole project was based around the "trip to the moon movie", which was a inspiration for the video for tonight tonight as well. (at least aesthetically anyways, I can't pretend to say that it was in fact inspired because I'm not a member of that band obviously).

I do rather enjoy pulling different personalities and characters out of pop culture, fiction etc and using them in D&D.  At some point I would like to use "Uncle Vernon" from Harry Potter.  I would probably use him as a rather oafish orc.

Ozymandias from the Watchmen is another perfect villain.  Actually just the way he is would be a perfect fit for some rather evil lord.

You can download "An invitation from the blue baron" here.

And here are d20 unique bad guys. 
Tired of the typical bad guys? Here's a d20 table with some strange ones.

1.  Vegetarian Ogre Tribe.
2.  Three Eyed Skunk Man Hybrid with a penchant for nice perfumes.
3.  An Honest Trader, with a dark secret.
4.  Insane Cult Leader, believes the world is flat.
5.  Crossbreed Dinosaur & Robot that is self aware.
6.  Punk Rock Minstrel Pixies.
7.  Piranha Men that can breath on land, and fly!
8.  Enraged Princess stuck between two planes of existence, appears as a shimmer.
9.  A demon who likes to spend time gardening.
10.  Vampire with a lust for collecting rodents.
11.  Old knight who was betrayed by his squire. 
12.  A monk who learned to bend time.
13.  A balding sorceresses looking for a wig of Chimera hair.
14.  A goblin tribe famous for their cheese, their herd of cows has been stolen by an unruly Minotaur.
15.  A human thief who has had his arms magically replaced with tentacles.
16.  A deposed lord with a major gambling addiction.
17.  A witch who made a pact with a evil allicorn. 
18.  Giant who spends most of his time building a fort made entirely out of large trees from nearby forest.
19.  Pirates trying to return an evil treasure.  (whoops stole that one!)
20.  The ghost of murdered bride (her husbands father was the murderer!).

RIP Zagnap

Just going thru my google drive and re-organizing things, deleting etc.  I found this little gem.  Zagnap a druid I created for our "out of the abyss" session.  Here is his bio.

Zagnap comes from a small svirfneblin mining community located north of Daggerdale, (however deep underground).  During a exploratory search of the underdark far from the community he was separated from his group.  Zagnap searched for his group for days, finally coming upon them, they had been slain by a group of monsters.  None were left alive.  Seeing the harsh realities of leaving the confines of the community, Zagnap decided that it was best to see what else was out there.  His adventurous spirit took over.  Carrying with him a staff he made out of a old petrified toadtool, his leather armour & sling made from the hide of a Rothe, he stepped out into the underdark in search of answers.  Answers to the world below.  He set out to write a book about the “Underdark Ecologies”, detailed within is plant & humanoid life.  As time went on he stumbled upon a meeting between a very select group of residents.  “The circle of the 5”, a Underdark druidic order made up of a variety of races.  All of which follow the teachings of Segojan Earthcaller.  Zagnap is currently an initiate of the order, and will not be officially inducted into the circle until one of the five dies.  

And here's the details of his untimely death.

$1.25 Minis

In the interest of being an el cheapo Canadian, I stopped at Dollarama yesterday to grab some minis.  I was looking for the cool coloured rock crystals that you see at gaming stores, but I was only able to find ones that had 2 different colours.  I had read somewhere that using the rocks for your spells slots in 5e is a handy technique.  I managed to find these fun little building blocks instead.

When I get some time I'm also going to number the blocks with a felt pen, which should make combat infinitely easier.

Awhile ago we played in our "out of the abyss" game, and we had got the DM some pathfinder minis for his birthday.  (one of the PF boxes).  While most of the monsters are pathfinder specific demon things, what the DM did was just use them as props/minis basically.  The idea was that creature on the card had nothing to do with what we were actually fighting (picture is a stringy looking demon, we are fighting orcs).  What I found though was the colour coding was crazy handy for tactics and keeping track of things.

As I stated in my post the other day on this:

Player:  "I attack the orc"
ME:  "which colour?"
Player: "the red one".

That combined with my home made battle mat I've been using since I started, should make combat relatively easy.

I'm excited.

Update on MF campaign:  Well yesterday evening got away from me, I managed to re-read a lot of the rules in the book.  Reading thru the monsters and gear I got a few ideas here and there for scenarios.  Yesterday afternoon I made a quick hex map with hexographer.  I may just have to wing the whole situation.  The good news is we are going to go thru character creation which should take a bit of time. Chances are the procrastination is going to kick in, and I'll be writing the night before.

I've got less than a week to plan.

Knowing me I'll put it off to the last minute.  Looks like our old school group is going to meet in about week.  The kicker is that we won't be playing the fantasy campaign as the DM doesn't have a lot of time to work on things (due to exams).  So we will be starting a mutant future campaign.  Of which I don't have a helluva lot written.  Well it's written, just in my head at this point.  I have a few little maps and other ideas prepped.  So operation consolidation and cohesive begins this evening.  (Or at least hopefully, i tend to procrastinate this shit to the day before).  I'm going to use wizard dawn and create a good 10 adventure locations and then plop them into a hex map.  I have a town home base (in my head) and a pile of factions already. 

Should be fun!  Can't wait to run the game!

Session 8 - Ransacking the warehouse - Curse Of Strahd

Caution may contain some spoilers.

Yesterday was a helluva a lot of fun, we managed to role play, fight monsters and explore!  All of the things that make up a typical D&D session.  None of them being too much, which is always good.

When last we left off we had just polished off a bunch of twig blights and holed ourselves up in the warehouse of the winery.

As per usual Von Richten (or whatever aka he goes by) buggered off, leaving us to our own devices.  

We explored the basement of the winery, finding not a lot of interest, other than some rather creepy ravens, and vats of wine.  One of our players decided to fill himself a few bottles of wine for later.  (malltov cocktail).  During the exploration our thief had the hardest time trying to open any type of chest, door etc.  At one point one of us said out loud "you are by far the worst thief I've ever heard of!'  To which the thief replied "yes but you have heard of me!"

At one point while checking out a rather large room, we heard footsteps coming towards us.  Our wizard Nym cast fake fire illusion, and the bad guy failed his save and buggered off.

After a bunch of exploring and splitting the party, Nym encountered a druid and charmed him.  The other 2 players found a bedroom with a secret door.  Nym brought the druid to the bedroom, and we decided to kill him.  Nice thing was the druid and Nym both had these strange twig blight wands, once they were destroyed no more twig blights! woot.

My character tends to have A.D.D. and wander off and fiddle with things.  At one point I was fidgeting with a spigot on the wine vat in the hopes of possibly breaking it and filling the room with wine.

We decided to camp in the bedroom for the night and barricaded ourselves in.  The next morning we woke up and found Von Richten dead on our doorstep.  Being murderhobos we looted his corpse.  During that looting we found a raise dead spell.  My Cleric just barely raised him from the dead.  (Most of the day my dice rolling was exceptionally mediocre, thankfully I made this one, barely.  The green dice pictured above rolled really well last session, but not this one. )

Another extremely funny thing I just remembered.  And I'm not even sure what the specific chances of this happening are, but we had to all roll initiative at one point, and all of us rolled a 9 with modifiers.  3 of the 4 of us rolled 7's and had mods, one of us rolled a 6 with mods.  and the DM rolled a 19, which is also midly strange.  Anyways, if someone wants to do the math go right ahead.

Alright so Von Richten is alive and well, and wants all of his stuff back.  We are sad haha.

A few more hours of exploration and we find ourselves in the basement.  Getting ourselves into the basement was rather odd.  My character just decided to wander down their first as he tends to wander.  Our thief wanted to ride a barrel of wine down the stairs yelling YEE HAW!  and the rest followed behind.

And there is a very large pissed off tree with green eyes.  A fight ensues.  While we all wanted to fireball the beejeebus out of this tree, that idea seemed like a bad plan.  Since we are supposed to be saving the winery and not burning it to the ground.

We did however light off a few malltov cocktails at the tree, once we remembered that our fighter had a decanter of infinite water, which we could use to douse the tree after it died.

The rather scary looking huge tree finally met its maker, we found 3 holes in the basement floor. and so ended the session.

Apparently we level up next time.

And as a side note, my cleric has become somewhat boring to play, and I'm hoping he gets killed off soon.  I'd like to play a paladin samurai in barovia at some point haha.

F.I.E.R.C.E. (Freakishly intelligent evil regurgitating carnivorous entity.) - New Labyrinth Lord Monster

F.I.E.R.C.E.

(Freakishly intelligent evil regurgitating carnivorous entity.)

No. Enc:  Unique

Alignment:  Chaotic

Movement: 40’ (10’)

Armour Class:  0

Hit Dice:  8

Attacks:  3 (Bite/Claw/Claw)

Damage:  1d8/1d6/1d6

Morale:  9

Save: F8

Hoard Class: XIV

XP:  1400

The F.I.E.R.C.E is an abomination created by two evil mages who were in competition with each other.  Both of the mages were trying to create a hybrid guard dog type monster.  During their experiments something went horribly wrong (or so the legend goes) and the F.I.E.R.C.E was created.  This as much information as historians could gather, as all notes on the monster were gobbled up along with the two mages.  

This monster is a cross between a large worm, dog and a small dragon without wings.  It is approximately 15 feet long, with a large mouth filled with razor sharp teeth.  It smells of death and vomit.  Because of its underdeveloped digestive system it spews forth an acidic regurgitation once an hour.  This acid is a wave about 4 feet wide, and usually spills forth fifteen feet.  (The acid does 4d6 damage to anyone in the general vicinity).  

The F.I.E.R.C.E is a ruthless killer, using its large bite and claws to defend itself.  It is incredibly slow and often will hide in shadows and darkness waiting for unwary prey.