I had to walk a mile for a vile pile of bile (monday night miserable bastards session 11)

Oh wow was that a fun session. I missed the previous session due to some work commitments. It appears that after today we will be taking a bit of a break until the start of September which is totally cool with me. Anyways here's Skord's take on what happened.

Day 11 in this forsaken forest.

We have entered the northmen's dungeon. Above the door scrawled were the words 

“Only the Hopeless Enter Here”.

(Whoever lives here, has a sick sense of humour.)

We walked down the hallway into the dungeon, and found a room at the end, carefully walking past a pit trap. It appeared there was a fan blade of sorts in the room. It was a circular room, the fan was not turning. Kojack carefully went into the room, sneaking around and checking things out.

Armand went back to check out the pit trap, I slung him down with some rope and spikes. At the bottom appeared to be a few dead bodies. He searched around, but was unable to find any exits from the trap. From the light of my torch, I swore I saw something glint at the bottom. I turned to look up to see how kojack was faring, and I heard a big click! and then a scream.

I hauled up Armand, and went to check on kojack who was being tended to by the cleric Rather. We discussed how to move forward, and decided to attempt to turn the large scary razor circular thing the other way. With a bit of elbow grease we managed to get it to stay in place with another more satisfying click. We shuffled thru the room carefully.

kojack went first into the room beyond, it was very large with hanging rafters, and a set of stone steps. Upon the steps was a stone grotesque creature that was very large.

On the rafters were smaller stone creatures. That crazy dwarf went up to check them out, and decided to putt one off with his warhammer.

Not thinking at first, I thought I'd try and catch it. I quickly realized this thing was heavy! How the hell did that dwarf putt it off the rafters is beyond me. The cleric realized that the stone statue was made from hell stone, literal stone from the abyss.  After that Kojack decided to drink down one of Hugo's special healing potions. I guess those don't always work, because the dwarf cursed at the sky "fuck you hugo!"

We decided to get out of this room, in case we woke anything up! (i.e. fuck that room).

Further down the tunnel, we came upon a room with a set of stairs leading down. Above the stairwell was written.

“hell is empty, all the devils are here” 

(seriously who comes up with this stuff).  

Just as we are deciding what we will do, the floor starts to cave in. We quickly run down the stairs, hearing a loud boom.  

Alright so we maybe trapped down here. Press on. 

We wandered around for a bit, and around one corner this super tall and very ugly green thing is snarling at us. It's holding a 6 foot elephant tusk menacingly. Only a few of us could get close to it for melee, I pulled out my sling and started chucking silver stones at it. One hit and it oozed a pile of bile (I believe green, but it was the heat of the battle so I don't know).

In the middle of the battle our trusty warrior armand fell to the beast, he lay unconscious on the floor, bleeding profusely. Thankfully we were able to kill the beast, but not before it spewed bile from its guts all over armand. Thankfully our trusty cleric Rathgar was able to heal him. Looting thru his body, that dwarf found some more Viz!

We found a very suspect tomb, and decided it wasn't worth walking into. The last room we found (after we found a set of keys to it) contained a dark dwarf. He wanted to talk. (I wanted to kill him). The dwarf took the lead and spoke with him. He brought mysterious tidings, as if he knew we were coming. He asked the dwarf if he was Durbin's brother (a dwarf we met early who guided us to this place. I may wring his neck if we get out of here). He was not related. The dark dwarf pulled on his pipe and shared it with a few of us. It was then we noticed the dark hole in the centre of the room. More word's were exchanged, and we started to grow tired of this guy. Then a low growl emitted from the hole, and something in the deep started to move. I lashed out at the dark dwarf, and he vanished. The floor caved in.......

And that my friends is the end of this tale till September.

*****

Our DM is Mr. Tim Shorts, you can find him here: 

https://www.gothridgemanor.com 

his micro adventures here:

https://www.patreon.com/gothridge

We are playing Old School Essentials. You can get it here:

Here's a bunch of cool stuff!

There's been quite a lot of cool stuff crop up in the last few weeks.  Typically speaking I get most of my news from Mr. Froth, you can check out his site here:  https://frothsofdnd.blogspot.com/

*  Alright first up to bat is The Blood Of Prokopius blog:  http://bloodofprokopius.blogspot.com/2019/07/ba5ic-rough-draft-of-5e-continual-light.html with a hack on 5e called "ba5ic".  This is super awesome.  I will probably do a blog post more about this later, and my thoughts on doing a hack (cuz everyone has one, or is working on one).  I actually asked that on the mewe OSR forum, basically "hands up if you have a hack you are working on".  I think I got about 20 or so digital hands hahaha.  That being said Ba5ic is super cool!  Go check it out.  There has been an edit to the rough draft, you can find the new version here:  https://bloodofprokopius.blogspot.com/2019/07/ba5ic-corrected-edited-draft.html

Darkfast Dungeons: Fantasy Adventure Game Basic Rulebook
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/284027/Darkfast-Dungeons-Fantasy-Adventure-Game-Basic-Rulebook?&affiliate_id=470115

The Darkfast Dungeons tabletop game is a fun and easy to learn print and play tabletop game for the whole family. This Fantasy Adventure Game expands the game to a full-blown Role Playing Game that's easy to learn and full of nuance and strategy. Character creation takes minutes and creates a unique hero ready for adventure. 

The Basic Game includes eight character origins and eight character classes, spells, miracles, magic items and 34 pages of monsters and animals. There are even rules for GM-less and Solo Play! Totally compatible with Save the Day RPG. 

*  DRIVE BY Spikepit isms!
https://anchor.fm/spikepit
If you haven't been listening to Colin "Spikepit" Green latetly you are missing out on some good stuff.  He has started a series of episodes called "Spikepit Drive By" where he pulls no punches. Good stuff.

*  The One Page Dungeon Contest winners have been announced! https://www.dungeoncontest.com/
It's nice that they included a list of honourable mentiosn as well.  I appreciate this.
Congrats to everyone! Here's the top 3.

Ed Nicholson  "Plumbing the Depths"

A mage shrinks you and sends you down into the plumbing of his laboratory sink to retrieve a precious ring lost there.
​
JD Thornton "The Buried Pyramid of the Undergod"

An opening has been discovered into the long lost temple of a depraved and violent religion, and the local historian is offering double market value for any artifacts retrieved. The PCs are not, however, the first looters to delve into the buried pyramid! Will they be the first to make it back out?

​Skerples "The Roving Wheel"

There’s a 500' tall iron wheel roaming the earth. Legend says there's a way inside the vertical spinning dungeon. Can it be stopped in time?.

I wrote an adventure called "tales of tenacity", you can find it here. 

*  Over at http://leicestersramble.blogspot.com/ Vance has been busy releasing a bunch of adventures:

The Lair Of The Mushroom Baron: http://leicestersramble.blogspot.com/2019/07/come-on-in-spores-are-fine.html

Wanger's Spit: http://leicestersramble.blogspot.com/2019/06/wangers-spit-stealing-real-estate.html

Check out the rest of his blog, there's a gold mine of good stuff.  (Vance has made some good use out of Matt Jackson maps)

*  A pretty cool Moldvay Basic Player Quickstart was created by Smoldering Wizard,
Check it out here: https://smolderingwizard.com/2019/07/01/moldvay-basic-dd-player-quickstart/

That's all I got for today, have a good one! 

I might be AFK for a bit

Don't worry about me though! I'll be around soon.  I have a few major changes going on in my life, and I'm going to worry about that right now.  In the mean time keep rolling those 20s!

CC Map

Do with it what you like! 

These maps by Shane Ward (3 Toadstools Publishing) are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License. Inquiries about permissions beyond the scope of this license should be made by contacting Shane Ward

d20 morale checks

I was thinking the other night about creating a table for monster morale checks based on a d20 roll.  As well, rather than having to look up a specific monsters morale, I would just use the hit dice to add a modifier.  Generally speaking a higher hit dice monster, is going to be tougher (and not always, but smarter).

Now obviously this might be a bit swingy, I am going to playtest this idea out in my own game.  The basic 2d6 morale check in Swords & Wizardry Fantasy Adventure Game is perfect for me for the most part, but I thought "hey can I do everything I need to do with a d20?"

Probably.

So here yah go, give it a try.

Go east and find the creek (Monday Night Miserable Bastards) Session Report

Players note: I can't believe that we just finished session 9. Time flies when you are rolling virtual dice. Speaking of, the dice gods were on my side last night! Most of my rolls were decent. Tim made us roll d6s for random monster encounters. Generally speaking when I run a game, I do that behind the screen, but I like the idea of having the PCs do it. Image courtesy of https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/

In the previous session, we met this dark dwarf in Hound's Head named Durban who explained to us how to get to the north-men's dungeon. He took us to the vicinity of the area we needed to explore and then said "Go east and follow the creek". My friend Kojack and I decided to get up early and explore. The other adventurer's in the party were sleeping like babies, and we didn't want to wake them up. Achtung (the hireling wizard of mine) came along on the trek. We figured we would do a bit of scouting, and get an idea of what the land looked like prior to waking up the other adventurers.

Within a few minutes of leaving the camp we stumbled upon a very large (I'm going to say giant) deer carcass that we being munched on by a weird beetle. It looked up at us, and snapped it's pinchers, which then created a electrical shock between them. A fight ensued, 3 on 1 this was going to be easy.

It wasn't really.

After a few good wacks, we got a rhythm and managed to kill the beetle. Kojack thought about the idea of using the carapace of the beetle as a shield. Unfortunately Skord had wacked it so hard that there wasn't really much left over. It did turn out that the beetle was filled with Viz (a magical component that sometimes allows +1 to things, or allows a caster to cast more often, very nifty).

As we explored we kept finding burial mounds, most of which were very old and undisturbed. I have to admit, the hair stood up on the back of my neck while we investigated them.

As we moved along, we found an old stone obelisk. The dwarf recognized that it had been made by his kinsmen. There was no writing, runes or any identifying marks. Grabbing a shovel Kojack dug down and found the bottom of the stone, there was still nothing of real interest.

We moved west, and ran into another shocker beetle. This place is infested with them!

Thankfully, death came swiftly to the beetle and we kept moving. We finally found the creek, and looked around. There was some interesting 3 foot plants on the far side of the creek. Achtung went to investigate.

Alas, after a quick spray of what can only be described as poison needles, Achtung met his maker. I have half a mind not to hire another poor soul, it's better if I do this alone. (or among my adventuring friends).

Sorry Achtung.

From the other side of the creek we hurled arrows and stones at the vampiric plant, and were able to disable it without much damage to ourselves.

Unfortunately we had to take a few things off of Achtung's corpse, but we did bury him. Hopefully he finds what he's looking for in another life.

As we meandered along the creek bed, we stumbled upon a recently deceased corpse. It appeared to be human, a cleric (from a quick search of his body, we found a holy symbol of the Great Imbibber). Beside him was a battle staff, which we took with us. I gave him his last rights, invoking the name of the Great Imbibber and his gospel. The cleric should have made his way to the halls of the great tavern in the sky.

We kept moving south along the creek, and finding more burial mounds (still fucking creepy). We finally stumbled upon the end of the creek, which lead to a large hill. Near the bottom of the hill was a cave entrance. Which was swarming with more of those god forsaken beetles. We fought one, while the others seemed to busy themselves at the bottom of the hill. Not being completely inept, we made a break for it before we got swarmed by them. Retracing our steps we found a small clearing near the edge of the forest and made camp. We will have to circle back and find the rest of the crew.

Hopefully they have some decent stew on, I'm getting hangry!

f**k spammers

Listen you stupid bots.  Go ahead and comment all your needless seo spam on this post ONLY!

I'm really getting tired of having to go thru and blow away all these dumb comments.

Not that I really want to spend the time creating a new wordpress site.  But its starting to get to that point.

Here's a random table of places and causes for spammers death. 


1)  In a ditch.
2)  Dragon fire.
3)  Acid burns.
4)  Drown off the sword coast.
5)  At the mercy of Iuz.
6)  trade places with a genie spend your life in servitude of stupid adventurers.
7)  Getting pushed from the top of a tower by a knight who was in the middle of something.
8)  Drink the iocane laced goblet.
9)  Become a sacrifice for the snake cult.
10)  Die of starvation in the stocks in Blacksand.

Epic conundrum

I had a wonderful session last night with the "Monday Night Miserable Bastards".  Lots of roleplaying, a lil exploration, a bit o' accounting.  I'll write up a play report tomorrow hopefully.

What I wanted to discuss today, is the fact that I didn't sleep last night.  I stayed up awhile thinking about running a game on roll20.  As you all well know I'm a big fan of Advanced Fighting Fantasy (as it was the first game I ever ran).  What I was thinking about was spending the time to work on the Blacksand adventure in roll20.  There's lots of little nice maps in the book that could be scanned or recreated for parts of the adventure (the battle ones could be done with pyromancers). 

The adventure (and most of the aff releases) were a bit of a railroad but fun nonetheless.  While I like all of the implementations that were done in Version 2 of AFF, I personally feel that the original rules would be perfect for a roll20 game.  It's just a bit more rules light.  The only real issue is the leveling up. 

In the newer version, during combat you roll to see who hits, and then how much damage and or reduction of damage happens.  This is a lot of rolls per person.  In the original I believe that all damage was 2, but if you tested your luck you could do 3.  Which is fine.  The combat is still quite deadly. 

Basically AFF2.0 is a bit fiddly, although not that bad.  I just think it might be a bit too fiddly for online play.  Speaking from having played Basic D&D, anything more than that might be quite time consuming. 

As well having the rules readily available for the players.  I do have a copy of the basics of AFF version 1 that I could kinda modify for the campaign, and I may just do that.

Of course I'm thinking far too ahead, but I do like the idea of slow prep.  Even if its just for giggles in front of a computer.

I suppose time will tell.  I do have some other more pressing work to get on before this.  Oh and I realized exactly how the next Isle of Dread session is going to go.

Finally figured out what I'm going to do when the PCs show up in Tanora. Originally I was going to have the natives on the beach with home made spears looking all concerned (but not outright aggressive) But I figured that would just start a fight. That said They haven't actually had a fight yet. So I think what I'll do is as the boat is coming ashore, they will notice the village is over run by giant lizards. This will hopefully create a bond with the villagers.

Well that was rambly wasn't it!

B/X Essentials saved my ass from a wet basement

As many of you know B/X Essentials has been re-dubbed Old School Essentials.  Which was funded successfully thru kickstarter.  From what I gather there were a few changes within the rules and a name change.  You can read the author's notes here.  (Actually it's a very interesting and good read if you have the time).

What has remained is the original B/X Essentials in RTF format.  And here's the part where I get into why its saving my ass.

First off, I've got a pile of clones and copies of D&D.  Far too many.  My current flavour is Charlie's Whitebox which I quite love.  (I'm DMing it in a Isle of Dread Campaign at home).  That being said I'm playing in a game with Tim and he's using B/X (specifically the Old School Essentials version I believe).  Reading thru the rtf's and the author's notes, I'm falling in love with this game!

Having recently got my office all setup in the basement I moved down a few D&D books to have handy when playing.  More often than not while playing old school games there is not a lot of need to pick up a rule book, but on occasion (like leveling) its handy to have a round.

I found out last night that the water pipe leading outside for the hose leaks behind the wall.  After weeks of running a de humifider in the basement, the room was fairly dry.  I felt like I could leave a few prized possessions on my desk for handy reference.  After my wife watered the garden I went downstairs to move the laundry load over and realized the floor was wet.  ACHK! Cue mild panic.  Bring up B/X Reprint and put back on shelf.  Then start dloading all the RTFs.

What I'll probably do is create a basic document within google drive for handy reference.  Mostly just the core rules (equipment, classes and that's it basically).  Just for a quick reference.  I've switched over from using a paper character sheet to a google drive doc.  As well all my notes are on the drive.

If you'd like to see them they are here and here.

Anyways, I gotta say thank you very much Necrotic Gnome for saving my ass!

So scorn was interesting (Monday night miserable bastards play report)

I write this at a sorry excuse for a bedside table in the craw inn. Scorn has been interesting to say the least. Upon arriving the guards gave us some hassle. I had to pretend to have a different name, which I failed at miserably. Thankfully I managed to pretend to be drunk, and the guard let me in. That sneaky priest just walked in with some commoners, no hassles. Must be his clothing perhaps?

We wandered about gathering information on dealers. Found a very pricey Inn that we decided against. Finally managed a decent albeit cramped spot at the craw. The seahawk tavern was quite a lot of fun. The halfling blessed a keg in the name of the great imbibber. I sometimes wonder if there is no such God, and this is all a bit of a lark.

Fundar was kind enough to buy me a Warhammer. It will need a name. Maybe the next thing I have to kill.

At the tavern we found out about "kettles", a great lady smith. We decided to meet her in the morn.  As well we found a few places for healing potions.

The dwarf was more than happy to negotiate for all of us. He enjoys that.

We managed to find "Hugo's healing potions" and bought a large jug. Who knows if this will work? It was however priced right.

Another curious magik shop we went to had a table that would change the items on it. Nifty I say! And good security.

Speaking of, we passed a group of spears today. One guy may have noticed me, he looked twice. Even with these scars, I shouldn't come back here. I am going to purchase a executioner hood.

I met up with Gwen and discussed a few things. A relayed the information about the asshole brewer to the crew. We deemed him unacceptable.


After buying quite a lot of silver goods at the smith, we retired for another few ales.