cat /proc/claus

Today I read two pretty amazing articles from ChattyDM, in which he describes how his skills as a RPG DM have helped him in his teaching job (and vice versa). Part1 - Part2 . I think this post really resonated with me, because it made me reflect about what I like in teaching, and what I like in Dungeon Mastering. I think I could extend the ideas presented there by making the connection between something else that I like - organizing events/parties, and preparing adventures/campaigns. I like brainstorming for group activities, and I think I use the same process for these as I do for brainstorming set piece encounters and scenes in my adventures, for example, but before reading those articles, I never really made the connection.

I get a lot of cool things from reading Chatty’s blog. One of those was the “Swords and Sorcery” D&D retroclone, which I had the chance to play with my Brazilian group today. Instead of re-running the great dungeon in the “Quick Start Guide” from scratch, I decided that I would expand the dungeon as it was left by the Daydream group last time I played it with them, in a sort of “consistent world between groups” system that I always wanted to try my hand at. It worked pretty nicely, because the group really got immersed in the changes left in the world by the previous group!

The group was composed of a Fighting Man, a Spell User and a Cleric (I didn’t allow humanoids, because I don’t really like the S&W version, and I want to work on my own house rules for them). The group decided that they were kids from the village near the ruins, and got some money recently from working themselves as hirelings for other groups and wanted to use their earnings to assemble their own expedition. They were heavy on the “character roleplaying”, and insisted with me that they only wanted to hire hirelings which were young kids, because they thought regular mercenaries would not respect them. I rolled a few village bullies and misfits, and the result was a small gang of the worst of the village, that wanted to try and explore the dungeon by themselves after hearing of the riches that the previous group of professional adventurers had gotten from it.

After a little more amusing RPing in the village, which included a visit to the local grumpy witch (who was grumpy because of the forceful haggling of the previous group), they headed down to the dungeon. They turned some undead in the first room, and explored bravely deeper and deeper, door after door. While they were heeding my warnings about the dangers of old school D&D, and had a hireling prodding the floor for pit traps in front of them with a pole weapon (I loved how the player convinced the minion to do that - “You need to poke the ground to see if there is any hidden treasure below the rocks!”), the “4E spoiling” showed up a bit by their bravery :-D. Eventually they got to the “Windy Room”, which I had modified a bit by making the trap cause 1d6 damage to characters who were blown against the walls.

What happened next was deserving of a scene in an Indiana Jones movie - except, without Indy. The entire group sees the room full of “treasure”, and “no danger”, and decides to get in, all at once. When they all enter the room, the windy trap picks up, and throws almost everyone to the walls. The Magic user instantly breaks his neck and dies, along with another hireling, much to the horror of the Fighting man’s player. The surviving members struggled against the wind do get out of the room as fast as they could, then they decided to quickly leave the dungeon with the bodies of their comrades.

The game ended around here. Two of the players were willing to go back in (including the MU player, who had just rolled one of the surviving hirelings into PC-dom), but I could see that the third player wasn’t really that into it, so we did some board gaming next.

The “all groups explore the same dungeon” idea worked really well, but since we won’t get much time to continue playing S&W (since we still have to finish our 4E campaign), I’m not really sure when I’ll be able to pick up on this dungeon again. I could try to start a third group, but with dreaded January closing in fast, that is just not possible.

Also, in spite of the lack of updates, I haven’t completely abandoned the ETD project yet. I had some serious optimization issues earlier this week, when I tried to implement some routines for painting walls. I’ll have to read the python tutorial carefully, because I’m almost sure the function is slow because I’m using some Java-isms or C-isms when I could use some more efficient data structures without much fuss. Expect a more detailed report soonish.

So it turns out that today was a very rainy day, and I decided to give up going to the Geocaching meeting. Instead, I spent some time preparing for the RPG 4E game tomorrow.

My players will mostly finish exploring the dungeon #6 presented at the Dungeon Delve book (one of the best 4E supplements I have read so far), but I started sorting out some treasure, and got inspired for writing down three more locations I want the players to explore, and sorting out the plans for this wing of the campaign a little bit more. The place I’m writing about now is an abandoned town based on the Mayan/Incan ruins. The initial idea was for the place to be filled with savage beasts and stone guardians. But while writing, I’m listening to the “Radio Rivendell” on shoutcast, and listening to this creepy, dark song makes it very difficult to resist putting some undead ghosts of the former inhabitants of the city.

After playing so much SLA and Swords and Wizardry the past few weeks, I grew a bit wary of going back to 4E with its piece meal encounters and multitude of minor magical items, but by preparing the adventure, I’m in back into the mood of pushing the new Vlachia campaign ahead - most of Ludus Island is still unexplored, and Xor does not want to return home without his hard earned cash!

Tonight I got to DM my second live session of Swords and Wizardry. It was a continuation of last week’s game. We’re currently running the dungeon in the Quick Start guide, and now that the party has cleared half the rooms and returned to town, I started filling the cleared room with new, bizarre monsters.

In the first session, the team invaded this ancient temple and started exploring, with Timmy, a young torchbearer, and Ed, a mercenary. They found Cristina, an Elvira-like evil cleric, and with clever use of a “Sleep” spell, put her to sleep, and turned her into a sexual-slave-trap-detector-monster-bait. After exploring a bunch of easy rooms, they ambushed a group of goblins and made short work of them, returning when facing the goblin mage.

In the current session, they were recovering from the encounter with the goblin mage when they met the new PC, who was accompained by a full entourage of 5 hirelings. They started investigating again when a goblin ambush took out half the hirelings (and poor Timmy!). Having get rid of the goblins, the group had some fun at a talking statue room, and almost got killed by a pack of giant rats. Only two PCs survived the onslaught, and one of them was unconscious (Yay! my first PC-kill!)

They returned to town, to re-stock on hirelings and PCs (this time a full 8 hireling mini-army, including Barack Obama :-P), and returned to the dungeon. It was different now, though - all rooms were deathly cold, and strange translucent zombies were everywhere, claiming for “revenge” — the zombies would meld in certain places, and managed to remove and eat the brains of one of the hirelings - who later turned back into a frog zombie! Aaaie!

We finished around here… This was a “replacement” game (the main GM for our regular game was missing), so I’m not sure when I’ll get to play it again, but we had laughs and laughs during the whole thing, so I hope it is soon

So I’m really enjoying this old school thing. The lightweight approach to PC death (the characters suck anyway, and it is so fast to make another one!) allows me to play more fast and loose with the rules, and have the monsters try interesting things, like ambushes and rush tactics on the players. I also invent a lot of stuff on the spot, knowing that if I make anything too broken, it is really easy to erase it later.

On the other hand, I still have to get the hang on how to deal with time and weight in order to better make sure that the party’s resources are taxed. Their lamps are almost running forever now, and they are lugging a LARGE ammount of treasure now without a problem. Also, the large amount of hirelings made things a bit… “strange”, but nothing that can’t be fixed by having the city block them from sending any more of its young men to their deaths

I’ll put some links later, I’m dead sleepy now.

This post describes a combat encounter for the D&D 4th edition RPG game. I ran this encounter today for my gaming group, and we liked the result so much I decided to share the encounter.

Scenario

4-5 lv 4 players. The group is clearing/investigating a temple defiled by demons. This is the “final” encounter - this demon is protecting the room that houses whatever the group came to search (in the case of my game, a portal that draws energy from the lower planes into the prime material). The group must overcome this last challenge to reach their goal.

Battle Map

The combat takes place in a 2 square wide, 2 square high, ~20 squares long corridor. A double door is in one end, and the demon is waiting for the party in front of the double door. The party comes from the other end of the corridor. There are NO light sources, so take this into account for surprise/initial distance for both sides.

The battle map may seem a little dull, but this will soon change.

Demon Corridor Guardian

These are the stats for the Demonic Guardian. For some reason, I can’t get Dungeonmastering’s “DM tools” style to play with Wordpress’ style, so I will have to improvise. Sorry about that (if anyone knows how to help, please contact me!)

Demonic Guardian Level 7 Solo Brute, 1500 XP
Medium Demon Humanoid

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Initiative: +5 Senses: Perception +4; Darkvision
HP: 360 Bloodied: 180
AC: 21 Fortitude: 25 Reflex: 19 Will: 21
Immunities: Variable 10; 1/encounter
Saving throws: +5
Speed 6 Action Points 2

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(Basic Melee) Claw Slash (Standard, At-Will)
+11 vs AC; 2d8+5 damage and the target is pushed 1 square.

(Melee) Slash and Slam (Standard, At-Will)
2 “Claw Slash” attacks in one target. If both attacks hit, the target is also knocked prone.

(Melee) 4-armed Raise (Standard, Recharge 5,6)
+9 vs Fortitude; 3d8+5 and the target is grabbed

(Ranged) Throw (Minor, At will (grabbed target only))
Ranged 3; 1d6+5 damage and the target is slided 3 squares and knocked prone.
Secondary Attack: +9 vs reflex - target must be another creature adjacent to the target of the primary attack. 1d6+5 damage and secondary target is knocked prone.

(Melee) Invoke Pit Soul (Minor, Recharge 5,6) * Fire
Targets a creature in Range 15 adjacent to a pit. +9 vs Reflex, 1d6+5 fire damage and target has -2 to hit until the end of the Demon’s next turn.

(Area) Demon World (Minor, Recharge 3,4,5,6) * Fire, Psychic
The corridor is enlarged one square in each direction (up to 12 width), and 4 empty squares adjacent to enemies become pits.

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Alignment: Chaotic Evil Language Demonic
Skills: Athletics +14; Stealth +10
Str: 20 (+8) Dex 15 (+5) Wis 12 (+4)
Con: 16 (+6) Int 8 (+2) Cha 6 (+1)

Tactics

The demon will try to use “Demon World” as much as possible to Change the terrain to its favor. It will try to throw
the defender away from it, and then generate pits to prevent the defender to reach him. If he can’t keep the defender away, the demon will try to use Slash and Slam to push him into one of the pits.

The demon will also keep some of the pits near the back line of the party, and try to keep the striker with the attack penalty as often as possible. If the striker of the party is on the back line, the demon will accept some opportunity attacks to rush into the striker.

If bloodied, the demon will use both his action points at once to hit one target with three “Slash and Slam”, to put one player down. He will fight to death. Also, he will wait two rounds before activating “Variable Resistance”, to make sure he chooses some kind of resistance which is useful to the Demon.

Note
Falling in the pit causes no damage, but requires a Athletics roll of 15 to leave in one turn. You cant do melee attacks from
inside the pit to the outside.

Suggestions

Try to concentrate on the dramatic effect of the “Demon World” and “Pit Soul” attacks. The Demon corrupts the foundation of the stones around him, and enlist their very help to fight the characters. The Pit souls are pale shadows of the demon the party is facing. Make sure to describe how the earth shakes and moans as the demon distorts it.

You know you are doing it right if the players are afraid that the “expand the corridor” power means that the room will fall to the ground in a few turns.

Also, since this is a solo fight with a Brute (lots of HPs!) don’t be shy about having the demon ignore the Defender and go straight for the squishies - your defender will be excited by the attacks of opportunities, and the fight will go faster (either towards victory or defeat!), and be more interesting.