A hat trick? Is that right?

This post is more than a month overdue at this point, but I'm a-tryin' to catch up. I may well forget some details, but, you know, nothing important. I hope.

Above is a map of GRISTLEHELM so far. Actually, I'm cheating a bit because I forgot to take a picture for this particular session. So, this map is actually from Session 9, which we played just this last Sunday. Confused yet? Ah, just look at the map---it's a thing of beauty. T.J. even colored in the spaces...

This was a crazy session from the get-go: my brother and sister-in-law were going to be in town for a concert on Sunday (the day we played), which I knew, but they decided to come the night before (they live in Omaha) and surprise me by showing up to play! Which I was! Too cool.

So we ended up with a huge party: nine players---the largest since our very first session. Will played the ever-present Melvin; my son Max made a new goblin character named Spike-of-the-Death, who fought with two daggers; my sister-in-law played a hobbit Thief named Catgut Dogskin; my brother reprised his role as Loric the elf, acting as a Fighting Man; Larry played Nimfitz the elf, acting as a Magic User; Carl played Mondlach the Magic User; T.J. started out playing Punka (are you guessing where my title comes from yet?) the Fighting Man; Steve played Mardias the Fighting Man; and Jesse (aka giantbat, our newest player!) played Saas the Cleric. Whew. I played the DM.

Some Highlights

• In one of the first rooms entered, both Punka and Saas were killed in a savage melee with hobgoblins (what is it with hobgoblins?!) I'm pretty sure Jesse in second place for quickness of new character death (right behind my friend Bill, who's character died in the first moments of the first room entered in our very first session...) This was sad, but Jesse...simply flipped to the next page of his notebook. He had come prepared with three characters! Pure old school, ladies and gentlemen. His next character was another Cleric named Marjoram, and T.J. rolled up a thief which, when he carried over his experience from Punka, turned out to be 3rd level (Punka had been 2nd level.) Death sometimes has its benefits...
• In another previously explored room, an old wine cellar, some of them thought a bit of a drink might be good. Marjoram, devotee of some jolly Finnish deity, broke off a bottleneck, took a swig (DM rolls a d6), failed a save vs. poison, swelled up, choked, and died. "She's dead?", someone asked. "Yup." Other characters quietly put the bottles back or stuck them in backpacks to use on gullible monsters...
• Jesse's third (and final) character, Pelf the Thief (you know, T.J.'s new Thief, Guppy, caught up with the party at some point, too, I just don't remember when...) found the rest of the party just after they had opened a tightly stuck door. Once dislodged, it expelled strange fumes; most of them failed a save vs. poison, which allowed me to roll many more d6s: Mardias and Melvin both suddenly not only believed that they were the last Lord Gristlehelm, but found they had perfect knowledge of the entire dungeon. Both immediately took off for parts unknown. Catgut and Nimfitz's hireling Veri both believed they were dead, and so collapsed to the floor. Nimfitz believed that he was a boa constrictor, and so began trying to constrict the "dead" Veri. Spike-of-the-Death believed he was a tree frog, and began making hopping leaps at the wall, trying to stick to it. Alan, Melvin's hireling, believed he was a gorilla, and so thumped his chest and tried to groom Catgut. Loric, Mondlach, Guppy and, soon, Pelf, looked on bemusedly. I'm pretty sure they stopped Nimfitz when he tried to swallow Veri... The room itself was bubbled, burned, charred, and empty.
• Melvin and Mardias came back to their senses in complete darkness. Luckily, Melvin's magic sword glows, and so they saw they were standing in what looked like a corridor with two dead-ends. Melvin concentrated on Alan, I believe, and proved without a doubt, as the sword pulled him forward, that part of its magic was locating objects... they did eventually find the secret door and the rest of the party.
• In a niche in an otherwise unassuming corridor, they found a gigantic golden head, a bust of the evilly leering last Lord Gristlehelm. About six feet high and four feet in diameter, T.J. calculated via iphone that it probably weighed in the neighborhood of 45 tons. Catgut climbed up on top of it, but couldn't find anything useful. Much discussion ensued about what the hell to DO with the thing. Finally, Melvin decided to chop off the nose with his magic sword. This worked, but his failed save vs. spells resulted in his face drawing up into a mirror-image of Gristlehelm's awful leer. Net result? His already low charisma was halved (down to three, I believe...) At some point here they were attacked by an ogre and a wolf, but took them down, with a sleep spell and some arrows. Man, adventurers are savage...
• They discovered what must have been a wizard's workroom, which ended up having a strangely thin wall on one side. Pelf broke through into a corridor where the mournful ghosts of dwarves stopped their work and pointed to a finely made dwarven hand axe, embedded in the wall. Pelf picked it up, and the ghosts faded away...
• Two doors in the room had complicated glyphs carved on them. Both were locked. When Guppy tried to pick one, it blasted flames at him, which he mostly avoided...

At this point, with our Real World time running out, they decided to leave and return to die another day...

Mantipedes, you say?

I guess they're getting to know us at The Source... They even spelled it right!

I've got to quit posting these logs three or four weeks after last playing 'cause, you know, I'm getting old, and my memory fuzzy. Plus, this last time, I tried to reorganize my gaming briefcase, and it didn't work out so well... I ended up losing the piece of paper on which all the characters' names were written; not so good.

So, I apologize in advance those of you with new characters last time---feel free to fill in what I've forgotten.

Playing this time was Will with Melvin the Fighting Man; Will's wife Susan (a first time gamer!) with a Cleric; Trevor with Narpet the Magic User; my son Max with Fireskull the skeleton Fighting Man; my brother Josh with an elf (remember the Holmes mindset now, so almost race-as-class); Chad, an old friend (like, from elementary school) with a Fighting Man; Carl, fresh from Dragonsfoot, with a Magic User. Trevor still had Octague the evil Cleric charmed from the last session, but I think Melvin let Alan One Hit, his surprisingly robust hireling, have the day off. Geez, when I look at that, it was a big, noisy party...

Some Highlights

• They really wanted to find the kobolds who'd ambushed them last time, but no luck...
• Narpet, hoping someday to become a lich, is hoping that Octague was looking for something in the dungeon that might help him achieve that goal. After an inconclusive conversation, he did, however, agree to paint his face white, "In honor of Father Orcus..."
• After kicking in a door, they attracted some ghosts. Most of the party failed their saving throws and took off in fear, hiding behind broken furniture in the room beyond the door. The ghosts went away eventually, and Fireskull, being undead and therefore not subject to being afraid of ghosts, got bored. He went wandering about nearby corridors while the others recovered, breaking down locked doors and shouting "It's just me!" to the rest of the party. He discovered some stairs leading down and, amazingly, was unmolested by wandering monsters...
• They found what appears to have been some sort of arena, with risers, a dias, and six locked grates in the floor. Peering into the grates, they saw sparkly things, but also heard slight moans and the scrape of metal and bones. In true old school style, they decided to leave well enough alone for now.
• Through a secret door in a nearby corridor, they found a strange, felted hallway running behind the seats in the auditorium, with small holes at head height. For servants of House Gristlehelm to spy, or worse, on guests?
• In a distant room that appeared to have been part parlor, part prison, they roused the ghost of a once-beautiful young woman, horribly disfigured by torture, who attacked them by flinging freezing blood from her wounds. Susan immediately said her cleric was going to fall to her knees and pray to send the ghost's soul onward. I thought this was so cool---she didn't really know about "turning", so she just tried what seemed natural for a cleric to do. I gave her three chances, getting harder each time: 2d6, 9 or higher/11 or higher/three dice, all the same number. It didn't work, but that wasn't the point (I mean, she is only first level, after all!) See, in the room description, I had written: "Mutilated, broken, maligned, wrathful. A cleric of a loving GOD might be able to lay this tragic wraith to rest." So, there you go... Defeated only through the agency of Melvin's magic sword, a diary found amongst her bones revealed her to have been Gwyneth the Pale, beloved daughter and heir to House Hyacinth, mortal foes of House Gristlehelm. If I'm remembering correctly, they took her skull with them, though it may only have been the diary.
• In one room, a pool was bubbling up from somewhere, filling about a third of the space. The wet walls and floor were crumbling and corroded. Strange movements and sounds near the pool turned out, on further investigation, to be literally hundreds of thousands of centipedes. When someone came too near the pool, furious motion in the swarm resolved into two roughly man-shaped forms composed entirely of centipedes, which came lurching out towards the characters. They managed to scatter the mantipedes long enough for Narpet, using his ring of water walking, to skim out on the pool and find the robed bones of what was apparently once a magic user. They left the room with a potion of healing and a scroll.
• And then there was the column of garbage...

Announcement: Otherness, Session 8

Otherness, Session 8 will be played, well, I guess tomorrow(!) at The Source Comics and Games, from 12-4. It's a Free Campaign, which means anyone can show up and play at any time. We have four confirmed players, one of whom is brand new, so they just may survive!

The depths of GRISTLEHELM will be further explored. Our intrepid adventurers ran into some odd stuff last time, and they're only just getting started...

Fight On! 6 released

I'm a bit tardy in posting this, but Fight On! 6 is available for consumption. And trust me, you will want to consume...

Dedicated to legendary publisher of Alarums and Excursions, Lee Gold, it is packed with delicious old school goodness. Some highlights:

• Erol Otus Art Challenge color-entry Grand Prize-winning cover by Mark Allen. Never have stirges seemed so cool...
• Sandbox Prepartation by the "Chicago Wizard" Mike Shorten
• I Need a Dungeon Right Now! by Jeff Reints
• Another installation of Baz Blatt's Tekumel-themed The Devil's in the Details (for which I had the honor to illustrate an ahoggya...)
• Another massive level for Fight On! community-created mega-dungeon The Darkness Beneath
• Enharza, City of Thieves by crazily creative Argentinian Santiago Luis "Zulgyan" Ortis
• World Creating as a Hobby by Lee Gold (who should certainly know something about it...)
• Naked Went the Gamer guest editorial by The Forge creator and indie-game iconoclast Ron Edwards, which has, not surprisingly, garned some controversy amongst participants in the Old School Renaissance.

So? What the hell are you doing still reading this? Go and buy it!

(and then go check out EVERY SINGLE LINK in this post---you won't regret it...)

Announcement: Otherness, Session 7

Otherness: Session 7 will be played this upcoming Sunday, August 30, from 12-4 at The Source Comics and Games. This is a Free Campaign, which means anyone can show up and play at any point. I already have five confirmed players, which is great, and even better 'cause it includes my little brother, with whom I haven't gamed since 1990 or 91. And I believe we played Rifts...

Adventurers will once again be braving the subterranean halls of GRISTLEHELM. It seems unlikely that all of them will be leaving intact...

On a side note, we're switching over to using the Holmes Blue Book as the rules-base of our campaign, along with a good dose of Greyhawk and Fight On! articles. This can be laid at Will's feet, since he printed out a nifty bookletized form of the said rules for me, which caused me to actually read them all the way through and realize how just how tasty they really are...

GRISTLEHELM

I guess they were busy at The Source last time we played---usually we get some sort of plasitic stand-up with flashy 3e heroes exposing their thighs to hold our table. In the end, though, this is more appropriately old school...

Our last session, played I believe three weeks ago this Sunday, was a first: they took a run at the first full dungeon I've created since high school! Called GRISTLEHELM, it's the underground coilings of House Gristlehelm, the scions of whom were rumored to be werewolves. The last Lord Gristlehelm and his wicked brood were driven below, presumably to perish, and their castle thrown down. The ruins now are peaceful, twined with flowering ivy and birdsong. However, any who look for it can still find the thick wooden door with the spiral stairs leading down into darkness, the golden Gristlehelm wolf head snarling in a flaking scarlet field at its dark, scarred center. Some say the door was sealed with silver and magic. If so, such is no longer the case. The door ratchets open for any wishing to enter...

We had a medium-sized group this time: Will, of course, playing Melvin the Fighting Man, accompanied by his hireling Alan One-Hit; T.J. playing Punka the Fighting Man; Trevor playing Narpet the Magic User; and my son Max playing Fireskull the Skeleton Fighting Man. That's right---a new character race in Otherness. Skeletons may be Fighting Men, Magic Users or Clerics of gods of death (obviously!) They only take one point of damage from arrows, but take an additional die of damage from fire. They're also vulnerable to being Turned by good clerics or commanded by evil ones. Otherwise, they're just like you and me... This all sprung from Max buying and painting a set of undead miniatures in his own expressionistic fashion. He's made several characters now, all directly based on particular miniatures. Two of them (Bloodarex and Mudskel) have even stormed the Ruined Monastery before it was ruined, but that's another post...

A Few Interesting Things

I find I'm still using the General Conflict table from my abortive Judges Guidelines. I mean, I could do something similar with only one die, but I like the curve of two. I actually tried another iteration of these rules with Max one day and, though it worked better, still left me going "meh." I can't say I'm done with tinkering (and lately I've been thinking pretty seriously about switching over to the Holmes rules---that lies on your shoulders, Will!), but the general ODD rules are just so wonderfully SIMPLE...

I'd been perusing my pdf copy of Fight On! 5, and so floated the idea of using Paul Vermeren's Dungeon Motivations. They bit, and I ain't never going back. This is now de riguer for delvers in Otherness. Our results:

• Trying to impress a love interest
• Chronic underestimator of danger
• Has terrifying dreams commanding the character to awaken a sleeping god (Max got that one...)
• Crazy old uncle has filled PC's head with glamorous nonsense about dungeon crawling
• And (drum roll please) an actual score of 100, made by a drop-in player who was simply wating for his group to get there: A deity in disguise, visiting the dungeon as a sightseer. He had made a magic user named Exi Dor (ya get it?) and, when his group showed up, Loki (that's who he really was, you see) quipped "Well, I think you've got it from here" and vanished... Perfect.

I'm missing one there, so if one of you is reading this, please fill me in.

Oh, and btw, Wuukys, from the same FO! issue, are now a totally playable Otherness race...

Some Highlights

• In the freakin' entryway, the characters found a loose stone with treasure hidden behind it. Lucky bastards!
• They found a room, painted all gold, with a big crack in the floor that disgorged a giant ant. They killed it and left quickly.
• An ambush by a group of kobolds forced them to leave the dungeon, rest for a few days, and return. It wasn't until later that I remembered that both Melvin and Fireskull, as 2nd level fighting men, should've both gotten multiple attacks against their .5 HD foes... Oh well. Of course, they didn't remember, either...
• Stumbling upon an evil cleric and his orcish henchmen, they killed the orcs and Narpet charmed the cleric. Since this was apparently once a wine-cellar, they also decided to drink some of the wine. A random roll found it to be extremely intoxicating...
• Now that the cleric (Octague) was Narpet's best friend, he showed them them the way he'd gotten in, which led through a room featuring a warm, algae-scummed pool with a demonic statue cavorting in the middle of it.
• Octague led them to a large room filled with old chains, hobbles and muzzles, including the skeleton of dire wolf. Large double doors to the west were ignored, and instead they followed the cleric out the doors to the east, up through a worked cave mouth and into the woods outside. In hollow were many rusted cages, which was all they had time to see before getting bum rushed by a sparrow-headed birdbear (see Fight On! 4).A quick melee saw the charmed cleric actually kill the beast, rolling a natural 20. Go figure.
• Melvin just made 3rd level: now officially the highest level character in the game! See what showin' up gets you?

It was just too much fun to run my own dungeon. I'm hopeful we'll head back down next time. We have only barely scratched the surface of GRISTLEHELM...

The Debut of Exis Hammerfist

Our last session, played back in the middle of May(!), was a big deal for me---my five-and-a-half-year old son Max played his first real game of D&D! The picture on the left is the miniature he chose for Exis his dwarven Fighting Man, and the dice he bought before we left the game store. Not that he needed new dice---he rolled four natural 20s. But more on that in a bit...

Another reason this session was a big deal was, of course, the descent into Level 2 of Xylarthen's infamous Tower. We had an unusually small group for such a serious undertaking. Will was playing Melvin, now 2nd level (I'll talk about that in a bit, too), R.M. was playing Kohenim the cleric, his son Max was playing Redwood the elven Fighting Man, and my son Max was playing the aforementioned Exis, also 2nd level. Melvin acquired the services of two thugs, um, I mean hirelings, named Alan and Zech. They chose the stairway in the former guardroom, aperoom, what have you, and down they went.

A Couple of Tangents

A while ago, Will mentioned to me his idea for xp's, that maybe it's not a bad idea to think of them as being given to the player as opposed to the character. He expanded on it in a post here. Actually, that whole thread was full of fiber, as it were. Go read it. Anyhow, after thinking about it a bit, I agreed with him. Especially given the "play once/month, Free Campaign" model we've got going on here, it seemed fair, especially to players like Will, who show up a lot. So, I grandfathered in the experience he'd built up with his other characters (there have been soooo many, after all...), and lo, Melvin was well into 2nd level.

Max's character I started off at 2nd level. I mean, c'mon, he's five...

As for Melvin's hirelings, I generated them using Robert Lionheart's excellent "Random Hireling Generator" from Knockspell 1. This is a great magazine, and a worthy colleague of Fight On! I bought the pdf of issue 1, but it's another that I'll eventually start collecting in hardcopy as well. Go read and buy!

Some Highlights

• More giant weasels. I don't know what it was about Xylarthen and weasels,I'm pretty sure someone's gotten hurt everytime they've mixed it up with these large, mean, smelly rodents...
• In one room a door was opened, which disgorged a hideously cackling skeleton doing a good impression of the Grim Reaper. He laid about with his scythe until Kohenim turned him, at which point he leapt back through the door and slammed it shut. Perhaps judiciously, the party decided to leave it shut.
• In another room, while searching, they heard sounds outside a door they hadn't yet opened. It became clear it was a group of kobolds. The door was yanked open, revealing an exploratory horde of somewhere close to 10 of the little blighters. Negotiations began, until Exis became impatient. Striding up to the hobgoblin leader, he punched him solidly in the head, dropping the doglizard in his tracks. Needless to say, the rest panicked and ran. The backstage of this was Max saying, "I'm gonna punch him in the face." Pan to group of players looking confusedly. Says I, "Are you sure?" Max: "Yeah!" "Okay," says I, "Roll that 20-sider." Pan to a natural 20. Wide-shot: Whole table cheering a grinning 5-year old. Too cool.
• In yet another room, some cheeky hobgoblins demanded a toll to pass through the room. Again, negotiations were in hand when Exis decided he'd had enough. Another punch in the face. Another natural 20. Naturally the hobgoblins tossed out their toll-box and took off.
• Eventually, the kobolds were cornered and dispatched. Another nine hobgoblins were encountered, a fierce battle ensued, and Redwood the Elf was slain. The wounded party decamped with his body, and thereby mostly survived their first foray into the deeper levels of the Tower.

We play again today, and hopefully there won't be anymore long hiatuses (is that a word?)

Max has just rejected going over to a friend's house in favor of coming with me, so I think another gamer has been born... :)