Otherness: Session 12

Ladies and Gentlemen, we're back!

After several months without posting or playing, Otherness 12 will be happening this Sunday, June 27, from 10-2, at the (usefully local) Fantasy Flight Games Event Center. 


I'm not yet sure what Adventure will be had, but play we will. After a few past sessions of mucking about with rules, we're sticking with mildly house-ruled ODD. I'm actually working on assembling a single URTEXT of the three little brown books and some sections from Greyhawk (mostly monsters, treasure and magic.) I'm doing this using the handy, free, surprisingly formatting-friendly PDFtoWord service.

As always, this is a Free Campaign, which means anyone can show up and play at any time. If you live in the area, come on out and join us!

(we'll be the ones having the most fun...)

Lapinetastic!

Boys and girls, here's your chance to own a piece of rpg history, and help out a good cause!

I've placed up for auction my copy of Bunnies & Burrows. All proceeds go to benefit the Gygax Family Memorial Fund, more of which can be read about here, and on the TARGA website.

Bid now: This is a 1st edition copy in close to pristine shape, including two, count 'em two copies of the two-sided goldenrod cardstock reference sheets. If you're curious, I have more images of the reference sheets, table of contents, etc. Just lemme know.

Why are you still here? Go bid!

Abridgment

I think I'm done with the big, sprawling accounts of play. I only end up delaying writing the posts until it's long past when we played. So, I'm now all about abridgment. I'm going to try smaller, more frequent posts.

In the spirit of abridgment, Otherness 11 was played with a rediscovered D&D simulacrum: Abridged Dungeons and Dragons. I have no idea how I first stumbled upon these rules, but I do remember that it was back maybe eight years ago when I was first getting interested in the White Box. I was cleaning out my games and there it was, so, since I hadn't had time to flesh out Level 2 of GRISTLEHELM, it seemed like a good session to try something different.

I have to say, it actually worked pretty well. It was low seriousness, with a Wizard (named Anton the Gloomy, Friend of Bats), one Hero (Melvin's twin brother), a dwarf, two elves, a goblin and...wait for it...a Ghoul named Ghoulio. Yes.

I took them through a dungeon I made a few years ago, The Lost Tomb of Frater Perduabo, Mad Alcymyst. No characters died, and I didn't really notice any imbalance from the elves being able to turn invisible or the Wizard having access to a big list of spells, including an innate ability to throw a fireball.

It'd need some tweaking for the long haul, but what game worth playing doesn't, right?

In case you're wondering, Ghoulio was discovered locked in a room full of mutated bats. On the fly (and this is what's so great about the oldskool mindset), I decided that since ghouls can't parlyze elves and so probably don't even LIKE to eat dead elves, there wasn't really any animosity between the two. I had a momentary vision of the King of Ghouls and the Burning Year having a diplomatic meeting in an overgrown graveyard lost in the forest. And really, Ghoulio was played (by Shelly, new gamer to our group) more like a Lovecraft ghoul, meeping and creeping, complete with very ghoulish finger-twitching...

Oh, in case you're wondering, it was Will's bday last week, and the cake arrived mid-session courtesy of his wife, Susan (playing Carol the Elf...) And it was tasty.

Happy Birthday, Will!

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...)