This Week in the OSR: Megadungeons

So this latest issue in the OSR seems to be about and around the Mega-dungeon.
There are a lot of reasons for this but they are better explained elsewhere.

http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=24039
http://aldeboran.blogspot.com/2012/10/schroedingers-room-and-fuck-diddles.html
http://muleabides.wordpress.com/2012/10/09/in-defense-of-the-megadungeon/
http://wondrousimaginings.blogspot.com/2012/10/played-dwimmermount-last-night-sucked.html
http://warlockshomebrew.blogspot.com/2012/10/empty-room-syndrome.html
http://dreamsinthelichhouse.blogspot.com/2012/10/lessons-from-running-mega-dungeons.html

Me? I am not trying to stir up any shit.  Here are my points of view.

• James is good guy. We don't see eye to eye on most things, but I enjoy his blog still.  He will get done when he gets done.  
• That being said, I hate to see the Kickstarter well poisoned or tainted.  Delays are happening in about half of the kickstarters I have funded, while I am not mad or even irritated, I am getting a little anxious. 
• Mega-dungeons are not my thing.  Sure I get the appeal, but give me the outside or the city or the planes.  One could argue that those are just different kinds of mega dungeons.  One might be right.

So it's Friday and typically slow around here.  So I wanted to capture your thoughts on this.

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My Kids are Awesome!

With the new reprints of 1st Ed AD&D now out my kids want our next game to be a 1st Edition one!

How freaking cool is that?

We have done just about everything we have set out to do in 3rd Ed and our 4th Ed game is still moving right along.

So what should we do then for 1st Ed?
I know I am going to throw in some house rules.

• 1st level HP will be equal to Con scores for all characters and NPCs include 0-level humans.
• I will be using bards, I am just not sure which one yet.
• Double damage on a natural 20.
• Will use strict multi-class and dual-class rules.
• If it is written down somewhere and it works with AD&D1, 2 or Basic D&D then it will be considered for this game.

I know I am going to use ideas from ALL the retro-clones where appropriate.  So it will be less of a 1st Ed game in rules, but certainly one in terms of tone and spirit.

Here are the adventures I want to use.  Again, I like sticking with these old school modules.

T1 Village of Hommlet, levels 1-2 (IF I don't use it in the D&D4 game)
B1 Into the Unknown, levels 1-3 (my go to starting module)
B2 Keep on the Borderlands, levels 1-3 (how can I NOT do this?)

L1 The Secret of Bone Hill, levels 2-4
X2 Castle Amber, levels 3-6 (love this freaky module, though it sticks out as the only Non-Greyhawk one)
A1-4 Slave Lords, levels 4-7
C2 Ghost Tower of Inverness, levels 5-7
S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, levels 8-12
G123, Against the Giants, levels 8-12 (I also have the Stone Giant one from Dragonsfoot)
D12,3 Against the Drow, levels 8,9-14
Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits, 10-14
S1 Tomb of Horrors, levels 10-14 (IF I don't use it in the D&D4 game, it is an AD&D classic)
CM2 Death's Ride, levels 15-20. (Again, unless I use it in my current 3.x game which the boys want me to do)


AND if their 4.e group does not get to the end, then I could use the Bloodstone H series too.  But that is getting WAY ahead of myself.


If you look over my previous plans here and here, you see I am sticking with the modules. 
I am running the HPE Orcus ones for 4e, and used many of the other classics in my 3.x games.


So far the boys have gone through B3, B4, S2, S4, WG4, I1, and X1 for 3.x (and a bunch I made up when they were younger like "Cave of the Rainbow Dragon" and "The Stinky Cave"), and H1 Keep on the Shadowfell for 4e.  So they are getting, as my youngest put it this morning, a full Dungeons & Dragons education.


Again.  This is going to be a lot of fun!  I am not expecting this one to start anytime soon, I still have a 3.x game to finish with them. 

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The Dark Druid

Something different today for the YAM Magazine LBGT Blogathon.  Today, not a character so much as characters  and an adventure.  I wanted to repost a link to the first ever Buffy adventure I ever wrote; updated to feature Willow & Tara more prominently.  Also updated with a new download link.
Originally posted here in 2010.


The Dark Druid: The Director's Cut

- Download here -

A bit of history.  Back in 2002 Eden was getting ready to release their newest game, The Buffy the Vampire Slayer game.  As you may know, I had already been playing a Willow/Tara focused WitchCraft game for about a year, so I was pretty excited by this.  Well I got asked by Eden to write the first Buffy adventure that would appear in "Games Unplugged" along with an interview with C.J. Carella talking about the game.

I took an idea I had been working on for my other game (tentatively called "All Soul's Night") and thus the Dark Druid was born.

I had been reading a ton of Irish myths then.  Among those were the stories of Fionn MacCumhaill ("Finn MacCool") and his foster mothers Bodhmal and Liath.  It occurred to me that Liath and Bodhmal were lovers, and to tie it more directly to my work in Buffy, they were reincarnated later on into the form of Willow and Tara.   Since that time anytime I read a story about Fionn MacCumhaill I can't help but read Bodhmal and Liath as lovers.

The original featured, rather prominently, Willow and Tara, as to be expected.  I had to make some changes to make it playable for others and to make it an "intro" or season opener type episode.  The plot dealt with an enemy from the Cast's past as a portent to greater evil in the future.  It was designed to be a opening episode of the season, but one that may or may not be directly related to the seasonal arc.  We were going to use this i n part of the great "Djinn" story, but that never happened.

Fast forward a few years and I was finishing up work on Ghosts of Albion and another adventure that sprang from "All Soul's Night" called "Blight" (which I have played at Gen Con before).  I felt it was time to bring back the Dark Druid and restore it to the mythology that I had created in my games.  Now you can have it too.  So it became a Prequel or an Episode 0 for my huge Willow & Tara series, The Dragon and the Phoenix.  This adventure and the Dragon adventures were designed to feature Willow and Tara.  My players were extremely pissed off at Tara being killed, so this was our way of getting our own way.

I updated it not only to fit better with my world-myths, and with some of the work I did on Ghosts of Albion and the adventure Blight.  In fact you can run Blight and The Dark Druid as co-adventures, separated by time.

The story is rather direct and linear.  This was partly due to the nature of the story and what is was supposed to do (introduce new players to the game) and part of just me writing for the Buffy game for the first time.  I have opted not to change that here, despite nearly 10 years of Cinematic Unisystem adventure writing since then.  It is supposed to be a quick, fun little adventure dealing with past lives.

The episode was well received and even has a bit on Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffyverse_role-playing_games#Adventures

It was the first. The start of a series of adventures that led me personally down a crazy path.  It's hard to gauge the effect it has had, it was so fundamental.  From this point my writing increased maybe a 100 or 500 fold.  Hard to say really.

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Player & Character morality

Read these two descriptions of how two different groups of players deal with a potential threat of otherwise incapacitated humanoids.

1) http://lotfp.blogspot.com/2012/01/what-my-players-taught-me-today-no-rope.html

2) http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/2011/06/they-didnt-kill-ubues.html

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that both groups are equally as dangerous to the PCs and if given the chance will kill them.  Which is the "better" solution?

Now this is not limited to adults or kids as one or the other.  I just played a 4e game with a bunch of 10-11 year olds that wanted "to slaughter everyone" and fight the other characters.  I have played with adults that are the same way.  I have played with both age groups that would rather fine a more rational action.

Here is a question from Tenkar on "Why are PC's so hooked on Torture?"

And we wonder sometimes why we can't get new blood into our games.

Do we as a group encourage this sort of play?  Is it something inherent in the rules or the agreed upon reality?  That is a "violence begat violence" sort of deal?

I did my fair share of immature violence back n the day, but my DM quickly cured me of that.
I had a thief that I felt was a real bad ass.  So while going through the adventure "Death's Ride" he shot a guy in the back with a crossbow.  The NPC was annoying him (aka me) so I shot him.  Throughout the entire run of the classic H-Series modules (Throne of Bloodstone) this NPC, now an undead revenant kept coming back to screw things up for me at the exact wrong moments.  He went from a vague pest to a Deadpool like character that couldn't be killed or turned.  And that included the insane humor.  In the process the already deadly modules turned into a meat grinder with this guy (Kirkroy was his name) letting all the demons know we were coming.

In the adventures above if I were the DM for both.  In #2 (which I was the DM) the characters were rewarded and considered to be heroes and saviors, not mass murdering thugs.  In #1 (where I wasn't), well nothing screws up your day like a bunch of unstoppable undead warriors claiming vengeance on the murder of innocents.  

What do you all think?  Am I being overly sensitive?
Mind you for this argument I am not accepting "it's just a game" as an excuse. Maybe it is just a game.  But I am talking about in-game behavior.  You might as well say "oh that is because we are on Earth".

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Caves of Chaos in HiRes

How awesome is this?

http://www.theweem.com/2012/02/01/caves-of-chaos-reimagined-by-weem/

HiRes, and otherwise just plain cool maps of the Caves of Chaos.

I am planning on printing these out as soon as I can cause you jest never know when you are going to get that itch to go back to the Keep.

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Let the Adventure Begin

If you are like me then it all started here, with an Unexpected Party.




December 2012 feels like a long way away.

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