Sunday morning in West Philly

I was hungover on my friend Wendy's couch one Sunday morning and made this.  It's been on my wall.  Her 5-year-old kid Elu was pretty freaked out that some shirtless moustached man was on his couch drawing on a brown bag, but then Wendy was like, 'Elu, you met him, that's Nate," and he got over it.  He'd rolled in my game once and then got too tired to continue, which is a problem many of us adults also endure.  I pointed out the "bunch of skeletons" in room 46 which he thought was cool, and I also got to explain the concept of room 4 which is, "Okay so in this room the floor has all fallen away because it's really old, and there are skeletons with grappling hooks that will try to grab you."  He said, "Cool!"

This is maybe not that legible so I've made a few notes.  Click for bigger, and then open in new tab for really big (still haven't figured out how to make this process easier).

1. Room 16: "breaking the hourglass causes time to stop in the fortress, + releases a time worm that tunnels into the future. Moves to random room every minute." (presumably the players could follow) Arrow helpfully points out that it is "impossible to act on world when time is stopped"

2. Room 26: "A ravenous turnip spirit lives here. If you break the mirror floor . . . reality breaks too"  I think the ellipses indicate the time it took for me to think of the rest of the sentence.

3. Room 33: This is the boss-room, you have to go through the locked door in the bottom of room 4 and bypass the "hex puzzle" in room 28.  Here is the leader of the hyena-men, Vermillion Hexclaw, formerly named "Lust Pus the Cheerless" in Diablo 2 style, until Wendy pointed out that it looked like I'd written "Lust, Pus two cheetahs" which is much better, so now he's guarded by a pair of cheetahs.

4. This is the throne he sits on.  "throne has really long legs like this"

5. "basilisk, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45 damsel, twinks, + a cleric of scorn as prisoners"  This is to indicate that the mazy hallway in the northeastern part of the hyena-man fortress has been left unguarded and unlocked except by a free-roaming basilisk, which the hyena-men consider lock and guard enough.  Notice the six-legged basilisk on the lower-left.

6. Room 44: "twink"

All the monsters

Alistair
Basilisk
Blindheim
Blood hog
Blue leopard
Blue gorilla
Blue scorpion
Carrion crawler
Caryatid column
Cobra
Crawling claw
Crow-skull children
Crystal lizard
Death's head moth
Deodand
Dividing demon
Evil cat
Firewurme
Fractal frog
Fractal ooze
Frog abomination
Gelatinous dodecahedron
Giant house centipede
Golem, birdcage
Golem, glass
Green knight
Gurgler
Hagfish
Harpy
Imp
Komodo dragon
Lion
Little hairy men
Lizardman
Mechanical cricket swarm
Mermalant
Moon beast
Moss hog
Ogre
Purple octopus
Red slime
Salamander
Skeleton archer
Skeleton, bonebride
Skeleton, knight
Skeleton, gigantic
Skeleton, mancatcher
Skeleton, piper
Skeleton, regenerating
Slaad
Sphinx
Spinosaur
Vampire
Vampire monkey
White elf
Witch
Wolf
Wolf-head men
Zombie
Zombie ooze

That's it so far.  I make up my own stats for all these monsters, because I run a 3.5-light game and all the 3.5 edition monsters have health and armor-class that's way too high, and all their powers are copy-pastes of the most boring spells.  

Basilisks don't have six legs.  Salamanders are small and extremely magical and live in fires.  Blindheims are the only correct blindheim, which is to say that they are a toad so ugly that to gaze upon it is to go blind, and they are native to Abazidun the Black Jungle, and must drink the milk of a drunken goat and eat the larvae of the veridian bot-fly in order to maintain their power.  I've mentioned that Thomson's bard has a blindheim in a hooded lantern - he is always on the look-out for goats, since his goats keep getting lost or killed by vampires.  The firewurme is not a dragon or dragon variant . . . but I won't say more to risk spoiling it.

Witches are necessarily Frazetta witches.

I can't account for the plethora of blue monsters and environments - aside from the ones listed, they've also fought a blue priestess of the Angel of Colors who stole Dirtface's color; groped through a thick blue smoke that the wizard Palethorp summoned to defend his tower; and found an underground blue jungle grown by the light of an orb held aloft by a statue of Zuggtmoy, Queen of Putrescence.  Blue gorillas have four arms and speak the language of dreams (several of my players are currently dream-infected with a blue gorilla they slew, and which threatens to burst from their psyches every time they dream).  As in Vornheim, to dream of a blue leopard means to meet one the next day.  Blue scorpions have an electric sting, I think, I lost that paper.  Ostrid the Blue had blue scorpion earrings and she threw them to the ground like firecrackers, and they appeared in a cloud of blue smoke.

Slaad are of the old, patient and extremely bored toad-man variety, and cast weird spells like ennui, duo-dimension, vomit slime, tar body, and stone-like-water.  Skeletons move the way they do in "Jason and the Argonauts," my players understood but I pulled up the video anyway.  Frog abominations are the monsters from Hellboy.  Deodands are grey-skinned naked tall guys who can swallow people whole, and live in the wastelands west of Belmric.  Sphinxes think very highly of themselves, and are revered as gods by the pygmies of Ovgalad.

Mermalants are dogs with beautiful long white hair and the hands of men.  They speak human language, sleep in offal, can exhale a cloud of biting flies, and were inspired by Kate Bush's hit single "The Hounds of Love."  (To my players: this doesn't necessarily mean you'll meet more if you follow the map to the Tower of Love)  The only one they ever met was named Tiny Bell, and he was a guard in a sanitarium in Olomoc, City of Plazas.  He pretended to be their friend after they killed his companions, a mathematician and a psychoanalyst, and then at his first chance fled outside into the snow.  Tiny Bell is probably still on his way home.

Party on!

I'm sick and I have a fever and the game tonight is cancelled while I shiver and drink tea instead.

So here are a few random tables I've been using to populate the world.  Outside the castle is an army of twelve-thousand-one-hundred-sixty-one skeletons (thank you James Raggi for the exact numbers), and inside is a palace of partiers: the royal family, 108 aristocrats and their retinues visiting from nearby cities, as well as servants, cooks, butlers, pages, prostitutes, fish-women, crow-head men, lions, frogs in cages, free-wandering turtles, a flailceratops, tumblers, fire-breathers, acrobats, opera-singers, beat poets, chamber choirs, string sextets, wandering orgies, and so on.  Exploring the palace is difficult because it's huge and everyone's drunk.  Leaving the palace is difficult because the woods are filled with skeletons.

My players have seen most of this stuff so I don't mind posting it.

Random Partygoer 2d10 (for the first list I cross it off and write a new one after I use it)

1. Naked chick or dude
2. They are wearing an ornate mask
3. An ancient woman in tiny clothes
4. Sumptuous beautiful dress or tuxedo
5. Someone uninvited who got in, but no one noticed yet
6. A random aristocrat
7. Smoking a cigarette from a jade holder
8. Elaborate face tattoo of an eagle
9. Striped harlequin’s outfit
10. Unusual hair – long dreadlocks, three feet high, mohawk, etc

1. Totally wasted
2. Trying to sleep with PC
3. Trying to poison another partygoer
4. Sober and straight-edge and hates this party
5. Dancing, really oblivious
6. Pretends to be interested in conversation, but immediately tries to extricate self
7. Friendly, immediately the PCs friend
8. Sleeping
9. Extremely bored, stinks of ennui, alone
10. Bursting with secrets about an important person

Skeleton Warbands

75% chance of 2d6 Archers - 1 HD, ac 8 or 12, shortbow
60% chance of 1d6 Bonebrides - 3 HD, ac 5 or 15, touch attack 2d6 flesh-to-ash, can fly 40'
             These are skeletons with a star-shaped halo, they float through the air as if in water; make a hollow clacking sound; cast 3 shadows – a black shadow, a dim shadow, and a red shadow; disintegrate at the call of the mourning dove; and cannot cross lines of salt.
60% chance of 1d8 knights on dead steeds - 3 HD, ac 2 or 18, greatsword or bastard sword and shield
30% chance of 1 or 2 Gigantic skeletons - 10 HD, ac 6 or 14, has the head of an elephant skull.  2 slams 1d8+Str, and knock back.  Special: the central eye glows red . . . Will save or picked up in the air and held, and then at the beginning of the next round crushed for 1d8 damage and dropped. I run these monsters as if each body part has a separate bank of hitpoints - each leg 2 HD, each arm 2 HD, chest has 3 HD, skull has 3 HD.
50% chance of 1d8 Mancatchers - 1 HD, ac 8 or 12, they wield shepherd's crooks and hooked nets.
50% chance of 1d4 Pipers - 1 HD, no attack, but their piping causes a horrible dance.  On their turn, each skeleton ally may shift 5 feet.  On the player's turn, the player must make a Will save or move as the piper wishes.
75% chance of 2d6 Regenerating skeletons - 1/2 HD, ac 8 or 12; they wield iron spikes with a groove running down the side, they stick into living creatures and let the blood flow over their bones.  They're into it.  Or they can throw their skulls to bite enemies from afar, 1d4 damage.  They regenerate one round after death.

What’s On the Skeleton? 1 in 6 chance for this table, for each skeleton; or maybe 1d4 per warband

1. A heavy 10 feet long rope around its neck
2. Metal teeth – extra bite +4 1d8 damage
3. a beautiful array of blue, purple, and red flowers sprouts from its skull
4. a small harp
5. the skeleton is petrified from age; +2 AC, +2 damage
6. a spell is carved into its skull, which it can cast.  1. shrink person 2. fly 3. gust of wind
7. a random potion
8. a black stone set into its eye-socket which can cause fear once/day; or a red stone, which can cast fireball
9. a beautiful purple cape, or an iron crown, or an ivory breastplate
10. a Siamese cat, or a vampire monkey, or 2d6 crows

Encounters in the Woods 

1. A White Stag
2. A Black Stag, with prayer flags trailing from its horns, and a stag-hunter of Unwerth the Immense not far behind
3. 2d4 wolves
4. A great howl of wind from the north
5. 3 snow leopards
6. A bone-bride;
7. 1d10 regenerating skeletons
8. 1d10 regenerating skeletons
9. a giant skeleton and 1d6 normal skeletons
10. 2d4 wolves, fleeing desperately from 4d10 normal skeletons
11. a herd of deer, fleeing desperately from 4d10 normal skeletons
12. a wizard encased in ice, surrounded by stone jars, inside which are growing a purple vine.  At night a flower blooms, and a nightingale emerges from the blooming flower.
13. a retinue of 2d6 musical skeletons, bearing 1d6 people in wooden cages;
14. a single hopping skeleton with one leg and a jeweled eye
15. a flock of birds and fleeing forest creatures (deer, gaunt rabbits, black squirrels), fleeing from a forest fire! And 2d6 skeletons bearing torches
16. 4 skeletons all chained together, and also an exhausted, unconscious powerful cleric of Otin the Gravelord, who thought he could gain power from them
17. a 5th-level necromancer riding atop the skeleton of a giant, striding over the forest; wears a jeweled amulet around his neck
18. a crowd of 2d6 terrified villagers, carrying children, valuables, pets (like a black iguana)
19. a head doomsayer and a retinue of 2d20 flagellants, like in the Seventh Seal
20. a skeleton on a white horse, blowing a horn of pestilence. Disease spreads to all who hear it! DC 14 Fortitude or contract a disease; a black star appears on the forehead, and the skin begins to draw in, bones show forth, then skin sloughs off… the dead come to life; incubation 1d6 days; then gain properties of undead, and lose 1d4 CON every incubation period.

Death lives!

My players lose to the monsters.

Sad Ed, a 6th-level bard with a nuclear guitar, an electric generator, and a blindheim in a hooded lantern, was killed by a Green Knight in the Tower of Violets.  They opened the door, saw the two knights, said, 'Oh, shit,' and ran, but the knights caught up.  The one with the ball-and-chain made a bouncing attack against everyone within reach, dealt like 20 damage to Sad Ed, and put his brains on the wall.

Neil, 4th-level Paladin of Belm, was killed by the wizard Palethorp.  They opened the door the ritual chamber, got off a few shots at Palethorp, and then he cast circle of death.  "Okay, so, a black pellet flies from his mouth and lands on the floor at your feet.  Smoke rises from it and enters each of your nostrils.  Everyone make a Fortitude save, you need an 18 or higher."  They had a hefty bonus from a scroll of death ward, but Neil failed and suffocated.

Before that they were exploring an underground temple to Tsathoggua, God of Frogs.  They poked around, slew some alchemists and their giant lobster, charmed the fractal frog, rescued a couple captives, freed a couple fat devils, and when they learned that not only was the actual living god down there, but also their vampire nemesis, said, "Nope," and left.  I count that as losing.

And they were in the underground temple in the first place because they were attacked by a group of regenerating skeletons and their moss hog, and couldn't find a way to deal with the skeletons, so fled through the snow-y woods, had the druid ask a flock of crows where to hide, and the crows led them to the hidden stairs into the temple.

They even had a TPK at the hands of the witches Frost and Thorn.  Frost was pregnant then and their captive and they were trekking across a swamp to reach the desert valley where roams the Sacred Agony-Beast of Izorides, upon whose lofty back is built the witches' ancient cathedral and home, and within whose heart is kept the Three-Tongued Knife of Queen Marybelle, which was used to slay the Demon Lord Urizen at the beginning of time, the body of which still blights the landscape in the wastes north of Havith Orr, city of goblins.  But Thorn, the dead Black Knight Cretched, and a pack of wolves caught up and ripped them to shreds.  I was like, 'shit, now what?'  So the witches chopped off a finger each (they mutilated their captive the same way) and threw them in a well before a decrepit Fish God.  They survived and found their revenge.

Before that they were mostly unstoppable, slaying gangs of bare-chested men, snow-leopard men, vampire monkeys, vampires, white elf bands on limb-gathering excursions, and even a damn manticore back when they were level two or three.  So I stopped caring about balance as much and started paying more attention to aesthetics, and I started randomly generating skeleton warbands to roam the woods, and I had Ningauble of the Eyeless Face (yes, the very one, yes I did screw up his name) warn them about the twelfth-level wizard's hefty powers, and I let powerful monsters and demons be totally immune to un-magical weapons, and I'm not sure they even have any of those.

'Your great-sword bounces off the skull as if it struck stone.'  'Okay I cast a spell to pick it up, let's throw it out the window.'  Roll, roll.  'The skull falls three hundred feet and lands intact. Dirtface, your body is still possessed by the dead wizard's mind. What do you do?'

The only one of these I felt bad about was Neil's death.  His player, Kathryn, hadn't played for a while, maybe three months, and couldn't find her character sheet, so before that session I helped her make a character and kit him out.  In the few moments of Neil's life, he was impulsive, cruel, and grabby.  I think he might have triggered a trap on purpose just to see what it did.  This was very different from Kathryn's previous character, a druid named Shiloh, who was kind enough to her owl animal companion to have a sweater knitted for him when they were in a city.

Nick is a little bit more nervous now.  When he saw the dinosaur, he asked, "Does it have wings?"  Thomson checks doors for traps and peeks through keyholes.  They create diversions, charm ogres and laser-shooting warrior-monks, and are happy to parley with groups of enemies whose powers they aren't sure about.  But they also know that their druid can summon a hippogriff and cast flame strike and ice storm, and that the barbarian has nearly a hundred hit-points, and that they are powerful and terrifying at full strength.  These days, they're usually not.  Life is good.

Everything's complicated, slay everything

Life is hard for me and my players right now because it's difficult to say who's the bad guy, or why, or what needs slaying, and why, and as a result they've become more sociopathic than ever before.

The very first enemy at level one, 0 xp, two years ago - they find a cabin in a haunted forest.  Knock knock, no one inside.  Break in, lock the door behind them, loot the cabinets, what do you mean no gold? Open the trapdoor, go into the cellar, see the children's heads on the walls.  I say, 'You hear a knock at the door . . .'  Long story short, they're too queasy to actually kill the insane lumberjack, so instead they tie him up, lock him in the cellar, and leave.

So now they're in a castle under siege by a skeleton army, which is led by a burning king on an iron chair, and it's protected by giant skeletons and death knights and skeletons that put themselves back together again when they die and flying skeletons with three shadows whose touch turns flesh to ash but die before the call of a mourning dove, but the skeletons right now aren't attacking the castle.  This is partly because things are too complicated inside the castle, and partly because the castle is protected by statues that shoot bone-busting lasers.  But supplies are running short and the castle guard has lost a lot of members.  So the skeleton army is erecting their own fortress out of the bones of their dead, and building something horrible inside.

(Every time I mentioned this, Cher our now ex-fighter who's moved away would whisper, 'What the hell is he building in there . . .?')

They would like to destroy the skeleton army but aren't sure how.  They waffle between wanting to save the world, and saying, 'This is like the third apocalypse happening right this instant, these people are hopeless, let's get out of here.'

But inside the castle everything's more complicated.  The lord of the castle has been taken captive by his mistress and sealed inside the palace chapel, the castle wizard locked himself in his tower and started casting a spell to gain control of the skeleton army and lay siege to Belmric to the west, and maybe worst of all has been the locked and abandoned tower residence of the lord's dead wife, the Queen of Violets, now occupied by a mysterious green king, who holds some sway over all the palace residents, none of whom want acknowledge his presence.

So the sessions since returning to the castle have been like this - invade the wizard's tower and slay the wizard.  What now?  Ok, explore the abandoned Tower of Violets. Whoa this place is huge and filled with difficult monsters and opposing factions, what the hell?  There were a good couple sessions where Thomson's bard was first killed by a monstrous knight in enameled green armor, and the players gave away almost all their gold to the castle bishop to bring him back to life, and then almost immediately after Thomson came back he made a bad roll on the use magic item mishaps chart (adapted from the totally insane rules for the maleficar at Last Gasp) and accidentally swapped bodies with the Damnation Prophet, whose body is composed of snakes.

'Okay, so, Sad Ed, your mind is yanked through the air and you suddenly see that you're looking at your own body, and your body is clutching its head and wailing, and now he's pulling out your sword. . . . This is permanent by the way.'

It bothers me that Sad Ed doesn't have his own body anymore, but on the other hand he got to torture his old body by putting a snake down his throat, so it's alright.  Where was I?  Uh

So there's been a lot of this back and forth, slowly exploring, tip-toeing around the castle, very conspicuously not trying to rescue Lord Unwerth, and meanwhile I'm sitting on the couch pulling out my hair trying to find a way to make sense out of the insanity that's this castle's back story.  When they're in the tower, they spend a lot of time interrogating the hapless minions, playing poker with them for information, charming them, and so on.  I'll say things like, 'So the man in the striped pants tells you that the King in Greens come from the Merelunds, a place of madness and fog north of the Swamp of Monsters far to the west, and that he's more powerful than you can possibly imagine,' and then they'll get angry that they didn't learn anything useful, and start a fight.

Finally, finally, when everyone is absent but our barbarian Dirtface (played by Nick), the wizard Mop (his sister Maddy), and quiet Shayne who plays the power-house 7th-level druid Ignacio (as well as his lady-wolf Deb), they decide to peek into the sealed chapel and I get to narrate the scene I've been waiting for -

'Okay, so, Dirtface, you're standing at the window and looking into the castle.  Inside you can see that the chapel is really huge, and made all of black stone, and there are dozens of swords hanging from chains on the ceiling with bodies impaled on them, and strapped to the central altar is Unwerth the Immense, completely naked, and standing over him is the Lady Adelaide, except her red hair is unbound now and her features are harsh and arrogant and she's naked from the waist up, and she holds a greataxe in one hand and a long white wand in the other . . .'

'Does she look like a witch?'

They chase down the mockingbird that the chapel's ability to open was transformed into, get a couple other friends onto skype, recruit some new guys from down the street, and barge on in to confront the witch, her dinosaur, the spirits of her two dead sisters, and the mind-controlled bodyguard of Unwerth.  She spills the beans - 'For behold! My name is not Adelaide, but Dread! Priestess of Izorides, Goddess of all witches!' and that she means to incarnate a demon into the body of Unwerth, and rule the forest from an impregnable fortress of terror, and that all flesh within the castle will be chattel to Namtar the Incomprehensible, Demon of Centipedes.

Here Shayne pipes in.  "I'd like to invoke my fortune!" which is: "A tear will be shed for you in unexpected quarters" and tells Dread the long tale of how Unwerth started two wars that led to the deaths of his parents.  Dread does shed a single black tear, and relents, and tells them that maybe they could see eye to eye (even though they totally beheaded her sisters), and that all she needs is a magical ritual dagger specially sanctified in the black fluid that drips from the slab where the demon is imprisoned far beneath the Tower of Violets, and that she sent a member of the city guard into the fundaments of the castle to sanctify the dagger, but that he has not returned.

To that my players say, 'Oh, well, if you incarnate the demon, will you destroy the skeleton army?'

Well, no, but hopefully they'll just move on -

'Okay, well, can we have some of the flesh and leave the rest for you? Because these people are all assholes but we could use a few henchmen'

I mean, maybe, but you get the sense that Dread and Namtar sort of want it all -

'Whatever, let's go find that ritual dagger and bring it back.  To the tower!'

I love my players so much.  This game is great.

Hi

Hi, I'm Nate.  I live in Philadelphia and I play Dungeons and Dragons with some people who live here, and a couple people who live in Brooklyn and Queens.  We skype them in.  I've been playing most of my life and the campaign I've been running for a couple years is pretty heavy on Zak's Vornheim (thanks for the inspiration), and I guess it's time to start giving back . . . I haven't kept a blog since high school, and I'm way past high school, so this is weird.  But I dig it.