FYI new blog header

The new graphic at the top of the blog is a still from the 1982 Rankin-Bass special The Flight of Dragons.  I wish I could give you some more stills, but my own copy is pretty low quality.  And the youtube clips of the great intro have embedding turned off.  Go check it out.  The opening song is by Don "American Pie" McLean. 

So instead I'll do a short run down of whatever images I can find via google search.

Carolinus, the Green Wizard, (Harry Morgan) has discovered that the magic is going out of the world as mankind embraces logic and science.

He calls a meeting of the Four Wizards.  Three of them agree to create a Last Realm of Magic, an invisible place for the elves and dragons and such to live.

The fourth wizard, Ommadon (James Earl Jones), is not cool with this plan.  Instead he plans to use his evil magic to corrupt the new world.  The other wizards swear to stop him, but cannot oppose a brother wizard directly.

The oracular Voice of Antiquity selects Peter Dickinson (John Ritter) as the champion needed to defeat Ommadon.  Trained as a scientist but a wannabe fantasy author and game designer, Peter is the only man who can straddle both worlds.

Carolinus travels to the future, where he finds Peter attemtping to secure financing to print and distribute this blockbuster new game about dragons and wizards.  The pieces represent Carolinus and other people back in magical times, showing Peter's strange connection to the times of magic.

Arriving in the past, Peter meets Gorbash, Carolinus's house dragon.  A spell fumble by the wizard results in Peter's mind being placed in Gorbash's body.  Peter eventually figures out the science behind dragons: they produce hydrogen naturally and float like zeppelins.  When they need to descend they burn off the hydrogen and vent it from their mouths.



Joining Peter/Gorbash and his draconic mentor Smrgol is Sir Orrin Neville-Smythe.  Everyone who watches this show would remember Sir Neville-Smythe as the most stereotypical British knight ever, except that everyone really remembers how he falls in love with Carolinus' daughter Melisande when he's a grown man and she's five years old.  Creepy.

Seventeen-year-old Melisande is Peter's love interest.  She is not allowed on the quest and spends a great deal of the adventure sick in bed, having visions.



I like the archer Danielle a lot better.  She's kickass with her bow.  Sir Orrin eventually forgets his obsession with Melisande and falls in love with Danielle, clearing the way for the inevitable Peter/Melisande pairing.  Two other companions added to the quest as they travel to Ommadon's lair are Giles the Elf, who looks just like a Rankin-Bass hobbit and a talking wolf played by Victor Buono.  He was a real show stealer as King Tut in the old Batman TV show.



The entrance to Ommadon's gloomy realm is guarded by this three-eyed ogre that the two dragons have to rassle.

But before wrassling, the dragons get blotto drinking wine by the barrelfull.

The final confrontation between good and evil takes the form of Peter explaining to Ommadon how all his magic is a load of crap.  His scientific knowledge literally shields him from the evil wizard's powers.

Dispelled in a poof of logic, Peter claims Ommadon's crown of power.  (Which incidentally, serves as the inspiration for the Red Crown of the White Queen in my Wessex campaign.)

The Last Realm of Magic is saved.  Peter literally sells the crown at a pawnshop to finance his game and he's reunited with Melisande.  They kiss, roll credits.

All in all, a charming little tale that's lots of fun to watch.  I've skipped several interesting parts that I can't find good stills for.

Carolinus's message that as humanity grows into a world of science and logic they must keep the magic of imagination in their hearts still speaks to me today.  Carl Sagan was saying the same thing at roughly the same time in Cosmos.  If Carl Sagan and a wizard can agree on something, I'm pretty sure it's true.

Dang, is it Wednesday already?

Man, I got crap to do!  Anyway, here's a wizard:

So this one time Finn and Jake go to wizard
school and learn all these kickass powers...

two brief FLAILSNAILS items

• Mike Davison of sword+1 is running a G+ play-by-post tournament.  The players guide PDF is here and the results of the first round are here, but the real action of the event is in the individual threads started by +FlailSnails Jousting Field.  Thirty knights competed in round 1, with 16 in round two (one contest was a tie and both advanced). One brave participant, Sir Polycarp, died from wounds received on the field of battle.  And my guy won 50 gold betting on the results of one contest!
• I think everybody who plays a wandering FLAILSNAILS adventurer should develop a brief stock intro, just two or three lines that give your character's name, what they reveal about themselves and what is obvious about them from their appearance.  "Donnal MacDonnal is a patchbeard youth clad in ancient scale mail and the tattered remains of a fancy cloak.  He's a fighting man of the spear-throwing, sword-swinging variety.  Donnal is accompanied by his henchman, the idiot-wizard Stanislav, and a magic pet lizard that is absolutely no help in combat or any other situation."  Something like that.  A quick readthru of these intros at the start of a session would really help orient people, I think.

Caves of Myrddin updates, part 2

"Hey, let's go hunt some medusas!"

When has that ever been an good idea?  That's what Sir Alexander Manning, Flinny the Elder, Rando the Halfing and the dwarves Farley and Blodgrist settled upon as a perfectly reasonable course of action.  Entering the Dungeons of Dundagel via the Grand Stairway under the big heap of stones in the center of the courtyard, they proceeded to track some serpent trails past several statues (a ghoul, a dwarf, a magic-user and an amazon warrior).

Sure enough, they eventually do battle with a trio of the snakey ladies.  Surprisingly, no one was turned to stone.  Sir Manning softened them up with a grenade that exploded with rainbow sparkles and deadly radiation (found in Urutsk, apparently) and some oil flasks followed thereafter.  Two of the three medusas fled at this point but the third was more angry than scared and bumrushed the party.  Farley grabbed a handy mirror and threw himself upon the gorgonous foewoman, wrestling her to the ground and trying to push the mirror into her view. 

For his trouble her asp-hair bit him in several places on the face and Farley curled up to die.  Fortunately another PC (Flinny I think) sucked the poison out, saving the dwarf but leaving him weakened.  Meanwhile the rest of the party curbstomped the medusa to death and carefully removed the head.   A test on a nearby non-giant rat established that the petrification power remained.

Following the trail of the medusas, they found another one that was finished off by the burning oil and a large hole in the floor with a rope leading down.  A dropped torch fell 100 feet or so and spluttered out in a small puddle of water.  Farley wastes no time in beginning his descent.  At 20' or so from the bottom he reaches the ceiling of the chamber and checks around as best he can with his mirror for that third medusa, but instead he only sees a room full of cheese.  Ancient wheels of red-rind cheese line the walls, ranging in size comparable up to wagon wheels in diameter.  The pungency here is fierce.

The rest of the party descends.  Most of them fall to examining the routes out of the room, while the halfling Rando decides to investigate the biggest pile of cheese wheels, awakening the Cheese Wheel Golem guarding the rest of the cheese.  Imagine the Mad Thinker's Awesome Android, only built out of wheels of stinky cheese.  The fight is epic.  Rando is beaten to within an inch of his life, including a blow that rips an ear from the side of his head (gotta love those Arduin crits) and at one point the ensorcelled cheese smothers him completely.  But he wields the might Hammer of the Gnome Kings and bursts out of its cheesy chest like a baby xenomorph!  The rest of the party are stabbing and hacking away, while Sir Manning wrestles a giant cheese-arm.  Eventually torches and oil are brought to bear, turning the monster in a harmless, melty mess.

All five adventurers return to the surface and get blitzed over at the Blue Rabbit.  Treasure for the run:

one medusa's head
19 asp-venomed arrows
2 shortbows (though I'm not sure anyone claimed these)
a stone rat
3 statues (the amazon and the two naked ladies on the surface were hauled away by cart)
as much cheese as everyone could carry, including the arm that Sir Manning wrestled
several small scars on Farley's face
one ear, halfling

I believe Sir Manning is throwing a cheese-themed party at Wike House, his newly-acquired manner in Lysnowyth, the campaign hex adjacent to the Abbey, the dungeons, Castle Bouttreaux, etc.

Caves of Myrddin updates, part 1

I've run three sessions since my last update.  Last Wednesday the game store group spent the entire session Beyond The Portal To Goblin Land*, so no real info is available.

On Saturday I ran a session at GaryCon for a bunch of players.  My notes are a little rough, but here's what the initial party looked like, I think:

4 dwarves: Balgo, Glavin, Lou and Guthouse Barrelboy.
Two halflings: Jonny Baggadonuts and the One Hit Point Wonder
Two magic-users: Simon and Robin.
Two fighters: Ragnar and Glavin
One elf who rolled so low for starting gold that he couldn't afford armor: Bellow
One cleric: Brother Steve

The One Hit Point Wonder was accompanied into the dungeon by Patsy the Loser.

Welcome to my nightmare.

This party entered the dungeon via the North Tower and had a brief run-in with Alice Cooper, who is a vampire, and his pet snake, who is also a vampire.  They then mucked around on the level with the purple raiders and the magic throne for a bit, until they stumbled upon the Goblin General Store.  Somewhere along the way Guthouse Barrelboy bought the farm.  Was he the one beheaded by the Mad Unicorn, or did the fake door with the poison gas trap kill him?  I can't recall.  Either way he was replaced by a cleric named Brodo.  Another PC died, but I can't quite figure out who it was from my notes.

Speaking of the Mad Unicorn, those bastards killed it.  I'm pretty sure Ragnar ended up with its horn.

The following a map purchased at the Goblin General Store, they attempted the south tower and the Spiral Staircase to Hell.  After finding one of the Hellmouths near the bottom of the vertical map they explored an area previously untrod by adventurers.  There they found a pool containing a stone sarcophagus, from which they released Ra-Por-Hotep, an ancient evil lich from the days when Cornwall was a colony of Ancient Egypt (???).  I thought these guys were totally doomed, but one of them finally remembered he had received a Potion of Undead Control from the Deck O' Stuff.  A few dice rolls later an Ra-Por-Hotep was the slave of the good guys.  He was ordered to surrender all of his substantial treasure hoard to them and then go jump into the Hellmouth.

The party then raced back up the stairs and ladders to the surface, fearful that Ra-Por-Hotep and/or the forces of Hell would soon be after them.  They ran into a little trouble with vampire Sean Connery from Zardoz but somehow managed to get past him and steal his paralysis pistol.

Pleased with their haul from the lich's hoard, they descended upon the Blue Rabbit and boozed it up.  Two of them woke up having joined the Church of Satan while drunk, a third donated to the CoS blood drive and a fourth came to in the bed of one of Ewella the Alewife's daughters.  One of the married ones.

Today's session write-up will come a little later.

*That's the title of Module WX3, third in The Wessex Campaign, an adventure series that doesn't actually exist.

So I guess Starfire comes from planet 8

So this map is for the Vega star system, setting of the Omega Men comics, as it appears in the pre-crossover-of-the-moment DC Universe.  I don't know anything about the Omega Men, but figuring out what this map means in the absence of that information would be an interesting exercise.  I think something like this map would make for a cool science-fantasy/planetary romance D&D setting.

Caves of Myrddin PSA

I've decided to teleport the Mad Unicorn into the Dungeons of Dundagel.  From a comment of mine on an old blog post:

The Mad Unicorn is a wandering monster that has appeared on multiple wandering monster charts of mine. Intruder_W encountered in at the beginning of my only 3rd edition campaign, where it wrecked a party exploring ol' Quasqueton.

The poor creature began life as a normal, well-adjusted unicorn, but ended up cursed to forever wander the underworlds. If it finds a way out of a dungeon it is immediately teleported to a random location inside some other dungeon. Years of wandering an unknown number of hellholes has driven it insane.

This backstory was written for the express purpose of beating up PCs with a unicorn.

No one has been able to slay, capture or save the Mad Unicorn.

Yet.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/