For sale: Everburning Torches of Dundagel

Last night the party acquired four Everburning Torches of Dundagel from the vampire lair.  They are keeping two and offering the other two for sale to other PCs visiting the Caves of Myrddin area.  Here are the known properties of the Everburning Torches:

• Under normal dungeon circumstances they burn continuously with the normal light, heat and flammability of ordinary torches.
• When placed in water the flame goes out, but it automatically relights when withdrawn.
• The flame only burns in proper dungeons.  E.g. The Torches do not work in the non-haunted basement crypt of the abbey.  Actual dungeons have some metaphysical property that differentiates them from other holes in the ground.  Upon reaching the exit of the dungeon the flame goes out, automatically relighting when you next visit a dungeon.

The two Everburning Torches retained by the party have been modified by the assistance of the blacksmith in Camelton, a nearby village.  The flaming end of the torch has been encaged by a heavy iron network.  This allows the torches to function as described above and also as flame tongue maces.  At least until this makeshift modification is broken from heavy use.  Whoever buys one of the Torches can spend 150gp to have theirs so-modified.

Here's how the sale works: Offers will be taken here, on G+ and via gmail (jrients@yaddayadda) from now until the next tabletop session, Wednesday October 19th.  Acceptable items offered include gold, gems, jewels, magic items, MU spells or anything else that might be of value to inhabitants of the Wessex setting.  At the session on the 19th I will present all offers to the owners and I will get back to whoever they choose to sell to.

Caves of Myrddin update

So last night the gang at the Armored Gopher took another shot at the dungeons below the ruins of Castle Dundagel and then later followed up with an excursion into the infamous Wet Cave.  Your primary informant for the Dundagel adventue is Gammo the Fighter, who caroused after they returned.  That night Gammo somehow wound up at the top of the belltower of the abbey church, drunk and stark naked.  While explaining to the crowd below that he was the World's Greatest Vampire Slayer he slipped and fell to what clearly should have been his death.  On the way down he cried "St. Emmet save meeeeeeeeeee!" and whaddyano, he miraculously survived the 30' fall without a scratch on his body.  So now he owes St. Emmet a solid.

But before this incident, Gammo managed to blab quite a bit about trip below Castle Dundagel:

• The party travelled down the spiral staircase from the south tower, which they had previously learned runs way deeper than they really want to go.  They instead took one of the side doors off the staircase, about 100 feet below the surface.
• They located some sort of big strange machine in a large cavern, but it appeared to be rusted and useless.
• A nearby chamber contained a mysterious magical square engraven on the floor.
• Except for a few rats that scattered, the only fight for the expedition was against a pair of vampires.
• The lair of the vampires was at the bottom of a pit trap.  Jessup the Bold fell in the trap and died, then one of the vampires dragged his body away to feast on his still-warm blood.  The party then went down into the pit they know contains vampires (I love these guys) and somehow overcame these fangy foes.
• Treasure scored by the party from the vampires included some gems, a magic sword now in the possession of Fynn the Thief, and some Everburning Torches (more on those last items in my next post).

A few days later, the party adds a couple of NPCs to its ranks, a halfling named Frito Lay (there was a chip bag handy when the character was being rolled up) and a Dutch cook/brewer called Jan.  They then visit the Wet Cave.  By questioning Frito and Jan you can discover the following facts:

• Some sort of creepy aqua-undead lurk in the Wet Caves, like a corpsy version of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
• Some passages slope up and don't completely flood when the tide comes in.
• A magical green fog blocking one passage is poisonous.
• Lankii the Elf found some sort of wizard ring, but it had a magical trap on it that blinded most of the party for a couple hours, causing the expedition to be cut short as the one PC who saved had to guide the rest of the party out with a rope.  Too bad I didn't roll any wandering monsters at that point.

Finally, near the end of the play session Fynn and Nick's MU (whose name escapes me at the moment) decide they want to try one last quick run.  I don't think I've mentioned it on the Gameblog before, but with this spacious new dungeon I'm giving out bonus XP if you are the first PCs to visit a new section of the dungeon.  These 2nd or 3rd level PCs know where the entrance to level 8 is on the map.  They also know that they will score 800xp if they can just enter the level for a moment then run like hell. 

The rest of the party wants nothing to do with this plan, so it's just Nick's MU, Fynn and Fynn's cook as the lantern bearer.  They make it a couple hundred feet down that same big spiral staircase when they hear something growly and big further down the stairs.  Jan the Cook hands the lantern to his boss and heads back up the stairs.  Fynn lays down some oil and lights it to cover their retreat, then follows Jan.  Nick decides he wants to see whether or not the monster presumably heading up the stairs is stopped by the burning oil obstacle.

There's a roar and a blast of fire shoots up the staircase, nearly engulfing Fynn.  Nick's MU never makes it out.  The dragon has claimed its first PC.

A with X, B with Y

Sometimes I really dig on an RPG setting but don't want necessarily want to run it using the attached system.  Here are a couple of examples. 

I love the original BattleTech material but the attached MechWarrior RPG doesn't do much for me.  Sometimes I think about adopting a bunch of material into Mekton Zeta, using the Japanese B-tech artwork and running a game about the brave large-eyed heroes of House Kurita fighting evil across the Inner Sphere.  One of the background themes of the campaign would be the way American and Japanese culture appropriate each other.  The foreground of the campaign would be about giant robots exploding.

Andy Hopp's Low Life is one of the few gamebooks out there perfectly blends good writing and great art.  Also, it is one of the stupidest settings you'll ever find.  It's a Savage Worlds book.  There's nothing wrong with Savage Worlds that punching Smilin' Jack in the face won't fix.  In fact I once used some old Gangbusters material to run a pretty dang fun Savage Worlds-powered gangster game.  But I don't want to teach it to my current crop of players and I'd just as soon use Mutant Future for most post-apocalyptic shenanigans.

S. John Ross's nifty Uresia: Grave of Heaven was originally written for Big Eyes, Small Mouth and later adapted to BESM d20.  However, if I were to ever run D&D 3.x again I would seriously consider Uresia for my setting.  Here's how it would work: The campaign would start in Rinden, the land of fairy tale style knights and princesses and dragons.  As far as the players are concerned, it would be "the Rinden campaign" at first and all they know about the world beyond the borders is those places are weird.  Initial PC choice would be limited to a handful of classes and races, fewer even than in the 3.x Players Handbooks.  Then we'd slowly introduce new classes and races that align with the other regions of Uresia, until you can send the party out into the world with some rough idea of what some of the other places on the big map are like.

Incidentally, S. John has been working on a systemless 3rd edition to Uresia for a while now.  In the meantime there are some goodies for the setting over at his Cumberland Games & Diversions website.

I've long been surprised that I've never encountered anyone who ever ran ICE's Space Master in the 3rd Imperium setting of Traveller.  Seems like a perfect combo to get a rich setting and lotsa wicked critical hits.  Maybe I'm the only person who wants both in a game.

Anyone else have any settings they'd prefer to yank from one game and import into another?

Wizardly Wednesday #2

Some call me... Tim.

The plague: fun for the whole family

Today we screened this short film in one of my classes as part of a look at Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. I thought maybe fans of later-period historical fantasy might dig on it. Certainly as I was reading Defoe's book I thought it would make great fodder for Warhammer Fantasy or Lamentations of the Flame Princess type games. The lumpy looking dude standing guard outside the infected tavern is a government-appointed goon charged with making sure no one in a quarantined building escapes.

a Star Wars groove

an interesting item from EPT

I was rereading Empire of the Petal Throne this afternoon when found this interesting entry in the magic-user spell section:

16. Research: A player may elect to perform the research necessary to develop a new spell. The inclusion of this in the game is at the referee's option, and all of its features must be clearly specified. The referee will determine the length of time needed to develop the spell and perhaps a percentile dice roll required to achieve success; these factors will depend upon the power and difficulty of the proposed spell. No such research can be done, however, unless this bonus spell is chosen from the Group III list.

What we have here is the EPT spell research rules embedded directly in the spell list.  All the bonus spells (as opposed to magics all MUs of a certain level or higher can cast) are rated group I to group III, so I tend to think of each group as roughly equivalent to two D&D spell levels.  Only it's more complicated than that.  Because acquiring bonus spells involves throwing dice, you can acquire a group III spell as early as your PC's 4th level or possibly never (though your chance at 11th level is 80%).  Also, the group III spells don't exactly map to 5th and 6th level spells.  Wish, for example, is on the group III list.

Anyway, I'm really digging on this implementation of spell research.  It largely preserves the Vancian concept of spells as post-apocalyptic remnants.  Most magic-users work within the framework of the small list of known magics, presumably left over remnants from the Age When Everything Was Super Awesome.

But Research leaves a back door open for new magic-as-progressive-science type spells to sneak back into the setting. Note that under this system spell research only enters play via magic-users who are both particularly successful and particularly obsessed, since to use this option you have to reach a decent level and be crazy enough to pass on Wish or The Demon spell or The Silver Halo of Soul Stealing or any of a number of other totally kickass spells.

It would be a snap to incorporate a similar mechanic into D&D.  And if you wanted to keep spell research away from the grubby paws of the elves, all you have to do is make Research a sixth level spell.

One last observation: researching new spells under EPT doesn't cost any money.