Caves of Myrddin: cannibalism narrowly avoided

I had a large group last night with 6 PCs (two elves, a dwarf, a cleric, a fighter and a thief) and 4 miscellaneous hangers-on (a cook, a halfling, a hopeless loser and some guy with a crossbow).  The party made several ventures into the Wet Cave, cleverly avoiding drowning by paying strict attention to the tides.  I thought I was going to be able to kill them all when they started acting like "clearing the level" was their primary goal.  There's nothing wrong with wanting to kill all the monsters.  But unless you need to secure your flanks or maintain an open path of retreat, there's no real upside to attacking dangerous critters that don't have any treasure.  "Let's kill these guys just because they're there" is damn fool way to die in the dungeon.


Maybe not quite this big.


But the real highlight of the night was the capture of Blue Nellie.  Not everyone playing knows about Blue Nellie, but at least a few of the Friday 4am PCs have encountered this large (4' long or so) blue lobster.  About mid-morning most days it scuttles its way into the wet cave, exiting around sundown.  A few people even managed to figure out that Blue Nellie was intelligent and possibly cursed.  Until last night Celumir the Bald, an elf in the Friday morning PC pool, probably knew more about Blue Nellie than anyone, researching the legend, interviewing local fishermen, etc.  He already knew what last night's bunch didn't figure out until they were well on there way towards planning a big lobster boil at the abbey guesthouse.

Centuries ago the evil wizard Myrddin used the caves that now bear his name to try to sneak an army of monsters into the catacombs below Castle Dundagel, in hopes of catching the forces of good Queen Morgana unawares.  A local sea elf named Cerellia tried to swim up the wet cave to find a way to warn the queen, but she was captured by the bad guys.  To punish her, Myrddin cast polymorph other and geas upon her, dooming her to centuries of attempting to finish her mission while in the form of a giant blue lobster.  What Myrddin knew and Cerellia didn't is that the Wet Cave has no easy connection to the rest of the Dundagel complex.  The PCs found her in the dungeon trying to dig a tunnel through the stone wall with her lobster claws.

After figuring out that Blue Nellie was cursed in some way, it took the Abbot throwing remove curse teaming up with the local Witch, who cast dispel magic.  Here's the true form of Blue Nellie/Cerellia the Sea Elf.

Fiendish bastard that I am, I was really hoping that last night's group didn't figure this out and the lobster stew went ahead as planned.  It would have been fun to describe a bald elf coming into the feast, figuring out what happend, puking his guts out and running away in sheer horror.

D&D sans chargen

Today -C over at Hack & Slash talks about the way building characters discourages newbies, especially in games that lock you into long-term decisions during chargen.  To avoid decision tree gridlock I prefer rolling characters.  Well, that's one of the reasons at least.  Standard D&D chargen in most editions is actually a hybrid of the two concepts, since you randomly generate your six stats, hit points and starting gold but you select race, class, alignment and equipment.  I've had some success streamiling chargen by using random starting equipment charts.  I'd play a random class, race and alignment but I don't think everyone else feels that way.

Ditching initial character generation is not altogether is not impossible, though.  If I recall correctly one of the early print editions of FUDGE contained a variant for chargen during play.  No one has a Strength score until you encounter a door that needs opening, then everyone rolls 3d6 and writes down a number.  Whoever is brave enough to pick up the strange book and use the arcane formulas therein suddenly becomes a magic-user.  The player who puts on the chainmail and grabs the sword is obviously now running a fighter.  That sort of thing.  Everybody would start out as undifferentiated, undefined peasants, in the vein the DCC 0-level rules or the old module N4 Treasure Hunt but even less defined.

(How do you say "-C"?  Is that "Negative C"?  "Minus C"? "Dash C"?)

Wizardly Wednesday #4

Gandalf the Grey as depicted in The Hobbit (Rankin/Bass, 1977)

a quick FTL thought

If I need to get some object or objects from here to Peoria, I have several options available: foot, bicycle, automobile, train, a plane, a helicopter or maybe a horse or even maybe a team of oxen. If the object is just a brief written message I could use a carrier pigeon as well. Obviously, some of these methods are more practical than others and even the practical ones have different advantages and disadvantages. Sending a hundred tons of grain to Peoria via locomotive is probably a lot smarter than putting it on a plane, for example. But if the grain actually needs to end up in one of the small towns just outside of Peoria, the tracks might not go that way, so trucking it might be the next best way to go. Or a combo of trucking and trains. But then if I want to send a package to Paris (not Paris, Illinois, which has a decent pizza place as I recall but lacks many other emenities of the one in France) a whole bunch of those options fall away, but in exchange we can use a sailboat, a self-powered ships or a submarine. Most sci-fi RPGs I've seen posit a single kind of FTL drive that functions as the setting's equivalent of the engines on an ocean-going ship (or in the case of stargate-type systems, FTL-as-train). It might be more interesting to develop several different drives in your sci-fi campaign, each with different advantages and disadvantages. Maybe most ships use the standard Muon Induction Field type drive, but along the hyperspace faultlines N-brane Slipdrives are more efficient for short hops. Meanwhile the Doragian Warpgates allow near-instaneous travel, but they primarily serve the economic interests of the Doragian Prosperity Coalition and non-Doragians have to pay huge fees to use them. Still if Boba Fett is holding a "WANTED: Disintegrated or Alive" poster with your face on it, maybe it's time to pay through the nose.

reminder: magic torches for sale

It's not too late to put in an offer to buy one of two Everburning Torches of Dundagel. Details here.

an amazing story, even if you're not a wrestling fan

let's help out Daniel

Daniel Dean asks "Are there any blogs or resources you're aware of that swing on the whole more towards jet-age-to-cyberpunk than they do sword and shield with optional sorcery?"


Personally, my blogroll covers mostly D&D fantasy with a few excellent post-apocalyptic and space operatic outfits.  Can anybody else recommend some neat places for Dean to check out?