Sunshine in a Bag, part 2

So thanks for all the great feedback (both here and on Google Plus) to my idea about drawing beads from a bag to power spells.  I'd like to pitch an alternate angle on the whole thing, where there's one bag of beads at the table that all spellcasters can access.  The normal spellcasting rules in your favorite edition still apply.  The beads represent drawing on additional magical power past the safe limits.  It's effectively giving in to the dark side of the Force, cutting corners for more raw power.

Conceptually, this idea springs from the dungeon as not just a series of monster-infested tunnels, but a metaphysical entity, a locus of maximum chaos and magic.  The reason so many evil wizards end up haunting dungeons is because that's where they are more powerful.  The players can draw on that same reservoir of chaotic energy, but it has its risks.

So start your bag of beads with 3d6 good beads, 1d6 blanks, and 1-3 bad beads.  Bad beads are seeded this way, roll d6 each session:

1-3 add one yellow bead
4-5 add one yellow and one orange bead
6 add one yellow, one orange bead and one red bead

I'll get to the three color of bad beads in a bit.  The basic deal is that a good bead is one spell level.  If you get one or more blanks you have to choose immediately: the spell is delayed at least one round or you can cancel the spell right now.  However, if you've already fumbled (drawn the yellow, orange or red bead), that still takes effect.  If you go ahead, what you have to do is draw replacement beads on your go the next round, unless the whole spell is cancelled because you take damage in between.  If you get blanks again, you are in the same boat as on the first round.

Now here's where it gets interesting.  You've got some spells memorized, right?  Draw from the bag and you don't forget the spell.  Or you can pay a premium to cast something else:

Spell memorized, but you already burned it today: Spell level +1 bead
You know the spell and can cast it, but didn't memorize it today: Spell level +2 beads
The spell is appropriate to your class and level, but not in your spellbook: Spell level +3 beads
The spell is appropriate to your class, but you are not high enough level to use it: Spell level +4 beads
The spell is not for your class: Spell level +5 beads.

That's right, under this system any caster can attempt to cast any spell in the rulebook.  The real question is whether or not they are willing to chance a disaster.  Disasters come in three flavors, mild (yellow), medium (orange), and extra spicy (red).  And since a mishap represents the strange essences of the dungeon biting you back, sometimes they change the environment.

Sample Yellow Mishaps

1. The spell gets away from the caster.  No effect and caster cannot use that same spell for 1d6 days.
2. Smoke comes out of the caster's ears.  Take d6 damage, save versus magic negates, and -2 on all die rolls until you get a good night's rest in a proper bed.  No save on the die penalty.
3. Spell goes off as planned but caster gains some minor mutation of the DM's choice that signals their taint.  Eg. red glowy eyes, a forked tongue, scaly skin, that sort of thing.
4. The dungeon fights back with more darkness.  As long as the party remains on this level non-magical light sources wink out at the most inconvenient times, never lasting more than 50% of the expected duration.
5. Dungeon denizens become more attuned to your presence in some unconscious way.  Double wandering monster chances as long as the party remains on this level and the caster remains alive.
6. All spikes pounded in by the party, ropes left behind, marks left for navigation, etc., disappear, swallowed up by the dungeon itself.

Sample Orange Mishaps

1. The spell gets away from the caster.  Randomly determine target among all present and caster cannot use that same spell for 1d6 weeks.
2. Electric energies coruscate up and down the caster's body.  Take 2d6 damage, save for half, and any activity but walking at half pace is impossible until you get a week's proper rest.  
3. Spell goes off as planned but caster falls to the ground in agony for d6 rounds.  When they recover, the caster has gained a random mutation.  (No.  I'm not going to give you a mutation chart.  If you're a DM you should already have one or at least know how to google that kind of shit.)
4. The walls on the dungeon start dripping blood.  Climbing walls and getting purchase with a thrown grappling hook become impossible.  Fumble chances are doubled.  The monsters are unaffected.  
5. 1d6 extraplanar entities appropriate to the level (level 1 = manes, level 2 = lemures, etc.) appear in a random room or chamber within 40' to 240' of the party's current location.
6. 1d6 dungeon features (doors, stairways, statutes, whole rooms) on this level or other levels visited by the party this session permanently shift to somewhere else on the same level. 

Sample Red Mishaps

1. The spell gets away from the caster completely and materializes as a hostile Spell Elemental.  Use Fire Elemental stats (randomly determine size) and it can use its own spell effect to its advantage (e.g. a Magic Missile Elemental would be shooting missiles like a champ).  Also, caster cannot use that spell ever again.
2. Unknown energies burst out of every orifice of the casters body.  Take 3d6 damage and everyone within 30' also takes 3d6, but they can save for half.  Caster and everyone who fails to save is comatose for 1d6 weeks.
3. Spell goes off as planned but caster falls to the ground in agony for d6 rounds.  When they recover, the caster has gained a random mutation.  Roll twice on whatever table you use and give the caster the more inconvenient, weirder, and/or crappier of the two.
4. Cracks open in the walls.  Giant clawed hands reach out and grab 1d4 random party members, dragging them into the body of the dungeon itself.  The caster and any NPCs get no save against this effect, but other PCs may save versus paralyzation to avoid.  The cracks close up and the lost party members reappear d6 weeks later, horribly changed.  They are now monsters and implacably hostile to their old comrades.  They will positively chase down the caster if they are not among the altered.
5. Any being in the dungeon capable of scrying or other extradimensional insight immediately latches onto the party and will be able to monitor their activity any time any of them they are in the dungeon.
6. The whole level dissolves into nothingness.  All present on the level save versus spells.  Failure indicates disintegration.  Success indicates you are dumped in a random location above or below the level.  Over the next d6 days the dungeon heals itself by forming new connections to reroute around the now non-existent level.

One final note: as you descend deeper into the underworld, more chaos energy becomes available to spellcasters.  Add 1d6 additional good beads and one more blank every time the party goes down a level.  Also replace the yellow or orange bead if it has already been drawn.  One red bead showing up in a session is quite enough, I think.

So here's my question:  You are a magic-user deep in the dungeon and nearly out of spells.  The present encounter is going badly.  The bag appears to have about a dozen beads in it.  That could be 11 good beads, one blank, and no bad beads.  Or it could be three good beads, six blanks, and all three bad beads.  How desperate do you need to be to find out?

My Free RPG Day adventure

So this morning I ventured out of my lair to Red Raccoon Games of Bloomington, IL, my friendly local games store.  (RIP Armored Gopher Games of Urbana, IL)  Red Raccoon doesn't offer a large variety of products in an old school vein, so I don't spend a lot of time or money over there.  But I dropped by today to attempt to score a copy of Vaginas Are Magic!, this year's Free RPG Day offering from that rascal James Raggi of Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

There's some sort of festival going on downtown and some streets are closed to motor traffic, so I end up parking a couple three blocks away and walking to the store.  Here's what I see as I approach:

I think it's great that they've put out a special sign for the event.

Though maybe specifying the year was unnecessary.

I arrived 15 minutes before the open time as posted on the internets, assuming I was going to be standing outside the joint like a dork for a while.  But I was willing to do that to score my copy of VAM!  Apparently, they opened early today because when I get there the place is hopping.  People are setting up a half-dozen demo games of various sorts (I saw 5e and Savage Worlds for sure) and the large basement play area has been take over by the Pathfinder Society.  After searching the store I finally find a spinner rack with the Free RPG Day stuff on display.

Sorry the image is so blurry but the store was so crowded I couldn't snap a pic without someone bumping into me.  Anyway, I see something that looks like the RuneQuest and DCC RPG offerings of recent years and a maybe new sci-fi thing from Paizo called Starfinder.  At the top is a little sign that looks like the VAM! cover art telling me to ask for it at the counter.  So I go over there.

I don't really know the owner.  My sister Jenn tells me he's a good guy.  (She spends way more time at the store because her thing is collecting and playing eurotrash games and such.)  But he's already having a bit of a day.  People are getting a little rowdy, his point-of-sale stuff is not behaving, and his employees unpacked and placed a bunch of new 40K releases on the shelf without putting them into the inventory system.  In my experience game store employees tend to be nice people but they also tend to be game nerds first, dependable workers second.

So I eventually get to the head of the queue at check-out and ask for the new Lamentations offering.  He looks around confused and finds a single copy with a post-it note on it, declaring that copy to be reserved for Tim So-and-so.  I didn't know reserving copies for Free RPG Day was a thing, or I would have called ahead.  The owner guy says he knows he received five copies of VAM! and calls over one of his henchmen.  Dude says he put one on "the table."

I don't know what table he means, so I end up wandering around the store trying to find it as the owner continues his interrogation of the employee.  He ends up admitting that he scarfed up one of the copies for his own personal use (not exactly the point of Free RPG Day promotions, I think) and that he took another copy for a prize for one of the demo games.  That second part catches me off guard a bit, as this is a family friendly place with lots of kids.  Why give a book away as a prize which you deem too unseemly to put on public display?  That just makes no sense.

(This is, of course, setting aside the whole problem that apparently the word "vagina" is dangerous, but vast product lines devoted to murdering people for experience points are harmless family fun.  But that's a bigger argument for another day.)

Anyway, the employee eventually retrieves the copy he was going to use as a prize and hands it to me.  He mentions that I am the first customer to ask for it.  That leaves the location of two other copies an unsolved mystery for the ages.

So I get back in the check-out line and end up behind a guy who is buying one of every new thing for 40K.  You know, the stuff not in the inventory system.  Honestly, that took time to resolve but a lot less long than I thought it would.  Since VAM! is free, I only went through check-out because I bought a copy of World Wide Wrestling: The Roleplaying Game, partially because I'm a mark and partially because I'm not going to get a freebie and not buy some merch.

James asked everyone getting VAM! to take a selfie with it.  I've never really done a selfie with a phone before, so I go back to my car and spend a few minutes trying to figure out how to do so.

Vaults of Vyzor, session #4

Today's party consisted of Belisarius Grouse (fighter played by August Aronsson), Limpy the Naileteer (kobold eunuch played by Jeff Call), Engsal the Enchanter (precocious magic-user played by Alex Joneth) and Engsal's 0-level henchweenie Kilitch.  At least that was the party composition at the start of the adventure.  Engsal was rolled up under some strange house rules elsewhere and is only 10 years old, so I joke that we're adding "endangering a minor" to the list of crimes committed by PCs in the campaign.  Prophetic.

Let me tell you my all-time favorite D&D mechanic: the open doors roll.  Player characters can melee gods and demons, bend reality with magic, and save whole universes from utter doom.  But apparently these same people can't always open a really stuck jar of pickles.  As a DM, few things amuse me more than a band of badass mofos who can't reach part of a dungeon because everyone blew their open doors roll.  The only thing funnier is something like this:  The fighter can't open the door.  The henchman can't open the door.  The kobold can't open the door.  But the 10-year-old Harry Potter wannabe gets it open.  Of course, by that time the monster on the other side is waiting eagerly and murders the wee lad on the spot.  Did I mention this was the very first door to enter the dungeon?

RIP Engsal

The monster in question was a Gelatinous Cube, which the orcs had lured into room #1 with a trail of food and then shut the door behind it.  Fortunately, the rest of the party slew the monster.  Kilitch the 0-level spearman was promoted to a full 1st level fighting man and Alex played him for the rest of the session.  It wouldn't be the only roster change in the party today.

The party then proceeded to the orcish armory.  Limpy the Kobold lured the guards away by pretended he still worked as a guard in the orcish brothel and advertising a two-for-one sale.  The three guards rushed out the door and down the corridor, leaving the armory to be pillaged for spare equipment for the third time.  

A listen at the south door out of the armory revealed too many orcish voices for everyone's taste, so they proceeded to the now-abandoned Temple of Orcagorgon and regions beyond.  They find the orc rec room unoccupied save for a lone goblish janitor mopping the floor.  They get him drunk and take advantage of him steal his mop and bucket.  Limpy puts on the janitors apron, intending to pose as a staff member while scouting out nearby rooms ahead of the party.  Unfortunately, the next chamber they explore is the temporary hidey-hole of a lost dwarf adventurer named Dundermachen.  All he sees is a kobold approaching, so he throws his warhammer and hits him in the face to the tune of 8 points of damage.  Limpy is no more.  I'd like to think that whatever koboldish afterlife he went to, Limpy was reunited with the ghost of his lost genitals.

awesome Limpy illo by Jeff Call.

The rest of the party shows up and the whole misunderstanding is sorted out, not that it does Limpy a whole lot of good.  So here's the thing.  The dungeon key says Dundermachen has 6 levels and a magic hammer.  But we are down a PC deep in the level, so I demote him to first level and up his strength to 16 so that he could still do 8 points with a d6 warhammer (I know the BX rules say d4, but that sucks).  This allows Jeff to continue play by assuming the role of Dundermachen.  In other words, this dwarf kills Jeff's PC and Jeff responds by almost immediately switching to playing his own murderer.  That sort of nonsense makes my whole day.

The party eventually finds a back way into the heart of the orc-occupied section of the dungeon, via a secret door to their larder.  They end up murdering two burly orc-wives working in the kitchen, then carefully rearranging the scene to make it look like they killed each other.  But they avoid the banquet hall, which seems to be occupied by 3 dozen or so orc warriors.  They double back a bit and discover a secret door, behind which they find stairs going down.  That's the first party to make it to level two.

I thought I was going to get them all with an ambushing carrion crawler lurking above a doorway, but Dundermachen's first attack roll was a 20.  The Arduin crit result was a blow to head that stunned the monster for the time necessary to turn it into green bug-goo.  The noise they make is sufficient to draw the attention of some nearby guards, but the party ducks behind a secret door.  They don't know what sort of being the guards were, but there was at least six of them and they spoke Common in gruff, shouty voices.

That's enough of the second level for the party and they return to the orcish rec room, where the goblin is still out cold from drinking too much orc grog.  It was at this time that my only wandering monster roll comes up, indicating a REDACTED from the REDACTED was on the other side of the north door.  I thought I was going to see a party member get his REDACTED torn right off, but they never open that door.  Maybe next time.

Instead, they decide to steal the orc's pinball machine.  Did I mention there was a pinball machine in the rec room?  Anyway, they have a pretty straight shot out of the dungeon but this thing is heavy, so it's all a matter of movement rate versus wandering monster rolls.  Sadly, the dice go the PCs way and no monsters show up to object to this blatant act of arcade-based larceny.  They make it back to the surface.

So now my problem is that I have no idea what a pinball machine is worth.  IMPORTANT DM TIP: Always know how much a pinball machine is worth if you put a pinball machine in your dungeon!  I think that's a direct quote from the DMG.  (The sad thing is, this is at least the second time I've put a pinball machine in a dungeon and I still didn't have my act together on this point.)  I decide that the only logical course of action is to look up the asking price of the first full size pinball machine I could find on ebay and multiply it by a d% roll to account for orcish wear-and-tear.  The first pinball machine I find is going for $5,750.  August roll 70%.  The Sorcerer of the Blue Mask himself buys the pinball machine off the PCs for 4,000gp.  That's the first big money score of the campaign, proceeds from the sale of a pinball machine.  Man, I love D&D.

All three surviving PCs then go carousing and two of them fail their saves.  Dundermachen loses a bunch of gold gambling and Belisarius finds himself deeply, earnestly in love with someone else's wife.  Guess I'll have to work up some NPCs around the castle so we can roll dice to find out who that is.

ONGOING ROLL OF THE DEAD

Limpy the Naileteer (Jeff Call)
Engsal the Enchanter (Alex Joneth)
Elfbraham Lincoln (Jeff Call)
Littlens (0-level NPC)
Biggens (0-level NPC)
Stimpy (0-level NPC)
Ren (0-level NPC)

Sunshine in a Bag

Okay, so this is an idea for a spell point system that has a little suspense built into it.  It won't work in online play, though, so I doubt I'll give it a try anytime soon.  Consider this just an idea I'm running up the flagpole.

Here's the basic idea.  You need a crapton of glass beads or tokens of some sort in a two or three colors.  Pick one color as your base.  That will be the "color of magic."  We'll say magic is purple.  Purple is a great color.  Then you have a color that indicates something bad (Like orange.  Orange is a sucky color.) and maybe a color that indicates something good (green maybe).  Each spellcaster using this system needs a small bag like an extra dice bag, to keep their beads in.

At the beginning of the session the DM takes the beads and bags behind the screen.  Roll 1d6 for each level of the caster and put that many purple beads (or whatever) in the bag.  That's the player's spell point reservoir.  The player is not allowed to count how many beads are in the bag nor should the player touch the bag except to pull out beads when casting a spell.  I.e. you're not allowed grope the bag long enough to suss out the number of beads.  You can only best guess by eyeballing the thing.  Pull out a number of beads equal to the level of the spell.  If you come up short--like you want to cast fireball and it turns out you only have 2 beads left--the DM should mess with the spell's parameters appropriately.

Kinda like this, but I think
they're cheaper at the craft store.

Fun times #1: When the DM rolls your initial pool of spell points, each six indicates that they should put 5 purple beads in the bag and one orange one (that is to say, a bad bead).  Drawing an orange bead sends you to some sort of spell fumble chart, which should have some results ranging from the inconvenient to the disastrous, some of which can be avoided or ameliorated with a saving throw or ability check of some sort.  Basically, some days your character is overflowing with magical energy and occasionally it gets away from you.

Fun times #2: Every time the DM rolls a 1, they put a green (good) bead in the bag.  When a green bean is drawn, immediately put a purple bead back into the bag.  The spell was slightly easier to cast than you thought it would be.  Don't put the green bead back.  That's a one time bonus bead, not an infinite engine of magical energy.

For more confusion, select a fourth color, maybe clear or white, to represent blanks.  When a blank is drawn, discard it but draw another bead immediately to replace it.  Keep drawing until you get a non-blank bead.  Add 1d6 blanks to every bag at the start of the session to keep the players guessing as to how many good and useful beads are in the bag.

So obviously a lot of the time more/bigger spells are going to be fired off under this system than canonical D&D.  I'm willing to accept that, given the possibility of fumbling with an orange bead and the inability to gauge exactly how many spells you have left, but your mileage may vary.  Note that I would still have people memorize spells, you can just cast more of the spells you have memorized.  Or you can re-study to change your choices.

The one part of this cockamamie scheme I'm still struggling with is what to do when rests happen.  I don't want the DM to have to pour out all the beads and re-roll every time an MU takes a nap.  Since you start the session with more power, I might slow down the regen rate for spell points.  Say you get 1d6 beads back for a good night's rest, but it takes a whole week to bump it to 2d6.  But I worry about the possibility of exceeding 6 times level beads in the bag (not counting blanks).  Not sure how to handle that without the DM tracking the beads behind the screen.  Any thoughts?  Is this idea just nonsense?

I feel like I should end with a Hermann Hesse joke but nothing's happening.

Vaults of Vyzor, session #3

So after the most recent raid on the Vaults of Vyzor, the half-orc Sneakerly Trull (Zak S.) opts to carouse and is unable to hold his liquor, so he blabs about the whole thing.  The expedition began with TERMEX the robo-dwarf (Mike Davison), Dudlow the Halfling (Paul Schaefer), and four lame spear-carriers, the NPCS Biggens, Littlens, Ren, and Stimpy.  

Sneakerly was actually late for the rendezvous to enter the dungeon.  TERMEX (Mike always put it in all caps.  If it's an acronym, I don't know what it stands for.  The Cyborg Name Decoder says it stands for Transforming Electronic Repair and Masterful Exploration Xenomorph.) and Dudlow opt to explore the first level below the Rosy Chambers, Castle Vyzor's den of debauchery.

Like this, but all the marble is pink and Elrond is in there somewhere with a gimp mask on.

The first room of level one is a guard post with 4 goblins and a bugbear on sentry duty.  Several of the NPCs fall in the battle.  It's one of those prolonged low-level slogs where no one hits anyone for several rounds in a row, much to the embarrassment of all concerned.  Eventually just one wounded goblin remains and runs for it.  The party opts to loot the corpses of the fallen foes rather than chase down the fleeing gobblin.  They find a bit of pocket change and not much else, except for the bugbear's coin pouch, which has "bad motherfucker" embroidered on it in Gobbocommon.  I don't know who ended up with that little trinket.

At this point Sneakerly Trull arrives and joins the party.  With three ways out of the first chamber, the party opts to check the door first rather than go down the distant corridors.  Sneakerly takes the lead, hoping that the locals will continue to treat him as a fellow monster rather than an intruder.  This pays off, as behind the first door is the guard barracks, where a sleepy bugbear in nightgown and cap reads Sneakerly the riot act for disturbing him.  Sneakerly claims to be delivering food and the bugbear shouts at him to try the orcs in the south and slams the door shut.

[When noise occurs--like combat--and there are monsters in an adjacent room, I often borrow a simple technique from MERP called the Activity Roll.  In MERP you roll percentile dice, the higher you get the more active are the nearby monsters.  No hard mechanics; it's just a guideline.  I usually roll a d6 for this in my own games, but I happened to have a d20 in my hand this time and rolled a "1," suggesting the lowest possible level of activity from the monsters.  My snap decision was that it was beddie-by time for the monsters and that the boss of the room was a grumpy sleeper.  The old timey sleepwear was added on the spot for comedic effect.]

Since the goblin also fled south, the party opts to head that direction.  They find a door on the wall of an extra-wide side corridor that ALSO leads to the barracks.  The Activity Roll is still low (a 4, IIRC), so they just earn another string of shouty profanity from Mr. Grumpy.  They eventually reach a fourway intersection further south and end up exploring a little bit in all three directions.  To the east they find the lair of the vicious silver shag carpet monsters, which they slay handily and turn into stylish cloaks.  The party declares themselves the Brotherhood of the Silver Cloaks.  [I'm using some old dungeon levels here and this room had three monsters found in an old game product I don't know.  All I have is some basic stats for 3 silver ______.  I'm not sure why I decided that they were hostile ambulatory carpet remnants.  We all agreed they must be related to cloakers and similar monsters.]

Detail from Mike Davison's map of the level.

Later, they follow the trail of goblin blood to the south, where Sneakerly scouts ahead and finds him, but some brain-eating zombies found him first.  They opt to back away and go elsewhere.  The zombies later start slowly pursuing the party, but they get confused in a region with several side corridors and parallel passages.  As far as anyone knows, those dead guys are still shambling around the level, looking for brains to devour.

To the west of the four-way intersection is a series of twisty passages all alike.  They find some slopes down and up and a spot where some green stains turn out to be nearly dried-out almost dead green slime.  They torch the nearly-starved green slime.  Beyond that, they find a room where three Mad Max Fury Road warboy-looking guys feast on a fresh corpse.  The players immediately peg these guys as ghouls, but I refuse to acknowledge they're right even as they're making saves every time they get clawed.

Three ghouls is a tough fight for nearly any low-level party, but some judicious maneuvering and ridiculous use of lard and caltrops allow the party to barely prevail.  Along the way, I roll two natural twenty claw attacks, one on TERMEX and one on Dudlow.  They both roll their own percentile dice to find their fate on the Arduin critical charts.  TERMEX ends up knocked out, with a concussion, and amnesiac.  Dudlow receives a major arterly slash on his leg.  He's bleeeding out fast.  They staunch the bleeding by applying fire to the wound, which very nearly burns him to death.  Sneakerly and Ren (the last hench-weenie) carry the dwarf and halfling out of the dungeon, where they recover from their wounds.

With 15 minutes left in the session, the party decides to go back to the dungeon.  The problem, though, is that no one can make their door open roll to get into the dungeon.  After each PC tries and fails, Paul rolls for Ren and succeeds while I'm rolling a d6 for the guards activity level and get a 6.  So Ren opens the door and catches a battle axe to the face.  Dead.  Oh, no, it's Mr. Grumpy!  And four goblins!  One of whom is all bandaged-up.  That one goblin barely survived the PCs' first visit and his run-in with the zombies.  What a champ.  While TERMEX fights Mr. Grumpy and Sneakerly bravely sneaks about, the goblins wrestle Dudlow to the ground so that the wounded guy can kick him in the ribs repeatedly.  The party eventually gets its groove back and murders the monsters just in time for the session to end.

They return to the Rosy Chambers.  Two expeditions has not resulted in much loot, but they've got a decent map of a good piece of the level and quite a few experience points for their troubles.  They know there are some orcs in the unmapped south and at least one wandering band of zombies.

Sneakerly has some money from some other FLAILSNAIL adventure and blows it all on carousing.  Plus he owes the mob 20gp because he rolled higher than his cash on hand.  Joining the festivities in the Rosy Chambers, he emerges several days later.  He can't find his underwear.  Or his clothes.  Or anything else he owns.

A fun couple of hours.  Hopefully someone will find some decent treasure soon.

Ongoing Roll of the Dead

Elfbraham Lincoln (Jeff Call)
Littlens (0-level NPC)
Biggens (0-level NPC)
Stimpy (0-level NPC)
Ren (0-level NPC)

Vaults of Vyzor, session #2

Roster

Darluk of the Hill People, fighter (Doyle Taverner)
Brutal Pete, dwarf (Aleksandr Revzin)
Sneakerly Trull, half-orc thief (Zak S)
Elfbraham Lincoln, elf (Jeff Call)
Limpy the Kobold (NPC)

Results

Once again no carousing happened, so only limited details of the dungeon activities are available.  The Citrine Hall was itself a hotbed of activity.  First, the musicomancers of the hall tested the Astral Wind Chimes they've been working on.  This results in the petrification of several witnesses to the test, but the PCs were not close enough to require saving throws.  A couple of days later, an orcs war party emerged from below and attacked the Hall.  Although it seems that all the orcs involved were killed or captured, a pair of magic cymbals seem to have gone missing.

Meanwhile, our heroes made two expeditions to the Vaults below.  The first time they came back pretty badly scruffed up, but with some objects looted from an orc temple and a pack of orcish playing cards.  The second time they barely made it back at all, leaving poor Elbraham Lincoln's bloody corpse in a hallway near an orcish rec room.

Orc & Undead playing cards by Ian Schofield.  Buy them here. 

Vaults of Vyzor session report

Roster

Belisarius

Belisarius Grouse (August Aronsson), fighter 1

Persimion Finch (Galen Fogarty), fighter 1

Elfbraham Lincoln (Jeff Call), elf 1

Sneakerly Trull (Zak S), half-orc thief 1

Results

The party entered the Citrine Hall of Castle Vyzor, where many Very Serious Men were attempting to build very silly musical instruments.  The party got to see a (failed) test of an Atomic Paradox Harp before being led to the stairs down into the Vaults.

The Citrine Hall is like this only a) the watermelon is also a set of bagpipes and b) the walls are yellow. 

They emerged a couple hours later alive, but changed.  Elfbraham and Sneakerly were clad as uniformed soldiery of the Orcs of the Red Hand, while Belisarius and Persimion also had various orcish bric-a-brac they collected on the way.  Oh, and they were covered head-to-toe in copious amounts of monster blood, foamy yellow puss, and unidentified slime.  In one of the worst things to ever happen in my games, Elfbraham Lincoln exits the dungeon with his own pet kobold in toe, a wretch clad only in an elaborate leather codpiece and who will be henceforth known as Limpy the Naileteer.  That's right, Elfbraham enslaved a member of another race.

I will divulge little else of this first outing, since these dungeon newbies didn't score enough gold to go carousing and blab about the adventure over ale.  But they did bring back some cool equipment they stole off the orcs.  And thanks to a combination of favorable die rolls and cunning play, the room 1 guard monster didn't destroy the whole party.  I honestly thought that was going to happen.