The Lands of Dual - A Dirty Dungeon Bash

After an introductory scenario my new campaign kicked off proper in Session 4 with a bit of light dungeoneering in the sewers.  The full session report can be read on my dedicated campaign site but my players seem to have enjoyed their first real taste of of Castles and Crusades.

Part of the sewer network of the town of Ayfal

I've been decorating at home recently and uncovered an abortive attempt to build a Worldworks style gaming board which promptly got canibalised for custom floorplans.  These seemed to go down well but the small rooms and even smaller corridors got the party stacked up in single file, resulted in two characters being involved in melee and blocking the entrance for others to assist.

This may be symptomatic of the 5' square concept for floor plans which I've always thought that however "materially" necessary it does lead to very cramped dungeons.  It may also be as a result of my players being a bit rusty at dungeon bashing.

Still I enjoyed DMing the scenario immensely (even though I hadn't spent too much time actually reading it) and can't wait for the next instalment.

The Lands of Dual - Session 1: Ayfal and The Challenge of Champions

My often touted new campaign has finally started, we had our first real session last week, and I'm pleasantly suprised with how my new group of players have accepted the switch to CnC.  As my free time is limited by family and work commitments I am trying to get back to the core concept of TLOD with this campaign (ie: to try to string together as many published scenarios as I can with only minor location tweaks) and evolve the story arc out of the player's backgrounds.

For the first scenario I've chosen "Challenge of Champions" by Jonathan Richards (Dungeon #58) which pits the PCs against a series of artificial "tests" created by the Adventurer's Guild as an annual competition as part of a membership drive.  This choice has set me a few DMing challenges right from the off, namely:

• The Scenario is designed for a party of 4 Level 1 PCs (1 of each class; Fighter, Mage, Cleric and Thief) who have entered as a team.  My party is 6 strong and none of them know each other at all, one is a Lizardman Cleric and another is a 2nd level Ranger!  Solution: divide the group of players along class lines and run two teams of three with NPCs filling the missing class slots.
  
  
• The PCs have to surrender their equipment and are only able to use items which are provided as part of each test.  As some of the "clues" to completing the test are contained within the items themselves, the question is how to visualise this?  Solution: create Item Cards for each piece of equipment provided.  As it is my intention to provide my players with item cards during this and future campaigns, this was a bit of a no-brainer and I've had some fun finding appropriate images from google images to depict the various items.  More on that in a later post.

Without giving too much away in case they read this.  I was pleasantly surprised with the different approaches my players used to tackle the first three challenges.