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.

Monday Motivations #5

Article #5 in a regular series where I offer up some ideas for character backgrounds by class.  I aim to collect these ideas together for a future pdf publication.

What made your character decide to become a wizard? Why did they leave their home town? Did they leave family behind or are they looking for something? These are all questions players face when generating their characters, with the best will in the world it's tempting to rely on cliché.

ASSASSIN

3.  New Sheriff in Town - When a new Sheriff arrived a few months back, things just started to take a turn for the worse.  He ferreted out some of your Assassin's Guild colleagues and the jobs started to dry up.  The final straw came when the Guild Master decided to close up shop.  You decide to strike out on your own, perhaps another town's Guild will have need of your skills...

4.  Set-up - That last job you did went South pretty quickly, those bodyguards knew you were coming.  Someone in the Guild is either supplying false intelligence or someone's put out a contract on you, but who? and why?  One things for sure, you can't go back to the Guild a failure, they kill failures...

WIZARD

3.  Magical Runt.  Being a wizard runs in your family your mother and father and your little sister are all wizards and they're far more accomplished than you will ever be.  Which is why you decided to run away and set up yourself up as a hedge wizard in a far flung corner of the world...

4.  Army deserter!  - Around your twelfth birthday your powers manifested themselves.  You were promptly registered with the local magistrate and you forgot about it completely as you buried yourself into your new studies.  Nine years later you shouldn't have been surprised when the kings letter arrived drafting you into the Mage corps of his army.  It wasn't long before you couldn't take anymore of the endless drilling so one night you escaped the compound and made a break for enemy lines...

BARBARIAN

3. A Legendary Blade - Whilst out hunting one day your prey darted into the relative safety of a small copse of trees and you hunter's instinct told you to follow.  The copse was deceptively dense and soon you needed to hack a path through the tightly knit trees.  You slash your way into a clearing and discover a pair of large boulders and lying at their foot a skeletal warrior holding a finely wrought blade.  The warrior has clearly been dead for many years, his disintegrating armour is of a strange design, the like of which you have never seen, however, the sword he carries is untarnished and as you slide it out of it's scabard you marvel at the keenness of the edge as it reflects the light.  After taking the blade back home your sleep is disturbed by strange dreams and a voice calling out to you.  Each morning as you strike out to catch the day's pray you feel compelled to keep walking and leave your dreary tribal hunter's life for that of adventure and distant lands...

Tuesday Trailer - Summer Wars

Mamoru Hosoda (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time) returns to direct one of her own short stories in "Summer Wars".

The virtual reality world of OZ is a huge and highly embedded social network, it has millions of account holders who have given it control of many aspects of their modern lives. Unfortunately "Love Machine" an AI starts to take over OZ with catastrophic results. As the boundary between reality and OZ becomes blurred, the only person who can stop Love Machine is a high school teen mathematician, Kenji Koiso.



Possibly more relevant to today's Social Generation than the Tron franchise with it's melange of different artwork styles reflecting the diversity of user generated content which inhabits todays social networks like flickr or myspace.  Is this the future of facebook... only time will tell...

Monday Motivations #4

Article #4 in a regular series where I offer up some ideas for character backgrounds by class.  I aim to collect these ideas together for a future pdf publication.

What made your character decide to become a wizard? Why did they leave their home town? Did they leave family behind or are they looking for something? These are all questions players face when generating their characters, with the best will in the world it's tempting to rely on cliché.

ASSASSIN

1. Revenge from Within - A loved one was murdered by an Assassin, the only way you can wreak your revenge is to become an Assassin yourself, gain access to the Guild's records and find out who hired the killer and why your loved one had to die...

2. Assassins Orphanage - When your parents died in a tragic accident the city's council made you a ward of the city, as is the law, and placed you in the care of the city orphanage whilst a search for your relatives was undertaken.  Only a select few are aware that the orphanage is a front for the Guild of Assassins.  They select the brightest orphans to undergo the complex and arduous training to become a silent killer like yourself...

WIZARD

1.  Royal Edict - some people say that the King is paranoid, but most keep their tongues in their heads lest the tyrant pluck them out.  Worst still are the many heinous persecutions he has exacted on those who possess magic.  From the mere hedge wizard to the master of guild of wizards he has imprisoned , tortured and executed all those who show even the slightest sign of thaumaturgical ability.  What drives him is a mystery but his edict banning the practicing of magic on pain of death resulted in you being spirited away from your mother and father, as a child, by your crazy old grandfather to his tumbledown tower just outside the king's reach on the other side of the border.  Your life has been one long lesson interspersed with drudgery, your reward being able to bend arcane forces to your will...

2.  Power Awakened.  Your idyllic childhood on a smallholding in a peaceful part of the kingdom was shattered when you almost killed your brother with a lightning bolt.  When your magical powers were awakened, your families' attitude to you changed, where once there was love now you found fear.  One day your father brought a strange old man to the house who poked and prodded and waved his hands around you.  After a short discussion with the man your father took you aside and with tears in his eyes handed you a backpack full of  your things and told you to be good and do everything that azusul tells you.  And as your home disappeared from sight among the trees you knew that you would not see your family again for a very long time, until your training as a wizard was complete...

THIEF

5. Kleptomaniac - Some people say that even as a child you couldn't keep your hands out of other peoples pockets, but they don't know what they're talking about.  It's like there's a part of your brain which is autonomous and just picks up other peoples things which they've left lying around.  With that kind of natural ability it was only a matter of time before you started to actively looking for opportunities for profit...

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.