Drow, Dirigibles, Duels and Drunkenness

I didn’t get a chance to write a session review for Monday’s session, mostly because I was piloting a starship around the galaxy blasting Klingons with lasers – the game isn’t an RPG per se, but it’s a pretty good game about space ships and lasers.

We start the session off with Babagya tottering away screaming “I’ll get you, my pretties!” and our heroes looking a bit worse for wear. They had been heading to Babagya’s old home, Muidercrag, to see if they might learn something more about the Big B’s history, and while she was headed straight north, they crew decided to steer their chicken-hut north east and investigate the village.

The village is a burnt out husk of what was once a thriving little community. Parts of the town have been burned to cinders, while others stand mostly whole, but the whole place is completely unlivable. Give any ghost town twenty years to grow over, and shit starts falling down, plants start growing up where there shouldn’t be plants, and the whole place goes to pot. Memphis occasionally catches a glimpse of Muidercrag as it once was, complete with dwarven citizens and animals and the like. They decide to get down into the city and see if they can figure out what’s going on with that, when the sun falls behind the mountains and the whole place comes alive, with building standing as they once were, dwarven citizens, sights, smells, tastes, the works.

A little girl tugs on Skull’s sleeve and asks for her help. Skull is right freaked out by this, and it turns out the little girl is actually a manifestation of Babagya-as-she-once-was. She explains that she’s going to kill them all, and gives each of them a doll representation of themselves.

When the sun comes up and the village returns to it’s natural, burnt-down state, they decide to leave the village, meeting Francois on the way out. He’s bringing some of the gear to start making the wall that will surround Muidercrag, tells them a bit more about the history of the place and how experiences like the party’s own are why they’re walling the place off. It’s a cursed place.

Also, there is a message for Skull, from her mother. Seems she wants Skull to come home, and it’s rather urgent.

As home is in the direction Babagya went, the whole crew heads north to the Spine of the World. The spine is a long expanse of arid land between two enormous cliff-faces that drop off into the world-ocean. On either sides of the spine, reaching impossibly high into the air, are the Cage Pillars. These huge stone cliffs are where the dragons are born. There are cities and towns along the Spine, and a network of roads. Far in the distance, smoke is rising from the captial city.

The chicken-hut is stopped by a patrol of a drow sheriff and his deputies and searched. They don’t seem to believe that Skull is who she says she is, understanding Mathilde of the Draconia Family to be dead over twenty years ago, about the time Skull ran away from home. They quickly search the chicken-hut, not taking anything for fear that whatever they take will dissolve a few hours later, and let the party pass. A few minutes later, they’re stopped by another patrol, and go through much of the same process. This time, though, the patrol is actually a group of polymorphed turtle-minions, who attack the party and are quickly put down.

Reaching the capital, they find the place overrun with turtle-minions, and two colossi are rampaging through the streets! The palace is empty, save for a few looters, who tell Skull that her mother is in fact at the farmhouse. They party moves south, avoiding the colossi for the time being, as Babagya cackles at them from the roof of the palace.

They come across a small hut in the middle of a poorly-tended farm. A single drow sits on a rocking chair with a crossbow in his lap and a piece of straw sticking out of his mouth.

“Good to see you again, Princess,” he says as Skull moves past him into the house. There’s a trapdoor that leads down into the basement, and the stairs are impossibly long, hundreds of flights to the bottom. When they reach the bottom, it leads to one of the colossus platforms the party is used to fighting the monsters on, a huge cliff-face built to house a single massive colossus. Skull’s mother and her step-father, an enormous black dragon, are conferring there with a few drow generals.

Drow magic on the spine is, by necessity, dragon magic. That Skull is a storm sorcerer has always been a point of consternation between her and her mother, but today, she is needed for exactly that talent. One of the colossi destroying the drow capital city has some strange control over wind and rain and lightening, and to get close enough to rid the streets of turtle-minions, they drow army needs to fly in on airships. They need Skull to “turn the colossus off,” for a while, giving them a window to get in and take the little zombie bastards down.

When the streets are clear, the party is the only group in the world with experience taking down colossi, so those will be the responsibility of Skull and her crew. Skull is infuriated.

“Did anyone even try to fight the colossi as they were stomping on people?”

“You noticed they were stomping on people?” her mother countered. “That’s what happened when they tried to fight.”

The party is given access to three airships, while Bruk Hearteater goes with Garuush, the dragon, to recruit the aid of more dragons as needed. Memphis and Bruce keep the colossi occupied while Skull tries to take down the storm colossus’ powers over the weather, and though the fight is close, they manage to build a window for the drow fleet to get in and kick some ass.

They rest for a while, as a horde of dragons and airships take out the easier foes. Garuush suggests that he could, with some help and some time, make the chicken-hut fly, and gets to work on that. The party goes to take care of some colossi.

The fight was very different than the other colossus fights they’ve done so far. These foes are, individually, less powerful than a single colossus would be, but taken together the fight is quite a bit tougher. There are still a few turtle minions around, and they’re pretty effective at fucking with people’s shit. And each colossus is still a pretty nasty foe. There are some huge stunts done by both colossi, though the best move of the day is when one of them burrowed down into the earth and exploded out from a building to grab one of the airships in mid-flight.

Halfway through the fight, Bruk and Garuush swoop down to help, and though Garuush is hardly an expert fighter, their help is welcome. Skull and her step-father have a touching family moment, where she accepts him as her “Dad,” and they take the last colossus down together.

Then, drunkenness. The party was pretty close to levelling up, so we decided to do some carousing for experience points. While most of the players get away with just enough experience to level up, Skull goes well above and beyond, and wakes up on the altar of a local temple, with a horde of Babagya’s cultists working dark magicks upon her body… and her soul…

Hair Metal Elves and Giant Phase Spiders

So the party had been hired on to retrieve a mysterious book from a powerful witch-woman who was apparently using it to destroy the world. They arrived in time to discover her waking up the Colossus of Tarsil, kick the crap out of the huge rock-man. Babagya the witch woman, sadly, escaped. 

The trip back was uneventful, and they stopped in at town to gather some information and prepare for the next leg of the journey. Bruk bought an executioner's axe for 15 gold and a song (literally), and the group informed the Archbishop of Geth that they had not yet retrieved his book, but did have some pretty solid information on the person who had it. The Archbishop was not entirely impressed, and made it very clear that the book was incredibly important and that the Library would need it back as soon as humanly possible. Horses were made available, and a stable-girl named Emily to bring them back once the group passed into the Femoral Forest.

The forest itself is a sick, twisted thing. Black trunks grip the earth and greasy black leaves blow grotesquely in the wind. The floor of the forest is unsafe, the things that live in the underbrush terrifying and strange. This is a place where people go missing in an instant and insectoid monkeys would not be out of place. Memphis was born and raised here, and knows the safe paths, the ways to travel through the canopy high above, avoiding the worst of the dangers below. His people hunt boar here, following the herds and snatching them from above, living in hanging tents and tending their long, luscious hair. 

After hours of traveling through the branches of the trees, the party meets up with a member of Memphis' tribe, a cocky priss of an elf called Cecil. The two argue some, but agree that the group should meet with the Matriarch of the tribe, Cecil's mother, and Memphis' aunt. They travel to a healthier part of the forest, where elven magic keeps the trees healthy and whole, and try to learn the whereabouts of Babagya and her chicken-footed hut. The talks do not go well, with the party and the Matriarch at odds about nearly everything. Auntie suggests, forcefully, that they not be in her tents in the morning. One of the elven children whispers that she may know something about the woman they seek (but is sadly killed by Bruk's morning breath before she can say anything else).

They set off early, towards Babagya's last known location, the Spider Caves of Femur, near the border with the Basin Plains (pelvis, for the record, is the Latin word for "basin"). Here they are confronted by dark blue women who have spiders for heads and a small horde of spiders. These were stolen, part and parcel, from China Mieville's Perdido Street Station with the cosmetic change of spiders for scarabs. Scarabs are more alien, spiders are more metal. The spiders and their mates take the party to school, knocking every one of them out and dragging them back to their mountain lair to be fed to their breeders.

They awaken, fight off the guards sent to keep them, and rescue many other soon-to-be-meals. They manage to kill three of the spider-people breeders, fight off the eunuch guards, burn down the egg lair, kill many of the males, and discover that the Colossus of Femur is a huge, chrome phase spider. Now, they didn't do much of that, really. They fought the breeders, and saved the survivors, but the night was getting late, and we jumped straight into the boss battle. Babagya, in classic villain form, taunted the player characters some before fucking off to her chicken hut far below, and they were faced with a huge, scary, powerful, teleporting spider. It took for bloody ever (it's 2:50 in the morning as I write this), but they took the bastard down in good form. No one died. A few of them dropped unconscious, but got up the next round. It was good, but again a bit of a slog.

Some Notes:

One of the keys to being a good DM, in my opinion, is figuring out what you did right and what you did wrong. How things were good, and how they weren't means that next session you can do things better, make the game more fun for everyone. Below are my notes on where I think the session was solid and where it could have used some work.

• The colossi need work. They're okay, but they take too long to kill and they don't do enough damage that anyone is frightened of them. This one only did 1d8+5 damage per bite, with some status effects that ended on a save. Not good enough. The bosses need to be terrifying.
• We need to fight Babagya. Even if we don't win, we need to see the bitch in action and understand what we're up against. As she is, she's a sort of amorphous... thing. Also, I need to find a way to seperate her image from that of the flying Koopa Troopa that drops shells.
• Dealing with Memphis' family was a lot of fun. The first session lacked in the role-playing department. This one was better, but we could still use a bit more in each session. I've been too encounter-oriented so far.
• I need to plan stop-points, places where it would be a good place to stop for the night. I need to start planning for four to four-and-a-half hour sessions, even if we don't hit a boss.
• It's time to hit a city, I think. ^_^ 

On Skill Challenges that Suck

Sometimes, skill challenges suck. I'm not one of those people who thinks that they need to be stricken from the game forever, but I have certainly run skill challenges that were not at the top of their form. In fact, I ran one on Monday, and it was mostly terrible. The challenge was getting across the Tibean Wasteland. For the most part, the development of the challenge wasn't as important as the act itself, which should have been my first clue that the challenge wasn't even needed in this case, and I would have been better off making it a series of role-playing moments, a combat encounter, and some investigation. Honestly, I think an investigation skill challenge would have been more fun in its place, and now I'm a touch sad that I didn't run one. I'd offer to do one this coming Monday, but I have different plans for this upcoming session. Maybe when we reach the Spine of the World, or the city of Sternum...

I think that's probably the one thing that differentiates skill challenges that are awesome and skill challenges that suck: what they're for. I understand that some players hate them in general; the math is screwy, or they believe that the challenge would be better left to good role-playing. Personally, I disagree, but I'll admit that when a skill challenge isn't going to clearly effect things, it's pretty stupid to have a skill challenge at all. Whether they passed the skill challenge or not, my players would have crossed the Tibean Waste. Making it a skill challenge didn't add any tension or drama to the act, and if it had, I think I would have failed as a DM. That's not a thing that should invoke tension, it's a simple act and it should just get done. Travel, meet some people while you're travelling, fight some bitches what get up in your grill, then be done with it.

When you're crafting a skill challenge, it has to mean something. I think that's part of what made the Night at the Opera skill challenge such a success; the players knew that if they did not make their show a success, they would have to come up with a different (probably much more difficult) way to get into the Mayor's house and get the information they need to open the Dungeons & Dragons Inc. Lodge. That is a damned fine skill challenge. Development for that makes a big difference. If you succeed, you get to go to a fancy party, and when the guests are all unconscious or fucking, you can do what you need to do. If you fail, you have to bust in the door, deal with the guards, find a way to subdue the mayor and his guests, and get done what needs doing. The first way is much more fun, much less trouble, and is better for role-playing and story-telling purposes. The second way involves a lot of combat, a bunch of unwanted attention, some trouble-shooting and an uphill battle to get to your goals.

And I think that is what a skill challenge should really be about. When you're planning these things, keep your goal in mind. And your goal should be fun. What would be the fun way to get this goal accomplished? What would be the less-fun way to do the same thing? Now, make the fun thing the reward for accomplishing the skill challenge. Make the unfun thing the penalty for failure. Set this up from the beginning, let your players know what is at stake before they start trying to figure out how they're going to roll this, and make them think about the actions they'll be taking to use those skills effectively. That will add tension to the challenge, make it worth doing, and make the whole experience a lot more fun to play through.

How to Make it Metal

In our introductory session, we did some things that were pretty kick-ass. We took down a level-five Solo without losing anyone. We busted through level two, straight into level three. We killed a dude with a scalpel, and that's always a fun experience. And while some of that stuff seems pretty Metal (and the events themselves were very metal within the framework of the game), none of those things are, in and of themselves, indicative of the genre we're trying to invoke with the game. A lot of the Metal flavor came from the set dressing, the player's descriptions of characters and actions, and the role-playing that happened around the table.

It can be pretty tough to run a game within a particular sub-genre of fantasy with Dungeons and Dragons. Honestly, the game is rather poorly set up to do setting-specific things. It's in nearly every way an Epic Fantasy Game, and that comes with a certain amount of baggage that can be difficult to shake off when you're trying to do something a little more unique. Making a game that tries to emulate the stylings of the Heavy Metal music movement is a little more unique than that, and it requires a bit of help from the players to really make it happen.

The first major step in making a game that fits a genre is understanding what everyone wants to do with that genre. Role-playing games are a collaborative thing; they require input from all of the forces that are making the game what it is, so bringing the players into the brain-storming is never a bad idea. At the end of the first session (which was, to be honest, only half-good), I sat down with my players and asked them what they wanted to see from the game, what sorts of things they'd be interested in playing through. There were some suggestions batted around, such as increasing the importance of the music in the game, stealing fashions and styles from various metal movements when creating the cultures of the various races (the Femural Forest elves, for instance, have adopted Hair Metal as their aesthetic; it should probably be noted, they're still bad-asses).

But catering to the players' expectation isn't where it ends. You have to involve them in the creation of the genre story. I can establish the dramatic form, and the players will ham to that naturally, but if you want a game to be truly effective in establishing a genre tale, you need to get players pushing the envelope. I need my players to push themselves, to see just how fucking Metal they can be. And that means I need to reward them for playing in a way that advances the themes I want to advance.

I'm a lead-with-the-carrot kind of Game Master, regardless of the game I'm playing. As much as I may love to kill people on a weekly basis in D&D Encounters, I'm not really out to get my players when I'm playing a story-based game. I'll kill them if I have to, or if the dice are particularly mean, but I try to avoid it when I can. People work hard to create those characters, they invest a lot of emotion into making those people "live," and they've invested quite a bit into making the story those characters are playing in pretty fucking awesome. I would rather not punish my players for not playing to type; that isn't going to make it any fun for anyone. Instead, I want to give them something tangible for doing the things that make the game "better." In this case, "better" equals "Metal."

So I'm going to be adding something to my game that is going to reward my players for doing things that are specifically in-genre. Much like the Favors rewarded players for acting within the genre of a cop drama, I'm going to craft a system that allows players to get a kick-ass reward for doing something that is incredibly, amazingly, perfectly Metal. This isn't something I've used yet, but I'll be introducing it on Monday as a way players can get more from the game.

Brutality

Brutality is measure of your character's reputation as a complete and total fucking bad-ass. At the beginning of the campaign, there are a few major players who know that you're the person to call when shit gets serious, but you're not generally well-known. As you progress in Brutality, people will come to know that you mean business, that you are not to be fucked with, and that the shit that you do is some pretty important shit.

When you do something that is 100% pure Heavy Metal, the DM may reward you with a Brutality Point. Brutality Points can be allocated to one of two stats on your character sheet: Fame and Import.

Fame is how well known your character is. A person with a Fame of one or two may be recognized in their hometown or by people in his or her field of work. A person with a Fame of 15 is known the world over. A person with a Fame of 20 is known by the Gods themselves.

Import is a measure of how seriously people take your character. A person with an import of 1 or 2 is generally considered to have a pretty important job in the community, the equal of a sheriff or a low-ranking officer in the army. A person with an Import of 15 is generally considered to have responsibilities on par with those of kings. A person with an Import of 20 has a job as important as making sure gravity still works, something that shakes entire planes of existence.

These are, of course, rough guidelines. You can fill them in however you like. A person with a Fame of 5 but an Import of 8 works behind the scenes for the most part, but the people who know about her respect her as the equal of the mayor of a minor city-state. A warrior with a Fame of 10, with an Import of 6 is known throughout the countryside as a monster-killing machine, and the country-folk respect him for it. As you gain Fame and Import, you can discuss with your DM how those things manifest themselves. They may result in requisitions for powerful magic items, free room and board, all the whores a woman can feast herself on, or even the attention of a God...

Pictures of a Harrowing Battle

Looking at the first picture you can see the heroes preparing to face off against the Colossus of Tarsil. I didn't have any gargantuan miniatures at the store that I was willing to crack open for the project (just a few of the blue dragons from the 3.5 minis line), so I spent a while looking around for an appropriately sized action figure. My Little Cthulhu takes up about as many squares as a gargantuan dude, and so it became the Colossus and worked fairly well. Behind him, you can see Ninjathulu, who I was using to represent Babagya, the first recurring villain of the game.

The second is a picture of me, rocking my DM face. In front of the screen, holding down the edge of the mat, is a wizard my boss got for my center. I'm sure he's for sale. Behind me, you can see the old Tournament Center television (currently a piss-poor monitor over by my own work-station), and some of the anime center.

After a long and harrowing battle with the Colossus, the party was victorious. Though Babagya escaped to wreck havoc another day, the party managed to survive to come kick her ass in the next time she shows her nasty face. The third picture shows the Colossus defeated. The green dots show the borders of the creatures space-occupancy.

Next time, we're hoping to have either a sound recording or straight-up video.

The Most Metal Campaign of All Time

We ran through the first session of the Most Metal Campaign of All Time last night, and it went pretty okay. The start of the session was a little rough, which was entirely my own fault for not having a clearer idea of where the campaign started. I could well have started it a half hour later in the story, and everything would have been just fine. I'm running double experience on a four-person group, and we made it through four combat encounters and a skill challenge in the five hours we played. One of those encounters was a level five solo, so we managed to skip second level entirely. The solo encounter was mixed with a minor skill challenge (sort of), but it worked out. Next time, I think I'll handle the skills part of it a little differently.

We started out at the Library of Geth, a place built on the cliffs between Capp and the Fibular Wastelands. It is a fortress full of books, many of them very important or ridiculously powerful. The city-state of Sternum uses the Library as a repository for things like their census, tax records, and declarations of war. The drow from the Spine of the World use it to store their most important magical teachings. It has never, in its history, had a book stolen from it. Until yesterday.

The Library's guards are some of the best-trained soldiers in the world, but it is the opinion of the Archbishop that the retrieval of the book does not require soldiers; it requires bad-asses. The thief flew into the library, took the book, set some things on fire, killed a squad of guards with little difficulty and flew away. For this mission, the Archbishop requests audience with some of the biggest names in kicking ass. On any normal mission, one of these people would be enough. For this, they'll need to join forces, move past their differences, and learn to work together.

After beating some information out of the locals at a pub, they discover that the thief was apparently a woman in a cauldron, rowing her way through the air with a broom. She was heading south, across the Fibular Wasteland, which is where our heroes trek. Getting across the waste was a skill challenge in three parts. After the first few successes, the party met AkTakk, the leader of one of the many gnoll tribes in the area. After talking with the group (and a successful Diplomacy check, which was part of the Skill Challenge), AkTakk offered his aid to the group, sending the message along to other gnoll and kobold tribes in the area.

He informs them that he has seen the woman who flies in a cauldron before, and that she also owns a hut that walks on chicken legs, and that she has taken up residence in the southern Tarsil Mountains. This is the second time the group has heard about the chicken-hut, and it became something of a symbol for the session. ^_^ It should be noted that I basically stole Baba Yaga wholesale from Russian folklore. I think a witch who flies in a cauldron and eats babies is pretty fucking metal, so she's in.

It should be noted that I hate dragon-kobolds. In my game, they’re all dog-kobolds, and they are more closely related to gnolls than anything.

After a few failures, the group stumbled upon a group of undead gnolls and kobolds, and there was an altercation. It was a tough fight, as the kobold slingers had the high ground (they were situated on the tops of hoodoos; for those who did not grow up around Drumheller, a hoodoo is like a fucked-up backwards mountain; the big rocks are on the top, the little rocks are on the bottom. They make weird pillar things. They’re awesome. The ones in Drumheller are usually some ten feet tall). Our heroes handily won the fight, and were met by another tribe of gnolls who were coming to their aid; together, they made it to the base of the Tarsil Caves, a series of black volcanic caves that jut out from the southern edge of the waste.

The first cave shows signs of habitation, with bootprints and regularly walked paths. The heroes push further back into the caves, squeezing into a narrow choke-point and being met by a group of black-cloaked cultists armed to the teeth. I love humans as monsters, by the by. Their higher-than-average defences and their seeming habitual use of reach weapons can be devastating in a fight. This fight was particularly tough, of the four pre-boss fights; the choke point meant that only three of the characters were visible enough to hit, focusing enemy fire (I make a habit of spreading out my damage when I’m playing a story-based games. It makes the encounters tough, but not debilitating; I only go after a single character when they make me).

After dispatching the first of the Witch’s cultists, the party is confronted by the woman herself, and two of the undead gnolls she’s been keeping around. There’s a parley, from which the Witch leaves, mocking the party, to be replaced by her favourite surgeon, Scalpel. Scalpel got some basic healing powers, and kept buffing the undead up, which was fun to watch. I ran the buffs fast and loose, arbitrarily deciding that he would heal them to just above their bloodied point. The tactical decisions to be made (“Focus fire on the skeletons, or kill the healer? Oh god, they’re big and scary again...) were fun to watch from the position of an Evil God, and seeing them interact with Scalpel was a lot of fun. He was a bastard and I loved playing him.

The final encounter for the night was not, as suspected, against the Witch, but instead against the thing she has awakened with her new book. She taunts the party one more time before awakening the Colossus of Tarsil, a gargantuan creature of stone and flesh. The colossus was stolen part and parcel from Shadow of the Colossus, which is an amazing game for the PS2 should ever you get your hands on it. Basically, he’s immune to damage until you hit his weak spot. Each of the colossi in the game will have different weak spots, and each one will be activated by different skill checks. They managed to get this one turned off pretty quickly and start dishing out the damage, which didn’t take away from the fact that the fucker’s a level 5 solo and the group are all first level. The fight was tough, with burst effects that hit everyone on the map and 4d6 damage punches. I calmed down a little on the number of attacks, as they were down a player, and it was still a challenging fight, but I probably could have turned up the heat and it wouldn’t have gotten crazy. The next colossus will be harder. I hope to have at least two players drop into negatives from a boss fight.

There are some pictures of the boss-fight in action. JP will be e-mailing them to me soon. Also, I'll be talking a bit about some of the more interesting parts of the game a bit more in-depth later: the theme, the tone of the game in play, the skill challenge (and how I actually run them as opposed to how I write them), skill challenges in general, and why anyone would use a glow-in-the-dark My Little Cthulhu as a miniature.