Peculiar Curios: Chicken Hut

My favorite feature in Dragon Magazine was the Bazaar of the Bizarre. Magic items are one of the things I love most about Dungeons & Dragons, and the distinct lack of kick-ass magic items in D&D 4E makes me pretty sad. Much like I miss the awesome write-ups of monsters from the 3.5 era of D&D, I miss items that have personality and history attached to them. So I’m going to be providing some of that here.

This week’s entry is one of the best-loved inventions from my home campaign. Our first Big Bad, Babagya, was, as mentioned in previous posts, Baba Yaga from Slavic myth. She was a horrifying witch woman who stole babies and ate them, flew in cauldron she rowed through the air with her broomstick, and lived in a hut that walked around on chicken legs. As the campaign progressed and Babagya began to grow away from her source material, the player characters discovered a culture of nomadic dwarves that built houses with chicken feet, and managed to win one of these amazing prizes for themselves. Since then, it has become one of the party’s favorite NPCs as well as one of their favorite items, and I kind of think of it as the mascot for my campaign.

The chicken huts are works of alchemical and magical art. Roughly as intelligent as a four-year-old human, they are capable of independent movement and don’t need to be personally directed to each destination. Simple directions will usually suffice. They allow their tenants to cross huge distances with all of the comforts of home; you can read a book while crossing dozens of miles. They never tire, don’t need to eat or drink, and are happy, willing servants of the people who live within them.

The dwarves that create these marvels have never sold one for money, though they have been known to accept challenges that would reward the winner with such a home. These challenges are never easy, and are almost always skewed in favor of the dwarves. Those few who can claim to have won a chicken hut truly deserve one.

Average Chicken Hut
Gargantuan  Vehicle
HP 400; Bloodied 200 AC 4; Fortitude 20; Reflex 2; Will 4 Speed 12
Pilot and Crew
As a semi-sentient vehicle, the Chicken Hut does not require a pilot or crew to operate. However, it does need clear and simple instructions to get from one place to another (requiring a DC 15 Diplomacy check).
Load
Fifty medium creatures; forty tons of cargo.
Out of Control
An out of control Chicken Hut bucks and flails about, causing anyone inside it to fall prone unless they make a saving throw every round. After ten rounds, it begins running in a random direction until control is regained.
Floors
An average Chicken Hut consists of a single main floor with a porch. The roof tends to be flat and shingled. A chicken hut is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Outside, it appears to be a 4 square by 4 square structure. Inside, it is a comfortable 8 square by 8 square structure.
Chicken Legs
For every ten damage the Chicken Hut takes, its speed is reduced by two squares. When its speed is reduced to zero, it moves randomly, out of control.
Alignment  Unaligned    Languages Dwarven

 

My Group’s Chicken Hut
Gargantuan Vehicle
HP 400; Bloodied 200 AC 4; Fortitude 20; Reflex 4; Will 4 Speed 12, fly 8 (clumsy)
Pilot and Crew
As a semi-sentient vehicle, the Chicken Hut does not require a pilot or crew to operate. It is smart enough to understand basic directions and get from one place to another without difficulty.
Load
Sixty medium creatures; fifty tons of cargo.
Out of Control
An out of control Chicken Hut on the ground bucks and flails about, causing everyone inside it to fall prone unless they make a saving throw every round. After ten rounds, it begins running in a random direction until control is regained. An out of control Chicken Hut in the air moves in circles at half speed. Each round, it has a 50% chance of descending. It descends 5 squares for the first 10 rounds it is out of control. After 10 rounds, it descends 10 squares per round. An out of control chicken hut that hits the ground after descending more than 20 squares is destroyed.
Floors
The Chicken Hut is a single main floor with a porch. The roof is flat and shingled, with a ballista mounted there. The chicken hut is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Outside, it appears to be a 4-square by 4-square structure. Inside, it is a 14-square by 13-square structure. The ballista can be used to make a ranged basic attack with a +1 proficiency bonus, dealing 3d10 damage on a hit.
Chicken Legs
For every ten damage the Chicken Hut takes, its speed is reduced by two squares. When its speed is reduced to zero, it moves randomly, out of control.
Resources
The Chicken Hut never runs out of food or water. Those things are magically created in the larder, pantry and ice cellar. The chicken hut can also create a great variety of objects with various levels of success. The limits of this magic have not been fully explored.
Chicken Wings
For every ten damage the Chicken Hut takes, its fly speed is reduced by two squares. When its fly speed is reduced to zero it starts to fall out of control.
Standard Actions
Claws • At-Will
Attack: +21 vs. AC
Hit: 1d10 + 11 fire damage. On a critical hit, the target also takes 10 ongoing fire damage.
Alignment      Languages Dwarven, Common

Picture Jacked from Tumblr, but it doesn’t say from whom.

One of Our Best Fights Yet

We played a single encounter in our Bones of a Dead God campaign today, as one of our players needed to go to work early in the night. That single encounter took just under three hours to finish up. Here’s the stats I was running off of:

Four of those. Also, two Two-Headed Trolls from Dungeon Magazine. Though, I actually eneded up using three of each for the encounter as played. I toned the Two-Headed Trolls down from Elite, though, making them a bit more easy to handle. Also, I kept forgetting they had two heads, so I was playing them as straight-up brutes.
The fun bit of the encounter was less the creatures and more the layout. The players began above ground-level, literally getting the drop on their opponents. There was a cliff some eight squares away from where the characters could just fall, necessitating that they swing in on ropes (some athletics checks). Some did so, while others hung around in the back. The paladin was immediately hit with two hits of Quotable, pushing him down to dazed. There was a power-round in which the trolls took it to poor Triptych, dazed and beaten and then, very quickly unconscious (from failed saves on Quotable). One of the two-headed trolls picked up Triptych’s body and started using him as a club, going after Memphis and slapping him upside the head.
Triptych makes his save, waking up and magically trading places with a slightly-pissed-off Memphis. Trip delivers the final blow on the troll, and the troll starts to fall… Still holding Memphis in his hand. Memphis dives for a rope, but falls a long way before he catches anything. He slams into the cliff, taking a HORRIFYING 10d10 damage from the fall, the catch, and the crash. He survived, wounded from the event, but not unconscious (a very real threat to life here…). And he lost his hat.
For those unaware, whenever Memphis’ hat becomes threatened, there is a chance the character will go completely batshit crazy, run up to people, and fire bullets into them with wild abandon. So, losing his hat, he is super angry. He climbs up the cliff with a dislocated arm, frenzied, and starts shooting every bad guy that moves. Skull’s familiar, who is also her brother, who is also a dragon, dives for the hat, pulling him out of combat for the rest of the encounter, but he isn’t fast enough to get it right away.
Triptych gets back onto the ledge (having been brought by the troll, as a weapon, to beat on Memphis, who was not on the ledge), and starts laying down some smack, as well as healing his own broken self. He gets in a few good hits, takes down one of the trolls with the help of Kage (who made his first appearance in a while this session), and turns his attention on helping the injured (Memphis).
Skull, until this point, has been tossing bits of magic out from her safe position on the r opes. She can hit guys that are close to the edge of the cliff without having to move, and she’s more than happy to stay there until her space starts filling up with trolls. One gets close enough to attack her directly after she summons her new spider friend (from an item). The troll tries to swing back to the cliff, but the spider attacks the rope, cutting it with its jaws, and kills the troll attached to it. Skull is pretty impressed with this, until a troll knocks her ass off the cliff with its club. She flies off the cliff, falling out of reach of any of the ropes when, from below her, she’s hit by a little dragon wearing Memphis’ hat! Woot!
She crawls her way back up the cliff as a couple more trolls get picked off, and when there are two left, they start to spread out (much to her consternation). She blasts one full in the face, and kills it, but doesn’t like that she wasn’t able to kill the second in a huge blast attack. They clean up the last of the trolls, and camp out on the cliff for the next few hours before heading further down the cliffs.

Session Review

So I’m actually writing some of this session review before the session happens. I’ve got some pretty intense stuff happening this time around, and I figured it would be best if I could just get some of it down before the session goes live, and fill in the blanks when it’s done. Obviously, I’m going to erase this introduction before I publish the post, but it’s nice to have a draft to come back to when the session’s done.

The first thing to take a good look at is the Social Combat system. I’ve designed the Headmaster at the Extreme Library around this sort of encounter as a solo who will give up when he’s bloodied. With completely average damage rolls, it will take 19 hits to finish him off; not a ton, just enough to see how the system works and where it needs to be tweaked a bit. Here, have the whole encounter!

This is how things usually go at the Extreme Library:

 

1. You go to the front desk and request a book.
2. The bookaneers go and get that book for you. This can take weeks.
3. Depending on the level of difficulty getting the book, you pay a fee.
4. You get your book.

 

The player characters are on something of a time-budget, though, and can try and convince the woman a the front office to let them go after the book themselves. That will, of course, cost something, as the Extreme Library makes all of it's money from it's book delves. Determining whether or not the players will be able to get the books for themselves (and at what cost) will be a Diplomatic Encounter.

 

Roll Initiative: d20 + (half level + charisma modifier + misc. initiative mods)

 

On your Turn: Choose Bluff, Diplomacy or Intimidate as a Fight, Defend or Manouever action. Roll that skill vs. the opponent's Passive Insight. If the check is successful:

 

Fight: Deal 2d6 + Charisma Modifier damage.
Defend: Choose a creature. That creature may spend a healing surge.
Manouver: Opponent suffers a -2 skill penalty to Insight (save ends).

 

 

So looking at his stats, he’s got a social AC of 22, and a +14 to hit on most of his attacks. That’s pretty much in line with level 10 rolls, though he was hit a little too often, and didn’t do enough damage to be a real threat.

The player characters actually knocked this guy around pretty easily, and it was slowly turning into a slog at about the point he was bloodied. They were going on all-out attack, which is fine against a guy like this, but he simply wasn’t dishing out damage on a level to be a decent threat. I think the next social combat encounter is going to be a lot higher on the damage dealt, with a higher Insight check; I want to see people using Maneuver and Defense rolls as well as just straight-up attacking.

The second thing I’ve done today is fuck with movement a bit. I incorporated a bunch of notes that constitute something of a miniature skill challenge; success on the skill challenge means you don’t take boatloads of damage.

The Extreme Library is built into the side of a huge ocean-facing cliff. It falls thousands of feat, hangs miles over the ocean (held up by the Cage Spires), and some say that the bottom is some sort of dimensional rift to where every book ever made in every language, written on every possible material has come to rest. It is an insanely dangerous place, due to the huge number of dangerous creatures that guard the various tomes of incredible value here and the certain doom that awaits anyone who falls.

 

The "broomsticks" that the party has are basically useless here; you can only fly a number of squares above the ground equal to your speed, and the number of squares between the ground and the Library are "infinite."

 

To get around on the walls here, they will need climbing and rappelling gear. The DC to climb down, using appropriate equipment, is 5 (just with half their level, every PC makes it); the shelves make for easy climbing, as there are plenty of hand and foot holds, but it is exhausting work (DC 22 Endurance check every hour, or lose a healing surge).

 

The combat map will be flipped on it's side, today, with one side being "Up," the other "Down." You can move up to your speed Up with a DC 25 athletics check or half your speed Up with a DC 15 athletics check. You can move an extra two squares Down with no climb check.

 

With a DC 20 athletics check, you can also "swing," which allows you to "fly" up to half your speed side-to-side (and diagonally down), but you need to begin and end your move action on the "ground."  While swinging you can make a melee basic attack as a minor action once any time during movement, without provoking an opportunity attack. You may swash your buckle at any time during this movement or attack.

 

Attacks that require two hands CAN be done, but provoke an Immediate Interrupt from Gravity that slides the character two squares.

 

If you fall prone, fall ten squares and take 2d10 damage. Your rope will save you from most of the damage, but not all of it.

The party made it through the first encounter using these rules, and while they didn’t look any different on the map, the shift in perspective from top-down to side-scroller resulted in a few moments that couldn’t have happened otherwise. Things like “falling as a charge” or “jumping on the gargoyle’s back” that would be completely ridiculous in a top-down map orientation.

We fought some bookend gargoyles, and a bookworm (just normal gargoyles, and a scythejaws that had its speed reduced to zero). Good times were had.

Minions You Learn to Hate

We fought a fellow called Angus von Lazerstein in our last session, and he was a douchebag. The session was actually much less about Angus himself, though, and much more about the hordes of minions he’d created in service to Babagya. I’ve rather changed my idea of what a minion is supposed to be since the first of those encounters. Minions are not cannon-fodder so much as they are suicide bombers.
We’ve had a recurring theme with the minions in this game. The players had been making cracks about Babagya’s flying around in a cauldron, suggesting that the image she evoked was much like a Koopa, dropping troopas from her bowl. So I started dropping in turtle minions, and after a few appearances, Awakened Iron Skull revamped them for her little escapade as Exalted Iron Skull.
In our first session, we faced a man called Scalpel who was healing Babagya’s undead gnolls. She has been busy trying to replace Scalpel and has finally found her man in the form of Angus von Lazerstein, a genius of lightshows and a powerful bard capable of, quite literally, melting faces with his solos. Having learned lessons from Skull (spontaneous minion production, minions made from elements, really good hair), Lazerstein set to work creating the perfect minion army.
I think the thing that is most ingenious about minions is “when they die” effects. To use minions effectively, you need to either create situations in which the minions are going to be mostly out of harm’s way, or you need to ensure that when they die, something crazy happens. The first wave of Lazerstein’s minion army created a blast of blinding light when they died, and left a smaller aura of blindness behind them. They had originally been flavored as turtles crafted from smoke, but when I rebuilt Lazerstein to focus on radiant damage, I shifted them over to flash-bangs.
The second set were a lot more deadly; they exploded in a burst of lasers and light and pyrotechnics. When they died, they had a burst two attack that did the minion’s normal damage, and an additional 1d6 radiant damage. This fight, built entirely out of minions and a single stronger creature a few levels below the party, was one of the most tactically entertaining matches of the night. The players were constantly trying to find ways to kill some that wouldn’t hurt the front-line fighters, and maneuver themselves into positions that would cause the least harm. They were pretty pissed when the single non-minion baddie was able to summon more minions into the middle of the battle, but managed to handle them in good stride.
The last battle was a mixture of the two previous types, with ranged minions on little platforms away from and raised above the main fight platform. Angus von Lazerstein was a solo a few levels below the level of the party, with HORDES of minions surrounding him. He was blessed with an aura that made his minions indestructible as long as they were adjacent to him, and had some powers that would allow him to spawn new minions as the turns progressed. Some quick thinking on the part of the players got Lazerstein away from the minions and then dropped him off of the main battlefield into the dark caverns below. While he was saved by his turtle companions, it would be a while before he could come back to harass the player characters again. With him out of the way, the players had no trouble getting up the rest of the stairs and into the city of Sternum.
I really enjoyed playing around with various kinds of minions, and I will probably be bringing them back for at least one battle before we reach Paragon. We’re already at level nine (I’ve been awarding double experience and setting up some very difficult challenges), and we only have a little while to go before we get into the meat of the campaign. As a change of pace, the next couple of sessions will involve a minimum minion count; it would be nice for some of the controller’s daily powers to actually matter in the future.
Next session: The City of Sternum and the Extreme Library.
Also, Glitterdust has a new look. I won’t be changing any of my old posts to look better in the new format, though I may go back and change the font size in the template. There are a few adjustments I need to make before I’ll be completely happy with it (like getting rid of the sponsored link spot at the bottom), but for the most part I like the new look.

A Recap in Short Form

I also haven’t written anything closely resembling a session review in a while, so here’s some stuff to catch you up: our heroes saved a drow city on the Spine of the World from two evil colossi that were hopping around Godzilla-style. In the party that followed, Awakened Iron Skull, got completely shit-faced drunk and ended up naked on an alter to the Dead God that our nemesis, Babagya, worships. The next day, the rest of the crew, plus Skull’s sister, went out looking for her, rediscovered a few of the crazy things they’d done the night before, and fought some of Babagya’s cultists. When they finally found Skull, she was flying, covered in lightening, and commanding a small army of Babagya’s turtle minions (who were made entirely of electricity). The heroes beat her down, brought her back to whatever passes for sanity in the girl’s head, and quickly skedaddled out of town.
One of the newest members of the crew, a paladin to Hagaar (the Horrible), knows about a kick-ass library in the city of Sternum where they could probably find information on Babagya’s plans, her cult, whatever. This library is similar to that of Morpheus, in that it has a copy of every book that has ever been imagined – including That Romance Novel I Planned to Write About a Girl Made of Putty Falling in Love with a Snowstorm, But Never Got Around To. It’s a little different from Morpheus’ library in that it’s built into a cliff face, it’s guarded by a horde of impossible monsters, it’s not organized in a way that any creature alive understands, and the most important books are all chained down, locked up and trapped.
So they make for Sternum by airship, but the recent uproar on t he Spine, and it’s subsequent non-uproar, has pissed off a few of the local dragons that have their eye on it’s fertile nesting ground. There’s an airship battle, in which a barrel-rolling airship, surrounded by a halo of lightnening and spitting flaming balista bolts everywhere crashes into a catastrophe dragon and kills it, but leaves our heroes stranded on one of the Cage cliffs. This cliff is the home of a backwards-as-fuck redneck village of Dragonborn and their draconic mayor. They spend the night in the home of the only non-racist dragonborn and then pillage and kill the entire village, including the mayor. They also got a pretty kick-ass portrait of Mayor Dragon wearing a fez from his office.
Now we’re going up the Cage the hard way; we’re taking the stairs.

On the Topic of Mayor Bear

In our most recent session of the Bones of a Dead God campaign, for which I still need to write a session review, the party fought a swordscale dragon, which was just a reskinned Young Iron Dragon. The dragon was the mayor of a village of Dragonborn that live on the Cage Cliffs, the jagged edges where the ribs have cracked and formed into fertile land.
I have a history of putting quadrupeds in positions of authority in villages. In one of our many D&D Fight Nights, the player characters were searching in vain for the mayor they had been sent to assassinate. They had actually walked right past him a couple of times, as the mayor had polymorphed himself into a pig, and was on his way out of the castle with the rest of the livestock in the morning. They managed to find and kill him, but it was noted that even this was not the first time I had a non-humanoid creature in the role of mayor.
May I have the most distinct honor and pleasure to introduce to you, Mayor Bear:
In one of the very first Fight Nights, I set the characters to finding some random dingus in a village that had been taken over by goblins. They were having a hell of a time finding the thing, going for the obvious Red Herring in the village square fountain, and then thinking it was the glowing axe being used by a hobgoblin warrior. Neither of these things were actually the dingus; the dingus was locked safely in a box in one of the store rooms of the market-place.
Before they could get to the store room, however, they met Mayor Bear, who was a bear in a fez that wanted very much to hurt them. I don’t think I came up with any good reason for why Mayor Bear was the mayor of the village, but it was established that he was, in fact, the duly elected official in these here parts. That’s actually something of a common thread with my quadruped mayors; they’re all elected.
Now, you could take this to be some comment on democracy if you wanted to. I mean, when taken from that point of view, it’s an interesting metaphor; Mayor Bear would symbolize qualities in the politicians I was meaning to satirize, be it is his overt aggression or his attempts to seem like everyone else while so obviously apart from them (the fez). But really, it was just something I came up with on the fly that I thought was kind of funny.
The same was true of Mayor Pig. He could have been a symbol for the cowardly politicians he was meant to represent, showing their gluttony and ineptness. But mostly he was polymorphed into a pig because I thought it was a clever way out of the castle.
And finally, the Swordscale Dragon could symbolize the unbridled power given to politicians when we elect them, the ridiculous sway they hold over a group of people. But mostly he was the mayor because he was the session end-boss, and I wanted him to have a reason to be in a village full of dragonborn.
What this has led me to is this: before we can begin any true discussion about the symbols and meanings behind a piece of art, we must first consider what might be blatantly obvious to the creator. It may just be that whatever symbol we’re analyzing is something the creator found interesting, or entertaining, or is just a whimsy. Something to consider.

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. ^_^ 

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.

The Most Metal Game Ever

So I've decided to put Undermountain to rest for a bit, and wait for Ian to come up with the next encounter for us. This is supposed to be a collaborative process, and while I'm totally down for taking his idea and running with it, I'd prefer to give the idea some time to breathe and let Ian get some input going. He's got a couple of weeks to make that happen before I jack the idea entirely. ^_^

Instead, I'm going to talk a bit about the first adventure I want to run for the Bones of a Dead God campaign. I suppose it's too much to ask for that potential players of mine avoid reading this blog, so I can't exactly get into too much detail about the first adventure or anything, but I'd like to talk a bit about the theme, the flavor and the set-dressing of the thing.

There are a few ways you can take a game setting like this one. The first thought through my head was "gothic Cthulhu horror" as we try to stop the evil cultists from waking up the dead god that makes up our whole plane of existence. Which was pretty dope. But then I got to thinking about crazy cultists, and how Rasputin (the guy that lives in my head next to the heading "cultist") wouldn't look out of place at all on a metal album cover. Tattered black robes, wispy black beard shot with streaks of gray, long black hair blowing in the wind as he holds out his hand toward you, the heart of a small child, still beating, gripped within. Yes. Rasputin-cultist is fucking metal.

Which forced the whole thing to shift in my head to become this huge, over-the-top heavy metal rock opera about stopping monsters and cultists from waking this dead god and bringing about the End of All Things. There's a very metal edge to that. Huge, macho barbarians oiled in the blood of their enemies, streetwise elven rangers dressed in spiked leather, sultry witches that look more like suicide girls than Elminster... Love it. Impossibly high castles looming over intricate cave networks of doom. Long-haired, wild-bearded cultists destroying the world. Lots of pentagrams, blood sacrifices, images of skeletons in dark robes, piles of skulls, tentacles and pig heads, anything Brom ever painted. Yeah. That's goooooood.

I'm thinking the first villain is going to be a fully-statted out cleric a few levels above the main crew. She'll be based on Baba Yaga, using a broom as her holy implement and flying about in a cauldron forged from the skulls of the children she's eaten. She'll be the leader of this death cult. The first adventure will have something to do with retrieving a very important book that has been stolen from the cobbler of the town of Capp. There will be many fights with Rasputin-cultists, a boss-fight with someone who isn't Baba Yaga, and the shocking discovery that the world is going to end in three months if y'all don't stop that bitch. ^_^

Also, I'm thinking each player should have their own WWF-style theme song. Oh fuck yes.