Actual Play - Death by Dragon in The Incandescent Grottoes

My regular Friday night gaming group has been playing through Gavin Norman's The Incandescent Grottoes. It's a dungeon that's full of caverns of glowing crystals, which is what it's named for, and also classic D&D monsters like fungi, slimes, and the undead. And, oh yeah, a dragon!

 
Leighton Connor from Akashic Library volunteered to be our referee for this one, since he's run this particular adventure before, for a group of kids and teens. Peter Kisner from Fantasy Heartbreak Workshop is the other player besides me in this game. 

 

I want to shout out a fun incident that happened in one of our recent sessions. As ever in these kind of situations, it's not possible to tell this story without spoiling a few possible surprises from the adventure, although I've tried my best to keep that to a minimum.

 

After our initial party of four got cut in half by some early dangers, Peter and I each rolled up two characters to accompany Gone Girl the thief and Gildur the dwarf. One of my new characters became a terrible wizard, and I made the other into a pretty good elf. The elf got a bonus language, which I rolled to select at random, and the dice decided he knew how to speak Dragon. I decided to make that a focal point for his personality. I gave him magic missile as his lone spell, used his remaining cash after getting armor and weapons to buy oil, and named him Flamethrower. (The wizard also got a bonus language - Regional Dialect. Like I said, terrible.)

 
So, when our newly enlarged party learned that there might be a dragon living in one part of the dungeon, obviously I had Flamethrower suggest that we should go visit it, so he could try talking to it. Peter agreed, because why not? How often do you actually encounter the monster the game is named after? Plus, we hoped it would go well. I thought Flamethrower might be able to engage the dragon in conversation, offer to do it a favor in exchange for treasure, that sort of thing.

 

We experienced one ominous omen on our way to the dragon's lair - a random encounter with a shadow monster. This was a pretty tough fight. Gone Girl used her only silver arrow, Flamethrower used up his one casting of magic missile, and Gildur made very good use of the magic sword he found earlier. I can't honestly say that this encounter changed the outcome of what happened next, but like, it was a very bad sign, and depleted us of resources that theoretically could have been useful.

 

Okay, so we leave the tunnel and enter the cavern where we think the dragon will be. It's not there, but we see another tunnel exit at the far end. In a loud voice, Flamethrower starts declaiming a polite greeting, "Well met, noble dragon, allow me to extend our most felicitous greetings to your royal eminence," and so on.
 

The dragon Kramers into the room, rolling up looking absolutely crazed with hunger and fury. It turns out the thing has only bestial intelligence. It shouts the only phrase it knows "EAT YOU!" and lunges for us, causing everyone to try to scatter.

 

I imagine this dragon looking like this angry weirdo from Shin Godzilla

We all wanted to run away, but unfortunately, the dragon won the initiative, and let loose with its breath weapon - a cloud of knockout gas. Everyone lost their saving throw except for Peter's gnome, Schnoz, and they all fell unconscious to the floor.

  

It turns out there was one spell left that the party didn't cast when we were fighting the shadows, and Peter had Schnoz cast it now, an illusion spell called spook that inspires temporary terror. And, in what I can only describe as a Looney Tunes moment, it actually works! Picture Droopy the Dog holding up a grotesque Halloween mask, and this big angry dragon suddenly recoiling in horror and scampering away at top speed, whimpering like a scared dog.

 

Who knows what terror lurks in the hearts of dragons? The spook spell knows.

The spell has a very short duration, so we only had a couple combat rounds of safety while the dragon ran away, came to its senses, and then came thundering back, even angrier than before. Schnoz managed to wake up Gildur the dwarf, and they each lugged another character to safety by retreating down the tunnel we came in. They took lucky Gone Girl and Peter's third character, leaving my other two behind, including Flamethrower, because this was all his fault.

 

The dragon came back into its main lair and started savaging my two unconscious characters, I think starting with the terrible wizard. Schnoz tried to wake up the two he rescued we are still sleeping, but to no avail. Gildur lights a torch and throws it across the cavern onto Flamethrower's supine body. You'd think being lit on fire would wake him up, but no.

 

The dragon wins initiative again, finishes killing Flamethrower, and starts advancing toward the rest of the party. When the initiative passes to us players, the torch lights Flamethrower's collection of oil on fire, and he explodes in a giant ball of flame, harmlessly, a safe distance behind the dragon.

I should note that at no point have we made any attempt whatsoever to actually fight this thing. After our attempted diplomacy failed, Peter and I have just been trying to get our characters to run away. Everything that's happened so far has been based on saving throws and initiative rolls. The dragon didn't even need to roll to hit our unconscious characters, just for damage, and even that was mostly a courtesy, considering they're defenseless.

 

As the enraged dragon stomped toward them, Schnoz and Gildur lugged the other two down a side passage toward and underground river, hoping that the current would quickly carry us far enough away, as long as we could all float until we got to shore. In the first bit of good luck we'd had in awhile, the shock of the cold water woke the two sleepers up. 

 

Now, swimming in armor is dangerous. Gone Girl was wearing leather, and got lucky again, so she survived to make landfall with Schnoz and Peter's remaining character. Gildur the dwarf was wearing plate armor, and he did not get lucky, so he sank and drowned, taking the magic sword (which was almost our only treasure up to that point!) with him.

 

This session was an absolutely magnificent failure, and I loved it!

 

 

The Incandescent Grottoes

 

My In-Person Summer Campaign - Into the Redlands

One of my in-person players is spending the summer abroad, so our adventures on the Island of the Blue Giants is taking a hiatus until he gets back.

In the mean-time, I've been thinking about how to try to get people together to play under the following conditions:

• Not every player can or needs to attend every session

• (this means that the millieu needs to be something less outre than the Blue Giants)

• (this also means that the structure of play needs to be expeditions: out and back each session)

• The campaign setting needs to be low-prep on my end

• (this means that I will be using a combination of pre-packaged adventuring sites, and procedural-generation rules to create the setting as we play)

• (this also means that both the rules and the feel need to be fairly consistent between the various components of play to limit the prep-time needed to convert rules or re-skin setting details)

• The rules need to be basic enough that my players can grasp them easily, clear enough that I can make rulings without having to keep looking up details, and interesting enough that I'm not tempted to waste a lot of time bolting on fiddly bits as options

• (this means that actual B/X and Labyrinth Lord are out as rulesets, I'm afraid, and it also means I'm not going to try to cobble together my own preferred BX-ish house rules for this)

So, I've decided that I'm going to use Lesserton & Mor to establish a home-base for players to launch expeditions from, and to provide their first potential adventuring site: a ruined ancient city, which will be procedurally generated during play. I'm also going to use In the Shadow of Mount Rotten to provide the second source of adventure: expeditions into the procedurally-generated monster-occupied wilderness. And finally, I'll be using Barrowmaze as the third main adventuring site, the giant necropolis of the ancient city. Treasures and dangers abound in all three locations, and each session's players can decide where to set out. There may be other adventuring sites (particularly in the wilderness) that are discovered during play.

I'm going to be using Adventurer Conqueror King as my ruleset for character creation, and I should have little or no trouble integrating the monsters and other setting details from my three Labyrinth Lord setting books. I find the way ACK handles attacks (essentially, roll higher than THAC0 plus ascending AC) to be easy enough to grasp to avoid slow-downs during play, and I'm particularly fond of the some of their classes and especially the templates in the Player's Companion.

Human adventurers can choose from the following character classes:

• Assassin
• Bard
• Cleric
• Explorer
• Fighter
• Mage
• Shaman
• Thief
• Venturer

Creating a dwarf character requires having Constitution 9 or higher. Dwarves can choose from the following:

• Dwarven Delver
• Dwarven Machinist
• Dwarven Vaultguard

Creating an elf character requires having Intelligence 9 or higher. Elves can choose from the following:

• Elven Courtier
• Elven Enchanter
• Elven Ranger

The town of Lesserton sits on the southern coast of what its human inhabitants call either Red Island or the Redlands. The Lessers eke out a living farming a narrow strip of fertile land along the southern coast. Red Island itself is far to the north of the continent, rarely visited by other humans except for occasional visits by missionaries, merchants, and raiders. Just to the west of Lesserton sits the ruined Imperial city of Mor, once a great metropolis, now a reminder of the Empire's collapse and the dark days that followed its fall. Just to the east is the Maze, a great underground necropolis dotted with above-ground barrows and cairns where citizens of Imperial Mor buried their dead. To the north lies the towering visage of Mount Rendon and the great expanse of the Redlands, an island mostly occupied by monsters, who in their own tongue call the peak Mount Rotten and the island itself the Rotlands.

Sessions will take place in-person, usually on Saturday evenings, as often as I can get at least two players able to meet at my house or host me at theirs.

Index: Snails

Below is an index of snail-related materials I might use in my own games.

At the time of creation, this Index has content from Dyson's Dodecahedron's "Snail Lords of the Salt Flats" mini-setting, (which may someday be published by Lost Pages,) and from Bernie the Flumph!'s "Blorgamorg, the Chthonic Snail" patron for DCC. More categories, as well as more entries within the existing categories, will be added as it becomes available.

from Dyson's Dodecahedron:
Snail Lord Character Class
Polearms of the Snail Lords
Dark Spire through Salted Lands
Twelve Bodies in the Firmaments of the Salt Flats

"Snail Lord" by Dyson Logos

from Bernie the Flumph!:
Patron: Blorgamorg, the Chthonic Snail
Invoke Patron, Patron Taint, and Spellburn (Blorgamorg)
Patron Spell 1: Snail Mail (Blorgamorg)
Patron Spell 2: Shell Shelter (Blorgamorg) (formerly planned as 3rd level spell "Shell House")
Patron Spell 3: Love Dart (Blorgamorg) (formerly planned as 2nd level spell "Slobber Globber Lobber")
Index of Blorgamorg entries on the Bernie the Flumph! blog
Crepuscular zine, issue 1, featuring Blorgamorg and "The Sanctum of the Snail" adventure (available for sale in print and pdf, note: I playtested this adventure)

As an aside, I keep wanting to call this patron "Blorg-ma-gorg" instead.

"Blorgamorg" by Josh Burnett

from Le Chaudron Chromatique:

Snail Flailer Character Class 

"Snail Flailer" by Evelyn Moreau

Update Log:

22 Feb 2017: Index created 

31 Mar 2017: Snail Flailer Character Class added

2 Sept 2017: "Shell Shelter" and "Love Dart" spells added, Blorgamorg index added, artist information for "Snail Flailer" corrected
6 May 2018: "Sanctum of the Snail" adventure added