Store-Bought

So E. had run his first game, and I had had the day of my life. And there we were, still sitting in South Carolina, wanting to play some more and sitting on the module I'd picked up at the store.

Let me say a few words about this module. I've already mentioned the proliferation of materials, and their increased expense, and perhaps increased quality as well. This module, which went for about $21 and bore the name the Barrow of the Forgotten King, looked good in the store: cheaper than the big adventure packs that seemed to require a commitment akin to that of the Peace Corps, better quality than the rows of cheap modules that gleefully advertised themselves as "dungeon crawls." BFK looked solidly in the middle.

So a bit after E. completed his first stint as a GM, we all sat down to take a swing at BFK. I decided to try to work it into the narrative of E's half-orc character and his ever-helpful uncle K. Which means we need to hark back to their last adventure below ground, in the ruins of some nameless castle near Bladesbat Cave. This place proved such a treasury that, in due course, back they went -- their highest aspiration being a bit of treasure,, and their tribe's greatest hope, no doubt, that the larders would soon bulge again with grick staples of every decription: salted, dried, fried, boiled, broiled, stuffed, and thus onward.

The castle ruins proved to have further reaches. Fairly bold by now, they returned to where they had been, then pressed on, into the narrow crack from which had issued the carrion crawler that stunned Thorgun, leading to a dramatic rescue by the outgunned uncle K. This crack wound its way around and through the guts of the mountain. This fit in well, as we had explored two natural caverns in Virginia and North Carolina (a practice I heartily recommend, by the way) on our way southward, so I was able to call on our joint memories of dank walls and the dripping dark. (A staple of every cave tour is the moment, toward the end, where they turn out all the lights, inviting you to "experience total darkness" and imagine the tribulations of the boys who discovered the cave, then lost their light deep inside it. That one, Linwood Caverns I believe, was distinguished by having a stream running OUT of the inside of the hill in which the cave sits, a stream inhabited by fish that don't seem to care whether they're underground or not. Our intrepid first explorers, having dashed their light into some dark crevice, allegedly found their way out by following the water.)

THIS cavern, in any event, threaded its way deep off into the mountain, but our semi-orcish pair were untroubled by this, since their race gives them "darkvision." E. recently expressed some curiosity as to how darkvision actually works. The Player's Handbook described DV dispassionately as the ability to see up to 60 feet in black and white, even in the complete absence of light. On the other hand, The Order of the Stick, a rather adult D&D-based online comic strip that E. frequents, depicts darkvision as two flashlight beams emanating from a character's eyes. I had to inform it was more boring than this.

Boring or not, it was sufficient to allow them to pick their way slowly through the mountain, and to emerge into ever more lighted caves that eventually gave way to a hillside grotto thriving with their less-than-favorite beast -- more carrion crawlers, qyite the nest of them, and Thorgun, still smarting from being stunned the last time out, wanted nothing whatever to do with them.
so they made their way back through the caves, and into the dungeon "proper."

What else to explore? There was still the long hallway with its upset pavings and burrow-holes. The holes were tempting, at least to the orcish, (as I may have mentioned in an earlier posting), but filled, as expected, with prodigious reddish ants. After beating down a few of these creatures, they retreated, abandoning any idea of fully exploring the nest.

There remained only the dark corner, where the ruined hall turned a corner.

Standing at that corner, they could see that the hall rain away, straight as an arrow, beyond the reach of their sight. just at the corner there was an inscription in the wall. They started down the hallway, but after a few hundred yards of walking, lost their nerve. The ancient stonework ran on and on, with out a break or stutter, and they lost all hope it would come to an end. they returned to its beginning and somehow, though neither of them could write, copied the inscription as best they could, intending to bring it back to the Bladesbat shamaness.

The shamaness was named Vishara. She was elderly, and not in a good mood. She scrutinized the copied inscription, and asked whether they'd been near a park. It was pointed out to here that they lived in a bat-inhabited cave, in a dank forest beside a swamp beside a set of mountains known for their dragon races, and had just come back from exploring underground ruins, so no, there had been no park involved anywhere along the way. She pronounced herself baffled as to what the term "Park Highway" might mean, but then prevailed upon Thorgun to try to redraw part of the inscription.

"Dark," it turned out was the word. Dark Highway. And writing this I now remember that I have already written it, because it was at just this point that I recounted the history of the term. Hmm, the same story told twice, in forgetfulness. Well, perhaps that brings me back to where I was before.

The Dark Highway, as you might imagine, was a very ancient road. This one ran away in a straight line, so far as was known, for the human town of Kingsholm. This was my hook into the BFK module, which was set in Kingsholm. But the road, so far as was known, was older than orcs or men. (I can't help channeling here H.P. Lovecraft's overwrought but atmospheric old story The Festival, in which the protagonist returns to a New England town called Kingsport. "Then before me I saw frosty Kingsport outspread in the gloaming ... antiquity hovering on winter-whitened wings over gables and gambrel roofs ... fanlights and small-paned windows gleaming out to join cold Orion and the archaic stars." And then something about a secret "older than Memphis, and mankind" but I digress).

For nebulous reasons based mostly in plot necessity, the Bladesbat head ordered our heroes to go explore the Dark Highway, even reaching Kingsholm if necessary. E, I will admit, was not entirely persuaded of the logic, not even with the knowledge that was "where the adventure was going to happen." Thus burdened from the outset with contrivance, the adventure unfolded.

It did not unfold entirely smoothly. I had read the module a bit, but not enough. Modules, if I can digress, have evolved since the days of the early G1-G3 releases. It's not clear to me they've evolved all that well. The Dragonlance adventures, for example, were heavily script, with, if I recall, fairly elaborate plot flowcharts, sections of narrative the GM was to read verbatim to the players, and sections containing data and facts for GM use. BFK was not as heavily scripted as this, but it still followed an odd division: the first section detailed each encounter from a narrative perspective, but all of the hard facts about an encounter, such as monster stats, were put in a parallel, denser structure in the second half of the module, like a set of large endnotes, so that one had to constantly flip back and forth between the somewhat connected narrative and the supporting data. This only compounded some of the other problems we were to experience.

The first one was unfamiliarity with an existing product. In my line of work (software development, and the management thereof), we refer to this as "integration risk" or "existing system risk". It's one thing to go in and build a brand-new system for someone, from scratch, that needn't link to any other system or product. It may take longer, but it will ideally have a strong conceptual purity, and the designers (us) will have complete facility with the product and its design. On the other hand, if we need to build onto or otherwise use or reuse something someone else built, we first need to learn that system or product. This will take time, and runs the risk that we'll never fully grasp the concept or design, and constantly be encountering small surprises and "oh wait" moments.

No different the task of running and adventure someone else wrote, a task made harder the less one actually reads and prepares! So the Barrow of the Forgotten King was plagued with these little issues from the beginning.

Thorgun and his uncle navigated the length of the Dark Highway, sixty-some miles under the earth. They emerged, after some days walking the dark and subsisting on grick pemmican, in a thicket on the hills over Kingsholm. Pushing through the brush, they came suddenly upon an ancient statue, overgrown (more details from module?). From that vantage, they could see downhill toward a cemetery, and below it the town of Kingsholm. and as they stood wondering what to do, they became aware of a sound from nearby, like nothing so much as digging.

Unfortunately, I had already miscalculated. The module was fairly carefully designed to start in the village and work its way up through the cemetry, finally,perhaps, to the area of the statue. I had managed to start the module at a point well toward its end. Ah well.

And now I need to actually FIND the module to jog my memory further. And so far, no luck. Stay tuned.