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.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Out of Order
One of the things I Do Not Like about Blogger is that it publishes posts in the order in which you began them, not the order in which you finally got enough done to press the Publish button.
As a result, those of you who have seen the Not Fair post might conclude that nothing new has happened. But there is indeed a new post, down below Not Fair, whose only sin is being started early.
Well, at some point I'll determine how to better sway the posting order, but till then I'll put this note out as a signpost to the fact that something has actually changed. The errant post is called The Day of Your Life.
As a result, those of you who have seen the Not Fair post might conclude that nothing new has happened. But there is indeed a new post, down below Not Fair, whose only sin is being started early.
Well, at some point I'll determine how to better sway the posting order, but till then I'll put this note out as a signpost to the fact that something has actually changed. The errant post is called The Day of Your Life.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Not fair
Some zealous readers press me with charges that it's been a month since I last posted. Not true! I mutter. It can't be, it truly deeply CAN'T.
And it isn't. Not technically, not quite a month, not here and now in the Gregorian West. Perhaps I have sinned on Roman terms, or Mayan, but one of our modern months pass by? Not so. A mere 26 days, no more, skinnier than even the skinniest of the twelve. Pish.
(There then followed a long apologetic focusing chiefly on the writer's many burdens, his foolish commitments to other causes, a jumbled and wholly unpersuasive farrago of nightmarish tales concerning book revisions, page proofs, conference papers, technical briefs and the like, all of which he would have us believe he signed on to execute in the space of a few short months. Cry me a river, as an ex-colleague used to say, though he tended to spice it up with a few expletives depending on audience).
This is a way of warning the reader that this post will be ... short, I believe is the current term. In the place of narrative, I offer something even more precious: media. One must stay current, after all.
Firstly, I just offer you a look at what might be considered a well-stocked bookshelf. Certainly nothing of the sort graced my shelves at eight or so:
I'll indulge the fiction, perhaps not absolute, that the image speaks for itself, and move onward. E. for a long time has been interested in how one might make a movie. Periodically he announces he will be a movie maker when he grows. (Just this morning he said to me "Dad, who gets paid when a movie gets made? When you say it cost a lot to make, who got the money?" We then have a discussion of movie economics, in which I can draw on many hours of bonus Lord of the Rings features in which the movie animators describe the one thousand days they worked continuously on Peter Jackson's miniatures). So we've been talking about movie technology, and then just recently we broke down and decided our young ones were no longer too young for Star Wars, which led to a discussion of "older" special effects technology, and how the Hoth walkers are jittery because they are using a form of stop-motion, and somewhere in all of this I decided to put my money where my mouth was and make good my claim that simple stop-motion animation was "not all that hard."
Indeed it isn't, but then, the results aren't all that good, but it gives me an excuse to experiment with YouTube, and another to divert your attention with colors and, in this case, some movement.
Hmm, what's more, I find YouTube seems to have cut off the last little bit! Nothing dramatic, just the jaws gaping ever wider.
Well, I regret the meagerness of this post, but a long bout of proofing and reading copy edits looms sharply in the foreground ...
And it isn't. Not technically, not quite a month, not here and now in the Gregorian West. Perhaps I have sinned on Roman terms, or Mayan, but one of our modern months pass by? Not so. A mere 26 days, no more, skinnier than even the skinniest of the twelve. Pish.
(There then followed a long apologetic focusing chiefly on the writer's many burdens, his foolish commitments to other causes, a jumbled and wholly unpersuasive farrago of nightmarish tales concerning book revisions, page proofs, conference papers, technical briefs and the like, all of which he would have us believe he signed on to execute in the space of a few short months. Cry me a river, as an ex-colleague used to say, though he tended to spice it up with a few expletives depending on audience).
This is a way of warning the reader that this post will be ... short, I believe is the current term. In the place of narrative, I offer something even more precious: media. One must stay current, after all.
Firstly, I just offer you a look at what might be considered a well-stocked bookshelf. Certainly nothing of the sort graced my shelves at eight or so:
I'll indulge the fiction, perhaps not absolute, that the image speaks for itself, and move onward. E. for a long time has been interested in how one might make a movie. Periodically he announces he will be a movie maker when he grows. (Just this morning he said to me "Dad, who gets paid when a movie gets made? When you say it cost a lot to make, who got the money?" We then have a discussion of movie economics, in which I can draw on many hours of bonus Lord of the Rings features in which the movie animators describe the one thousand days they worked continuously on Peter Jackson's miniatures). So we've been talking about movie technology, and then just recently we broke down and decided our young ones were no longer too young for Star Wars, which led to a discussion of "older" special effects technology, and how the Hoth walkers are jittery because they are using a form of stop-motion, and somewhere in all of this I decided to put my money where my mouth was and make good my claim that simple stop-motion animation was "not all that hard."
Indeed it isn't, but then, the results aren't all that good, but it gives me an excuse to experiment with YouTube, and another to divert your attention with colors and, in this case, some movement.
Hmm, what's more, I find YouTube seems to have cut off the last little bit! Nothing dramatic, just the jaws gaping ever wider.
Well, I regret the meagerness of this post, but a long bout of proofing and reading copy edits looms sharply in the foreground ...
Monday, June 11, 2007
The Day of Your Life
Bear in mind that we are entering, in this retelling, maybe day 3 of E's discovery of D&D. As it turns out, this was more than enough time for him to decide to try his hand at being a gamemaster -- bless all eight years of him. After we returned from the game store, he announced it was time for HIM to make a dungeon, and for me to make a character. Well, there's a lot to be said for fostering ambition. So I let him tell me what he wanted to do.
E began to narrate the "things" his dungeon needed to have: an incubator, a training room, a secret passage, an arena ... As he went, he drew inspiration from a dungeon cross-section featured prominently in the DMG. I have to admit, the picture has a powerful appeal -- makes me want to sit down and start hammering out a dungeon myself:
Well, guided by this architecturally correct, exploded-view dungeon, E continued to enumerate the key features of his dungeon. Once we had a list of a dozen or so, I began to draw a map that incorporated them. We went back and forth on each item, trying to decide where to incorporate it and how it should look. I'll share our results, though really, they're none too legible. I'll do my best to transcribe the legend.
The legend, as best I can read it, goes like this:
1. Orc guards; giant owl statue; thick wall
2. Dueling ground/arena
3. Training room
4. Secret passage with dragon eye lock (as on the cover of the Monster Manual, seen in this image):
5. Incubator
6. Orc barracks
7. Weapon room
8. Dining hall
9. Kitchen
10. Forge
11. Storeroom
12. Destrachan training
13. (In E's own hand) Caverns!
With the dungeon designed, of course I needed a character. I rolled a dwarf, a ranger I believe, named Eragol. Well it rapidly transpired that Eragol was not going to enter this dungeon alone. No, he was going as part of a large gang of fairly high level characters, all NPCs. And this was just as well, since the power behind this particular dungeon was a Dark Sorceror of level 20 or thereabouts. Vaguely skeletal, possibly undead, generally bad news.
The gang of us pushed our way into the dungeon. It turned out that the parts of the dungeon we had actually drawn and designed were the innocuous parts. The orc guards didn't bother us much: apparently too busy doing arena training and incubating monsters. The real dungeon was reached by going straight downstairs from the first room, through the secret door with the dragon eye lock. THERE, it turned out, was the real dungeon. We proceeded through the dark. Eragol didn't get to do very much: the place was haunted by a number of hideous Monster Manual creatures called destrachans, eyeless horrors which are capable of locating you by a form of sonar, then bursting through solid rock walls to assault you (the orcs above, as you might note from the legend, were given to training them). My crack squad of NPCs dealt with most of these, but we did encounter some lower-level cave dwellers, such as cloakers, which Eragol handily dispatched. Finally, a climactic encounter with the dark lord himself, in which the NPCs figured prominently, and hardy Eragol somewhat less so.
But all was to be redeemed. E was aware, of course, that at the end of an adventure one handed out experience. I think I got about 600 XP for my participation in the struggle with the dark sorceror.
"And then -- Daddy, this is gonna be the day of your life -- for those two cloakers you killed? TWO HUNDRED POINTS each."
Now why is this significant? Well, like many kids, E has struggled a bit with math from time to time. (Last night, he tried to tell me he was "not very good at math.") But it's interesting what can be accomplished with the right motivation. Here, in his head, he had started with 600 XP, and, realizing that one makes the leap from level 1 to level 2 at 1000 XP, had correctly reasoned that two cloakers at 200 apiece would bring me exactly to second level. More, he'd assumed I would follow his reasoning, and be suitably thrilled with the award (and so I was).
The day of my life, indeed.
E began to narrate the "things" his dungeon needed to have: an incubator, a training room, a secret passage, an arena ... As he went, he drew inspiration from a dungeon cross-section featured prominently in the DMG. I have to admit, the picture has a powerful appeal -- makes me want to sit down and start hammering out a dungeon myself:
Well, guided by this architecturally correct, exploded-view dungeon, E continued to enumerate the key features of his dungeon. Once we had a list of a dozen or so, I began to draw a map that incorporated them. We went back and forth on each item, trying to decide where to incorporate it and how it should look. I'll share our results, though really, they're none too legible. I'll do my best to transcribe the legend.
The legend, as best I can read it, goes like this:
1. Orc guards; giant owl statue; thick wall
2. Dueling ground/arena
3. Training room
4. Secret passage with dragon eye lock (as on the cover of the Monster Manual, seen in this image):
5. Incubator
6. Orc barracks
7. Weapon room
8. Dining hall
9. Kitchen
10. Forge
11. Storeroom
12. Destrachan training
13. (In E's own hand) Caverns!
With the dungeon designed, of course I needed a character. I rolled a dwarf, a ranger I believe, named Eragol. Well it rapidly transpired that Eragol was not going to enter this dungeon alone. No, he was going as part of a large gang of fairly high level characters, all NPCs. And this was just as well, since the power behind this particular dungeon was a Dark Sorceror of level 20 or thereabouts. Vaguely skeletal, possibly undead, generally bad news.
The gang of us pushed our way into the dungeon. It turned out that the parts of the dungeon we had actually drawn and designed were the innocuous parts. The orc guards didn't bother us much: apparently too busy doing arena training and incubating monsters. The real dungeon was reached by going straight downstairs from the first room, through the secret door with the dragon eye lock. THERE, it turned out, was the real dungeon. We proceeded through the dark. Eragol didn't get to do very much: the place was haunted by a number of hideous Monster Manual creatures called destrachans, eyeless horrors which are capable of locating you by a form of sonar, then bursting through solid rock walls to assault you (the orcs above, as you might note from the legend, were given to training them). My crack squad of NPCs dealt with most of these, but we did encounter some lower-level cave dwellers, such as cloakers, which Eragol handily dispatched. Finally, a climactic encounter with the dark lord himself, in which the NPCs figured prominently, and hardy Eragol somewhat less so.
But all was to be redeemed. E was aware, of course, that at the end of an adventure one handed out experience. I think I got about 600 XP for my participation in the struggle with the dark sorceror.
"And then -- Daddy, this is gonna be the day of your life -- for those two cloakers you killed? TWO HUNDRED POINTS each."
Now why is this significant? Well, like many kids, E has struggled a bit with math from time to time. (Last night, he tried to tell me he was "not very good at math.") But it's interesting what can be accomplished with the right motivation. Here, in his head, he had started with 600 XP, and, realizing that one makes the leap from level 1 to level 2 at 1000 XP, had correctly reasoned that two cloakers at 200 apiece would bring me exactly to second level. More, he'd assumed I would follow his reasoning, and be suitably thrilled with the award (and so I was).
The day of my life, indeed.
Saturday, June 2, 2007
A Tale of Two Game Stores
All of the foregoing, if you can believe it, took place in just the first two days or so of D&D Resurrection. Early April. Then dawned the third day, and uncle K opined that it might be a fine idea to visit a game store. The adventures so far had been a bit rough and ready, and I think he was hoping for a "bought" adventure with some meat, that we could milk for a few hours. Good thought, so we saddled up.
Now let's stop and talk for a second about game stores. Long ago, the only store round these parts that sold anything gaming-related was a chain called Allied Hobbies. They had a shop in Ardmore, and another out at King of Prussia Mall. (TA still cannot believe there's a town called King of Prussia. Well there was once, dating back a long way, as you might imagine, to those of Washington's soldiers who hailed from Prussia and presumably still had fond thoughts of its king. But the old town has been dismantled bit by bit, till now it is only a maze of highway interchanges and the great mall itself sprawling in the midst). Allied Hobbies was quite serviceable: the Ardmore shop sold a good variety of lead figures, including the defunct Dragontooth line, which added in imagination what its sculptors lacked in finesse. And the King of Prussia shop was where I laid hands on the very first packaged module ever sold, the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief (actually released in advance of the AD&D books themselves, so we somehow staggered through the first couple based on the old rules). So Allied Hobbies was a serviceable place, and indeed it's still around, though none of its stores are where they used to be.
Not long into my first fascination with D&D, a new game store opened, up the road from the King of Prussia Allied Hobbies, at the Valley Forge Shopping Center. I can't for the life of me remember the store's name. Regardless, it was a harbinger of a new species, the pure games store. Allied Hobbies was worthy, but it was a hobby store, with its figures and rules books tucked at the ends of aisles that bulged with massive plastic battleship kits at 1:20 scale, and wooden-ships kits of horrifying complexity. (As I think about it, the long-departed Wayne Toytown also sold some of the early gaming materials: it was there that I purchased my first copy of The Dragon, #10 to be exact).
In any case, the new place instantly supplanted Allied Hobbies as The Place to Go for gaming stuff. Role-playing and board/simulation games were in the midst of a huge growth spurt, and the place thrived. Unlike Allied, it's still around in recognizable form, but we'll get back to that.
So by the time uncle K made his suggestion, I had been to a game store or two. But I wasn't sure what to expect from a game store in South Carolina in 2007. So off we went.
The place we lit down at was a combination games/comics store, which seems a usual combination these days. It was large, bright, clean and spacious -- almost supermarket-like in its proportions, very unlike the Center City Philadelphia comics stores at which I used to spend my weekends (institutions such as Comics for Collectors, a slightly finicky operation that used to have a shop on Rittenhouse Square, and seems now to be confined to New York, and the eminently small and comfy Fat Jack's, which, remarkably on two counts, seems to still exist in their location on narrow Sansom Street, and yet not have a web site). Point being, this place wasn't like those.
If you haven't been to a game store in a while, the things you notice are:
1. There's more stuff.
2. The stuff costs more.
More stuff: AD&D material has, of course, been proliferating for thirty years. After the original AD&D, came, I believe, AD&D 2. With the third edition, it ceased to be Advanced, and plain old D&D it is again, in a glorious Edition 3.5. In its essence, it still consists of the same three rulebooks: Players' Handbook, Monster Manual, DM Guide. Okay, except the Monster Manual is now multi-volume (they seem to be up to MM V). For players, well, in addition to the PH itself, there are also many class-specific books, each delving further into a specific class. There must be five or so of these, along with things like a Dungeon Survival guide, and a couple hefty volumes on playing characters of draconic lineage. I'll stop linking the things or the whole page will go blue.
The DM, as well, can spend as much as she likes on books. No reason to stop at just the plain DMG, there are a couple volumes on how to make dungeons, as well as individual sourcebooks to help you set adventures in cold, hot, wet, dry and other geographies. (Not far off, I'm sure, is the Official D&D Sourcebook for Eastern Taiga and Sub-boreal Woodlands, in two fat volumes.)
This all leaves out, of course, one of the largest categories of Stuff: adventure settings. Back in the day, as earlier alluded, this consisted entirely of modules as they were known. The mind echoes with names like Vault of the Drow, White Plume Mountain, Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, and Tomb of Horrors. (Heh, not to mention Temple of the Frog, as well as Tegel Manor, Dark Tower, Caverns of Thracia and other Judges' Guild delights. Seriously not to mention The Nightmare Maze of Jigresh! But all of those solid efforts are as chaff before the mighty wind of modern adventures. These are entire product lines, like Eberron and Forgotten Realms, game settings that each boast a dozen hard-cover game books, not to mention a big stack of adventures and a slew of novels.
Of course, you may not want to buy into an entire new world. You may want to make your own, but feel the need to insert a substantial setting here and there. No problem! Simply plunk down $120, and you are the proud owner of 672 pages documenting the mighty City of Ptolus.
Not feeling so rich? So scale your expenditure back to $100 and be content with the world's largest dungeon.
And that's a useful segue to the topic of "costs more." Granted that $120 is only about $48 in 1980 dollars, forty-eight bucks for a game setting was pretty unheard of back then (I think the biggest books from Judges' Guild topped out around $18). Consider further that all of the hardback game books run about $35, and that you can easily get a dozen of the things and, well, it adds up.
Even a simple module, it turns out, will run you $20 or so. I settled on The Barrow of the Forgotten King. Uncle K, somewhat overwhelmed by the WALL of D&D material, briefly considered whether D&D for Dummies might not be an appropriate path back into the game, but decided against it. And with that, we left the brightly lit acreage and headed for home.
***
Now, if I may, before I get back to what happened when we cracked the module open, I'm going to skip ahead a month or so. It is Saturday, a swimming lesson day, and I have shamelessly bribed my son to go to his lesson. This will only work once, but I think it's important to get him back in the water, so I stoop. I've told him we'll visit a game store after the lesson, and he can choose a D&D book to buy. Yes, that would be one of the stock $35 hardcovers. There ya have it.
The place we visit is the successor of that self-same games store of long ago, from the Valley Forge Shopping Center. Though I do forget the original name, there was some point in the last 20 years when the store became a branch of The Compleat Strategist. The Strategist is probably one of the oldest games stores in the country. I visited the flagship, in downtown New York, in December or so of 1980, with some summer camp alumni, and was suitably impressed.
But the King of Prussia Strategist? Shifted from its old, spacious location on DeKalb Pike into a small shopping area that consists of a remodeled barn and outbuildings, it is ... not what it was. It is small, low and dark. When we visit, a gaming group is just sitting down at the back for the Saturday game. "Anybody got any of these items?" the GM demands. "Robe of Falconry? Deck of Azurite? Radiant Headpiece? Shimmering Mask of Zerthul?" Muttered negatives all around. "K, well lemme figure out yer bonus, then ..." Various dice rolls. The GM moves them along and begins reading, literally reading, loudly from a bought adventure. This forms the backdrop of our stay.
E. can't decide what book he wants. What he really wants is the Dungeonscape book we saw the SC store, but it's not here. We spend a long time looking fruitlessly. Meanwhile, a large gamer with a big white beard, floppy denim hat with good-cause buttons pinned all over it, suspenders and a blue t-shirt over a Santa Claus-like belly, has trapped the store owner with a long political harangue. Finally I am able to rescue the store owner by asking the whereabouts of Dungeonscape. Though relieved to be freed, he isn't much help, and waves vaguely at the shelf where we've just spent 15 minutes looking. Clearly the book isn't there -- too bad, as I have to admit it's the one I would have chosen myself.
More people crowd in. The game in the back drones on. Finally E. settles on an environmental sourcebook called Stormwrack. His love of the sea coming through. We prepare to buy it and skedaddle. There's only one customer ahead of us (one of several father-and-son pairs I see there), but things are not so simple. The shopkeep first asks whether Dad is paying with cash or credit. One doesn't hear that question much anymore. But here you do. Dad is using credit, and the shopkeeper pulls out one of those slider things that you use to take a card impression. He takes the card impression, then with great labor fills in all the details of the purchase on the charge slip. Then he puts on his glasses, picks up a calculator, and carefully figures the sales tax, writes that on the charge slip, then, again using the calculator, figures the total. Next he takes the card to an authorization machine, runs it, and enters the total. Once the card is run and approved, he hands the charge slip to Dad for signature. Dad signs, clearly somewhat impatient. But the sale is not complete. The shopkeeper now produces one of those old metal boxes with a double or triple roll of sales slips on it. He now proceeds once again to write out all the details of the purchase, long hand, and slowly at that. He then strips the sales slips from the box, hands Dad the white copy, opens a small metal drawer in the bottom of the box, and slips his own pink copy carefully into it. Finally he produces a bag, puts the sales slip, the charge slip, and the purchase into it, and hands it all to Dad, who is rather tight-lipped at this point. Finally father and son are free to go.
I watch in something near awe. In most establishments the purchase would have taken 45 seconds, tops. This process probably took three or four minutes. Clearly this could only work when you haven't many customers at once. It's now my turn to step forward. Knowing we have quite a bit of work ahead of us, I engage the shopkeeper in a bit of conversation. He acknowledges they're affiliated with the main Strategist, but, he notes, waving at the metal box, the charge slips, the calculator "they still got us using thirty-year old equipment." True enough.
We complete all the steps of our purchase with due diligence, and finally leave, dice still rattling in the background. The GM's monotone follows us into the April air: "The Temple of Ashara was once a wondrous site of worship, but is nearly ruined now, and has fallen on hard times ..."
It has indeed, dear lady. I finger my brow for signs of a Radiant Headpiece or Shimmering Mask of Zerthul: nothing.
Now let's stop and talk for a second about game stores. Long ago, the only store round these parts that sold anything gaming-related was a chain called Allied Hobbies. They had a shop in Ardmore, and another out at King of Prussia Mall. (TA still cannot believe there's a town called King of Prussia. Well there was once, dating back a long way, as you might imagine, to those of Washington's soldiers who hailed from Prussia and presumably still had fond thoughts of its king. But the old town has been dismantled bit by bit, till now it is only a maze of highway interchanges and the great mall itself sprawling in the midst). Allied Hobbies was quite serviceable: the Ardmore shop sold a good variety of lead figures, including the defunct Dragontooth line, which added in imagination what its sculptors lacked in finesse. And the King of Prussia shop was where I laid hands on the very first packaged module ever sold, the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief (actually released in advance of the AD&D books themselves, so we somehow staggered through the first couple based on the old rules). So Allied Hobbies was a serviceable place, and indeed it's still around, though none of its stores are where they used to be.
Not long into my first fascination with D&D, a new game store opened, up the road from the King of Prussia Allied Hobbies, at the Valley Forge Shopping Center. I can't for the life of me remember the store's name. Regardless, it was a harbinger of a new species, the pure games store. Allied Hobbies was worthy, but it was a hobby store, with its figures and rules books tucked at the ends of aisles that bulged with massive plastic battleship kits at 1:20 scale, and wooden-ships kits of horrifying complexity. (As I think about it, the long-departed Wayne Toytown also sold some of the early gaming materials: it was there that I purchased my first copy of The Dragon, #10 to be exact).
In any case, the new place instantly supplanted Allied Hobbies as The Place to Go for gaming stuff. Role-playing and board/simulation games were in the midst of a huge growth spurt, and the place thrived. Unlike Allied, it's still around in recognizable form, but we'll get back to that.
So by the time uncle K made his suggestion, I had been to a game store or two. But I wasn't sure what to expect from a game store in South Carolina in 2007. So off we went.
The place we lit down at was a combination games/comics store, which seems a usual combination these days. It was large, bright, clean and spacious -- almost supermarket-like in its proportions, very unlike the Center City Philadelphia comics stores at which I used to spend my weekends (institutions such as Comics for Collectors, a slightly finicky operation that used to have a shop on Rittenhouse Square, and seems now to be confined to New York, and the eminently small and comfy Fat Jack's, which, remarkably on two counts, seems to still exist in their location on narrow Sansom Street, and yet not have a web site). Point being, this place wasn't like those.
If you haven't been to a game store in a while, the things you notice are:
1. There's more stuff.
2. The stuff costs more.
More stuff: AD&D material has, of course, been proliferating for thirty years. After the original AD&D, came, I believe, AD&D 2. With the third edition, it ceased to be Advanced, and plain old D&D it is again, in a glorious Edition 3.5. In its essence, it still consists of the same three rulebooks: Players' Handbook, Monster Manual, DM Guide. Okay, except the Monster Manual is now multi-volume (they seem to be up to MM V). For players, well, in addition to the PH itself, there are also many class-specific books, each delving further into a specific class. There must be five or so of these, along with things like a Dungeon Survival guide, and a couple hefty volumes on playing characters of draconic lineage. I'll stop linking the things or the whole page will go blue.
The DM, as well, can spend as much as she likes on books. No reason to stop at just the plain DMG, there are a couple volumes on how to make dungeons, as well as individual sourcebooks to help you set adventures in cold, hot, wet, dry and other geographies. (Not far off, I'm sure, is the Official D&D Sourcebook for Eastern Taiga and Sub-boreal Woodlands, in two fat volumes.)
This all leaves out, of course, one of the largest categories of Stuff: adventure settings. Back in the day, as earlier alluded, this consisted entirely of modules as they were known. The mind echoes with names like Vault of the Drow, White Plume Mountain, Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, and Tomb of Horrors. (Heh, not to mention Temple of the Frog, as well as Tegel Manor, Dark Tower, Caverns of Thracia and other Judges' Guild delights. Seriously not to mention The Nightmare Maze of Jigresh! But all of those solid efforts are as chaff before the mighty wind of modern adventures. These are entire product lines, like Eberron and Forgotten Realms, game settings that each boast a dozen hard-cover game books, not to mention a big stack of adventures and a slew of novels.
Of course, you may not want to buy into an entire new world. You may want to make your own, but feel the need to insert a substantial setting here and there. No problem! Simply plunk down $120, and you are the proud owner of 672 pages documenting the mighty City of Ptolus.
Not feeling so rich? So scale your expenditure back to $100 and be content with the world's largest dungeon.
And that's a useful segue to the topic of "costs more." Granted that $120 is only about $48 in 1980 dollars, forty-eight bucks for a game setting was pretty unheard of back then (I think the biggest books from Judges' Guild topped out around $18). Consider further that all of the hardback game books run about $35, and that you can easily get a dozen of the things and, well, it adds up.
Even a simple module, it turns out, will run you $20 or so. I settled on The Barrow of the Forgotten King. Uncle K, somewhat overwhelmed by the WALL of D&D material, briefly considered whether D&D for Dummies might not be an appropriate path back into the game, but decided against it. And with that, we left the brightly lit acreage and headed for home.
***
Now, if I may, before I get back to what happened when we cracked the module open, I'm going to skip ahead a month or so. It is Saturday, a swimming lesson day, and I have shamelessly bribed my son to go to his lesson. This will only work once, but I think it's important to get him back in the water, so I stoop. I've told him we'll visit a game store after the lesson, and he can choose a D&D book to buy. Yes, that would be one of the stock $35 hardcovers. There ya have it.
The place we visit is the successor of that self-same games store of long ago, from the Valley Forge Shopping Center. Though I do forget the original name, there was some point in the last 20 years when the store became a branch of The Compleat Strategist. The Strategist is probably one of the oldest games stores in the country. I visited the flagship, in downtown New York, in December or so of 1980, with some summer camp alumni, and was suitably impressed.
But the King of Prussia Strategist? Shifted from its old, spacious location on DeKalb Pike into a small shopping area that consists of a remodeled barn and outbuildings, it is ... not what it was. It is small, low and dark. When we visit, a gaming group is just sitting down at the back for the Saturday game. "Anybody got any of these items?" the GM demands. "Robe of Falconry? Deck of Azurite? Radiant Headpiece? Shimmering Mask of Zerthul?" Muttered negatives all around. "K, well lemme figure out yer bonus, then ..." Various dice rolls. The GM moves them along and begins reading, literally reading, loudly from a bought adventure. This forms the backdrop of our stay.
E. can't decide what book he wants. What he really wants is the Dungeonscape book we saw the SC store, but it's not here. We spend a long time looking fruitlessly. Meanwhile, a large gamer with a big white beard, floppy denim hat with good-cause buttons pinned all over it, suspenders and a blue t-shirt over a Santa Claus-like belly, has trapped the store owner with a long political harangue. Finally I am able to rescue the store owner by asking the whereabouts of Dungeonscape. Though relieved to be freed, he isn't much help, and waves vaguely at the shelf where we've just spent 15 minutes looking. Clearly the book isn't there -- too bad, as I have to admit it's the one I would have chosen myself.
More people crowd in. The game in the back drones on. Finally E. settles on an environmental sourcebook called Stormwrack. His love of the sea coming through. We prepare to buy it and skedaddle. There's only one customer ahead of us (one of several father-and-son pairs I see there), but things are not so simple. The shopkeep first asks whether Dad is paying with cash or credit. One doesn't hear that question much anymore. But here you do. Dad is using credit, and the shopkeeper pulls out one of those slider things that you use to take a card impression. He takes the card impression, then with great labor fills in all the details of the purchase on the charge slip. Then he puts on his glasses, picks up a calculator, and carefully figures the sales tax, writes that on the charge slip, then, again using the calculator, figures the total. Next he takes the card to an authorization machine, runs it, and enters the total. Once the card is run and approved, he hands the charge slip to Dad for signature. Dad signs, clearly somewhat impatient. But the sale is not complete. The shopkeeper now produces one of those old metal boxes with a double or triple roll of sales slips on it. He now proceeds once again to write out all the details of the purchase, long hand, and slowly at that. He then strips the sales slips from the box, hands Dad the white copy, opens a small metal drawer in the bottom of the box, and slips his own pink copy carefully into it. Finally he produces a bag, puts the sales slip, the charge slip, and the purchase into it, and hands it all to Dad, who is rather tight-lipped at this point. Finally father and son are free to go.
I watch in something near awe. In most establishments the purchase would have taken 45 seconds, tops. This process probably took three or four minutes. Clearly this could only work when you haven't many customers at once. It's now my turn to step forward. Knowing we have quite a bit of work ahead of us, I engage the shopkeeper in a bit of conversation. He acknowledges they're affiliated with the main Strategist, but, he notes, waving at the metal box, the charge slips, the calculator "they still got us using thirty-year old equipment." True enough.
We complete all the steps of our purchase with due diligence, and finally leave, dice still rattling in the background. The GM's monotone follows us into the April air: "The Temple of Ashara was once a wondrous site of worship, but is nearly ruined now, and has fallen on hard times ..."
It has indeed, dear lady. I finger my brow for signs of a Radiant Headpiece or Shimmering Mask of Zerthul: nothing.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
How To Cook a Grick
For reasons I can't fathom, the Blogger feature that emails me when someone posts a comment seems to work with complete randomness. I got no emails for a month, despite folks posting comments (and me in due course finding them and belatedly answering), then this afternoon a flurry of several emails, but still one email fewer than there were comments posted. Hmm.
In any, Elliot asked about grick recipes. And I have been the source, and I have answers. Here's the word from Bladesbat on grick cookery:
1. The tentacles should be lightly cooked and eaten with salt.
2. The body should be slathered in garlic and spit-roasted
3. Don't cook the beak. It's not good to eat, but you can and should save it to gnaw on, as it keeps your teeth sharp.
Sounds pretty tasty to me!
In any, Elliot asked about grick recipes. And I have been the source, and I have answers. Here's the word from Bladesbat on grick cookery:
1. The tentacles should be lightly cooked and eaten with salt.
2. The body should be slathered in garlic and spit-roasted
3. Don't cook the beak. It's not good to eat, but you can and should save it to gnaw on, as it keeps your teeth sharp.
Sounds pretty tasty to me!
Sunday, May 27, 2007
How It Ought to Work
Any prospective blogger really should be aware of the basic requirements of their craft, at least if they care whether anyone reads their stuff. The most basic requirement, it seems to me, is regularity. I think most people still consume blogs in a fairly low-tech way (that's actually sort of a term of art in the tech sector, at least for me, and is not necessarily derogatory: low-tech is often the simplest and best solution, and the admonition to "stay low-tech on this design" warns us not to make things more complex, fussy or expensive than they need to be). By low-tech I mean the practice of periodically returning to the bookmarked blog and seeing if there's anything you haven't seen. A few hardy souls may consume your blog via more high-tech tool such as an RSS reader or other aggregator that scans a variety of data sources, pulls them together and lets you know when any specific data source (a blog, say) has new stuff.
But regardless, regularity is still a requirement. As indeed it is in any form of writing. Speaking of other forms of writing, perhaps I can use that as a bit of an excuse. In a by-now-typical fit of overconfidence, a couple of my colleagues and I have once again signed up for vastly too much technical writing in too short a period. We have just finished a six-week period of revising one of our technical books to keep up with new software, and are now engaged in a rewriting the training curriculum for said software from the ground up. I've also personally signed up to write two technical white papers (yes, on the same software release), as well as put together two talks for the annual developer conference. It's nice to be invited to do all of these things, but there's definitely some eyes >> stomach going on there.
So that, for what it may be worth, is my excuse, and it's taken me so long to write that I'm going to have to postpone the actual intended content of this post till some unspecified future time.
OK, kidding! Let's move on. I left Thorgun on the castle steps, peering down into the dark.
One thing we learned about half-orcs is that they have darkvision. Sixty feet of crisp black and white visibility even in complete darkness. Mostly this has been useful since it eliminates some cumbersome game mechanics; when E wants to do something in the dark I don't face the choice between letting little issues like lighting slide, or pedantically insisting he needs to remember to bring a lantern. No fussing with lanterns, no oil flasks, none of that. (Some of you may recall games in which oil flasks were a primary weapon, deemed to be as flammable as naphtha and as safe to carry as beef jerky).
Below the stair, and the shattered ruins of its door (recalling that marvelous chapter in Narnia 2, Prince Caspian, where the Pevensy kids are wandering in the ruins and find a broken door gaping on darkness, and slowly begin to realize they're in the ruins of the castle they ruled from, Cair Paravel, itself one of the greatest names in fantasy lit but I digress) was a small warren of rooms and passage (see the earlier map). Most notable were the scattered shells of large eggs. Thorgun recognized them right away as grick eggs, and proceeded cautiously. The first room to the left was filled with these shells. From there, three arches opened onto a huge space further west, which for now he decided to leave alone. Instead he crossed the main passage and found a second passage twisting east, then north. Here the obligatory slithering sounds commenced, and he had soon met and defeated the day's first grick. If I recall right, a second much larger one then appeared from deeper in, driving him back out into the daylight.
Once more, at Bladesbat Cave, Thorgun caused a bit of a stir. Not only had he brought back the usual grick, but also tales of hidden ruins. As we know from some of his earlier outings, not everyone in the cave bore him the best will, and it seems likely that plans were laid to raid the caves and tunnels for the treasure that presumably lay there. (It might even be that Thorgun himself sparked those ideas by talking a bit too freely about the loot he had discovered, which in the end was a handful of coins dropped by grick victims of old).
All of this occurred, believe it or not, over the course of about two days in early April 2007, owing to E's discovery of his uncle K's gaming books. Uncle K was busy with work-related matters but expressed considerable eagerness to join E in the game, and at this juncture he did so. Good thing too, as opposing forces were beginning to scheme against our crew. Hearing the rumblings in the camp, they made hurried plans to return to the castle and delve deeper. Not long on their way, they heard shouts and the clatter of armor behind them, and picked up their pace.
They reached the castle at speed. A look back over the dank forest, and a sharp ear, told them a stout band of malcontents was not far behind them. Standing and fighting was a poor option, as was running away. Instead, they decided to plunge straight into the dungeon, hoping their enemies would lack the courage to do so, or in any case the resourcefulness to make a success of their descent.
From the main passage they headed west, through the eggshell-scattered room and through the three arches into the wide hall beyond. This hall had once been paved with huge stones, but many of these had been lifted and thrust aside, apparently from below. Underneath, the sandy soil was pocked with dark, inward-twisting holes. "Burrows" was the word that came to mind, but they had no time to think too hard on the matter, as the gang of Bladesbat thugs was now making their way cautiously down the outer stair.
It turned out that crouching in the dark (OK, granted that all parties involved have darkvision) was the best approach. Darkvision or not, the marauding band was most uneasy in the dungeon. They stood firm during what sounded like one grick encounter, but shortly afterward, Something Emerged to drive them moaning from the underground. There was a brief sound of retreating feet, then silence.
Thorgun and uncle decided it would best to get out of the plowed-up hall. The burrows looked threatening, and they had begun to notice that the air was pungent with a sharp, sweet reek (formic acid, as it happened). They got out of there and went back to the main hall, where they found a dead grick, presumably left by the fleeing thugs.
They made further explorations. The main hall twisted left and ended in a locked door. My memory of the room was imperfect, but E has reminded me that, once they broke the door down, they found a number of sealed boxes, with high-grade weapons carefully packaged in oilcloth or the like: good steel swords and shield. They availed themselves of some upgrades, though Thorgun decided that the swords were no improvement on his huge greataxe. Further east, they ventured into the passage that seemed to be as far as anyone had yet penetrated. From ahead came a faint sound of running water. That was what probably masked the sound of the approach of a truly immense grick, all barbed tentacled and menace, doubtless getting very tired of having to chase off one visitor after another.
These visitors, though, did not chase. They fought. Uncle K, though level 1 to Thorgun's 2 or 3, proved to hit nearly as hard as he did, and the beast went down in a flurry. Alone, one imagines Thorgun would have been hard pressed.
And so onward, down some stairs and into a large round chamber with six inches of water on the flow, flowing slowly eastward. They soon discovered that a natural stream flowed through, from some small caves to the west, over the floor, and away eastward, to tip over a ten-foot drop in the eastern passage and spill out a grate in the hillside. Clearly a sewer, built in such a way that anyone wrestling the grate out of the hill would have faced a wet, ten-foot climb to get into the castle's underbelly.
And finally, at the back of the room, a barely traversable crack into darkness. Actually, traversing it didn't come up much at first, because it promptly disgorged its inhabitant, an enraged carrion crawler.
Now, I have deep affection and nostalgia for carrion crawlers. They were somehow emblematic to me of the first Monster Manual. Nothing ever quite said ADVANCED D&D (as opposed to the rudimentary form we'd presumably been playing) as a carrion crawler. That said, I had forgotten how they actually worked ...
How they work is by secreting a paralyzing goo that knocks you out of commission for many tens of minutes -- in effect, for an entire combat. And that was just what happened to Thorgun. In all truth I had been fudging the dice not infrequently on e's behalf, and this time I was somehow disinclined to do so. So Thorgun was out of business, and uncle K fought on. E was as put out by this as by earlier near-death experiences, and threw himself in a corner, but soon recovered as his uncle handily defeated the critter (maybe not so handily, it was a bit touch and go, but uncle pulled through).
Once they'd composed themselves they explored the crack. It opened into a series of caves, finally reaching the hillside burrow of the rest of the carrion crawlers. They looked to be too much to handle, so it was back into the underground.
The only unexplored area was the torn-up hall with the ominous holes in the ground. These turned out to be the burrows of giant ants. They tried a bit of burrow exploration, but were quickly put off by the teeming numbers. They retreated and, with a bit of daring, went ahead to where the hall turned a corner.
From there the hall stretched out straight as an arrow for much farther than either of them could see. Beyond the turn was an ancient plaque on the wall, covered in what appeared to be writing. Though neither of them could read it, Thorgun alertly copied it, reasoning that Vishara, the Bladesbat shamaness, might be able to make sense of it. Then, with the ants chittering menacingly at burrow openings, they finally headed for daylight.
Old Vishara seemed perplexed by their intrusion when they found her,and spent a long time squinting at what they'd written. Finally she peered at them and said "Were ya near a park somewheres?" A park? In the swamp? Certainly not. Well, she said, the plaque alluded to a "park highway." She ordered Thorgun to draw a P, then a D (here I was glossing over the fact that barbarians start out illiterate and need to spend skill levels to learn writing). He did so.
"Ah," she said. "I had it wrong. It reads:
HERE BEGINS THE DARK HIGHWAY*
Dark, dark. That's more like it!"
More like what, exactly? Thorgun and uncle K retreated to lick their wounds, watching their backs for any more mischief from the Bladesbat gang.
Still ahead:We visit a game store, and E decides to try his hand at game-mastering.
*A fellow I gamed with a bit in my college days, Mr. John Bedell, once said (or at least is said to have said) that "originality is the art of concealing your sources." As a veteran cobbler of things together, I agree with that sentiment, whoever said it. I'll strike a blow against my own originality, then, by admitting that the phrase Dark Highway has rattled around my head for 20 years, ever since another old gaming friend, Mr. Chuck D., included a Dark Highway in a game he ran. Now, CD may have had it from other sources, but I can trace the chain of non-originality no farther. Credit where credit is due. Or wait, this would be non-credit where credit isn't due ... well, see the trouble the whole idea of attribution entails?
Let's just say, "I've always like the sound of The Dark Highway."
But regardless, regularity is still a requirement. As indeed it is in any form of writing. Speaking of other forms of writing, perhaps I can use that as a bit of an excuse. In a by-now-typical fit of overconfidence, a couple of my colleagues and I have once again signed up for vastly too much technical writing in too short a period. We have just finished a six-week period of revising one of our technical books to keep up with new software, and are now engaged in a rewriting the training curriculum for said software from the ground up. I've also personally signed up to write two technical white papers (yes, on the same software release), as well as put together two talks for the annual developer conference. It's nice to be invited to do all of these things, but there's definitely some eyes >> stomach going on there.
So that, for what it may be worth, is my excuse, and it's taken me so long to write that I'm going to have to postpone the actual intended content of this post till some unspecified future time.
OK, kidding! Let's move on. I left Thorgun on the castle steps, peering down into the dark.
One thing we learned about half-orcs is that they have darkvision. Sixty feet of crisp black and white visibility even in complete darkness. Mostly this has been useful since it eliminates some cumbersome game mechanics; when E wants to do something in the dark I don't face the choice between letting little issues like lighting slide, or pedantically insisting he needs to remember to bring a lantern. No fussing with lanterns, no oil flasks, none of that. (Some of you may recall games in which oil flasks were a primary weapon, deemed to be as flammable as naphtha and as safe to carry as beef jerky).
Below the stair, and the shattered ruins of its door (recalling that marvelous chapter in Narnia 2, Prince Caspian, where the Pevensy kids are wandering in the ruins and find a broken door gaping on darkness, and slowly begin to realize they're in the ruins of the castle they ruled from, Cair Paravel, itself one of the greatest names in fantasy lit but I digress) was a small warren of rooms and passage (see the earlier map). Most notable were the scattered shells of large eggs. Thorgun recognized them right away as grick eggs, and proceeded cautiously. The first room to the left was filled with these shells. From there, three arches opened onto a huge space further west, which for now he decided to leave alone. Instead he crossed the main passage and found a second passage twisting east, then north. Here the obligatory slithering sounds commenced, and he had soon met and defeated the day's first grick. If I recall right, a second much larger one then appeared from deeper in, driving him back out into the daylight.
Once more, at Bladesbat Cave, Thorgun caused a bit of a stir. Not only had he brought back the usual grick, but also tales of hidden ruins. As we know from some of his earlier outings, not everyone in the cave bore him the best will, and it seems likely that plans were laid to raid the caves and tunnels for the treasure that presumably lay there. (It might even be that Thorgun himself sparked those ideas by talking a bit too freely about the loot he had discovered, which in the end was a handful of coins dropped by grick victims of old).
Strength in Numbers
All of this occurred, believe it or not, over the course of about two days in early April 2007, owing to E's discovery of his uncle K's gaming books. Uncle K was busy with work-related matters but expressed considerable eagerness to join E in the game, and at this juncture he did so. Good thing too, as opposing forces were beginning to scheme against our crew. Hearing the rumblings in the camp, they made hurried plans to return to the castle and delve deeper. Not long on their way, they heard shouts and the clatter of armor behind them, and picked up their pace.
They reached the castle at speed. A look back over the dank forest, and a sharp ear, told them a stout band of malcontents was not far behind them. Standing and fighting was a poor option, as was running away. Instead, they decided to plunge straight into the dungeon, hoping their enemies would lack the courage to do so, or in any case the resourcefulness to make a success of their descent.
From the main passage they headed west, through the eggshell-scattered room and through the three arches into the wide hall beyond. This hall had once been paved with huge stones, but many of these had been lifted and thrust aside, apparently from below. Underneath, the sandy soil was pocked with dark, inward-twisting holes. "Burrows" was the word that came to mind, but they had no time to think too hard on the matter, as the gang of Bladesbat thugs was now making their way cautiously down the outer stair.
It turned out that crouching in the dark (OK, granted that all parties involved have darkvision) was the best approach. Darkvision or not, the marauding band was most uneasy in the dungeon. They stood firm during what sounded like one grick encounter, but shortly afterward, Something Emerged to drive them moaning from the underground. There was a brief sound of retreating feet, then silence.
Thorgun and uncle decided it would best to get out of the plowed-up hall. The burrows looked threatening, and they had begun to notice that the air was pungent with a sharp, sweet reek (formic acid, as it happened). They got out of there and went back to the main hall, where they found a dead grick, presumably left by the fleeing thugs.
They made further explorations. The main hall twisted left and ended in a locked door. My memory of the room was imperfect, but E has reminded me that, once they broke the door down, they found a number of sealed boxes, with high-grade weapons carefully packaged in oilcloth or the like: good steel swords and shield. They availed themselves of some upgrades, though Thorgun decided that the swords were no improvement on his huge greataxe. Further east, they ventured into the passage that seemed to be as far as anyone had yet penetrated. From ahead came a faint sound of running water. That was what probably masked the sound of the approach of a truly immense grick, all barbed tentacled and menace, doubtless getting very tired of having to chase off one visitor after another.
These visitors, though, did not chase. They fought. Uncle K, though level 1 to Thorgun's 2 or 3, proved to hit nearly as hard as he did, and the beast went down in a flurry. Alone, one imagines Thorgun would have been hard pressed.
And so onward, down some stairs and into a large round chamber with six inches of water on the flow, flowing slowly eastward. They soon discovered that a natural stream flowed through, from some small caves to the west, over the floor, and away eastward, to tip over a ten-foot drop in the eastern passage and spill out a grate in the hillside. Clearly a sewer, built in such a way that anyone wrestling the grate out of the hill would have faced a wet, ten-foot climb to get into the castle's underbelly.
And finally, at the back of the room, a barely traversable crack into darkness. Actually, traversing it didn't come up much at first, because it promptly disgorged its inhabitant, an enraged carrion crawler.
Now, I have deep affection and nostalgia for carrion crawlers. They were somehow emblematic to me of the first Monster Manual. Nothing ever quite said ADVANCED D&D (as opposed to the rudimentary form we'd presumably been playing) as a carrion crawler. That said, I had forgotten how they actually worked ...
How they work is by secreting a paralyzing goo that knocks you out of commission for many tens of minutes -- in effect, for an entire combat. And that was just what happened to Thorgun. In all truth I had been fudging the dice not infrequently on e's behalf, and this time I was somehow disinclined to do so. So Thorgun was out of business, and uncle K fought on. E was as put out by this as by earlier near-death experiences, and threw himself in a corner, but soon recovered as his uncle handily defeated the critter (maybe not so handily, it was a bit touch and go, but uncle pulled through).
Once they'd composed themselves they explored the crack. It opened into a series of caves, finally reaching the hillside burrow of the rest of the carrion crawlers. They looked to be too much to handle, so it was back into the underground.
The only unexplored area was the torn-up hall with the ominous holes in the ground. These turned out to be the burrows of giant ants. They tried a bit of burrow exploration, but were quickly put off by the teeming numbers. They retreated and, with a bit of daring, went ahead to where the hall turned a corner.
From there the hall stretched out straight as an arrow for much farther than either of them could see. Beyond the turn was an ancient plaque on the wall, covered in what appeared to be writing. Though neither of them could read it, Thorgun alertly copied it, reasoning that Vishara, the Bladesbat shamaness, might be able to make sense of it. Then, with the ants chittering menacingly at burrow openings, they finally headed for daylight.
Old Vishara seemed perplexed by their intrusion when they found her,and spent a long time squinting at what they'd written. Finally she peered at them and said "Were ya near a park somewheres?" A park? In the swamp? Certainly not. Well, she said, the plaque alluded to a "park highway." She ordered Thorgun to draw a P, then a D (here I was glossing over the fact that barbarians start out illiterate and need to spend skill levels to learn writing). He did so.
"Ah," she said. "I had it wrong. It reads:
HERE BEGINS THE DARK HIGHWAY*
Dark, dark. That's more like it!"
More like what, exactly? Thorgun and uncle K retreated to lick their wounds, watching their backs for any more mischief from the Bladesbat gang.
***********
Still ahead:We visit a game store, and E decides to try his hand at game-mastering.
*A fellow I gamed with a bit in my college days, Mr. John Bedell, once said (or at least is said to have said) that "originality is the art of concealing your sources." As a veteran cobbler of things together, I agree with that sentiment, whoever said it. I'll strike a blow against my own originality, then, by admitting that the phrase Dark Highway has rattled around my head for 20 years, ever since another old gaming friend, Mr. Chuck D., included a Dark Highway in a game he ran. Now, CD may have had it from other sources, but I can trace the chain of non-originality no farther. Credit where credit is due. Or wait, this would be non-credit where credit isn't due ... well, see the trouble the whole idea of attribution entails?
Let's just say, "I've always like the sound of The Dark Highway."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
