DL 2 - Dragons of Flame - Review

A while back I tried to give a fair review of Dragon’s of Despair; to express what I liked about the modules, to look at where it went wrong and to see what could be salvaged.  To reiterate, the fundamental problem with the Dragonlance modules (as far as I can tell from reading two of them) is that they are story and hero driven high fantasy epics masquerading as 1^st edition AD&D Modules.  This isn’t to say that the story is bad, or that such epics might not make a good table top game, but it’s certainly hard to fit the epic ethos and genre conventions into a high lethality, combat adverse system like 1e AD&D or the B/X and OD&D that it derives from.

NICE THINGS ABOUT DRAGONLANCE

!Fantasy Apocalypse, takes an idyllic high fantasy world and reveals both its troubles and doom.

!Good Enemies, The party fights dragons, and dragon men who present some fun tactical challenges.

!Solid Worldbuilding, There is a sandbox under the railroad waiting to be played with many cool ideas.

HORRIBLE THINGS ABOUT DRAGONLANCE

!Saccharine Tone, High fantasy bathos is overwhelming and painfully clichéd.

!Forceful Railroading, forces player decision making and goals along a single storyline.

!GM PCs, Precious little plot immune horrors that must survive to force players down the rails.

!Lack of Meaningful Factions, There is bad and good, sometimes good is grumpy, but it’s very clear.

DRAGONS OF FLAME

Why does Dragon decor consist of Dragon skulls?

The second in the Dragonlance Series of modules Dragons of Flame was written in 1984 by Douglas Niles and continues the story right after Dragons of Despair leaves off.   Player Character clerics, or at least the insufferable singing cleric Goldmoon, can now cast spells thanks to some platinum discs. Niles has an even heavier hand then Hickman at forcing the party into a series of chutes leading to heroic adventure, and he’s content to emulate the maundering pretentious language of Dragons of Despair as well. What’s worse is that while Dragons of Despair only required the railroad by necessity and encouraged the use of the novel derived pre-generated characters, Dragons of Flame actively creates all sorts of Quantum Ogre situations (events/encounters that occur regardless of PC action) and railroading while actively discouraging the use of anything but the pre-gens, some of whom “must survive”. 

B9 - Castle Caldwell & Beyond - Review

THERE’S NOT MUCH BEYOND CASTLE CALDWELL

Club Sleeper hit of 2005

It’s not worth noting, but Castle Caldwell’s cover art is amusing, a droopy eyed lizard man carries an attractive swooning woman who is wearing an outfit straight from a mid-2000’s anti/neo-folk album cover: mini-heeled ankle boots with slouch tops, a studded girdle, some chunky jewelry and a white peasant dress.  If I’d worked for Rolling Stone in 2007 a photo shoot recreating this silly scene with the folk-rock ingénue of the year would have been a personal goal. Sadly this is the best thing about Castle Caldwell.

Castle Caldwell and Beyond is a bit strange, a series of small adventures designed to each be played in a few hours, rather than a larger location or set of problems to be solved over several sessions.  I really enjoy this idea of module design, but Caldwell just doesn’t come together very well.  It also depends on the use of boxed text, and the boxed text is terribly dull, fleshed out with the obvious and uninspiring.  B9 is broken into five smallish adventures, beginning with the named Castle.  There’s a lost opportunity here as only the first two of these little scenarios are tied together, while the final two are unrelated.  Ultimately Caldwell is poisoned by dull writing, uninspiring map design, incomprehensible monster variety and pointless treasure.

A Short Adventure Locale - PDF download

KUGELBERG FLOOD

The Drowned Dome of the Voivode

The 2014 One Page Dungeon Contest Just ended, and I spent a good amount of time this year trying to figure what to write up for it.  Of the five ideas I originally had, I ended up starting PDFs of three, and then realizing that the two I liked the most wouldn’t fit on a single page.  I entered a cloud castle, but am dissatisfied with it.
 

The Kugelberg Flood is the last of these. A vanilla fantasy world one shot location/event focused on plundering the cursed pleasure dome of an ancient tyrant, now sunken beneath the sea.  The party will have twelve hours to explore the place and grab what they can while the sea is at a once every ten year magical ebb.  The dangers include a spectral odalisque, mad automatons, poison coral and a lot of zombie sea life. I suspect the dome could be run as a 1^st level adventure, but the enemies are a bit tough for that.  Perhaps it’s more appropriate for a 2^nd level party. The greatest danger though is of course the return of the ocean so I think this thing would only work if one’s GM enjoyed timekeeping.

KUGELBERG FLOOD PDF FORDOWnlOad

Fall of Empire

EMPIRE OF RAG & BONE

Since the surrender of its fleet and the loss of the more vigorous Southern, Eastern and ‘New’ provinces, eight generations ago the body of the Successor Empire has rotted.  The empire contracts and spasms - Postowns lay abandoned, the Tradetowns in revolt or dusty decline and the wide estates of an unknown multitude of petty barons, atamans, viscounts, colonels, pashas, nawabs and lairds teeter under the weight of preening desire, feud and a nobility grown strange, reclusive, and horribly fecund. Even the Imperial capital, a metropolis for a three hundred generations, is as a comatose patient, atrophied and so weakened that it barely twitches in its most vile of fever dreams, reeking and tangled amongst soiled sheets.

The howls of the inbred and moronic Emperor echo from the empty and lightless windows of the Imperial spires when the moon wanes.  The rumormongers in the Dockwards whisper that He, the ‘sunshadowing light of the world’, hunts his own misshapen children like a red gummed dog amongst the graceful arcades, scuttling through the wreckage of five millennia of opulence.  Only the amber masked priests of the Imperial cult, and perhaps the more human of the hulking heredity Excubitores, their frames grown monstrous from generations of selective breeding and the ancient magics poured into their sires, know or care about the truth of these rumors.

Pahvelorn Character Sheet Collection

PAHVELORn
Character

SHEETs

My most played character of late has been Beni Profane, an OD&D (well Greyhawk) thief, who has survived in Necropraxis’ long running Vaults of Pahvelorn.  The campaign is on hiatus, with the party having just slain some kind of lich and the floating ruins that have long loomed over the Vaults (a huge pit in the earth with several entrances) descending back to earth.  The campaign is thus poised on the brink of either victory or destruction, as what exactly will happen next is very much an open question.

Beni Level 1-3

Beni began as a “rat catcher” which was largely an excuse to include “sack with six rats” on his sheet. The rats have proved their usefulness, as did Beni’s faithful terrier.  The dog died in the last session (which was almost a TPK, the survivors of a huge fireball blasted and unconscious on the floor except for one Cleric who managed to cast hold person on the lich/awakened  arch mage and save the group.

This is Beni’s first character sheet, with the portrait based on a woodcut from the 17^th century. He has his ratting pole (with hook, dead rat and flag) and his ridiculous hat (with floral scarf and emergency/sneaking candles).

Dungeon Moon - Character Progression

Dungeon Moon Character Sheets

So I’ve been playing Nick from Paper & Pencils’ game on his rather unique setting “Dungeon Moon” intermittently for quite a while now.  The setting is a huge funhouse megadungeon, but with a better setting explanation then most.  

Makepeace NoHells 4th level.

The character I originally made as a joke “Makepeace NoHells”, who I originally suggested was a “Atheist Paladin” has turned out to fit the setting quite well as a militantly atheistic warrior.  Militant atheism being rather appropriate to a campaign setting where numerous extremely unpleasant demi-gods run about being nasty.  Makepeace is a fourth level fighter now and wields a dangerous magical axe that slowly fills with power from killing creatures, gems on its haft glowing as it becomes stronger, until the wielder channels this power into a single huge blow.  He’s a dangerous lunatic these days, having successfully slain (or at least trapped) on of the gods of the dungeon moon and returned with it to his strange cannibal cult family compound.  Equipped with the finest plate armor available from the cult armory and dependent on his unnatural dexterity Makepeace has become very hard to injure, making him an effective frontline fighter and door opener.

Above is the character sheet I drew of Makepeace during the last session, after Makepeace had a magically induced goblin fetus surgically removed (there are actually rules for surgically terminating demon pregnancies in LOTFP – just saying) by the party’s other fighter, Zoad the musketeer.

MakePeace NoHells, Level 1

 It  was also recently revealed, thanks to a magical magnet trap, that the reason Makepeace constantly wears a sinister full helmet inscribed with the ‘null’ symbol denying the existence of gods (foolish really in a game where there are clearly evident, actual demi-gods roaming about) isn’t just devotion.  Despite normal human intelligence and a manly enough voice, Makepeace has the grinning round face of a large baby.  The product of genetics both inbred and tampered with by wizards in the last few generations has made the fighter a freak.

KillSin NoHells, hench-cleric.

 After a few adventures, when Makepeace’s party kept emerging from the tunnels under the rocky surface of the Dungeon Moon with food, valuable and glory. His family/church has allowed him to bring along one of their most promising young preachers  as a henchwoman.  Sister-Aunt Killsin NoHells is a first level cleric of the ‘human’ spirit (though human can be switched out for whatever sentient species is currently behaving in a friendly manner).  She’s been an effective henchwoman, and has used her habitually memorized ‘command’ spell to rather good effect.  

 

DL-1 Dragons of Despair - Review

Dragonlance, much reviled, much mocked but secretly much adored.  Back when it was originally published I never read or played any of the Dragonlance Modules, or perused the novels.  By the time Dragonlance was in full swing the guys I played games with had moved on to Car Wars. Jack over at Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque once suggested Dirtbag Dragonlance - which still stands as a good setting idea, but I am curious if there is anything to be salvaged from Dragonlance that could make a fun game without the inclusion of Monster Trucks. Also Beyond Castle Cadwell is such a waste of a good design idea that I may have to stop reviewing the B-Series of modules.

DRAGONS OF Despair

I decided I should actually try reading one of the Dragonlance Modules to earn the right to either ridicule or defend them.  I picked Dragons of Despair, DL1, because

It's the 80's!

it’s the first.  The title is good at least, and the module does include both dragons and despair. Published in 1984, Dragons of Despair is a work by Tracy Hickman, who also wrote Rahasia, which I reviewed a while back.  Hickman has a signature style, one I detest, but it’s absolutely his own, as much a Gygax’s painstaking treasure accounting and bloodthirsty trap advice is his.  From what I can tell the marks of a Hickman adventure are complex story, evocative detail, player handouts, high fantasy and a moral impulse.  

The introduction to Dragons of Despair is emblematic of this sensibility, and lays out an odd set of GM instruction in a more poetic context – a piece of creative writing about how the GM is playing the role of some ancient lore-master/historian/demigod rather than acting as an impartial referee.  It’s perhaps a subtle difference or a hokey one, but I think the idea that the characters are the sort of people that ancient semi-divine robed spirits would be interested in watching is a fundamental difference between a Hickman adventure and the traditional D&D mindset.  It also sadly creates a world where plot immunity is encouraged for player characters. The rules don’t make dying harder, but the future destinies of the recommended party members seem to. 

The odd thing about Hickman's modules (the two I've read) is that within the plot driven railroads and the mechanical problems caused by the plot's strict morality there are some cool encounters and good ideas: metal poor world with steel coinage, elevator encounter, loss of Clerical magic, and the Draconic army that seems modern in it's (fascist) ethos massacring the heck out of high-fantasy land.  There must be something salvageable from these ideas.

The problems I have with the Hickman game world are many, but at the core Dragons of Despair (and Rahasia) appear to be an effort to use the medium of table top games to tell a different kind of story then the picaresque of most D&D games.  They strive to be sweeping and epic, and while my experience playing suggests that this approach rarely works, that any sweeping epic moments must arise from the players own goals derived from observation and interaction with the world rather than the ones predetermined by a GM or adventure writer, I can’t say that the goal of Dragonlance modules wasn’t a novel one.  IT was also a very successful goal apparently, as the novels and modules of Dragonlance were D&D’s flagship world for quite a while, and beloved by a lot of players.

What’s awful about Dragonlance, and it is awful (though not without redeeming features), isn’t it’s goals or the creativity behind it, it’s the world it evokes and the way it tortures D&D’s mechanics to make that world work.

Thunderhead Manse

Hey - One Page Dungeon Contest, last minute submission below.  Hopefully this will exercise my desire to make flying monkey related adventures.

Link to PDF of Thunderhead Manse

Play Report - fairytale reskin of B3

I recently ran a game of the re-skinned B3-Palace of the Silver Princess setting it in a fairy tale land, with anthropomorphic animals and whimsical elves.  It went well, and the adventure proved a couple things. First, those 80’s modules loved their combat, second that a story with hints to discover motivates players to explore and third, re-skinned goblins can be really scary.  I redrew the map of the first level of the dungeon, because the original is very linear and lacks any organic sense – including things like putting the Princesses’ dressing chamber next to a butcher shop and placing military style traps in a school room.  I based my reskin on the ideas in this review: B3 - Palace of the Silver Princess

B-3's first level, redrawn for sense.

A WEDDING RUINED

The berry wines and honey-mead have been flowing for a week now, and even the lowliest hired labor from the terrestrial sphere and the less respectable outlying villages have been basking in the absurd plenty that the impending wedding of the fey Queen Azure to the mysterious Scarlet Dragon Knight trails in its wake.  Azure in her typical grandiose way, only to be expected from a self-proclaimed “Daughter of the Earth Goddess”, “Ever Truthful Oracle” and “Czarina of the Peaceable Forest Peoples” has invited every being with even the slightest connection to the fey courts.  The small hamlet of Bobble, in the lee of her great castle is overflowing with intelligent animals, gnomes, lesser fey, dwarves, the more civilized goblin folk and even occasional humans.  Every low roofed toadstool hut has been crammed to its musty rafters as the more enterprising crofters take in guests, or rent their homes to traveling artisans while they camp in the woods.

The eve of the wedding finally sees the tiny town at rest, though late night preparations continue in the castle, with the windows of its towers and enchanted bowers ablaze with multicolored light and the sounds of revelry.  Yet not long after midnight this relative peace is disturbed when a huge explosion, and cacophony of unearthly howls, rumbling earth and cracking rock tears through the night.  Man, elf, dwarf, gnome, boggin, sprite, badgerman, rabbitwife and mushroom people dash into the small fountain square at the center of Bobble and stare up at the castle bluff where the towers have shifted and a sulfurous light creeps downward like slowly dripping oil from the tangled bows of the castle’s living woods. An enormous tower of black smoke fills the sky coming from the collapsed central dome of the castle, it’s silver filigreed roof fallen.

B8 - Journey to the Rock - Review

Initial thoughts

Cover art - Party is nice in a mid 80's way
The Rock lasts magesty

Firmly entrenched in the mid 80’s, and TSR’s trends towards higher fantasy adventures with clearly delineated good and evil, Journey to the Rock is still an exception after the unsettling (and often unnecessary) railroading of B5-B7 that seems to mark the beginning of a move away from sandbox play.  Written by Michael Malone in 1985 doesn’t have the popularity or notoriety of much of the B series, I’m not really sure why this is, as there is much to use in Journey to the Rock, perhaps it came out at a time when D&D was trending away from the sort of vanilla world exploration fantasy that it represents towards the epic scripted adventures of Dragonlance, perhaps B8’s solid structure is lost underneath a coat of dullness that still makes it a bit of a slog to read.   B8 doesn’t just return to the more open world popular in the early B series, it returns to the practice of giving tidbits of GMing advice, which is welcome.   There’s advice on character death that focuses on wandering adventurers rather than henchmen as replacements.  It’s an interesting choice when compared to the advice in B2, and which I read as a move in mid-80’s D&D towards a party of individual heroes vs. party as a band of desperate treasure hunters or wandering pack of mercenaries.  The rather decent pre-generated characters show this as well, with typical fantasy backstories and quite good statistics, but without being overly long and complex.  None of this is bad or especially good, just noteworthy as a signpost of the direction D&D was taking in the mid 80’s.  Another example of the mid 80’s railroad/heroic adventure thinking in Journey to the Rock is the inclusion of optional encounters that are to be avoided if they might destroy the party.  It’s a shame as the vast majority of these individual encounters are quite good, and beyond time pressure or avoiding hammering a wounded and foolish party of adventurers there’s no reason to avoid them.

B8 is supposedly novel because it is primarily a wilderness adventure, but this is only partially true.  B8 is an adventure that occurs in the wilderness, but it provides three ‘paths’ to the target location rather than a hex crawl to explore, though one could easily  explore the empty hexes (squares actually) striking out across the map.  There are simple, and seemingly solid wilderness travel and encounter rules, and some nice concepts embodied in the day and night encounter lists.  The encounters themselves have tiny bits of character to them that go a long way to making them feel naturalistic (Forest ogre wears deer skull helmet, goblins send out raiding parties if the party kills their hunters) and while this isn’t much it’s better than a lot of modules - B series or contemporary.  One issue is that the map represents maybe three days of travel at the rates provided (which seem high), making this a rather short wilderness adventure, though the density of the path’s inhabitants may slow a party down.  Another positive and noteworthy element of Journey to the Rock is that many of the monsters are unique, and many are not outright hostile.  This is a huge departure from B7, B6 or B5 where good and evil are drawn sharply and creatures are either friendly or instantly aggressive.  

The dullness of Journey to the Rock begins with the plot, despite containing some classic swords and sorcery elements such as the ancient city phased out of time and seeking to return.  What’s surprising here is that the core ideas are fun, but they are presented in a blunt, rules heavy manner, and worse the interesting bits aren’t expanded upon while the minutia is.  The party is accosted by a merchant in the wilds who wants to offer one of them a job from a local wizard and noble.  The party travels to a manor where they are given a job to trek to a distant glowing massif and recover an ancient amulet to allow the wizard to bring his lost city back to the world.  This is presented as an absolute good, which is a bit strange, and the hook itself is “go get the wizard something for money” is so trite and miserable.  Weirdly the module writer thinks this hook deserves several pages to set up.  After accepting the quest the adventurers wander off into the wilderness, presumably along one of the three trails on the map they receive.  The North trail goes through some mountains and the abandoned ruins of the phased city.  The Western trail wanders through forest and the Southern barrens or a desert. All three paths lead to an interesting set encounter and a puzzle involving the nature of the rock itself.