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Monthly Archives: November 2012

Part One

So my reasons for sending the players into Gamma World were two-fold. First and foremost I’d just picked up the box set and thought it would be pretty fun (it was!) Second I’d stumbled on the over-arching idea for the campaign, and I wanted to know if it was something my players would like. However I couldn’t ask them if they wanted to do it without major spoilers.

I am happy to say that the experiment was a success, my players really enjoyed the jaunt, and seemed eager to press on in D&D, but also to return to Gamma World in the future. The stage was set, and once the players made their way out of the ruins of Astridax, I started dropping hints and clues about the overarching meta-plot.

Part One

So this is a good point to mention a couple of things here. First off, Gamma World is fucking fantastic. Fourth Edition GW is superb. You’ve probably seen the Penny Arcade Comic about GW, and if anything it understands just how amazing GW is. It condenses 4th Edition down to the important bits and trashes anything else that’s not important. Then it takes it and puts it in a post-apocalyptic setting where basically anything goes. 

That said there are two complaints about the system that are I initially thought were pretty legit, but I have come to the conclusion are basically bullshit.

First is the cards. Yep, they made a Collectible Card Subgame that you can use for gamma world. You can buy booster packs, and they are hella expensive. There’s a simple solution. Don’t do it. The deck that came with the game is all you need. Really it’s plenty. If you can pick up some boosters on the cheap, maybe … but it’s not so big a deal to only have a DM deck to draw from. And the DM deck comes with the game.

Second is Ammo. Here’s the way ammo works. You keep track of every bullet, erg of laser-shot, and arrow. No wait, that’s dumb and stupid. You have ammo for each of your guns. Every fight you have 2 options: Don’t fire your gun more than once or fire it as many times as you frakking feel like. If you only fire your gun once, you’re conserving ammo and don’t run out. If you fire it two or twenty times during a fight you’re not conserving ammo, and at the end of the fight you run out of ammo. Now in general every 2-3 encounters the party will find Ammo. And ammo is totally abstracted. So if Bob’s pulse rifle, and Claire’s slug-thrower are both out, they can hash out who gets the ammo however they like, but then that player is resupplied. Maybe Claire gives Bob some ancient tech to get the ammo, and then it was bullets all along.

Part One

Hit points corrected, gear distributed everyone was set. They entered the laboratory where the Necromancer Aline was controlling the undead via the Artificer of Dreams.

The party had acquired a device that allowed the user to mimic any sound. DJ, one of the players, had a devious idea. Using the device, he imitated Meera, Aline’s long dead lover, and the indirect cause of the whole tragedy. Now it’s been a couple of years, so I doubt I’ll do his speech justice, but the gist of it was “Aline, what you did was wrong, I don’t want this unlife. If you still love me you’ll undo the horror you’ve wrought and let nature take it’s course.”

Okay, I was thinking, that’s probably worth a surprise round at least. So I told DJ to give me a Bluff check. He rolled a crit, so I did the only thing appropriate: I trashed the final boss fight and the party just instantly won. Aline realized her error, released control and stepped out of the machine, allowing several thousands of years of time to finally catch up (the Artificer of Dreams had been sustaining her as well). So yeah, final battle completely subverted by a bit of player ingenuity and a damn lucky roll. Who am I to not give it to them though.

Part One

This is part three of the recap of The Increasingly Misnamed D&D Campaign. 

I’ll probably put some kind of table of contents here eventually.

So the Artificer of Dreams is a dais with “coffins” on it. The coffins are magic, nigh indestructible, and only openable from the inside. One is occupied. The party enters coffins and are submerged into the dreamworld from which Aline’s necromantic powers extended into Athas. 

This ends up being kind of like The Matrix, they made new characters in Gamma World, and I heavily modified the pre-built adventure to be appropriate to a world taken over by Aline. 

Having never played 4th edition Gamma World were were only a little surprised at the ridiculous lethality of the game… so to keep things fun, I just had everyone make a new character after every encounter (if they had died). Queue the end of the penultimate encounter and one of my newer players (who’s only played a couple of D&D sessions before) is dead. While everyone else tries to figure out the best way to distribute gear in preparation for the final fight, I help Alec build a new character. During this I discover something exciting, EVERYONE had been doing hit points wrong. They had all, independently, been adding their Constitution modifier, not their constitution score. No wonder everyone had been dying so often. We fixed everyone’s HP and then moved on to the final battle, the confrontation with the necromancer Aline.

Part One

So the party traveled through a portal to Dark Sun, one that took much longer and was a more difficult crossing than normal. They arrived in a cold dark corridor with only two routes to go. A little investigation (and temporarily barred door) lead them to find one dead end, then back track out. They encountered a few native creatures that had made their way into the dungeon, but mostly a bunch of skeletons and ghosts that were haunting the dungeon.

They also learned that it wasn’t a dungeon at all, but the castle Astridax, that had been buried in it’s entirety millennia earlier to keep a great evil from spreading across the land. I don’t think they figured everything out, but I’m not sure what they missed, so for simplicity’s sake I’m going to reveal everything… it’s not like it matters at this point. I give you, a short history of the Kingdom of Astridax.

Astridax was also the name of the Castle and the race that inhabited the region, back when Dark Sun was still fertile. The Astridax were a race of blue, parthenogenic humanoids. Aline was a great sorcerer who dipped into necromancy (via an Artifact called the Artificer of Dreams) when her lover Meera was killed and unable to be resurrected. Aline went insane and began to kill and raise the rest of the populace. Sileara, Meera’s sister and also a great magician realized the horror this would eventually cause and since she was not able to defeat Aline, she instead buried the entire castle hundreds of feet underground where the evil could not spread.

The party fought their way through the dungeon facing horrors such as skeletons that kept reanimating, ghosts, and native creatures that had gotten trapped inside the dungeon with little to eat. Eventually they pieced together enough of the puzzle and found the Artificer of Dreams, but not before fighting Meera’s Revenant. This was a rather fun “boss fight” as Meera was not entirely pleased with having been raised. She started the fight by apologizing and made saves every turn to keep from attacking the party… there was of course plenty of other stuff to keep the party busy. Eventually they destroyed everything else but the power of the Artifact would keep bringing Meera back, so their only option was to enter the machine and kill Aline from within it.

A little over two years ago 4th Edition D&D was still pretty fresh, and the Dark Sun campaign setting was coming out, something I had dabbled in far less than I’d have liked back in High School. I grabbed a couple of friends, and my roommate at the time was also running a game, so we could both take turns running and playing, and do a nice arc here or there and then have plenty of time to prep. This was great.

When the campaign started it was going to be a mix of Sigil and Dark Sun, and maybe other settings. Sigil the Hub, and the party could go to various settings and have adventures, returning to Sigil eventually to start new arcs. The players basically knew at this point that they were going to end up getting stranded on Athas, they just didn’t know the full extent of the stranding. See, portals throughout the multiverse had been weakening, or failing outright. And of course the chosen first destination, Athas isn’t exactly known for being well connected.

The initial party was contracted to retrieve a coin which happened to be a port-key. The key had been stolen by some Skulks. Skulks are a race that that have an ancient enmity with Tieflings, and had bamboozled the Tiefling that had hired the party in particular by having one masquerade as the merchant’s estranged brother. The party eventually tracked the Skulks down, forced their way into the Skulk hideout and went through the portal to Athas, where the Skulks had been planning on perpetrating nefarious deeds.

On the other side they found themselves at the base of a dungeon, with the portkey, one last Skulk and no way home.

So, I am about ready to put the kibbutz on my increasingly misnamed D&D game due to the ridiculously uncommonness of actual sessions being able to occur. I’ve now accepted two players whose play style might not entirely jive with my own. Assuming they even show up.

In case the campaign does end up ending I think I’m going to take a break from my normal stream of consciousness posts, and do campaign summery. This will also allow me to get a bit of a buffer built up so I don’t end up missing 2-3 days when life gets really busy and I can’t stick to my schedule of trying to post every day.

So I was thinking it’d be kind of neat to set up some sort of mechanical (possibly using Legos) device to move a laser pointer around to entertain animals. Then I was thinking… you could have it set to repeat the same pattern, and videotape your animal(s) reactions. You could even have it come on for sporadic periods through out the day and see if the animals can remember when the “red dot attacks” each day.