A Tale of Two Dragon Warriors

Today's guest post comes from DashJump, whose name should sound familiar if you recall our Mega Man 25th anniversary marathon. As it turns out, he plays other games, too—in this case, Dragon Warrior! Last year around this time, we had an overview of the four NES games; this year, we're continuing the holiday tradition with some stories from the Game Boy Color adaptation...

Guaranteed 100% Spoiler Free!

It was the best of games; it was the worst of games…and all one Game Boy Color cartridge!

Dragon Warrior (aka Dragon Quest) was published in the same era as Final Fantasy by the Enix part of the now-juggernaut Square Enix, or “Squeenix” as lovingly called by us professionals. Also similar to Final Fantasy, it spawned a gaggle of sequels and offshoots. Finally, like all good fantasies, it only made sense to update the graphics, tweak the balance, update the King James script, and re-release the game for a modern console. Well, modern at the time.

But wait, there’s more! Why update one game when you can update two for twice the price? Unlike (classic) Final Fantasy storylines, there is continuity within the (classic) Dragon Warrior franchise. The first three games and second three games each form a story arc. It’s teetering on this first arc where my story begins…


Dragon Warrior I

I named my character Biff (given the four character limitation of the Game Boy version) and quickly learned he was a descendent of Loto (known as Erdrick in the North American NES port). Apparently some evil genius DracoLord (Dragonlord on the NES) had stolen a magic tchotchke and was using it to ruin everything for everybody. Of course, it fell to me to save the world; this wasn’t The Sims where I could expect to beat the game by calling friends and selling used cars.

Well, all the fixtures of the classic RPG are present as you enter this land. You get to wander a glorious 8-bit world slaughtering slimes, leveling up, collecting gold, buying bling, and staying at inns while progressing towards your destiny: defeating DracoLord! The only surprise for modern gamers? You are on your own. This game is a party of one.

However, it’s this honest simplicity that appealed to me most. The updates to the game make it a touch easier and faster than its older NES counterpart. Plus, NPCs you encounter share useful clues with you. No one blathers on about the weather or a pie they baked, save the “puff puff massage” girl at the bathhouse. You should get to know her. Moving on!

To a seasoned veteran of RPGs, Dragon Warrior is a great weekend project. You’ll be humming the chiptunes long after your adventure is over.

So it was with great expectations that I nestled into my chair to begin the next chapter of my quest…


Dragon Warrior II

In this adventure, you play as the descendent of the warrior in your first game. So, I named him Baff.

From the introduction, you learn you will not be alone this time. Your first objective is to assemble your team. If you are able to complete this objective, you may have a chance at beating the game. I’m serious.

I believe it took me as long to track down the first of my peeps as it did for me to beat the first game. Not that there were too many places to look, mind you; that would have been far less frustrating. No, I was visiting the same places over and over. Having become so over-leveled, I even wound up going to a cave some old man told me I dare not visit alone, wondering if perhaps he was evil and lying to me.

Fortunately, our third teammate revealed herself much sooner, and we were on our way.

With your team assembled, you embark upon a mighty fetch quest. Unlike the last game, where the McGuffins you collect along the way are either useful or novel, in this game, little of what you collect does more than allow you to collect something else. There are a few neat locations you visit along the way, but the game by and large lacks the charm of the first.

To its credit, though, many of these drawbacks are symptoms of evolutionary growing pains. Having additional party members facing more than one creature at a time adds new dimensions of strategy to the battles that weren’t present in the first game. The introduction of new ways to travel opens up the world, making the game feel less linear. You even get to visit locations and pick up items from the last game, strengthening the story continuity and making this journey feel like a part of something bigger.

All those changes almost made up for the negatives. That is, until I arrived in the final area and unlocked hard mode. After hours of searching, finding, unlocking, revisiting, band camp, grinding, grinding, and grinding, I felt prepared. Unlike the first game, I had managed a deathless run to this point. I set foot out into this new land and was crushed like an ant on a kindergarten playground. It happened over and over and over again. I was dumbfounded.

After spending as much time grinding in this place as I did to reach it, I was finally ready to defeat the evil dastard who thrust this torturous quest upon me. Watching him disappear into oblivion? Priceless.

Still, despite returning peace to the kingdom once more, my dragon sense tingles. I feel, perhaps, evil has yet to be permanently vanquished. When asked why, I can point to only one sign: the Dragon Warrior III cartridge on my shelf.

To be continued...

Sunday Spotlight: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind: The Only Game of the Year Edition

At last, my Backloggery can stop crying for a while. That only took ten months.

A Proper Crystalis Celebration

As is my yearly custom, I am pleased to report that I have celebrated the (15th!) anniversary of The END DAY by playing through Crystalis, the NES RPG cult classic that made the bold proclamation that this day in 1997 would mark the end of civilization as we knew it. Well, I say that the post-apocalypse has never looked better.

For starters, for the first time in a few years, I was able to play through Crystalis from start to finish in a single sitting. Marathoning the game isn't a requirement, but I'm at the point now where I can breeze through it in 3-4 hours; that's about how long I spend playing video games anyhow (when I get the chance), so why not finish the whole thing in one go? Besides, part of the enjoyment I derive from playing this every year is experiencing the continuous progression of the story and the gameplay from one area to the next; I don't get the full effect by taking a few days to complete the game.

More exciting than that, however, was the release of Part 1 of GameCola's Crystalis-themed D&D podcast, hosted by yours truly. It's an alternate retelling of the story in which the game's four wise men--Zebu, Tornel, Asina, and Kensu--are the heroes. If you're interested in Dungeons & Dragons, or are a Crystalis fan, or just like sitting in on other people's (virtual) tabletop gaming sessions, this one comes highly recommended.

However, the best part of this END DAY was unquestionably the rare opportunity to fire up my NES, settle myself into the couch, and watch the graphics of Crystalis' otherwise normal introductory cutscene go completely bananas:

Apparently, the mistakes of the past could have been avoided with a little more Tornel Teaches Typing.

 

In short, this was a good day for Crystalis.

Double (Dungeons &) Dragon(s)

It's like I'm back in college again. I've got two D&D quests I'm currently writing--one is a new long-term campaign with a dedicated group of players and characters, which I haven't had since I graduated; the other is a D&D quest...based on a video game.

Toward the end of my time in school I held a one-shot quest where the players used (loose) D&D rules to create an anime or video game character of their choice, banding together as a ragtag bunch of heroes fighting their way through everything from a level of Mario Kart to Worms: Armageddon. It was utterly ridiculous, and an absolute hoot, and now I'm working on smashing tabletop roleplaying together with video games once more for a very unusual edition of The GameCola Podcast. I won't spoil the surprise of the game our quest will be based on, but it's safe to say it's one I've talked about before on this blog.

As for the long-term quest, I'm finally able to bust out an idea I've been sitting on for about five or six years, and that alone has me very excited. I'm taking my time to map this one out, though; I've got a few story arcs in mind, all wrapped within one main plot, and I want to make sure I do it right. No doubt there will be at least one gelatinous cube somewhere, a magical crystal, and an incomprehensible number of pillars and tapestries.

All I mean to say here is that there's some fun story potential on the horizon, and to not worry too much if you don't see me quite as often around here for the next few weeks--it just means that I'm writing D&D instead.

Or playing Morrowind. For inspiration.

Oh, man. Or blogging about playing Morrowind instead of blogging. I'm so doing that this week.

Let Others Choose the Way

[Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8]

In addition to verbal descriptions of locations and scenery in my D&D campaigns, I employ crudely drawn maps on an erasable whiteboard to help the players visualize the setting, and to keep track of where everything is whenever exploration and combat inevitably ensue. Some DMs will draw maps on graph paper or lay out dungeons tiles to ensure distances remain consistent and accurate, but I don't care to expend the extra effort to calculate exact lengths ahead of time when, in my head, the distance between the castle and the goblin cave is precisely "pretty far." I'm content to approximate distances with the D&D miniatures we use to represent the characters, as the base of a medium-sized miniature equates to a 5-ft. diameter in the game world.

Anymini, the players thought it might be amusing to take certain liberties with the map I'd drawn while I was away from the table.

Go ahead. You can click to enlarge. Judging from the handwriting, the room full of magical kittens, and the wonderful reference to the Ted E. Bear song from Sam & Max: Season One leads me to believe that only my wife could have masterminded this diabolical reimagining of the tower map. I let it slide for a while.

The party awakes from their slumber and opens the door into the hallway--comically bumping the door into the golden-furred cat that had fallen asleep in front of it. Hissing at the party, the cat runs off--a far cry from the friendly kitty that had fetched the key in the jail.

Doing a little more exploration on this floor before progressing, the party finds a secret door (elf senses, you know) in the dining hall fireplace, which leads into Ziggy Frood's secret bedchambers. Bedchambers also accessible by the elevator up from the basement level, which the adventurers smack themselves for not trying. Bedchambers filled with cat tapestries (depicting cats, not made of cats) and a small adjoining bathroom with kitten-scented soap. A search of the area reveals the Knockback Ring I had planted, along with one of the last strips of paper, saying, "...whose cold shell melts into ooze..."

There doesn't seem to be much immediate value to the Knockback Ring--the players ambivalently offer it up to each other until someone finally takes it. Exploring the rest of the tower's second floor, the party comes across a bathroom where the minotaur had clearly been showering earlier. They claim a paper from the drain that reads, "...nature, which is consumed to easily by flame..." as well as a potion that the half-blind minotaur apparently mistook for shampoo. Having done all there is to do here, the heroes climb the stairs to the training chamber level, unlocking a sizeable door at the top with the key they picked off the minotaur's corpse. Reluctantly, I erase the whimsy from the whiteboard to make way for the floor that will defeat the players.

Not the heroes--the players.

First comes the examination of the platform in the middle of the room, with lines carved into the platform, extending from the center, resembling spokes on a bicycle. There's an inscription: "COMING OR GOING / IMPOSSIBLE TO SAY / I REMAIN WHERE I AM / AND LET OTHERS CHOOSE THE WAY." Unable to immediately discern the purpose of the platform or the meaning of the riddle, the heroes begin opening the doors lining the room.

The first door is to the ooze chamber, where a lake of poisonous green ooze resides in the middle, with a few small platforms forming a path to a larger platform in the center, assuming anyone cares to roll a few Jump checks to maneuver across. The only thing of interest in the room is the teleporter in the middle of the room--which the heroes don't yet know is a teleporter--but it's obviously going to take a little effort to reach. Instead of looking around the other chambers before thrusting anyone into danger, Dia takes the initiative to jump across to the teleporter.

Upon closer examination, there are unintelligible runes inscribed around the teleporter's edge, along with a series of five numbered switches--which I am improvising because it is just now occurring to me that I should figure out exactly how these teleporters work. The heroes eventually discover that flipping switches summons whatever creature is in the corresponding jail cell--as evidenced by the sudden and triumphant return of their seryulin sea slug pal.

For all the hullabaloo they made about trying to take the slug with them before, the party seemed to be utterly baffled about what to do with it now that it was here. The best solution they had--and indeed, the best solution, period--was to open the door to the water chamber and let the slug swim around in a more comfortable habitat (thanks to that successful Knowledge check at the beginning of the game that gave everyone some much-needed insight about the creature). The water chamber is a dim room filled to the ceiling with magically contained water, and as with every other room here, there's a teleporter in the middle.

Exploration of the other rooms goes relatively quickly: a chamber whose every surface is covered in ice; a chamber resembling a cave, complete with outcroppings and stalagmites behind which to hide; a sky-blue room with some vision obscuring clouds floating about, and some sort of enchantment in the room allowing anyone to fly; an ash-gray room with a rounded platform overlooking a pit of raging fires; a room containing a small portion of the cogs and gears that were initially to make up the entire floor; a chamber with five pillars--effectively Tesla coils--bearing evidence of having been dragged around; a greenhouse with a variety of plants, including a concealed Udoroot (which the heroes were fortunate to not disturb) and an enormous swaying plant reminiscent of Little Shop of Horrors that rotates in its gigantic pot to keep its eyeless gaze fixed in the direction of anything moving nearby. Oh, and a perfectly empty-looking room with absolutely nothing in it but the teleporter.

Well, that, and a well-hidden trap on every square. One of the floor tiles sinks as Sally steps onto the floor, triggering a poison dart trap that prompts another discussion of what that Amulet of Delay Poison does.

After poking around in all of the chambers, there is little left to do but crack that riddle on the platform in the center. Now, I've been writing D&D riddles for many years, and I've come to understand that it is the characters, not the players who play them, who ultimately solve the riddle. Thus, I allow the occasional Wisdom or Knowledge roll to provide hints to the players that their characters would be likely to consider. Additionally, I've started trying to make the riddles somewhat relevant to the situation, or at least provide some clues somewhere about what the solution might be. None of this seems to help this time around.

The quest grinds to a halt. Knowledge and Wisdom checks aren't high enough to come up with any particularly helpful clues, and the only solid lead is that the riddle pertains to a form of transportation. Once again:

COMING OR GOING
IMPOSSIBLE TO SAY
I REMAIN WHERE I AM
AND LET OTHERS CHOOSE THE WAY

After ruling out carts, carriages, and the like, the party proposes one option that would certainly fit the description: a road. However, a road is not going to magically emerge from the floor and take everyone to the top of the tower. Stairs are. Assuming anyone says the word "stairs" before the characters die of expired patience. It's not until someone looks up at the ceiling, sees the tunnel leading up to the next floor, and receives some nudging from the DM that the correct answer is spoken. The "bicycle spokes" on the platform begin to rise from the ground, and before long a spiral staircase has emerged.

I make a mental note to ensure I test my own riddles more extensively in the future, and to plan a little more thoroughly so that I'm not realizing, "Oh wait--there's probably a hole in the ceiling where the stairs will go" after the party has already exhausted all the clues I can give them.

To help break up the tedium of trying to crack the riddle, I had suggested the players try to piece together the scraps of paper to form something meaningful. After writing everything out on paper and then tearing up the paper for a more authentic (and easier) attempt at piecing the notes together, the party soon came up with the following:

HAZARDS SET INTO MOTION WITH GEARS AND COGS

WHICH TURN AND GRIND BY THE POWER OF LIGHTNING

RACE THE LIGHTNING BACK TO THE CLOUDS FROM WHENCE IT CAME

THE CLOUDS THAT FLOOD THE WORLD WITH RAIN

THE RAIN THAT BRINGS LIFE TO ALL NATURE

NATURE, WHICH IS CONSUMED SO EASILY BY FLAME

FLAME, WHICH WARMS THE FROZEN LANDS

WHOSE COLD SHELL MELTS INTO OOZE

WHOSE ACIDIC TOUCH SINKS DEEP INTO THE EARTH

AND UNDERGROUND ARE HIDDEN HAZARDS UNKNOWN

[repeat]

Nice, neat, orderly...but not entirely useful. Clearly, this was referring to the training chambers, but how wouldn't become apparent for a little while longer.

Anyhow, we're past that: right now the party just solved the riddle. The cat appears again at this point and darts up the spiral stairs past them. At the top of the steps is the top of the tower, completely empty except for the cat.

The cat transforms into a full-sized Ziggy Frood (who the party scribe describes as "a stoned '70s wizard"). The master of the tower had been trailing them all along, growing progressively less friendly after the party had begun slaying his staff. Of course, the players had suspected something like this for a while, but there had been neither reason nor opportunity to act on it. That quickly changed when Ziggy announced he was dragging them each into one-on-one combat with him.

Outrage. We won't fight you. Yes, you will fight me. I'll be downstairs; find me, or else--and come alone.

The way I envisioned this playing out was as follows: Ziggy teleports into one of the training chambers. One or more party members enter the room where Ziggy currently is; Ziggy has a readied action to cast a spell or fire off an elemental ray (effectively a regular ranged attack like you'd make with a longbow, but with the appearance of a magic spell) when the first person enters the room.

If more than one person is headed into the room, Ziggy will use his move action to click his heels together and activate the teleportation anklet that will take him to the next training chamber referenced on the list the party assembled from those scraps of paper. This effectively gives Ziggy the ability to hit and run before anyone else can get in an action. He'll only stick around to fight if he's facing one of the characters alone.

Once the players realize this, they can play it one of two ways: send in one person at a time to fight...or set up a series of ambushes to let the training chambers work for them.

With the help of the assembled scraps of paper (or through close observation over at least a dozen turns), the party would be able to predict where Ziggy would show up next, and lay traps for him wherever he arrived. The Tesla coils could be dragged around the room so that the electricity jumping between them (controlled by a switch on the wall) would pass across the teleporter where Ziggy would appear. Someone could lure the hungry plant in the greenhouse to be facing the teleporter when Ziggy arrived, spotting him as a new meal and taking a decent-sized bite out of him. The Knockback Ring could be used to push Ziggy backwards in the trap room, triggering any number of damage-dealing, save-requiring traps.

The seryulin could save the adventurers the trouble of trying to move and attack through dark water by swimming up behind Ziggy in the water room and reminding the characters why they were wise not to try petting it back in the prison.

Every location is designed to provide some interesting hazards that can be beneficial to the heroes if they are thinking creatively enough. However, the battle is set up so that traditional hack-'n'-slash tactics will work as well.

Aside from a failed Suggestion spell and a bat swarm summoning (allowing me to finally use the bat swarm I had left in the corner of the basement a while back), Ziggy is surprisingly conservative with his magic. I blame this on me as a DM being more caught up with logistics than actual combat, but it doesn't help that I as an RPG player am naturally inclined to save my magic for emergencies and other situations where regular attacks just aren't cutting it. Apparently, a final battle against opponents who are winning doesn't quite count as an emergency for me.

Over the course of fifteen rounds (so, about a minute and a half in game time) the party successfully manages to zap Ziggy with the Tesla coils, put him within biting range of the overgrown monster plant, and allowed him to be attacked by the ambush slug. Most of the other rooms aren't used to the potential I imagined for them, in large part because the Knockback Ring is all but forgotten in the flurry of readied ranged attacks that has Dia and Salieri firing through doorways as Sally tries to get close enough to Ziggy long enough to spear him. There's more of a focus on individual combat capabilities than elaborate setups and team coordination, but the party's approach is ultimately effective.

Toward the end of the battle, Dia summons a monstrous spider capable of entangling the groovy wizard in a web, and Salieri loads his crossbow with those teleportation-inhibiting bolts of Minor Binding he picked up after the party looted the defeated redcap's shop. Sally sets a fire on one of the teleporters where Ziggy is expected to appear next. Ziggy's best asset is his mobility, and the party strips him of it, and also sets him on fire. Humiliated, in pain, and with dangerously low HP, Ziggy transforms back into his cat form and makes a mad dash for the stairs, risking the attacks of opportunity to outrace his attackers to the top.

When the party arrives, Ziggy has a little (read: humongous) surprise for them. Four giant stone statues come to life and climb up the side of the tower, soon surrounding the heroes. Injured from the fight and barely able to contend with one of the golems in peak condition, the party is at Ziggy's mercy. Thing is, Ziggy has conceded--the heroes have survived his test, and are free to go. He produces three scrolls, each signed by one of the characters, stating that "I, the undersigned, agree to be a test subject for Ziggy Frood and to have my short-term memory wiped so as not to create any bias or preconceived notions about the test," or something to that effect. After verifying that the signatures are, in fact, authentic, the party gets reeeeaaaally upset.

Which is not what I was expecting. I was expecting an "ooooohhhhhh" revelation instead of getting angry about something they willingly signed themselves up for. Well, that I willingly signed them up for. Sally hands Ziggy the unhappy letter from Zep Neblin that was found on the ground floor of the tower--she had previously tried to shout at him that his funding had been cut and he needed to stop his tests, but he had written it off as some sort of mind game--and upon realizing that there were no more free resurrections awaiting his mangled test victings, Ziggy becomes apologetic...especially because he can no longer compensate the party for their trouble, as he had previously planned.

The party threatens to go directly to the gnomes to file a complaint. Ziggy counters that he's the only one with the creativity to prepare the kinds of challenges that reflect what real-life combat situations will be like for the emperor's son--if he's removed from his position here, the gnomes will only convert this tower into an ineffective and uninspired sword-training facility.

The party...does not care. Making sure that inconceivably fascinating sea slug creature of theirs is properly cared for before they leave, the party exits the tower and heads off for...

...actually, we have no idea where we're going. It's nothing but miles and miles of snowy expanse in all directions, and we didn't bother to ask Ziggy which way toward civilization.

Oh, well.

QUEST COMPLETED!! THE END!!

Piles of XP all around for a job well done. And piles of XP to you, faithful reader, for (presumably) sticking around through all eight parts of this unfathomably longer-than-expected story. I think we could both use a break--I hear there's a day spa up on the second floor that's pretty nice...

Sunday Spotlight: Part 7 of That D&D Story I'm Taking Forever to Tell

[Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8]

After one last sweep of the room, the adventurers progress upstairs to a curved hallway lined with barred windows on the left and wooden doors on the right. A little colder up here, the heroes can see out onto the snowy, barren expanse surrounding the tower. The first door they come across bears a sign that reads, "Trading Post," though in retrospect, it would've been amusing if one of the letters had been worn away so that the sign read "Trading Po t" instead. They open the door and pile into a relatively small room with a wooden counter, a pile of containers against the wall, and a small, terrifying man in a blood-red cap.

Putting on an accent that I can only describe as "crazed old man pretending he's Scottish despite never having heard a Scottish accent before," I begin to speak to the players as the redcap. Wish that I could remember exactly what I said, but the exchange of dialogue essentially proceeds like this:

PLAYERS: "Hello, creepy shopkeep. Have you any wares? We've never been shopping before and aren't looking for anything in particular. Also, we're very poor because we didn't go searching the crates in the basement for goods to sell you, so we're really not sure what we're doing here. Be afraid of us! We might attack you! Uh...just kidding. You are fascinatingly creepy."

REDCAP SHOPKEEP: "Buy something, or I'll eat ya."

The redcap continually needs to restrain himself from killing the party--though he talks openly about desiring to do so. Redcaps by nature are highly superstitious, and he's been told by the master of the tower that it's bad luck to eat the customers--something he continually needs to remind himself of whenever he begins to think aloud how refreshing it would be to cut them open and soak his cap in their blood.

Before the campaign began, I had asked the players whether there was any equipment they'd like to see show up somewhere in the quest, perhaps something they couldn't afford to buy as part of their starting equipment. I got one request for an Armband of Elusive Action, which allows the wearer once a day to avoid provoking an attack of opportunity--for example, offering an opening for the enemy to strike her in the back as she turns away to disengage from melee combat. The shopkeeper is wearing one of these armbands and is willing to part with it; otherwise, most of his wares are all the typical equipment and items you could find in the Player's Handbook. Finally, after realizing that they are not obligated to patronize a shop simply because it exists, the party departs.

They don't get very far down the hallway before they hear large footsteps coming toward them. Taking point, Sally the elan psychic warrior is the first to spot a large horned creature wearing a tattered old vest, like some sort of respectable butler polymorphed into a giant beast that's CHARGING RIGHT AT US!! Dia, the elf ranger, fires at the foe from a distance. Sally, carrying a weapon I've rarely seen player characters favor, is perhaps the first person in any of my D&D campaigns who has been in a position to mount a spear against a charge and deal double damage against the attacker. The minotaur goes down.

Loot: 200 gold, a potion of Magic Fang, a masterwork buckler, and a key ring that had been hanging from his horn.

Party divides up the loot and gains experience points from the DM...except the DM is a moron who can't read the XP chart, and wonders why the party is halfway through the tower and still hasn't leveled up yet.

In a stroke of brilliance, the party drags the minotaur corpse to the trading post and sells it to the redcap shopkeep, who is overjoyed to have fresh blood, red blood. CREEPY OKAY MOVING ON.

Continuing down the hallway, the party grabs a slip of paper fluttering against one of the bars, about to fly out the window. It reads, "...trace the lightning back to the clouds from whence it came..." Behind them is a door to a room filled with bunk beds sized large enough for half-giants, but seemingly comfortable for smaller creatures as well. The only item of real interest in this spotless room is another scrap of paper: "...and underground are hidden hazards unknown..."

The next cryptic fragment is found through the dining hall around the corner, and inside the adjoining smaller bedroom (presumably for the kitchen staff): "...flame which warms the frozen lands..." Across from the bedroom is the kitchen, with a sizable boiling stew pot fuming up some noxious smells. Sally, believing the stew is somehow poisonous (and not just a blend of really gross ingredients) decides to kick over the pot, setting herself on fire with the flames under the pot. She quickly puts herself out. She and Dia then find sharp kitchen knives (technically, masterwork daggers) and return to the dining hall with Salieri the half-elf cleric.

Salieri has been mostly hanging back this whole time, but the player controlling him has been keeping track of the events of the quest. For posterity, for historical accuracy when referring back to an adventure in future quests, and for blog posts like this one, I like to designate a party scribe who'll jot down at least basic bullet points of everything that happens--though I've had one or two people turn their notes into hysterical memoirs of the character they played. I award 250 XP up front for whoever agrees to take notes, and grant them an extra 5 XP every time they gain XP for any other reason. Fair compensation for their efforts without putting them too far ahead of their fellow party members, I believe, plus the gratitude of the DM.

Now, I wasn't expecting the players to run into the minotaur so soon, let alone take him down so effortlessly. I had hoped for at least a little bit of time spent fighting him somewhere around the dining hall area of this floor, or hiding from him in one of the bedrooms along the hallway. As they went to leave the dining hall, the characters were surprised to find that the minotaur was still very much alive, and was about to burst into the room for a real fight.

What they didn't know at the time was that they hadn't killed the minotaur--only dropped him to negative hit points. Before he could bleed to death at -10 HP, the redcap shopkeeper fed a healing potion to his ally, as it's bad luck to let the groundskeeper bleed to death. That's not to say he didn't do anything creepy before reviving the minotaur, but I prefer not to think about what my murderous characters do when I'm not looking.

So hey, the minotaur's back. Roll for initiative. Turn order is Dia, Salieri, Huggarth (the minotaur, whose name was never revealed during the quest), and Sally. The battle rages for eleven turns, or a little over a minute. During this time, Sally is engaging the minotaur in close-quarters combat while Dia and Sally learn about the penalties for firing into melee without possibly harming their allies if they miss. I like to offer the option of taking the standard -4 to your attack roll to shoot carefully enough to never hit your friends, or rolling as normal and then tossing a d6 to see what, exactly, you hit if you miss the target by more than 4.

Despite dishing out some considerable damage, the half-blind minotaur is still not quite a match against the heroes. He bolts out of the dining hall and heads toward the trading post to enlist the help of Rowdy Roddy Redcap (another name that was never revealed to the players), who is more than excited to cut open customers who have become intruders. Joining the fray at the top of the turn order, the redcap helps to turn the tide of the battle in the bad guys' favor, but the DM is too much of a softie to let one of the heroes die instantly after receiving more damage in a single blow than anyone at this level has any right to receive in a normal combat situation--there may or may not have been a fudged die roll that allowed the character to survive at around -8 HP or so. Evidently the dice were trying to make up for several turns of the monsters whiffing thanks to unbelievably low rolls.

Toward the end of the battle, the angry minotaur turns on the redcap, complaining that this isn't worth fighting and continually dying for anymore. With the extra damage dealt by the minotaur, the heroes kill the redcap--who instantly vanishes, leaving behind only a tooth--as well as the minotaur. With the trading post unguarded, the party finally behaves like normal adventurers and ransacks the place for everything it's worth.

Loot: Ring of Protection +1, 10 crossbow bolts of Minor Blinding, a Cognizance Crystal (1 Power Point), an Amulet of Toxin Delay, the aforementioned Armband of Elusive Action, a potion of Invisibility, a scroll of Glitterdust, the aforementioned redcap tooth, dragonhide gloves, a rhinohide sack, 1801 GP, and a scrap of paper saying "...the rain that brings life to all nature..."

This time when consulting the XP table, the DM realizes that all this time, he has been a moron. Now reading the correct amounts on the experience table, he awards an appropriate amount of XP for an encounter against these monsters, and gives the players everything he had inadvertently cheated them out of before. At last, the party is at the appropriate level for that last battle.

::sigh::

Seeing that it's a good time for the characters to take a rest and recover their HP--and a good time for the players to take a break, level up their characters, and go to bed for the evening--the party heads to one of the bedrooms, bars the door, and goes to sleep.

When we return to play again the next day, I find the players have completely rewritten my campaign.


[To be concluded in Part 8.]

Waiting for Wednesday, Volume 4, Issue 20

Ya know, I don’t think I ever really understood the term “my fever broke” until last night, when I alternated between being freezing cold—literally teeth-chatteringly cold—and ridiculously hot. I had a couple of very strange dreams, which someone later pointed out were likely fever dreams.

Again, another term that until last night meant very little to me.

One of those fever dream things was particularly interesting, as for a little while there, I pretty vividly dreamt that I was a character in Game of Thrones, warding off a Lannister attack while riding on the kingsroad on my way back to Winterfell.

Aside from demonstrating how utterly clueless I am about a wide variety of things, my fever-induced insomnia last night made me realize that apparently even my fever dreams are dorky, which made me laugh.

Which then made me swoon a bit before laying back down.

Anyway, after the weird dreaming and teeth-chattering coldness of the night, I actually started to feel human again sometime around 4:00 in the morning.

Not to fear, though, because not only did I make it to work this morning—I was even about an hour early. Probably because I was still shaking off the effects of whatever the heck plague I caught last night was.

All this is basically to say that I won’t be posting much today about comic books.

You know, because of the weird fever.

Review: Final Fantasy V Advance

Every so often I'll update my Backloggery with links to the reviews I've written about the games on my list, and sometimes I'll reread my own work if I can't recall why I ended up rating a game the way I did. Such was the case with Final Fantasy V Advance, which held a measly rating of 2/5 stars on my Backloggery instead of the somewhat higher 6/10 I'd given it on GameFAQs.

In case you've never had the chance to read it, or in case you're looking for a nostalgia kick, here below is a link to my review from back in 2008, when I still wrote overwhelmingly in-depth reviews (and had enough time to finish writing them in less than a week!). It's surprisingly thoughtful, surprisingly funny, and surprisingly easy to read despite its length; hopefully you'll enjoy it as much as I did discovering it again:

Review: Final Fantasy V Advance

Yes. It's a Giant Sea Slug. Let's Move On.

[Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8]

"You awake to find yourself in a jail cell." Or something to that effect. Something that all adventurers need to hear at some point in their career. Like a rite of passage, the jailbreak is. A moment for the players to orient and introduce themselves, and then the rite would begin.

But first, let's be fascinated by the giant sea slug.

Never mind the elf ranger (Dia), half-elf cleric (Salieri), or elan psychic warrior (Sally) in the other cells; we need to prod the seryulin and talk to it and roll Knowledge checks to see if it's safe to pet.

It is not safe to pet.

After five or ten minutes of examination, attempts to befriend the seryulin, and individually trying to break out of the prison, it occurs to the characters that there are, in fact, other people they could work with to escape.

Obligatory hellos and a moment for the players to describe their characters to the other players. Realization by DM that he should have made the players write at least a paragraph of backstory for their characters to help establish motives and personalities from the get-go.

It takes a while, but the characters--now a party--escape from their cells with the assistance of the golden-furred cat. Initial attempts to force open the doors, pick the lock, and shoot the key off the hook on the wall were unsuccessful--the latter primarily because the false key exploded when jarred loose from the key rack, confusing the players, and necessitating a tag attached to the real key essentially saying, "Use this key! It's the real key! It won't explode and punish any would-be escapees!"

Of course, before they can leave the room, the party must settle the question of the seryulin.

Do they open the door and let it loose? Do they leave it to wither away in its cell? For now, with tears in their eyes, they drive off into the sunset to find another reason to release the sea slug.

Or something like that.

Look, it's the storage room!

Fluffy bouncing rats nibbling on all manner of goods inside a variety of crates. A variety of crates that the adventurers completely ignore. Gold, ammunition, and random useful items weep silently as the heroes pass them by. There's some discussion about the best way across the room to the ladder on the opposite side, and the rats come progressively closer, and begin to take an interest in the heroes. Carefully, the heroes make their way across to the ladder, in the process spotting a scrap of paper with the clue, "...whose acidic touch sinks deep into the earth..."

The party also notices that the rats are chowing down on gnomish fluffy bunny food. You are what you eat, after all. The rats have also gotten into a stockpile of pillows, which is really just an in-joke put there for my own entertainment after playing too much Morrowind and rescuing a townsperson's precious pillows from some overgrown rats, receiving her reward for the important task, and then looting her pillows behind her back and selling them for a pittance.

...But I digress.

Another slip of paper is found under the overturned table at the top of the ladder, "...hazards set into motion with gears and cogs...", and a few options are discussed for reaching the platform in the middle. Another fluffy rat bouncing around on the rafters poses a potential problem for a grappling hook plan; Sally manifests My Light, and psionically transforms her eyes into blazing headlights that break up the darkness and get the attention of the rat. Combat ensues; wounds are exchanged; rat is killed and falls to the floor below, where the other rats begin to snack on it.

The bat swarm remains in the shadows.

As it turns out, the ladder can be pried loose from its fittings against the wall, and pulled up to form a bridge from the rafters to the platform in the middle. Great success. Party crawls over to the platform, discovers the up/down buttons, and uses the elevator to go up to the next floor. Meanwhile, the cat from the prison has been following the party and nestled itself into Dia's backpack.

The elevator stops at the ground floor, in the large round (and mostly empty) chamber. Another scrap of paper is found by the large crystal statue of a man and his cat, "...which turn and grind by the power of lightning..." The cat hops out of the backpack and starts roaming around the room, coming and going as it pleases for the remainder of the quest.

The large double doors (presumably to the outside) are shut tight, but a letter, still damp with snow, is wedged under the door. It reads:

WE'RE GETTING UNCOMFORTABLE WITH THE NUMBER OF CORPSES YOU'VE BEEN SENDING OUR WAY. WE HAD A DEA, AND I DON'T HAVE TO REMIND YOU WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF YOU FAIL TO DELIVER THE RESULTS YOU ASSURED US WERE WORTH OUR INVESTMENT IN YOU. YOUR FUNDING HAS OFFICIALLY BEEN TERMINATED.

EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY, YOU'LL WORK WITH WHATEVER WE'VE ALREADY GENEROUSLY GIVEN YOU. NO MORE SERVICES; NO MORE SUPPLIES. GIMRACK WILL BE ARRIVING WITHIN A MATTER OF DAYS, PROVIDED THERE ARE NO MORE SETBACKS HERE; IF YOUR FACILITY ISN'T READY BY THE TIME HE REACHES YOUR DOOR, YOU'LL BE JOINING YOUR "GUESTS" AND WILL BE DISPOSED OF IN WHATEVER GRUESOME AND CREATIVE WAY WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT MANGLED HALFLING BOY LAST WEEK.

YOU KNOW THE ONE.

-ZEP NEBLIN


[To be continued in Part 7.]

Gearing Up for the Final Confrontation

[Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8]

The original plan was for the party to fight or puzzle their way through one last floor before arriving at the roof of the tower, for a showdown against Ziggy Frood, A.K.A. Final Boss Wizard Man. There's something majestic about rooftop battles with the right surroundings--in this case, an open expanse of snowy wilderness--and it seemed fitting for the final confrontation to take place at the very last place the party could explore of the tower.

The original plan also counted on me being at all original.

It was the last floor before the roof that was giving me trouble. I had a few ideas--a maze, random deathtraps, a maze, some sort of big puzzle, a maze--but nothing was solidifying that was particularly appealing or made sense. Thinking back once again to Dungeonscape, I kept asking myself, "why would this be here?" Running out of time, I figured I'd rationalize it later, and began filling in the map with the best idea I had to work with: gears, cogs, and sprockets. Inspired by Princess Tutu.

Yeah, you read that right.

My wife had been watching this anime series at the time about a girl who's a duck who's a girl (or something like that), and though I'd only caught glimpses of it here and there, an image of turning gears stood out in my memory. An image totally unrelated to ducks and tutus (as far as I could tell), but still it was there in the series. I thought, "Hey, having the adventurers jump and climb around on gears might be a fun way to put their skill checks to use while simultaneously offering a memorable location and introducing interesting environmental hazards for combat situations." Also, I've played too much Castlevania--all those clock tower levels were bound to influence my creativity at some point. I went about sketching a detailed system of gears and walkways that I ended up erasing entirely a few minutes later.

The prison in the basement; the fancy statue on the ground floor; the big mess hall and dormitory rooms...random gears just weren't matching up with the direction of this tower, no matter how much I liked them. I thought about converting the tower into a lighthouse, or a giant clock, or anything that could conceivably have a reason for a whole room full of machinery, but nothing fit. So I erased it all.

But I still liked the idea that pulling a switch would cause a spiral staircase to raise from the big gear in the middle of the room, leading to the top floor of the tower, so I kept that in place. I now had a large empty room with a random gear laying flat in the middle.

Well, maybe it should be a platform instead of a gear. Change the teeth into short staircases consisting of a few steps up onto the platform. And instead of pulling a switch to get the spiral staircase to unfold from the platform, there could be a riddle inscribed on the platform. Speak the right word, and the staircase emerges.

Now, what to do about populating the rest of the room...

With the platform as the major centerpiece of the circular room, and having already used up the "ring of pillars" idea on the ground floor, it made sense to line the wall with smaller rooms, with the door to each room facing inward toward the big platform. If I was making this into a battle academy, there'd need to be some training rooms, right?

Enter the deathtraps.

This is where it all came together: If you're going to prepare someone for combat in a Dungeons & Dragons world, you need to thrust them into all sorts of strange locations, fighting all manner of bizarre creatures. Each room could have its own unique flavor--a slippery ice room; an arboretum full of dangerous plants; even a room full of gears! And I could install a magical teleportation platform in the center of each room that could pull any creature from the basement prison cells instantly into combat with the trainee. The gnomes, with their generous funding, could certainly have made such things possible. Yes, this would do quite nicely.

Forget the roof; this was the place for a final showdown. The adventurers could explore the rooms to their hearts' content, visit the roof whenever they solved the riddle, and then chase the (accidentally bad) bad guy down into the training chambers to win their freedom. He'd teleport from room to room, and the heroes could possibly use the training chambers to their advantage with enough clever planning and coordination. There was even an opportunity to layer another puzzle on top here: I could write up clues pointing to a set pattern that the final boss would use to teleport from one room to the next, and I could scatter these clues throughout the tower--also adding a little bit more for the adventurers to see and do in the rooms that weren't so exciting.

I wrote the clues as a sort of infinite poem, looping back on itself just as the wizard would be able to keep teleporting around the training chambers in order indefinitely. Each line of the poem would be written on a different scrap of paper that the adventurers could find; even if they only found a few, they could still piece together what they had to get a better idea of where the wizard would be found next once the battle commenced. Strictly optional, but worth some XP and certainly helpful if they could find everything.

I also went back and filled in the last empty part of the map, which was the center of the second floor; Ziggy Frood needed someplace to sleep, so I gave him a secret bedchamber accessible through a trick fireplace in the mess hall, as well as via the elevator from the basement (which would reach the door to his bedroom if the adventurers tried pressing the "UP" button one more time instead of getting off at the ground floor). I'd hide another scrap of clue paper in there, along with a homemade Knockback Ring that magically bull rushes the target backwards about 5 ft., which would be helpful if the heroes wanted to try knocking Ziggy backwards into a pool of acid or a fire pit in one of the training rooms. Again, not a necessity, but another option in case the party sought alternatives to brute strength damage output.

I checked things over once more. I had a plot. I had a map that made sense within the context of the plot. I had sufficiently diverse challenges, and sufficiently diverse ways to approach those challenges. I even had a place for the adventurers to spend their hard-earned loot. Yes, this would do quite nicely.

Break out the dice and character sheets, folks. It's time to play.

[To be continued in Part 6. ]

Monsters as an Alternative to Creative Interior Decorating

[Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8]

Now we had a premise. The heroes had agreed to test the effectiveness and security of a training facility run by Ziggy Frood, a wizard not entirely uninspired by some of the hippie surfer bums from Hawaii Five-O (which I'd been watching on Netflix at the time). The agreement was that the party would be healed and resurrected should any calamity befall them, and their short-term memories would be wiped so as not to allow any biases or preconceived notions about how to approach the challenges. Unbeknownst to the party and the wizard, the gnomes who had been funding the whole endeavor had decided to pull the plug on Ziggy's funding--in other words, no more resurrections. What was supposed to be an ultimately harmless (albeit eccentric) exercise between good guys had turned the wizard into a bad guy, without him realizing it.

Actually, I'm getting a little ahead of myself. By the time I had finished drawing the empty, circular room that was the ground floor, only part of the premise was fleshed out. I knew the tower was going to be some sort of school, but I still couldn't decide whether it should be a wizarding school, or a janitorial school, or what. So, I bought some time for myself by using the second floor of the tower as the dormitory level. Surely by the time I was done drawing the beds and the bathroom and the dining hall, I'd have figured things out.

As a side note, a characteristic anachronism of my generally low-tech campaign settings is that they all have bathrooms with running water and flush toilets. I don't know why that is. It's just the way it's always been.

I always struggle when it comes to designing bedrooms, kitchens, and other areas that are more often assumed to exist in an RPG than actually shown. Unless there's a particular reason for a party to visit them (beyond thorough exploration), it's tough for me to do anything other than jam them in out of a sense of obligation to some sort of realism. Thus, there were many bland rooms with little other than basic furniture in place.

If the students were supposed to be on break or not even at the tower yet, the second floor would seem especially barren. It wouldn't make much sense for there to be random monster encounters, and no particularly good skill challenges or puzzles seemed appropriate. Once more, Dungeonscape to the rescue: instead of having a dungeon with designated locations for each encounter and event, why not have a dynamic dungeon with a life of its own, that the heroes happen to be interrupting? What if the caretaker--say...a minotaur--was patrolling the floor? And what if there was a shopkeeper--the owner of the "school store," as it were--who might interact with the caretaker should they ever cross paths? I could always spice up the rooms with some vivid descriptions of how boring they are--the real focus of this floor would be its inhabitants.

I wanted a monster for a shopkeeper. Poking around my various Monster Manuals for something exotic, and of an appropriate challenge rating should fighting break out, I selected one of the more unlikely options for a shopkeeper: a redcap.

Brutal and nearly insane, redcaps are the kind of monster that would sooner slice you open and soak its fashionable hat in your blood than quibble over exact change. However, there are always exceptions, and there's usually at least one way to twist a monster's normal behavior to conform to whatever unusual role you might have for it. Redcaps, for example, are very superstitious. They also have been known to hole up in abandoned locations such as old towers. Suppose one outcast redcap gets separated from the pack, finds an empty tower, decides to make himself at home, and then encounters a persuasive wizard who does a little bit of sweet-talking and bargaining to get the redcap to stay on as a shopkeeper...setting some very clear boundaries by persuading the redcap it's "bad luck" to do one thing and not do another thing. It's bad luck to eat the customers, for instance. See? Perfectly logical redcap shopkeep.

As for the minotaur caretaker, he could simply be a hired hand who has grown too old and wise to lust for battle the way his more reckless kin do. Moreover--and this would work nicely once I'd established the tower as a battle academy, too--he'd still be capable of scaring off any hoodlums and would-be invaders. Not too capable, mind you; the heroes still had to be able to take him down if push came to shove. A half-blind minotaur (so, 50% miss chance), with no weapons other than his natural attack (gore 2d6+STR, if I recall correctly, with a lower strength score due to his advanced age) would be appropriate against a party of three low-level characters, I thought.

To add to the fun, the key to unlock the door to the next level would be dangling from a ring placed atop one of the minotaur's horns. Victory in combat, sleight-of-hand, or a clever ploy to otherwise separate the key ring from the minotaur would be the order of the day, and the otherwise dull rooms on the second floor could provide interesting opportunities for the party: scoop up the key ring from atop one of the bunk beds, or knock over the stew pot in the kitchen and grab it while he's leaning over to clean up the mess, perhaps.

Between the monster merchant and the roaming caretaker, there was finally enough for the party to do on this floor. Next up was the final floor of the tower before the roof, but the roof would only serve a brief story purpose--the real action, and the final showdown, would be just ahead.

[To be continued in Part 5.]

Circular Logic

[Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8]

In my time as a Dungeon Master, I've created a lot of circular rooms. Big ones, small ones, some as big as your head--assuming your size category is Gargantuan or larger. It is increasingly difficult to come up with new ideas for them, in part because I have a strong drive to make my circular rooms symmetrical, and to fill them will pillars.

Anyone who's ever played in any of my campaigns will tell you there must be pillars.

So, there would be a circle of pillars on the ground floor of the tower. And if the elevator wasn't lined up to emerge in the center of the room, I'd just put the stairs up to the next level in a symmetrical location. Add the huge (locked) doors to the outside world, and we'd be all set. All set with absolutely nothing. Either I needed some creativity, fast, or I needed a good explanation for why this room was so barren.

I thought for a little bit. What if this tower was a training facility? The evil wizard I wanted to have as the "final boss" could run the place, and perhaps his students could have wizard duels here on the ground level, hiding behind pillars and Wingardium Leviosaing people when they least expected it. Wrong fantasy world, sure, but I could see this tower as a sort of modest Hogwarts for the bad guys. The jail in the basement could be where they kept monsters and prisoners to be dragged out for training exercises, too--now things were starting to come together.

However, with the underground storage area still somewhat under construction, and heroes who would be ill-prepared to take on a horde of trainee spellcasters at this point in the quest (unless the spellcasters were spectacularly terrible, in which case it might be funny to watch the enemies blow themselves up), it made sense for this quest to take place either between semesters (if this was a sort of wizard university) or before the tower's grand opening, when people roaming around would be at a minimum.

Still...the room felt a little empty. Perhaps a statue of the villain they'd eventually fight might be a nice touch. Wizards like feeling self-important, and what better first impression of a school than to see the headmaster's huge crystal statue directly through the front doors.

Yes, the statue should be made of crystal. A sort of translucent orange-gold crystal. The wizard would be standing proudly with his arm outstretched toward progress, the future, world domination, whatever, like that Zefram Cochrane statue from Star Trek. For flavor, sculpted onto the statue's arm would be the jailbreak cat from the beginning of the quest, blocking the wizard's view of whatever he was pointing at, and staring back at him. I had decided the cat would follow the adventurers throughout the tower, coming and going as he pleased, but it wasn't until creating the statue that I changed my mind from having this be the wizard's cat to having this actually be the wizard himself. The wizard could keep tabs on the party's progress, potentially mess with them or even rescue them if desired, and help prevent the tower from ever seeming too empty.

But...why?

I laid out the pieces I had introduced and began looking for a connection. Heroes imprisoned with all their gear still in hand. Wizard Cat follows them around. Tower is designed to hold students, but no students are here. Portions of the tower are still empty or incomplete.

The wizard was testing his own facility before opening it to the public.

The heroes were guinea pigs. But maybe they weren't the first ones, or the only ones--what if they were the last guinea pigs? Maybe the wizard had an agenda, was under pressure, was in a rush to make sure the heroes had a shot at testing everything in the tower.

I started considering all the possibilities of absurd deathtraps that would make perfect sense as training exercises for the students. Hm...the party would be no match for a wizard powerful enough to create everything I had in mind--he'd have to have outside support. Who would finance such a tower?

Wait...the gnomes could finance such a tower. Before the tower quest started to materialize, I had thought about kicking off the adventures in this world with a quest launched from a gnomish kingdom, which in my head was in the same region as where this quest would take place. The gnomes gave the wizard near-unlimited funding to create whatever kind of training facility he wanted. But, again...why? Why would the gnomes be so generous?

Maybe they weren't generous. Maybe they had a vested interest in the success of the tower.

Maybe the crown prince of the gnomes was about to become a student.

Yes...this would do nicely. And this would help to make the bad guy a bad guy without necessarily making him evil. The wizard I had in mind was named Ziggy Frood (a little Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy influence there), who would be a laid-back dude who, for all intents and purposes, would appear in a puff of smoke from the '60s or '70s, if you take my meaning. Not really a bad guy, but all ideas and none of the responsibility necessary to manage his funding wisely. I wanted him to be slightly sympathetic, or perhaps just slightly pathetic--killing the heroes wouldn't be his goal, but the circumstances would put him into a situation where he would inadvertently become the villain.

That's where the heroes would come in: they had been hired to test out the strengths and shortcomings of the facility, from the security of its jail to the training rooms up on the third floor. They would be intruders to test the readiness of the staff. They would have their memories wiped so their testing would be completely unbiased by what they already knew about the tower. They would be promised a gnomish resurrection spell if they were to perish along the way. The safest, most authentic testing method Ziggy Frood could think of, and harmlessly deadly diversion, to boot.

But...what if the gnomes got tired of resurrecting the beta testers? Those spells are costly, you know. What if they demanded results from Ziggy Frood, issuing an ultimatum that funding was being cut off and the facility was to be ready by the time the inspectors--or the prince himself--or the prince's father himself--arrived within the next few days?

Better yet...what if he hadn't received the ultimatum yet?

At last, there was a plot.

[To be continued in Part 4.]

Playing Around on the Rafters

[Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8]

Seasoned D&D players always run the risk of metagaming, or thinking about the game in terms beyond what their character would know or think. One's first encounter with a skeleton or devil might leave the player wondering why their weapons seem to be so ineffective, whereas an experienced player might know to keep a small stockpile of silver daggers, cold iron javelins, good-aligned morningstars, and other weapons of various types and qualities for monsters with every kind of damage resistance. An excellent way to discourage metagaming without completely rewriting the stat blocks of time-tested monsters is to simply modify the physical descriptions of, say, those dire rats that everybody knows carry that nasty filth fever disease and shouldn't have more than 10 hit points.

OK, I had to double-check in the Monster Manual to be sure. So maybe not everybody knows.

The imprisoned Seryulin notwithstanding, this trio of cuddly, fluffy rats would serve as a fine introduction to basic combat for first-level characters, with the added bonus of crates and boxes behind which to hide, should any of the characters choose to attack or provide support at a distance. Frankly, I would've let the characters dive into barrels and stealthily Looney Tunes their way across the room, with the rats oblivious to these three storage containers tiptoeing their way toward the ladder on the far wall (with the proper skill checks, of course). That was another possibility--avoiding combat altogether. All the XP, but none of the loot--though none of the risk of a premature and violent ending to the quest, either. I'm all about options, and especially when the challenges are geared toward a party of a higher level, any possibility that avoids excessive bloodshed is a good one.

Hopefully the "aw, it's strangely cute" appearance of the rats would deter the adventurers from charging in with swords...uh...blazing. Actually, they wouldn't likely get blazing swords at all this quest. Charging in with swords...masterworking? Eh, nevermind. More importantly, I felt like adding in stupidly fluffy rats that bopped and hopped everywhere they went. I'd justify it later.

At the far end of the storage room would be a ladder leading up to the rafters. This would be a two-story storage room, with the heroes possibly running around on the crisscrossing support beams above, chasing another bouncy rat à la Chrono Trigger during the first trip to the future. I included a platform with an overturned table and chair at the top of the ladder--the idea was that there had been a previous jailbreak, and either the guards or the escapees were using the table as cover during a showdown. When not being used for defense, the table and chair setup would have been a sort of unfinished office for the official in charge of monitoring incoming prisoners and outgoing personnel; given that the corner of the storage room was rough rock wall and hadn't been neatly carved into yet, I was going for a bit of a feeling like there was still some work to be done in this area.

The key reason for climbing up to the rafters was to reach the platform in the center, which was supported by a tall round pillar and featured a freestanding cylinder with a sloping top and two triangular panels that could be pressed to make this elevator go up and down. Depending on how the adventurers went about getting there, they might get into a scuffle with the dire rat ambling about the rafters, which would squeak and awaken the sleeping swarm of bats in the dark corner of the room that was still more like a cave than a finished storage area.

Now, a bat swarm (or any kind of swarm, for that matter) can be particularly tricky for a band of Level 1 adventurers, seeing as how normal weapon attacks are more effective against individual creatures than a whole moving mess of individual creatures. Area-effect spells and swung torches are two ways to damage a swarm, and there would be torches in abundance on the walls of the jail and storage room--any adventurer with any sense of self-preservation would pick up a freebie torch when there are clearly signs of being in or around a cave. Plus, these bats would have an absolutely minimal amount of HP, so one hit would be all it'd take to disperse them. It's all about options for me, but it's all about balance, too--higher-level monsters are still fair game for lower-level parties if they're not working at peak performance.

Perhaps the trickiest part would be getting onto the elevator from the rafters, as there was enough of a distance that a Jump check from a standing start (over an almost-deadly drop to the floor below) would have been required. Alternately, the heroes could push that overturned table to the edge and form a bridge to the elevator, or even find some rope in the crates below and lasso the control pillar to climb over.

Once aboard the elevator, they'd have the option of going back down to the ground to pick up anything else they'd left behind, or ascending into darkness. This is where my advance planning started getting fuzzy--I'd had the first section of the tower mapped out since before I put pencil to paper, but I hadn't really considered all that much about where the heroes would go from here. I was hoping I'd have some inspiration by the time I got to drawing the first floor above ground.

I drew an empty room.

[To be continued in Part 3.]

Laying the Foundation for a Tower

[Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8]

When I was taking suggestions for the column that would eventually become Sunday Spotlight, my blogging compadre Alex suggested a weekly behind-the-scenes look at crafting adventures for Dungeons & Dragons. Up until recently, I haven't had much new material to discuss--my D&D heyday was back in college, and the regular sessions and one-shot campaigns I'd been playing since then got more and more infrequent over the last year or two. Well, after mulling over the options and putting myself in the right mindset, I have successfully launched a new D&D campaign setting, with a trio of college friends as the guinea pigs for the first adventure.

There's two major parts to this story: This first part covers the thoughtful planning and preparation of the adventure. The second part covers the total deconstruction of my planning and preparation at the hands of three adventurers who killed my shopkeeper, literally redrew my dungeon map, and harbored an irrepressible fascination with some random mutant slug monster. The full story is really too long to tell in just two parts, however, so I'll split this all up into an indeterminate number of smaller parts for easier digestion.

The decision to create a brand-new campaign world for this quest was the right one, I think. The setting I used in college holds many fond memories for me, but its continuity is complicated (and undocumented) enough in a few places that I'd eventually run into some issues reconciling what already exists with where I want to go from here. The setting I'd been using post-college quickly began to show signs that it had been too hastily constructed to achieve the lofty aspirations I had for it--I'd hoped for each adventure to play a major role in establishing the history of the world, but I was so focused on how things would come together in the long term that I lost sight of what the heroes would need to face in the short term, and how even the little details would play such an important role in the world's history. I've learned lessons from my successes and shortcomings with both campaign settings, and when I finally sat down to write the quest the day before we were to play it, I knew exactly how I wanted to structure it.

The very first campaign I ever played in had the adventurers exploring an old "abandoned" castle at one point. There were, of course, monsters and traps and an evil wizard to fight, but it was a completely self-contained portion of the adventure that didn't have us mucking about in town or exploring Generic RPG Cave #8472. I liked that. I wanted to emulate that. Town adventures can be fun, but it can be incredibly easy for the players to get sidetracked with colorful townsfolk who are entertaining but in no way useful toward stopping the cabal of dissident shamans in the woods where 90% of the adventure is supposed to take place. Roleplaying staples such as caves, forests, and the basic monsters that inhabit them can absolutely be a hoot, but you can really only get away with that sort of thing once, with a group of first-timers. Only one of my players was effectively a neophyte; the other two had played in a number of my campaigns previously, and were quite familiar with the "kobolds jump out of the bushes" routine.

In my head, there were vast snowfields and a huge city and a number of other notable features on the part of the world map where the heroes would find themselves. On paper, there was merely a tower. Two levels below ground, three stories above, and enough space for a dramatic showdown on top of the tower. Looking out the window, the heroes would see only a frozen expanse, but there would be enough clues inside the tower to hint at what lay beyond.

My new rule of world design: Always plan for more than the players will see. Even if you yourself don't know exactly what's out there, offer glimpses of future plotlines and yet-to-be-revealed secrets. Nothing has to be concrete until it's immediately relevant to the players, as long as you're willing to improvise or deflect if something becomes relevant sooner than expected.

The basement of the tower was the easiest part of the quest to write. And by "write," I mostly mean "draw." Though there was once a time when I hammered out several pages of florid descriptions and contingency plans for when the adventurers did one thing or another, nowadays I tend to simply draw maps, scribble notes in the margins, and rely on my imagination and improvisational skills to convey the rest.

I knew I wanted a jail. The original premise of the quest was going to be a straightforward jailbreak involving the heroes fighting their way out of this tower, with a confrontation with their wizard captor at the end, but there were some lingering questions with that scenario: Why were they captured? How were they captured? What purpose does this tower serve when there aren't heroes in need of an adventure? What kind of self-respecting jail would possibly allow this trio of no-name Level 1 characters to escape from it? One of my favorite supplemental rulebooks, Dungeonscape, prompts the DM to ask and answer such questions in order to craft a dungeon that works as a functional location in the campaign world, and not just as a series of challenges slapped together because the DM felt like it.

Eh, I could figure out the details later. Right now the most important part was to start drawing. I grabbed a mug from the kitchen cupboard and used it to trace several circles across a regular piece of paper, and began filling them in one at a time with each level of the tower.

As I said, I knew I wanted a jail. I sketched out a row of simple holding cells and a hallway wide enough for an ogre or something to comfortably patrol, and then drew in two key racks--one right in front of the cells, and the other at the end of the hallway. I put numbers in circles next to them on the map to correspond to numbers in a separate document that I never ended up writing, which would have given a short blurb about what each numbered thing was. If I have a little extra time, I do try to get at least a few things written out in longhand, you see.

I'd decided the quest would open with each of the characters in a different jail cell, and that they'd have all of their equipment from the get-go. That opened up another question of why they'd be in jail fully armed, but I was starting to formulate that part of it. The obvious key rack in front of the cells was close enough that anyone toting around a 10-foot pole in their pants would be able to snag the dangling key with the proper Dexterity check. This would be funny, because the key would be enchanted to explode in the lock. I'm sure there's a lesson about careful adventuring in there somewhere, but really, I just wanted the key to blow up. The real key would be on the other rack, also reachable by a Mage Hand spell or other clever solution. Failing all else, there would be a cat. Meow, Handle Animal, go kitty get key. That sort of thing.

Once out of the--oh, wait a second. I'm getting ahead of myself. There'd also be a sea slug. Specifically, a seryulin (page 148 of the Monster Manual III for those of you at home), which is a sea cucumber of doom used by a particular water-dwelling monster race as war mounts that are alarmingly fast on land. I thought one would make a fun addition to the jail.

Now, the seryulin was mostly added as a gag, the random sea monster randomly in jail alongside the adventurers. However, I've played too much Space Quest, and fully intended for the heroes to get eaten/trampled/dissolved by the beastie should they be stupid enough to open the cell of this unidentified and slimy CR 7 monster simply because they had the key.

That's another thing worth noting: I am unusual. I mean, cruel and unusual. The challenge ratings of the monsters and traps I had in store were fit for a higher-level party, or at least a party of more than just three Level 1 characters. To balance this out, every potentially life-threatening situation would have at least one alternate solution that would lessen the chances of bodily harm and permanent dismemberment. A clever party might be able to avoid direct combat and do-or-die skill checks by paying attention to their surroundings and using the objects they find to their advantage.

The first real test of the collective cleverness and general disposition of the heroes would take place in the storage room just outside the jail. Amidst crates and barrels filled with who-knows-what would be a scavenging trio of rats.

Big, fluffy, bouncing rats.

That sneer when approached.

Pretty sure I didn't consult Dungeonscape on this one.

[To be continued in Part 2.]