Mindflayer Tower, Level 2

Map by Dyson's Dodecahedron

This is not the final layout, but it gives me an idea of where the encounters are going to take place. The silver circle in the back is the acid cauldron where the electricity that runs the tower is generated.  

Did experience a few technical difficulties during the set-up phase. 

When the player says...

You say ... what kind? 

100 Signature Tavern Drinks

play us out Bubbles .... 

State of Play

I’m gaming now more than I ever have. I have followed a FB group of local players for a while now and back in September I took a chance and answered a DM who was for players. So in addition to the bi-weekly session I DM with the kids, I’m now also playing in a weekly game, this time as a player,  which has made for a pleasant change.

Both games start up again this week after a holiday break. Tonight I’m hoping to get the group back on track after a very extended side-quest that has been going on since May! (not including the summer break) and has involved a mushroom maze, a flooded shire, new characters, time travel and nuclear weapons. Tonight I hope to wrap it up and get the characters back together and on track, where they will discover that they’ve actually jumped forward ten years, and the city is now controlled by an alien Mindflayer and his Psychophantic Cult bent on summoning an Illithid Dreadnaught during the upcoming Conjunction of the 13 Moons. Infiltrating and surviving the Lunar Observatory / Summoning Tower will hopefully make up the rest of the term. 

But first they have to survive this;

The other group is tomorrow night. I play Coaltooth a Dwarven Arcane Thief (I’m never going to use the term ‘Rogue’. I’m just not), who has become obsessed with the idea of stealing the massive ruby that powers the magical stasis field containing the undead, lovecraftian horror that has already half destroyed the city before being stopped by our brave party. Just don’t tell anyone that we’re also the group that let it out.  

Coaltooth
From the 2nd ed Talisman Board Game.
Ironically, the illustration is for the 'Rogue'
character 

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The Hits Damage System

What do you do when you’ve spent the weekend writing a detailed sandbox adventure set in a tangled swamp and culminating in a dungeon crawl through the ruins of a High Court of Law, but then on Wednesday, sick as a dog, you drive twenty minutes to get to the game, take out all your books, dice and miniatures and realize that you’ve left all those printed pages filled with the descriptions, stats, hidden traps & treasures, plus the rules you worked out for doing karaoke with witches, sitting in your work bag back home?

The answer is Trolls. You make them fight Trolls.

Along with my notes, I’d also forgotten to bring any pad of paper, without which I am utterly useless as a DM, and had to repurposed the back of a couple of blank character sheets. They were fighting trolls because the regenerating bastards take a long time to kill, but which also means a lot of adding and subtracting on my part as the DM. With not a lot of paper or patience for that, I decided to try something that has been percolating for the past few weeks now. And I think it worked really well.

The Hits Damage System
For use with Dungeons and Dragon (editions, -5) or any other game system that uses a numerical “Hit Point” damage game mechanic.

As characters gain levels, the damage rolls get larger and some people aren’t great at on-the-spot math. Nothing can kill the flow of combat faster than frequent pauses while the DM is mentally subtracting 18 from 73 plus another 7 off in bonus damage. The Hits System is just a shortcut for the DM to handle these large numbers.

This system doesn’t require learning any new rules or doing any math on the player’s part. Nothing changes for them and their damage is handled normally. This is strictly for the DM’s use when tracking how much damage the DM controlled monsters/opponents have taken.

How it Works
Divide the monster’s Hit Points by 10 [For the purposes of rounding off: 11-15 = 1, 16-20=2). For every 10 hit points, give them one “O”. Any monster/opponent with 10 or less Hit point always gets one full O.

Example, The average 5e Troll has 84 hit points. They get 8 “Os”, OOOOOOOO.

I use circles are used because they are quick and easy to draw. Useful when dealing with healing and regenerations - instead of erasing or crossing out, you just add new circles.

Now, whenever a player character hits a monster for 1-6 points of damage, colour in just half of the circle. If they hit for 7-12 points of damage, you colour in the whole circle, and so on…

When all the circles are coloured in, the monster/opponent is dead/incapacitated.

I’ve only run this once with a pair of regenerating trolls, but I’m going to keep using it in my game and see how it responds in other situations. 

Note: I make no claim that this system is a brand new idea. I'm sure similar damage systems exist, either in other homebrew hacks or in non-D&D rule-sets.

Last Session

A couple of photos from the last session of the term before the summer break. Here is how it all looked from my perspective.



Close up of the final slime pit with the Otyugh. Its pear and grape sauce with graham wafers as the floating mushrooms. Wish I'd taken a pic of this with more of the paper Minis.

The Cheap DM: Fungal Forest 8 - Game Night

Lighting detail. 3 mini-strings (about 30cm long) of flower lights. They run off batteries. 

The party enters the cave.... 

Battle with a roper.

The full and final layout! 

The Cheap DM: Fungal Forest 7 - Cast of Characters

Just some of the characters and critters who will be inhabiting my Playdoh fungal paradise. 

The Murmuring Merchant. If you ever want to have a lot of fun as a DM, make a non-verbal NPC your players will want to interact with. This guy has good stuff to sell, but only communicates in grunts and blowing raspberries. 

A Mantango, one of the 'good' tribe of Myconids living in the fungal caves.  

The Dryad of the Baobob Tree is slowing being consumed and transformed by the myconids. If she completes her natural transformation she will become a Mycollosus, a living god-being. If she dies while the bones of the black dragon continue to poison her roots, she will become a Slime Giant and wreck havoc.

Lobstrose. The first NPC they meet appears to be a gentle giant, who tells them to be careful around Kandida, and that the dryad is dying and insane. In reality, he was an adventurer in the party that killed the dragon, but was left behind for dead. Trapped and mutated by the alien environment, he's become an embittered bully who rules over the Deathcaps. He blames the dryad for his condition, and wants her to feel continue the pain of dragon bones poisoning her roots. He's absolutely right about Kandida though.

Kandida the gnome alchemist. Let's just say that her potions have many, many, many side effects. Her three eyes don't always blink at the same time and the top one is rarely looking in the same direction as the other two. I played her as an unhinged version of Vanellope Von Schweetz and despite doing nothing but offering to help the party, they were utterly terrified of her. I'm quite proud of that. I stumbled across this picture and loved it too much not to use it. 

A Deathcap, the 'bad' myconid tribe. 

Found this picture of a baby mimic. Now I get my chance to find out if the playes are too young to know what the movie 'Alien' is about.  

A pussbug. Stinging little bastards and, when dead, useful as currency to certain non-verbal, and very hungry, merchants.

The Cheap DM: Fungal Forest 6 - Final Touches

The slime kit I bought was a complete loss and I had nothing to fill the slime-pit the night before the game. I had an idea to use jello cups, but I couldn't fine any in lime. I did fine these. Mmm, sweet, delicious pear-flavoured slime.

The last touch was three sets of battery powered LED sting-lights. A little darkness hides a thousand mistakes. I put a few of the standees I planned to use to test the sizing.  

The Cheap DM: Fungal Forest 5 - Build Details

You can really see the sugar/playdoh reaction happening here. The liquid in the upturned egg at the bottom-left is suppose to dry into crystals. It is a cool effect, but it takes days to really start to work. I've also put the aquarium plants in now and I really like how the look. 

To keep the playdoh from drying out, I washed everything in coats of white glue and water. Took a few tries to find a good ratio, but it worked.

Sprucing up some of the blander areas.The white stuff is drying glue.

I actually wrote a whole sub-plot for the 3 of these swirly eggs I stashed in the maze, but so far the party hasn't looked twice at them. 

The Cheap DM: Fungal Forest 4 - The Build Goes On

Starting on the Slime Pit, where the final showdown will take place. I'm genuinely pissed that I lost that set of bones somewhere between home and the game-shop, they were an inspiration for the plot. Have to come up with something before next session. 

This is some knock-off brand playdoh that I grabbed to test. It has a softer, but greasier texture to playdoh. It also pulled like taffy (something that playdoh doesn't do) which allowed me to do these ribbons. The trashcan is a candy container.

Lots of glow stones. My wife made the plant.

Trying something with the Easter Eggs. Bit boring at the moment.

All laid-out. 

The Cheap DM: Fungal Forest 3 - The Build Begins

The green pom-poms are just stuck with white glue. I later covered the spots with paint, which helped them stand out more.

I quite liked how this wall turned out, even if some of the jelly-beans kept popping out their holes as the sugar reacted the playdoh. The shell would start to melt and they'd slide out if they could. 

I did a couple of these root-like tendrils, but I as never happy with results. 

Cluster of plastic eggs. The goop is glow-n-the-dark silly putty, which I didn't end up using.

Glowing stones and yellow jellybeans. You can see here where the moisture in the playdoh started pulling the sugar out of the jelly beans. It actually produced a decent slimey effect.

I was running out of ideas at this point so I just crushed some green playdoh between my fingers and dropped it on a mushed blue wall.

The Cheap DM: Fungal Forest 2 - Laying in Supplies

All in I figure I spent between 40-50$ on this. Honestly, its at least 10$ than I was hoping to spend, but its my first build and I chalk a lot of that inexperience. I ended buying too much of some things that I didn't need, and had to go back for things I didn't think of at first. Everything is from the Dollarstore or Walmart. 

The bulk of the project is made out of Playdoh and a bag of plastic Easter Eggs. The eggs had jelly-beans inside and I ended up making use of those as well.

Other purchases included:

-Growing Crystal kit and a Slime Kit. One was partially useful, one was not and neither was worth it in the end.

-Some plastic aquarium plants. The best purchase by far and I'm only looking to get more.  

-Mini-strings of LED flowers and required batteries. 

-Bag of glow-in-the-dark plastic pebbles. Good colour, lousy at the glow-in-the-dark part. 

-Paint, brushes, carving tools

-Silly Putty and a row of green-pompoms. 

The Cheap DM: Fungal Forest Part 1

There are only three more sessions before the end of this term and I want to shake things up a bit before raising everyone up to 3rd level on the last session. Inspired by our new volunteer, I'm going to offer up a SideQuest: A chance to explore a small Fugal Forest beneath a dead baobob tree in the middle of a swampy lake. 

I was going to do the usual,' find some maps on-line' to use as terrain, but I wasn't finding anything that matched the pictures in my head. Then last Sunday afternoon I was out walking the dog when I found two plastic easter eggs lying under a tree in a public park. They had either been overlooked, or more likely, been ransacked of their goodies and then discarded. I liked their bright colours and their shape, and inspiration hit. 

I made a run to the dollar store to see if there were any holiday deals left. I found some spotted plastic eggs, so I grabbed a bag for test purposes (note: I'm gonna need two more bags). I also broke out the grid board I made a few months ago out of some laminate scavenged from work. I haven't had a chance to use the board yet, so I'm excited about that as well. 

Just laying things out to see what it might look like. 

Quick sketch of a map. It needs to look curvy and organic. 

Sketched out where the terrain is going go using thin masking-tape. The green square at the top will be eventually be a slime-pool. The tablet will have a image of a mushroom forest, possibly representing an entrance into another, deeper area if they want to keep exploring.

I wasn't sure what to do with these swirl-pattern eggs at first, but I think that standing them upright makes them look like markers or carvings made by the Myconids. 

I did mention the slime pool. Another dollar store purchase. 

The next step is gonna require a shit ton of playdoh. 

The Cheap DM: The Warlock's House Map

Modified an existing map from Elven Tower and adapted it to my own needs to serve as the floorplan to the Warlock Laru's lab/shop/residence. And yes, you spotted it. That is an interplanar psychocannon aimed at a thaumatically charged black-silver mirror etched with fluxing co-numeral coordinates up there in Laru's lab.   

1: Customer Office.
This is where Laru, and occasionally Grixby would meet with clients requiring the services of Warlock.

2: Grixby's Lab
Small workspace the apprentice Grixby has taken over in order to to continue his passion for alchemy. This room is lit by jar-battery lights.

3: Kitchen

4: Grixby's Room
Light by one jar-battery light.

5: Shop
Laru and Grixby primarly provide services for those who might require Warlock or an Alchemist (more clients come to see Grixby), but they also lazily maintain a small curio shop filled with strage idols, magical components, Grixby's potions and the occasional surprise.

6: Second Floor

7: Gumball Trap

8: Secret Room
Here Laru stores much of his books, scroll and paraphernalia related to the Illitid.

9: Library

10: Laru's Room.
That's suppose to be a bed, not a TV.

11: Laru's Lab

12: Preparation Room

13: Interplanar Psychocannon. 

The Cheapest DM Tries 3D Printing...

So in the real world I work for a university, and like many schools nowadays they have a 3D printing service. Last week I stopped in and talked to the guy and it turns out he's a gamer as well. We spent a solid hour talking gaming, printing and going through models that I might like. Academic projects have priority (of course), but he's gonna try pumping out a few of the models we found. Its not expensive, less than a dollar for a standard 25mm mini. The trick apparently, is finding model that will print well. 

In the meantime he gave me a couple of failed minis he had on hand that will make decent ruins.