WarWalker! The Arena of Death!

I'm writing a Module! Hopefully for sale at some point, but mostly for funzies. Here is a carnival game I came up with for PCs to play before the main event.

Arena of Death!

This booth appears to be a large puppet theatre, constructed and painted to resemble an ancient gladiatorial arena. There are two wooden consoles bolted to the front: one with five, red-painted levers and buttons, the other with five green levers and buttons.

Jesska, a red haired gnome dressed in an oversized purple toga will try and sell them on “Experience a "Gladiator Fight To The Death!", "DEATH! MAYHEM! MAGNETS!" "Just like Olden Tymes!” It is one gold per play per PC. 

Once the gnome has been paid, she will disappear behind the curtain and blow a short, off-key trumpet blast. Then she will pull back the curtain revealing two marionettes: one a dented wooden gladiator with a sword and shield both painted green. The other is a wooden Minotaur pained red.  The backdrop to the theatre is an old fashioned arena, complete with spectators bedecked in togas and a corpulent emperor standing with his arm outstretched and thumb pointed with down.

A quick experimentation reveals that the levers on the console, cause the marionettes to move and jerk. The green console controls the Gladiator, the red console controls the Minotaur.

To play the game, print or copy the following cards onto paper or (10) index cards.

HEAD	ARM, RIGHT	ARM, LEFT	LEG, RIGHT	LEG LEFT
DEFEATS Arm, Right Leg, Left	DEFATS Arm, Right Arm, Left Leg, Right	DEFEATS Head Leg, Left	DEFEATS Arm, Left Head	DEFEATS Arm, Right Leg, Right
BEATEN BY Head Arm, Left Leg, Right	BEATEN BY Head Leg, Left	BEATEN BY Arm, Right Leg, Right	BEATEN BY Arm, Left Leg, Left	BEATEN BY Arm, Left Arm, Right

HEAD	ARM, RIGHT	ARM, LEFT	LEG, RIGHT	LEG LEFT
DEFEATS Head Arm, Right Leg, Left	DEFATS Arm, Left Leg, Right	DEFEATS Head Leg, Left	DEFEATS Arm, Left Head	DEFEATS Arm, Right Leg, Right
BEATEN BY Arm, Left Leg, Right	BEATEN BY Head Arm, Right Leg, Left	BEATEN BY Arm, Right Leg, Right	BEATEN BY Arm, Left Leg, Left	BEATEN BY Arm, Left Arm, Right

The game is played when the characters throw a lever (a mechanism does not allow more than one lever to be pushed forward at a time), and the the marionettes slam into each other.  Magnets tied to the end of the strings (connected to other magnets hidden in the marionette’s joints), disconnect when struck hard enough, causing that part of the marionette to go slack.

In game turns, each side chooses a card from their hand and plays it (if the gnome is playing one “side”, she draws randomly).The two cards are compared and the losing side must drop their card. The winning side can reshuffle their card back into their hand. The game can be played until one side has no cards left, or for a set number of hands Hands (5 recommended) and the side with the most cards left, wins.

If the Knight and the Minotaur play the SAME card, there is a tie:

•The Minotaur’s horns allow it to automatically WIN if the Minotaur Head card is played against the Knight’s Head Card.

•The Knight’s Right Hand card is carrying a sword and allow it to automatically WIN if the Knight’s Right Arm card is played against the Minotaur’s Right Hand Card.
•All other ties are settled with a Sleight of Hand roll. The Carny gnome running the booth has a SoH skill roll of (+6 +OR equal to +2 over the player’s Sleight of Hand Skill/Dex Attribute; whichever number is highest.)

Beaten By	Beaten By	Location/Lever	Beats	Beats
Arm Left	Leg Right	Torso / Head	Arm Right	Leg Left
Torso	Leg Left	Arm Right	Arm Left	Leg Right
Arm Right	Leg Right	Arm Left	Torso	Leg Left
Arm Left	Leg Left	Leg Right	Arm Left	Torso
Arm Right	Torso	Leg Left	Arm Right	Leg Right

My D&D Mini

In the game that I play in the DM has a stockpile of LEGO mini-figs and parts that he lets us use as character figs. Just after the campaign started I had a few days off work so I decided to build something that would really represent the whole character idea.

It was a such a treat to empty out a box of LEGO and just build something.

Presenting Pffwyggyn Kebbla, 13th Stratum Wizard of the Inventors School, Professor-en-Absenteeism of Thaumnatics at the Gizmodic Institutionarrium of Marbleheart Seitch, testing out his potion powered jetpack with unicorn-horn guidance system while flying over his Gizmotic Neutromatic Archanomechanical Defensive (and Xploration) Amour, or G.N.A.D.A for short. 

    I got an Inspiration point for this. 

When the player says...

You say ... what kind? 

100 Signature Tavern Drinks

play us out Bubbles .... 

Dark Sun for 5e

Stumbled across this little gem, a 5e conversion guide to Dark Sun by Keil Chenier. Dark Sun has always been one of the most underrated of the D&D play-worlds IMHO. I've never personally run or played it, but I have an idea to include a version of Athas/Barsoom as one of the 13 moons of my personal setting of Yth. 

Maybe if the group takes the bait and goes looking for that crashed spelljammer I planted I can plan a visit there. 

Free Classic Traveller!

Available through DriveThru, now! 

Article Here! 

Best Dungeon Map Ever?

I think so!

 ....  from Dyson Dodecahedron

https://dysonlogos.blog/2018/11/19/eff-your-dungeon/

D&D Under the Sea

Last Sunday I took part in another D&D 5e one-shot hosted by a local gaming store. This time the party were a squad of Atlantian Royal guards tasked with watching over their king on his day off. Yes, this King …

It was a blast. The party ended up interacting with or battling against as many of Aquaman’s rogue’s gallery as I could comfortably squeeze in, including Ocean Master, King Shark, Black Jack, Scavenger and of course, Black Manta.

What I’m enjoying about these sessions is that the store provides the scenario, which means writing for scenarios that wouldn't normally occur to me and I have to get creative. In this game I came up with an underwater creature-riding race at the Atlantean Hipposphere against King Shark on a barely controlled giant great white shark (using adapted dinosaur racing rules), and a dungeon crawl through a giant maze coral looking for the King’s anniversary present to his Queen before the Scavenger destroyed the whole thing.

Along the way one of the party was force-fed a Potion of Lobster form (never roll a 1 when negotiating against a giant shark-man), the sorcerer found Captain Cold’s gun (a Wand of Cold), the ranger pair-bonded with her giant eel racing steed, and the Rogue found an ancient tomb with a golden robed figure inside. When he cracked it open the water pressure instantly destroyed the body, but he did find a golden ring inside. Putting on the ring required him to face his worst fear, but he made the saving rolls and … yes, I turned the Rogue into a Yellow Lantern/Sinestro Corps.

I live in an Atlantic coastal city so the climax had the party battling Black Manta and a raised army of Trench on the waterfront while the King raced back to Atlantic to stop his brother’s attempted coup with an army of sahuagin.

The Unexpected DM

A local gamestore runs small one-off games in local bars on Sundays. Last Thursday, I threw my name in after my wife showed me the ad asking for DMs on Facebook. I had no idea what to expect, but I figured that if nothing else it would at least be an experience.

Shortly after contacting the store, I was sent the module we were expected to run and I nearly called them back to say no thank you. The set up was: Kid dragons going to ‘Smaugwartz School’.

My first reaction was shock. On their own the elements were fine: A game with dragon hatchling PCs could be fun. I’m not a Potterhead by any means, but I’ve read the books and enjoyed them. I could fake enough for a Hogwarts game. But this mash-up just felt … juvenile. I kept picturing a preschool show like Paw Patrol about a group of colourful kiddy dragons going to a magic school. Oh, what fun and educational adventures they’d have.

Pictured something like this....

If this is what modern kids want out of the new D&D, I want no part of it.

Luckily I persevered and read through the whole thing. It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, the premise actually was that the hatchlings were ‘graduating’ and were given a final test by their teacher. They had to fly to a nearby valley and talk to some elves, visit some dwarves and terrorize some kobolds.
The reasons they had to do these things wasn’t very clear, but the one who returned with the most treasure, followers and princesses would be given a small starter horde by the school. You were supposed to give the dragons points for doing things like ‘lighting fires’, and ‘kidnapping princesses’. It didn’t hang together in a coherent way, but at least it wasn’t set in the actual school or require a lot of role-playing dragon versions of Potterverse characters.

I sat down and quickly rewrote it while sticking to general plot. Since the game had been advertised under that title, I had to keep that horrible "Smaugwarts" pun, but I tweaked that too. I placed the school inside a tall mountain dotted with caves, instead of an actual school. I also clarified the encounters and what the party had to do at each location.

The dwaves lived in a bronze city at the edge of the mountains. The city, and its vault, were protected by two giant cannons on the walls, regiments of archers and royal guards who rode flail snails into battle.

The kobolds lived in an ancient ruins in the middle of a swamp, and would gladly serve the dragons as followers, provided the dragons rid them of their current protectors … a family pack of Tyrannosaurus Rexes.

I kept the Harry Potter theme alive in the dragons visit to the (house) elves who happily negotiated with the beast as to how many elves would serve them, and at what prices.

"Look! Elves, sir!."
"Keep walking Sam. Don't make eye contact."

When the game got underway I was immediately cheered when one of the players declared that he thought the Smaugwarts idea was a little silly, so his character was actually an exchange student in from the Forgotten Realms. After the game, another player said he’d also been worried when he saw the game was going to be Potterdragons, but that he’s enjoyed the actual session.

The game itself went smoothly, with the group causing merry havoc in the dwarf city, getting nearly eaten by T-Rexes and being surprised (and not a little nonplussed) at the congeniality and eagerness of the elves to sell themselves into servitude.

The fun I got out of rewriting the adventure and its positive reaction were a good reminder of a lesson I relearn every time I roll some dice. It’s not the module that makes the session. It’s the dedication and commitment of the players and the dungeon master around the table that counts.

4th Edition Really was the Death of Fun

I've never been a D&D settings guy. I like some of the weird stuff, Planescape, Darksun, Spelljammer. Dragonlance is terrible and has always been terrible. I've got a soft spot for Mystara, but for me, growing up in the Dragon magazine era, the Forgotten Realms felt like the 'default' D&D setting. Default also meaning 'generic'. We never developed a full D&D campaign back in the day (for epic, long running stories we played WEG Star Wars, and you should too), but we did play occasionally and mostly we did what groups our age did: we used one guy's homebrew world that we tooled around in when we wanted to rob a dragon of her hard earned horde.

I'm continuing this with my own players. I have a world/cosmos idea and one city fleshed out, but what lies beyond that is gonna depend a lot on what my players want to do we (hopefully) start up again in the fall. D&D 5 looks like its going back to FR as a default and some of the players might read ahead and I figured I'd refresh my memory a bit.

And that's the long way to say that I took the 4th edition FR book out of the library (because I live in a small city with a good, but not great library system). The world description stuff in the book itself is fine, but the time jump and absurdity of the disasters that occurred in the mean seem pretty silly, even for a fantasy setting. But that's not my gameworld, so its for me to worry about.

I never paid much attention to 4th ed, though I've since heard all the horror stories. Reading the introductory adventure in the FR book, I was completely flabbergasted at how fidgety and foolish 4th ed really is. In my day we had a room description and one line of stats for the monster - this thing has two pages on a simple goblin fight.

But what really killed it for me (and prompted this unnecessary rant) was a story choice. In the first  town of the adventure there is a store that is selling a black horn dagger with a small magical boost at a reasonable price. The adventure really wants the players to have it and offers it up cheap ... but makes no allowance for what to do if the players choose to steal it instead. And trust me, someone is always gonna want to steal it. And if in case, if the story wants a player to have the dagger so much, why not let them steal it?  (WotC castrating the Thief to turn it into the Rogue was a big reason I never played much 3rd ed).

The horn dagger comes back later in a barrow dungeon when the party encounters a hobgoblin shaman who is attempting to resurrect the corpse of an ancient Ogre King. The dagger was once a horn on the Ogre's skull. Okay, not a bad scenario set up... except that is isn't. The text implicitly says that the shaman's ritual won't work. YOU DON'T GET TO FIGHT THE UNDEAD OGRE KING!

Why, why, WHY would you write it like this??!! Giving the party a chance to stop the resurrection, sure. But hinting at pretty good monster, and then cutting it off before it even becomes a possibility is  .... just not Dungeons and Dragons!

I've notice some of thing in a lot of the 5th edition adventures as well. I think its a symptom of the corporatization of WotC under Hasbro, which to be fair, has made D&D more popular that it has ever been. But I also think cleaning up the game has also removed a lot of the grit and gore that made the game so tantalizing to us as kids of the 70s and 80s.

Luckily, the BEST part of D&D as a game is that you don't have to play in their worlds, you don't have to follow the text, you don't even have to follow the rules if you don't want to. Building your own game is where the real magic lies. That and the friends you'll make along the way.

Dark Souls D&D that Doesn't Suck

I've noticed with getting back into D&D that there are new players who's first and primary experience with RPGs is through video games. In most cases this isn't such a bad thing, I was able to explain several of the concepts in a table-top rpg using Skyrim examples as a sort of bridge.

Skyrim and Fallout players are common, then you've got Dragon Age fans, even a few Final Fantasy classicists, but the hardest guys to handle are always the Dark Souls lone-brooders. Thankfully, some kind and twisted soul has based his entire D&D campaign in the Dark Souls universe, and has put some of his materials up on Reddit. That ought to be enough to make any in-game brooder soil his pantaloons.

The Random Life: What did I miss?

Spooktacular - a WEG GHOSTBUSTERS clone! I many actually spring for the hardcopy here, knowing full well that I'll never get to actually play it - but nevertheless, I have ideas! 

Someone found some classic cartoon characters Dungeons and Dragon stats from a very old issue of Dragon magazine. I love how they're portrayed as lords of chaos.   

Since the D&D group is taking a break over the summer, I've turned my rpg attentions to a little side project. I was looking for something different than D&D when inspiration hit. The pic is a hint. 

The Shannara Chronicles

They look as bored by this as I felt. 

I normally don't like to do this, I'm normally in favour of people enjoying what they enjoy, but I think its my duty to point out just how bad this series is.

I went into this expecting it to be kinda bad, but hoping it was of a kind of bad I could ignore (Into the Badlands), or perhaps even be a little charmed by (The 100). Instead all I got was plots that varied between non-nonsensical and boring, dull stereotypes, unlikable characters and no sense of the world beyond its 90210 meets Lord of the Rings aesthetic. When you can't get any traction out of a magic meets post-apocalyptic setting, you're just not trying.

Then again, I've always thought the books were derivative trash that quickly shifted into overstuffed, self-important melodrama (neither type was uncommon in fantasy books of their times: post-Tolkien and then 80s epic fantasy respectively) so perhaps I shouldn't have been so surprised.

The Random Life: Embarrassing Archaeology

Cracked article about 'embarrassing' archaeological finds contains some interesting stuff to add to a 'Random Items/Search the Room' table.

Either a very disturbing find, or a very useful one, depending on how
deep in the dungeon you are and how many supplies you have left. 

Zombie Types

Found this little gem today. A great little guide to every kind of zombie you could think of.

The Random Life: New Star Wars D6!

Dungeons and Dragons will always have been my first, but when I think old-school gaming, I think about the West-End Games Star Wars. This was our campaign world, where we played an obnoxious band of rebels/mercenaries who battled the Empire, slavers and criminals from Yavin to Endor and beyond. While I'm not sure I could comfortably return to that world without my fellow Banthas by my side, I'm thrilled to see that the old system is making a comeback. 

If I was to go back, I'd start with the Star Wars REUP project. A fan doc that reviewed and re-complied the rules.

Also worth checking out, this collection of Deviant Art works for use in Star Wars and other sc-fi games.

The Random Life: TMNT & Other Strangeness

Lucky find today at my local comic book shop. A 4th edition with shelf-wear and some crispy binding glue, but otherwise solid with no cracks in the spine.

We kind of played this one back in the day, at least I dimly remember some hairbrained idea to merge this with the martial-arts rules in Ninjas and Superspies.

I think I ended up with a spear-welding hedhog with Drunken Kung-Fu, which in retrospect was a pretty good summary of my life at the time.