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.

Blunderblade

Another item that came out of my dragonschool game. Used by Dwarven Vault and Royal Guards

Blunderblade
Cost: 250gp 
Weight: 12 lbs 
Damage Blade: d10 slashing.  
Damage Blunderbuss 2d6 piercing. Ammunition (range 20 cone). Dodge action - Dex check vs ToHit toll for ½ damage.  
Heavy, Reach, Two-Handed, Ammunition 
Blunderbuss can only be fired once. Requires 1 FULL round to reload – if loader is wounded, or performs any other actions, reactions or bonus actions beyond reloading the gun, then they do not have enough time and must begin again in a later round.  

What's Inside the Dwarf Vault?


Quick chart I made for the Dragon School Adventure. Roll d8 for found Treasure ... 

8     A jaunty crown studded with inferior quality, but colourful gemstones  500gp

7     A statue of a stern dwarven god. Before every d20 roll, you can roll a d6. if you roll a 6 you get an  Advantage. if you roll a 1, you get a Disadvantage. 400gp

6     A black velvet painting of a Fellen Presslever, the Dwarf elvis. worth 400gp

5    367 gp in mixed coins, small gems and jewelry.

4     A potion of Fire Breath: Allows a 2d6 burst. if drunk and used by a red dragon, does 4d6 damage 2x range. 100gp

3     Jar of Healing Potion (enough for two 2d6 heals, or one full heal) 50gp

2     A child's dirty sock filled with pennies. Worth 152 coppers

1    A large iron safe. massively heavy and almost impossible to carry (reduces movement by half. disadvantage on all rolls while holding.) Inside are neat piles of small slips of green paper. Worthless. AC 18 to Hit. HP 100 Resistant to all physical and blunt magical damage attacks.


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.

Marvel FASERIP: Elsa Bloodstone - Agent of H.A.T.E

STATISTICS                                        

Fighting        IN           40          
Agility           EX           20          
Strength        IN           40          
Endurance    AM         50          
Reason          TY           6             
Intuition       TY           6             
Psyche           TY           6             
Health:    150                        
Karma:   18          

BACKGROUND                                 
Real Name: Elsa Bloodstone      
Occupation:  Monster Slayer, Mercenary
Legal Status: No criminal record
Identity: Public                                 
Place of Birth: Bloodstone Island
Marital Status: Single                    
Known Relatives: Ulysses (father,
deceased), Cullen (brother)        
Base of Operations: Bloodstone Manor,
H.A.T.E. Aeromarine, north Atlantic,
Shockwave Rider, State 51,
Past Group Affiliations: H.A.T.E., Nextwave,
Legion of Monsters        
Present Group Affiliations: Nextwave,



KNOWN POWERS
Longevity: Whenever Elsa wears her Bloodstone choker she ceases to age. When not wearing the stone she ages at approximately a third of the rate of a normal human. She uses the stone to slow her aging process down even further, but has no desire to become truly immortal like her father. In practical terms, this mean she biologically ages about one year per decade.

Durability: The Bloodstone gem worn by her father left traces of itself even in his DNA, which was passed down to his children. Elsa processes increased physical strength, durability, speed, stamina, agility, reflexes, and senses, all boosted to superhuman levels.

Reneration: Elsa regains 5 Hit Points per hour. If wearing her Bloodstone choker, she can even regenerate limbs or recover from seemingly mortal wounds (at the rate of 2 Hit Points per day).

Bloodstone: Elsa owns a small fragment of the Hellfire Helix gemstone that was once embedded in her father’s chest. However, unlike her father whose durability and immortality derived solely from the gem, Elsa’s durability and longevity appear to be natural and not dependent on the gem. However, when wearing the fragment (which she has put in a choker that she wears around her neck) her healing powers are increased and she temporarily ceases to age.

TALENTS
All forms of Combat, including Marksmanship, Military and Business/Finance. Also extremely knowable on monster lore and pertinent magical knowledge. She is fluent in many languages and can read several languages considered dead, lost and/or occult.

BACKGROUND
Elsa is one of two known children of the he formally immortal Ulysses Bloodstone, a prehistoric warrior who had discovered an alien entity called the Hellfire Helix trapped inside a meteorite. The Hellfire Helix summoned an alien being known as Ulluxy’l Kwan Tae Syn to help it find a host but Ulysses battled Syn, and during the fight the Hellfire Helix was smashed. A piece of it, known to history as the Bloodstone Gem, became embedded in Ulysses’s chest granting him superhuman strength, durability and immortality. Over the millennia, he used his powers to become the world’s most renowned monster hunter and mercenary the world had ever seen.

It is not clear when Elsa or her brother were born, but it soon became apparent that she had inherited at least some of her father’s strength, agility and toughness without requiring that she wear the Bloodstone. Her father began her training literally in the cradle, where she learned how to strangle imps and slay small monsters with a broken plastic spoon. As she grew older, her father’s training intensified and crossed the line many times into abuse, though Elsa’s memories of this time are thought to be spotty with age and fragmented by possible meddling by H.A.T.E.

After her father’s death, she retrieved a fragment of the now destroyed Bloodstone Gem and placed it on a choker she sometimes wears around her neck. Based out of Bloodstone manor, hidden somewhere in England, she took over her father’s business, working as a mercenary specializing in supernatural exterminations and monster attacks.

Elsa was the first the first one requited by Monica Rambeau and Director Dick Anger into Nextwave.


Elsa Bloodstone was created by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning.  Artwork by Stuart Immonen, Wade Von Grawbadger, and Dave McCaig with Paul Mounts