Enter the cave of the kobolds!

My party just finished up their first dungeon. It was kinda hairy there at the end when they came up across their first overpowering encounter and their fighter foolishly charged headlong into battle and got knocked to dying in a single blow. From an attack of opportunity that she triggered. But they managed to pull it off in the end.

All in all, I have to say I'm very pleased with how the dungeon played out. I drew a quick map sitting in Tony's Pizza enjoying a slice. Like all my best work, I put it together the day before I needed it. And I expected to get two sessions out of it. I ended up getting six, including the session they took to get there and the session in the middle where they paused for healing and shopping in town. Not bad for something I basically threw together in an hour.

One of my favorite baddies from fantasy works is the necromancer. I don't know why, but undead are just wonderful enemies. I think it's a combination of the mindless approach and the fact that it's the friggin dead come back to a semblance of life. Plus, their mindlessness makes it really easy to run them. I knew that I wanted to put them in the dungeon, but I decided not to tell my players that they were going to find undead. Gotta have some secrets. (Well, I have a small stack of note cards with secrets, but that's another post.)

I had the players meet a lady who told them that her son, James, had been captured and held by kobolds who used a nearby cave as a base to raid from. I had planned for her to die on the way, but they managed to save her. Which is ok, because that just changed her from dead to missing. It actually might be better, because now they have another mystery what needs unraveling. Gotta keep the players guessing. A wondering player is an engaged and interested player.

The original plan for the first chambers. Also notes on traps and tracking negative health from the final encounter.

I knew I wanted to hit them with a trap straight up. At first I planned on it being a tripwire that dropped a big rock on them, but ended up changing it to an alarm pressure plate. I decided that the kobold leader would be asleep and the kobolds in the first chamber would be distracted by a dice game or something if they didn't trip it. Of course, they did trip it, so the kobolds were waiting for them and the leader showed up after a round or two of combat. But kobolds are unwilling opponents, so they surrendered when the tide of battle started shifting against them.

What the first chambers ended up looking like.

And that's the extent of the kobolds I had planned for the cave that they were told was full of kobolds. One of the kobolds they interrogated told them about the skeletons that were waiting and also about the secret door to the treasure chamber.

The planned next chambers. They ended up being changed around.

Originally I had planned for the party to come across a chamber the had signs of bodies being bleed out and killed in the next chamber, along with a locked door to a cell where James was being held. This chamber ended up getting changed to being the third one, and got a face lift into a whole little temple room to a dark god. Can't have an evil group with undead without a temple to a dark god, after all. I also moved the flaming skeletons (which was a template I found in a book about undead enemies and I just knew I HAD to use them) into it to give it a more impressive feel.

The other room turned into a storeroom. I put a few crates with some adventuring gear that I noticed my party hadn't grabbed (like torches, who doesn't grab at least a torch or two during character creation? Honestly...) but the barbarian came in and smashed the crates, destroying it all. My pressure plate made the party nervous when they found the lever, so they tied a rope to it and pulled it while standing in the hallway. And that was where we ended the first session in the cave. So I suppose that's where I'll end this post. We'll revisit the cave shortly.

The finished storeroom, with opened secret door.

After smashing the skeletons and finding the treasure trove, you take a moment to pause and loll on your new pile of coins to read another few pages of Sam's journal.

Stop me if you've heard this one

A priest walks into a bar and meets a warrior, a wizard, and a thief. They proceed to beat on some monsters and acquire fame and fortune.

The tavern. A fantasy RPG staple for longer than I've been alive. Don't know how to get your group together in game? They meet in a tavern. Need a place to drop a rumor? Patron or bartender in the tavern. Taverns are rather easy to drop in a campaign and the problem with that is it leads to laziness. And that is why, I believe, tavern starts have such a crap reputation in the RPG sphere.

However, with a little work, tavern starts are perfectly fine. The game I'm playing started, well, outside a tavern, but still. The game I'm running has had quite a bit around the Vulgar Unicorn tavern. It's where two of the party members met during the practice session I ran with them. (Of course, they're both new players, so a tavern start isn't just another generic beginning to them, but still) It's also where I introduced the PC who took the spot of the guy who ended up not being able to play. I worked on that introduction, though. The party was asleep, so I gave them a dream, and that's where their characters first saw the new player.

And that's really all that you need to do to make meeting someone at a tavern into something special and different. Sure, the actual meeting of the characters happened there, but now it has an air of being something that was destined to happen. Especially because I also tied one of my campaign's (planned to be) ongoing themes into it. It's not Joe Schmoe meeting up with Jane Schmoess and then randomly going out and killing stuff, there's an actual reason they knew they had to get together. Of course, there was more going on in that dream than my PCs know. They don't know there were two separate endings and one person didn't have the dream at all (well, I guess one person doesn't know that). But that's just because they didn't talk about it much.

In fact, this holds with all cliches and overdone things. They're cliches and overdone for a reason, and that reason is because they work. All you have to do is put a little thought into it, and wiggle some neurons into discovering a way to give your cliche enough of a change to make it feel different enough without changing it so much it's unrecognizable.

You sit by the crackling fire in the mostly empty tavern. The bartender wipes the bar, seemingly distracted by a passing thought. You light your pipe weed and open Sam's tattered diary to the third entry and read...

Daring rescues

Rescue, such a funny word. It's a portmanteau from "rest barbecue." You know, the heroes would be sitting around, eating their smokey, delicious turkey legs (which is why they have turkey legs at Ren Fests, natch. The whole thing about the turkey being a North American bird, and not part of the old world? Rubbish. The heroes just ate them all for their tasty, tasty legs) when a page would run up and shout about some trouble. So the heroes would rest their 'cue on whatever was handy and go out to save the day. And that's where the word comes from.

Well, perhaps I'm making that up, like the time I convinced some younger kids that the word island stemmed from people in crow's nests shouting "It IS land!" on explorer ships way back in history. However, you have to admit it's far more entertaining than what the online etymology dictionary tells us. Apparently it's from Latin via Old French. And, while you might rescue a princess, it wasn't a daring rescue, it was a daring rescous.

Of course this is only relevant because my players rescued someone in our last session. And circumvented half the dungeon (well, maybe a third) by managing to tear down a door I didn't expect them to. Remember what I said about players and unexpected plans?

Anyways, I suppose a little background on the campaign wouldn't be amiss here. The world itself is a semi-random one, based on The Welsh Piper's amazing hexcrawl system, with a good bit of the stuff proposed by the old Dungeoncraft column in Dragon magazine. The gods are active in the world, with their own agendas and goals. There's some political stuff I have brewing on the back burner, ready to boil over into all out war if my players don't get the hints I'm going to be throwing out there and act on them. But, right now, my players are in the Town of Spielburg (I've decided to link to anything that inspired names, settings, whatever), sleeping in their beds in The Vulgar Unicorn after dropping their charge at the cleric's temple for rest and relaxation.

They thought they were dealing with kobolds, but I found something about applying a flaming template to skeletons in a book and had to use it. So they're actually dealing with necromancy. There's also profane temples and human sacrifices. You know, all the tried and true fantasy tropes. And there's much, much more. However, my players have been linked to this blog, so those secrets will keep themselves until a future time.

You pause a moment, and pull out the journal you discovered with the deceased half-elf Sam and peruse it a bit more.

Tracking your journey

You're walking through the woods when you come across a half-elven corpse lying under a tree. Searching the corpse (which tends to be the first thing every PC does when coming across a corpse) you find a leather-bound journal. You open it and read:

Greetings, gentle readers, and welcome to my diary. I am Sam, orphaned child, and son of Gentlemen.

 One of my favorite things about online gaming is the ease with which I can chronicle what happens in the game. My old campaigns were notes scribbled on maps and in the margins of other written material. But they were always incomplete. I'm still keeping a set of notes, and they happen to be scribbled on the paper map of the dungeon I made as my first concept. But, since Embrel is being run as a text chat, I also have complete logs of the sessions saved on my hard drive. And, thanks to an old program called DM Genie, they have hyperlinks to the parts of the campaign that are relevant.

But this is more about player journals. We're playing Draikonheim, where I'm a player, with voice over Skype. So the log is only us rolling dice. I've taken it upon myself to post an in character story line via diary entries. After all, I'm sitting at home, right in front of my computer, right? Might as well. Plus, since I post it on the internet, I'm sharing it with some people. It's just the internet version of bothering the clerk at the game store about your character and the session you just played.

Plus, it's amazing how much easier it is to play and plan out stuff to do when you have a chronicle of the events that had happened. Of course, my character is a very unreliable narrator, what with being a rogue and more than willing to inflate his own self importance, especially in his personal journal. But that's ok, because all the really important stuff is correct. Plus, during the period where we just couldn't get a game together for a month, at least I had those to read again and keep excited for the next game.

You continue to read the journal:

Blank slates

There is nothing as intimidating as a blank slate. It's kinda funny how true that is. You sit down and think and ponder and come up with all these great ideas. Then you sit down and that first, blank page just stares at you and says, "Ha! You thought you were so big with your grand ideas, but now you don't know how to start them!" This is true no matter what you're doing, from meeting four strangers on the internet and creating a campaign for them to writing the very first post of your blog. Well, at least it's true for me.

However, I have no troubles with actually building the world. For me, that's the easy part. I've been designing campaign worlds for a lot longer than I've actually been roleplaying. I found a copy of the red box Basic D&D books in the neighbor's trash, and fell in love. I devoured those books, and created many, many dungeons that never got played as I didn't have a group. As I grew older, I played a little 2e AD&D, but not much. Eventually I came across Rifts.

Now, I know that tons of people hate on Rifts for valid reasons, so I'll just say that a few house rules turned that system into one I loved. Plus, that game marked a turn around. I managed to convince my brother and a couple of friends to play, and that was what we did. And I pretty much always ran the games. But, boy, was I a lousy GM. I railroaded the players on half-baked plots that I was improvising as I went along. I'm surprised they played along. I'm sure it was mostly the setting, as that was what really made me love the system.

Over the years I would still design campaign stuff, but, outside a few small games that never went on for longer than a couple months, didn't play. Then, a few months ago, I met some folks on Reddit, and we started gaming. Well, the D&DNext game I joined started (and has been great fun) but the 3.5 game we tried to start never took off. So, I eventually decided I would DM and built a world.

Now, it's been 10 years since my last attempt at running a game. And I was pretty burnt out on always being the DM (seriously, I think there have only been like 3 games I've been a player, not counting games that ended up being just a single session) back then. Fortunately, I've found that the joy of creating a dungeon has come back. And, unlike my early dungeons, I've also got people to go through my dungeons!

Anyways, I've started this blog to chronicle the game I'm running and my thoughts on it, as well as how I set things up vs how they actually come out in the game itself. Because, if there's one very important lesson my railroading self needed to learn, it's that players always ruin the game you set up, and that makes it better.

Ha! Take that first page! You are blank no longer!