Play Reports for Fuck the King of Space

For the past year I’ve been maintaining private play reports for Fuck the King of Space, same way I’ve always done for ORWA. They’re dry, soulless things intended strictly for my own records. None the less, I’d always intended to create a section of the site where I posted them publicly, same as I’ve always done for the ORWA recaps. I was lazy about it, which is why they’re still not up even though the game is 9 months old now.

Or, rather, they weren’t up until today! A few hours ago Play Report Author Extraordinaire Anne Hunter prodded me about my laziness, and knowing someone is actually interested in reading something is always a great motivator. So now they’re all up and ready to be read if you’re interested. You can always access them using the little “Fuck the King of Space” link on the top navigation bar.

While we’re on the subject, if anyone is wondering why the ORWA recaps stopped…yeah, I’m sorry about that. I had a rough few weeks where I just didn’t have the energy to post them, and then I never felt like going back to upload all the ones I missed, and because I didn’t do it the project just kept getting bigger, and now I’ve got 30 posts to upload and it just sounds like a tedious mess and I’m sorry. I’ll do it. I’ll do it.

Also, visit DIY & Dragons. Her play reports are much better than mine.

On a Red World Alone Play Reports

Occasionally, I’ve gotten requests to start writing play reports. Usually I’m only too happy to respond positively to reader requests. I rarely get them, and it strokes my ego to know that someone actually wants something from me. Validation is intoxicating.

But play reports…I hate play reports. They’re painfully boring to read, and I tend to skip them even when they’re written by some of my favorite bloggers. Heck, I even skip them when they’re written by some of my favorite bloggers and I feature prominently in them. Clearly there’s an audience for these things, and I don’t want to denigrate anybody who reads them, or indeed, anyone who writes them. It just feels uncouth to publish something that I wouldn’t want to read myself.

All that being said, I’ve recently been making a big effort to improve my note taking. Part of that effort has meant sitting down after a session and writing out detailed notes on what happened. Essentially, I’m actually writing play reports. They’re unpolished, and organized more for my reference than for readability. But whether or not I’m sharing them with people, they exist. So I may as well share them.

I don’t want to make them part of the regular stream of posts. The unpolished nature of the things would bother me too much if they were going to spend any amount of time on the front page of the site. But, if you’re interested, I’ve been uploading them to the campaign page for On a Red World Alone. I’ve actually been doing this for awhile now. It only just occurred to me recently that I probably ought to tell people I’m doing it.

There should be a new one every Thrusday.

When Ginny Bo Fails a Morale Check

A few months back, in Vaults of Pahvelorn, my character Eriara’s apprentice died. It was really too bad, he’d shown a great deal of promise (took out an entire flock of pegasi)! but ultimately succumbed to one of the most ancient sources of character death: a large rolling stone. We weren’t even able to recover his hat.

I told the mighty Brendan that Eriara would like to search for a new apprentice. As she’s only 12 herself, I noted that I’d very much prefer a young apprentice. Someone who wouldn’t have any problems taking orders from a child. Brendan did some rolling, and informed me that the only hireling available was an 86 year old man.

I was…annoyed.

I wasn’t upset or even really frustrated, mind you, but annoyed. I had gotten the exact opposite of what I wanted, and since magical healing in Pahvelorn has a small chance to age your character by 1 year, this 86 year old bastard may well die of old age. I understand that in this form of play, we give dice the power to tell us how the world exists. Sometimes it doesn’t exist in a way which is advantageous to us. I embrace that, but it doesn’t mean I’m always happy about what I get.

I took him, because he was the best I could get. I dubbed “Ginny Bo” because it sounded ridiculous and I wanted to make this imaginary person feel bad about being my only option. I didn’t train him as a magic user. I intended to use him merely as a torch bearer until we got back to our home town where I could search for a proper hireling. But then something started happening.

I don’t remember if it was Brendan, or I, or someone else who said it. But it was agreed that Ginny Bo had lived a long and boring life. That he regretted not being more adventurous in his youth. He had decided to jam all of the life he could manage into his last years. This was convenient for me, since I kinda wanted him to die. Using this as justification, I sent him into all manner of dangerous scrapes. And even though he was rarely effective, he somehow managed to end up alive at the end of every session. I began to inject more personality in the character for shits and giggles. Before I started to like him, the rest of the party already loved him. That proved infectious because soon enough, I loved him too.

His adventures at this point are too numerous to recount, but you’ll find hints of them in the ever-lengthening titles he’s given to himself: Ginny Bo of the Devil’s Helm. Wielder of the Black Sword Obynig, called “Butter Steel.” The Giantslayer. The sludgifier of the Great Worm.

All of that is my long, rambling way of leading up to my problem: morale checks. In OD&D, when a player character tells a hireling to do something which places them in particular danger, the GM makes a die roll to determine whether that hireling will obey, or flee. The mechanic is important, because it prevents the player from having a bunch of entirely expendable pawns they can order about without repercussions. But it doesn’t work for Ginny Bo.

The crazy things Ginny Bo does aren’t done because Eriara orders him to do them. He does these crazy things because he’s a glory hound eager to make his mark on the world before he dies. If he were ever to fail a morale check (which he hasn’t yet) and flee from danger, it would break the wonderful illusion of his character which has amused us all so very much. Yet as a GM myself, I wouldn’t ask Brendan to exempt Ginny Bo from the rules for role playing reasons. That’s just not how I like to play.

Fortunately, I came up with a better idea. Last week I got permission from Brendan to draft a random chart. One which will serve as an alternative to mere flight in the event that Ginny Bo ever does fail a morale check. The idea is that while Ginny Bo will never flee from danger, he might become so wrapped up in the adventure that he acts to the detriment of himself or the party.

Here is the chart, as I’ve drafted it. A 1d6 should be rolled in out-of-combat situations (such as dungeon exploration), whereas a 1d12 should be rolled in combat.

Ginny Bo begins to monologue. He rants about his greatness and his achievements.
He opens the nearest door and charges through it heedless of the danger, or charges deeper into the most dangerous looking part of the wilderness.
He attempts an overly complicated maneuver and throws out his back. For the next 3 turns he can’t do much more than walk around and carry a few things.
Ginny Bo realizes HE ought to be the party leader! He begins barking orders at the rest of the party. All of his ideas are terrible.
Falls asleep, probably standing up. He is very old, you know.
Regardless of any need for stealth, he shouts his name and attempts whatever task he was given recklessly. He will probably fail spectacularly.
Ginny Bo drops his weapon and headbutts the nearest enemy. (Probably while wearing the Devil Helm).
He puffs out his chest and taunts enemies. Possibly offering them a “free shot.”
Attempts to perform a Karate-Kid style leg sweep. There is absolutely no power behind it, and he looks like quite a fool impotently kicking at his opponent’s legs.*
Tries to twirl his weapons around in a fancy display of swordsmanship. Drops his weapon.
Tosses aside any armor which can be easily removed and declares “I can take ye’ naked!”
Attempts to tackle opponent and wrestle them on the floor. Regardless of the opponent’s size.

*This may or may not be based on an actual childhood experience.

Tavern Tales 3 & Deadly Dungeons 15: The Funny Tea Room

The room is simple, largely conforming to the architectural style and level of dilapidation of the surrounding rooms. It is good if this room can be placed adjacent to a dining hall or kitchen, as when the dungeon was active, this room produced a drink which (for some reason) was favored by the lord or lady of the place.

It is dominated by a large pit in the floor, 5ft deep, filled with a swirling, bubbling, steaming liquid of a faintly brown color. On the wall of the room is a large rack covered in pegs, and from many of the pegs hang wooden mugs with a copper inlay. The mugs themselves are essentially worthless, being worth ~3cp each, for a total of 20-60 cups in all. The liquid in the floor both smells, and tastes, like a mild tea. If any one drinks it, they are affected by one of the following, determined by rolling 1d12. All effects are permanent, unless noted otherwise.

The liquid is poisonous to your body. Roll a save v. poison, or a fortitude save DC 15. Failure causes death.
A -1 to a random ability score. Use 1d6 to determine.
Spend 10 minutes vomiting and shaking violently.
Burn the roof of your mouth really, really badly.
Antlers sprout from your head.
Tiny, inefficient wings sprout from your back. They might be of *some* use keeping cool or jumping an extra 3-4 inches, but that’s about it.
Skin turns orange.
Feel pretty good about yourself for the rest of the day.
A scorpion stinger grows in your mouth. It is not harmful to you, nor does it interfere with normal tasks. It can be used to sting anything you put your mouth on, delivering a poison which deals 1d6 CON damage per turn, for 3 turns.
+20 to your strength for 1 hour.
A +1 to a random ability score. Use 1d6 to determine.
+1 level.

Players may continue to drink from the pit as many times as they like. Effects will stack with each other, and any effect rolled twice for the same character should be properly “enhanced” according to GM discretion. However, once a character has rolled a 9 or higher, their body will have adapted to the effects of the brew. From then on, regardless of the mixture they create (see below), or what they roll, no magical effect will occur. The drink is still quite tasty, though. They’ll find they enjoy it even more than before.

Adjacent to this room is a room filled with barrels. These barrels each contain a mixture which, when combined with the tea-water in the previous room, will slightly alter the random roll. If a barrel is completely dumped into the tea-water pit, then the additive will become inert after 10 minutes. If any two of these are mixed together, then their numerical bonuses or penalties will average. Orange spiral overrides anything it is mixed with. If any of these are consumed without being combined with the tea water, it tastes so awful the players will reflexively spit it out. Forced consumption causes death.

The symbols on the barrels, and their effects, are:

Blue Square. Smells like meat-juice. -4 to the random roll.
Purple Triangle. Smells like a bowl of raw egg. -2 to the random roll.
Red circle. Smells like beets. +2 to the random roll.
Black “X.” Smells like coffee. +4 to the random roll.
Orange Spiral. Smells almost sickeningly sweet. The random roll is replaced by a 1d6 roll to determine the player’s skin color: 1. Bright Red, 2. Blue, 3. Green, 4. Purple, 5. Orange, 6. Transparent. This effect functions even after the player has become immune to the tea-water’s other effects.

The above room appears in the megadungeon my players are currently exploring, Castle Nalew. They discovered it yesterday, and I think we probably spent an hour or more there. They tried every concoction they could think of, and much of the above information is stuff I had to improvise when they asked questions I wasn’t prepared for. Other information I had to improvise was: what happens when you become transparent twice, and what happens when you feed the liquid to a green ooze?

I could write a rather lengthy post about how much fun we had with this, but much of it would probably come across as “you had to be there” humor. However there is one story which is so impossibly perfect, I could not resist sharing it.

The very first character to dare drinking from the tea was the party’s monk. He rolled a seven, meaning his skin turned orange. Later, when they discovered the barrels in the next room, the monk was the first to try the orange spiral concoction, rolled a 5, making him orange a second time. I said that while he had been “Trump Orange,” he was now a wholly inhuman neon orange. After popping around to a few different colors, he again hit orange twice in a row, causing him to actually begin to glow orange with the strength of several candles.

The character’s name?

“Karrot.”

Sometimes the dice are the best comedians at the table.

Tavern Tales 2: Ooze, Poison, and Near Death Experiences

It’s been awhile, but I have a few more Tavern Tales to tell, if you’ve got the time!

Underwater Ooze

Over the last few months, Brendan‘s Vaults of Pahvelorn campaign has become one of the best parts of my week. I love the game, I love the group, and I love having the opportunity to be a player as a change of pace. I’ve also enjoyed the challenging, and high-mortality style of Brendan’s GMing, despite the fact that it cost me one of my favorite PCs ever. As a group, we’ve learned to be cautious, and when its best to simply run away. I think we’ve become quite skilled at navigating the depths, but our explorations are far from done. And just this past week, we encountered a challenge which very nearly defeated us entirely.

In a large cave, amidst a forest of glass trees, we discovered a series of ziggurats. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say, we had reason to believe there was treasure in those ancient structures. We ventured down the stairs which led into the first, and were immediately confronted with an octagonal room filled thigh-deep with water. We could see a dry passageway leading further into the dungeon straight across the room, as well as a stone slab with a body atop it that we wanted to investigate. But the water was murky, and even a first level adventurer would know not to step into any water you can’t see the bottom of.

We tested the bottom of the water with our 10ft poles, and felt only thick sludge. We thought perhaps it would be safe to trudge through–but when we withdrew our poles, we noticed that the metal hooks mounted on the ends of them were completely gone. Our rat catcher, Beni Profane, pulled a rat forth from his pouch and tossed it squarely into the center of the room, and we all watched expectantly. At first the tiny cr5eature frantically swam back towards us, and dry land. But the rodent didn’t make it three feet before a grey, gloppish ooze rose up from the water, and came down on the rate, dragging it beneath the surface.

Now thoroughly convinced that we didn’t want to step into the water. we broke some of our 10ft poles in half, and used rope to tie foot hold knots to each half, thus constructing a crude pair of stilts. We tied a rope to Beni–as he is our most dextrous party member–and sent him staggering through the mucky black waters to the other side. Once he had successfully made it there, he used an iron spike to mount the rope to the wall, then tossed the end back to us. We constructed a crude bridge of two ropes–one for our arms, and one for our legs–and began to cross one by one.

The dice were not with us, though, and the second to cross–our beloved hireling Levis–caused the rope to snap from the wall. He fell with a splash into the water, and lost all composure. He miraculously managed to flee from the water without too much injury, and continued fleeing towards the ziggurat’s entrance, where we later found him dead from an unknown source.

The rest of us managed to reattach the bridge and make it across. The entire process took at least 40 minutes of game time. But it was well worth it!

…I’m kidding of course. We didn’t find a single copper piece in the entire Ziggurat. And in addition to losing Levis, one of the player characters–Satyavati–also lost his life while fighting a monster in that next room.

Without question, that was our most dismal delve into the depths yet. And I adored it.

Poisoned Journal

I’m not sure whether I’ve mentioned this or not, but recently my younger brother asked me to introduce him to the hobby. I threw together a quick amalgamation of OD&D rules I gleaned from playing in Vaults of Pahvelorn, made a dungeon, and told him we’d play for three hours on the the following Saturday. Six weeks later, it has turned into a running campaign which I’ve dubbed Dungeons & Dragons & Little Brothers; or D&D&LB for short. Running the game has unfortunately pushed back a few other projects I wanted to work on, but I’ve also been having a great deal of fun with it, so I don’t mind.

In a recent game the party found part of an ancient manor house which had fallen into the earth in ages past. Most of it had been destroyed, but a few rooms remained largely intact, and could be accessed directly from the caves they were exploring. They had good luck finding treasures here, and when they encountered a largely intact, luxurious office room, they started to get pretty excited. Too excited to check under the desk as they normally would have. They didn’t notice the dire rat nesting there until it leapt out to defend its territory. My brother’s character, Garret, took a bite to the face which dropped him to -2 hp.

Now, the way I handle death in this game is thus: If the character reaches 0 hp, then they are unconscious. They can be revived after 10-60 minutes, but cannot fight or move quickly, lest they risk reopening their wounds and taking 1 hp of damage. If the player ever falls below 0 hp, they must make a save versus death. If their save succeeds, then they return to 0 hp and are unconscious. Characters who succeed on a save versus death also receive a permanent disability, based on the manner of their near death. If the save is failed…well…roll 3d6 for your stats, in order.

As it so happened, Garret succeed on his save. He was left with a permanent hole in his cheek which cost him 1 point of Charisma, and was reduced to limping around at 0 hp, but was otherwise none the worse for wear. Garret’s companion, Drako, urged that they should return to the surface so he could recover. But Garret insisted that they had cleared the room of danger, and it would be a shame to go back without looking through the room to see what they could find. As it turned out, Garret was correct. That single room held more treasure than the party had yet discovered in the rest of the dungeon combined. They found ancient books of law from before the fall of human civilization, and even managed to procure a piece of fine sculpture, dedicated to a powerful goddess.

Unfortunately, Garret had been wrong about clearing the room of dangers. For while there were no more vicious creatures there to attack them, there was a vicious poison dart trap. One which stung Garret in the palm when he attempted to open a locked journal. He failed his save versus poison, and had to be dragged back to town by Drako. Even before they made it to the surface, Garret’s mental state had been reduced to that of a vegetable, and it cost the Party every penny they had earned that day, just to restore his mind.

Near Death at the North Tower

For the most part, I’ve been very proud of how quickly my younger brother adapted to the dangers of OD&D. Despite his actions in the previous story, he’s made more good choices than bad ones. But even good players sometimes have bad tactics. And no player is immune from the occasional wrath of poor fortune.

While investigating those underground manor houses, the players came upon a deed to the “North Tower.” They did some investigating, and discovered that the building was still standing, the deed was still valid, and their new property was only a half day’s travel from the town they were residing in. Truth be told I didn’t expect them to find that deed as quickly as they did, but that’s the nature of the game. Sometimes players surprise you.

They decided to go investigate their new property, and promptly found themselves in a pitched battle with the bandits who had claimed the tower as their hideout. It was an absolute route. The magic user was the first to go down. His “Shield” spell gave him an AC of 3 against normal missiles, so he tried to stand in front and offer cover for his companions. The first volley of arrows overcame his increased armor class, and he went down, barely making his save v. death to remain unconscious at 0 hp. The players barred the door from the outside, dragged their companion around a corner, and tried to revive him so they could flee. The bandits immediately succeded on their first 1-in-6 chance to break the door open, and charged out swords and arrows blazing.

Drako held up a leather tarp to obscure her form, and ran for the trees, but an arrow hit her in the leg for 3, which is exactly the amount of HP she had at the time. Garret held out a good while longer with the help of the party’s two hirelings, but he and one of them were both dropped to 0 hp within a few rounds. The remaining hireling wasn’t about to fight on alone, and surrendered. For a moment, I thought my brother was about to learn what TPK stands for. But then I noticed something: Every single member of the party had miraculously ended up at 0 HP. Only one of them had even needed to make a save vs. death.

I couldn’t see why a group of bandits would kill a group of potentially valuable prisoners, so a few days later, the party awoke in a prison, and began to plot their escape.

Tavern Tales 1: Hot Rocks, High Rolls, Whores, and Higgins

I don’t like posting play reports on Papers & Pencils. It’s not that nothing worth sharing happens in my games, because that’s not true. My games are awesome and you would be lucky to play in one. But typically the really great stories I tell about my games cover maybe 10 minutes of play. And while I might get multiple 10-minute stories out of a single session, I don’t like retelling the other 8 hours of gameplay which surround those cool stories. Exploring rooms and successfully fighting monsters is a lot of fun when you’re doing it, not so much fun when you’re reading about it. If I wanted to dress it up and turn it into a story I could probably make it entertaining. But at that point I’m just writing fiction. And I’ve got The Girl and the Granite Throne to work on if I want to write fiction.

But I don’t see any reason why I can’t share shorter stories about the awesome stuff which happens in games. So pull up a chair, order a pint, and let me tell you about my recent adventures…

Hot Rocks

In the most recent session of my ToKiMo Pathfinder game, the players were exploring the largest dungeon they’ve encountered to date. They were prowling through the bottommost levels of the dungeon when they found a crazy guy who had been lost there since he was a child. He warned them to stay away from the “hot room” several doors to the south. He was very insistent that he didn’t like the hot room, and they would not like it either. Little did he know, he was talking to Player Characters. So the first thing they did was make a beeline for the hot room, and discovered that it was nothing more than a functioning sauna.

Curious as to why a sauna would function with no one around to care for it, the players tried to figure out how the place worked. They quickly discovered where the water was dripping into the room onto hot coals. The source of the water was unknown, but far more interesting to them was how the coals could possibly be hot. They hadn’t seen any living creatures in this area of the dungeon, aside from the crazy guy. And he clearly wasn’t responsible for maintaining the room. The players asked the sorceress, Phoenix Darkmatter, to take a look. And she discovered that the rocks were, indeed, magical.

Deciding that magically heated rocks would probably earn them some nice coin, the players asked if they could take some of them to the surface to sell. I told them the rocks were not held in place at all, but they were far too hot to hold, and would cause severe burns. Likewise, trying to put them in a backpack would be a lot like putting a lighted torch into a backpack. I was curious to see if my players could figure out a way to transport the stones, and they did not disappoint. After a few moments of discussing between themselves, Phoenix spoke up, and reminded me that since she had the Red Dragon bloodline, she had a minor resistance to fire damage. She asked if it would be safe for her to hold the rocks, and I said yes. In fact, the stones just felt pleasantly warm to her–but her clothing and equipment was still vulnerable.

This left the players to ponder some more, until Poker, the party’s rogue, suggested that Phoenix just swallow the rocks. Which she did.

The party plans to ‘retrieve’ the stones at a later date, so they can be cleaned, and sold. In the meantime, Phoenix has a pleasant warmth in her stomach, as though she’d just eaten a bowl full of hot soup after coming in from the snow. I was so impressed with their problem solving, I gave both Phoenix and Poker 1 point of experience.

Not That Kind of Corner!

A little earlier in that same ToKiMo session, I was describing a room to the players. It had been used as a library in the past, though most of the books here were burned and unreadable. Part of the room above had collapsed into this one as well. The only other notable feature in this room was a hole in the corner, which led deep down a winding shaft, into a sewer below.

While describing that last feature, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, I said “There’s a whore in the corner.”

Needless to say the next 10 minutes of play time were lost as the entire group tittered and joked about what kind of business she must get down here, and how they didn’t want to play ‘that kind of game.’

Sigh.

Badass Minotaur

Near the end of that session, the players freed a minotaur from imprisonment. It’s a bit of a long story as to why the minotaur was there, and why she didn’t rip them limb from limb the moment she saw them, but the important part is that she agreed to work along side the party until they found a way out of the dungeon. Also her name is Bessy, because I made the mistake of mentioning a joke name before giving her a real name. She stayed at the back of the formation, and didn’t really do much. She wasn’t a hireling–the players weren’t offering her any gold or any shares of treasure. All she wanted was to get out of there. Plus, I’m not too terribly fond of running NPCs along side my players. None the less when the party was under attack she would pull out her axe and help, while doing her best to stay out of danger.

In the last room that the players explored that day, they encountered a mummy. Mummies are a challenge significantly above the party’s level, and halfway through the fight things got even worse when a second mummy in an adjacent room shambled out, and immediately attacked a level 1 paladin PC, dropping her below 0 hit points. The situation was grim for the party. After a few rounds they’d gotten the mummies down to about 15 HP each, but several party members were in danger of being killed before the battle was over.

Then Bessy’s turn came up. She was trying to defend the injured paladin, and was already in position from a previous turn. Her high base attack bonus allowed her to make two attacks, so I rolled both at the same time using different colored dice. The party was in bad shape, and they were all watching this roll expectantly, hoping the NPC could pull their asses out of the fire.

A lot of gaming stories reach their climax with the line “and then I rolled a 20.” But that’s not what happened here.

I rolled two twenties.

It’s something I’d never seen before. It will only happen one out of every 400 times you roll two d20s together. It has a 0.25% chance of occurring. I was stunned. It was such a remarkable roll that Bessy not only cleaved straight through the Mummy she was fighting, but she also hurled her axe across the room and smashed the other mummy into dust as well.

Higgins

Come listen young adventurers, heed what you’re told. ‘Bout a wizard named Higgins, and his actions so bold.

Higgins was a magic user in the OD&D game “Vaults of Pahvelorn” which I’ve been playing every Monday for the past few months. Higgins was evil, but he knew he wasn’t powerful enough yet to get away with being blatant about it. He did his best to keep his evil private, while in public he cultivated an image of being both generous and heroic. He once donated an entire share of treasure to the town guard just to apologize for wasting their time when the party reported a crime that was covered up before the guard could arrive to confirm it.

I was proud of Higgins. Pahvelorn is a deadly game, and a lot of my fellow adventurers had died before me. But Higgins was smart, and he was lucky. His risks were calculated, and if he ever did something foolish, the dice were always willing to give him a second chance. Playing 3 hours a week for something like four months, Higgins slowly accumulated greater and greater power. It took me several months to gain access to any spell other than Read Magic, and I think I was among the first in the party to reach second level. I started to think that Higgins might be able the achieve the goals I had set for Margo, before he died. Perhaps Higgins could become the most powerful magic user this campaign world had ever known. Perhaps he would build a tower in the city of Zorphath, and rule over it as the lords of old had done. And he’d do it wearing stylish robes he’d sewn himself, and the 3 horned helm he’d taken from his master’s killer.

I assume you’ve guessed, from my use of past tense, that none of this will ever come to pass.

It all started when the party decided to go to a nearby haunted cathedral. We had been there once before, and survived only by fleeing with our tails between our legs. But most of us were level 2 by this point. We were also much better equipped, and better prepared for the kinds of challenges we would face. Truth be told I felt a little wary, but I was willing to go if my party would be there beside me.

We had a few tough encounters, but we were managing, until we reached a rather innocuous room with a ghost. He wasn’t hostile towards us. He barely even noticed us. He was on his hands and knees, searching for his cat. We thoroughly poked and prodded the room with our 10ft poles, and found the dry bones of his cat, along with several large rats, beneath a table. We prodded the rats in turn, but nothing seemed to happen, so we assumed the room was safe. We directed the ghost towards his cat’s location, and he moved to look. As he peered under the table, though, he reeled back and shouted something about demon rats.

It seems foolish now, but I thought we’d been as thorough as we could be in testing the room for danger. I announced that Higgins would step forward, punch and kick the rat skeletons into dust, pick up the cat skeleton, and return it to the elderly ghost. I was making a big show about being heroic, and the entire group was chuckling over it. Save for Brendan, who was flat-out laughing his ass off. For awhile I thought I was just a really funny guy, until Brendan managed to choke out:

“The rats actually animate and attack you.”

I’m sure my face turned as white as my character sheet as the dice were rolled. Three out of the four attacks hit me, and the damage dice rolled high, reducing me to -13 hit points. I was given a saving throw against death, which I failed.

And just like that, all of my plans to turn Higgins into an evil overlord who would rule for 100 years came crashing down…because he stopped to rescue an old man’s cat.

I Love Creative Players

When you’re GMing a game, what really makes you smile? What is it that your players do which makes you feel like as though the game is going perfectly? For myself, I love it when my players approach a problem from a direction I never considered. Or, even better, when they decide to tackle a problem I haven’t considered at all. I’m of the opinion that if they’re thinking that creatively, then it is because I was able to foster an environment where they felt like thinking creatively was beneficial. They recognize that the world around them has a certain kind of logic to it, and that logic is consistent enough that they’re able to think about problems diegetically.

I’d like to share three stories which I think encapsulate this idea really well.

Skeleton Feet: Different areas of my game world are keyed to different encounter tables. Everything which can be rolled on those tables has been carefully selected for that area. For unintelligent creatures, my reason for putting them there might be as simple as ‘this is where they live.’ For more intelligent beings, there will often be a small backstory, perhaps a couple sentences in length. If the players encounter 1d4 orcs, it might be because there’s a hidden orc village in the area, which was founded when a group of orcs was driven from the northern mountains by humans. Simple as it may be, it already solves a lot of problems. The orcs will react violently to humans, there is a village nearby for the players to find if they want to find out where the orcs came from, and I’ve added to the history of my world by saying orcs used to live in the mountains to the North, even if my players don’t find that out.

In my game world, 3 or 4 adjacent ‘zones’ all share a small possibility that the players will encounter a handful of goblin skeletons. The backstory on these skeletons is that many many decades ago, a necromancer passed through the area. He was still relatively inexperienced, and he experimented with his necromatic powers by raising a lot of dead goblins from a mass grave he found. The necromancer has since moved on, and is now a powerful lich in a tower in the far south. Given that you can’t really interrogate skeletons, I figured that if my players encountered them, they’d wonder why they were there, but not pursue the idea too far. To be honest, when I wrote that, I was really just looking for a way to make the encounter table more varied in those areas.

It took my players a few sessions of adventuring before they encountered the skeletons. They managed to defeat them handily. Here’s what happened, (roughly transcribed from a recording I made of the game):

Phoenix The Sorceress: Do any of our characters know about undead? What can we learn about these?
Me: Knowledge(Religion) is used for undead. Gibbous?
Gibbous The Cleric: Sweet, I’m useful! *roll* I got a 17.
Me: Alright! You’re able to notice two things about these goblin skeletons. First, they seem to have been animated for a very long time, and second, it doesn’t seem like they were being guided by any set of instructions.
Gibbous: [Sarcastic] That is super helpful.

At this point, the party very nearly moved on, figuring that there was nothing interesting about the encounter. But after a bit of chatter, some of the other players started to get curious.

Rosco the Ranger: Maybe they came from a nearby crypt?
Poker the Rogue: How old are the swords they were using? Can we tell?
Pumofe the Barbarian: I just woke up from a 200 year sleep. Do their swords look like something I would recognize from when I was around.
Me: Interesting! No, they don’t conform to any style you would have been familiar with 200 years ago. They are probably of more recent stock.
Pumofe: Can we see on the bottom of their feet how much bone is worn away?
Poker: [Joking] Check how worn their teeth are, check them for parasites…
Me: Wow. Um…well, you’re not CSI, but the feet seem to be worn down pretty thin. They’ve been walking around for maybe twenty to fifty years.
Pumofe: Do they have anything stuck to them which might tell us where they’ve been?
Me: Lots of little tree branches, leaves. A few tiny scraps of cloth, but its so deteriorated that it’s impossible to identify.
Gibbous: Is there someone we could ask about this maybe? Someone who would know the history of the area? I have Knowledge(History).
Me: Well, knowing anything about this would probably be too specific for your character to know about, since you’re not from around here. But make the check, and we’ll see if you know of anyone more familiar with the area’s history than you are.
Gibbous: I rolled a 16, so that comes up to 20!
Me: That’s plenty. Do you remember the town down South between the two rivers? The high priest of Obad-Hai is elderly and learned. He would know a great deal of the area’s history.
Pumofe: Is that on the way?
Poker: Yeah, we need to follow the rivers to get back to the Wizard’s tower anyway.
Gibbous: And we can still kill orcs along the way!

From there the players continued on to the town of Overton, spoke with the high priest, and learned of the necromancer who had passed through the area some 30 years prior on his way south. They added the Lich to their “list of things to take care of,” about 10 levels before I had planned on them doing so.

I love this story in particular because it demonstrates that my players don’t view the world as random anymore. I honestly don’t think I would have considered how worn down the skeletons feet were if I was a player.

Razorgrass: This incident occurred in my most recent game, actually. The players traveled to the Abyss to hunt for demon’s blood. Given their low level, I decided to send them to a rather innocuous corner of the Abyss. Instead of facing hordes of demons, I designed an area where the environment itself was hostile. One where divine (i.e. healing) magic would summon demons to attack them.

The players had only been there a short time when they encountered a large field of grass, which they quickly determined was razor sharp. Fortunately, most of the group is heavily armored, and those who aren’t only took a small amount of damage. None the less, the players didn’t want to squander their hit points in a place this dangerous. So Phoenix used her Gem of Fire Ray to burn a 60ft path through the field.

Shortly before this, the players had hast healing magics, and I had been tracking a band of demons as they approached the party’s location. They had only just begun walking down the path when the demons burst from the trees behind them. I described the demons as “About 5ft tall, corpulent, and naked. With a jaundiced-yellow color to them, and wicked claws on each hand.”

The barbarian wasted no time in shouting to the others: “Run into the grass!” The demons were some of the least intelligent of the Abyss, and were excited by the prospect of devouring mortal flesh on their home plane. They charged into the grass after the players, and promptly had their HP reduced by almost half as each step through the razorgrass dealt 1d4 damage to their naked bodies. The players were easily able to wipe the floor with the weakened demons.

Though they did pay a price: there was much less blood in each demon after the battle for them to harvest.

Zalekios and the Buildings: In this story, I actually wasn’t GMing. I was playing my chaotic evil Warlock/Rogue, Zalekios Gromar. None the less, this story marked a turning point for me as a GM. I felt such a sense of accomplishment and freedom after this encounter, that I decided this was the kind of feeling I wanted to enable my own players to experience.

Zalekios Gromar is, in a word, overpowered. And the GM who kindly runs games for me has often been frustrated by the difficulty of crafting encounters to challenge me. Zalekios himself is supposed to be an intelligent, but extremely overconfident character. He once leaped from the 4th floor of a tower simply because he was bored by attacking his enemy from range. And after being overpowered for so long, I the player had become pretty overconfident myself. Nothing seemed to be able to stop me. So when a Paladin appeared in a town I was resting in, and demanded I surrender myself, I charged him with eldritch blasts blazing. We battled for several rounds, each dealing a lot of damage to the other. But I quickly noticed that my HP was getting dangerously low. Zalekios was in very real danger of dying.

I was kicking myself for being so foolish as to charge a paladin head on, and frantically tried to come up with something I could do to get out of this alive. The paladin had already told me he’d tracked me for weeks, so running would only be a temporary reprieve. And since he could magically heal himself and I could not, that seemed like a bad plan. Desperate for some tactical advantage, I asked the GM what buildings were nearby. We were, after all, in a town. He said that the encounter was taking place in a largely undeveloped area of the town, but drew three houses on the map none the less. They were small, just one story high, made of cheap wood and clay.

That was all Zalekios needed.

He cast a special type of Dimensional Door which left a silent image behind, and ported up to the roof of the nearest house–just barely within his range. I attacked from range while the Paladin was distracted, and then again while he charged the house. Instead of climbing it as I suspected he would, the Paladin simply bowled himself into the supporting frames for the house, causing it to collapse just as I ported away. I tried to point out that the paladin should lose his powers for destroying someone’s home, but my GM replied that all three houses were abandoned, and that this part of town was sparse because all the buildings here were being taken down so nicer ones could be built. The pally did, however, take damage from a building falling on him.

I bounced between the remaining two houses that were within range of my Dimensional Door, trying to keep the paladin at range. He inexorably began to limit my escape options until he had me completely cornered. I was at 3 hit points, and had to make a choice. Either I could attack and be killed immediately afterwords, or I could run and be killed immediately afterwords. I decided that if this was Zalekios’ time, I’d rather see him go out with some fight left in him. I charged up an Eldritch Blast–

–and never, in all my years of gaming, have I been so ecstatic to see a natural twenty. The paladin was blasted, and Zalekios strapped the body to his horse just so he could resurrect and torture it.

The GM later admitted to me that the paladin had been specifically designed to beat me. He was a gestalt Paladin/Barbarian (which I pointed out should have been impossible) who was a good four levels higher than Zalekios himself was. The GMs plan had been to capture me and take me to trial or something. But my tactics had defied his expectations, and allowed a little bit of luck to make the difference between life and death.

That’s one of the best feelings I’ve ever had while playing a tabletop game. I was supposed to lose, the game was stacked against me. But because I made superior use of my environment and the choices available to me, I won the game.

I want my players to feel like that as often as possible.

How Zalekios Gromar Learned Clarity

Today, for the first time in a few months now, I managed to get together with my friend Jeremy to play a session of our Zalekios Gromar campaign. For me, this is always a huge amount of fun. Not only is Jeremy an entertaining fellow to sit around and chat with, but he’s also the only person I know who is willing to occasionally take on the mantle of game master. Most of the time managing the game is my responsibility, and I love it. That’s why I have an entire site dedicated to running Pathfinder games. But being the game master can also be both limiting, and stressful. Taking some time to be a player rather than a GM lets me cut loose a little bit. All I really need to worry about is my own actions, and how I can survive and succeed with my own goals.

Being a player also allows me the opportunity to see the game from the opposite perspective. No matter how concerned I am with ensuring that my players are having fun, it’s always valuable to sit down, be a player, and figure out what I want. Are the things I want as a player being facilitated in the games I run as the game master? Which elements of the game am I enjoying, and which am I finding arduous? I find that my occasional jaunts to the other side of the GM screen are often more educational than a week’s worth of reading blogs and old Dragon magazines. And tonight, two lessons stood out to me.

First, some quick background on the game. Zalekios is currently working a number of angles within the game world, many of which are indirectly opposed to one another. Not only is he working for a kingdom, but he’s also working for someone else who wants to destroy all the kingdoms, whilst simultaneously attempting to establish his own kingdom. It can become a little confusing, but I’ve got 23 charisma and 10 wisdom, so what do you expect? Anyway, the kingdom Zalekios is working for (Angle #1) sent him to investigate some strange attacks which were destroying ships as they left a nearby port city. This worked to Zalekios’ advantage, since he needed to scout that same port city as part of a plot to destroy all the kingdoms (Angle #2). In the city, he booked passage on one of the ships, and sailed with it until it was attacked. He captured one of the Sahuagins, and forced it to lead the vessel to the mysterious “Wet Gnome Lord” who was behind these attacks.

So here’s a bit which will become relevant later. Having captured this creature, I began forming plans for how I might find use for it as a minion. So, when we left the ship to venture to the island home of the Wet Gnome Lord, I took the Sahuagin with me. Memory may fail me, but my conversation with the GM went something like this:

Me: I’d like to take the…Sha-hugga-mug with me.
GM: The Sahuagin?
Me: Yes. That. I’ll untie him from the mast, but leave him tied up with some loose rope for me to hang onto.
GM: Like a leash?
Me: Yeah, kinda like a leash. How long can he go without breathing water?
GM: Lets say 48 hours.
Me: Alright, well, we’ve been sailing for over 30, so I’ll let him swim to the island in the water, whilst I hold his leash from within a rowboat.

Now, what I understood to be happening was that the Sha-hugga-mug’s arms were tied to its sides, and I had a rope around its neck to serve as a leash. I figured it could swim well enough with its legs, and if it couldn’t…well, Zalekios is Chaotic Evil. Keel hauling a sea creature is far from the worst thing he’s done. Hell, earlier in that same session I’d committed a murder simply to enhance an intimidation check. Then killed the fellow I had been intimidating to keep him from pinning the murder on me!

Once we reached land, we entered the Wet Gnome Lord’s tower, and that’s about the time my ladyfriend joined the game, once again playing as Zalekios’ four faithful level 1 goblins. We encountered the wet gnome lord, and I completely ruined all my GM’s plans by negotiating with the session’s endboss. (Let that be a lesson to all GMs: players will always defy your expectations.) It ended up being well worth my while, because not only did I convince a powerful wizard to leave the ships alone (Thus fulfilling my obligation to Angle #1), but I also convinced him that we were allies, making him Angle #4. I am a devious little schemer, yes I am.

To solidify our partnership, the Wet Gnome Lord asked Zalekios to take care of a golem which had gotten a little out of control. Zalekios agreed, and climbed up into the locked attic, where he found the golem walking around in circles, paying the intruders no mind. Zalekios moved off to kill the creature, and assumed the four goblins would find some way to help (or, more likely, find a way to make things much more difficult) We rolled initiative, and I leaped into combat. It was then that the GM asked;

GM: So, wait a minute, you’re just leaving the Sahuagin there unattended?
Me: So what? It’s tied up.
GM: No, it only has a leash.
Me: …fuck, yeah, I guess that’s how you would have interpreted that. What I meant is that its arms were still tied to its sides.
GM: Then how would it have swam?
Me: It has webbed feet, I figured that would be fine.
GM: No, it would need its arms to swim effectively.

Oops.

I was already engaged with the golem, so I wasn’t going to bother with a low level creature like the Sha-hugga-mug when I was already facing something which could probably kill me. Fortunately, thanks to the marching order, my four goblin worshipers had the creature surrounded. So whilst I battled the golem, they subdued my prisoner. They even managed not to kill him! Though he will have a nasty burn on his face, and a bad limp from now on. Everything went better than expected, but this all goes to illustrate a point. I wrote recently on the point of GM clarity, but this story goes to show that player clarity is just as important. There was no clear point during play when my GM being more clear with me would have fixed the problem. Even if he had allowed me to have the creature’s arms bound due to the misconception, that would have meant changing a minor ruling from an hour’s worth of game time prior. (Namely, whether or note the creature could swim, and thus continue to survive on land). The entire problem could have been fixed had I, as the player, simply been more clear about my intentions.

On an unrelated note, a funny story from this game session: one of the four goblins, named Poog, is a cleric. He cast the spell Burning Hands on the Sha-hugga-mug during combat, and I quickly looked it up in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook, where I was surprised to learn it was a 15ft cone. My GM, also surprised, said “Well I guarantee you it wasn’t that way in 3.5.” So, I got out my 3.5 PHB, and we looked it up, and much to our surprise, it had been a 15ft cone in 3rd edition as well! Flustered, my GM added “They must have changed it from second edition!” So, I pulled out my 2nd edition PHB, and he found the spell and read the description aloud.

GM: When the wizard casts this spell, a jet of searing flame shoots from his fingertips. His hands must be held so as to send forth a fanlike sheet of flames: the wizard’s thumbs must touch each other and the fingers must be spread. The burning hands send out flame jets 5 feet long in a horizontal arc about 120 degrees in front of the wizard.”
Me: …So, it’s a cone?
GM: Shut up.

Good times.

Goblins Redux

My friend Jeremy, his family, my ladyfriend Morrie, and I have a half-assed Thanksgiving tradition which we started three years ago. In that far off year of 2009, I was doing quite poorly financially, and Morrie (not yet having met either Jeremy or myself in person) wanted to come up and visit the both of us. So during the time off, Morrie and I both spent the Thanksgiving vacation staying with Jeremy and his family. We spent the week having all manner of fun with one another, and among other things, we spent one very enjoyable evening playing an extended session of D&D. It was the Zalekios campaign, which Morrie made a character for. Since then, we try to get together over Thanksgiving to enjoy each others’ company, and wreak some havoc with some chaotic evil role playing.

This afternoon, while Morrie and I were getting ready to head off to Jeremy’s home, we realized something annoying: neither of us had the slightest clue as to where her character sheet for “Jerry the Chaotic Evil Halfling Barbarian” was. We were already late, and had no idea where to look, so Morrie suggested something which would end up teaching me several valuable lessons before the day was done:

“Why don’t I just play the four Goblins?“

I blinked. The idea was twofold odd: I’ve never been in a game where a player played more than one character, and I’ve never been in a game where a player’s character is so drastically lower in level than the other players. Truth be told I’ve been interested in trying both of those things for a long while now, and Morrie was willingly taking on the task of guinea pig. “Sure,” I finally replied. “I’m sure Jeremy won’t have any problems with that.” So we show up, pumpkin pie in hand, and I tell Jeremy about Morrie’s idea. As I suspected, he’s fine with it, and we begin play.

As play began, Zalekios was standing over the body of his good twin, and the GM gave me space to come up with a plan. Seeing that I was trying to take over the town, I decided to assume the role of my twin. After all, we were twins. The only problem was Zalekios’ rather horribly self-mutilated face. Fortunately, I had a dead twin on hand whose face I could cut off and wear temporarily. I then promptly chopped up my twin’s body, and spread his remains about town. When the townspeople became frightened, I told them that I would go off and gather a fighting force to protect us from “these vile acts.” Having a charisma of 23 comes with distinct advantages; such as being able to dupe 377 villagers into believing you’re not wearing their dead mayor’s face as a mask.

So off Zalekios went to fetch the small group of goblins which he had conquered in a previous game. A few days later he returned, no longer wearing the dead mayor’s face, and with the 33 goblins in tow. When asked about his “injuries,” he claimed that he had been cut viciously while defeating the goblin tribe’s chieftain. But now that chief was dead, and the tribe owed him their absolute loyalty. Again, 23 charisma can be damned helpful in duping level 1 commoners. Once I had everyone convinced, I began directing them in constructing better “defenses.” A phrase which I’ve placed in quotation marks because only Zalekios knows that the pits and walls won’t be used to keep anything out. The purpose of those obstacles is to keep the villagers in once Zalekios begins to establish the new order of things.

The whole thing was done in a very rules-light way, because there aren’t really any rules on the subject. Essentially, Zalekios’ role in the first half of the session was that of director. I told the GM what I wanted the villagers to do, and he told me what worked, what didn’t, and what complications presented themselves. I was really very happy with the way this played out. I tried something almost exactly like it a few months back which failed miserably, so I’m glad to see it can work if done properly. I may need to give it another try soon.

Morrie, playing the goblins, really shined during this part of the game. Building on the role playing the party (especially Poog) had done the last time these goblins were in play, she set about to cause goblin mischief, and generally make Zalekios’ life more difficult. When Poog cut off all the pig tails in town “for his collection,” Zalekios had to quickly spin some lie for the population about pig tails being a necessary reagent in a spell which would ward the town against evil. Even my 23 Charisma was strained getting them to accept that one, and I had Poog flogged for the nuisance.

The town needed lumber for its walls, so I sent Rita, Chuffy, and 3 other goblins to protect the humans who were gathering it. The GM used this as an opportunity to run an ad-hoc 1st level adventure. He sent a couple bears to terrorize the commoners, and Morrie took control of Rita & Chuffy, while I played as the three Monster Manual standard goblins. It was a genius idea, nestling a 1st level adventure within a 13th level adventure. It worked fantastically, and everyone had a great deal of fun.

Once the goblins returned with the lumber, it was starting to get late in the evening, and we still wanted some time to play Magic before Morrie had to go to work. To speed things along, we decided to put off furthering the construction for a later date, whilst Zalekios, with all four goblins in tow, answered a persistent call from Al’Kim. Al’Kim is a high level government official with the nation of Mulgran who believes Zalekios is a loyal compatriot. And while the two do share goals, Zalekios is also the second-in-command of an organization seeking to overthrow Mulgran. I hold that it is Al’Kim’s fault for making Zalekios sit in a waiting room for 30 minutes once. But I digress. Al’Kim wanted Zalekios to investigate some unusual goings-on at a port town a few days’ travel away.

On the road, the five characters were attacked by three wyverns. This is what I had been waiting for: a chance to see how well level 1 characters survived combat geared for my level 13 powerhouse. I began combat by casting Fel Flight, granting me wings, and flying up into the air. This left most of the goblins somewhat helpless, but Rita managed to hit one of them with an arrow, and Mogmurch successfully threw an alchemical explosive at one of them dealing a few damage. On the wyvern’s turn, they mostly ignored me and went straight for the goblins. Poog was reduced to -3 in a single bite attack, and none of the goblins managed to make any hits.

Zalekios, with his lowly 10 wisdom, decided to dive bomb the Wyvern laying atop Poog, and attempt to pin it to the ground with a slam attack to the neck. I rolled my Combat Maneuver roll against the wyvern’s Combat Maneuver Defense (Zalekios’ game hasn’t switched fully to Pathfinder yet, but we have house-ruled in a few of the better rules) and Zalekios succeed. The three wyverns failed to make any progress that turn, but Rita did manage to pull Poog aside and feed him a healing potion. In the following round, Zalekios channeled his Eldritch Blast ability into the Wyvern, killing it. And, as a bit of theater for my goblin minions, Zalekios used his move action to take a big bloody bite out of the dead Wyvern’s head. They cheered for their Blood God.

By then, though, a second wyvern had landed and made a bite attack against Zalekios, which fortunately missed. Still riding the high from his utter domination of the previous wyvern (and still suffering from 10 wisdom), Zalekios used his clawed hands to grapple the offending beast’s head, digging his sharp fingers deep just behind the jaw. He was again successful. I jokingly asked the GM what the DC would be to rip the dragon’s head off. Truthfully, my plan was to try snapping the creatures neck, but I never expected what happened on the goblin’s next turn.

First, Chuffy managed to make a devastating sneak attack on the wyvern’s underbelly. But even more spectacularly, Mogmurch successfully threw his last alchemical bomb of the day into the snapping maw of the grappled wyvern. The GM allowed this as an automatic crit, and Mogmurch rolled just below max damage an all his dice, blasting the mighty CR6 creature with a fiery explosion which left it reeling. This left me wondering just how plausible my earlier joke was. So when my turn rolled around, I asked the GM what the explosion’s visible damage had done. He confirmed that numerous muscles and tendons had obviously been severely damaged or even destroyed. So Zalekios looked the monster in the eyes, set his legs against it’s shoulders…

…and pulled.

I think Jeremy was a little flabbergasted. He asked me for a strength check. I rolled the twenty-sider in my hand for a long while. This was the kind of roll which could make-or-break a game session. For all my philosophical skepticism, I tried to force the die to roll high through sheer will. Finally, I threw the die, and a 19 came up. I think Jeremy had been hoping for something low so he could simply ignore the question of how to adjudicate such a ridiculous plan. He settled on making an opposed strength check for the wyvern, and I kid you not: he rolled a 19. I thought for sure I was finished. No way was Zalekios stronger than a fucking dragon.

But as it turns out, Zalekios is just strong enough that his roll was 1 higher than the wyvern’s. The bones cracked, the skin tore, and Mogmurch and I were bathed in the blood of our victory. The final wyvern fled.

We ended the session there, and I came away having learned 3 very important lessons which I will take with me into my future GMing:

Anyone who says ‘playing characters of vastly different levels sucks’ doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Based on how much she was smiling, I would say this ranks among Morrie’s top five gaming sessions ever. And I say that as as someone who has been gaming with her for 3.5 years. In RP, the goblins were providing a lot of the game’s entertainment and challenge. And in combat, never once did they feel useless.
At least in some circumstances, a single player can play multiple characters without being overwhelmed.
Adventures where the PCs simply direct others in performing tasks (finding lumber, digging trenches, etc.) can be a lot more fun than you might think. I’m starting to ponder a game where each party member is given a task: one to build the defenses, one to train the villagers to fight, etc.

For the record, all of Morrie’s goblins survived the game, and everyone agrees they should return. But Morrie, wisely I think, has decided that she does not want these characters to level. She thinks it’s more entertaining when they’re low-level goofballs who get on Zalekios’ nerves and sometimes manage to help despite themselves.

We have decided, though, that Mogmurch deserves something special. He has been granted the title of “Dragonboomer,” and from now on will always receive a +4 when attempting to throw objects into a small space.

We Be Goblins! (You Be Food!)

“We Be Goblins!” is a charming little Pathfinder module which Paizo has made available as a free PDF through their online store. I printed out a copy a month or so ago, and thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Despite the short length of only 16 pages, there are some remarkably charming touches which make this module memorable for me. The adventure is well designed with a good mix of challenges for the players. The pregenerated characters are interesting, and developed well enough to give players a baseline to role play from without being constricting. There’s a good sense of humor throughout the adventure as well, with a number of catchy songs scribbled in the margins. I must admit, I’ve recited a few of them to myself while driving. They are quite catchy:

We be Licktoads! We Make Raid!
Put the longshanks to the blade!
Burn them up from feet to head,
Make them hurt, then make them dead!
Cut the parents into ham,
Smush the babies into Jam,
All the rest in pot get stewed,
We be Licktoads – YOU BE FOOD!

Which brings me to one of the biggest draws to this module: playing as evil goblins. Players have never been prevented from playing as evil characters, or from playing as goblins; the Monster Manuals and Bestiaries even have racial traits for goblins which players could use if they liked. But as I’ve discussed in the past, while not forbidden it’s certainly not encouraged. Despite that, something about Pathfinder’s version of goblins has caught hold of players. As any sensible company should, Paizo is cashing in on that with a number of products. The artist who designed Pathfinder’s Goblins can be thanked for that, I think. He or she somehow managed to take the most generic-of-the-generic fantasy monster, and reinvent them into something which is both classic and novel, adorable and terrifying all at once. The song above is a testament to all four seemingly contradictory traits.

On a lark last weekend, I decided I wanted to see how this adventure played at the table. What’s more, I wanted to do it with enough people for all four of the pregenerated characters to be in play. So during the week I conferred with the players from two of my gaming groups. Remarkably, each of them had Saturday free. Considering how difficult it can be to get either group together for a game, I thought it might be a titanic effort to get both together at once. But everybody was open to my first suggested date and time. So this morning I got up, cleaned my apartment, and was going over my notes just in time for people to start arriving.

The opening of the adventure is somewhat wordy for my tastes. My rule of thumb is three paragraphs. If I’ve got more than three paragraphs to read before the players get to start taking action and making choices, then I edit down. I may pride myself on my writing, but my friends didn’t make room in their busy schedules to listen to me read aloud. They came to play a game. All the same, the introduction didn’t go off too poorly. The players got a good sense of who and where they were. But to be honest, if I were to run it again I think I would cut a lot of the introductory crap and jump into the bonfire as quick as I could. That’s where the game really got moving.

After the goblin leader provides the PCs with their mission in the opening scene, the tribe has a bonfire celebration to, as cheif Gutwad says, “burn bad luck away from [the PCs].” Essentially it’s a big rowdy goblin party in honor of the PC’s upcoming quest. Here, I think, would have been a much better place for a lot of the exposition which happened at the start of the adventure. Rather than have the goblin chief tell the players to avoid the creature known as Lotslegs Eat Goblin Babies Many, the PCs could have overheard frightening stories about it from other goblins during the feast. But this is a minor nitpick at worst.

The content of the bonfire are four “dares,” as the goblins call them. To test the bravery of the PCs, the tribe presents them with challenges. If they succeed, they are rewarded with the right to borrow a few pieces of magical gear. If they fail, or refuse the challenge, they are mercilessly mocked. I must admit I was somewhat worried that this was the kind of thing which sounded good on paper, but wouldn’t work out in play, but I was wrong. It was during this more lighthearted, role-playing heavy activity that my players really started to get into their characters. I’m not often fortunate enough to have excited, in-character conversations going on between players. More on that later.

My players ended up succeeding at each of the four challenges without much incident. It was then that I began to realize that the pregenerated characters were extremely overpowered. I honestly cannot comprehend how the rogue managed to have a +16 to his stealth check at level 1. [Edit: Okay, I see. The Goblin size bonus, and the Goblin racial bonus, stack.] This ended up detracting from the game somewhat, as I never really felt the characters were in real danger. Though, in fairness, I did significantly reduce the difficulty of each of the challenges. Not to make things easier, but simply because I can’t make it seem exciting to ask players to make a DC 15 ride check three times in a row.

In the morning, the players set off on the grand one mile (1/6th of a hex) journey to the grounded ship marked on the treasure map, and the cache of fireworks it held. They were nearly there when they were accosted by Lotslegs Eat Goblin Babies Many, a giant spider who hungered for goblin flesh! Two of my cowardly players hid from the beast, the rogue succeeding at doing so despite the bells which another player had secretly attached to her clothes. The fight was brief, with minimal damage on the part of the players. Considering that this is probably the second most difficult fight in the adventure, I was somewhat disappointed in how quickly the spider was felled.

From there, the players moved on to reach the ship. And that is where things took a turn for the awesome. One of the four goblins is a cleric named Poog. According to his character sheet, Poog is ashamed of being one of the worst animal riders in the clan. The character sheet also says Poog is brave to the point of being overconfident. So when Poog was acting as a scout into the the muddy area surrounding the ship, and was charged by a rabid horse, Poog’s immediate response was:

“POOG WILL RIDE HORSE!” Complete with my player’s best goblin voice.

As it turned out, Poog failed to mount the charging beast, but managed to deal it a crushing blow by bracing his javelin in the mud when the horse came around for a second charge. From there on in, the events of the game took a back seat to the hilarious role playing exchanges between the characters. The woman playing the aforementioned rogue took it upon herself to goad Poog on. She heaped insults onto him, and quickly discovered that there was nothing she couldn’t get Poog to do by simply telling him that he wasn’t good enough to do it. And all of this simply goaded Poog onward, culminating “POOG CAN RIDE ANYTHING!” being shouted several times. In one combat, Poog and the Rogue actually took turns mounting and pushing each other off of a very confused dog which the other two party members were desperately trying to kill.

The climax of the adventure came when the four goblins were attempting to flee the ship with their firework booty. Just as they were about to escape, they were accosted by Vorka, the goblin cannibal whose fireworks they had just stolen. She had cast Spider Climb on herself before the party reached her, so her first action in combat was to walk up the vertical mast of the ship high enough so that melee attacks couldn’t reach her. Unfortunately, this prompted Poog to remember that he’d earned an Elixer of Dragon’s Breath during the bonfire challenges. Before the rest of the party knew what was happening, the mast was on fire, and Vorka was quickly jumping down onto the deck to avoid the flames.

The rest of the adventure proceded entirely without incident. Vorka’s rolls were so terrible that she was killed without much of a fuss. And despite my attempt to destroy the player’s fireworks by having the chest catch on fire, they were all dexterous enough to get the prized explosives to safety before they were ignited.

Having now played through it, “We Be Goblins!” is an entertaining way to spend four hours. It suffers significantly from lack of challenge, though. When I run a one-shot game such as this one, my expectation is to see one or more players lose their lives. Since they’re never going to play these characters again anyway, what’s the point of coddling them? This failing is particularly bad since the game comes with its own pregenerated characters. If they knew how powerful the PCs would be, why couldn’t they make the adventure a little tougher to give it the edge it was missing?

I must reiterate that it was fun, though. It brought my group together and gave them a situation which they had a lot of fun with. I’d be a little wary of starting up yet another campaign, but I’m pretty sure everyone agreed that it would be fun to return to those characters (and that group) again someday.

Maybe I’ll run them through an edited version of The Sunless Citadel next…