My Attempt at Running a "Normal" Basic/Expert D&D Game...

So I volunteered to run 3 sessions for Red Box Vancouver this month, and as a change of pace from my regular DM style attempted to make a "normal" dungeon for the adventures.

First I whipped up some maps in my awesome graph paper Moleskine notebook during some lulls in a Mutant Future Game (during which Kronh the Slayer got to get down with a four-boobed mutant queen!), and roughly blocked out some areas with the awesome Tekumel underworld chart PDF (I've got to get my hands on a copy of the Pettigrew Selections ASAP!). Came up with a couple wacky things with the results, but they were well within the precedents of early TSR OD&D/AD&D output.

Next I worked on the monster lists for stocking the dungeon; somewhat unsurprisingly my attempts at normalcy went pretty much went out the window at this point and things took a pre-Wessex Rientsian turn... (I was planning on using the spiffy S&W Tome of Horrors Complete for this, but between the monsters I wanted to use and my preference for the Fiend Folio version of some monsters nope; maybe if they included Hoard Class and Morale Scores... ;) As an aside every post Fiend Folio version of the awesome Crabmen ignores two awesome things about the Fiend Folio version: A) They're nuts about silver & B) They carry off women.)

Regardless I soldiered on in my attempt to make a normal B/X D&D dungeon and stocked it using a combination of the B/X D&D dungeon stocking tables; the Appendices of the AD&D DMG; and the Awesome Tricks. Empty Rooms, & Basic Trap Design PDF by Courtney C. Campbell of the Hack & Slash blog. (I'm planning on giving the regions unexplored after tonight another go-over with the also-Awesome Old School Encounter Reference by Kellri; the Judges Guild Ready Refs' Sheets; and sundry dungeon tables by Zak S.)

I did the stocking in a two-hour period before rushing to meet the super-cool Red Box Vancouver crew at a far too crowded and loud coffee shop in a cool neighborhood (as opposed to the tumbleweed infested coffee shop we used to use...). Graham proceeded to generate a halfling hobbit with 18s in Dexterity and Constitution, and a Strength of 13-15(?) right in front of me and I swore that that sheet would end up on my DM Trophy Triumph Death Wall...

The session was pretty awesome; I failed in my quest to gut the Red Box Vancouver stable of badass PCs (for this week...) but I managed to:

A) Totally beat the living shit out of badass dwarf Gamgar with the first dungeon encounter, on the stairs leading down into the dungeon, with a very muppet-like, hunched and piteously whimpering, mother-freaking Stair Stalker! Which also totally freaked the fuck out of the players, who were also incensed and skeptical when they took the same monster's remains to a wizard to have it identified and were told that it was a monster called a Stair Stalker that rarely spontaneously generate on underworld staircases.

B) Kill one of the party's sociopathic thug retainers, Rhino Toronto of the Toronto brothers, between expeditions via random roll, when he cracked his head slipping in bloody cobblestones while bashing a farm boy's head into an alleyway curb.

C) Nailed Gamgar with a pit trap, and was a hair away from tossing him down another one a mere minute later before another player thought to check the floors.

D) Kill Merrigold Serpenthelm's two batshit-vicious rottweiler sized "war dog" pitbulls (that were always pissing everywhere and eating dungeon-dressing bones) via shambling "Blind Dead" ghouls that also spent several rounds attempting to lap up Columbo the double-18 stat hobbit's blood with their withered jerky tounges but were unable to claw through the paralyzed hobbit's plate mail. Fortunately the stupid blind dead all shambled through the magic circle hologram gate to Carcosa that the party was cowering behind.

E) Got Dino Toronto of the Toronto brothers cut in half by a dark Jedi's lighsaber when the party broke into Darth Vader's tomb.

F) Got the DM-infuriating statistically gifted hobbit Columbo's eye taken out by the same dark Jedi's lightsabre. It was awesome when Merrigold Serpenthelm tried to invisibly sneak up on the dark Jedi who was force choking a hobbit and knocking arrows out of the air, and of course the Sith dude just used the force to know where he was.

Other hijinks included:

- An inexplicably Italian accented cowardly hobbit, who had a key to the service entrance to an abandoned wizard's manor handed down to him by his great-great-great grandfather who was a cook for the aforementioned wizard.

- Dino Toronto being apprenticed to Merrigold Serpenthelm by an elderly half-deaf, senile, drunken guardsman in a powdered wig as court-appointed punishment for inflicting random ultraviolence upon farm boys instead of him being tortured by virtue of the party intervening and feeding booze and gold to the "judge".

- Merrigold being able to identify by smell a pool of dog urine in the dungeon by virtue of his batshit massive pit bulls pissing everywhere for the past week.

- The party looting Darth Vader's suit of plate mail from his sarcophagus.

- The party killing a four armed white ape and than finding magic hologram gates to Barsoon and Carcosa.

- Retainers consistantly cowering from monsters and danger.

I can't wait for next Wednesday's return to The Manor of Kalapron!

Pluton Zone II - Dresh pt. 1

Featuring:

The Adventurer Stowaway

The Scientist-Nephew

The Smuggler Drax Corlu

The Fulsome Sow drops out of warp at the edge of the Dresh system. Drax Corlu consults the charts for the Dresh system in the Sow's navigation portfolio; he finds a colorful page torn from a children's book. The ship spends several days manuevering to use it's magnetic scoop to collect hydrogen from the atmosphere of a gas giant and makes way to the orange desert world of Dresh.

Dresh is a massive planet consisting of the lighter rocky elements; although it has twice the circumference of Terra it has the same gravity. It rotates at twice the speed of Terra resulting in days that are roughly Terran-standard in length.

Inversely Dresh is orbited by an ultra-dense moonlet at an extremely low altitude, thusly orbiting at an extremely rapid rate that is also rotating opposite to the rotation of the planet.

The result of these extreme orbital and tidal forces on the light-element desert world of Dresh is that there is an equatorial band of extremely light and fine sand and micro-dust that has virtually semi-liquid properties, functioning as a massive straight-running river-sea of sand circumnavigating the planet. This is visible from orbit as a pale orange, featurless blur bisecting the globe.

The Sow is hailed from an unspecified source seeking mercenaries; when the party informs the speaker that they are merchants the comm line is dropped.

The Sow lands at the rocket field of Iubbu the Slug's Palace; the domain of a Slug-Person Crime Lord. They investigate Iubbu's court, where various factions of the planet meet to sip stale beer and water and attempt negociation. In front of a stained red velvet curtain, smoking a hookah upon a pile of greasy huge cushions is a small-bus sized gray slimy Slug with man-like arms, Iubbu.

At one table, in contrast to the harshly puritan garb of the majority, are several sun-bleached long-haired and beared men in brightly dyed stillsuits and robes, Sand Surfers. At another table several workmen in blood stained work clothes bearing pole-glaives and skinning hooks are glaring at the Sand Surfers. The party inroduces themselves to the Sand Surfers, who are brimming with brotherly love and righteous spirit and are seeking principled mercenaries to plie their trade in the defense of the innocent.

The party excuse themselves pleading a lack of qualification and return to their table. They see Iubbu confering with a pop-eyed hairless pale man in a purple robe who scurries over and informs the party that Iubbu is seeking someone to discretely return some lost property.

A pleasure automation of his escaped in the morning and fled into to rocky hills northeast of the port; the party would be provided with a high speed flit car, and upon the safe return of the unharmed pleasure automation they would recieve a reward of 2,000 Terces. The party agrees, picks up the flit car, and skims into the hills.

Several hours are spend skimming aroung and over the rocky hills before a fleeing pale pink figure is seen in a valley below; the Adventurer, who was a chauffer for Amazon-Matriarchs upon his homeworld, skims the flit cars down into the valley where they can see its pink, woman-like body with flexible silver fittings. The Smuggler repeatedly attempts ESP contact to ensure that it is a robot and not a living being and than the Adventurer attempts to turn and stop the vehicle in front of the fleeing robot.

The high-speed flit cars strikes a rock with its undercarriage while the vehicle is rapidly turning and braking and the flit car loses control, spinning and tumbling over the rocky ground, sending its passengers flying, and shattering the front-end bubble canopy.

Fortunately the party only has minor bumps and scrapes and quickly get to their feet. They see the robot running away and the adventurer runs after it,bringing it down with a tangle grenade. The robot, entangled in restraint bands, is babbling about how cruel Iubbu implants robots with pain circuits and tear ducts and tortures them for his amusement and for sale to "The Weepers"; the Adventurer has some experience with robot technology and immediately turns it off.

At this point a pattering is heard, rapidly getting louder to thunderous proportions, and a herd of one or two hundred cow-sized brown, long-necked, three-eyed, honking animals with moose-like snouts and six flea-like legs come scampering and bounding over the rise of the hill above them, with their dented flit car between the animals and the party.

The Smuggler Drax Corlu attempts to use his yogic flight abilities while The Adventurer-Stowaway and the Scientist-Nephew drop the robot and begin madly dashing across the rock-strew valley.

Panting, they glance over their shoulders to see scores of bounding, hooting borwn forms sweep across the flit-car, elicting loud banging sounds, sweep across the prone robot, and sweep across the attempting-to-fly Smuggler who dissapears into the furry mass.

The Acientist-Nephew throws a nerve gas grenade into thebounding mass while the Adventurer-Stowaway fires blasts into the mass from his energy weapon; the herd panics and begins bounding in away from the party and the valley.

The smashed scattered remnants of the flit-car and pleasure robot are revealed; the Smuggler is mildly trampled but intact. The Adventurer-Stowaway gathers up the contragravity core of the flit-car, the face of the pleasure robot, and the head of one of the slaughtered beasts, and the party begins tramping back to the space port.

Twelve hours later, exhausted, they stramp down the ramp to Iubbu's subterranean court; fortunately he is not present and they are greeted by his purple-robed major domo, who is horrified to hear of and see evidence of the destruction of both the flit-car and the pleasure robot. Fortunately he believes their tale and informs the party that the "Hill Hoppers" are a hated pest on Dresh for their destructive bounding rampages.

The party than inquires about compensation for their efforts; the major domo simultaniously blanches and flushes and than whilst trembling with indignation informs the party how lucky they are that he is sympathetic to their misfortune with the Hill Hoppers and willing to diplomatically intercede on their behalf, as otherwise things would not bode well at all for the party:

"One time there was a smuggler that Iubbu comissioned to deliver a cargo; at no fault of his own, the smuggler was intercepted by a patrol and had to jettisson the Iubbu's cargo. The smuggler attempted to repay Iubbu, but could not keep up with the interest he was accruing; Iubbu hired bounty hunters to capture him and..."

At this point the Major Domo is striding towards the stained red curtains behind Iubbu dais of greasy cushions, and whips one aside revealing the white, porcelain-like perfect life-sized likeness of a screaming handsome space pilot with roguish aspect, arms upheld in horror.

"...had him marmelized and kept here to serve as both a trophy and a warning!"

Shaken, the party agrees that their inconvenience was inconsequential and returns to The Sow.

Sky Vessels of Planet Algol

I've known from the campaign's inception that Planet Algol has to incorporate flying vessels, from rocketships and flying saucers to dirigibles and sky-boats.

I'm really enthusiastic about the one-page Sailing the Skies of Mars rules by Sean Willis, as they are simple and utilize the familiar mechanics of Armor Class, Hit Points and so forth, although that naval combat rules from Expert Dungeons & Dragons are simple as well and have an illustrious pedigree.

Sailing the Skies of Mars divides skyships into 4 different categories, based on passenger capacity, from the 1-2 person fliers to 50 person galleons, from which armor class, movement rate and potential weaponry determined by size (hull class?). Elegant and simple, and an easy way to categorize that various concepts I have regarding Planet Algol sky vessels:

Ornithopter (1-2 person flier): A homage to Dune and Hawkmoon, they resemble insectile winged helicopters designed by a Martian Leonardo Da Vinci. There are one and two-seater varieties, and they have limited cargo capacity. The pulp adventurer biplane of Planet Algol.

Sky Chariot (4 person skiff): These generally resemble an Atlantean version of the Star Wars Landspeeder although bird sculpture and miniature flying saucer (with a bubble canopy) versions exist. Planet Algol's flying cars.

Skyship (10 person barge): Resembling a cross between a rocketship and a dirigible, with an open deck on the top, generally silvery, needle-nosed and bearing tail-fins. The yachts of Planet Algol's skies.

Contragravity Barge (50 person galleon): Encompassing vessels ranging from those similar to Jabba sail barge from Return of the Jedi to Stargate-esque flying pyramids (although I prefer ziggurats...).