Wing Three

ADVENTURE 10 - PAKKALILIR

PC Roster:
"Pakkalilir" was just about perfectly built for my needs for the day: it involved only a single foe, but one that was tough enough to keep three low-level adventurers busy fighting it for a while; said single foe was a monster who already had an official D&D Miniature made in his likeness; I had happened to notice that said D&D Miniature was available at my local gaming store (and thus a grell became the second D&D Miniature purchase in my life, for $2.00, I believe); and the adventure was written by Willie Walsh, whose adventures were always a blast to run. (He wrote in the AD&D days, and I had run a bunch of his adventures for my sons in our AD&D 2E campaign.) "Pakkalilir" also appeared in Dungeon #52, which was the same issue that "The Hurly-Burly Brothers" was printed in, making this double feature a no-brainer.

Since the creature's location wasn't immediately obvious, the PCs got to do some tracking, exposing Jacob (and Dan, for that matter) to the 3.5 tracking rules. (It would have been better if Chalkan, Jacob's ranger, was in this adventure, but Slayer had some tracking ability.) When they found the grell in its cave and started fighting it, Gareth was grappled by the creature's tentacles and levitated to the top of the ceiling, where Cal and Slayer were hard-pressed to reach the grell. But eventually they killed it, although it was kind of touch and go for poor Gareth by then. However, just as Jacob was soon to realize the downside of multiclassing, Logan was likewise starting to realize that his "front-line fighting sorcerer" experiment wasn't all that he had hoped it would be; Gareth, through careful feat, spell, and familiar selection had managed to hold his own as a fighter - but only as a fighter without the fighter's vast feat selection, which made for a pretty poor fighter indeed. Logan was already thinking that had Gareth been killed, he would probably have let him stay dead and try out a different PC concept he was eager to try: a human conjurer. But Gareth survived the adventure, and he hung onto him for a bit longer, anyway.

ADVENTURE 11 - IRIANDEL

PC Roster:
"Iriandel" is another adventure from the pages of Dungeon, this one from issue #83. It was written by Tito Leati, who would end up writing several cool adventures for the magazine over the years. This one dealt with returning a unicorn's stolen horn after it was severed many years ago, causing a curse that the PCs must undo. It had some outdoor combats, which I thought would be a good change from all of the dungeon delving the group had been doing (although it had a bit of that as well).

This adventure stands out in my mind for several reasons. First of all, it dealt the party our first PC death, and oddly enough, in our group of two relatively brand new players, one player who hadn't gamed in decades before this campaign, and my son who had been gaming with me for close to 15 years, it was my son whose PC bought the dust. It was pretty much his own fault, too - the PCs were up against a group of three ogres (still a pretty challenging threat at the party's level at the time) and Akari charged them at the end of a round, leaving the three other PCs well behind him. The ogres all got to attack before any of the other PCs could respond, and so Akari found himself triple-smacked by ogrish greatclubs and well past -10 hit points. Vicki was actually misty-eyed at the thought of Akari's brutal slaying - not in full tears, mind you, but nearly there - and while I had been previously aware that she pretty much keeps her emotions to the forefront, I saw this as evidence that she was definitely emotionally engaged in the campaign. So from that aspect it was a good thing (her attitude, not Akari's death).

The adventure took two sessions to play through, and fortunately Akari had been slain at the end of the first session, so I had time to react so Logan wasn't stuck out of the whole game for the second session. There was a half-orc thief NPC in the first half of the adventure, a freed prisoner, who I did up a full set of stats for on a character sheet, and I had Logan run him as a fill-in PC for that one session only. It wasn't optimal, but it was better than him sitting the whole session out. Plus, since this was a magical adventure, with the alicorn having special powers and all (and the elven pantheon specifically looking to get the unicorn's horn back in place through mortal agents), I didn't think it would be too far out of place to have the elven gods agree to restore Akari to life at the end of the adventure. In thinking it over and then explaining my ideas to Logan, he agreed that it would be cool if the elven gods didn't raise Akari back as a human, but instead reincarnated him as an elf. (I'm sure they saw it as a "free upgrade" for services rendered.) So we did just that - after Iriandel's alicorn was placed back on the unicorn's head, it fused into place and began emitting a brilliant light, which coalesced into the shape of a glowing elven figure, none other than an aspect of Corellon Larethian himself. Akari's body had been wrapped in a tarp and kept in a barn in a nearby halfling village for safekeeping during the course of the adventure, and we had Iriandel (while being touched by Corellon's hand) channel energy through its alicorn and into Akari's tarp-covered body, which suddenly moved. When the other PCs helped get him out of the tarp, Logan revealed his new initiative card, which was a hand-drawn image of Akari now in elf form.

Shortly before running this adventure, I had been given a set of D&D Miniatures as a gift, and it included a giant owl. There's a talking owl in the adventure, which although is only normal-sized, its whole purpose is to relay information to the PCs. Since there was no combat involved, I went ahead and replaced it in the adventure with a giant owl (which is also able to talk), so I could use my Large mini in the game. The box also had a Devotee of the Silver Flame miniature (it's an armored paladin from the Eberron campaign), which Logan uses as his Akari figure to this day.

Logan quickly got tired of his hand-drawn initiative card (Vicki and Jacob had switched to images from the Wizards of the Coast website for Feron and Chalkan's cards), so we looked around on-line and found an ink drawing of an armored male elf with flowing hair that he liked, and we used that as his new initiative card. On the back, where normally it would say "AKARI", it said instead "AKARI REBORN".

ADVENTURE 12 - EX LIBRIS

PC Roster:
If you have a copy of Dungeon issue #29, then I'm sure you remember "Ex Libris" - it's the one with the the shifting rooms that you have to move around in the correct fashion, like one of those number puzzles with 15 squares in a 4x4 grid that you have to move one square at a time to get the numbers all in the correct sequence. Written by Randy Maxwell, it's one of the coolest adventures from the early issues of the magazine, and one I had flagged as an adventure I definitely wanted to use in the campaign. Although the dungeon complex was a temple devoted to Oghma the Binder, a deity from the Forgotten Realms pantheon, it was easy enough for me to co-opt Oghma as an aspect of Boccob and call it good.

The temple ruins topside had some carrion crawlers roaming around, which gave me an opportunity to use the two green caterpillars from my plastic bug collection. Similarly, I was able to use the plastic skeletons from my HeroQuest game as the huecuvas, so from an "appropriate miniature" aspect I was doing just fine. Then the PCs went to the lower levels of the complex, which is where the shifting rooms were located.

I did some heavy modifying to the shifting rooms in this adventure. To start with, I cut the size of each room's dimensions in half, so instead of 16" by 16" square rooms, I had 8" by 8" square rooms. The reason for this was purely from a practical aspect: I knew that I could fit an 8" geomorph into a 9" by 12" manila envelope for storage (both to and from the game session and for posterity afterwards), which was much better (and less expensive) than had I made the squares the size called for by the author. (I'd have needed 15 pieces of posterboard to get 15 appropriately-sized squares had I done it the "accurate" way.) Also, since this was an AD&D 1st Edition adventure, I made quite a few alterations to the monsters encountered. One room was filled with various carnivorous plants, and where 3E didn't have stats available for a given plant monster I used another that was thematically appropriate.

Likewise, there's a room with another group of adventurers who join up with the party and then try to betray them when it's convenient; not wanting to have to run four additional NPCs (and knowing full well from past experience that Dan wasn't going to trust any of these new guys any farther than he could throw them), I replaced the whole group of them with one lone doppelganger, taking the form of Old Clem. When they met up with this phony Old Clem, I gave a plausible explanation as to why he was down here instead of upstairs guarding the horses: he said that a group of "squid cats" had shown up from out of nowhere and started eating the horses, and there didn't look to be much that he could do to stop them so he hightailed it down where he'd hopefully be safe. I was counting on Dan or Logan to know that a "squid cat" was likely to be a displacer beast, and to fill in the other players (which they did). This gave them something to worry about when they eventually left the underground complex, and took their minds off of any suspicions that Old Clem might not be who he said he was. Happily, it worked like a charm.

In any case, the players all loved the adventure (as I had been pretty sure they would), even with the prospect of a long walk home without their horses. However, when they got back to their encampment, hoping to find the "squid cats" already gone and keeping their fingers crossed that maybe some of their equipment would be in salvageable condition, they found their horses tied up where they had left them, placidly eating grass, and Old Clem sitting up on a tree branch with a fishing pole in his hands. (He had just invented "squirrel fishing" and was pretty pleased with his success thus far.) The other "Old Clem" - the doppelganger - had gotten stuck in the shifting rooms below and needed help to get back topside. It didn't really mean the PCs any harm, and while they were all walking over to the campsite, he had taken off at full speed in the opposite direction. Once the PCs saw the real Old Clem in the tree, they just had time to see the fake version running into the forest, shifting forms as he ran. They worried a bit about having released a doppelganger into the world to cause whatever mischief it might get itself into, and they were more than a little concerned about it coming back to get them, but they needn't have worried - it stayed as far away from the area as it could.

As a plot hook for this adventure, I had used Altamaic the Calm, an NPC cleric of Boccob from "The Mad God's Key." This gave the campaign a little bit of verisimilitude, and I already had an initiative card for Altamaic - wanting a hooded, robed monk (not a D&D monk, a historical one), I scanned in a picture of Destiny of the Endless from Neil Gaimen's "Sandman" comic book and used him. (Later, I'd return to the same source and use Matthew when I needed an initiative card for a raven familiar.) Anyway, I had Altamaic provide the PCs with the rumored location of a forgotten temple of Oghma that was said to contain a bunch of otherwise lost books and tomes, and ask them to go check it out and return any books and tomes that they found to the Temple of Boccob in Greyhawk City. This they did, establishing Altamaic as a recurring NPC, and one who would have many dealings with the PCs in the years to come.

Another recurring NPC I created at somewhere around this time was a gnome wizard/cleric who ran a magic shop, one Piddilink Dundernoggin by name. (I preferred the earlier editions' version of the gnomes, with their prodigious noses and ridiculous names.) He sold mostly potions and scrolls, with the occasional magic item thrown in for good measure (and he would often purchase unwanted magic items the PCs discovered in their adventures). Best of all, he often took shortcuts in his magical item creation, so you could occasionally find a really good price on a potion if you were willing to live with the unfortunate side effects (like a potion of cure light wounds that turned the imbiber's skin green and warty for 1d4 hours, or the potion of cure serious wounds that tasted so bad you had to make a Fortitude check to drink it all down, and then another to keep it from coming back up).

By the end of this adventure Chalkan, Feron, and Rale were just about at 6th level, with Akari (who had spent half an adventure being dead) lagging just a little bit behind. Still, I figured that one more adventure ought to get everybody up to 6th level, at which point we'd have seven 6th-level PCs and it would be time to merge the two parties (and allow Vicki to make up a new 6th-level PC, so they'd all be on an even front). Since the PCs were already away from Greyhawk City, it only made sense to throw an adventure at them that they could stumble across on their way home....

ADVENTURE 13 - PEER AMID THE WATERS

PC Roster:
"Peer Amid the Waters" was another one of mine, this one from Dungeon issue #78, written right at the end of the AD&D 2nd Edition era. It took a little bit of effort to convert it not only to 3.5 but also to a higher level than it had originally been written for, but it wasn't all that difficult. The basic premise is that a magical item, one of a pair of conduit bracelets, gets accidentally activated underwater by a pair of nixie sisters, which opens a portal leading to the interior of an Egyptian-style pyramid. The pyramid fills with water, the nixie girls get sucked into it, and nobody's seen them since. The nixie scout party that went in to rescue them hasn't been seen again either. Worse yet, these young nixies are the only daughters of the tribe's leader, so the tribe's pretty desperate to find some assitance.

That was the plot hook I had originally devised for the adventure, and I stuck pretty close to it this time around as well, although I had come up with what I thought was a humorous way of getting the plot hook started. As the PCs travel down the road, I'd have a pair of nixies hail them from the shore of Stillwater Lake. The adventure calls for them to tell their story and ask for help, but I had decided in the meantime that these nixies only spoke Aquan fluently, and had only a smattering of knowledge of the Common tongue. Here's what I had envisioned:

A pair of green-skinned men, dripping wet, each about 4 feet high and built like a slender elf with webbed fingers, come running up to you from out of the lake. "Help!" one cries in halting Common, "You help us!"

"We...need...girls," the other explains, pausing to dredge up each word.

"Yes," agrees the first. "We had two girls...now, no girls. You help us get girls."

"We...need...girls...fast," emphasizes the second.

Click to expand...

The whole point was that at first it would sound like the nixies were simply looking for dates, and that it would take a little bit of time (and roleplaying) to figure out exactly what it was the nixies were asking the PCs to do for them. However, Vicki inadvertantly put the kibosh on my whole plan. Once I started in with my "pidgin Common" act, she piped up with, "Wait, they live in the lake, right? So do they speak Aquan? I'll try greeting them in Aquan." Sure enough, Feron's Intelligence bonus had allowed her to choose several different languages at character generation, and she had learned Aquan before even starting her adventuring career. Oh well, flexibility is the key to good DMing....

I don't recall much about the specifics of how the adventure played out this time with this group, other than (unlike with my original playtest group, back when I originally wrote it) everybody got out of the pyramid alive, including the two nixie children. In fact, the most important factor in this whole adventure was that by the time it was over, all four of these PCs had attained 6th level, which meant that the next adventure would unite the two groups into one, and from that point on we'd be able to have each player decide which of his or her two PCs would be going through any given adventure. (Recall that Vicki would be making up a new 6th-level PC for this event.) Everyone added a sixth level of the character class they already had attained five levels in, with the exception of Chalkan, who was now a 4th-level ranger/2nd-level cleric. (Now that I mention it, I do seem to recall Jacob's disappointment that Chalkan had been unable to singlehandedly turn the mummies in the pyramid with his single level of cleric; he was already noticing that a multiclassed PC wasn't going to be as good at class abilities as was a single-classed PC.)

I can also pin this adventure down to a specific year, if not an exact date. This would have been somewhere around the vicinity of August 2007. At the time, Dan and I were still working in the same office. We had started working in that office together when he was transferred over from his previous job, sometime in 2004. (I had been in that office since the previous year.) At that time, both he and I were Air Force Majors. I officially retired as of 1 March 2007, but as luck would have it they were looking at converting one of the Major's billets in my little six-person office over to a civilian slot, and the timing worked out just right that I was hired to effectively replace myself. Dan retired from the Air Force in the late summer of 2007, and did me the honor of asking me to officiate at his retirement ceremony.

The ceremony went well - I gave my little speech encapsulating his 20 years of dedicated service to his country, he gave his speech thanking his family for supporting him throughout his career - and it was at the reception afterwards, when we were all snacking on cake, punch, and various delicious nibblies that Vicki came up to me and told me, with great excitement in her voice, that she had pretty much decided on either a barbarian or a wizard for her next character.

Since we're on the subject now, let's discuss her next PC. After puzzling which of her two character concepts she wanted to run with, the fact that we already had a barbarian, Slayer, in the group led her to try out a wizard PC. (That, and I think Vicki enjoys the flexibility of running spellcasters.) She had a condition, if it was okay with me, though: she wanted her to be called a "witch" instead of a "wizard." I was aware that Pathfinder had come out with a witch character class, and I also knew that Mongoose Publishing had come out with a book entitled The Quintessential Witch, but I resisted the impulse to pull either of those into the campaign, and stuck with my campaign decision that this would be Core Books only, for the ease of my new players. Plus, I think the desire to be called a "witch" mostly stemmed from Harry Potter fandom, which was fine by me.

So, Vicki's second D&D PC was a human witch (wizard in all but name) by the name of Delphyne Babelberi. For her backstory, we jointly decided that her parents had been killed when she was little, she had been raised by her maternal grandmother (a "witch" herself), who had taught her all she knew of magic and had now sent her off into the world to make her own way and find her own destiny. She had a raven familiar named Ignacious, or "Iggy" for short.

Next adventure, I'd have to find a way to get these two groups (three groups, really: the original group of three, the second group of four, and now Delphyne) of adventurers together into a unified whole.

ADVENTURE 14 - CHALLENGE OF CHAMPIONS II

PC Roster:
I had a pretty good idea that I'd be using one of my "Challenge of Champions" adventures to get the whole group together, as they were perfectly suited to my needs. After all:

• They were sponsored by the local Adventurers Guild, and what better way to integrate eight different PCs into a group than by ushering them all into the same Guild?
• The Challenge of Champions series were each a series of ten puzzles, which played to Vicki's strengths as a puzzle solver.
• Anyone could sign up to enter the contest, and if you didn't happen to be a group of four (the required team size) you'd be placed in with a group of strangers to form a four-person team.

So, that's exactly what I did. The only real decision I had to make was which one of the Challenge of Champions adventures I wanted to run. The main problem with all of them was the same: my son Logan had run a PC through each one already, having been one of my primary playtesters at the time (the other one being his older brother Stuart). Still, that was easily fixed, as I made him promise not to "solve" the scenarios using his prior knowledge from having already gone through the adventures. I figured I'd game the system as much as possible by using one of the earlier adventures in the series, and since I really liked the "puzzle hook" of the last scenario in the second one, "Challenge of Champions II" it was.

I told each of the players that they could run whichever of their two PCs they wanted. Logan opted for Akari, having already decided that Gareth was an "experiment that failed." Dan and Jacob each chose to run their original PCs, possibly because it had been a while since they'd run them. Vicki, however, was eager to try out her new wizard ("witch") PC, Delphyne Babelberi. So I decided that for this contest, you weren't allowed to enter as a team; rather, you signed up individually and were assigned to a particular team by the age-old method of drawing names out of a hat. As luck would have it, these four PCs were grouped together, and we decided that if they placed high enough in the contest, they'd be offered slots in the Greyhawk City Adventurers Guild. Furthermore, if they got in (and I already had decided that, barring a horrific end score, they'd be getting in), their other four PCs would likewise have earned high enough scores to be offered a slot in the Guild. (After all, there was no way around it: each player could only run one of his or her PCs in the Challenge of Champions; once they'd run their first PC through, they couldn't very well run their second PC through, since the players would already know the solutions to the 10 scenarios. Four PCs would just have to compete "offscreen.")

They did about as well as I had expected - that is to say, very well indeed. Dan got off to a bit of a rough start by having his PC fall into a pit that had been covered over with the illusion of a solid floor, but this was caused by an assumption on his part on just exactly where the clue he had been given was telling him it was. (I even gave him a Reflex save to avoid falling in, but he failed it, and so was declared "dead" for that scenario, and earned no points for that one.) But it was pretty smooth sailing from that point on, and Vicki pretty much aced all of my word-based puzzles, while Dan's prior experience on the workings of (A)D&D spells and magic items aided greatly on that front. (Logan was equally skilled, but was holding back at my request, to give those who had never gone through the adventure before a shot at solving the scenarios. I had made him a deal, that if the party was completely stumped at the 10-minute point - each scenario lasts up to 15 minutes of real time; I had a stopwatch and everything - he could have Akari get a sudden inspiration as to how best to proceed, but I don't think it ever came to that.)

So, at the end of the adventure, all eight PCs were ushered into the Greyhawk City Adventurers Guild, and I had my unified party at last. Here's how I decided to structure the Adventurers Guild:

• The Guild was divided into "wings" of 8 adventurers. Our 8 PCs comprised "Wing Three."
• Each wing was a section of Guild Headquarters, comprised of the following: eight bedrooms, two bathrooms, a communal living area, and a kitchen. The doors to the eight bedrooms were all lined up alongside each other down a long a stretch of hallway, and despite the cramped positioning of the doors each led into a different extradimensional room, each a square with 30-foot sides. The bedrooms came equipped with the standard bed, dresser, writing desk, and storage trunk, but could be customized to the inhabitant's liking.
• Each member of a wing wore an Adventurers Guild ring. (I let Jacob design the logo for the Adventurers Guild between sessions; he came up with a sword and a wand crossed over each other in the middle of an equilateral triangle.) Each ring, at creation, was fused with one other Guild ring, so instead of eight separate rings there were really four sets of two rings each.
• When activated (by a rapid double-touch, not unlike the method by which Spider-Man activates his mechanical web-shooters in the comics), the Guild ring teleported the wearer back to the common living area of their wing.
• If the wearer of the other ring in the set was touched to the ring that had just been used to teleport its wearer back to the wing's common living area, the "fresh" ring could be used to "lock onto the coordinates" from which the ring's mate had just teleported. (Obviously, the rings were passed out so that each player's two PCs received a complete set. This was an easy way for the players to swap off PCs during the course of a given adventure.)
• The rings could not be used to teleport between different planes. They could, however, be activated (by someone who knew how) by other than the wielder. This could come in handy in sending a slain PC back to Guild Headquarters and allowing the dead PC's partner to teleport in and take his or her place.
• Originally, the rings each held one charge and had to be recharged after each use, which cost 3,300 gp. (Much later in the campaign, I made the rings self recharging, although they could still only be used once per day to either teleport back to Guild Headquarters or trace the teleport of the other ring in its set.)
• Each ring was personalized by the carved inscription of the wearer's name on the inside of the band.

Effectively, that meant that for each adventure, the players would decide which of their two PCs they'd be running for that session. The other four PCs were on "backup duty," hanging around their wing in case they were needed to "bink" back to replace a returned PC. (I don't remember who first coined the term "bink" to mean "use the Guild ring to teleport," but it's a term we use to this day.) The initial expense in recharging a ring meant that they would really only be used in an emergency, but this was a nice way (I thought) to prevent a PC death from forcing the dead PC's player to sit and watch everybody else running through the rest of the adventure. Of course, the system wasn't infallible (if the slain PC's body wasn't retrievable, there'd be no way to activate his or her Guild ring), but I figured it would serve our purposes pretty well. (And I have to admit it really has. Not only has it made it easier to prevent PC death from keeping the player out of the rest of the game session, but it's really given this campaign a much different feel than any other (A)D&D campaign I've ever run.)

By the way, as a final comment, you now know why I've chosen to call this campaign "Wing Three." However, the fact that I chose "Wing Three" over any other possible number has a small story attached to it. Dan and I both had the same first job in the Air Force, back when we were brand new Second Lieutenants. We were both trained as missileers at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, and then were each assigned to Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, where we pulled combat alerts over the course of four years of crew time. Each missileer would be sent to the field on the average of every three or four days or so, to spend 24 hours in a launch control center monitoring 10 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles with his crew partner. Dan and I were in different squadrons - he was in the 740th Strategic Missile Squadron, and I was in the 741st - and our respective crew times weren't exactly the same (although they overlapped; I got to Minot in June 1987 and he got there sometime in 1988 or so), but Minot AFB is where the two of us first met.

So what's the significance of that? Each of the ICBM Missile Wings is given a numerical designator; Minot is "Wing 3."

ADVENTURE 15 - WAR OF THE WIELDED

PC Roster:
Binked in:
This was the first adventure where the PCs were all working for the Greyhawk City Adventurers Guild, and as it turned out it was the first time some of them opted to activate the power of their Guild rings. "War of the Wielded" was another adventure that was on my "I want to run this some day" list, because it had a really cool plotline: the PCs are drawn into a war between two competing thieves guilds, each with a handful of aligned intelligent weapons. It was written by Michael Kortes and appeared in Dungeon issue #149, the next-to-last print edition. While originally written as a 5th-level adventure, it included suggestions on scaling it up for a higher-level party, and I followed those suggestions with no problems.

However, I did do a bit of restructuring to the city that this takes place in. The adventure places it in a coastal city; I saw no reason not to port it over to Greyhawk City, even if it meant moving Greyhawk City to the edge of the Nyr Dyv (I've always hated that name; in my campaign, "Nyr Dyv" is not the name of the lake - however, since the name has never actually come up in game play, I haven't really bothered renaming it yet) and making it a lakefront city. After all, I'm certainly no Greyhawk purist - I merely use the "default" campaign settings of Greyhawk because that's what's mentioned in the Core Rulebooks. With two new players, I didn't want them to have to "translate" what they were reading about the standard gods into my own pantheon, for example. I've read a little of the "standard" Greyhawk City from the boxed set of the same name (from back in the AD&D days), but the city in my campaign world bears little resemblence to the "real" one other than sharing the same name. In later adventures, I'd squeeze the Styes into the slum section of Greyhawk City; my Greyhawk City doesn't have all of the crazy "laws" passed by Xagyg the Mad, and in fact I'm only vaguely aware that there's even a ruler of the City - although I do know there is a Council of Noblemen and a Council of Guilds that run much of the City's day-to-day affairs.

Anyway, I wanted to take advantage of the fact that there are two thieves guilds fighting each other, and that both have plenty of hired muscle, to reintroduce the character of Irontusk the half-orc, who first ran into the PCs in "The Mad God's Key." (If you recall, Dan had an odd fascination with wanting to have Rale pull out Irontusk's eponymous iron tusk and wear it around as a trophy.) I thought it would make perfect sense for him to have been hired on by one of the guilds as extra muscle, which would give me an opportunity to allow Rale Bodkin to bask in his weird dental fetishes.

As events transpired, no such luck: Rale got heavily wounded early in the adventure and had to "bink" out, being replaced one round later by Cal, who finished out the adventure. That meant that during my big final battle between the two warring thieves guilds, with an oversized fiendish rust monster thrown in for good measure, it was Cal who encountered Irontusk, not Rale. Furthermore, as it was Rale with the dental fetish, I didn't even bother pointing out to Dan that this was Irontusk; Cal had never met the half-orc before and it meant nothing to him that he had a fake tusk made out of iron. (And thus I was learning that planning adventures for an unknown group of PCs every session was going to bring on some unforeseen complications.)

The fiendish rust monster was subdued and knocked out rather than slain outright. Despite some talk of trying to tame it for their own use, eventually it was decided that the beast was just too dangerous around a group that relied heavily on metallic objects, and they opted to sell it instead. Fortunately, there was a logical buyer right there in Greyhawk City: one Lord Henway, who ran a zoological garden of sorts, with all kinds of exotic creatures on display. He agreed to purchase the oversized rust monster from the group for a hefty sum.

Rale did get a cool sword out of the deal: a luck blade - a +2 short sword that grants its wielder a +1 bonus to all saves, grants its wielder one "reroll" of a die (but then he has to accept the second die roll result), and had at one time granted its former wielder several wishes; that power has been used up but it's rumored to have a "final wish" that would completely destroy the blade if activated. (I planted this last bit in as a future "escape from death" card with a penalty for use - namely, the loss of a cool magic sword.) For reasons known only to himself, Rale named this sword "Liverwurst."

My records indicate that Delphyne was also forced to "bink" back to Headquarter in this adventure and get replaced by Feron, but I don't recall the circumstances. I do recall that we were using her Feron initiative card to fill in for Delphyne since Vicki hadn't yet decided on an image for her, and then she decided that the image of Iggwilv from the cover of Dungeon fit her mental image of Delphyne close enough. So after running the adventure, I went home and built a Delphyne initiative card using the Iggwilv image.

It's worth noting that at this point our gaming group had dropped down (temporarily) to three players, as Logan was off to college. We vowed that we'd keep running his PCs for him in his absence so they wouldn't get behind the others in the XP department, and that when he was home on vacation we'd try to get a gaming session in. (Logan was really looking forward to summer break!) The original plan was that we'd switch off each session as to which of the three players was running Logan's PC, but Vicki quickly opted out of that deal (she didn't want to be responsible for getting another player's PC killed), so we pretty much switched off between Dan and Jacob pulling double duty with one of their PCs and one of Logan's. And when I say "one of Logan's," what I really mean is "Akari" - since the rest of the group had long since figured out that when given the choice of bringing along an unarmored sorcerer who wielded a greatsword on the front lines or an actual front-line combat machine who by the way could also heal himself, the decision was a fairly easy one.

ADVENTURE 16 - THE BUTTERFLIES OF DOOM

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"The Butterflies of Doom" was an admittedly silly little adventure that I had originally created as a homemade adventure for the old HeroQuest board game. (After we had gone through all of the adventures that came with the game, I started making up new ones.) I took the basic idea - that a surge of wild magic had warped a wizard's mansion and all of its inhabitants into strange creatures and odd magic effects - and converted it to D&D 3.5E. I had even submitted the idea to Dungeon; oddly enough, the editors didn't think it met their current needs. (Imagine that.)

There's not going to be much to this write-up, sadly, as I don't recall much of the specifics. I remember there were stretches of corridor in the mansion where gravity worked in different directions. I recall the wave of wild magic had been caused by an experiment by the mansion's owner (a wild mage by the name of Palliphron Vex) and his apprentices involving no fewer than five rods of wonder. (Furthermore, one of the rods survived and is carried by Feron Dru to this day, although she only uses it as an absolutely last resort.) The effects of the surge reached all the way to the front lawn, creating the two swarms of carnivorous butterflies that led to the PCs investigating the goings-on in the mansion, and also infusing the two stone lions guarding the steps up to the front door with opposing personalities: one insulted anyone who came near with near-obscenities, while the other apologized obsequiously for his partner's behavior. Inside, some of the bed linen had manifested into sheet phantoms, and while some of the apprentices had merged into a chaos beast and others had morphed into a gibbering mouther, some of their personalities had been shunted into Palliphron's duckbunny familiar, who was rescued from the mansion and eventually took on a consulting position with the Adventurers Guild. (He did, after all, possess pieces of the personalities and memories of four different wizards. He took the name "Quiffington," an amalgamation of pieces of the names of the four wizards merged together.)

At one point, a mermaid fell from the ceiling onto an animated dining room table, and after defeating said table the PCs managed to hoist the grateful mermaid up through the ceiling back to her home on the Elemental Plane of Water. Before departing, she gave Feron a dolphin necklace, which grants a +5 bonus to Swim checks.

All in all a weird little adventure.

I did try something new map-wise for this one, though. Since the "dungeon" was a wizard's mansion on the outskirts of the city (after the "giant chicken incident" of several years back, Palliphron was asked by the Greyhawk City Council to relocate to the edge of the city for the safety of its citizens), and the PCs could see the size and shape of said mansion, I drew an outline of the mansion on the back of a large sheet of desk calendar, then created individual room geomorphs that I "plugged in" as the PCs explored the building.

I got to use two butterflies from my "plastic bug" tube for this adventure, each representing a separate cloud of "Butterflies of Doom."

And that's about all I can relate about this one. Oh, wait - I did include two other monsters in this adventure for Jacob's benefit, thinking that no 11-year-old boy would be able to resist a crap golem or a urine elemental. I was right - he thought they were hilarious.

ADVENTURE 17 - START AT THE END

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"Start at the End" was one of the free adventures that you could download from the Wizards of the Coast website; it incorporated one of the free "Map of the Week" maps that were also available on the site. (I believe both may still be available in their older sections.) It any case, it was written by Rich Redman, and I chose it specifically because it featured a dragon guardian, and I felt it was about time I had the PCs face up against a dragon in this game that we'd been playing for several years now. (It was a fairly small dragon, suitable for a group of 6th-/7th-level PCs, but still.)

Before I get to the adventure itself, I need to discuss initiative cards. This was the introduction of Delphyne's initiative card, and up until now Dan was still the only holdout, continuing to use his hastily-sketched-in-pencil drawings for his PCs (Kord's symbol for Cal; little more than a stick figure backstabbing another figure for Rale). This time, I was ready for a little gag. I had gotten hold of a digital photo of Dan, and I superimposed his head onto a drawing of a human rogue from the Wizards of the Coast site (it's the guy with the little rat-tail of hair hanging forward on his shoulder) to use for Rale. Before I started the session, I threw down the stick-figure Rale initiative card that Dan had been using and said we could continue to use that one, or we could use this one instead - and dropped down the Dan/rat-tail-haired hybrid. It got a big laugh (which I had been hoping for), and Dan decided that he'd use it from then on. Then I slapped down my new Cal Trop initiative card, which was the same picture of Dan's face, superimposed upon the cover drawing of the Lost Worlds combat flip-book of a human fighter with shield and sword. (I had Photoshopped the sword out of his hand and replaced it with a mace, and slapped Kord's holy symbol onto the shield for good measure, then drew on a goatee to top it off, as Dan had been experimenting with a goatee since retiring from the Air Force.) I explained that they looked similar because Rale and Cal were cousins. I then further explained that Cal had two siblings, and threw their initiative cards down onto the table to the sounds of laughter as I introduced them: his goatherder brother, Trip Trop (the same photo of Dan's face slapped onto a commoner holding a goat under one arm), and his sister Yvonne "Von" Trop (the same photo of Dan's face slapped onto an image of Julie Andrews from "The Sound of Music"). In each case Dan's face had the same hair as the "undoctored" version of the photo I had used for his siblings.

This wasn't just for the sake of a gag, however; I used Trip Trop as the plot hook to get the PCs into the adventure. Trip wrote to his brother Cal about a bunch of local people having gone missing in the past few weeks, and would he and his adventuring band be willing to look into it if they had the time?

I bought another D&D Miniature for this adventure: it called for four xorn, so I picked up a xorn to demonstrate what they looked like (and used game pieces to represent the others - brown, gray, and black). I also stocked some area-appropriate magic items in the last room of the dungeon, namely the three ivory goat figurines of wondrous power (it being goat country, after all). Cal ended up with the goat of travail; Slayer got the goat of terror, and Delphyne wound up with the goat of travel.

Akari was run by either Dan or Jacob. He was starting to manifest a bit of a split personality by this time; when Dan ran him, he was much braver but took to talking in a slightly British accent; when Jacob ran him, we had to occasionally overrule his more cowardly actions as not staying in character. (Jacob had taken to playing it safe for his PCs whenever possible, possibly stemming from the "a rust monster ate my sword and armor" incident back in "Gorgoldand's Gauntlet.")

ADVENTURE 18 - RANA MOR

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NPC Roster:
I absolutely loved "Rana Mor" from the very first time I read through it, and was absolutely determined that I was going to run it one day. That day finally came when it was time for us to go through our 18th adventure. "Rana Mor" was written by Rich Baker and appeared in issue #86 of Dungeon, and to this day remains one of my favorite adventures of its level. I loved the way it used an exotic locale (a set of ruins in a steaming jungle) and the way that it created different aspects of the standard 3.5 pantheon. I appreciated the variety of monsters it managed to fit in, and the very scale of the ruins themselves.

In fact, the scale of the ruins caused my first decision on how to deal with the maps. The maps in the magazine were all on a 10-foot scale, whereas I (and my players) had become used to an inch representing a 5-foot square. I knew if I simply drew up the geomorphs showing 1-inch squares representing 5-foot squares, I'd make a hash of things in no time at all, forgetting that one square on the map in the magazine was not equal to one square on the map on the table. My solution was to draw out the geomorphs in 2-inch squares, so that a square on the geomorph exactly corresponded to a square as drawn on the DM's map in the magazine. It was easy enough to look at where in the 2-inch square your PC's miniature was located and decide what actual "5-foot-square" he was on.

However, I tried something else new with the maps of the ruins. This time, taking a cue from the "fill it in as you go along" method I had used for "The Butterflies of Doom," I plotted out large areas of the Rana Mor ruins (as much as I could fit onto the back of a page from a desk calendar), drew the outer walls, and brought along a Sharpie marker so I could draw in the interior walls of each room as the PCs explored it. I figured the PCs would know the general shape and structure of the building they were entering, but wouldn't know the interior layout, and this method worked out pretty well for this adventure.

I stocked some magic items of my own creation into the ruins of Rana Mor. One was a stone carving of a winged tiger; if you channeled a 5th-level (or higher) summon monster or summon nature's ally spell into it, it would become an actual winged tiger, much in the same way that a figurine of wondrous power comes to life but then later reverts to statuette form. I also created a staff that did the same deal with flame blade by channeling an appropriate level spell into it. Both items ended up with Feron Dru, who to this day...has never used them. Wait, I take that back - she may have used the staff once. [Edit: This was true for the majority of our campaign, but in our last adventure session I ran an adventure written specifically around the stone tiger carving, and a band of Rana Mor ghosts that were trying to get it back. So Feron's been prompted to remember she has this, and even named the winged tiger "Linus."]

To get the PCs on the adventure, I actually used the Adventurers Guild. The adventure's supplied plot hook is a quest to find the "Rain Tiger," a magic gemstone with mysterious powers; I actually made it a Guild-sponsored quest that had been assigned to Wing Three. It turns out that there's a hidden teleport circle in the bowels of the Adventurers Guild Headquarters of Greyhawk City; stepping through it leads to a similar circle in the Adventurers Guild Headquarters on another continent entirely. The adventure calls for an NPC named Balama Theron to take the PCs on her ship as far down the river as she can and then leave them to follow the rest of the way on foot; I made up a character sheet for Balama and let Vicki run her as well as Feron. (Balama was a fairly low-level rogue/wizard, but she had a wand of magic missiles that was put to good use.) I turned Balama over to Vicki not only so our only female gamer could run the female NPC, but so Vicki would have the experience of running a second character at a time; Dan and Jacob were getting that experience in spades by swapping off who got to run Akari each session.

There was a memorable quote in this adventure. While the PCs are still on Balama's ship, the Starchaser, they are attacked on two sides by a group of natives (some of them spellcasters) in their canoes. Dan, who as you may recall chose to create a cleric PC specifically so he could keep his son Jacob's half-orc barbarian "in the fight" for as long as possible, used some "buff up Slayer" tactics instead of going for the offensive spells. Slayer soon found himself not only the proud recipient of an enlarge person spell (boosting Slayer's strength and making him Large sized) but a water walk spell as well. That was all it took for our little half-orc to regain his long-forgotten taste for front-line fighting; the natives soon found themselves up against an evilly-grinning, 12-foot-tall half-orc racing across the river at them, brandishing a greatsword as long as their canoes. After chopping one canoe up into kindling, Slayer grabbed up one floundering native by the ankle and used him as a club against his cohorts. And that's when Jacob ad-libbed his now-immortal line for the hapless native/club: "I hate my job!"

The whole table, players and DM alike, burst out laughing, and Jacob basked in his moment of glory. It was one of our funniest lines, and I'm glad it was Jacob who came up with it, because I had been worrying a bit as to whether he was enjoying the game.

I also had a bit of preparation fall flat on its theoretical face. One of the natives, Saeng Ki, was a woman wearing face paint that made her face look like a skull, and she had a tiger animal companion; I even went to the trouble of making her her own initiative card, since she had been depicted in the issue's artwork. Since Slayer had brought along Fang by this time, and Jacob had evinced the same sort of "I don't want anything bad to happen to him by bringing him into combat" attitude that had been plaguing Slayer for some time, I gave Saeng Ki's tiger animal companion a magic collar that he could activate once a day by swatting its gem stud, which would then heal it to its full hit point total. (I had intentionally created the magic collar for Fang's benefit, realizing that he'd be the only one who could use it after they slew the tiger.) Well, the "magic collar" of my plan went exactly as anticipated, but the "make an initiative card for Saeng Ki" I could have done without, as she stepped into view and was promptly cut down before she could do so much as utter a single word.

"Rana Mor" took us four sessions to finish. Those ruins were huge, and there was plenty of action before the PCs even got to the ruins (plus some extra action after they had finished up in the ruins, like being chased by a reserve troop of natives all the way back to Balama's ship, and an encounter with a Huge fiendish spider that had created a web across the river since they had last traversed it. (Logan had been purchasing D&D Miniatures by the boxload and had scored a Huge Fiendish Spider with one set; I couldn't resist.)

Perhaps because I enjoyed this adventure so much, it ended up sowing several different future plot hooks. I liked the fact that the Adventurers Guild had expanded into this other continent and vowed to do some more with the concept. I liked Balama Theron, her half-orc first mate Hurm Feros, and the Starchaser, and vowed that our campaign had not seen the last of any of them. (In fact, I had an immediate idea as to how I could incorporate Balama into a future adventure, although it would be years before that idea got implemented. Still, into my campaign notebook it went.)

Have only gotten through first couple posts, but just wanted to say this sort of summary where you see how a campaign develops is very interesting. Thanks for posting it!