Hi there! Remember me?
This post is cross posted over at RPG.net, so some parts are retelling some earlier content from this thread just so ya know.
So, we've been a busy gaming group since the last post, and finally finished the Keep adventure and are moving on. I'll be starting another thread in a bit in order to solicit some more advice as I move the heroic tier into the endgame. But before that, we had a few changes in the makeup of the party as well as some other things. Here’s what you need to know before I get back to recapping:
I was able to get credit in a sociology of gender class as well as service learning credits for running this game, which has now expanded into a grant proposal to write a research paper for publication. (I know, right?) The paper’s on preconceived notions of gender, as in what assumptions do a group of gamers bring into a fantasy realm from their own world in regards to gender assumptions. Which is a fancy way of saying that I tweaked POLland a bit, changed the society to a matriarchal one, and gender swapped many of the principle NPCs as well as occasionally throwing them curveballs. The PCs are all female though the players are a mix of genders and orientations, which was where I got the spark of the idea in the first place. So, as a group we all took part in some worldbuilding/retconning in which we created a narrative in which females came to dominate following the collapse of the Empire of Nerath. All of this is cool, but unnecessary to go into here, but if enough people bug me, I’ll make another thread about it.
We did learn valuable insight about gender relations over the next two gaming sessions following the last recap. Unfortunately what we learned was that one of the players, the player of the Tieflling Paladin, had a crush on me, which got more complicated when a different player and I started seeing each other, which came to a head in the final battle with the Big Bad. Long story short, there were confrontations and she is no longer a member of the group. It took a while to get back into a decent flow but we’re there now. So some of the recap will be curiously lacking in details and that’s why.
Anyway… This post is cross posted over at RPG.net, so some parts are retelling some earlier content from this thread just so ya know.
So the first session in the keep was also the first session for the new player (first ever non computer based RPG of any kind, actually) and exceeded everyone’s expectations by picking up an intuitive grasp of her character’s ability and the tactical aspects of the game faster than I have ever seen anyone do. Which was way cool, but unfortunate in a way because I had left the beginning of the keep essentially as written in order to give her a couple of easy combats to learn the ropes. Good tactics and good rolls led them through the entry way and the torture chamber, which I threw in a 2nd torcherer and added a controller to give it more of an epic feel, but these guys plowed right through everything.
Flavor wise, I’d played up the haunted aspects by lifting the bloody writings on the walls from one of the conversion threads as well as having the goblins get more and more demonic as the encounters went on, and then just went pure zalgo on them. So while the combat fell flat, the exploration aspects more than made up for it. They were actually unnerved at times. The new player was hooked for life and I spent the time between that and the next session planning on how to fix what is despite the very cool efforts of several people around the web, a for the most part a flat-out awful dungeon. I was brainstorming at one point and became particularly crabby at a really stupidly designed part when I tossed it aside and realized that the only parts of the keep itself I was going to use was the last two encounters (because there were printed maps for them. And damned if I wasn’t going to get some value out of this stupid module) in which I swapped Kalarel and the female Necromancer from the burial site who, given the new gender status quo, became retconned as the actual mastermind. The two of their efforts were creating more frequent tears in reality which had effects on time and space, which they used to magically transport the last two rooms of the keep to Another Place Altogether in which they were able to get the level of sacrifices they’d need to finish the ritual, which would permanently open canyon sized breaches into the Shadowfell and the Abyss. Orcus was pleased as demonic punch at this and promised to send an aspect to personally carry out the last mystical aspects.
So the PCs know they’re in a countdown (mysterious hourglass ticking down to noon on midsummer’s day which was incidently coming right up) but they have no idea as to what will happen once the deadline happens. (Which was fine with me, because at this point neither did I.) They were able to learn, when the wizard’s character Rolled 3 20s in a row when trying to research, learn, and recreate the ritual from the slaying stone adventure to try to track down the baddies that way. (Came up with that on her own she did. My little mage’s all growds up
) I ruled that she had done far better than she’d expected and now was able to determine the direction and distance from a slaying stone if one is on the same plane of existence in a general way, that shortly after the PCs had entered the Keep, she could not determine any information on the stones, though she was aware that the ritual was functioning properly and that earlier she knew that both were here and below them.
So lacking any other plan, they tried to continue in the general direction they had gone, all the while dealing with more and more haunted things, the most prominent being Sir Keegan, cursed to wander the halls eternally after she’d killed her entire family and everyone in the keep while charged to guard the closed portal to the shadowfell. The removal of the end areas and the portal’s distance allowed a brief glimmer of sanity in which she saw a chance to redeem herself. (Oh and everyone acted predictably in regards to the gender of the knight. I’d been very careful with pronouns when describing her and made sure to never neglect to say the “Sir” part, Full disclosure, once she showed up, I accident;y said “he” as often as any of them, so I get to be part of my own analysis.
The next part was so incredibly awesome, which I even now am gritting my teeth at how the very end of it was ruined, but I’ll get to that in the next post.
I am here as always to clarify bits that I glossed over in the description.
