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<blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 6033163" data-attributes="member: 508"><p><strong>ADVENTURE 6 - THE MAD GOD'S KEY</strong></p><p></p><p>PC Roster: <p style="margin-left: 20px">Akari, human paladin of Hieroneous</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"> Chalkan, half-elf ranger</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"> Feron Dru, half-elf druid</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"> Rale Bodkin, human rogue</p><p></p><p>This was an adventure from issue #114 of <em>Dungeon</em>, and I wanted to run it because it was a cool adventure and as it was written for 1st-level PCs, I wanted to use it before my new set of PCs got too high in level that modifying it would be too onerous. I don't recall the specific reason, but I found myself home alone for a long weekend - my wife had likely taken the rest of the family back to Illinois for a visit, and I didn't have enough leave saved up to go with (I was, at this point in time, still an active duty Air Force Major). I remember it was a heavy winter, and we actually had a snow day at work, so I was unexpectedly home all day with nobody else in the house - sounded like a good opportunity to create some extensive geomorphs for the next adventure!</p><p></p><p>This time, I got even more creative than just cardboard shapes as a geomorph map. The adventure starts off with a chase through the docks of a city (I don't recall which city, but it didn't matter; I had changed it to Greyhawk City, the home base of my PCs), so I decided to hunt up my stacks of construction paper (my wife and I used to help out at the boys' grammar school, and I was often a bulletin board decorator) and make a decent map of the dockside area. I used six sheets of construction paper as my background; blue for the water, beige for the ground, and I made brown docks and moored boats, different colored roofs to denote the buildings, and even made a rowboat that the PCs could borrow and move around the map. All but the rowboat were glued down onto the main construction sheets, such that I could fit each sheet into a manila envelope for storage but lay them out in a 2-by-3 fashion and have a large map for the chase scene.</p><p></p><p>Later in the adventure there's a bit of a cavern crawl, so for this section I used cardboard and cut out the geomorphs as I had done for the previous adventure. And here's where I learned the value of flexibility: I discovered that if I tweaked the sizes of a few of the twisting caverns I could cut them all from the same piece of large cardboard I was using, and thus they'd all be the same color. (Had I stuck to the exact specifications of each chamber, I'd have run out of room and one of my stone chambers would have been a different shade than the others.)</p><p></p><p>We ran this adventure back over at Dan's house, and it went over very well. Jason Bulmahn's "The Mad God's Key" is rightfully praised as one of the better 1st-level adventures to ever see print in the pages of <em>Dungeon</em>, and we had a blast with it. The chase through the docks was exciting, and there were a few moments in the caverns at the end that still stick out to me to this day. The PCs end up fighting two evil cultist clerics in a room filled with ankle-deep blood, and one of them is controlling the skeleton of an owlbear. Akari was doing only fairly well in hitting his enemies down there in that room, and then one of the clerics cast <em>blindness/deafness</em> on him, robbing him of his sight. From that point on, Akari had only a 50% chance of even successfully hitting anything he was targeting in a given square. (The method we use for this is to allow the blinded PC's player to attack as normal, and then if he hits he rolls a d6, while we intone "Wouldn't it be <u>odd</u> if that hit actually missed?" - if he rolls an odd number, then the hit actually missed.) But as luck would have it, he was on fire with his longsword once he was blinded; I don't think he missed even once. It got to the point where Akari's out-of-character nickname became "Zatoichi," after the blind swordsman of Japanese movie fame.</p><p></p><p>There was also something that happened earlier on, when the PCs finally caught the half-orc, <strong>Irontusk</strong>, they were chasing through the docks. After they had captured and interrogated him, Dan decided that Rale wanted to pull out the metal tooth that gave Irontusk his name. That didn't sound like something that a surly half-orc would put up with, so I had Irontusk tell Rale to pound sand. I think that Dan really wanted Rale to have that tooth, though, and I kind of felt bad about it after the fact; not that I had told him no, but that I hadn't even really given it any consideration at all. Nowadays, I try to at least consider any proposition that a player puts forth; this time, I had more-or-less handwaved it away as not happening without any consideration at all, and I think I kind of disappointed Dan by doing so. (I later on resolved to give him another shot at Irontusk's tooth, but it didn't work out as I had planned. Oh well.)</p><p></p><p>In any case, since the cultists had stolen a book about how to create new types of undead and the book was never recovered (or maybe it was recovered with some pages missing - I've since forgotten), I filed away that fact as a future plot hook, figuring that I could bring one or both of the cultists back at a later time as some new sort of undead the PCs had never encountered before. And I actually did so, some years later, but by that time the players had no recollection of who these two guys were. Live and learn - don't wait <em>too</em> long to make return appearances by former opponents.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Richards, post: 6033163, member: 508"] [b]ADVENTURE 6 - THE MAD GOD'S KEY[/b] PC Roster: [INDENT]Akari, human paladin of Hieroneous Chalkan, half-elf ranger Feron Dru, half-elf druid Rale Bodkin, human rogue[/INDENT] This was an adventure from issue #114 of [i]Dungeon[/i], and I wanted to run it because it was a cool adventure and as it was written for 1st-level PCs, I wanted to use it before my new set of PCs got too high in level that modifying it would be too onerous. I don't recall the specific reason, but I found myself home alone for a long weekend - my wife had likely taken the rest of the family back to Illinois for a visit, and I didn't have enough leave saved up to go with (I was, at this point in time, still an active duty Air Force Major). I remember it was a heavy winter, and we actually had a snow day at work, so I was unexpectedly home all day with nobody else in the house - sounded like a good opportunity to create some extensive geomorphs for the next adventure! This time, I got even more creative than just cardboard shapes as a geomorph map. The adventure starts off with a chase through the docks of a city (I don't recall which city, but it didn't matter; I had changed it to Greyhawk City, the home base of my PCs), so I decided to hunt up my stacks of construction paper (my wife and I used to help out at the boys' grammar school, and I was often a bulletin board decorator) and make a decent map of the dockside area. I used six sheets of construction paper as my background; blue for the water, beige for the ground, and I made brown docks and moored boats, different colored roofs to denote the buildings, and even made a rowboat that the PCs could borrow and move around the map. All but the rowboat were glued down onto the main construction sheets, such that I could fit each sheet into a manila envelope for storage but lay them out in a 2-by-3 fashion and have a large map for the chase scene. Later in the adventure there's a bit of a cavern crawl, so for this section I used cardboard and cut out the geomorphs as I had done for the previous adventure. And here's where I learned the value of flexibility: I discovered that if I tweaked the sizes of a few of the twisting caverns I could cut them all from the same piece of large cardboard I was using, and thus they'd all be the same color. (Had I stuck to the exact specifications of each chamber, I'd have run out of room and one of my stone chambers would have been a different shade than the others.) We ran this adventure back over at Dan's house, and it went over very well. Jason Bulmahn's "The Mad God's Key" is rightfully praised as one of the better 1st-level adventures to ever see print in the pages of [i]Dungeon[/i], and we had a blast with it. The chase through the docks was exciting, and there were a few moments in the caverns at the end that still stick out to me to this day. The PCs end up fighting two evil cultist clerics in a room filled with ankle-deep blood, and one of them is controlling the skeleton of an owlbear. Akari was doing only fairly well in hitting his enemies down there in that room, and then one of the clerics cast [i]blindness/deafness[/i] on him, robbing him of his sight. From that point on, Akari had only a 50% chance of even successfully hitting anything he was targeting in a given square. (The method we use for this is to allow the blinded PC's player to attack as normal, and then if he hits he rolls a d6, while we intone "Wouldn't it be [u]odd[/u] if that hit actually missed?" - if he rolls an odd number, then the hit actually missed.) But as luck would have it, he was on fire with his longsword once he was blinded; I don't think he missed even once. It got to the point where Akari's out-of-character nickname became "Zatoichi," after the blind swordsman of Japanese movie fame. There was also something that happened earlier on, when the PCs finally caught the half-orc, [b]Irontusk[/b], they were chasing through the docks. After they had captured and interrogated him, Dan decided that Rale wanted to pull out the metal tooth that gave Irontusk his name. That didn't sound like something that a surly half-orc would put up with, so I had Irontusk tell Rale to pound sand. I think that Dan really wanted Rale to have that tooth, though, and I kind of felt bad about it after the fact; not that I had told him no, but that I hadn't even really given it any consideration at all. Nowadays, I try to at least consider any proposition that a player puts forth; this time, I had more-or-less handwaved it away as not happening without any consideration at all, and I think I kind of disappointed Dan by doing so. (I later on resolved to give him another shot at Irontusk's tooth, but it didn't work out as I had planned. Oh well.) In any case, since the cultists had stolen a book about how to create new types of undead and the book was never recovered (or maybe it was recovered with some pages missing - I've since forgotten), I filed away that fact as a future plot hook, figuring that I could bring one or both of the cultists back at a later time as some new sort of undead the PCs had never encountered before. And I actually did so, some years later, but by that time the players had no recollection of who these two guys were. Live and learn - don't wait [i]too[/i] long to make return appearances by former opponents. [/QUOTE]
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