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<blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 6034212" data-attributes="member: 508"><p><strong>ADVENTURE 8 - WHITE QUEEN'S GAMBIT</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>"White Queen's Gambit" was an adventure I had originally submitted to <em>Dungeon</em> only to have it rejected, mostly due to the number of player diagrams it required (which would have eaten up too much of the page count). I later submitted it to Mongoose Publishing's <em>Signs and Portents</em> magazine (back in the days when that too was still a print magazine) and they printed it in issue #2, but I have to admit that it didn't turn out very well there - they had no more room for the extra player handouts than did <em>Dungeon</em>, so they condensed several of the puzzles involved to the extent that they were pretty much ruined. In any case, I still liked the adventure, and it was very much in the same vein as "Gorgoldand's Gauntlet" - a puzzle-heavy adventure, this time an exploration of the tomb of an entity that long ago called herself the "White Queen," and provided divinations to those who would seek her out. The ruins were located on the inside of a jagged projection of rock half a mile or so from the coast. I knew Vicki had enjoyed the puzzle-solving aspect of "Gorgoldand's Gauntlet," so I thought this would be a good idea for the next adventure.</p><p></p><p>I don't recall the plot hook I used to get the PCs to the sea coast; following a treasure map, no doubt. (Again: beer-and-pretzels game - no heavy thinking involved, although I was slowly starting to think that this campaign could become more than that.) The PCs stopped off at the fishing village within sight of the upthrust rock and hired an old fisherman to row them out there. On a whim, I decided the fisherman's name was <strong>Old Clem</strong>, and he, being a relatively poor fisherman, was mightily impressed by these obviously powerful adventurers who were hiring him for a day's easy pay. (A solid gold piece just to row them out to the Rock and stay there until they returned, and he could even bring a rod and reel and fish out of the boat while he waited! What a deal!) It took some convincing to assure Dan that I wasn't going to strand the PCs there (again, he had apparently been burned one too many times in his AD&D 1st Edition past by double-crossing NPCs run by adversarial DMs), but they eventually climbed up the rough winding stairs that wound up the outer edge of the Rock, and found the temple at the top where the White Queen had once run her oracle business. They fought a giant praying mantis on the way up, which allowed me to use one of the plastic bugs I'd bought a whole tube full of for a couple of dollars.</p><p></p><p>Once they found the way to the temple's interior (it involved the first of several chess puzzles, which activated a hidden set of stairs leading into the ground below), Vicki proved her puzzle-solving mettle was still going strong, as the party pretty much allowed her PC to figure everything out and they just helped take care of the monsters and traps they encountered along the way. At the end of the adventure, they encountered the White Queen herself: a gynosphinx, now trapped as a ghost and destined to remain bound to her lair until someone could solve her riddles and take all of the treasure she had coveted in life. I added a little to her demeanor since having originally written the adventure, and ran her as a world-weary ghost all but certain that these latest adventurers would fail to free her spirit, just as all of the previous few who had made it this far had in the past. I still remember her improvised dialogue when she first manifested before the PCs (who were more than a little concerned that they were up against a gynosphinx ghost, something <em>way</em> beyond their ability to handle in combat): "So you have entered my tomb, defeated my traps, invaded my final resting place, and now seek to slay me so that you can plunder my vault of a lifetime's collected treasure?" (Short pause.) "Thank the gods, it's about time - I only pray you're successful."</p><p></p><p>Since I didn't want to waste the opportunity to throw a sphinx riddle at my players, and since I had recently written an article on that very subject ("Riddles of the Rhyming Sphinx, <em>Dragon</em> #271), I decided to go whole hog and force each player to solve a riddle - that way, I got to use four riddles instead of just the one. (Because really, how often are PCs going to encounter gynosphinxes over the course of their careers?) Each player had to answer their own riddle, although the ghost allowed them to converse amongst themselves, which allowed Vicki to come up with most of the answers. The riddles correctly answered, the gynosphinx's spirit happily vanished into the afterlife, and the PCs got the creature's amassed loot.</p><p></p><p>As a final little surprise, I had Old Clem - who, as promised, was still waiting for them when they returned from the Rock - sign on as a full-time hireling. He was an excellent fisherman, a halfway decent cook, and he could look after horses fairly well even if he wasn't all that great at riding them. Since Jacob had had his ranger, Chalkan, pay Old Clem the gold piece for his services as a rowboat captain, Old Clem considered himself to be in the direct employ of Chalkan (although later, when we merged the two groups of PCs, Old Clem would generally accompany whoever was going out in the field). I found an image of a happy-looking, toothless old man using Google Images, and that became Old Clem's official initiative card (although he didn't see a whole lot of combat in his illustrious hireling career, as he generally stayed in camp with the horses and whatever animals the PCs didn't want to bring into the adventure site with them).</p><p></p><p>One chamber in the tomb was lit by a whole series of <em>continual flame</em> candles; Feron keeps a bunch of these in her backpack to this day.</p><p></p><p>Finally, somewhere about this time Jacob decided he wanted Chalkan to be able to heal others and turn undead, so he became the first of our PCs to multiclass. He soon learned that it wasn't his brightest move, as Chalkan could now cast cleric spells and turn undead but nowhere near as well as Cal could, and likewise he could be a melee combatant but nowhere near as well as Akari could. That tended to be a bit frustrating for Jacob, who rather enjoyed it when Chalkan was in the spotlight, and here his plans to get more action for Chalkan were having the opposite effect. Still, it was a valuable lesson for a new player, but one that wouldn't quite sink in just yet.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Richards, post: 6034212, member: 508"] [b]ADVENTURE 8 - WHITE QUEEN'S GAMBIT[/b] PC Roster: [INDENT]Akari, human paladin of Hieroneous Chalkan, half-elf ranger Feron Dru, half-elf druid Rale Bodkin, human rogue[/INDENT] "White Queen's Gambit" was an adventure I had originally submitted to [i]Dungeon[/i] only to have it rejected, mostly due to the number of player diagrams it required (which would have eaten up too much of the page count). I later submitted it to Mongoose Publishing's [i]Signs and Portents[/i] magazine (back in the days when that too was still a print magazine) and they printed it in issue #2, but I have to admit that it didn't turn out very well there - they had no more room for the extra player handouts than did [i]Dungeon[/i], so they condensed several of the puzzles involved to the extent that they were pretty much ruined. In any case, I still liked the adventure, and it was very much in the same vein as "Gorgoldand's Gauntlet" - a puzzle-heavy adventure, this time an exploration of the tomb of an entity that long ago called herself the "White Queen," and provided divinations to those who would seek her out. The ruins were located on the inside of a jagged projection of rock half a mile or so from the coast. I knew Vicki had enjoyed the puzzle-solving aspect of "Gorgoldand's Gauntlet," so I thought this would be a good idea for the next adventure. I don't recall the plot hook I used to get the PCs to the sea coast; following a treasure map, no doubt. (Again: beer-and-pretzels game - no heavy thinking involved, although I was slowly starting to think that this campaign could become more than that.) The PCs stopped off at the fishing village within sight of the upthrust rock and hired an old fisherman to row them out there. On a whim, I decided the fisherman's name was [b]Old Clem[/b], and he, being a relatively poor fisherman, was mightily impressed by these obviously powerful adventurers who were hiring him for a day's easy pay. (A solid gold piece just to row them out to the Rock and stay there until they returned, and he could even bring a rod and reel and fish out of the boat while he waited! What a deal!) It took some convincing to assure Dan that I wasn't going to strand the PCs there (again, he had apparently been burned one too many times in his AD&D 1st Edition past by double-crossing NPCs run by adversarial DMs), but they eventually climbed up the rough winding stairs that wound up the outer edge of the Rock, and found the temple at the top where the White Queen had once run her oracle business. They fought a giant praying mantis on the way up, which allowed me to use one of the plastic bugs I'd bought a whole tube full of for a couple of dollars. Once they found the way to the temple's interior (it involved the first of several chess puzzles, which activated a hidden set of stairs leading into the ground below), Vicki proved her puzzle-solving mettle was still going strong, as the party pretty much allowed her PC to figure everything out and they just helped take care of the monsters and traps they encountered along the way. At the end of the adventure, they encountered the White Queen herself: a gynosphinx, now trapped as a ghost and destined to remain bound to her lair until someone could solve her riddles and take all of the treasure she had coveted in life. I added a little to her demeanor since having originally written the adventure, and ran her as a world-weary ghost all but certain that these latest adventurers would fail to free her spirit, just as all of the previous few who had made it this far had in the past. I still remember her improvised dialogue when she first manifested before the PCs (who were more than a little concerned that they were up against a gynosphinx ghost, something [i]way[/i] beyond their ability to handle in combat): "So you have entered my tomb, defeated my traps, invaded my final resting place, and now seek to slay me so that you can plunder my vault of a lifetime's collected treasure?" (Short pause.) "Thank the gods, it's about time - I only pray you're successful." Since I didn't want to waste the opportunity to throw a sphinx riddle at my players, and since I had recently written an article on that very subject ("Riddles of the Rhyming Sphinx, [i]Dragon[/i] #271), I decided to go whole hog and force each player to solve a riddle - that way, I got to use four riddles instead of just the one. (Because really, how often are PCs going to encounter gynosphinxes over the course of their careers?) Each player had to answer their own riddle, although the ghost allowed them to converse amongst themselves, which allowed Vicki to come up with most of the answers. The riddles correctly answered, the gynosphinx's spirit happily vanished into the afterlife, and the PCs got the creature's amassed loot. As a final little surprise, I had Old Clem - who, as promised, was still waiting for them when they returned from the Rock - sign on as a full-time hireling. He was an excellent fisherman, a halfway decent cook, and he could look after horses fairly well even if he wasn't all that great at riding them. Since Jacob had had his ranger, Chalkan, pay Old Clem the gold piece for his services as a rowboat captain, Old Clem considered himself to be in the direct employ of Chalkan (although later, when we merged the two groups of PCs, Old Clem would generally accompany whoever was going out in the field). I found an image of a happy-looking, toothless old man using Google Images, and that became Old Clem's official initiative card (although he didn't see a whole lot of combat in his illustrious hireling career, as he generally stayed in camp with the horses and whatever animals the PCs didn't want to bring into the adventure site with them). One chamber in the tomb was lit by a whole series of [i]continual flame[/i] candles; Feron keeps a bunch of these in her backpack to this day. Finally, somewhere about this time Jacob decided he wanted Chalkan to be able to heal others and turn undead, so he became the first of our PCs to multiclass. He soon learned that it wasn't his brightest move, as Chalkan could now cast cleric spells and turn undead but nowhere near as well as Cal could, and likewise he could be a melee combatant but nowhere near as well as Akari could. That tended to be a bit frustrating for Jacob, who rather enjoyed it when Chalkan was in the spotlight, and here his plans to get more action for Chalkan were having the opposite effect. Still, it was a valuable lesson for a new player, but one that wouldn't quite sink in just yet. [/QUOTE]
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