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<blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 6041620" data-attributes="member: 508"><p><strong>ADVENTURE 24 - THE STYES</strong></p><p></p><p>PC Roster: <p style="margin-left: 20px">Akari, elven paladin of Hieroneous</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"> Feron Dru, half-elf druid</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"> Rale Bodkin, human rogue</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"> Slayer, half-orc barbarian</p><p></p><p>"The Styes" is an adventure by Richard Pett from <em>Dungeon</em> #121 that has grown a sort of cult following, and with good reason. It was on my list of "adventures I want to run," and by this time the party was of an appropriate level to send them through it. The Styes is a slum, and as I had mentioned before I had decided that my Greyhawk City was not going to be bound by any constraints of what the standard, out-of-the-box Greyhawk City was supposed to be like. Thus, the Styes became the slum part of the city. The fact that the map of the Styes shows it to be part of a coastal city was no deterrent, as I had previously made my version of Greyhawk City to be a coastal city as well, the better to fit in "War of the Wielded."</p><p></p><p>This adventure write-up won't be in the fiction format of the last three previous posts, in part because I don't want to give too many spoilers away and ruin it for anyone who might wish to run their PCs through the adventure, but also for the more practical reason that I don't recall all of the details. I will say that it brought about the death of Rale Bodkin, who was attacked by a fiendish kraken and devoured. He was later <em>raised</em>, but it left a bad taste in Rale's mouth, and to this day Dan insists that Rale shudders at the mere thought of sushi. As is often the case in D&D, the fact that Rale himself was killed wasn't as big of a disapointment as the fact that all of Rale's gear was left in the belly of the fiendish kraken, and thus was unrecovered. That meant that his <em>luck blade</em> (which he had for reasons I can no longer recall named <em>Liverwurst</em>) was no more. I vowed that in the near future I'd have to write an adventure that featured a quest for a replacement sword for Rale.</p><p></p><p>In the meantime, my penchant for building initiative cards for each of the new monsters (that is, monsters for which I didn't already have an initiative card) in a given adventure was paying off in dividends. I liked the fact that I got to decide what each of the monsters (and important NPCs) looked like, and it came in incredibly handy to thwart a particular bit of metagaming that was going on with Jacob. He had purchased a <em>Monster Manual</em> of his own with some Christmas money he had been given, and was reading up on the various monsters. (He tried doing it during play, but I quickly put a stop to that.) So the fact that there's an encounter in this adventure with some skum really threw everybody for a loop, especially as I never used the term "skum" to describe them, simply referring to them as "fish-men." The fact that I had avoided using the 3.5 <em>Monster Manual</em> illustration of the skum for my initiative card, preferring the Tony DiTerlizzi illustration from the AD&D 2nd Edition <em>Monstrous Manual</em> instead, was throwing poor Jacob into a frenzy. He had never seen the illustration before, and neither had Dan for that matter, since all of his previous (A)D&D gaming had been under 1st Edition. So there was no spouting off "It's a skum, it can do this and that and it's susceptible to this and has so many Hit Dice," which was a nice change. (I often kidded Jacob that if he continued to have his PCs be such "experts" about monster lore I was going to make him spend all of their available skill points on the appropriate Knowledge skills.)</p><p></p><p>This adventure was a rough one for me, miniatures-wise. I didn't have much in the way to accurately represent manticores, save for a few fill-in lions/tigers from a zoo animals set (and heaping helps of imagination). I was able to use some lizardmen minis I had on hand to represent the skum, and scorpions made adequate chuuls, but again, for the fiendish kraken and the aboleths, I had nothing. This may have been the first adventure where I decided that flat tokens were better than nothing, and started printing out appropriately-sized tokens to use in the place of miniatures. Fortunately, I was able to use multiple different images to represent different aboleths, and later took to numbering the individual tokens if I needed to use more than one of the same image. I used to cover the tokens I printed out with the same Con-Tact paper I had been using for my initiative cards, but eventually gave up that practice as well. Now I just print out tokens for any creatures I can't accurately represent, and when I'm done with them I put them in an old check box I keep for that purpose.</p><p></p><p>We did have another casualty in this adventure: Nocturna, Feron's eagle animal companion, was slain attempting to protect his mistress from one of the skum she and the others were fighting. After this adventure was over, she decided to call another eagle animal companion, and named this one <strong>Felix</strong>.</p><p></p><p>Slayer brought Fang along on this adventure, but I recall him still keeping his dire wolf out of combat for the most part. When it came time for Fang's actions, he'd often "snarl and growl and look impressive," but that was pretty much it. Soon after this adventure I had Piddilink Dundernoggin create a pair of gems that could be placed on the forehead of a trained animal and its master, and allowed Slayer and Fang to "field test" them at no cost. The stated purpose was to allow the master to give telepathic directions to his animal companion, but as with most things made by the shortcut-taking gnome, this one had a flaw, one which I held in reserve until the appropriate time to use it.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Richards, post: 6041620, member: 508"] [b]ADVENTURE 24 - THE STYES[/b] PC Roster: [INDENT]Akari, elven paladin of Hieroneous Feron Dru, half-elf druid Rale Bodkin, human rogue Slayer, half-orc barbarian[/INDENT] "The Styes" is an adventure by Richard Pett from [i]Dungeon[/i] #121 that has grown a sort of cult following, and with good reason. It was on my list of "adventures I want to run," and by this time the party was of an appropriate level to send them through it. The Styes is a slum, and as I had mentioned before I had decided that my Greyhawk City was not going to be bound by any constraints of what the standard, out-of-the-box Greyhawk City was supposed to be like. Thus, the Styes became the slum part of the city. The fact that the map of the Styes shows it to be part of a coastal city was no deterrent, as I had previously made my version of Greyhawk City to be a coastal city as well, the better to fit in "War of the Wielded." This adventure write-up won't be in the fiction format of the last three previous posts, in part because I don't want to give too many spoilers away and ruin it for anyone who might wish to run their PCs through the adventure, but also for the more practical reason that I don't recall all of the details. I will say that it brought about the death of Rale Bodkin, who was attacked by a fiendish kraken and devoured. He was later [i]raised[/i], but it left a bad taste in Rale's mouth, and to this day Dan insists that Rale shudders at the mere thought of sushi. As is often the case in D&D, the fact that Rale himself was killed wasn't as big of a disapointment as the fact that all of Rale's gear was left in the belly of the fiendish kraken, and thus was unrecovered. That meant that his [i]luck blade[/i] (which he had for reasons I can no longer recall named [i]Liverwurst[/i]) was no more. I vowed that in the near future I'd have to write an adventure that featured a quest for a replacement sword for Rale. In the meantime, my penchant for building initiative cards for each of the new monsters (that is, monsters for which I didn't already have an initiative card) in a given adventure was paying off in dividends. I liked the fact that I got to decide what each of the monsters (and important NPCs) looked like, and it came in incredibly handy to thwart a particular bit of metagaming that was going on with Jacob. He had purchased a [i]Monster Manual[/i] of his own with some Christmas money he had been given, and was reading up on the various monsters. (He tried doing it during play, but I quickly put a stop to that.) So the fact that there's an encounter in this adventure with some skum really threw everybody for a loop, especially as I never used the term "skum" to describe them, simply referring to them as "fish-men." The fact that I had avoided using the 3.5 [i]Monster Manual[/i] illustration of the skum for my initiative card, preferring the Tony DiTerlizzi illustration from the AD&D 2nd Edition [i]Monstrous Manual[/i] instead, was throwing poor Jacob into a frenzy. He had never seen the illustration before, and neither had Dan for that matter, since all of his previous (A)D&D gaming had been under 1st Edition. So there was no spouting off "It's a skum, it can do this and that and it's susceptible to this and has so many Hit Dice," which was a nice change. (I often kidded Jacob that if he continued to have his PCs be such "experts" about monster lore I was going to make him spend all of their available skill points on the appropriate Knowledge skills.) This adventure was a rough one for me, miniatures-wise. I didn't have much in the way to accurately represent manticores, save for a few fill-in lions/tigers from a zoo animals set (and heaping helps of imagination). I was able to use some lizardmen minis I had on hand to represent the skum, and scorpions made adequate chuuls, but again, for the fiendish kraken and the aboleths, I had nothing. This may have been the first adventure where I decided that flat tokens were better than nothing, and started printing out appropriately-sized tokens to use in the place of miniatures. Fortunately, I was able to use multiple different images to represent different aboleths, and later took to numbering the individual tokens if I needed to use more than one of the same image. I used to cover the tokens I printed out with the same Con-Tact paper I had been using for my initiative cards, but eventually gave up that practice as well. Now I just print out tokens for any creatures I can't accurately represent, and when I'm done with them I put them in an old check box I keep for that purpose. We did have another casualty in this adventure: Nocturna, Feron's eagle animal companion, was slain attempting to protect his mistress from one of the skum she and the others were fighting. After this adventure was over, she decided to call another eagle animal companion, and named this one [b]Felix[/b]. Slayer brought Fang along on this adventure, but I recall him still keeping his dire wolf out of combat for the most part. When it came time for Fang's actions, he'd often "snarl and growl and look impressive," but that was pretty much it. Soon after this adventure I had Piddilink Dundernoggin create a pair of gems that could be placed on the forehead of a trained animal and its master, and allowed Slayer and Fang to "field test" them at no cost. The stated purpose was to allow the master to give telepathic directions to his animal companion, but as with most things made by the shortcut-taking gnome, this one had a flaw, one which I held in reserve until the appropriate time to use it. [/QUOTE]
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