Ideas for stereotyped hack and slash adventures

[Wraith Form]

I've never been a module person. We never played with them in the old days and I tend to forget stuff I didn't make up myself too easily.

Terrific! Great to see that my suggestion is just casually discarded like so much 'used' toilet paper, without you even bothering to look at a Dungeon Crawl Classic.

Sheesh. *pouts*

 

[Wystan]

I've never been a module person. We never played with them in the old days and I tend to forget stuff I didn't make up myself too easily.

So if you tend to forget stuff you didn't make up yourself, why are you asking for ideas?

Just a friendly Snark as some of the DCC modules are real fun and easy to navigate...

 

[Shadowslayer]

And you don't need much more than that. Hilarious! Nice change from my typical 'Infernal creature enslaves local political authority. Corruption ensues' plots.

heh...well, its all an allusion to Monte Cook's whole "orc and pie" thing.

Actually, a friend of mine ran us through an adventure where the Town Elder had been charmed by a Mind Flayer to turn over the town's accumulated wealth to him via a bunch of Goblins. One of the side-effects of the charm was an uncontrollable craving for cake. (that part was never really explained...he was just a quirky DM)

The Elder literally spent all the tax money importing flour and eggs and stuff and holding huge banquets...because when the Elder ate cake, he didn't like to eat it alone.

Anyway, we took care of things and he was snapped out of it. He issued an edict that no more cake would ever be served within the walls of his town...and there was much rejoicing...especially by he town's lone baker.

So, ever after, every time we completed another quest someone would say "well, let's go back to town and eat some cake"

And eventually we ended up calling ourselves "the Order of the Cake"

I even got myself a miniature knight with shield and tried painting an emblem of a little cake (with candles) on the shield. Alas, my fine-detail painting sucked as much then as it does now, and it ended up as just a plain shield.

So...that goofy enough for ya?

 

[phindar]

The big hack-and-slash game I wanted to run but never did was my DOOM2/D&D crossover. At the time I thought about it I was playing a lot of DOOM2 and D&D, so it made sense to combine them. They even made DOOM minis at one time, though the only ones I ever picked up were a trio of imps and the cyberdemon. I've thought about painting that cyberdemon, but I gave up mini painting years ago. Too much work. I still paint terrain, but you use a different kind of paint.

What were we talking about? Hack-and-slash. While I tend to zone out during dungeon crawls, I do enjoy a good bloodbath. I was running a high level game (for my group, which means 10th level) a couple of summers ago, and every session was about an hour of build-up, three hours of massive, set-piece combat, and then half an hour of looting and xp. The loose premise of that game was dragonslayers, but they didn't spend that much time on dragons. The best combats from that game were the ones that filled the table. Lots of mooks, lots of different monster types, lots of enemies with different tactics. It took a lot of prep to get combats with that many moving parts, but those were the sessions I most enjoyed running and the ones the players seemed to have the most fun at as well.

The other great thing about a short-term, mini-series style game is there's no need to be stingy with anything. Have everybody make two or three back-up characters and throw CR's out the window. "Recommended Wealth by Level?" Screw that, bad guys should be like pinatas, exploding with loot. You want to give a 5th level Paladin a Holy Avenger, put an artifact in every dungeon, steal Vecna's other eye, whatever. You don't have to worry about wrecking the game, because you're only in it for a few months anayway. You can always start over later and be sane. For now, go crazy. No crafting rolls, no boring scenes. High magic, high risk, high reward, hi-octane. Full-tilt boogie.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

For straight up beer and pretzels fun, I'd go with Kobolds Ate My Baby, which is even lower impact than the lightest weight dungeon crawl.

 

[Land Outcast]

You could always use this:
http://www.io.com/~sjohn/plots.htm

some of the plots offered are more involved than a dungeon crawl, but any of those ideas can be used as background for a hack-n-slash game.

 

[Particle_Man]

Well you could always use the "homebrewed Summon Monster" idea where the PC party has been summoned to another plane to fight some beings but something goes wrong and they both gain freedom from their controller and can't yet get home.

Then just pick the planar CR1 bad guys that strike your fancy. Monodrone Modrons, perhaps?

 

[Wraith Form]

For straight up beer and pretzels fun, I'd go with Kobolds Ate My Baby, which is even lower impact than the lightest weight dungeon crawl.

Oh, wait, that's a pre-published adventure. Olive doesn't run those. Scratch that idea.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Oh, wait, that's a pre-published adventure. Olive doesn't run those. Scratch that idea.

It's not a pre-published adventure.

 

[Olive]

It's not a pre-published adventure.

Just a published one I guess.

Some fun ideas in here. I might not do the pie thing after all as my ability to maintain a silly campaign for anytime at all is probably pretty limited by the fact that I'm not really that funny.

My current idea is along the lines of PCs are wondering down a road separately and randomly all encounter some Big Bad doing something. Rather than just kill them the BB charms/dominates them, teleports them across to the other side of the world and geases them to find a multi-parted legendary macguffin and bring it to him. He figures that if they die, no worries, and if they succeed he'll have a macguffin to play with. Then I can use all sorts of weird stuff from my books and do monster-of-the-week without it all getting too silly...