der_kluge
Adventurer
(warning, long rambly thread ahead)
Round Robin GM’ing – A synopsis
So, at Gen Con, I scheduled two “official” games of Round-Robin GM’ing, and organized two non-official ENWorld pick-up games of Round Robin. Each game was quite different, but all were quite enjoyable. What follows is some of my observations of this game having run it now multiple times at various conventions and for friends. Also included is a brief description of the actual plots used, which are interesting to say the least.
The Thursday and Friday games were official Round-Robin games. The games themselves were advertised requiring “mature” “18+” players who “were comfortable DM’ing 3rd edition D&D”, which is the system of choice for Round-Robin, since it’s pretty much universally known, though it can be ran using any rules set.
Thursday’s Game
The players I got for these games were generally of a high caliber. Thursday’s game was 6 players total. We randomly made 7th level characters. We had a Halfling paladin with a German accent, and a wardog named Blitzkrieg, a female sorcerer, a human rogue, and I can’t honestly remember what else. One player rolled a 5 and bravely assigned it as his constitution. He made the rogue – with 13 hit points. We rolled the dice, and as luck would have it, I started the game. I had the idea of a wizard coercing the characters into stealing something for them. I decided to introduce a macguffin right away. The players started in an alley, having just escaped from guards who kept calling them thieves and bandits. To the surprise of the rogue, he found something – a pulsating red cube – in his pocket, and he didn’t know how it had come to be there. Immediately, a concealed door opened, revealing a fat man in a pompadour hat who tells them about a wizard who has likely used magic on them to coerce them into stealing something, from who he does not know. This man wished their help in stopping this wizard, since he had been a thorn in his side. His associate “Ralph” could assist them by acting as a guide through tunnels in the city. From there, the players find some lazy guards, and accost them to try to get out the information of who had accused them of theft. Turns out, it was another wizard, an elven wizard who was as old as the town. Eventually, we made our way to his tower, where we decided the best course of action was to return his cube. He was angry, but received his cube, and when we asked for his help in dealing with the others, he left and said there would be some sort of test. He also called the cube by its name, calling it the “ghost cube”. He left, shut the door, and left us to ponder what was going on. A short while later, there was a huge explosion, and it threw the wizard into our room, horribly wounded. The cube now rest near the exploded doorway, and it began to issue forth large volumes of seawater, which seemed to “eat” away at the floor, since where the water was, it was much deeper than just on the surface, as a thrown javelin had revealed. A man emerged from the cube, and laughed and said that he was finally free and then promptly fled with the cube. Now, it’s important to note that the other wizard in this story was identified as a gnome, and this wasn’t a gnome. We evacuated, and took the wizard with us. His building crumbled into ruins behind us, we fled back into the tunnels beneath the city, and we woke him up. Of course, he was mighty upset that his tower had now collapsed, but was more upset that this man was freed from his cube. He explained to us that the cube was a prison used to store some sort of ghostly pirate ship, and now that it was free – of course we were all doomed, and the city would be destroyed. Meanwhile, the town is now totally flooding with water. Not phased by this, we acquire a beer wagon and paddle our way to the other wizard’s tower. At this point, from inside a fog bank, cannons ring out, and buildings on the perimeter of town begin falling down. Nice. We make our way to the tower, a sizable structure with a window up high. Several folks attempt to climb the window, and some succeed, only to find a flesh golem inside. Others manage to swim down and into the doorway, and make their way up to the others, fighting a mimic who explodes into a room full of underwear once it is destroyed. Meeting up, the party makes their way to the wizard’s chamber. At this point, we decided maybe he wasn’t a gnome, but that maybe his name was “thanome”, since his race had apparently changed somewhere along the way. We found him at the top, laughing maniacally at the top with his cube, and then undead pirates showed up to protect him once we showed up. The rogue, with a death wish, attempted to shove the wizard out the window. He had to tumble past two sets of guards to do it. The first set hit him, taking him to 5 hit points, but he managed to squeeze by the next set with ease - then came the 20 on the grapple check! The wizard grew wings (?) and the rogue hung by his feet on the outside of the window. The next player attempted to shoot the wizard with an arrow, missed, and hit the rogue – taking him to -1. The rogue then fell into the ocean waters, and incurred an additional 8 points, taking him to -9. The monk, fearing his buddy might die, jumped out to save him on the following round. “roll a 10 to stabilize on a 1d10” the GM said, and the rogue rolled a 10. We just couldn’t kill this guy!! I can’t honestly remember if we killed the wizard or not. I think someone took a called shot on the cube, and it was either destroyed, or fell into the water.
Friday’s Game
Friday’s game was 5 players, and I was quite a bit more tired, and I don’t feel like I had engaged the players as much as I had done on Friday. Thusly, I failed to mention the idea of introducing a macguffin early on (which often helps drive the plot quite a bit), and a BBEG (which obviously gives the whole thing a point, right?). So, this time we made 6th level characters. I made a bard, and there was a human cleric of “Hercules”, and I can’t remember what everyone else was. The guy next to me started it, and we started out on a road, headed towards a castle. This castle apparently belonged to some ancient elven lord named Black Leaf, I think (no relation to the dead rogue). This game essentially turned into a dungeon crawl. We initially fought a ettercap in the forest, and then made our way inside, where we fought some zombies, and freed some ogres, who spoke of a back entrance. A lot of stairs and rooms kept us on our toes trying to make sure we didn’t violate the 3 dimensions and somehow put something where it couldn’t go. Me and another guy bickered on symmetry versus asymmetry. It was funny. In a garden courtyard, we met a vision of a scene unfolding between an elven lord and an elven maiden who was apparently pleading with him. The conversation turned ugly, and eventually he stabbed her. The water in the fountain then poured with blood, but once the visage was gone, the fountain was crystal blue once again. Searching the ground, the players found a necklace, and a mother of pearl ring. I had made a vain attempt at adding in some macguffins, but ultimately neither was used. We proceeded on to a room full of over a hundred small beds. Each bed had a name plate, and the name plates were found in a desk drawer. When my character attempted to replace the name tags (which were numbered) to each bed, I could hear the sounds of children. Frightened, but persistent, I finished the job, and then we were promptly beset upon by a swarm of ghostly children things. Not pretty. We finally managed to kill them, and the others told me not to do that again. Heading into a basement, we found a room with vats of water. Looking in the vats, we find several small elven fetuses swimming around. Niiice. Apparently these are incorporeal fetuses as well, since our weapons went right through them. We met a man in here, who didn’t bother to stick around, and left. We then searched the entire castle with a GM handwave, finding nothing of great interest until we managed to get to the top where we fought a mummy. Mummies have to be the toughest CR 5 creature in the world, and I think it killed half our party before we killed it, then we ran out of time.
Friday night’s game
Friday night, after the Ennies, I got Crothian, Justinian, and SteveJung to play a game. Glassjaw and Carlzog were going to join, but they wussed out and went to sleep instead.
This time we made 5th level characters. I made a stoic human fighter with a bastard sword. Justinian had a Halfling cleric of Kord, Crothian made a obtrusive, blunt gnome rogue, I believe. Steve made a wizard. At one point, Justinian pointed out that his character had 400 feet of rope. “You do realize that that weighs 40 pounds”, I told him. We decided that instead of armor, he wore a bulky sweater. Crothian kept telling him that no matter how much rope he had, the next chasm was going to be that wide +1.
Anyway, SteveJung started, and he described a curious disagreement between the church of Kord and the church of St. Cuthbert. The high priest of Kord asked us to speak to the church of St. Cuthbert, who had apparently gotten some kind of restraining order against the church of Kord. We kept getting the run-around by some acolytes, but eventually we found our way to the dwarven high priest, whose eyes turned red, and then attacked our party. We killed him, and then killed one of the acolytes too, since his eyes also turned red. A window in his room activated some sort of spell, and an apparition of a visage of Cuthbert showed up, but we dispelled it with a dispel magic. The other acolyte ran and called out “murderers” and we busted out the window, and fled outside. We went back to the church of Kord, and stayed in their wine cellar for the night, plotting our next move while the priests divined our next action. In the morning, it was decided that we would travel east to the mountains to where the priests of Cuthbert had been to see what they had encountered. Obviously, it had affected them in some negative way. We made our way out there and found a village of gnomes, who recognized Crothian’s character as an outcast, but we stuck by him, and we hired a guide to lead us where the others had gone. He helped us avoid some goblin camps, and took us to a lava tube in the side of the mountain. Some dwarven runes on the wall helped guide our way, and we followed the maze-like tubes for some distance, leading into a large cavern. From there, we found a hole that led down some 400 feet – just enough for a feather fall, or for our rope. We decided to tie off our rope in case we needed it for an exit, and we used feather fall to get to the bottom. At the bottom, we found a most curious thing – some lava fall that was in a stasis, and wasn’t terribly hot to be near. There was also a freakish face sticking out of the side of it, sort of like Han Solo, and it didn’t seem real. We prodded over this thing for some time. Justinian very nearly fell into a bottomless pit nearby, but managed to avoid it. Eventually my character started poking at it with pointy objects. That’s when PirateCat showed up. Crothian mercilessly passed to PC who’d gotten a quick scoop of what was going on, and brought in his own pc, a Halfling cleric, who decided I was a knight. And then I started attacking the face, and it started screaming at me, taunting me even, “more, give me more, yes!” So, I obliged. It wasn’t until the thing got huge, busted out of his lava prison, and had managed to trample the Halfling, charm my character (who was then freed from said charm) that I decided I needed to stop wailing on it. Cure spells seemed to piss it off, and other spells and arrows cast at it were redirected towards other people. It resembled a giant tick with tentacles and a human face. Eventually Justinian’s character managed to grapple the thing, and drag it into the bottomless pit where he cast featherfall on himself. But alas, we had no rope, and wouldn’t have been able to get to it in time. So, his character literally lived and died by the rope.
There’s a lesson there – if you think rope is handy, make sure your friends have some.
Saturday’s game
Saturday’s pick up game consisted of myself, Ethernaut (a good friend of Cthulhu’s Librarian), Pielerinho, Buttercup, Elephant, and Spider. I needed to eat some dinner, so I asked them to make a 5th, 6th, or 7th level cleric, since I had those handy. That seemed agreeable, so they decided on 5th. When I came back, I ended up giving my sorcerer and my bard to Elephant and Buttercup who reworked them slightly, and I found an older cloistered cleric I had from a campaign I was in. He was 6th, but I revised him to 5th. Ethernaut was a paladin, Pielerinho made a glaive-wielding trip-expert fighter. Buttercup made a “homely” female bard with a beautiful voice. Elephant made a gnome sorcerer. Spider was a monk/fighter, or a monk/rogue, I forget. We rolled off, and Buttercup lost, but just couldn’t bring herself to start a game from scratch (it’s not easy!), so since I rolled second lowest, I started. Spider had described his character as a street thug, with a bad nose which had been broken a lot. We called him “the nose”, which we did, since his real name was unpronounceable. Anyway, “the nose” was describing a recent incident at a brothel in which he was having sexual relations with a whore when she promptly became possessed by a demon, eyes ablaze, and then died. He fled, and decided his friends might like to investigate. Indeed they did. They convinced the madam that they *all* wanted to be part of the show, and she allowed them in “Linda’s” room. There, they found the scene as described – naked, dead hooker on the bed in a small room. Shortly thereafter, the whore started shaking violently, and she exploded, sending blood and entrails all over the entire place, which were promptly revealed as runic symbols. Casting a read magic, the sorcerer could tell that it was some sort of high level conjuration spell. They tried cleaning it up with prestidigitation, but it didn’t react to the spell. The fighter grabbed a towel and tried to clean it, who was promptly charmed and spoke a grave prophecy to the party. Shortly thereafter, some men were heard outside asking about the room, and we deduced that they must be cultists. A battle ensued, and one of the cultists was slain, and the other was captured. He shouted that we demon-worshippers wouldn’t get away with it, that the order of the iron dagger would stop us. Oops, apparently these were good guys. Ouch. We made amends, and he told us of a grave omen that involved a goddess of fertility, and that we needed to seek out the crystal blood shaft (nice), but there wasn’t much time. This man told us of a demon named the Redeemer who had been trying to return to the mortal realms using a pure innocent person as a host, and normally was found in orphanages and the like. So, we headed to the mountains, where we encountered a yuan-ti (I guess??) and some flying snakes (stirge stats). We managed to kill all of them, and then rested for the night. In the morning, the gnome was gone, and we remembered that we didn’t bother to take a watch. We followed enormous footprints back to a lair, where the bard had heard of a legend of a giant in the area. With a clairvoyance, we found the giant in his lair getting a little drunk, and the gnome tied up. The bard went in invisible, and botched a couple of move silently checks. Informed of trouble, the paladin and the fighter charged in. A battle ensued, and meanwhile the bard freed the unconscious gnome from the rope. In the battle, the giant proceeded to hand our asses to us on a silver platter, and in one round took the paladin from 44 to 4 hit points. The fighter challenged the drunk giant to a drinking contest, and with a good bluff check, the giant obliged. We’d dealt it a harsh blow, too, and it wasn’t interested in sustaining further damage. The fighter then proceeded to slight-of-hand two vials – one of a flask of acid, and another of a CLW potion. He gave the giant the acid, who didn’t like it much, but not wishing to admit defeat, took up the challenge again. Again, the giant was aching, but was too tough to admit defeat. “Let’s raise the stakes”, the fighter challenged, and produced a flask of alchemical fire for the giant this time. After burping up some smoke, the giant admitted defeat, and we fled the giant’s lair! Finally, a few days later, we made our way up to a temple at the top of the mountain where we could hear a baby being born. The omens were pointing to the time being right, so we hurried up the path. Then we could hear shrieks from the maidens, and we found a demonic elven baby now flying around with a scaly umbilical cord. At the end of this cord was a large eyeball. We’d been told that holy water would defeat it, so we had plenty on hand. It attacked us, but not very successfully, and we handed it a sound defeat. Reacting quickly, the fighter grabbed the falling baby on the flat of his glaive, and swooped it over to the elven maiden and said “You’ve got a beautiful baby”. Great ending!
Round Robin GM’ing – A synopsis
So, at Gen Con, I scheduled two “official” games of Round-Robin GM’ing, and organized two non-official ENWorld pick-up games of Round Robin. Each game was quite different, but all were quite enjoyable. What follows is some of my observations of this game having run it now multiple times at various conventions and for friends. Also included is a brief description of the actual plots used, which are interesting to say the least.
The Thursday and Friday games were official Round-Robin games. The games themselves were advertised requiring “mature” “18+” players who “were comfortable DM’ing 3rd edition D&D”, which is the system of choice for Round-Robin, since it’s pretty much universally known, though it can be ran using any rules set.
Thursday’s Game
The players I got for these games were generally of a high caliber. Thursday’s game was 6 players total. We randomly made 7th level characters. We had a Halfling paladin with a German accent, and a wardog named Blitzkrieg, a female sorcerer, a human rogue, and I can’t honestly remember what else. One player rolled a 5 and bravely assigned it as his constitution. He made the rogue – with 13 hit points. We rolled the dice, and as luck would have it, I started the game. I had the idea of a wizard coercing the characters into stealing something for them. I decided to introduce a macguffin right away. The players started in an alley, having just escaped from guards who kept calling them thieves and bandits. To the surprise of the rogue, he found something – a pulsating red cube – in his pocket, and he didn’t know how it had come to be there. Immediately, a concealed door opened, revealing a fat man in a pompadour hat who tells them about a wizard who has likely used magic on them to coerce them into stealing something, from who he does not know. This man wished their help in stopping this wizard, since he had been a thorn in his side. His associate “Ralph” could assist them by acting as a guide through tunnels in the city. From there, the players find some lazy guards, and accost them to try to get out the information of who had accused them of theft. Turns out, it was another wizard, an elven wizard who was as old as the town. Eventually, we made our way to his tower, where we decided the best course of action was to return his cube. He was angry, but received his cube, and when we asked for his help in dealing with the others, he left and said there would be some sort of test. He also called the cube by its name, calling it the “ghost cube”. He left, shut the door, and left us to ponder what was going on. A short while later, there was a huge explosion, and it threw the wizard into our room, horribly wounded. The cube now rest near the exploded doorway, and it began to issue forth large volumes of seawater, which seemed to “eat” away at the floor, since where the water was, it was much deeper than just on the surface, as a thrown javelin had revealed. A man emerged from the cube, and laughed and said that he was finally free and then promptly fled with the cube. Now, it’s important to note that the other wizard in this story was identified as a gnome, and this wasn’t a gnome. We evacuated, and took the wizard with us. His building crumbled into ruins behind us, we fled back into the tunnels beneath the city, and we woke him up. Of course, he was mighty upset that his tower had now collapsed, but was more upset that this man was freed from his cube. He explained to us that the cube was a prison used to store some sort of ghostly pirate ship, and now that it was free – of course we were all doomed, and the city would be destroyed. Meanwhile, the town is now totally flooding with water. Not phased by this, we acquire a beer wagon and paddle our way to the other wizard’s tower. At this point, from inside a fog bank, cannons ring out, and buildings on the perimeter of town begin falling down. Nice. We make our way to the tower, a sizable structure with a window up high. Several folks attempt to climb the window, and some succeed, only to find a flesh golem inside. Others manage to swim down and into the doorway, and make their way up to the others, fighting a mimic who explodes into a room full of underwear once it is destroyed. Meeting up, the party makes their way to the wizard’s chamber. At this point, we decided maybe he wasn’t a gnome, but that maybe his name was “thanome”, since his race had apparently changed somewhere along the way. We found him at the top, laughing maniacally at the top with his cube, and then undead pirates showed up to protect him once we showed up. The rogue, with a death wish, attempted to shove the wizard out the window. He had to tumble past two sets of guards to do it. The first set hit him, taking him to 5 hit points, but he managed to squeeze by the next set with ease - then came the 20 on the grapple check! The wizard grew wings (?) and the rogue hung by his feet on the outside of the window. The next player attempted to shoot the wizard with an arrow, missed, and hit the rogue – taking him to -1. The rogue then fell into the ocean waters, and incurred an additional 8 points, taking him to -9. The monk, fearing his buddy might die, jumped out to save him on the following round. “roll a 10 to stabilize on a 1d10” the GM said, and the rogue rolled a 10. We just couldn’t kill this guy!! I can’t honestly remember if we killed the wizard or not. I think someone took a called shot on the cube, and it was either destroyed, or fell into the water.
Friday’s Game
Friday’s game was 5 players, and I was quite a bit more tired, and I don’t feel like I had engaged the players as much as I had done on Friday. Thusly, I failed to mention the idea of introducing a macguffin early on (which often helps drive the plot quite a bit), and a BBEG (which obviously gives the whole thing a point, right?). So, this time we made 6th level characters. I made a bard, and there was a human cleric of “Hercules”, and I can’t remember what everyone else was. The guy next to me started it, and we started out on a road, headed towards a castle. This castle apparently belonged to some ancient elven lord named Black Leaf, I think (no relation to the dead rogue). This game essentially turned into a dungeon crawl. We initially fought a ettercap in the forest, and then made our way inside, where we fought some zombies, and freed some ogres, who spoke of a back entrance. A lot of stairs and rooms kept us on our toes trying to make sure we didn’t violate the 3 dimensions and somehow put something where it couldn’t go. Me and another guy bickered on symmetry versus asymmetry. It was funny. In a garden courtyard, we met a vision of a scene unfolding between an elven lord and an elven maiden who was apparently pleading with him. The conversation turned ugly, and eventually he stabbed her. The water in the fountain then poured with blood, but once the visage was gone, the fountain was crystal blue once again. Searching the ground, the players found a necklace, and a mother of pearl ring. I had made a vain attempt at adding in some macguffins, but ultimately neither was used. We proceeded on to a room full of over a hundred small beds. Each bed had a name plate, and the name plates were found in a desk drawer. When my character attempted to replace the name tags (which were numbered) to each bed, I could hear the sounds of children. Frightened, but persistent, I finished the job, and then we were promptly beset upon by a swarm of ghostly children things. Not pretty. We finally managed to kill them, and the others told me not to do that again. Heading into a basement, we found a room with vats of water. Looking in the vats, we find several small elven fetuses swimming around. Niiice. Apparently these are incorporeal fetuses as well, since our weapons went right through them. We met a man in here, who didn’t bother to stick around, and left. We then searched the entire castle with a GM handwave, finding nothing of great interest until we managed to get to the top where we fought a mummy. Mummies have to be the toughest CR 5 creature in the world, and I think it killed half our party before we killed it, then we ran out of time.
Friday night’s game
Friday night, after the Ennies, I got Crothian, Justinian, and SteveJung to play a game. Glassjaw and Carlzog were going to join, but they wussed out and went to sleep instead.
This time we made 5th level characters. I made a stoic human fighter with a bastard sword. Justinian had a Halfling cleric of Kord, Crothian made a obtrusive, blunt gnome rogue, I believe. Steve made a wizard. At one point, Justinian pointed out that his character had 400 feet of rope. “You do realize that that weighs 40 pounds”, I told him. We decided that instead of armor, he wore a bulky sweater. Crothian kept telling him that no matter how much rope he had, the next chasm was going to be that wide +1.Anyway, SteveJung started, and he described a curious disagreement between the church of Kord and the church of St. Cuthbert. The high priest of Kord asked us to speak to the church of St. Cuthbert, who had apparently gotten some kind of restraining order against the church of Kord. We kept getting the run-around by some acolytes, but eventually we found our way to the dwarven high priest, whose eyes turned red, and then attacked our party. We killed him, and then killed one of the acolytes too, since his eyes also turned red. A window in his room activated some sort of spell, and an apparition of a visage of Cuthbert showed up, but we dispelled it with a dispel magic. The other acolyte ran and called out “murderers” and we busted out the window, and fled outside. We went back to the church of Kord, and stayed in their wine cellar for the night, plotting our next move while the priests divined our next action. In the morning, it was decided that we would travel east to the mountains to where the priests of Cuthbert had been to see what they had encountered. Obviously, it had affected them in some negative way. We made our way out there and found a village of gnomes, who recognized Crothian’s character as an outcast, but we stuck by him, and we hired a guide to lead us where the others had gone. He helped us avoid some goblin camps, and took us to a lava tube in the side of the mountain. Some dwarven runes on the wall helped guide our way, and we followed the maze-like tubes for some distance, leading into a large cavern. From there, we found a hole that led down some 400 feet – just enough for a feather fall, or for our rope. We decided to tie off our rope in case we needed it for an exit, and we used feather fall to get to the bottom. At the bottom, we found a most curious thing – some lava fall that was in a stasis, and wasn’t terribly hot to be near. There was also a freakish face sticking out of the side of it, sort of like Han Solo, and it didn’t seem real. We prodded over this thing for some time. Justinian very nearly fell into a bottomless pit nearby, but managed to avoid it. Eventually my character started poking at it with pointy objects. That’s when PirateCat showed up. Crothian mercilessly passed to PC who’d gotten a quick scoop of what was going on, and brought in his own pc, a Halfling cleric, who decided I was a knight. And then I started attacking the face, and it started screaming at me, taunting me even, “more, give me more, yes!” So, I obliged. It wasn’t until the thing got huge, busted out of his lava prison, and had managed to trample the Halfling, charm my character (who was then freed from said charm) that I decided I needed to stop wailing on it. Cure spells seemed to piss it off, and other spells and arrows cast at it were redirected towards other people. It resembled a giant tick with tentacles and a human face. Eventually Justinian’s character managed to grapple the thing, and drag it into the bottomless pit where he cast featherfall on himself. But alas, we had no rope, and wouldn’t have been able to get to it in time. So, his character literally lived and died by the rope.
There’s a lesson there – if you think rope is handy, make sure your friends have some. Saturday’s game
Saturday’s pick up game consisted of myself, Ethernaut (a good friend of Cthulhu’s Librarian), Pielerinho, Buttercup, Elephant, and Spider. I needed to eat some dinner, so I asked them to make a 5th, 6th, or 7th level cleric, since I had those handy. That seemed agreeable, so they decided on 5th. When I came back, I ended up giving my sorcerer and my bard to Elephant and Buttercup who reworked them slightly, and I found an older cloistered cleric I had from a campaign I was in. He was 6th, but I revised him to 5th. Ethernaut was a paladin, Pielerinho made a glaive-wielding trip-expert fighter. Buttercup made a “homely” female bard with a beautiful voice. Elephant made a gnome sorcerer. Spider was a monk/fighter, or a monk/rogue, I forget. We rolled off, and Buttercup lost, but just couldn’t bring herself to start a game from scratch (it’s not easy!), so since I rolled second lowest, I started. Spider had described his character as a street thug, with a bad nose which had been broken a lot. We called him “the nose”, which we did, since his real name was unpronounceable.
Anyway, “the nose” was describing a recent incident at a brothel in which he was having sexual relations with a whore when she promptly became possessed by a demon, eyes ablaze, and then died. He fled, and decided his friends might like to investigate. Indeed they did. They convinced the madam that they *all* wanted to be part of the show, and she allowed them in “Linda’s” room. There, they found the scene as described – naked, dead hooker on the bed in a small room. Shortly thereafter, the whore started shaking violently, and she exploded, sending blood and entrails all over the entire place, which were promptly revealed as runic symbols. Casting a read magic, the sorcerer could tell that it was some sort of high level conjuration spell. They tried cleaning it up with prestidigitation, but it didn’t react to the spell. The fighter grabbed a towel and tried to clean it, who was promptly charmed and spoke a grave prophecy to the party. Shortly thereafter, some men were heard outside asking about the room, and we deduced that they must be cultists. A battle ensued, and one of the cultists was slain, and the other was captured. He shouted that we demon-worshippers wouldn’t get away with it, that the order of the iron dagger would stop us. Oops, apparently these were good guys. Ouch. We made amends, and he told us of a grave omen that involved a goddess of fertility, and that we needed to seek out the crystal blood shaft (nice), but there wasn’t much time. This man told us of a demon named the Redeemer who had been trying to return to the mortal realms using a pure innocent person as a host, and normally was found in orphanages and the like. So, we headed to the mountains, where we encountered a yuan-ti (I guess??) and some flying snakes (stirge stats). We managed to kill all of them, and then rested for the night. In the morning, the gnome was gone, and we remembered that we didn’t bother to take a watch. We followed enormous footprints back to a lair, where the bard had heard of a legend of a giant in the area. With a clairvoyance, we found the giant in his lair getting a little drunk, and the gnome tied up. The bard went in invisible, and botched a couple of move silently checks. Informed of trouble, the paladin and the fighter charged in. A battle ensued, and meanwhile the bard freed the unconscious gnome from the rope. In the battle, the giant proceeded to hand our asses to us on a silver platter, and in one round took the paladin from 44 to 4 hit points. The fighter challenged the drunk giant to a drinking contest, and with a good bluff check, the giant obliged. We’d dealt it a harsh blow, too, and it wasn’t interested in sustaining further damage. The fighter then proceeded to slight-of-hand two vials – one of a flask of acid, and another of a CLW potion. He gave the giant the acid, who didn’t like it much, but not wishing to admit defeat, took up the challenge again. Again, the giant was aching, but was too tough to admit defeat. “Let’s raise the stakes”, the fighter challenged, and produced a flask of alchemical fire for the giant this time. After burping up some smoke, the giant admitted defeat, and we fled the giant’s lair! Finally, a few days later, we made our way up to a temple at the top of the mountain where we could hear a baby being born. The omens were pointing to the time being right, so we hurried up the path. Then we could hear shrieks from the maidens, and we found a demonic elven baby now flying around with a scaly umbilical cord. At the end of this cord was a large eyeball. We’d been told that holy water would defeat it, so we had plenty on hand. It attacked us, but not very successfully, and we handed it a sound defeat. Reacting quickly, the fighter grabbed the falling baby on the flat of his glaive, and swooped it over to the elven maiden and said “You’ve got a beautiful baby”. Great ending!
