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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 6037540" data-attributes="member: 508">ADVENTURE 20 - PRISM KEEPPC Roster:  Akari, elven paladin of Hieroneous             Delphyne Babelberi, human witch (wizard)             Mercutio Midas, human cleric of Pelor             Rale Bodkin, human rogue             Slayer, half-orc barbarian"Prism Keep" was another Dungeon adventure - this one from issue #45, and written by Rich Baker (the author who later wrote "Rana Mor" - so it's no wonder I enjoyed both adventures!) - that was on my "I have to run this adventure some day" list.  It involved an archmage's cloud-borne castle and the creatures that had overtaken it during the archmage's incapacitation.I fell in love with this adventure the first time I saw the map of the castle.  It had seven giant prisms jutting up out of it, each one a different color.  When I made the geomorphs for this adventure, I used white posterboard for the "normal" rooms but used colored construction paper for each of the spires, and I was very pleased with the results.  This was written back in the AD&D days, so I made a few slight changes to the monster palette, but nothing serious - I tried to replicate the monsters called for in the adventure with 3E versions, even if I had to create them myself.  (For instance, there's a "hordeling" that shows up late in the adventure - I just had to wing the stats myself, as there were no 3E hordeling stats available.  I could have just replaced the hordeling with a different fiend, but I wanted to keep it as "pure" as possible.)Anyway, the adventure served as a bit of an "interruption" from the PCs' original plans, which was to hightail it back to Greyhawk City as fast as possible to go turn in Kazmira for the reward.  They had "binked" her back to Headquarters using Akari's ring, figuring Gareth could keep her imprisoned until their return (they had even affixed a note to that effect upon her person before "binking" her home).  But now they had this looming castle floating directly overhead, and it was making the nearby townspeople a bit nervous.The crystal that had dropped practically at the PCs' feet turned out to be a way of controlling the castle, as well as granting access to it.  They got Old Clem and the horses securely tucked away at a nearby inn with an attached stable, plunked down enough coinage to pay for a few days (they weren't sure how long it would take them to deal with the castle's inhabitants), and were off.However, this time they had an additional, if temporary, member of their adventuring party.  We ran this adventure over a Christmas break, so not only was Logan back from college (and eager to grab the reins back from Dan and Jacob and run Akari through an adventure), but my older son Stuart was as well.  Stuart and Logan had been through two previous campaigns with me thus far (one was AD&D 2nd Edition, the other started out 3.0 and switched to 3.5 and is still technically crawling along at a snail's pace at the rate of about one adventure every year), but this was the first time that Stuart was available to play in this campaign.  He rolled up a human cleric of Pelor named Mercutio Midas for the event, and it just so happened that Mercutio was staying at the inn that Old Clem had just been tucked into for safety while the rest of the party checked out the floating castle.  Stuart even wrote up an introduction for his character: those of you who have seen the movie version of "V for Vendetta" will recall V's introductory speech to Evey Hammond where just about every other word begins with the letter "V"; Stuart did up something similar, where just about every other word started with "M."Going through the adventure as written went perfectly fine; once again, Rich Baker had done a great job in ensuring a wide variety of monsters.  Jacob even happened to have a Brass Golem D&D Miniature (obviously patterned after the mechanical minotaur from one of the old Sinbad movies - "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger," I believe) that made a perfect stand-in for one of the creatures encountered in the castle's library.  However, we did run into a couple of  problems in integrating Stuart into our campaign.When Stuart had gone away to college, he bought up a full set of 3.0 books (he already had the Player's Handbook) because he fully intended to keep playing D&D while he was away from home, even if it meant DMing himself.  Unfortunately, Stuart's DMing style varied greatly from my own (as reported by none other than Logan, who had run PCs in campaigns run by both of us - it helped that both boys were going to the same college).  Stuart's DMing style was very much in the "I'm the DM and what I say goes" camp, and he was apparently trying to bring some of his own DMing preferences into our game.  For example, there was one point in the adventure when a female human wizard - an apprentice to the fallen archmage - and her summoned demons were at a standoff with the PCs.  She wanted them to surrender peacefully, and they'd be allowed to go free; the PCs were having none of that nonsense, and although it hadn't devolved into violence yet, it was certainly imminent.  Stuart took it upon himself to have Mercutio save the day, by approaching the wizard as if to discuss the situation calmly, at which point he expected to be able to whip out his dagger and slit her throat, instantly killing her with one action.  In real life, he argued, having your throat slit meant instant death, and he was irritated that I wouldn't allow it in my game.  (Oddly enough, I had run into the exact same argument with my brothers decades earlier when running a Gamma World campaign, when they were fighting each other and one brother was ticked that he couldn't just slit the other character's throat in one move and be done with it, regardless of the abstraction of hit point totals and the fact that the combat resolution mechanism in the game didn't support that.)So Mercutio wasn't allowed to bend the rules completely to his favor and "win" D&D, and Stuart was a little sulky after that.  He also played Mercutio "in character" all the time, roleplaying him to the hilt, which was perfectly fine with me although that wasn't the way the rest of the group ran their characters.  The problem arose when Mercutio, after the party had taken down a group of enemies, yelled out (in character) "You just don't F@#$ with us!" - completely disregarding the fact that Joey, all of 4 or 5 at the time, was right there in the room.  (Stuart and I don't see eye to eye about the topic of public swearing and probably never will.  He's firmly in the "They're just words!" camp, whereas I, having raised not only two boys of my own but now raising my wife's nephew, try to have a bit more "situational awareness" about who's around me and what I can say.)  Vicki smoothed it over with a quick, "Whoops!" for Joey's benefit, and Stuart had the good grace to apologize, but I don't think he was particularly happy with the artificial constraints I had on this current campaign, which after all was started for the express purpose of introducing an 8-year-old boy to D&D, and later encompassed his entire family (and half of mine).  Stuart had run an all-evil campaign in college (plus several others: one was based on Roman undead hunters, another was D&D but involved alien abductions, and so on) and I think he found our games a bit too tame for his tastes.Getting back to the adventure, the Archmage's apprentice, Irinia, had been given her own initiative card (a close-up of the image of a woman in a wizard's costume I had found online), because she had teleport on her list of spells and I had written it into my notes that she would teleport out if combat got to be too tough for her, thinking that she would make an excellent recurring foe.  After all, if the PCs managed to foil her plans here, she'd want revenge on them, right?  No such luck - by the time she had decided "That's it for me, next round I'm escaping!" she had been cut down by five PCs before her turn ever came around again.  Which just goes to reinforce a lesson every DM must relearn from time to time: recurring enemies generally aren't chosen in advance; rather, they're the lucky ones who have an opportunity to escape immediately and take it.In any case, by the end of the adventure the PCs had successfully cleaned out the flying castle and revived the Archmage, Alarius.  One of his (still-loyal) assistants informed the PCs that his master needed a restful night's sleep after his recent ordeals, but would reward them in the morning, if they'd like to spend the night in Prism Keep.  And then, just because I hated the idea of wasting an opportunity of being in a cloud castle (which, by the way, had started floating away guided only by the wind during the adventure after the PCs lost access to the control prism), I had the floating castle crash into a cloud island and founder.  The next adventure would involve exploring the cloud island that they had inadvertantly run into.  (However, both Stuart and Logan would be back in college by the time we got to play our next session, so we had Mercutio go his own merry way and put Akari back into "PC run by another player" status.)</blockquote>

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