World's Largest Dungeon in actual play [Spoilers!]

[BlueBlackRed]

I've been following your blog and am quite impressed at the level of detail of the combats you get in there. I've been writing up session diaries from my own campaigns for a while now and unless I take a few notes and write up a rough draft fairly soon after the session, I have trouble remembering who did what to whom and how and when...
I'll say it again --- you do a really good job on the wld blog. It makes me wish my player's characters were of higher level so I could toss some Liches and Mohrgs at them.

Thanks!
My recall isn't quite perfect, but I get the best of it in there.
Like you, I forget more and more after a while. The combat with the lich probably had a couple more rounds in it than I remembered, but nothing of interest happened in those rounds.

I've got an MP3 player with recording ability. I figure with what I'm doing with the World Eater, Tyrus, and the upcoming Invistis fight, I'm going to need it to help keep things straight.

 

[John Gaunt]

OT: Hastings = WLD in Clearance Racks

This post is off-topic, but if anyone running the WLD needs a second copy of it, visit a Hastings near you ASAP. The WLD is in their clearance racks for $9.99. The remainder mark is on the shrinkwrap and not the book itself. I hope my wife doesn't kill me when she sees the SRP of it.

I suspect that most Hastings have it, because two years ago I saw the same general selection of clearance books in both Greenvile, Texas and Billings, Montana. Granted, that's only a sample of two, but Hastings is a chain.

Get to the Greenville, TX, location before I snag the remaining 4 or 5 copies for eBay.

(Hastings is a chain CD/DVD/Software/Videogame/Bookstore located in the United States.)

 

[Hussar]

Well, my guys found the three elven corpses past the masher room in Region B. I figured that they somehow came into the region from F. With that in mind, I whipped up another map fragment for the party with some warnings. I hope that this will entice them to better organize their movement. Considering the map fragment actually has a pretty direct route through F into G, it might actually work.

On a side note, despite a warning from an ally and the evidence of several sessions, my guys set off EVERY TRAP in the Celestial region of B. Three dead PC's, all by the same player. Sigh.

Take a look at this:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v79/Fuiche/dungeondressing/Elvenmapfragment.gif

and tell me what you think.

 

[Qwillion]

Nature's wrath

I was having such a fit about bland posions and diseases in the d20 system, well I just got a product to reveiw for d20 magazine rack called Nature's Wrath (the 3.5 version), If you plan to run region i, you should buy this book. It has additional rules for symptoms and conditions rather than just plain old ability damage.

when I finish the review I will post the appropriate links here.

 

[jim pinto]

I was having such a fit about bland posions and diseases in the d20 system, well I just got a product to reveiw for d20 magazine rack called Nature's Wrath (the 3.5 version), If you plan to run region i, you should buy this book. It has additional rules for symptoms and conditions rather than just plain old ability damage.

when I finish the review I will post the appropriate links here.

i was just about to say, the board has been awfully quiet...

this product sounds perfect for region i

yeah. one of my complaints was that d20 couldn't really capture what this region was about. all it does it zap your stats over and over again. and the region needs to feel opppressive and scary in a different way....

cancerous legions and foot fungus and crotch rot

..... hey! there's a great new book. d20 crotch rot.

 

[Traevanon]

I dont have any developments at the moment because the party is going through the sub-dungeon I added. Its kinda funny, the party always knows they have left the regular WLD when the dungeon turns vertical instead of horizontal. The last one was a snake pit with downward levels, this one is a tower.

The party is just getting into the meat of the plot. It will probably be about 3-4 more sessions before they leave the tower and start into region N. The tower is run by Athor Defiers (manual of the planes) who are attempting to escape the dungeon by creating and expanding their own pocket dimension beyond the boundaries of the wards.

They have enslaved many outsiders (mostly devils so far) to study. So on the off chance that the Celestial Garrison discovers and attempts to stop their plot (rather than the PCs) the hordes will be loosed to battle them.

Of course we will never see the result of their experiment, but the final battle inside a custom pocket dimension should be interesting.

 

[Hussar]

I'm also not going to be adding too much for a while. Heading home for the holidays (YAY!) and not going to be playing for a while.

I would be very interested in that book though Quillion. Look forward to the review.

 

[JediSoth]

My "reboot" went extraordinarily well. For the first time in 19 sessions, we had a truely balanced party. There was a pseudodragon rogue, a dwarven fighter/deep rift defender, a halfling warmage, and a gnome favored soul (a NPC to make up for an illness-related absence of the player who said she was making a cleric).

I told everyone to either bump their existing character up to level 9 or make a new character at level 9 (if they'd died or were just tired of their old character). I started them off in Region G. I had them wake up with the hound archons in G1. Since the only surviving character there was last played during the session when Region I was totally immolated, it was an easy transition. His last memory was narrowly escaping a fiery death and now he woke up surrounded by intimidating celestials.

The hound archons told them in no uncertain terms that they were not welcome here; they had too much to do to coddle a bunch of mortals. If they wanted to do something useful, they could take care of that pesky basilisk to the west. So, the PCs were reunited with the NPC they lost in Region A (he was knocked through the portal in Longtail's room by an Ogre) and they set off to kill the basilisk. Naturally, they didn't know it was an Abyssal Greater Basilisk, but that didn't stop them. They all took precautions to ensure they wouldn't be subject to its gaze attack and the fight ensued. It was shaping up to be an epic battle, but the pseudodragon stung the basilisk and I rolled a 1 on its save. The tiny character took out the huge monster and they coup de graced it to death.

So, after two rounds of combat, they sauntered back to the hound archons with the head of the basilisk. The hound archons were so impressed they asked them to recover that Flame of Aranel thingie. So they headed east along the river of lava and encounter the Vrocks in the magical darkness. Technically, an easier encounter than the basilisk, but it took them the rest of the gaming session to kill the Vrocks because of all their immunities. The PCs used up approximately 80% of their resources before emerging victorious.

It was the first session where I felt the PCs were actually challenged in the last dozen or so games. Sure, Madness was tough, but only one PC came close to death in that encounter, and they had no clue how to truely kill it. But since I've restructured the group to take out the disruptive power-gaming hack'n'slashers, the WLD is a challenge once again, rather than being just a huge depository of easy XP (and I was increasing the encounter difficulty prior to the reboot).

Proof that a balanced party (or an unbalanced one) can make all the difference between a repository of fun and a suppository of anguish for both the DM and the players.

JediSoth

 

[rvalle]

We just finished Region A. Took 12 game sessions run about one a week... so 3 months. In game time was about 5 days.

Most notable encounters:

The battle with the kobolds. I messed it up by forgetting about all the rubble and beds in the room. Still turned out to be a great fight.

Battle with the Owlbear. This was great fun (for me ). The Owlbear ended up going early in the init order and closed with the party so the fight took place in the doorway. At first they thought it was a tough fight with an Owlbear. Once they realized it had SR and 5 points of DR they were pretty freaked out. They were on the verge of running when the beast finally went below 50% Hp's and retreated back into the room. One only player had gone down and Owlbear didn't bother killing her as she had done no damage. She was just in the way as he was trying to get to the ranger that was hitting him with arrows.

Not an encounter you would think of as being memorable... but one of the random encounters was interesting because it caused the only party death so far and for the RL issues it brought to a head. Mostly my fault really but I'm not too broken up over it.

The party was in the Long Hall where the big battle had taken place. I rolled an encounter and it was 4 orks. I had them enter the room from a side door just as the party was passing it by.

Now, one of the players and I have issues with each other's playing style. He is a " I'm here to do damage" kind of player where most of his characters are basically him with different weapons. In this case, he as playing a dwarven Cleric. To give an example of his idea of 'role' playing he did this at the start of the encounter: Rolls a d20 "I made my will save so I don't attack them on sight".

So some dialog starts up... a 'who are you' 'Well, who are YOU' sort of thing. After about 10 seconds of this the player has hit is limit... "All right... enough of this. Lets get this over with. I walk up to the Orks and attack them."

I was taken aback by this as I had not planned on them fighting... So I start to flip though the book knowing there was the Ork section in there. Orks... Orks... There they are. Whats the stats? The first stat block is for Ork Barbs. Ok, fine. They are 4 Ork barbs.

The fight starts and during the orks turn they all rage and go to town. The party knows this has taken a turn for the worse.

Now, one of the players is playing a dwarf who is the brother of the above dwarf. During the last adventure he had touched the red gem in the hidden throne and was cursed. He knew about the curse and was going to cast 'Pro from evil' on himself if fighting started (I allowed this to negate the curse effects while the Pro was up and running). I make a on-line log of what happened during each adventure but none of the players had bothered to read it... so the 'problem' player had no idea his 'brother' had been inflicted with said curse.

So... once the fight started he had to start rolling for the curse effects. Spent most of the time cowering. This leaves 3 other party members (all 3rd level) to deal with the 4 raging barbarians. Two of the orks take out their rage on the dwarf that started the whole thing and end up dropping him to -9.

Only two players left and they are getting scared. They have managed to drop one ork and wound another 2 pretty bad. The gnome bard gets a sleep off and sleeps the one uninjured ork. The other two, pretty banged up, decide to run for it. One gets cut off and is dropped. The other runs... and drops as his rage wears off and he loses his extra Hp's!

While this is going on the player rolls his 10 and does not stabilize - so he dies.

He tried to give me flack about it later. "What were 4th level creatures doing there so early in the dungeon? You could have taken out the whole party with that fight".

My response to him was that he made an assumption that 'They were only orks' and just wanted to kill them and move on as they were a nuisance to him. We had a pretty heated discussion where I pretty much told him he shouldn't play with me running any more. A couple of days later we decided to give him one more chance and he's doing better. Him and his girl-friend are now running the two Lizardmen that the party has rescued.

After that night I looked though the ork section in detail and realized my mistake... there was only one barb in the room. Having 4 of them wandering around was a stretch. Hmmm...

If they had made it to the orks I was going to have to bump that number up a bit and write the 4 off as having been a strike team that was cut off during the chaos of the region. Works for me.

The players are now entering region E. I'm taking a couple of weeks off to get the map and region ready. Main problem so far is where to move the Shadow Hound leader as his current location makes no sense. Moving him down to the block of rooms with the rest might be a problem though as any encounter will turn into a situation where all the hounds run to the fight and overwhelm the party. Still... this is probably where he will end up.

rv

 

[Veldan Rath]

Thank God for Ebay

After all of the thread reading...I got up the gumption to go crusing on ebay for the WLD.

I just won it for $32.66, including shipping!

I will be springing this on my group for the next campaign

Till then, happy hunting!