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

[spectre72]

The extra characters were only really active in the overland trip, and don't worry they will soon be trimmed down a little bit.

I have modified the stirge nest to be a stirge swarm, and the rogues were left behind at camp and we are now using the dwarf trap detection method (stomp everywhere setting off traps) so one or two of them will get it soon...

And two of the PC's are already diseased.

Yes it was a pain for the first hour or so of the game, but I think they will soon be trimmed down to a good manageable size.

The biggest reason each of them has 2 characters is to allow one of them to get back into play quickly when their character dies. We only pay once every month or two so down time while waiting for a new PC to show up is a drag.

And just to be clear each player will now only have 1 active PC per session with the rest in camp resting, healing, ...etc. If said PC dies then the other one can come out of camp to continue the session.

Scott

 

[Old_Man_Fish]

Third Session 03/06/2005 Party Consists of:
Korim, Aasimir Paladin 2
Sharulf Dwarvern Rouge 3
Timbull (aka Shield) Dwarvern Fighter 3
Mendell (aka Poker) Dwarvern Fighter 3
Andvari Dwarvern Cleric 3
Maxim Gnomish Sorcerer 3
Perkiset Dwarvern Fighter 2/Barbarian 1 (Joined in A80)

Day 14: The party started out resting in room A41. They had been there for one day after looting everything from rooms A42 and A43 with no real ill effects from fighting the rats and fiendish rat swarms. They decide to go ahead and search A44, finding nothing of interest. they move down around through A45 to A46 where they accidently set off the burning hands trap. (Sharulf changes chalk mark from "safe" to "unsafe"). They go up to the laboratory in A47 and take their time searching the room and find all of the items (scrolls, wand and diamond) as well the traps which were easily taken care of. They decide to take the time to identify the wand, and, a few hours into the process hear some creatures approaching the doorway. They set up to jump the creatures should they enter the door. (Random Encounter) They quickly defeat the 8 kobold warriors. Unfortunately, 3 escape but they do take 4 captive whom fell asleep. They take the time to question these creatures and find out the approximate area of where the kobolds are located on this map. The kobolds are all killed during questioning or when they were released. (Paladin will be reading the Book of Exalted deeds this weekend, as after I questioned him on allowing this he said "I Thought I was supposed to give evil no quarter") After the fight with the kobolds the party finishes identifying the wand and moves on towards the large (Unmarked) rectangular rooms and finds the secret door at the bottom of the hallway near A51. They enter the room among much confusion (What, down here? but that is black on our map...) They felt some evil presence (the throne) and didn't understand it so they ended up smashing the throne with the mining tools that they had found earlier. The party decides that the hallway outside of A51 is safe and sleeps here.

Day 15: The party goes into the room at the other end of the hall and looking at their map decides that there is a hallway they would like to go to on the other side of the wall. They try to tear the wall down but after a few futile hours decide that it would be faster to just walk around. The party makes it into A48 where the sorcerer decides to play with the pretty floating ruby after ignoring the warning on the door. BOOM! Next the party moves into A49 where they provoke a random encounter with 2 Fiendish Dire Weasels, 3 Fiendish Dire Rats and a Fiendish Darkmantle. They have no real problem taking these creatures out although one of the fighters does take some Con damage and the paladin contracts devil chills again. The party then moves down to A78 and A79 where they play with many of the crates and barrels but manage to avoid any ill effects of the trap or mold. Finally they move to A80 where they have an epic battle with the 22 stirges. Once again they employ their tactic of tower shield in the door with multiple people using reach weapons behind him and the sorcerer and thief using ranged weapons to provoke the creatures into attacking. Timbul ("shield") takes 14 points of Con damage.

Day 16 - 18: The party finds the ring of warmth and rests here for 3 days.

Day 19: The party moves onward into rooms A75 and 76 where they take their time searching and discover the secret door which is sealed shut with the many spikes. They decide that whatever is behind this door must be really important and rest so as to let the cleric memorize bull's str.

Day 20: The party enters A74 (disabling the trap), A73, A72, A70 and A71 before coming to A69. This battle was TOUGH. It took about 2 and a half hours real time. I don't think that the party would have had any chance at all if they had come straight here instead of going the round about way that they did allowing them to reach third level beforehand. On the other hand, this was one of the most enjoyable encounters I have run in some time, as Boyikt was taunting them constantly from behind his wall and continually picking on the gnomish sorcerer. Towards the end of the battle, Boyikt would scream out "all right, that's it, I give up." and then laugh maniacally as he sent the flaming sphere onto the sorcerer one more time or attacked again with color spray or magic missile. Maxim, the gnome sorcerer had previously stated that he HATED kobolds with a passion and that it was one of his missions in life to kill as many kobolds as possible. He often referred to Boyikt as the anti-Maxim during the fight.

The koblods had heard the party coming and subsequently set up shop behind the small wall for cover. Boyikt, who had already cast mage armor, now casts Mirror Image. Maxim casts sleep knocking out two of the kobold warriors. The fighters, paladin and barbarian all move up through the rough terrain to try to get in range and over the wall to fight the kobolds in hand to hand combat. Andvari, the cleric, blesses the group and Sharulf moves in to the room to trade missile fire. At this point the Krenshar moves out from behind the wall and uses its Scare effect. Korim, Poker and Perkiset all fail their save and run leaving the party with only one fighter, and that fighter being the one who doesn't usually fight. Over the next several rounds Maxim and Boyikt trade many insults and spells. The fighters are essentially useless as they have all run away or are cowering in the far corner of the room. When they finally do make it back they try to fight over the wall or climb it (in full armor) and fail horribly for a few rounds. Finally they decide to try to break it and are successful after another few rounds. Meanwhile Maxim has gone unconscious from the second casting of the flaming sphere (replacing the web spell). The cleric is able to bring him back up over 0 hp for the second time in the fight as Sharulf finally finishes Boyikt.

During the battle with the kobolds, Perkiset, the barbarian, who had run out of the room made it up to A54, and got into a wrestling match with the darkmantle. They ended up knocking each other down to 0 hp at the same time and in one last move of desperation, they both attacked and knocked each other down into the low negatives where they both bled to death.

All in all the battle lasted about 14 rounds and the party felt both ineffective and unstoppable. One of the kobold warriors survived and is now trying to be converted by the paladin and the cleric. The party found the bracers, cloak and mw dagger. This is where we finished for the week.

Once again, thanks for the great material.

 

[Lasher Dragon]

Can someone please help me with doing XP for the WLD? I read that doing it by EL is one way to go, but I cannot figure out how that makes much of a difference - most of the encounters I read have the exact same EL as CR. I am starting it Saturday and I still haven't figured out how I am going to do the XP. Also, my players plan on trying to go through everything, so I'm thinking about just giving 2 levels per map, ignoring XP, and having a point pool as said earlier for item creation. Suggestions, advice, comments?

 

[DemonGnome]

Anytime you have only 1 trap or monster the EL will usually be the same as the CR (barring situational modifiers). Later on when the groups run into encounters with multiple enemies then the EL will be different then the CR. For the first 6 regions I ran them through I used the "Exp based on EL" method, but having recently jumped them into Region N a lil earlier then expected I am going back to "Exp based on CR" until they catch up then switching back again. One note of warning is that there are many places where I believe assumptions must have been made about the encounter (sometimes I haven't a clue what they were) which caused the EL to be listed significantly lower then it should have.

As for the "How"? Take an example encounter of a group of four level 4 characters (Average group level 4). They run into a room with a Ghast (CR 3) and 3 Ghouls (CR 1 each). The EL of this encounter would be 5. The group rushes in and vanquishes the undead menace. Now, awarding experience according to CR, the group would receive 1700 experience (800, 300, 300, 300) whereas awarding the experience based on EL, the group would receive 1600 experience. As you can see at lower levels it isn't much of a difference in experience, though you may want to verify the EL's of each room as they can often be off. Higher up the difference between CR & EL Exp methods can be more dramatic. Basically if the group is advancing to fast use the EL method, if too slow use the CR method, or just arbitraily do whatever the want.

 

[TroyXavier]

I got the book Monday and I'll be running it for the first time this Sunday. Hopefully it will be as fun as it looks.

 

[Lasher Dragon]

LMAO @ Troy's quote

 

[Firebird]

calculating xp for the WLD

What I did was figure out how many xp would raise the party 2-3 levels and divide it by the CR (using the lowest found in the area asa common denominator) of the encounters in the area. Once I had the final xp per CR 1, it was easy to list any encounter just by multiplying this total by the actual encounter toughness. While I know this underpays for the tougher encounters, the WLD says to underpay these anyway in artificailly limiting level advancement.

As a result, a CR 1 encounter in Area A worked out to be 21 xp using a total of halfway between levels 3 and 4 for the area endpoint if the party is comprehensive and also allowing for skipped rooms. DM's can raise or lower this as they wish to dictate pc advancement. works for us so far.

Anyone else have a better idea of how to do it?

 

[BMHadoken]

It's a labrynth!

I ran my group of four friends through some of the WLD but after they progressed further into the dungeon I found a quick problem that I had never really thought about before. My problem was mapping. At first there wasn't much required from them as there weren't multitudes of doors to keep track of and so many different hallways and such. The thing was that I could go into detail so that my group would know exactly where everything was but that made the game run at a snails pace. I tried speeding things up by being brief in my explanation of room dimensions but that just served to confuse my group, and by the end of the session things went from a wondrous start to dissapointing finish. I'm looking now for ways to combat this problem before trying to continue into the WLD with my group. Any suggestions are much appreciated.

 

[BlueBlackRed]

Message to Jim Hague from my players

They don't like you.

They had their second battle with Madness last night.

The first battle, last week, they were ready for and he still gave them a run for their money.

The second battle last night he was able to get the drop on them and they were able to win, but almost lost 1/2 the party in the process. After that fight the sorcerer dropped 2 fireballs on him and followed it up with 2 scorching ray spells (for 4 rays).

Later, after they returned to rest in region E, they came back to check to see if he was still dead. Nope - so they ran for it.

On the way back, the only true fighter in the group contracted the healing curse that gives a +2 to int & wis, but -6 to charisma. He's a dwarf barbarian with a charisma that is normally. So that left him an inredibly smart vegetable.

And that is just a brief glimpse of the last 2 sessions.

So accordingly, their opinion of you is not that high.

 

[Sieobahn]

My problem was mapping.

I have this problem with most campaigns (though I tend to run dungeon style adventures).
Getting the players to do the mapping is difficult, unless you go into extreme detail describing everything. So what I started doing was draw the map myself on graph paper, and clip it onto the DM screen with a bulldog clip so they can see it.

Recently I have moved high tech and now use the Klooge Werks software on my laptop, with the client software running on an old PC with an LCD screen on the table. I have loaded the maps into the program (someone in this thread editted the maps to remove all the secret doors and other revealing marks), and with the program I can reveal areas as they explore. So when they zoom out they can see the entire map and know where they have been.

Yesterday I have my first session with a projector shining down on the table, with the right level of zoom and I don't have to draw stuff on the whiteboard for minitures combat anymore! It worked great.

I have been tempted to make them map anyway, and refuse to zoom out to show large area's of the dungeon. However I feel that will take away the enjoyment of the game.


I had a lot of fun in yesterday's game. One of the players had to bring in a new PC (his old one was cursed by the throne in room A52, so they kicked him out of the group). I took him aside and asked him to create his new PC as an ally of Longtail. I had thought taking him aside like that would arouse some suspicion, but they just shrugged it off. The long moment of silence and the look on thier faces when he started the battle with Longtail by attacking another PC was priceless! Having his old PC they had abbandoned join in the battle also on Longtail's side didn't help either.
That battle ended with two PC's dead (one of them the traitor), one captured, and the others run away as fast as they could. I have done a write-up here if you are interested.