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

[BlueBlackRed]

Hoody Freakin Hoo!

I strongly suggest that everyone go buy the most recent Knights of the Dinner Table (#98).

Check out the Web Scryer portion of it. It has web addresses to several of the blogs.
RPGMP3, Spike's Journal (my favorite), Twofalls's Sanguine Sentinels, The Arcane Army, A Mighty Crawl, The Gits, and mine.

And I got my "Tales from the Table" posted in the same magazine.

So I'm doing a little happy dance right now.

 

[The Cardinal]

After some prelude gaming on wednesday, yesterday I've really started my WLD game.


These are the rules:
Anything from the 3 core books, Savage Species, the Complete books, the Expanded Psionics book, the BoVD, or the BoED, or the PG to the Wilderlands goes – some things from UA are available.
Ability creation: either 6x3d6 *plus* 14 points to add directly to the ability scores, or 3x4d6(best3) and 3x5d6(best3).
At the start of the campaign each player has to present 3 leve1-1 PCs, one of them must be the PC he starts the campaign with, the other two are replacements. Whenever a PC dies the player may choose to activate one of his remaining replacement PCs *or* to build a "monster" PC appropriate to the current region of the dungeon – the level and XP-total of replacement PCs is equal to the beginning of the average party level; he may also choose one of the 4 pre-generated NPC "emergency replacements". However, should at any one point in time the party contain only dead or "monster" members, then the campaign stops and the game is considered "lost".


So far, they did pretty well. All 7 starting party members are still alive, and they have explored about 1/3 to 1/2 of A (the western half). I've set many encounters on "difficult" and by mistake send double the prescribed amount of trogs against them in the northwest – but they left the ogre and the coward orc alive (they even forced them to become roomies in the water room!), and the Charisma 20 Hexblade even managed to keep the trog cleric from his "death in combat" plan. Now they've encountered their first pair of death dogs (from FF), learned about the importance of silver, and have yet to encounter the first lemures...
(yes, I've stolen the Kyton/lemures idea and added some death dogs to the mix of section A)
However, they're in there for 2-3 days now, their rations are running low, and they *really* feel the lack of a rogue in their group...



Starting PCs
Replacements

Human(Avalonian) Warmage
Half-Fey/Half-Woodgnome Paladin of Justice
Half-Ogre Rogue

Half-Ogre Barbarian
Human (Amazonian) Rogue/Paladin of Freedom
Fey-touched Human Warlock

Half-Elf Ranger
Mountain Dwarf Fighter (Tank)
Human Fighter/Sorcerer

Dark Elf Psychic Warrior (Archer)
Half-Orc Cleric (Shaman)
Half-Giant Soulknife

Centaur Centaur
Human (Amazonian) Amazon Warrior
Gnome Alchemist

Mountain Dwarf Cleric
Kobold Warlock
Half-Orc Monk

Human (Amazonian male) Hexblade
Human (Altanian) Barbarian
Human Warlock


EMERGENCY REPLACEMENTS
Human (Avalonian) Cleric
Halfling Rogue
Half-Orc Bard
Dwarf Wizard

 

[The Horror]

He he he. Just completed the second session. They hit room A87 and were completely done over. The barbarian was first through screaming as usual. The three blades hit him severely hurting him. The rest of them saw the weapons in the room and were lured in. The paladin was the first to step through the threshold into the lighting bolt trap. He made the Reflex save and almost died.

That's when I got nasty. The book didn't specifically say the trap reset, so I made it so that the trap fired off at anything and everything crossing the threshold after the scythe trap has been sprung. The paladin was trapped in the room, with the rest of the party outside. All of them are too scared to cross the threshold, and they have no Rogue in their group. They eventually settled on waiting for 3 days to recuperate. The party pulled back to their safe room and are hudling in the dark for 3 days to conserve their latern oil. The paladin is alone in a trapped room in absolute darkness trying to meditate for 3 days.

We left it at that. I'll start at day 1 next time we play.

They really miss that Rogue right now.


The Horror

edit: Oh yes. The party as it stands is: 1 paladin, 1 bard, 1 dwarf barbarian, 1 halfling monk, 1 half orc cleric. There is another barbarian but the player was only there for the first session so that's a backup character atm.

 

[twofalls]

Blogs

I hadn't posted to my blog in over two months. Learning that the links were printed in KODT made me feel very negligent and I immediatly posted another entry. My new year's resolution is to place one post a week to the blog until the story is told.

Glad the see the thread hasn't died yet.

 

[hitomikitage]

Well, just had another 2 sessions this past weekend. My PC's seem to have this nasty habit of dying due to their own mistakes. This past weekend saw the Hexblade die because he entered the shadow room in region F alongside the guys in Ghost Touch armor (one of which has cleric levels and the anti-stat and level damage feat from Libre Mortis) and getting killed. One of the half-orc fighters died to the cryo-hydra after failing his save to avoid the icy breath blast (due to an excessive use of the forge in region E that permanantly saps hit points.) Finally, the other half-orc fighter died when they went into the room in region F with the Minotaur janitors (minotaurs speak Giant, which none of the pc's speak, so there was no parley for them this time around) when one called his buddies from the room to the north. The half-orc used spring attack to hit one, and then move into combat with another (the first time he has used spring attack after a kill to move into combat with another creature), but due to reach, suffered an attack of opportunity (a critical hit) that did massive damage for which he failed his save. This brings the death toll of the dungeon (so far) to 8 PC's (Human Favored Soul, Human Paladin, 2 Human Clerics, Human Mystic Theurge, Human Hexblade, and 2 Half-Orc Fighters) and 1 NPC (Lizardman Ranger.)

It was also very interesting to see the group scrambling to find a safe location after a random Minotaur patrol nearly killed one of the other fighters in the group. It actually took a random encounter with one of the celestial garrison before they realized they had wandered back to region E from region F. That warp gate is good stuff. It should be interesting to see how they handle the Maze.

Thanks,
Howard Hooven

 

[jim pinto]

Put me in coach

Hey gang

I'm back in the office after a short holiday break.

What's everyone so gloomy about?

Get your dice and go out there and game!!!

 

[BlueBlackRed]

That was some vacation!

Soooo...did you buy Knights of the Dinner Table #98 yet?
Didja didja didja??

My group hasn't played the past few weeks. Stupid holidays!
We're going to get back into it this Friday & I'm ready.
We may even have a new member added to our group.

Maybe even soon I'll have a post in the "World's Largest Graveyard" thread.
Assuming my dice don't fail me again.

...I mean seriously, out of like 20+ rolls, only a single double-digit appeared on that d20.

 

[fridge]

Spell components

About to start my group through the WLD.

How are other GM's handling spell components for their spellcasters?

Being stuck in the dungeon, spell components are going to become hard to come by!!!

I considered adding spell components are part of the treasure, eg swapping out some of the cash for the expensive components, but then the spellcasters would have to recognise that they may be components for a spell they may have in 10 levels time but don't need now.

Any thoughts?

 

[The Horror]

How are other GM's handling spell components for their spellcasters?

I think your idea sounds fine. Make sure to liberally throw in entire shelves full of components in all the mage rooms in the dungeon.

As for my group, all they have is a necromancer. I ruled that he needs a body part appropriate for each spell he wants to cast, and that the body part is expended when the spell is fired off. So for example, any detect spells require eyeballs and so on.

 

[Ozymandias]

Finally heading to the WLD!!

Hello all!

Long time reader, but first post.
I have been waiting forever for my copy of the WLD to get here from my FLGS (which isn't local to me here in Germany). Now that I have it, I kind of placed it with my books at one of my game sessions a month ago. Everyone wants in...
Only problem is that they are really attached to their 10th/11th level characters we have been playing for 15 months. I am scheduled to move again in 6 months so I don't really want to start them over....

So... I am looking at doing the sci-fi like "beam in" of the existing party into a region. I have "scanned thru" the entire book but have thoroughly read region G and its surrounding regions. I got this idea from an earlier post about using the lantern archons for bringing in replacement characters.
Does anybody have any other suggestions or any caution towards this type of action?

Oz