Tag Archives: D&D

Twelfth Session (12 page pdf), “Mansion of Shadows, Part II” – The PCs hang out with a Chelish noble family for a while, and witness depths of degeneration that make even hardened criminals from Riddleport uncomfortable.  After a long night of sneaking around the mansion and fleeing from horrid things, they lure the eldest son out to the forest and whack him.

[Note: spoilers for Mansion of Shadows, a Green Ronin d20 adventure]

Our Pathfinder campaign, Reavers on the Seas of Fate, continues in good spirits as our fledgling pirates continue their infiltration of the Staufen family manor.  I haven’t had to change the adventure a whole lot from the Green Ronin original; “demented devil worshipping noble family” drops right into Golarion’s Cheliax without a second thought.  In fact, the players are already speculating on both the Asmodeus worship and “seven sins” ancient Thassilonian elements, both of which came along in the original!

The players definitely found the mansion super creepy.  The best parts were:

• The hugely fat naked freak eating nonstop in the kitchen.  My impression of it picking up its battleaxe and giving them the hairy eyeball even as it continued to munch on a leg of mutton, and that later when it was sleeping it was sleep-gnawing on the same mutton, made quite an impression. But they were most disturbed when they found out it was female (Leanor Staufen).
• Serpent being too nosy and ending up running around Three Stooges style fleeing from one devil after another in the mansion at night, even tossing himself down a staircase to escape more quickly.  “Woowoowoowoowoo!”
• Sindawe seducing Amalinda Staufen in the catacombs under the temple to Asmodeus, and after she put out the candle, he started to realize that her cadaverous body was horribly similar to a lot of the preserved corpses in the room.  He got so nervous that he lit a sunrod and passed it off as “Oh, I just wanted to be able to look at you.”

Rules note, Serpent had to spend an Infamy Point to stop Jack from getting away.  The PCs didn’t really coordinate ahead of time and so when Serpent decided to attack Erich it caused enough confusion that Jack rode off on his horse, which would have been pretty much a scenario-derailer – if they couldn’t find a way back into the mansion then the pirate attack would pretty much be a non-starter.  But Serpent coughed up an Infamy Point so I rolled a random encounter and said “His horse got disabled by a… dire badger… so you’re able to catch up to him.”  So in the end it worked out fine.

Next time in Mansion of Shadows, Part III – both a mass combat and a naval battle!  I’m working on rules for both to make them fun and not onerous.

Eleventh Session (10 page pdf), “Mansion of Shadows, Part I” – After the PCs kill Jasker Gant, one of crime lord Boss Croat’s lieutenants, they decide to go on the lam for a while.  They get “loaned out” by Saul to Captain Clap of the pirate ship Wandering Dagger, who has a little job for them.  Also, the triumphal return of Thalios Dondrel, son of Mordekai!  [Reavers on the Seas of Fate Home]

Thanks to Paul (Serpent Johansson) who has taken on session scribe duties.  You’ll notice I included some pics in this session summary – for the sessions, I Google for random images and pull images from the adventure PDFs as props.  The players said that for their use at least, it would be a lot more helpful to have the NPC pics in the session summaries for their reference.  I hope no one objects to me using them in this way; if you have a beef just let me know.

Mansion of Shadows is a Green Ronin “Bleeding Edge” adventure from back in the day.  I liked the line, they were all pretty good.

Using this adventure illustrates two important principles useful for everyone running a pirate campaign (the best kind of campaign).

1.  It’s easy to take any adventure location and make it an island.  When 3e was new, my gaming group and I (rotating DMs) ran a pirate campaign.  I bought all the initial wave of third party d20 adventures and handed them out.  Since most of them try to be “generic” by placing themselves in some semi isolated location that doesn’t have too much relation to the surrounding world,  you can usually wave your magic wand and call it an island with zero additional work.   One of them I remember had a map that was a huge field of mountains, with one road leading in, and the town/adventure location right there in the middle of it!  Might as well have been an island in the first place.  This one is no exception – the town of Staufendorf is largely encircled by rivers.  A wave of my lasso tool in GIMP and oh look it’s an island.

2.  It’s easy to take any adventure and make it suitable for evil (or neutral-piratey) characters.  A lot of adventures – and Paizo and Green Ronin’s are frequently examples – have several factions of bad guys for you to play off each other.  Paladin-heavy parties have angst about that but piratey parties sure don’t.  Frankly most adventures have a fairly simplistic view of good – “go kill the bad guys and take their stuff!”  Well, that’s as rousing a battle cry for bad PCs – good sticks together, but evil is happy to cannibalize itself.

Behind the Scenes

The party totally did not want to go help the slaves, but Ox (now in NPC form since Bruce moved) wasn’t to be persuaded to leave them behind.  So it was the worst of all worlds, in that only Ox and Sindawe were there for the fight!  No worries, however – Jasker Gant rolled totally crappy and Ox got a megacrit on him and then on one of the goons in short order.  The party’s general conclusion was “Oh sure, now he becomes effective!”

I knew they wouldn’t be able to resist killing another crime lord’s capp (“made man”/lieutenant) for long.  They barely refrained from killing Braddikar Faje earlier, and this time they didn’t even worry about it.  (Tommy’s player Kevin was playing Ox for the encounter).

Anyway, they went and wangled themselves a gig with a pirate ship to go raid a Chelaxian manor house.  After the pirates put them on board a pleasure yacht, I rolled two random encounters.  The first, a wyvern, was pretty tough.  The second was a dire shark!!!  I’m not a big believer in “level appropriate” when it comes to wilderness encounters.  But I had mercy – they killed the wyvern and had it on a tow rope, so when the shark showed up it just ate the wyvern.  Seeing a 60 foot shark go by caused a real brown pants moment.

Then they wandered around Staufendorf a while.  Everyone they talked to, they tried to get at “why are there crucified commoners about?” but everyone would just say in a loud voice, pretty much verbatim, “Staufendorf is a lovely place to live, full of honest and hard-working folk.  It’s a great place to raise a family!”  It got the point across, heh heh heh.

So now they’re infiltrating the nobles’ mansion, trying to figure out how to weaken it enough that 30 pirates can take the place.  They’re kinda worried about it since it’s very well defended.  I’m not sure how they’re going to do it, but I’m sure they’ll figure it out.

Tenth Session (11 page pdf), “Death in Riddleport, Part III” – Samaritha’s gone missing, and the PCs track her to – yes, you guessed it – the serpent temple.  Along with a new friend, they hit the place hard, and there’s no retreating this time.

Sadly, Bruce (Ox), our usual session scribe, moved to Dallas and no one else brought a laptop, so this isn’t one of our traditional session summaries.  I took some notes while running the session and have written it up in a more short story kind of format.  I think it turned out pretty well, and hope you all enjoy it.

As a bonus, I’ve started a “Monsters and NPCs” page where you can check out the full character sheets for Salvadora Beckett and Milos the cultist.  Salvadora was an example of a new class, the Inquisitor, that Paizo is having an open playtest for as part of their upcoming Advanced Player’s Guide.   There’s also updated character sheets for many of the PCs on the Characters page.

The session went really well.  We finally finished Death in Freeport!  Now that they’re third level, the serpentfolk weren’t an insurmountable obstacle, though even when the PCs prepared with antitoxins they definitely took some damage at their hands.

There were a bunch of really great moments this session.  My favorites:

• When Lixy asked Wogan, the chaste cleric of Gozreh, “exactly” what his religion prohibits as she cozied up to him.  I could virtually see the word balloon with “Gulp!” in it appear over Patrick’s head.
• When Wogan went to pull his pistol in the ensuing combat and it wasn’t there.  That’s one of those moments GMs live for.  “What do you mean it’s not…  Oh…  Crap.” <sound of weapon cocking behind him>  I wanted to giggle and hop up and down clapping my hands like a little girl.  Then her tossing it towards the latrine as a diversion rather than trying to shoot him – what can I say, I was very proud of myself.  The possibility of getting shot didn’t scare the player, but the thought of his 500 gp masterwork pistol getting flushed- that got to him.  That whole scene was totally movie-worthy.
• When Milos created his fast zombies!  I was reading the new Bestiary and it not only detailed some variant zombies but was specific about how to create them – in this case, remove paralysis as part of the animate dead makes “28 Days Later” style fast zombies.  Wogan was actually using Spellcraft to figure out what was being cast and the remove paralysis really confused him, he figured he had some big paralyzed monster he was letting loose or something.
• When Sindawe broke through all the undead blockers and dealt out double crits to Milos.  We are using the Paizo “Critical Hit Cards” and they said he busted his kneecap and then spun him around, rendering him flat-footed.  It let Tommy get in a sneak attack sling stone shot that put him down (while standing upside down on the ceiling, thanks to spider climb) – a three hit boss kill!
• When Sindawe hugged Salvadora unexpectedly after they cleared the serpent temple.  The rest of the players really did give him the hairy eyeball, and he really did say “What?!?  She saved my life like twice!”

There were fun little bits besides that, like trying to convince the apothecary they really needed something to counteract snake poison and not VD, and carrying out that big teak desk past the crowd of gendarmes.  I think the party started to really fire on all cylinders this session, and everyone got a chance to really pitch in.

Ninth Session (15 page pdf), “Holiday In The Sun/Flat On Rat Street” – The characters help Saul celebrate Swagfest in the streets of Riddleport, and there’s a startling amount of violence.  Then, they go to a local moneylender to find out what happened to the bar’s floor manager… and there’s a startling amount of violence.

First, I ran “Holiday in the Sun”, an interstitial Freeport adventure from the Freeport Trilogy.  There’s a big street festival, like Riddleport’s answer to Mardi Gras.  They got to have some random fun, choosing costumes, drinking, that kind of thing.  An assassin tried to take out Saul, and though the PCs stopped her, she totally took out Tommy in one shot.  He didn’t take that well; he took her back to the animal cages and tortured the crap out of her.  Explicitly enough that it took the other players aback.  And when they came back and she was missing, he really got scared.  Mmmwah hah haaaa!

Then they participated in various festival games.  Sindawe had a bad turn when he ran off solo and stumbled into the lair of an ettercap and some dream spiders!  In the original adventure it was a rogue aranea; in this one I decided it made sense for one of the crime lords to have an ettercap working for him as tender for the dream spiders, whose valuable venom is used to make a drug named shiver.  He got bitten repeatedly by the spiders till he was tripping his balls off, and then he got webbed up.  Bruce (Ox) spent an Infamy Point to have him rescued by the Splithog Pauper.  Funnily enough, when the rest of the PCs found him in an alley with a note from the Pauper, their reaction was “We told that guy to leave town!  We hate him!”

Then, the Yellow Shields organize a hit on the PCs, which they get out of without a lot of trouble.  After, when Tommy’s back at the Gold Goblin, he complains to Saul that they’re all pretty beaten up and don’t want to go back to the festival.  He tells him, not unkindly, to “Sack up and get back out there.”

Next, it’s “The Flat On Rat Street,” from Shadow In The Sky (the first chapter of the Second Darkness adventure path, which I am somewhat using for inspiration).  Saul tells the PCs that the floor manager, Larur Feldin, went to make a payment to a moneylender named Lymas Smeed and hasn’t come back.  The PCs go, bust in, kill his baboon, and beat him with a phone book for some time.

This scene really frustrated Sindawe’s player particularly (he was already a little ill-humored about the spider thing).  He was convinced that he just wasn’t beating the guy hard enough or searching good enough to find the answer, and it just wasn’t appearing – that they must just be doing something wrong.  He got pretty upset about it (not till debrief afterwards did I fully understand what was going on).  Of course, in this particular scene, there is absolutely no way to figure out what really happened from within the scene; you have to move on and find out from other sources.

I blame training from bad D&D modules for twisting players’ expectations.  Too many D&D scenarios wrap everything up nice and cozy.  Whenever you kill a bad guy, he always has a long note on him detailing his God-damned life story.  It’s from the same playbook that states “monsters” fight to the death, et cetera.  There’s always a convenient self-contained answer to the problem in the dungeon – the “silver weapon when there’s lycanthropes coming” syndrome.  Real mystery, intrigue, or complication is rare.  I try to run things very “realistically” – meaning if something in the game world doesn’t make sense to a reasonable person, it’s not because Gary Gygax decided that “weather is magical” or other such bullshit, but instead because yeah, there is something wrong here.  Afterwards, I told the frustrated player that really he was more on the right track than everyone else – that yes, it doesn’t make any sense that a common moneylender would let himself be tortured to death rather than give up the info they wanted, and that it shouldn’t be a source of frustration, but instead an opportunity to use that correct first step to re-engage with the game world and find out the next step.  We got things back on track, but I think it’s so unfortunate that there’s so much crappy D&D that trains people to not trust their own senses because the answer’s always “GM fiat” or “that’s just what the module said” or whatnot.  In my mind, the acme of achievement (in a simulation-focused game) is to get it to where everyone feels like they can engage completely in the game world, without having to second-guess about what metagame stuff is going on.  Metagaming is for pussies.  Yes, you can quote me on that.