Tag Archives: undead

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Forty-fourth Session

Forty-fourth Session – We continue our CQB-filled city fighting as we try to liberate Fythorp from the undead. We get to murder some live people too, as a bonus!

Lady Skeam

We continue to clear the Cider House, which still has poisoner monks in it that decided to serve Lady Skeam rather than skedaddle like the others we met on the road. Some of them are ambivalent about serving her but we just sweep and clear them, poison monks are bad enough, but bootlickers must go.

After we get through them, it’s into the salt mines, where we try to bluff our way in using poison monk robes but that goes to shit fast and we kill kill kill! Many of our foes are “salt-tongued cultists” which generates a lot of unfortunate speculation from the group.

We do capture an ex-acolyte of Alar who has been working for Skeam, but he seems penitent enough that we send him above to fight random undead in the streets to work it off.

We do stop to refill our lamprey milk dreaming drug from the Snuggoo cultists in the mines (that’s a long story, you need to read these summaries from the beginning…). They helpfully tell us a secret passage to get right to Skeam’s lair.

Fighting Lady Skeam is one of those complex environmental boss battles with soul pylons and skeam-bound skeletons emerging from pylons and such. We manage to kill her and avoid the whole lich-escaping-to-their-phylactery thing because Podrick’s magic wolf-spear he found long ago can pin even gaseous or incorporeal creatures, which turns out to be a great benefit when we’re always fighting vampires and liches and ghosts and stuff!

From DCC 66.5 Doom of the Savage Kings

Podrick invokes the powers of Chistu to turn Lady Skeam’s soul and destroy her forever. The effect is breathtaking, or at least as breathtaking as a 1980’s effects house can manage.

And with that, Fythorp is liberated from the undead army!

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Forty-third Session

Forty-Third Session – Time to liberate Fythorp from its undead masters!

Fythorp is actually the village of Hirot from DCC 66.5 Doom of the Savage Kings. Paul our GM used ChatGPT to convert it to “what would happen after a bunch of undead take over!” AI is the lazy GM’s new best friend and from here on out a lot of the stuff we do isn’t from printed DCC adventures but is AI-generated. We do some wandering around to adventure locations but when we go somewhere that needs to be something specific it’s easier to whole cloth make it as we are basically carrying the plot around with us in a mature campaign.

We juggle a bunch of allies. We have a group of bounty hunters along, the Ironfall Company of dwarven mercenaries, Morgan the goth, Amathies the lamia, my three berserker retainers… We create complex tactical plans with the nut of it being the party infiltrating the Sanctuary of Alar via underground tunnel to stop it from spewing out the supernatural clouds covering the area – we figure the best first strike to weaken a whole city of undead is to get the sunlight shining again.

Long story short this is successful, though there are a lot of extreme undead shocker traps/devices in the church. We aren’t too badly wounded and reason that with the sudden onset of daylight powerful undead are probably trapped in inconvenient places so a hurry-up offense is called. We go break into the local courthouse where undead weirdos have been “judging” and executing locals. We get there just in time to interrupt the Mayor’s execution!

Hemp destroys both Skull Clerks with the blazefire bow. He finds himself short of legalistic one-liners, so he goes with, “The defense rests!” Then he calls out for Old Man Fish to cure his magical boils.

About this time the worthless priestess from Weebrook arrives with some peasants in tow and declares herself the savior of Fythorp. We decide she’s a danger to herself and others but luckily talk her into fortifying the courthouse instead of going and getting more peasants turned into undead we have to fight.

The hurry-up offense continues and we hit the Cider House that used to hold poison monks, it’s our last hardpoint to take in the town and we know it must have secret tunnels into the salt mine where Lady Skeam’s HQ is!

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Forty-second Session

Forty-Second Session – We talk to every NPC who will talk to us in Weebrook and then head off to the undead army occupied Fythorp to begin our guerilla resistance.

But first, Gallfred goes to meet the local witch Ymae the Mad Widow. Seems like there’s old witches everywhere and they’re generally related. He loves their poison and filth. And she makes him an indecent proposal – she’ll make an undead-catching net if he agrees to marry her! “Sure,” he says…

After that, we split our time between recruiting allies and planning Gallfred’s bachelor party!

We go and talk to the worthless local duke, who checked out the undead army and turned tail. As best as we can tell he and his thanes don’t do anything except live off the townsfolk. Hemp mentally marks them all for death as part of his “Anarchy Now” political platform, but decides not is not the time since the region is already very destabilized. “Soon…” he muses.

And then we go skulk around the haunted town of Fythorp. The local church is spewing out supernatural cloud cover of the “I bet vampires can scamper around freely during the day in this zip code” variety.

We find some holdouts boarded up in the local inn and get a message to them. Then, we pretend we’re with a batch of bounty hunters we’ve befriended that are roving magic artifact collectors (Lady Skeam has people rounding up chaos artifacts to give to her). We send word that have found the Helm of Chistu, which can be used to summon whatever evil god they worship (Chauvinism, IIRC), and would like 5 large for it please. This story has the benefit of being true, but rather than hand over the helm to the banshee that comes to get it, we attack!

We’re sad to find out that the banshee is the nice sea shanty singing lady from the town, now undeaded. She nearly gets away but Gallfred uses his dowry on her (the undead catching net the witch made for him). Our sorrow is assuaged by the fact that she did indeed have 5,000 gp on her. “Grand Theft Auto for the win!” we cry.

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Forty-first Session

Forty-First Session – Travel is easily as dangerous as dungeons in DCC. We return from the Mortal Kombat Dimension and travel first to Wymoor and then to Weebrook, and there’s quite some trouble along the way!

First, we meet a weird cursed chimera doing a demon summoning ritual. We’ve actually run across this chimera like twice before out of sheer encounter table luck and he’s become a recurring thing. We kill him so he won’t recur. (Well… It’s probably not that simple, but may as well try.)

When we get to Wymoor by luck it’s the Spring Renewal festival, so we drink ourselves into a frenzy and/or unconsciousness. like a medieval version of The Hangover.

But no rest for the wicked, we leave the next morning and come across ghouls trying to sacrifice some random peasant. And then we come across some random monks that are actually a poisoner cabal that Gallfred keeps wanting to join. And we reunite some ghost lovers. Fythorp has been taken over by an undead army, we get it!!!

We finally get to our home town of Weebrook and they are quite distraught by the ill goings-on right down the road. We brought some refugees here knowing that army was coming and knowing the 5 of us weren’t “fight an army” caliber, but it’s still sad.

I spend the rest of the time trying to wingman Podrick into hitting on the crazy priestess lady in town but he denies her his precious bodily fluids for some reason.

Carrion Crown Chapter 6, Shadows of Gallowspire, Session 5

350px-Gallowspire_confrontation

Fifth Session (10 page pdf) – We ascend Gallowspire and it’s a fight to the finish with a would-be successor to the Whispering Tyrant!

Welcome to the final session of our Carrion Crown campaign! It lasted for exactly a year of every-other-weekend play. We’re level 14 and locked, cocked, and ready to rock.

We have some luck and an optimized necromancer – the one fight on the way up the tower that could have been epic and/or fatal was the nightwing, and Zurak banished it at a go. We did a good job at not hesitating to use our spells as we went up but also not depleting ourselves completely.

Then we threw down with the lich!  Well, an amped up semi lich dude. But the “solo caster vs party of PCs” fight never lasts too long, we lay on greater dispel magics and swarm him.

You can see our final L14 character builds (for some of us, at least) on the main Carrion Crown page! I’ll publish a retrospective with thoughts from the players and GM later.

Carrion Crown Chapter 6, Shadows of Gallowspire, Session 4

Fourth Session (15 page pdf) – Dr. Vaus turns into his alter ego Ironface and head butts the Grey Friar till they both regret it. Then, shopping! And then we meet the most helpful ghasts in the world. And then we fight fight fight.

ancientpsychictandemwarelephant

Ancient Psychic Tandem War Elephant

First, Bruce our session scribe treats you to an extended bout of more-purple-than-usual prose. I missed the Grey Friar fight because I was taking my daughter to band camp, but I got there in time for the shopping!

We went to Gallowspire and fought the ravener first.  That’s like a dracolich but not copyrighted, apparently. I liked the end scene where I gently send him to his rest courtesy of my (Su) Healing Hex.

Then we had one of those shitty D&D fights, with “dreams” that look and act all undead but aren’t because they know we have anti-undead stuff going on, and they spam fear and confusion and such on us all combat.  Yay, I got to spend the whole combat running away. That’s one game mechanic that needs to die in a fire, it is so un-fun.

Then we rested.  Then we fought two devourers and a nightshade, and went to rest again.  I summoned a celestial triceratops again but to make it more Indian-y I insisted it was an ancient psychic tandem war elephant (see pic above!).  Dr. Vaus’ force bombs are the one thing that actually allows us to dump damage onto anything in this craphole.

I’m not too jazzed with this final chapter, but next time should be the climax!

Carrion Crown Chapter 6, Shadows of Gallowspire, Session 3

Third Session (14 page pdf) – As we wander through Renchurch, our necromancer and dirge bard keep us in lively discussion with the local undeads. And we do bong hits with Whispering Way acolytes. (No, really!)

The Worm That Walks

The Worm That Walks

Apparently there’s nothing you can’t add the lich template to, including werewolves and worms. The grind would be a bit trying, but with all the charmed undead we have around, we at least get to talk some before the killing.  When we came across Whispering Way acolytes smoking spirit siphons, Girl was so put out by the dungeon that she flopped down and started taking hits with them. This was quite successful, as we talked with them for a long while and then moved on.

When we fought a bunch of “cenobites” it took us a long, long time to get through our heads that wasn’t code for Hellraiser type cenobites (which you see a lot in Pathfinder, they’re called kytons) but actual, you know, monk type cenobites. But undead, so whatever.

Then it was double up action with the Worm that Walks and the wolf-lich. Spells! Violence!

 

Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Three, Twelfth Session

Twelfth Session (11 page pdf) – “Tower of the Vampire Queen” – Collecting their reward from a crazy evil vampire stripper takes a while. Then, they decide it’s time to clean up Lefty’s act at a most inopportune time.

OK, this is where the whole “don’t trust the vampire stripper” thing really started to make this drag a bit, but I rolled with it. In the module, it really was just a matter of going down into a room, messing with some trapped sarcophagi, and coming away with scads of loot. But they distrusted her so much that they wouldn’t go down there.  “Bring it to us!” they demanded. It eventually comes to blows, but the vampiress’ vampire tiger totally owns Serpent and so she manages to force a detente. The players are all talking depressed like “oh we lose we’re minions now” while she’s like “come get your treasure you crazy blood-sacks.” Finally they take it, including the spell-storing gem the Rain Tiger, and depart Rana Mor.

Then mistrust hits a second time. Lefty is on watch and tells Sindawe something’s coming.  I guess he thought it was a trick since Lefty’s still flame-slug-possessed, so he sleeper holds him and the group ends up fighting his flame slug. This wouldn’t have been so bad if Lefty hadn’t been telling the truth, because they’re all otherwise engaged when the gibbering flaming guys show up again (those possessed by Tears of Nuu’rugal sometimes mutate till they’re kinda flaming gibbering mouthers on legs over time). I had anticipated a tough fight where they finally defeat the guys they ran from a couple sessions ago, but since they were in disarray already from fighting Lefty and his flame-slug it was going poorly for them – Wogan spent an Infamy Point to collapse the ruins on them rather than fight it out.

And that’s the session – it was supposed to be “loot some treasure and then have a random encounter” but ended up taking the whole time!

Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Three, Eleventh Session

Eleventh Session (17 page pdf) – “Rana Mor” – Though they pretend to look down on vampire strippers, the crew still does what this one bids them. They penetrate to the heart of the temple and kill the ancient undead high priest. Now they shall claim their just reward.

Saeng Ki

Saeng Ki

I’m afraid the art for Saeng Ki (this is from the actual adventure in Dungeon) backfired a little in this case.  Normally, “hot chick” can be somewhat inspiring to our all-guy group. But in this case, it was a little too over the top, and they immediately dubbed her “a vampire stripper” and refused to take her seriously on the grounds that both vampires and strippers are Chaotic Evil and that she’d betray them in ways few men have been betrayed by a woman.

So even though she’s offering them a pretty good deal, there’s endless back and forth bickering and negotiation and all for the first part of the session.

Finally they move off at her behest and wander the dungeon.  I put in some Azlanti chariot beetles; I went through all the Pathfinder stuff I had and pulled everything vaguely Azlanti to use on this whole trip.  Then there’s a lively fight in a room full of dart traps with undead monks in a silence zone.  It culminates with a long knock-down-drag-out with the main huecuva priest and his mummies; the PCs retreat initially and lead the mummies into some traps and then retreat more till Saeng Ki herself is helping them… Death or glory!

Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Three, Tenth Session

Tenth Session (12 page pdf) – “Graveyard of the Masters” – Below the Azlanti graveyard lies a hidden temple to Zura. The crew fights their way through undead clerics around the blood moat until they meet – a skull-faced stripper?

For this set of sessions I reskinned the Rich Baker adventure “Rana Mor” from Dungeon #86, originally set in an Indian jungle, as the Zuran temple. Zura, the Vampire Queen, was an Azlanti deity of vampires and blood and cannibalism and related themes. I wanted a place that was exotic and undeady, so I used this and just added a layer of blood and stuff over the existing symbology. The PCs were fascinated with the moat of blood; they took samples and wondered if they’d get powers from drinking it (“Yeah, probably just the power of hepatitis,” they decided in the end.)

They explore the place and fight a bunch of lively undead guardians, including cleric types that summon things, and it’s some heavy action for a while there in a running battle through the ruined halls.

Finally they meet the priestess Saeng Ki.

Saeng Ki

Carrion Crown Chapter 1, The Haunting of Harrowstone, Session 2

Second Session (21 page pdf) – Weird occurrences lead us to the ruins of Harrowstone Prison outside of town to investigate the Professor’s death. Turns out it burned down and was inhabited by serial killers. Awesome.

Haunting_Harrowstone_Dave_Rapoza_post

The campaign’s going well so far.  I’m trying to expand on my understanding of Sredni Vashtar’s Girl and to play both her and the weasel without going too over the top. Dr. Vaus had a little “roleplayer regret” along those lines; when he takes his mutagen he put on an iron mask and yelled “Ironface!” Turns out he was getting carried away and really wanted that to be a later development when he takes some greater mutagen that really affects your sanity thing and he tried to pull back some from that after.

I feel bad that I keep skunking Vladimir on Knowledge skill rolls – I think he intended to be good at those, but he’s a monk and I’m a witch and I’m an Int machine…  That plus good rolls kept me going on with super in depth explanations – “Ah yes, the Whispering Way is… <paragraphs>.”

I had to go before they started the dungeon delving this time – more to come though!