Session 3: Raid on the Slavers Stronghold

As with all Sunday Sessions this one was shorter.

Kensuke and Leroy continued to sneak through the camp.  With it being one in the morning the camp has only the Goblin watch on the towers.  The swamp is dangerous in the night and the twenty foot palisade does give a sense of security.  Who would expect a master Ninja and Martial Artist to come super jumping on top using stealth and complex moves to take out the inhabitants?

They climb halfway down the palisade on the inside and jump down.  Making several stealth rolls they sneak through the sleeping stronghold.  The first building has a large double door that is locked.  Not wanting to alert the goblin watch they leave it and continue to sneak through camp.  Kensuke and Leroy come upon a rotting building with five sleeping individuals inside.  Kensuke takes watch while Leroy sneaks in and uses his ninja skills to kill the occupants in their sleep.  Suffering a -4 on stealth while silently attacking Leroy places a knee on chest, hand over mouth and slides his short ninja swords under the chin and through the head.  Much to the disdain of the GM Leroy doesn’t even come close to failing a roll.  This continues on to the next room as Leroy kills the Ogre smith and four more Goblins.

The find a large round house and a very well kept, reenforced building.  They decide to check out the the round house and find about 20 sleeping Goblins.  Leroy knows his luck would not hold out in there so they prop the door shut and investigate the other building.  They find they are unable to open the door and there is no lock to pick, feeling that the book they need to return to normal must be in the buiding Kensuke concentrates with a power punch and places a fist sized hole through to door.  Now knowing they made too much noise Leroy rushes in to the building to find it very quite.  Kensuke stays back at the entrance to monitor the Round House.  Without warning a dart flys at Leroy hitting him.  There is an old Goblin with a blowgun.  Before he can reload Leroy attacks but the quick little Goblin dodges or parries all of his attacks.  Sensing Leroy may need help he jumps to attack only to have a few more Goblins charge out of a side door.  Obviously no one told the Goblins not to fight a Martial Arts master in close combat and Kensuke grabs one goblin and using his throwing art skill he uses one Goblin as a weapon against the other.  Leroy on the other hand is finding out that this old Goblin knows a thing or two about combat.  After a few rounds all three Goblins are dispatched.  Kensuke runs out to check the Round House while Leroy runs in to see if the book is in the next room.

The Goblins in the round house are trying to get out so Kensuke grabs a barrel of oil from the smithy and starts the hut on fire.  Meanwhile the Goblin watch start to fire Crossbows at the heroes.  Leroy runs into the main room to find what can only be described as a human sized demon with claws the size of long knives and a mouth full of sharp needle like teeth.  Behind the demon is the Witch and she commands the demon to kill.  Doing what comes naturally to such find upstanding heroes Leroy runs away screaming.  Kensuke is just finishing up the barbeque  when Leroy runs out of the room with the Demon chasing after.  Not one to wait he Super Jumps into the fray and the pair of the spar off with the supernatural entity.  The fight lasts a few rounds before the creature is sent back to its own plane of existence.  The two run back in to confront the witch or get the book and leave.  When they arrive there is no one about.  Using perception they locate a secret door but too late!  The witch has left through a side door!

Long story short they catch up to the witch and dispatch her very easily as she never had the time to start another ritual to summon a demon.  They take the book they need, dispatch the Goblins on the towers, with Sethroy’s help who had just finally arrived, (not without taking some serious damage) and head back to where Aloysius is only to discover he has been kidnapped.

Session 2: In Search of the Swamp Witch

With all three players available this time we did the wrap up from the previous session with the characters returning to town to get their reward for killing the Cave Bear.  The Leroy the Ninja was almost blind in the daylight having acquired Darkvision from the cursed stone.  After collecting their reward they headed back to the inn where they unloaded some wares and put Leroy down to rest.  Sethroy the Assassin went about selling the gem stones and got mixed reactions due to his newly acquired Feral Aura.  The jeweler gave him a better deal in fear of this Human with an inner rabid animal, and the weapons dealer gave him half the going rate because he didn’t like the look of him.  Meanwhile Kensuke the Martial Artist was walking behind Sethroy completely covered, with hood (like a sith) due to his physical appearance as his skin had not just gone albino, but slightly translucent as well.  He borrowed the obsidian knife from Sethroy and left to go shave has he had not done so for almost a year.

Sethroy then goes to the Enchanter to see about making a special cloak out of the Cave Bears unusual pelt and to see if this curse could get lifted.  After charging them slightly more than what they just brought back from the tunnels the Enchanter gives Sethroy a quick inspection and tells him to go back to the Inn and he will refer the case to a colleague of his.

That day Leroy introduces Bob his galactic space hamster.  Bob has much to say on almost everything but since only Leroy speaks galactic space hamster he will have to interpret.   The next day men from the city watch arrive to escort the three to Patriarch Ranz Mentzer the ruler of Cillamar.  The Patriarch was once a high priest in the Theocracy of the Lance and is a very pious man.  After interviewing them the Patriarch says he feels slightly responsible for their condition.  After all if he had had the men to go after the Cave Bear this would never have happened to the player characters.  The Patriarch will not abide evil in any forms, nor will he allow the possession by evil forces.  To battle this evil he has assigned Theodore the Acolyte and Aloysius the Artificer-Scholar.  After a week and a few days of research not only is the crystalline Cave Bear Cloak finished but Theodore found some information about a Swamp Witch to the south Kyleth the Witch Queen is known to be in possession of the Ars Maieficus, a wicked tome of forbidden knowledge sure to detail the cure to the crystal’s curse.

The following day the three head off with Sethroy on horseback, Kensuke and Leroy on foot and Aloysius will be accompanying with two ponies, one laded down with boxes.  The first three days of travel are peaceful but on the fourth day the party is attacked by bandits.  I mean who wouldn’t attack some one who is obvious a minor lord with his expensive cloak, 2 retainers (only one that has weapons) on foot and an old man with two ponies laden down with what is obviously treasure.  The party refuse to pay the ‘toll’ and Leroy rolls a 4 on perception! He easily spots the three bowman hidden in the brush.  The following battle takes about eight seconds as Sethroy and Leroy throw knives at the bowmen and Kensuke powerleaps to the man in the road and paralyses his legs and arms with pressure points.  Leroy then Power jumps to the bowman who is still recovering from the surprise of the knife in his chest and in three quick strikes (even after penalties) there is an explosion of bits of flesh, bone and blood has his Ninja-To slices through the unarmored bowmen. By now Sethroy finally gets to the third bowman (dodging a shot on the way) and dispatches him cleanly.  The three tell the bandit on the road to go back to his farm and lead an honest life or they will be back to punish him.

That night everyone has strange dreams of something evil chasing them towards the obelisk.  When they wake up they have gone through another transformation.  The rest of them have gone albino and dark vision and Leroy has gained Feral Aura. The group now has a dilemma as they can no longer see properly during the day.  Not to fear says Aloysius as he pulls out a weird head contraption with leather straps, brass tubes and rose quartz enchanted lenses.  I can see fairly well with my Nocturnal Occulus!  The party camps for the rest of the day.  Aloysius shows the group his hand held repeating catapult, although it really should be mounted on a tripod as it is very unbalanced, and not very accurate but works well to pepper an area with small stones.

That night the group move slowly (as the horse and ponies can’t see that well) and enter the swamp.  Their feral aura works in their favor as most of the wild animals stay away (it was at this point the GM remembers the horse and ponies should have reacted to it and decides it’s better not to mention his mistake to the players).  After a day in the swamp the party find a series of foot bridges going between ‘islands’ in the swamp.  Following it brings them quickly to a scene of carnage as Orcs lay scattered around their barred wagons.  Something very large hit these Orcs.  Kensuke does not believe in Orcs and insists they are just really ugly humans with bad dental hygiene.   Aloysius swears as he realises that the orcs are using Blight Weapons!  He describes the evil process used to create them to the characters and the characters decide to leave them behind.  The characters conclude that the wagons are meant to either hold prisoners or slaves due to the shackles on the inside and the iron bars.

After a short time following the bridge network the players see a group of Orcs huddled on an island, they are certainly afraid of something but there is no light for them to see.  The characters call out to the Orcs from a distance and the Orcs reply in thier own language and shake their Falchions in the air.  The group spend several minutes trying to decide what to do with the Orcs when just then the GM has had enough and shouts.  Only one player jumped (sadly) so he was not able to react when a large Dragon falls from the sky behind the Orcs and starts attacking them relentlessly.  The Horse and Ponies should have bolted but the GM forgot about them again.  Leroy and Kensuke Power Jump into the fray doing an Eiffel Tower on the way while Sethroy runs up and Aloysius starts setting up his repeating catapult.

It is obvious that the Dragon is behaving strangely and seems to be sick.  Kensuke unleashes a barrage of attacks on the Dragons neck while Leroy pummels it with his tonfa’s.  The crushing attacks appear to be doing minimal damage to the dragon.  By the time Sethroy arrives the dragon had not managed to land a single blow on the heroes.  Leroy has now focused the attacks on the dragons Eyes (missing most of the time) and Sethroy attacks with a swing and a lunge.  the first weapon to actually puncture the dragon and Sethroy is rewarded by a splash of acid on his hands causing a bit of pain.  Now the dragon is extremely enraged and bites Leroy however the GM rolls a 2 for damage and Leroy’s Ninja armor soaks up the damage and the dragon looses a tooth.  A few more rounds and the players dispatch the dragon and the creature seems to have some form of necrotizing fasciitis.  Some of the scales are in good nick and Sethroy and Aloysius start to plunder the creature while Kensuke and Leroy scout out the area using a map they found on one of the Orcs corpses.

40 minutes later they come on an Orc Stronghold made of Wood with a 20 foot high Wooden Palisade.  The Towers have Goblin Guards which Kensuke says are just ugly midgets. [I should point out by now Kensuke agrees that Orcs had existed but all the ones he has seen are now dead so they are extinct, just like dragons. <sigh>]  Using their Super Jump, a DX check, and a stealth roll at -2 the two Super Jump to the top of the palisade wall and climb down.  Inside they find two slave pits with Humans, some Elves, 3 dwarves and 2 gnomes.  Here we end the adventure as we ran out of time.

After 40 minutes

The Sinister Secret of Whiterock

As you can tell from my infrequent posts over the last few years I have not had much time to play GURPS and most of my friends have had even less time.  Well now I have a group of three that play, more or less, every other week.  However I still have not had a lot of time to make any original adventures so I’ve been doing something I have not done since the 80’s, I’m using purchased adventures!  Now converting adventures can be almost as time consuming as making one from scratch but it will still save me some time in the long run.

I’ve decided to go with Goodman Games Dungeon Crawl Classics with a splash of some original AD&D modules for good measure.  Our first adventure was The Sinister Secret of Whiterock #51.5. I found this adventure to be the perfect starter for our games.  It took six hours to run through the entire thing and it gave the party time to remember how to play (including myself).

Converting Challenges

As with anything GURPS 4e the one place that it will fall short is the lack of diverse book of Monsters.  Now they do have a lot of monsters but it is spread out through several books and not all of them are suitable for every adventure.  This is not normally a problem with my regular Fantasy games, but for Dungeon Fantasy it is a large problem for me.  I use DF when I don’t have a ton of spare time to design, this includes NPC’s and Monsters.  I replaced Owlbears with Cave Bears and had to design my own Sih’hel.

Thankfully the rest of the monsters where quite standard, Giant insects and mammals and a few skeletons.

Now the traps threw me for a bit as I don’t normally have traps in my standard fantasy games, however with a bit of reading I found the area that explained them.  When I get the time I will make a list like Grimstooth Traps for GURPS.

Playing Challenges

I have to admit that I forgot a good portion of the rules and I did not run the game as seamless as I should have.  The first few combats were a challenge and I did not do so well when the players did unexpected actions.  The players pretty much walked in unprepared.  No healing potions, no torches, no bandages.  For a Ninja, Assassin, and a Martial Artist they found out what happens when you don’t follow the 7 P’s ( Prior Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performances).

Overview of the Session

One player could not make it (the Ninja), So we start the game in an Inn (what? you where expecting something original?) when the players hear rumors of a Cave Bear in the area and the inn keepers son went missing while gathering herbs and firewood.  The innkeeper offers the players some gold and a weeks worth of boarding (excluding food and drink) if they would find his son.  The players except as they are extremely low on cash and I have not offered any other options.

Not expecting much they just head out without supplies (silly adventures) and discover some standing stones while following the cave bear tracks (which they only found because they critically rolled Per, none of them had tracking).  They accidentally find the entrance (grace of GM).  Thankfully the Assassin had Night Vision 4. All the combats go well but the martial artist is slowly whittled down throughout the game and relies heavily on defensive maneuvers and techniques towards the end.  The Assassin fairs no better and during the final confrontation the two end up running back up the dungeon and ambushing and retreating the entire way up.   After dealing with the Sih’hel sorceress  the two delvers limp back down to the black crystal obelisk to find any treasure.  What they do find is the Ninja player who is unconscious and tied to an alter.  They find some health potions (grace of GM) and end up spending over 24 hours in the place recovering and getting their loot together.  The don’t realize until they reach the light of day that the black obelisk has transformed their features giving them pale white skin, dark vision 1, and a feral aura (-1 reaction rolls).  Now how will they deal with this curse?

Microsoft OneNote and GURPS

OneNote and GURPS

Microsoft OneNote is an amazing program that can be used effectively as a campaign manager.  There are other programs out there like EverNote, Realmscape and a few others but as I already have OneNote and use if for University I just stick to what I know.

OneNote acts just like a spiral notebook that you can keep adding pages and tabs to.  You may screen capture, use OCR, and links within OneNote and to pages on the internet for easy reference.  You can get Apps for both android and iPhone/iPad which I have used for my Android tablet and my iPhone.  The photo above shows a desktop picture overlaid with my iPhone screen cap.  I tend to place my maps into OneNote then number them in OneNote and link the numbers to the descriptions in another tab.  It works really well except the links won’t work in the Apps.  I almost wish I would have waited for the Windows 8 tablet from ASUS instead of getting my Android.

I will be using this extensively in my GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Games.

Revised Sewer Tiles

Here is the revised Sewer battle Tiles for Level One of the Mega Dungeon.  The walk ways are 3′ and the water channel is 6′

 

 

 

 

 

I’m still working on the CC3 Effects but I like what I have so far.  The brick pattern from the first sewer test was just not doing it for me.  I’ve had to add and move the Sheet effects around.  Here is what I have on them so far, each with one or more effects.

  • Floor Sunken
  • Floor Depressed
  • Floors
  • Water
  • Deep Water
  • Floor Raised
  • Walls
  • Shadows

I’m debating on whether or not to have lighting effects.  There will be narrow water channels of 3′ with no walk ways as well.

A few simple Geomorphs

So I’m feeling a bit better and quickly created these three Geomorphs.  I wanted to see if it mattered visually placing a 3′ corridor to a 6′ corridor without some kind of transition, or if a corridor going to a dead end at the edge of the geomorph looked odd.  Well in some places they may look a bit odd, but creating a cave in would solve that problems fairly quickly.

The Grub Tavern
The Grub Tavern

Not all Geomorphs have to be a random assortment of rooms and corridors.  I give you “The Grub Tavern” a place that is safe to drink and rest up while exploring the never ending passages of the under world.  It features a large common area, 12 rooms for rent (from the stairs not shown on Geomorph) good food and ale.

Cross Roads

Random Geomorph 1

Once I get a good assortment of Geomorphs made I will place them in a pdf for use.  What size should each tile print at?  3″, 4″ or 6″ tiles?  I have not decided yet.

I’m also exploring the random and themed Geomorph.  I’m not going to go too much into explaining why all this is here, that just takes the fun out of Mega Dungeons, but I would like some organisation to them other than just the random mess that you see in old school mega dungeons.  Don’t get me wrong I plan on using random mess as well.  Hey if it is not broke why fix it.

Planning my Mega Dungeon Part 1

So where to start?

Well lets start out with what you need for maps to play any version of GURPS.  GURPS uses a Hexagonal Grid with one hex = 3 feet.  This is much different then the standard D&D of 1 square = 5 feet (or 10 feet in some maps).

Well I started by using a square map with a hexagonal grid.

Now this looks nice and works really well except for one problem.  You can only rotate it 180 degrees.  If you rotate it 90 degrees the hexagon grid becomes vertical not horizontal so this means you have to make two versions of this tile, one with a vertical hexagon and the other with a horizontal hexagon in order to be able to rotate it.  This is not exactly what I had in mind.

After several discussions on the World Works Games forums I decided that it was possible using a hexagonal tile.  The advantages to this is you can freely rotate them and they will always match up with the next tile!

This allows me to create battle tiles for use with miniatures and have them line up with the other tiles.  I made the tiles as large as I could to fit on either US letter or A4 paper.  Some of the things I notice is that when you have corridors meeting diagonally across the edge of the tile it needs to be slightly smaller than if it meets head on.  The image above is a perfect example.  The north/south corridor meets the edge head on and is 6 feet wide.  The east/west corridor will be slightly off if matched with another tile that goes head on so it needs to be adjusted.  I’ve discussed with on the Steve Jackson Games forums and figured out that for a 6′ corridor I need to reduce the size to 5′-6″ if it runs diagonally to the tile edge in Campaign Cartographer.  Case solved.

However what about large scale maps?  It is fine to make a whole bunch of random battle tiles but even your standard square grid tiles require several battle tiles to make a descent layout.  So after several discussions with people (including Kuroshima) I came up with this design.  The hex tile above will be the main geomorph tile.  It contains 13 full size battle maps and 6 half tile battle maps.  Now I can draw geomorphs on this tile and if needed easily transfer them to a full size battle tile for use with miniatures.  There will be two connecting points per side.  So one tile that looked like this can be duplicated and rotated to create this maze of corridors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So far I’m happy with the results. I will continue to keep everyone updated on my progress as I come up with a way to easily create large scale dungeons for GURPS games.