Actual Play: Calvinball in the Shrine of Duplicity

Savage Tides: Fogmire Part 3

Today's game picked up immediately from where last week's game left off: the delvers are in an evil shrine, wounded after killing a bunch of demons, and huge statue-golem is animating and coming to kill them.

Plans Change

I'm adapting the Savage Tides Adventure Path for these sessions, and I'd already done the prep work and monster conversions. In the adventure as written, the golem wakes up a few rounds after the delvers kill the demons and attacks. It's a big pile of hit points, DR, and magical immunity and I'm sure it's a lot of fun in D&D. In GURPS, it's a bit less overwhelming, and I always figured it was going to be a bit boring after the "oh no, emergency!" surprise ended. The swashbuckler, the saint, and the scout would hardly be able to hurt it, and so it would really just be a solo combat with the knight.

Then as I was reviewing my notes this morning, I had an inspiration: put some cursed artifacts on the altar behind the golem, and have the golem continue to revive every time it went down as long as the artifacts where in the shrine. The delvers would have to fetch the artifacts, dodge the golem while moving them out of the room, taking damage all the time, and then kill the golem again. It sounded a lot more fun.

Slow Start

The play of the game started slow. For some reason, the delvers decided to evacuate the wounded before fighting the golem. There was about 5 rounds of people being picked up and carried around while everyone argued whether it was a good idea to fight the golem in the shrine or in the hallway. Finally the half-ogre knight threw the cabin boy into the wall (he was aiming for the door but missed), drew his flail, and began wailing on the golem.

The golem had DR10 and 45 HP. Big Al decided to go for the leg, on the general principle that things that have fallen over are easier to fight. Without being specific, I warned them that the golem was huge, and it would be really hard to cripple its leg in a single hit, or even in multiple hits. So on his first shot, Big Al rolled 23 damage (on 4d), added his +12 bonus damage from Weapon Master, and totally crippled the monster. A couple more rounds of beat down and the golem was out.

Calvinball

Then the chaos started. The artifacts wreathed themselves and the golem in an impenetrable field of evil light, healing the golem in the process. The saint recognized what was going on, and alerted the other delvers that as long as the artifacts where in the shrine, the golem would heal and get stronger every time in went down.

The golem rose up and engaged the knight while the scout and the swashbuckler ran for the altar. The swashbuckler picked up a cursed knife (taking 1d-3 irresistible toxic damage every second) and starting running for the door, followed by the golem. The saint said a prayer and pulled the other two artifacts off the altar, one of them landing near the knight. Who proceeded to play croquet or maybe jai alai with it, giving it a massive wallop with his flail.

Over the next several rounds, the golem and the delvers played a really weird game of rugby or field hockey, kicking the various artifacts across the floor of the shrine, picking them up and tossing them to each other, and dodging the deadly golem. Everyone really got into the experience, with the swashbuckler gleefully dodging between the golem's legs to retrieve an evil skull and the scout running up and down the walls while impaling artifacts on his arrows and shooting them away. It was crazy fun.

Finally, the delvers got all the artifacts in the hall, the golem fell over, and we wrapped that sequence of play with the assumption that Big Al could just beat the golem to death again.

Elated and amused, the delvers looted the place, sanctified the shrine, and left.

The Colony of Farshore

The rest of the session was mostly role-playing. The delvers walked south to the Great Wall of Tanaroa, got through the gate, and sold an annoying NPC's horse to the natives for passage to the colony of Farshore. Finally! Back to civilization, of sorts.

The delvers were annoyed to discover that their ship still hadn't made it around the island after dropping them off a week earlier. They were more annoyed when they discovered that thanks to the gold trade with the natives, inflation was rampant in Farshore and meals at the tavern were costing 80 times normal. They were somewhat relieved when they discovered that local pirates were attacking the fishing fleet, and that was artificially raising the price of food even more - there was an obvious solution for delvers. All that pretty much went as I had anticipated and planned.

I introduced the morally ambiguous antagonist of the Farshore social scene, Lord Manthalay Meravanchi, at the very end of the session. He's an obvious villain in the adventure as written, the rival of the delvers' long-standing patron. I wanted the question of whom to support to at least be a bit tricky, so I introduced him as a devout follower of the same religion as Daughter Joan, the saint. He fawned over her, praising her wisdom and thanking the gods for sending her to his island, and then commiserated with the other delvers about having to travel with his annoying nephew (aforementioned NPC). As I had hoped, the delvers were charmed, though some of Manthalay's more comments about how to deal with the natives made them a little squeamish.

What Next?

That's the end of Here There Be Monsters, and a good pausing point in the campaign. I'll be writing some Changing Tide articles about my preparation for Tides of Dread, the next adventure, but I won't be in a hurry. One of the other players will take over running Dungeon World for a while, and that should take us through April and mid-May.

Changing the Tide: Welcome to Farshore and Beyond

Welcome to Farshore

In the Savage Tide Adventures Path (STAP), the final episode of the 4th adventure (Here There Be Monsters) segues directly into the opening of the 5th adventure (Tides of Dread). The delvers, having just crossed a significant portion of the Isle of Dread, arrive at the northern colony of Farshore just in time to rescue it from pirates. Cue dramatic music!

My problem with this presentation is that it's a huge pain for me. I've got one session left before our group returns to its normal gaming experience, which in this case is going to be Dungeonworld. There's already the final tedious fight from Fogmire to complete, and I ended on that cliffhanger so I'm pretty much committed to the grindfest versus the nigh-invulnerable golem. This is probably something I should have thought of ahead of time and planned differently. The opening of Tides of Dread is a neat set piece, with the delvers running around town saving people from pirates and probably needing to split up to save everyone in time. I don't really want to cut it, but I don't want to end on a cliffhanger that may never get resolved, nor do I want to start it and then play Dungeonworld for a couple of months and come back to Savage Tide.

Fortunately, there's an easy way to resolve this: postpone the attack. Let the delvers arrive safely in town, and discover the rampant inflation. Having to put up with the inflation for a day or two should make the impact of the town's gratitude for saving them from the pirates more meaningful. It should also give me time to set up some of the role-playing bits and politics without the pressure of recovering from the pirate attack.

And Beyond

STAP covers 12 adventures, but I'm only running about half of them. Some just came off as boring or implausible to me on the read-through, so I'm cutting them. For sure, I've already skipped the first adventure, and I don't intend to run Lightless Depths, which is a weird railroad trip that's hard to explain and not interesting. I'll probably keep City of Broken Idols, which is an expansion of the old Taboo Island from X1: Isle of Dread, though I'll remove a lot of the plot elements that I'm using inconsistently at best (ie, all the references to the demonic pearl factory which ties into the overall "let's kill Demogorgon" storyline that I've been ignoring). The Snakes of Shuttlecove, or whatever the next adventure after that is, bores me to tears, so I'm definitely skipping that.

In summary, my current plans are to run the main plot of Tides of Dread, since it's an interesting sand-boxy sort of story. The delvers have a limited amount of time to explore the Isle of Dread, recruit allies, loot Taboo Island, fortify Farshore, and do other heroic stuff before a pirate fleet comes to raze the colony. Depending on how well the delvers do at looting and fortifying, they may decide to flee back to civilization or defeat the pirate fleet. Either way, we'll pretty much be done with the Isle of Dread (and most of STAP), unless the delvers want to stick around some more and explore more stuff.

At some point, though, they'll be done with the Isle and go back to civilization, turn all their loot into magic items, and become more powerful than I can imagine. Killing orcs and ogres will stop being a challenge at that point, but it seems cruel to not let them play around with their Puissant Fine Balanced Elven Welsh Longbows of Armor-Breaking Accuracy and whatnot. So while I will happily offer to retire the characters at that point, when they refuse, I have a plan.

After Serpents of Shuttlecove, the next STAP adventure Into the Maw. As written, it's a sailing trip into the Abyss and then a prison-break from a demonic prison. It sounds rather insane, and I don't think it's going to work for my group: first, all the delvers are "good" that they won't cut deals with demons, and second, Sister Joan the Saint will have Enhanced Smite by then, and 3d bu damage in a 16 yard radius means that you don't have to cut deals with demons because the demons are all burnt to ash. Reflecting on this reality, I was going to just toss the adventure, but then I had a good idea. Instead of making it a demonic prison in the Abyss, make it an unseelie faerie prison in Faerieland. It should convert over pretty easily, since the difference between "scary scaly demon" and "creepy unseelie nightmare" isn't really that much in concept. But there's nothing objectively evil about bargaining with the fae, even if its often unwise.

So adapting Into the Maw should work as a high level adventure, and high powered unseelie fae make perfectly adequate enemies against 400 point delvers and don't strain credibility at all. The fact that the place is a prison means I can even use some of the demons, since they would be escaped prisoners either way.

The last 3 adventures in STAP are a big war against Demogorgon. I'm not sure how I feel about them, and I'm not sure that even high point delvers are really ready to kill gods. But I can worry about all that next year.

Actual Play: Savage Tides Fogmire Part 2

I just got back from running the second Fogmire session of my DF:STAP game (here's the link to the first). This session was mostly a big brawl.

SPOILERS for Savage: Here There Be Monsters below

This session started where the last one ended: the delvers have opened a bunch of magically locked doors, and are staring down a corridor lined with monkey statues. Some Scout! and Thief! rolls later, and Blackjack the scout was convinced there are proximity traps on the statues, and Simon the swashbuckler-thief was convinced the hall was safe. He failed his roll against Overconfidence, and ther was a flurry of diplomacy and physical grapples to keep him from setting them off.

The proximity traps didn't go to the ceiling, so Blackjack activates hid Sailor Slippers (letting him walk on walls and ceilings) and Chi the elementalist cast levitate and floated past them. On the far side, Chi spent a lot of fatigue to effectively disarm the traps and everyone else walked down to the doors to the final shrine. No traps were found on the doors, everyone got ready, and Big Al kicked the door opens.

Inside, a pair of teleporting ape demon martial artists and their spirit naga wizard pal were torturing some captives, suspended thirty feet over a fire (it's at time like these I cop to the fact that my game is over-the-top gonzo). Knowledge checks were made, and Big Al shouted "the snake-woman is like a medusa! Don't look at her face!" to general scoffing.

Blackjack quickly learnt that Big Al did know something: looking at the naga triggers her gaze attack and he was inflicted with Pacifism: Reluctant Killer (Naga only). There was some whining about the power of the effect, but that's how Afflictions work in GURPS and I was unmoved. Honestly, it could have been worse: Blackjack narrowly missed gaining a Sense of Duty to the naga. He hit the naga with his arrows anyway, but she burnt some Destiny points to make her Dodge rolls. Everyone else advanced into the room. The naga activated her Delay spells, granting her Armor 5, Blur 5, Walk on Air, and Great Haste. The demons ready to attack.

A general melee ensued. Blackjack ran around on the walls, complaining all the time that he can't really do much against Homogeneous enemies with DR10 (true) or against people that he a -9 or more to hit. I continued to be unmoved. Sister Joan the saint starting smiting demons, only to find that one of the demons is wearing a cloak of Cosmic Fire Resistance +10. There was more whining, and then someone remembered that that Simon can actually pickpocket the cloak in combat (yes, there's a massive penalty, but he has Thief! points).

The lesser demon tried to teleport to kill Blackjack, but critically failed and ended up unsupported over the ceiling. Two rounds later, it landed and got murdered by Big Al (with ST22, Weapon Master, and an silver oversized flail, he was much less concerned about their DR). Blackjack ended up shooting the naga, killing it with meteoric iron arrows after it took out Chi with a 6d lightning bolt. The boss demon, without its cloak, got worn down by Sister Joan's smites after spending a couple of round trading Knight! and generic destiny points with Big Al.

With the monsters down, Sister Joan went to heal up Chi while the others rescued the captives. People were celebrating their victory and admiring Simon's fancy new cloak when they heard an ominous growl - and the Lemurian Golem, previously looking like a statue, began moving. Sadly, it was 5pm and we had places to go, so the session ended there.

This was a pretty good session. The delvers did really well, killing 3 highly abusive enemies that were often tailored against their specific strengths. Chi went down, and Sister Joan was hurt, but everyone else survived without wounds (though Luck and Destiny points had pretty much been exhausted). I don't think it's the kind of session that I want to run very often, but it was fun this time.

One thing I realized again is that I really need to play every weird monster at least twice before I get a feel for its best tactics. The bar-lgura where a lot more effective this time, since I remembered to use their teleport this time. It just makes me sad, since I tend to generate a lot of my own monsters and I don't often play them to their best potential on the first appearance, and there isn't always a second time.

Escapism versus Struggle

Some people play role-playing games for the struggle, and some people play it for the escapism. I'm much more the latter than the former, and I think most of my players are the same way. I don't think that one style is better than the other, but it is an aesthetic preference that most people on the table should share for maximum enjoyment. This was much more of a struggle session than an escapism session.

(Snide aside: I do have the same derision for the people who think they're proving their superiority by beating arbitrary imaginary fights that they do for me for playing in "wuss mode." Fair's fair. But that's not directed at people like Peter V. Dell'Orto, who seem to prefer a more struggle oriented style without casting aspersions on people who don't share that preference.)

Actual Play: Savage Tides Fogmire Part 1

I just got back from running the Fogmire session of my DF:STAP game. We didn't quite complete the dungeon, which I quite expected: the fight with the bar-lgura and the gladiator ape court was quite big.

SPOILERS for Savage Tide: Here There Be Monsters below

The session started with the delvers interrogating a zombie that's being tortured by demons. Why is the zombie being tortured? I don't know. The bar-lgura interrupted the discussion by teleporting in, capturing a bunch of inconvenient NPCs, and teleporting out. The delvers didn't get much of a chance to fight, though they did learn that the bar-lguras were vulnerable to silver (almost none of the PCs have silver weapons) but otherwise had very high DR.

Some prayers were made and a holy oracle pointed the way to the dungeon. The delvers explored a bit, avoided the obvious traps, used Scout! destiny points to track the monsters (the original adventure makes it clear that the bar-lgura drag their captives through the tunnels, despite being presumably able to teleport anywhere inside the complex) and quickly got to the first set of traps: the Doors of Sacrifice and the Shrine of Duplicity.

The Doors require a blood sacrifice from the delvers, in the form of one delver sticking both hands into a pair of bronze demonic mouths. A pair of (non-magical, non-important) statues loom on either side of the door, and the players were convinced they were golems. Some time was wasted, smashing the golems to pieces, but even then, the delvers didn't want to try to open the door. Finally, the elementalist used Shape Metal to shrink the door in its frame and they got in that way - and laughed a bit when they realized they could have just smashed the doors open.

The puzzle in the Shrine is fiendishly difficult, non-intuitive, without clues, and a definite case of pixel-bitching. The delvers searched enough to be able to disarm the traps on the mirrors (more Thief! and Scout! destiny points spent to find those traps) but I made them work out the candle-throne-mirror-candle-throne-mirror-portal sequence all by themselves. I think that took an hour of real-time to get through.

The first couple of delvers through the portal were sneaky, but the elementalist made some noise and the saint was spotted by the demons. A big fight broke out. The elementalist was kidnapped to the upper level, where one of the bar-lgura spent the better part of 7 rounds trying and failing to throw him off the edge. The other bar-lgura bounced around, opened the door for the fiendish gladiator apes, and got smited multiple times by the saint. The apes went after the saint and the scout, but failed to connect with either. Despite a constant stream of reinforcements and the knight taking a couple of rounds to get through the portal, the scout managed to kill enough apes to link up with the swashbuckler, who killed the rest. The ones going after the saint got ignited by smite, and I discovered that gladiator apes don't have High Pain Threshold. So their awesome Brawling-18 got dropped to an effective 11 thanks to "on fire", "-4 shock penalty each turn", and "-1 SM penalty." The saint just kept burning them, dodging, retreating, blocking, and parrying. Eventually the knight showed up and helped her out.

Finally the demons were down and enough apes had died that the rest cowered (and got exterminated by the  scout at range, but we didn't play that out). The delvers quickly explored the rooms. They figured that the valves in the the Chamber of Bones were trapped, and the elementalist used Apportation on a piece of bone to make a lever to turn them. He still got hit by the Rain of Icy Shards, but it wasn't as bad as it could be. They recovered the iron monkey paw ("It's not a statue, or a bas-relief, or a carving, obviously... I guess you'd call it a bit of tacky iron bric-a-brac?") from the fountains, and then went into the Iron Ape Statues room.

My friends are bright people, and confronted with a pair of iron ape statues missing a hand apiece while they were holding an iron model of a monkey paw, they quickly figured out what to do. There was some quick searching ('hey, you guys never said you were searching the court room"), some more Scout! and Thief! destiny points, and then they unlocked the treasure chests and found the other paw.

We ended the session with them opening the doors to the Hall of Howls. So far, they've been quiet enough that they haven't attracted attention of Team Evil in the Shrine, but we'll see how it goes.

My tactics with the bar-lgura could have been better. I'm torn as to whether the Shrine of Duplicity was too hard - it's clearly an annoying, single solution, pixel-bitching puzzle, but on the other hand, my players figured it out with minimal prompting, hints, or clues. I'll have to ask if they thought it was too frustrating or not.

Changing the Tide: Fogmire

Fogmire is a very linear and somewhat random dungeon that nominally acts as the conclusion of Here There Be Monsters (HTBM) in STAP. For my purposes, it has advantages in that its short, straightforward, and filled with interesting traps. It has the disadvantages of being so linear that adding any branching or loops to it would require completely rewriting it, and the one monster to a room problem that is so common with D&D3e adventures.

I can deal with the linear nature of the dungeon by pretty much ignoring it and looking forward to the adventure, Tides of Dread (ToD). ToD is a mini-sandbox, exploring the Isle of Dread while preparing for a pirate invasion. So this silly linear dungeon is fine; the PCs are going to be under a lot of time pressure (their allies have been captured by teleporting demons and are being tortured). A straight dungeon is simple for them, and instead of worrying about which way to go, they can focus on resource management (prayers, potions, HP, time) and not dying in the traps.

The one monster to a room is more of a concern. 5 PCs, plus 1-2 allies, versus a single monster is going to go poorly for the monster in GURPS. Okay, it goes badly in D&D, too, but it's really obvious in GURPS. The choice of monster acerbates the problem. A lone naga wizard is just going to get shredded, and disguising itself as a zombie "to make it look less threatening" isn't a plan, it's insanity. The mob template of gorillas is just a boring melee monster.

My simple solution to these problems is to combine two of the rooms, change the mob template into a bunch of gladiator apes, and move the naga wizard down the hall to the Shrine. A pair of teleporting demons, grabbing people and pulling them onto the upper level of a room with two levels, should distract the PCs plenty while a few waves of a dozen or more gladiator apes come charging in. The naga wizard works better at the end of a long hall filled with traps than at the front of it; the fact that she has another teleporting demon martial artist to play bodyguard should also drastically increase her lifespan. The fact that the PC's allies are slowly dropping toward a pit of fire should also nicely divide their attention, though honestly only for a round or two.

Notes on the conversion to GURPS are here.

Changing the Tide: Reworking the Sargasso Sea

The Sea Wyvern's Wake adventure in the Savage Tide Adventure Path has a sequence where the delvers' ship is trapped in a creepy and eldritch sargasso sea. In the adventure, it's not much of a puzzle: the delvers are harassed at night by creepy assassin vines and vine horrors, they find a journal telling them to go to the center of the sargasso to kill the mother-plant that is summoning the vines, they go to the center and kill the Mother of All in an epic if unrealistic battle.

Even as a simple DF adventure, it's pretty linear and doesn't require much thought. However, my players like thinking, exploring, and solving puzzles and mysteries a lot more than they like straightforward combat. They'd just had a few sessions of straightforward combat, and I figured they'd lose interest if I gave them another. Instead, I adapted the premise to create an interesting puzzle monster.

My first step was to declare to myself that an eldritch horror from beyond time and space, the kind of thing that creates a 10 mile morass of floating vines to entrap ships on the high seas, can't be killed by unsophisticated direct damage. I didn't really stat it out, but I was thinking DR 30 (not versus silver), 1000 HP, Instant Regeneration, Magic Resistance 20, and so forth. The massive DR, HP, and regeneration meant that fighting the thing straight up was an impossible battle, while the weakness to silver was the first step towards giving them an out.

The next step was to think about ways to hurt this thing. I knew I wanted it to be vulnerable to silver weapons because a lot of PCs in my games, over the years, have bought silver weapons that weren't really useful and I wanted to make up for that. I could also provide hints to the vulnerability with vague allusions to moon metal or were-bane, or confuse the issue by alluding to night metal or heavenly metal (which most players would think to be meteoric iron). I finally decided on a multi-ingredient poison or herbicide.

I started with belladonna. It's a poison, but it was also used as a cosmetic, and "beautiful lady" is an easy translation into a lot of languages, at least at a recognizable if not accurate level. Garlic was another easy choice. It's historically a cure for just about everything, is the kind of thing that might reasonably be found on a sailing ship, and has a bunch of funky slang names that are generally recognizable. Two of my players are from the San Francisco Bay, so I was worried that I would give the game away immediately by calling it "the stinky rose".

I was stumped for the last ingredient for a while. I wanted at least one ingredient that if the players couldn't figure it out entirely, the delvers would at least be able to find some close substitutes. That made me think of white wine vinegar, since the ships might have white wine to use as a substitute. A wikipedia search on the varieties of vinegar confirmed that vinegar was a good choice, because of all the varieties, and I finally chose Jacob's Tears vinegar as a strange one that had alternate names.

Finally, I wanted them to have to apply the poison to a specific place. The original adventure has the Mother of All living at a bottom of a 100' shaft lined with budding and growing vine horrors. It's creepy, but a bit stupid: the adventurers can start by standing at the top and dropping damaging spells and attacks straight down, while the Mother can teleport anywhere in the Sargasso Sea so she can either move to the top of the shaft and fight the adventurers or teleport the heck away and completely frustrate any chance of victory. That's weak adventure design, since it means the adventurers only win if the monster gets the Idiot Ball. I wanted the Mother to be a static foe, but clearly some kind of creepy producer of additional threats - a mother indeed. I liked the imagery of the original shaft of budding vine horrors, and it had a nice resonance with the literal meaning of kindergarten - "child garden" - which inspired another clue. The heroes would need to shoot the Mother in the kindergarten.

As this was supposed to be a puzzle, giving them a single list of "moon-metal, stinking rose, pearl barley vinegar; apply to the budding vines" would be something of a let-down. Instead, I came up with the idea that each of three ships previously trapped in the Sargasso had tried to create the poison with varying degrees of cluefulness and resources. The various logs' allusions and half-references could be compared to each other to resolve the puzzle. I ran the clues by Bruno to see if it was too hard - I figured the combined mental resources of 5 people at a table had to be at least as good as one very bright gamer. She figured it all out and even realized the Mother was a load-bearing boss.

I was happy, and wrote up notes and hand-outs here.

Actual Play

As it turned out on the tabletop, I forgot that my players were essentially a committee, and a committee is less bright than the individual members. I had to gently steer them away from some of their more insane half-conclusions, and as it turned out, none of them really knew that belladonna was used as a cosmetic. Eventually, though, they managed to figure out the poison and make it.

When they finally arrived at the Mother of All's rooms underneath a wrecked ship, I had a sudden insight: if there's only one thing to shoot, they're going to shoot that one thing. I probably should have thought of that earlier. So I ended up drawing a bunch of stuff on the map: a collection of venus flytrap-like mouths, a "bunch of weird electrical things, some kind of weird organic Tesla coils and Jacob's ladders", a bunch of weird organic pump-like organs, some "strange polyp like growths", and "a patch of open space in which new vine horrors periodically bud and grow." Then I had to clarify that the pumps were not the thing's heart and didn't look like hearts and for all they could tell, were being used to drain the water from the below sea-level chamber they were in.

The players now had several targets to chose from, and being players, they fixated on those dang pumps. I don't know why. More gentle steering and reminders that pumps are not necessarily hearts when dealing with eldritch biology of some kind of creepy Cthulhuoid plant eventually allowed the players to remember the phrase "essence of motherhood." They couldn't read the word "kindergart" on the print-outs, which was my mistake for putting the blur too close to the word. Though Bruno managed to read it on the PDFs so I'm not sure how I was supposed to catch it. Eventually they shot a silver-coated meteoric iron poisoned arrow (the scout had a collection of silver-coated meteoric iron arrows, so they didn't even have to take the chance on silver versus meteoric) into the nursery, the Mother of All retreated, and we had a fun chase sequences as the delvers fled the suddenly sinking wreck and tried to recover loot on the way.

It was a pretty memorable experience, and a lot of fun. I strongly recommend that other GMs either steal this puzzle or come up with something similar the next time they need to put their PCs up against a nigh-unkillable monster.

Actual Play: Savage Tides Gargoyle Cliffs

So a bit of background for normal people who haven't read the Savage Tide Adventure Path recently:

In STAP, through a series of coincidences and railroads, the delvers acquire a pirate ship (the Sea Wyvern) and are chartered to escort the cargo ship Blue Nixie to a trading colony on the Isle of Dread. The Isle of Dread is the same Isle of Dread described in the old D&D module (X1, included in my brother's ancient blue Expert box). On the way, they get in a storm, the Sea Wyvern gets caught on a reef, almost all of the friends the GM has so painstakingly made into real people on the voyage drown, and the delvers are forced to walk across a dinosaur infested island to the colony.

I didn't have the heart. Killing off most of the passengers and crew seemed like a sick joke, so instead I had the Blue Nixie get reefed and the Sea Wyvern find it on the beach a few days later. The delvers' patron and expedition leader had already left, to walk across the island and get help, and they were forced to follow her. This let me run the rest of the adventure more or less unmodified, except for the additional parts I wanted to modify.

The adventure, as written, consists of 4 parts: the beach and the journey south to the Dark Pass; the Dark Pass, a tunnel through a mountain ending in an ancient, mummy-guarded tomb; the Gargoyle Cliffs, a long walk along beachside cliffs while being attacked by ferociously territorial gargoyles; and Fogmire, a demonic shrine in the middle of the island. We'd played through the first two parts in the previous weeks (my players did not like the way I substituted a giant psychic lizard for the T. Rex, but it pleased me), and so this week was the gargoyle cliffs.

This was a pretty straightforward section: the delvers get ambushed by gargoyles on the cliffs, take a sabotaged primitive elevator down the cliffside, and get assaulted by the gargoyle chief and his bully boys.

The initial ambush went about as well as could be expected: 4 gargoyles pop out and get the stuffing beat out of them. I'd given the gargoyles stone armor (DR 4) and a level of DR that isn't by-the-book legal for PCs in DF (also DR 4) and that meant that the scout's bodkin arrows to the vitals only did enough damage to cause major wounds and take the gargoyles out of the fight, not kill them. Small victories, I guess.

The sabotaged lift was a little more amusing. None of the PCs really checked to make sure the lift worked beyond a casual "does it look like it can hold us?" so they didn't really detect the sabotaged cables. The first two people to try the lift were Simon and Chi. When the cable broke, Simon easily made the Acrobatics check to jump free, and although Chi didn't even try, Big Al reached over to grab him. The lift smashed the back of Big Al's helmet, but didn't do anywhere enough damage for him to even notice. Then the delvers used rope to repair the lift and Blackjack used his nifty new Sailor's Slippers (climb any surface, 5 minutes/day) to scurry back up and recover the rope. Cheap bastard.

Finally, we had the big fight with the gargoyle chief. The gargoyles flew in, dropped rocks (that mostly missed) on everyone's head, and then landed and fought. Chi started using Shape Earth against their rock armor, which threw me. On the one hand, it's cool, and at 6 FP per suit of armor, not something he could do a lot. On the other, it felt horribly abusing. I treated each successful shaping as a grapple against the gargoyle, that could be broken by a contest of gargoyle's ST versus Chi's Shape Earth skill +5. The gargoyle chief broke out of his (destroying his armor in the process, and opening him up to Big Al's flail) and another gargoyle ended the fight trapped in his.  Everyone seemed to think it was cool, so I decided I must have made the right call.

There was a nice bit of terrain, too. The delvers were on a narrow path when they spotted the gargoyles, and it got narrower (with a 4 yd drop to a ledge) before opening to a cave. After the delvers spotted the gargoyles, they tried to hurry the non-combatants into the cave, but a couple of them slipped and fell to the ledge (taking some pretty bad damage rolls for the fall, too). Some of the delvers, in turn, jumped down to protect the injured, which had a nice effect of splitting the party into three groups: Blackjack in the cave with the patrons, Sister Joan and Simon on the ledge with the wounded non-combatants, and Chi and Big Al with some allies up on the cliff path. The gargoyles could freely move between all three locations, though I didn't take much advantage of this.

Wildcard specific destiny points (and destiny points in general) again reared their head in this session. I appreciate the idea that destiny points can be used to enable cool things and to prevent the death of a beloved character, but they also give the PCs another resource for avoiding death. Case in point, the mortally wounded gargoyle chief decided to make an all-out attack against Big Al, trading a massive pile of attack bonuses for severe penalties to Big Al's absurdly high defense. Big Al calmly rolled the dice, ate the -7 penalty, failed (but not critically), and spent a Knight! destiny point to succeed. I just don't know if I have the heart to routinely send foes with skills in the 28+ range after the PCs in order to force them burn destiny points (and Luck) fast enough that the foes can actually threaten them. At any rate, Big Al and the gargoyle chief dueled, Big Al won, and the rest the delvers shot gargoyles in the vitals or chopped off their wings, legs, and tails until enough of the gargoyles decided this wasn't working and ran away.

So now I need to make sure that next week's Big Bad has a pile of Destiny ("not go down like a chump in front of the heroes") in addition to all the other wacky stuff he needs to hold his own against the delvers. Moderately high play DF (we're in the low-300s now) can be tough to GM.

Actual Play: Savage Tides Background

I'm going to put up Actual Play reports from my GURPS DF adaption of Pathfinder's Savage Tides Adventure Path (STAP), along with some nodes here and there on how and why I converted stuff. But let me start with some general history of this game.

At least a year ago, two things happened around the same time. First, SJ Games released Matt Rigsby's The Mirror of the Fire Demon (MotFD), the 1st published adventure for GURPS DF. Second, my group's (at the time) regular GM got sick / disappeared into work / had a kid or something and was unable to run anything.

So as a stopgap, I volunteered to run a straight from the rule books GURPS DF game with MotFD. I'm a rules tweaker by nature, and DF is full of stuff I don't like (cheap Flying! generic magic! quick and dirty enchanting means that everyone has Cornucopia Quivers! unrealistic armor weights! overpowered weapon mastery! light, cheap rations and expensive healing potions! etc) but in the interest of speed and simplicity, I didn't change a single thing. The players were intrigued, and off we went.

The initial PCs where:
Sister Joan, a human Saint (played by RB). Joan was an intolerant, smelly, crazed holy woman.
Simon, a human Swashbuckler-Thief (played by DM). Simon was a light-hearted swashbuckler, always out to look cool and save the innocent.
Blackjack, a wood-elf Scout (played by TB). Blackjack was their paranoid wilderness guide, looking to avoid murdering bunnies while getting paid.

They were soon joined by:
Chi Nyugen, a human metal/fire elementalist (played by JS). Chi was a freaky wizard, cursed by strange and unpleasant happenings in his life, who joined the group after his initial expedition got overrun by fire demons.
Big Al, a half-ogre knight (played by WS). Big Al thought he was a bard, but swung a horribly mean flail. He was generally described as "strong as a horse, and nearly as big" or "good lord, we could ride him!". Without  Weapon Master, he only did 4d+4 damage and wasn't quite the Mayor of Crazytown he'd become, but was on his way.

These five delvers stomped their way through MotFD, running from the teams of other scary delvers, murdering the teams of other evil delvers, and being lied to by the teams of other friendly delvers. A good time was had by all. It wasn't high role-playing, but it was a good way to spend a Sunday afternoon with friends.

So eventually that finished, and we were again at loose ends, and somehow I volunteered to run STAP. I can never really tell why causes something to spark the "I'd really like to, or at least be willing to, run this" feeling, but STAP worked for me and the PCs wanted to spend their earned loot and do cool stuff on a sailing ship.

So that's the players, the characters, and the background. In a couple of months of on-again, off-again play (the group nominally meets weekly, but schedules collide and we play other stuff), they've gotten through 2 1/2 of the STAP adventures: the Bullywug Gambit and Sea Wyvern's Wake. They're finishing up Here There Be Monsters now, and skipped No Honor Among Thieves (the first adventure) since I thought it was a bit dull.