Castle of Horrors Session 8

Thursday is GURPS day!

Most of my gaming group met for another session of Castle of Horrors, though +Douglas Cole wasn't able to make it. This was another fun and interesting, but not necessarily terribly productive, session. Fighting undead may or may not be dangerous, but it tends to take up a lot of play time.

Well, That's Creepy

At the end of the previous session, the PCs were in the castle's basement after having killed a mad ax man and secured the magic ax Vengeance. Doug's character Neil and +Eric Schmidt's character Yusef had explored down some stairs and found a locked door. After some discussion and further recriminations on the subject of murder, the PCs decided to climb some nearby stairs that led to the base of the north tower.

When I first mapped and stocked the dungeon, I noted to myself at one point that there were only two ways to the base of the north tower: down the spiral stairs from the upper levels, and up the stairs from below. For reasons that will shortly be obvious, I thought it was very unlikely that the PCs would be coming down the spiral stairs and thus they'd have to be coming up from below. Nevertheless, I staged the encounter under the assumption that the PCs wouldn't see in the stair well and had the monsters hiding there. I'm not really sure why I did that.

At any rate, the new room was a roughly 60' across circle, with the PCs coming up a square flight of stairs on the west side. Roughly a dozen bodies of dead adventurers lay strewn on the floor, obviously dead from hideous wounds. The stairs themselves were shrouded in mist. Looking up above (with the aid of +Theodore Briggs' character Thomas and his tactical flashlight's 100 yard beam), the PCs saw the hollow interior of the tower rising around 160', nearly empty aside from the spiral stairs. And a huge beating heart hanging from the ceiling at the top of the tower.

I ruled that huge beating hearts are eerie and a little scary, and called for Fright Checks. Neil and his girlfriend Angela both failed them, as well as +Uhuk of the Guard's character Ryan. Neil ended up throwing up for about fifteen seconds, while Ryan and Angela were stunned. Since I was running Neil in Doug's absence, I was pleased by these results since it meant I didn't have to deal with them. Meanwhile, the mists in the stairwell were flowing into a pair of the dead bodies (despite the lack of a breeze) and the bodies were starting to animate. The PCs drew weapons and a fight was on.

Undead: Sometimes dangerous, always tedious

Rifles and shotguns are good for killing living things, as has been previously noted, but not particularly efficient at disabling things that are already dead. The PCs shot and blasted the bodies as they climbed to their feet, and dropped one of them after a barrage of bullets. The mist flowed out of the body and into another one, which proceeded to animate and return to the attack.

With only two zombies attacking at a time, the PCs weren't in too much danger, though one of the zombies managed to get behind +Kevin Smyth's character Raleigh's Ally/Dependent Jamie and give him a solid punch to the back of the skull that knocked Jamie to the floor with a concussion. But the zombies were resilient (they had bonus HP and needed to be dropped to -5xHP before the mists were forced to abandon) and the mists that were animating them were only briefly vulnerable when they were out of a body, and even then, rifles and shotguns aren't the best weapon against diffuse mists.

At one point, Thomas decided to drop his shotgun onto his sling and pull out the magic axe Vengeance and go to town with that. Sadly, Thomas didn't actually know how to use the axe, and even though Vengeance created a couple of shockwaves that were capable of damaging the mists, Thomas couldn't hit with them. He dropped it about the same time that Jamie was knocked to the floor, so Jamie picked it up. Jamie is significantly stronger than Thomas and knows how to fight with an axe, so the zombies started getting carved up pretty quickly.

Also around this time, Raleigh had an idea. I'm not saying it was the worst idea of the session, but it didn't do much to improve the situation. She aimed at the huge heart above and eventually shot it. Her slugs bounced off the heart and apparently angered it: it began filling the tower with pulses of red light, and a dozen or more halberds began animating and swinging wildly on the spiral stairs. Since the PCs weren't on the spiral stairs, it wasn't an immediate danger, but Raleigh freaked out and everyone decided that was a clear sign not to attack the heart or climb the spiral stairs.

Eventually, Jamie managed to down a zombie. Yusef had just drunk the potion of fire breathing, and expelled a lethal burp at the mist. Jamie's next attack created an explosion that blew the mist into nothingness. At that point, I called the fight: the remaining mist wasn't going to better alone than two mists working together, and Jamie with Vengeance was sufficiently skilled at killing the mist as to make the outcome more or less inevitable. Spending another three hours running the fight wasn't worthwhile.

Much to my surprise, that fight ran 14 rounds of game time: long enough for Neil to recover from his vomiting and rejoin the fight. It wasn't the longest fight I've run, in terms of time spent fighting, but I think it's one of the longest in terms of in-game time.

Recognizing Danger

The PCs weren't willing to try making their way up the spiral staircase in the face of a dozen animated halberds, but they did take the time to loot the bodies for some minor coinage. Then they decided to explore the third exit from the room: a hallway running east on the north side of the castle.

As Kevin predicted, it went into an octagonal tower, because castle defenses tend to be symmetrical. The tower itself was similar to its sibling to the south, except that the ceiling was bare of cobwebs. The PCs decided that was a bad sign and stopped at the threshold to examine for potential problems. The tower walls were littered with small black half-disks, which turned into swarms of stone butterflies under prolonged examination by high powered flashlights. Neil, Thomas, and Yusef backed up as the swarms flew forward and began cutting at their clothes and skin.

Raleigh quickly cast Thunder Breath, and belched a deadly sonic attack that shattered half the swarms and sent the rest flying into the far wall fast enough to crush the rest on impact. In the process, she also sent Yusef tumbling to the ground, badly injured, but some aspirin and splints (aka first aid) resolved the worst of his problems.

At this point, Raleigh was regularly failing calamity checks whenever she cast a spell, and was so far past her Threshold that she wouldn't recover all her Tally that night. Everyone was also short on sleep and yawning. After a brief discussion, they elected to make an immediate camp in the courtyard: they were doing well for treasure with roughly $70,000 in gold coins alone, and no one wanted to take more injury while tired.

Since it was already after 9pm, we ended the session there.

Evaluation of Play

My players are convinced that every monster has a weak spot, in its vitals or in its skull, and if they just shoot it there, it will take massive damage and/or be easily stunned. They persist in this belief even after I point out that they're fighting a zombie that started with half it's head blown off, and that  after a couple of rifle shots to the forehead, the zombie doesn't meaningfully have a skull or head and is still fighting. I'm not really sure what's up with that.

Castle of Horrors is turning into an extended playtest of my College Ritual Book Magic system. +Nathan Joy and I were both using it in Uhuk's Chaos Scar game, but Nate was only available intermittently and there's a limit to how useful it is to playtest your own stuff. I'm pleased that it's working out fairly well, and that Kevin feels safe in risking calamity by going over his threshold. Kevin's character is possibly a little over-powered, though not more than any other wizard would be. We had a good discussion about it after the game, which will probably be turned into a blog post or two later this week.

One thing that I've started doing is using Angela to break tedious debates. As has been noted, my players are a cautious bunch, and will sometimes waste ten or fifteen minutes arguing about taking some course of action that I know, from behind my screen, is perfectly safe but that seems risky to them. Since I know it's safe, I've started having Angela just go ahead and do whatever they're debating to break the logjam and move the game along. It's worked well so far on the two instances I've used it, and I'm going to keep pushing it.

Another thing I didn't mention in the write-up is that Vengeance is starting to change Jamie's personality. He's now more irritable (Bad Temper) and reckless in battle (Berserker). It's not a huge thing, but it's a side effect of the weapon. However, Vengeance itself isn't cursed, at least not in the modern post-D&D gaming parlance meaning of the term: Jamie can put down Vengeance at any time. This is a deliberate choice on my part: I think a weapon that will potentially harm the user is more interesting if the user has the choice to give it up whenever they're ready to give up a weapon that is very useful against a large category of hard to hurt foes. That way, it's Jamie's tragic choices that will eventually cause many of the PCs to get hacked to pieces by an ally, instead of some kind of compulsory hex that prevents him from putting the weapon down.

I was really pleased that the PCs realized that the lack of cobwebs on the ceiling of the tower meant danger. It's been a subtle but consistent theme in the room descriptions, and I'm glad that effort paid off. Of course, that also means its time to subvert it soon. I think I know how that's going to happen.

Technical Notes

The new version of MapTools 1.4 has a feature for isometric views. I've ranted on the group that I'm not very impressed with this feature: it requires a lot more art assets and doesn't really improve clarity very much. This session was one of the few times it would have helped: the layout of the stairs at the tower base is obvious in an isometric view and a little confusing on a flat map.

The location of the stairs flat, top-down view in lower left is confusing.
The isometric view in the upper right is clear about the stairs.

What Next?

Next Thursday is Thanksgiving in America, and people are traveling Wednesday night so I'm not running a game next week. That gives me two weeks to contemplate the consequences of the various decisions the PCs have made so far. They're wreaked a fair bit of havoc throughout the castle, and various people are going to respond in various ways. I think that's also an important part of the story of this game, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it unfolds.

Beyond that, I finally figured out how I wanted to stock the last room in the sub basement, the one that had been giving me problems for the last two weeks. I still need to finish stocking the crypts, but I mostly know what I want to do there and it's just a matter of writing down the details. I've also started drawing the map of the first of the Caves Beneath, which I'm adapting from Xak Tsaroth in DL1 "Dragons of Despair". I probably won't need that for several months, but better to be ahead while there's time.

Castle of Horrors Session 7

Thursday is GURPS Day!

Another Wednesday, and another session of Castle of Horrors. This was a good session, but not as much was accomplished as I might have hoped: the opening fight with the skeletons bogged down a bit, and there wasn't enough time to accomplish much else. The PCs mostly finished exploring the basement, though.

"These are fast skeletons, then!"

The session started in the middle of the fight from last session: the undead erupting ooze was merrily burning from multiple alchemist fires, but some of the PCs could just barely make out some animated skeletons rising. People shifted position a bit, and wondered aloud if the skeletons were going to be fast or slow.

The answer was fast: very fast. The skeletons had a move of 11, and quickly a horde of twenty were racing through the piles of burning alchemical fire and into melee range. Gunfire slowed them, but it took multiple rounds to actually stop them. +Uhuk of the Guard's character Ryan was more successful with his machete and bony fists, generally eliminating a skeleton a round. +Kevin Smyth's character Raleigh ended up casting Sound Missiles on +Eric Schmidt's character Yusef's rifle, and after that, Yusef was capable of blasting through two or three skeletons per burst, since the crushing follow-up damage of the missiles did double injury to the skeletons and tended to evaporate some important bones.

Raleigh also built up and threw an explosive Blight Ball, which didn't destroy any of the skeletons but did damage several of them. This was actually an interesting bit of action mechanically: Raleigh had to lob the ball over several of the skeleton's heads, and even with Luck ended up missing. The scatter roll had it landing short, such that the front line of the PCs would be effected, and no one wanted to eat 1d+4 toxic damage (DR does not protect). +Theodore Briggs argued that since the scatter roll affected his character Thomas, he should be able to use Luck to reroll it, and that seemed valid to me. The best of three rolls wasn't great, but it was good enough to scatter the blast to get several of the zombies and none of the PCs.

Around this point, the erupting ooze glob that was on Thomas' plastic riot shield finished eating its way through the shield and soaked through his shirt. There was an argument as to whether or not I had adequately warned him and whether or not he would have had time to do anything about it even I had, what with the attacking hordes of skeletons and all. As it turned out, he only took 1 injury, so I told him to suck it up. Thomas discarded his shield and play resumed.

Jamie got beaten up again to establish
the skeletons are dangerous

Eventually, I called the fight on the grounds that it'd been two and a half hours and I wanted to do other things in the session. The PCs won, but had to immediately retreat up the stairs due to all the smoke generated by the alchemical fire. In the hidden passage, they bandaged up and Raleigh cast a healing spell but failed her calamity check. Nothing too bad, but now the cost of Major Healing is doubled and she probably won't be casting it again.

As a side note, at some point Eric got a critical hit on a skeleton, and hit it in the funny bone. No real effect in game since skeletons are immune to stunning, but everyone though it was a hilarious effect.

The basement of no loot

An hour or so later, the PCs returned to the basement and searched the place. The skeletons had no loot aside from rusty broadswords of tetanus and unpadded chainmail in equally awful condition. Searching their rooms discovered about half a pound of corroded copper coins and some random bits of metal: everything organic within two feet of the ground had been destroyed.

A fist-sized lump of ooze was eating Thomas' shield, but it was easy enough to burn away with the resources the PCs had available. Thomas now had a somewhat smaller and frailer shield, but the thing only cost him $90 to start with and could be replaced in the Real World.

The PCs moved north, into the empty great room which was now filled with burnt undead ooze ash. Nothing useful came out of searching that, so they kept moving on, to another set of empty rooms in which everything had been eaten by the ooze. Past that was another half-eaten doo

Duel to the Death

Thomas peered under the door and saw that the next room was an armory, filled with rusty weapons. The area in front of the door had been repeatedly gouged by a jackhammer or something and scorched, too. Also, there was a man in full plate harness carrying a halberd. It's possible I buried the lede in that description.

There was a quick confab about what to do about a guy in the basement, and eventually Yusef was delegated to knock on the door and try to talk to the guy. Which he did.

They never got the halberdeer's name, but they quickly established some things about him: he was crazy, he wanted to duel, and his halberd's name was Vengeance. He would duel any of them, one at a time, axe or polearms versus his halberd, to the death. The winner (which would be him) would keep Vengeance, or in the unlikely event that one of them one, take it.

It worked for Indy, so it must be a valid solution!

Almost everyone was moving toward the "leave the crazy guy alone in the basement" when Yusef brought his rifle to his shoulder and decided to kill the guy. The halberdeer screamed "cheaters!" and turned out to be a variant Sword Spirit, with Higher Purpose +4 to "Defeat Cheaters." There was various and sundry whining about how this was unfair, blah blah blah, but I ignored them. Yusef and +Douglas Cole's character Neil tried firing at the guy, but he was quick and close and had a long reach weapon and parried their attacks, knocking their rifles out of line. Then Thomas nailed him with a pair of rifled shotguns slugs that blew through his armor and killed him outright. It was a bit anti-climatic.

Role-Playing!

At this point, another argument broke out: Raleigh wanted to know why her friends had turned into a bunch of murderers, and upon reflection, no one really wanted to pick up the halberd because they were afraid it was cursed. I sat back and laughed and laughed. This is the kind of role-playing that advances the plot, so I was fine with it, and it was really funny.
 
Finally, Neil's girlfriend Angela decided she wanted to know what it was and went to pick it up, but Thomas blocked her and eventually picked it up himself. Nothing particularly bad happened to him immediately: the halberd resized itself to a dwarf-sized hand axe, which was convenient, and Thomas improvised a blade cover for it.

Further Downstairs

Neil searched the room and found a secret door, which led to a set of stairs descending down a level (or as Yusef dourly pointed up, possibly to some other level of the castle entirely). By that point, it was time to end the game, so we wrapped up there. The PCs now had two obvious choices: continue down the stairs and explore the sub-basement, or take some stairs up from the empty rooms, which would presumably put them on the first floor at the base of the north tower. It should be an interesting choice.

Evaluation of Play

The skeletons were nasty foes, but the narrow corridor made it hard for them to bring their weight of numbers down on the PCs. Instead, they ended up getting shot and smashed to pieces. That's been my general experience with mook rushes in dungeon fantasy style games: although the maneuver economy implies that three to one odds should be good for the mooks, the mechanics of actually getting all their units into place and attacking at the same time never quite work. Mooks in the front line get killed too fast, and their replacements end up with the unviable options of Move (and not attack) or Move & Attack (and miss) or use some kind of Attack maneuver with a Step of 2+, which exposes them to deadly counterattack on the next turn, thus repeating the cycle. All of which lets the PCs heroically stand against a tide of mooks pretty successfully, as long as the PCs stay together in a mostly anchored line so the mooks can't envelope them.

Reviewing my notes, I screwed up on the encounter with the Axe Spirit. He would have dodged at least one, and maybe both of Thomas' shots, and shouldn't have gone down so easily. I suspect he still would have gone down pretty quickly and without really damaging the PCs, so I'm not too bothered by it. As I have mentioned, encounter balance in Castle of Horrors is something of a wild guess, and an easy boss encounter can only be expected sometimes. There will be other things to run from soon enough.

What Next?

I'm still working on the sub-basement. There's one room that I just can't figure out what to do with. I'm getting closer, but the original encounter is subpar and everything I thought of so far is nonsensical. I have a temporary work-around in place, but it's definitely something I need to resolve soon.

Of course, it may not matter. Now that Eric is embracing his inner murder-hobo, the PCs may decide to go on a bandit murder spree against the goblins, leprechauns, and gnomes. That'd be pretty harsh, but it would have the advantage that I have all those encounters prepared.

Castle of Horrors Session 6

Thursday is GURPS Day

My online group met for the sixth session of Castle of Horrors. +Nathan Joy had been replaced by +Eric Schmidt, which reduced my NPC load somewhat, but then +Kevin Smyth was sick last night so I ended up having to run his PC and his PC's Ally/Dependent, so I was back to being busy. Still, it was a good session, and though there were some teething issues, we had a lot of fun and got through a fair bit of exploration.

+Douglas Cole wrote up this session on his blog if you want the view from the player's side.

Delvers Versus Ooze, Round 1

Picking up at the point we left off last time, the PCs were in the castle basement, hacking away at huge spiderwebs and looking for loot. They decided to move west along the north side of the hall, aiming for the passageway in the northwest corner and then move to the scorched and damaged door in the west wall.

As +Uhuk of the Guard's character Ryan hacked his way through the webs, everyone saw a faint phosphorescent glow move south from their target passageway through the webs and out through the south passageway. It was apparently another ghost, but since it wasn't interacting with them directly, they ignored it. When they reached the north passageway, it turned out to be a doorway into what was apparently the ghost's chamber: a cold but mold free bedroom. They tossed the place but didn't find anything, and moved to the west door.

That door was odd: the lower two feet of it were missing, and there were scorch marks on the new bottom and ashes and shards of glass in front of it in an area free of spiderwebs. +Theodore Briggs' character Thomas crouched down and peered under the door into the next room: a large chamber, almost entirely empty except for some broken stoneware, some random nails on the floor, and a bunch of tapestries on the walls that were missing their bottom two feet. It also stank to high heaven.

While Thomas was evaluating that, a weird gurgling noise came from the south side of that room, and he soon saw a huge mass of oozing pus and vileness creeping across the floor. He rapidly backed away from the door and passed the last "willey-pete can of coke" to +Eric Schmidt's character Yousef, as the only person with any skill at throwing things. The ooze started extruding tentacles that reached under the door, so Yousef threw the vial at it and everyone retreated back to the east while the ooze recoiled to the west. No one thought that they had any weapons that would be very effective against the ooze, so everyone decided to go someplace "safe". I pointed out that I, as the GM, couldn't make sense of that directive, since where was a safe place in the Castle of Horrors, and they clarified that they meant back up the stairs and out into the northeast courtyard.

Castle of MC Escher

After some discussion, the group decided to cut through the chapel and head for the stable, hoping that Wiremu's goblins might have some kind of magical fire weapon that could defeat the ooze. The only problem was that the stables were empty and the goblins were gone. There was absolutely no sign of them, even after the PCs spent two hours thoroughly tossing the place. It was another mystery. The stables themselves seemed spacious and reasonably secure, so there was some discussion of using them as a new campsite now that the goblins had abandoned it.

After that, the next plan was to take one of the spiral stairways down into basement, the one south of the octagon room that Raleigh and Thomas believed would exit on the south side of the spider-webbed hallway. However, when they went down the stairs, the next landing was clearly the T-shaped intersection that led to the rooms occupied by the gnomes - which were on the third floor! Climbing back up the stairs returned them to the first floor, and everyone was completely flabbergasted by this. Thomas tied off some string to some nearby dungeon decor and they thoroughly retraced their steps, going down past three landings to find themselves where they started. Going up the stairs had the same effect: these spiral stairs were a continuous loop.

Everyone agreed that was weird as heck, but there was nothing that they could do about it at the time. They abandoned the stairs and decided to try the outer set of spiral stairs in the hidden passageway.

Delvers Versus Ooze, Round 2

As they approached the stairs, I reminded them that the stairs stank to high heaven, and now that they had recently had a whiff of it, the stairs specifically stank of the ooze in the basement. Nevertheless, they decided to give them a try.

The stairs ended about a level below, and almost immediately, they heard the glurping sounds of the ooze moving toward them. A couple people got a brief glimpse of it, and then everyone beat feet back up the stairs since they still didn't have weapons that could defeat it.

"Who Puts a Death-Trap in a Shed?"

Yousef then proposed that they go investigate the overlook area to the east of the chapel, and since it was an empty area on their map, they did so. I pulled up the lovely picture of the castle exterior, and explained that they were on a cantilevered extension jutting out over the cliff. There were some giant spiderstrands hanging over the overlook and descending down to some windows in the cliff wall below, and from there down to the mist shrouded valley, which the PCs chopped up because they really hate giant spiders.

There were two sheds full of ancient, decrepit, rusty, and moldy garden tools and supplies on the north and south side of the overlook. Thomas and Yousef spotted some copper glints in the north shed that looked to be oxidized bronze or copper tools. After a quick discussion of economic realities (copper at $6/pound is not something that sensible people steal in less than quarter-ton lots), everyone pretty much decided it wasn't worth investigating.

However, Thomas eventually decided he'd steal one of the tools, and dug through the mound of old gardening supplies to get one of them. At which point a massive scythe slashed through the area over his head (neck high on anyone who wasn't a dwarf) and another at thigh level (knee high for normal people). He caught the one going for his legs on his polycarbonate riot shield, which got gouged and cracked, but everyone figured that was better than loosing a leg or two. Ted complained that he hadn't noticed the trap, and I pointed out that he hadn't said he was searching for traps before picking up the tool.

Examining the mechanism on the scythe trap showed that it had been maintained sometime in the last year, and for a bit, that was all the interest anyone showed in the issue. I was a little frustrated, because this was the third or fourth Clue! that people had been ignoring, but it's not the GM's job to draw conclusions for the players. Fortunately, Thomas eventually got suspicious: who puts death traps in garden sheds? He tossed the shed, and spotted a small chest buried under the mound of gardening supplies. He then dug it out and moved it into the sunlight.

It was locked, but as far as Thomas could tell, not trapped. He quickly picked the lock, and discovered he missed a trap that sprayed an acid cloud in front of the chest. Thomas and +Douglas Cole's character Neil took some damage, mostly to their armor, but Raleigh patched them out pretty quickly.

Inside the chest was a small pot of gold and a pile of silver: 57 gold coins weighing an ounce each and around ten pounds of silver, roughly $60,000 value all told. It was quite a find, and I eventually noted that it was the Leprechauns' Pot of Gold. Everyone rejoiced, and then tore apart the south shed in case there was more loot in there. There wasn't.

Meeting People, Making Deals

The new next plan was to climb the grand stairway in the chapel, the one that went up the south tower and also the one that the ghost procession had gone up. However, on the way back through the chapel courtyard, people spotted a bunch of Wiremu's goblins lounging in front of the stables. Everyone went back and after a brief discussion, Yousef was delegated to see if Wiremu had any fire weapons. As a side note, the plans to use the stables as a base of exploration were also nixed, because apparently people didn't believe me when I said the goblins probably had great respect for property rights.

As it turned out, Wiremu did have some fire weapons: five vials of alchemist's fire and a potion of "fire breathing," which could totally turn a man into a pillar of ash. He wanted 500 silver pieces - about two pounds of the stuff - for them. There was a brief discussion of the fact that no one knew the market value for any of this stuff nor how highly Wiremu valued silver versus gold or anything else for the matter. Thomas stepped up and negotiated a bit, cutting the price down to 375 silver pieces, but no one could tell if they'd gotten a good deal for the stuff or not.

They also managed to establish that Wiremu would buy silver and pay in gold at a 6:1 ratio, so it looked like there was a way to make a lot of money by buying cheap silver in the Real World and selling it for cheap gold to Wiremu. I said that I wasn't going to discourage them from doing that - in fact, I encouraged it if they wanted to get expensive gear - but that doing so didn't count as finding treasure for experience purposes. And it's not like there'd be any downside to letting someone like Wiremu know that they had a lot of money. Doing so would be safe as houses, really.

Delvers Versus Ooze, Round 3

The alchemist's fire vials were handed out, and everyone trooped back down the southern spiral staircase to face off against the ooze again. This time, they found out it was an erupting disgusting ooze, as pustules of yuk fired out and splashed against Thomas' shield, which started smoking. Thomas, Yousef, Ryan, and Neil chucked alchemist's fire at the ooze, and mostly hit it and started it burning. The ooze retreated up the corridor while spurting more gunk at people.

Everything looked mostly under control, when Ryan, Neil, and Yousef spotted some skeletons in a nearby room start to stand and grab weapons. That was clearly bad, and Neil freaked out a bit, but it was getting late, and that seemed a perfect place to stop for the night.

Evaluation of Play

This was a good game, and I had a lot of fun. I loved the looping staircase: I'd initially put it in the castle to conceal the fact that I didn't have the basement or the tower levels completed, but I kept it because it's just hilarious. My brief description above doesn't do justice to just how confused, indignant, and baffled everyone was by those stairs.

The group remains a bit unfocused, but Uhuk was definitely making an effort to get everyone to do something instead of waiting for me to ask, "Okay, now what are you doing?" I still had to ask that a few times too many, but things are improving.

This was a combat light, role-playing and exploration heavy session, and I think that was good. I really don't care too much about most of the combat, aside from some of the monsters being crazy things to encounter. I just want people to hurry up and run into more weird and strange things. This session had the ooze and the endless staircase, as well as more shenanigans with Wiremu, so that was great. And because I had expected them to take some alternate routes, I'm better prepared if they end up going deeper into the dungeon.

Technical Notes

Skype was disappointing, as usual, costing us about 15 minutes of play time as we restarted calls to clear out some echoes. It was especially exasperating because everything had been going fine, until suddenly it wasn't.

MapTools remains a mixed blessing. I don't have to explain the maps, because people can see them, but it also means people have an authoritative and absolute idea of their position. This makes certain traps and puzzles really difficult: it's hard to get lost on a set of endless stairs when you can look and see that you're on the "Castle 3rd floor" map. I could give the maps less descriptive names, but then I wouldn't necessarily know what's going on. It's probably an inevitable limitation of the online format.

What Next?

I still need to finish the sub-basement. It's mapped, and the accessible parts of it are described and stocked, but not all of it is accessible yet and I need to fix that. And the PCs are (theoretically) getting close to an entrance to the Caves Beneath, so I need to prepare that, too. I expect the PCs will continue working through the basement, which leads to plenty of weird stuff. More good times ahead!

Reading Rappan Athuk: Level 3

I'm continuing my read-through of Rappan Athuk with the third level, "Beware of Purple Worms!" It's another level that doesn't quite manage to be competently written, but isn't noticeably awful, either. It has a moment or two that is fairly decent, and maybe an idea that could be reused in another, better dungeon.

Beware of Purple Worms

That warning is inscribed in glowing runes just before the entrance to the dungeon level proper. As warnings go, it's a little vague: the purple worms attack people in the center of the cavern that is the first major room, and also are attracted to light sources. Another line or two about staying near the cavern walls and/or not using light sources would probably have been useful, but it's a warning that explicitly names a threat in the dungeon. For Rappan Athuk, that's pretty good.

The description of the level itself claims there is a delicate food chain: the purple worms feed on giant rats and are hunted by umber hulks. Exterminating one of the elements of the food chain changes the presence of the other elements, and the GM is directed to "adjust the wandering monster table accordingly." That's the kind of directive I might write in my own campaign notes as a reminder to myself, but I think it's a bit lacking in a published dungeon. It's basically an instruction to make something up, and if the GM had the time or desire to make stuff up, why buy a published dungeon?

Pointless Treasure

There's a very well hidden tomb of an unknown mage in the purple worm cavern. There's some extremely nice treasure: staff of power, robe of the arch-magi, and roughly 10,000 gp in jewelry. All that treasure is also cursed if stolen, with a curse that is extremely hard to remove, requiring multiple high level spells and then inflicting a secondary curse on the thief. It's possibly realistic, but it basically means that the PCs either can't take the treasure, or get punished heavily for doing so. It works out to about half a page of text that might as well not be there.

Maybe Interesting, Definitely Complicated

A description of a rakasha's lair and his multi-layered illusions takes up two or three pages. The rakasha has different illusions depending on how dangerous he thinks the PCs are, and each of his three rooms gets different descriptions depending on which illusion is in place. I can't really tell if this is a hint of brilliance or more humdrum stuff, because the set up is just too complicated. Still, it seems better than most parts of Rappan Athuk.

Level Layout

The purple worm cavern is on the
middle left, and the rest of the level
is on the middle right.

This is a surprisingly short level, with only 9 named rooms and another six subrooms. As is usual for Rappan Athuk, it's a fairly linear level. There's a total of three branching points, and it's otherwise a straight shot. The map makes it look slightly more complicated than it is.

There is a subcomplex of rooms that loop and branch, but since they're all explicitly empty except for random dungeon dressing and random encounters, I don't know how useful or interesting they are.

One of the branching points is a river passage to level 3a. As usual in Rappan Athuk, there's no text in this level describing the passage, and the text in level 3a vague about this passage: there's certainly a rapid currrent in level 3a that will carry people to level 6a in twenty minutes, but there's no suggestion of how long it takes to get from level 3 to level 3a. Somewhat bizarrely, the level 3a room description alludes to the river in level 3 splitting, so it's possible to go straight to level 6a as well as go through level 3a on the way to level 6a, but there's no text in level 3 about it. The description of level 6a barely mentions the river at all, and says it comes from level 3 only. It's endemic of the slap-dash, half-assed way that Rappan Athuk is put together.

Opinions So Far

Rappan Athuk isn't a very good dungeon. It's very linear, both in its design for individual levels and for the connections between levels. It's uninspired, with underdeveloped encounter design. It's not put together very well, as I've noted about the few alternate level connections like the river above.

I don't think I'd enjoy playing in Rappan Athuk. And as a GM, I'm annoyed that I paid money for a not very polished, not very well designed adventure. Fixing the problems with Rappan Athuk would take nearly as much effort as creating my own dungeon (because that's basically what I would have to do). It wouldn't even provide much inspiration for a redesign, since the individual levels are so bland and badly put together.

I'm going to go through a couple more levels to see if some part of it starts to hang together. If not, I'm going to give up and try doing a read through of something that isn't so uninspiring.

Caslte of Horrors Session 5

Thursday is GURPS Day!

My online group met for the fifth session of Castle of Horrors. +Nathan Joy had to drop out due to work issues, so we're looking for a player to replace him and in the meantime, I'm running his character Yusef as well as +Douglas Cole's character Neil's dependent Angela. I'm beginning to get a little overwhelmed.

Despite my issues, this was an interesting session. The characters learned the consequences of sleeping in the Castle and ventured into the basement, despite their earlier plans to go up instead of down. They survived and prospered, but now they need to decide where to go next.

The Obvious Problem With Sleeping In a Haunted Castle

As usual, we started the game where we left off session: the PCs were bedding down for the night in the area they believed to be most secure: the hallway between the octagon room and the chapel. It had some advantages: there were only two exits, and nothing had attacked them in the hallway so far.

We had a rambling and somewhat disjointed discussion of watch schedules. +Kevin Smyth's character Raleigh claimed that casting magic was draining and she needed her rest, so she was off the watch, and everyone else was kind of "meh" about the matter. They finally decided on three watches of three hours each, with the guards looking past each other and most everyone else bedding up against the walls. There was a brief discussion of the possibility of Neil and Angela sharing a watch, but everyone agreed that would just get everyone killed while the two lovebirds stared into each other's eyes.

The second watch was Jamie (Raleigh's dependent) and Neil, and +Theodore Briggs' character Thomas was sleeping in the middle of the hallway. About twenty minutes after midnight, four indistinct, barely phosphorescent blobs phased through the west door, followed every second by another four. Jamie shouted an alarm which woke up everyone but Angela. Thomas woke up, but was so overwhelmed by the sight of the mass of ghosts that he stayed on his bag in shock. +Uhuk of the Guard's character Ryan grabbed him and pulled him out of the middle of the hallway before the ghosts trampled him, and Neil did the same for Angela. The ghosts kept coming, rank after rank at a walking pace.

Raleigh was curious, and dug a tupperware container out of her pack and tried to get some ectoplasm. She failed, as the ghosts were entirely insubstantial, but she did brush one of the ghosts in her attempt and had a little bit of her soul sucked out - nothing too bad, but it did reinforce the idea that no one wanted to be trampled by the endless waves of ghosts. The other PCs pressed up against the walls and sucked in their guts to avoid that fate.

(Anyone who has read the original I6 Castle Ravenloft will recognize this encounter: it's the straight text of the ghost march from E7: The Cemetary, modified slightly for how I intend to run ghosts in Castle of Horrors. This module is really the gift that keeps on giving in terms of inspiration and encounters I can use with little modification.)

We Are Not Sleeping Here Any Longer

Eventually, all the ghosts exited the hallway through the west door. At which point, two arguments broke out: Angela was curious about the ghosts and wanted to know what was going on, while Thomas wanted to relocate the base camp to someplace safer. That spawned a third argument, about where a safer place would be.

Angela won her argument, with Raleigh's support, and Ryan and Jamie removed the barricade from the west door in time for Angela to just barely spot the last of the ghosts leaving the chapel to head up the great spiral staircase. She wanted to chase after them, but Neil persuaded her that running after a horde of ghosts into unexplored territory was not the best plan.

Thomas and Raleigh contended a bit about relocating, but Neil weighed in on Thomas' side and Angela supported him, so Raleigh's plan to continue camping in the hallway was abandoned. Yusef nixed Neil's idea of sleeping in the courtyard, and eventually everyone trumped over to the dining hall and made camp there.

"They Tried to Turn This Into a Pantry"

Yusef and Thomas were on the third watch in the pantry when someone tried the door. The barricade held, and Thomas crept over to the door while Yusef quietly woke everyone up. There were some muffled thumping sounds against both doors, and then silence, so Thomas cleared the barricade and tried to open the door - and failed! Someone or something had tied a rope to the doorknob on the other side, and Thomas wasn't strong enough to break the rope. Ryan stepped up and opened the door easily enough.

The doors had been secured by 1/4" thick strands of spidersilk. Everyone was pretty upset about that, except Yusef who wanted to call it quits as quickly as possible. He was overruled, and since Ryan and Thomas could see fading trails of giant spider foot prints on the ceiling with their IR vision, the decision was made to stop trying to sleep and to go hunt giant spiders and/or spider-centaur things instead. I believe at this point Neil made a comment to the effect of "might as well, since I am never sleeping again." Apparently, the Castle of Horrors was stressing people out.

Into the Basement

Ryan tracked the spider trail back to the Leprechauns' door and Raleigh knocked. After a few minutes, one of the leprechauns opened a smaller door and asked what they wanted. As the PCs wanted to kill the spider-centaurs and the leprechauns didn't care about that, the leprechaun said "door's unlocked" and retreated back through the north door. The PCs turned to the south staircase.

Yusef does not want to deal with the giant spiders.

This was their first good look at that staircase, and they immediately saw it was blocked, wall to wall and for its entire length, by thick spiderwebs made from gigantic strands. Yusef, who dislikes spiders and had been opposed to this plan from the beginning, retreated into a wall of "nopes" while Ryan pulled out his huge machete and went to work, hacking out a path. He was strong enough to slash through the strands and to pull himself out when he accidentally touched them, but it was slow going and not very quiet. Everyone else followed behind him.

Let's go provoke the spiders and see what happens!

The stairs opened onto a hallway that headed west and had several entrances and exits nearby. Thomas heard some muffled words and saw a flicker of flames from near the ceiling in a room to the east, which was all the warning the PCs got as three driders attacked. The first one ran across the ceiling and fired an arrow at Ryan which split into three midflight - and Ryan was too busy chopping web to notice and took one of the arrows painfully to the chest. A second drider stepped into sight and through an explosive fireball at Raleigh's feet. Ryan jumped into the uncut spiderweb to avoid it, but almost everyone else was badly burnt and had their clothes set on fire.

The driders apparently started to take pity on the PCs, or at least decide that they wanted fresh meat, because they started slinging masses of web gunk at the PCs and generally missing. This turned out to be a poor choice for the driders, because Neil wasn't badly wounded and had his rifle ready: three rounds rapid of 7.62mm into what he thought would be the wizard-drider's vitals did 165(!) injury and rather excessively killed it. The remaining two driders swarmed toward him, firing arrows and swinging swords, but his trauma plate held. Yusef put another three rounds into the scout-drider, killing it, and Neil hit the last drider with a pair of bullets that stunned it and caused it to fall off the ceiling next to Ryan, who proceeded to put it out the PCs' misery.

Patching Up and Finding Loot

Raleigh spent the next hour performing first aid on everyone, and when that wasn't enough, casting Major Healing to cure most of Angela's burns. Thomas pulled the mail hauberks off two of the driders, patched them up to close the bullet holes, and gifted them to Angela and Jamie. The PCs also recovered a lot of silver and copper coins and a few gold coins, as well as some other interesting stuff.

The first thing they looked at were some vials on the driders' belts: two small ones on one side, and a larger one on the other. Thomas opened one of the smaller ones and gave it a sniff test to no effect, and then opened the larger one. That one immediately foamed up like a shaken can of coke and then the foam started burning, so it got labeled the "willey-pete can of coke" and tossed away. At first, Thomas failed his DX check, but his Luck had just refreshed and he exactly made it on the reroll. He secured the other willey-pete can and decided the others were probably healing potions but didn't test them.

Then the PCs tried the bow. Surprisingly, it was comfortable to Angela's draw strength. Jamie also tried it and found he could draw it but it was hard. Finally, they passed it to Ryan and again, it was just within his draw strength. Since Ryan curls about six times as much as Angela, they agreed the bow was very magic, especially when they discovered it fired three arrows even though Ryan had only nocked one. As useful as that bow might have been, only Angela had any training in bow, so she kept it.

The session ended a bit aimlessly as the PCs finished searching the immediate vicinity. The driders had made nests on the floors of two of the rooms, and Raleigh recovered a grimoire that she couldn't read from one of them. It was running late, so we ended there.

Too Long, Didn't Read

Uhuk posted the following summary to the mailing list immediately after the end of the session:

We saw ghosts and determined they don't stay in tupperware. Also, do not touch, they are cold. We fought driders. They use swords and FIRE SPELLS. Player characters burn merrily, we need to remember to pack more burn ointment next time. Ryan also shouldn't take Ibuprofen, or at least not that generic crap. We found not nearly enough gold coins, a few swords, and some mail armor. We found a magic bow that shoots x3 arrows and is really strong! We found some potions of mysterious provenance, some of which are ON FIRE. And we found some kind of book, which Raleigh is crazy about.

I think that about sums it up.

Evaluation of Play

This was another good session, and people were appropriately scared by the ghosts and the massive spiderwebs. I think the PCs bit off a bit more than they could chew by attacking the driders, but it worked out alright in the end. Modern guns really do a number on anything vulnerable to bullets, but the PCs continue to be underarmored. Though they're slowly fixing that: Raleigh took a maximum damage arrow hit to the torso, but thanks to her nifty full suit of heavy plate, shrugged it off.

Everyone continues to be a bit unfocused, and there's often dead time unless I prompt people to do stuff. A fact that was actually discussed: this group isn't terribly curious and impulsive, which keeps them from doing too many dumb things, but does mean that the action drags a bit at times. Well, I'll keep prodding them and maybe a new player will change the dynamic.

Technical Notes

This week we had mike problems. I accidentally hit the physical on/off switch on my mike just before the game started, and no one could hear me for ten minutes until I realized what I'd done. Doug's mike inexplicably failed several times, causing him to effectively drop out for five minutes each time. As these things go, it wasn't too bad, but it was a little annoying.

MapTools mostly worked, though we had the problem that it doesn't handle multiple levels very well. Some of the PCs were at the top of the stairs during the drider fight, and even though they could technically retreat into the first floor room, it wasn't easy to show that. Sometimes I really want a true 3-D virtual tabletop, though I recognize what a pain in the ass that would be to program and use.

I took some screen shots of the areas that the PCs have explored so far, so that readers can better follow the action. They're not really to scale with each other.

Ground floor and courtyards; mostly explored

Second floor, with only the chapel, great hallway, and
throne room explored.

Third floor and the tops of the parapets. Only the
gnomes' chambers are explored.

The basement, filled with spiderwebs, and barely explored.

What Next?

I'm not really sure what the PCs are going to do next. They weren't going to go into the basement until they'd cleared the rest of the castle, but here they are. Fortunately for me, I've got most of this basement level mapped and stocked and it'll be easy to finish the rest before next week. The sub-basement is less finished: I mostly know what I want to do, but I haven't written up all my notes and there are one or two encounters that are a bit vague in my mind. On the plus side, I'm not sure that the PCs can even get through the monster guarding the stairs going down, so it may not be an issue.

Call for a Player

If you're interested in joining our little group, we have a slot open! I posted in the SJ Games forum at this handy link with all the details.

Reading Rappan Athuk: Level 2

Another Monday, another level in my read-through of Rappan Athuk: Reloaded. Level 2 is bland and uninspired, but bad not bad in the way the previous levels were: it's not completely linear, has no inexplicable death traps, and doesn't involve toilet humor. It doesn't really have anything going for it, but it's still an improvement.

Rappan Athuk's level design has advanced
all the way to "not obviously bad." They
need to do better.

Boring and Pointless Hallways

Level 2 is officially titled "Marthek's Place & Ambro's Base," but that doesn't amount to much. It's mostly a square made from long hallways, with several complexes of a few rooms off one side or another of a corridor. The map itself is dull and I doubt these would be memorable levels of a campaign.

The rooms themselves feel unconnected to each other: Marthek is avoided by the other creatures, the moody skeletal warrior lair stays in his crypt, and Ambro the ogre doesn't go on patrol. Some dungeons have an organic quality to them, and a sense that things might be happening behind the scenes. Rappan Athuk doesn't have that quality or sense, even though the text refers repeatedly to the evil priests on level 4 who are supposed to go around resetting traps and using charm spells to produce new minions. Instead, every area is its own encounter, and there's no sense of what the "Dungeon of Graves" was before it because a monster infested hole in the ground.

There's nothing in this level that really ties it to any other level of Rappan Athuk or to the dungeon as a whole. It could easily be replaced by something better if a GM wanted to put in the work, or it could be painlessly removed and inserted in some other dungeon, though why anyone would bother is beyond me.

Marthek and Ambro, Unremarkable Antagonists

Given that the name of the level refers to these two, you'd think they'd be impressive or memorable. They aren't. They're completely forgettable. The most interesting thing about either of them is a map which is a pointer to a different adventure by the same people. If the most interesting part of a published encounter is a suggestion that the party go someplace else, then that encounter has real problems.

Marthek himself is a barbarian, once chaotic good and now cursed to be chaotic evil by insanity. He can be cured, but since he attacks on sight and there aren't any rumors about him, I doubt most players are going to try to cure him. More likely, he's going to get hit by a Color Spray or Hold Person or just beat down thanks to the action economy. Without a lot of work from the GM, no one is going to remember him by the end of the session.

Ambro is an ogre, leading a group of 4 other ogres. There's a little bit of pointless color in his room (coins lined up heads or tails as the ogres sort them) that I can't tell is amusing or slightly crass but either way doesn't add much to the encounter. It's nominally a fairly high level encounter but I would expect most PC groups that got this far into the dungeon to handle it with ease.

Saracek the Badly Boxed Off

Saracek is the previously mentioned skeletal warrior. The module text frankly states that low level parties shouldn't enter his crypt, but the lock is only DC 30, so a reasonably competent 3rd level thief should be able to open it. I assume this is more of Rappan Athuk's general difficulty in converting to D&D 3rd edition, but it's still a bit sad that they couldn't even manage to prevent a low level party from getting into it.

Also annoying is that there's a warning at the door, written in such a way that a character needs to know both the Celestial and Infernal languages to read it. Depending on the campaign, that might not be combination of languages that anyone in the party can manage, in which case the warning is useless. Even if the party can read the warning, "in death a dark warrior-king" is probably not sufficient information for a party to determine that there's a skeletal warrior beyond the door and evaluate whether they're good enough to defeat him. So the entire warning is most likely a waste of time.

Some Stuff That's Incomplete

The map shows that rooms 10 and 20 have exits to the surface. I had to read through the room descriptions twice to find the text for the relevant tunnels. Room 10 exits to "a cave" but doesn't specify where the cave is on the surface map, and the text for the wilderness section doesn't mention this entrance either. Room 20 also just exits to the surface with no location specified, but has the added benefit of having a second tunnel descend to level 4 without specifying where on level 4 it goes. The level 4 map has a tunnel that goes to room 20 on level 2, so that's answered, but the room description for the area near the tunnel doesn't mention the tunnel or the passage to level 2. It's just shoddy.

Opinions So Far

This isn't a terrible level, which as I said, makes it better than the previous couple of levels. But it isn't a great or even fairly decent level either. It's nothing that any GM couldn't come up with in a couple of hours of work with a random dungeon generator, a copy of a Monster's Manual, and a sheet of graph paper. There's not a single interesting setpiece, trap, or random encounter in the entire mess.

Hopefully, the rest of Rappan Athuk will be better. At this point, I really think Keep on the Borderlands is a more interesting dungeon to play in, and more useful for a GM as either inspiration or a learning tool. Rappan Athuk has nothing going for it.

Castle of Horrors Session 4

Thursday is GURPS day!

My online group met last night for another session of Castle of Horrors. +Nathan Joy had to stay at work late, so he couldn't make it, and +Douglas Cole was preparing for surgery after his abortive career as as a gasoline powered launch vehicle, so the game was a little unfocused. Still, we managed to deal with the gargoyles, do a little exploring, meet some friends, and figure out where people were camping for the night. It was a decently productive session.

Last Stand of the Scared Little Bunnies

As usual, we started where we had left off last session: with the PCs kiting the gargoyle's from the octagon room to the chapel. Almost everyone had a rifle out, and fired away at the gargoyles. Thanks to Aim actions and rate of fire bonuses, they generally hit, but the hollow gargoyles didn't have vital organs so the bullets weren't particularly effective. +Uhuk of the Guard's character Ryan was fleeing into the chapel and being overtaken by the gargoyles, who would try to hit him as they flew by, but he mostly ignored their hits.

Things changed when +Kevin Smyth's character Raleigh threw an Explosive Sound Ball - something of a misnomer, since the spell is really just an area effect spell at a distance. Still, it did decent area of effect crushing damage, so it actually hurt the gargoyles a fair bit, and more to the point, it knocked them back. Gargoyles are clumsy flyers, and though they are heavy, they don't have much resistant to being tossed around while in the air. Two of them face planted for minimal damage. Since some of the gargoyles had been slowed already from previous damage, it meant that the gargoyles were now strung out and arriving one at a time at the PCs' firing line, instead of hitting en mass.

The first gargoyle reached the firing line and grabbed (but missed) Yusef's gun. The gargoyle behind him managed to dodge the "Endor" trap made from a throne dropped off the balcony above the door, but the next one tried to dodge under it and clipped the floor and then nearly had its wings torn off by the throne-pendulum. Meanwhile, concentrated gunfire from the firing line finally killed a gargoyle, and it shattered into a pile of worthless rubble.

Raleigh cast another spell at this point, imbuing the bullets from Douglas' character Neil's gun with an energy sheathe that did decent damage to the gargoyles. He started lighting them up, and the next batch of gargoyles streamed toward him to try to steal his gun away. One of them got a decent grip on it, only for Raleigh's boyfriend Jamie to start hacking away at it's arm, while Neil himself used the fact that Technical Grappling grapples are two-way: he put the gargoyle in an arm-lock, using his captured rifle as a lever. (Doug claims that he's trained in his martial arts classes to do a similar trick when someone grabs the short staff he's wielding.) That gargoyle got hacked to pieces before it could do much else.

From that point on, the battle shifted pretty decisively in the PCs' favor. Raleigh got punched once, but her refurbished plate harness absorbed the blow (though she herself got knocked on her ass from transferred momentum). The badly wounded gargoyles, even with HT 14, started critically failing HT checks to stay conscious, and I just marked them as dead. We were quickly down to one nearly unwounded gargoyle brawling with Ryan and a pair of heavily shot up ones at the gun line, and I called the fight: the PCs won without taking much more damage.

"I'm Anxious to For You to See the Rest of This Ginormous Death Trap"

The reason I called the fight was because the outcome wasn't in doubt and finishing it would take up too much time. And honestly, there are so many strange and bizarre things in the Castle of Horrors that I want the PCs to interact with. Every minute that they spend dealing with a nearly played out encounter is a minute that they're not dealing with the other dangerous oddities. It's the same reason I cut the role-playing short last week.

Where Do We Go Now?

After bandaging themselves up, reloading, and resting a bit, the group had a decision to make: where to go next? They decided to return to the octagon room, now that they could safely move through it, and investigate the doorway to the south, opposite the stairs they'd used to flee from the gargoyles in Session 2.

In the guard's hallway. The secret door doesn't
directly on the map.

 

That doorway led to a dusty and cobwebbed dining room, lined with grimy mirrors. There was a brief discussion of stealing the silver backing from the mirrors (it was a large room) but since silver isn't worth anywhere near as much as gold, they backed down from that. +Theodore Briggs's character Thomas did meticulously search some old china cabinets, and found a large case of silverware beneath a false bottom in one of the drawers. They eyeballed the 20-30 pounds of sterling silver as worth somewhere between $4000 and $8000, and figured that was a pretty good haul.

Thomas also found a secret door behind one of the mirrors that led to a guard corridor. The corridor was lined with rusty and worthless weapons and went around the outer perimeter of the keep before ending at another spiral stairwell. Since that stairwell stunk of rotten eggs, they avoided it. After a bit more discussion, they went up the grand staircase on the north side of the octagon.

"That's definitely Harbinger assuming direct control"

The stairway led to an intermediate platform between levels 1 and 2, guarded by another pair of sharkfaced Void Brutes. Once again, a fight didn't break out, somewhat to my surprise. One of the void brutes grunted at the PCs for a while, before suddenly standing up straight and inviting them upstairs in a much more cultured and polished voice. After that, it reverted to a slightly hunched, looming and went back to grunting.

Kevin (or maybe Raleigh?) noted that they'd just seen a clear case of mental possession, and no one was happy about going into a possible mind controller's lair. But they also didn't want to turn their back on the void bruttes, so up they went.

The mind controller's lair was the castle's throne room: a huge room with a massive gilt throne on the south side, surrounded by weird mystic circles. The mind controller himself, a robed man named Donald, asked them what they were doing in his castle. He claimed to be the Keeper of the Castle, but was mostly focused on his research. He believed that the throne was an artifact that gave its controller immortality, based on the fact that the accountant in the next room didn't sleep, eat, drink or age.

I'm not sure how the PCs felt about Donald, but he was clearly obsessed with the throne and unconcerned with the rest of the castle. He also offered the a 1 ounce gold coin to go down to the goblins and buy him some rations, since the goblins refused to do business with his void brutes and he didn't want to disrupt his research to do it himself. The PCs took his money and gave him their own rations, because it's worth being hungry for a day or two to earn $1000. When Donald had nothing more to do with him, the PCs excused themselves and headed back to the first floor.

Stop For The Night

I'd pointed out in email that the Icon took about 50 hours to recharge, and it seemed most likely to me that they'd activated on Friday afternoon with a plan to return to the Real World on Sunday evening. As such, they'd spent about four hours exploring and fighting gargoyles, and needed to think about where they were going to sleep.

No one wanted to stay in the courtyard for some reason, and the poorly fortified chapel was ominous and hard to secure. Someone suggested the dining room, but in the end they went with the hall between the chapel and the octagon: plenty of space, but only two doors and both opened inwards and could be easily blocked. Thomas spent some time stringing noisemaker traps around the chapel entrances and Ryan blockaded the hallway doors. Both of them saw a leprechaun in the chapel courtyard, who proceeded to turn invisible when he saw them looking, and both of them noted that his footprints were disturbing the grass in a path heading east toward the overlook, but neither of them decided to deal with it then. Instead, we closed up for the night.

Evaluation of Play

The fight in the chapel went surprisingly well for the PCs. The gargoyles had a surprising number of critical failures on defense rolls and rolls to maintain consciousness, but they also never failed an attack roll to grab a weapon, even though they only had a 50% chance of doing so successfully. So I guess that balances out. I had really expected the PCs to have flee again, and was looking forward to turning the gargoyles into some kind of near mystical threat, but it didn't happen.

The rest of the session went well enough. One thing that I'm appreciating is that this game isn't Dungeon Fantasy, and the PCs have quite the same adversarial attitude toward the dungeon's inhabitants. They've been willing to talk to anything that wasn't actively attacking them, which is nice. Later conversations show that they don't trust any of the dungeon's inhabitants, which is wise. But it really does make a nice change of pace from the "kick down the door, attack anything that moves, only negotiate when the odds are bad" method that we got used to when we were playing a conventional Dungeon Fantasy game.

I'm still a little disappointed that no one is stepping forward to keep the group organized. I'm finding myself asking "what are you doing NOW?" a bit too often. Some playgroups manage to keep focused and some don't, and I think this current one is one of the latter groups. It's not a huge problem, but again, there's all kinds of encounters that I am anticipating them experiencing and that doesn't happen when they're all silent and not moving forward.

Technical Notes

For once, Skype and MapTools behaved themselves for most of an entire session, though Kevin was disconnected from MapTools randomly at one point. Fortunately, it wasn't an important part of the game, so no harm done aside from some confusion.

What Next?

The PCs have forted up for the night, and they managed to pick a pretty decent location. Veterans of the original Ravenloft module might recognize that their location isn't perfect, but really, no location is. Assuming they survive until morning, I think they're going to move on to exploring the second and third floors. They've already been through parts of those levels, so that may go fairly fast, and then they're going to have to decide if they want to go up the towers or descend into the basement. Given that the basement is already known to be either stinky or filled with spiders by giant spiders, I suspect they'll go up before they go down.

For myself, I need to finalize my plans for what happens to them overnight. The rest of the castle is mostly stocked and I just need to clean up a few places. Stocking a large dungeon is never done: there's always something else you can polish up a bit. Still, I'm in good enough shape for now.