Silence Darkness Death Silence Darkness Death

So the party was rolling up on this castle tucked away in the excellent Shoe Thief map Jez drew for Red & Pleasant Land* which I have defaced with…

…"Pale King's knights fighting decimator".

Being hungry for adventure--and noticing the decimator had 60,000gp worth of gems embedded in its wrists--they decided to intervene.

So:

IN THIS CORNER, REPRESENTED ON THE TABLETOP BY THE RANCOR…

The Decimator

Colossal Avatar of Ona -- a deity of indeterminate gender and variety that snuffs out illumination in all forms. Particularly hates books, and it's priests punish speaking with death. Paradoxically also associated with light, but in forms like Cherenkov radiation and white phosphorus. (Ona invented by Odyssey)

AC: 19
HP: 300
3 Atks at +10 for 2d30/2d30/d100

1st round--Silence Aura 1000'
2nd round--Darkness Aura 200'
3rd round--Death Aura 20' (1st hit knocks you to zero hp, second kills anyone at or below zero)
…then it starts over again

Move: as human

(and yes this is this same rancor as this guy…

)


AND IN THIS CORNER, IN THE BLACK MILK TIGHTS…

The D&D W/PS team…

Stokely the tiefling wizard

Brian the human wizard

Kerowhack the human thief

Tizane Ildiko the tiefling cleric

Gypsillia the half-elf thief

Mariah the human cleric

The megalethality of the monster did what I wanted--it forced everybody to work together...

So Brian wasted no time casting Reverse Gravity...

…and now an interesting situation obtains: the spell's radius is smaller than the height of the Decimator, so he was reverse-gravited from his nipples to his toes but the top of him was fine.

(Also note Reverse Gravity has a ceiling of 100' in 5e.)

This cleverness freed everybody up to start artillerying the now-floating decimator, who had to make a Dex Save Vs Bryan just to move on account of having to use its big paws to walk.

Still, that left it with two attacks doing 2d30 each per round, and it (that is: I ) figure out it could throw pieces of castle at people….

At least until they disintegrated its right arm, at which point all it could do was hold on with its left and kick stuff.

Oh, and do the silence then darkness then death thing.

Kerowhack came through with a natural-20 with a dagger for 44 points of damage (non-spellcasters add their entire d20 roll to damage) and Mariah used locate creature during the darkness rounds.

There were a few close calls (Rolling d30s for damage creates so much tension at the table it's amazing. Try it. Stokes was down to 4 hp at one point and I rolled a two. Everybody exhaled.) but only Gypsillia fell afoul of the death aura, mostly because she was trying to climb into its butt and timed the rounds wrong --quoth Gypsillia: "Trying to get into a Decimator's butthole is like doing double-dutch".

Mandy shot a blade barrier at it in the dark and missed, then Stokely used Bigby's hand to shove it towards the barrier and that was the end of the Decimator.

So she's up there in the sky at zero hp, floating against the 100' anti-gravity ceiling along with dozens of shredded chunks of colossal flesh.

Someone had featherfall and cast it just as the spell wore off--allowing Gypsillia to avoid becoming Flatsillia and then healing her up.

Good job, team…though since they used so many of their best spells I surrrre hope there's not another one….

*Available now! GO GO GO! BUY BUY BUY!

Blood Frenzy and Larceny and Level Drain and Cute

Stokely missed a session. So we were updating her:

…King.

They want to see the Pale King because they want to collect their reward for rescuing the Sleeper ("that mouse"). The Sleeper himself was not forthcoming with loot.

The Pale King

It went like this:

A month ago they get into the dungeon, find a bunch of bottles with messages floating in them in a pool. One (the ranger could tell) was written by a mouse. It wanted to be rescued.

So then they spend like hours and hours and session and sessions roaming the dungeon...

…fighting demons and vampires and giant rooks, Mandy loses all her stuff, people almost die 2 or 3 time, Stokely loses 2 levels, Halloween comes and goes...

Yeah, I know, Tuxedo Mask sucks, but what am I supposed to do? 

…be all "Yeah, you guys can all go out as Sailor Scouts and I'll just stay home"?

...and then after like 5 sessions, they find the mouse, thanks to the druid's owl.

Chewie played the owl. Owls are good at finding mice. 

After all that shit, the party's expecting the mouse to give them a reward. Because, y'know, a writing mouse: it's probably rich, right?

And, frankly, the DM is expecting the mouse to give them a reward.

But then Mariah the cleric had found this teacup, so she's all "Tell the mouse we have a teacup it can rest in".

"The mouse comes out, crawls into the teacup…and disappears"

"No way…"

Y'know how sometimes you get to show your players your notes to prove you didn't just make up a gotcha because you're horrible?

Well I got to do that with my new book for the very first time...

"FUCK!"

Then I kind of just couldn't stop laughing for ten minutes because: seriously.

So Mariah turned her attention to other things, like the manticore Joey Vs Skin had drugged in other room that was paddling in circles thinking it was a manta ray after rolling a 1 to save vs hallucinogen.

Mariah found this obscurely charming even though manticores are jerks.

All this interspecies romance got everybody talking about rolling on the carousing table.

Stokes' witch problem turned into a whole elaborate plot thread--Mandy dealt with her unexpected morning after a lot more efficiently:

Then they fell in a river and fought some dragonfish. But that's life.

No more cute stuff for like a year after this. It's all claws made from the dreams of dead men after this.

When A Giant Egg Stops Drops And Rolls It Looks Weird

So Mandy had been separated from the rest of the group by a magic ring she had burned into her flesh that teleported her from danger when she went below 0 hp.

Unnnnnnfortun8ly it teleported her right into the lap of a red rook and The Thirster, a demon with hypno-eyes instead of nipples and enough points in Arcana to know to chop Mandy's finger off.

Left: Thirster. Right: Fellow demon that got aced by the wizard last week

They threw Mandy in a cell and--much worse-- took her stuff. That's 17 levels and 6 years worth of stuff.

Luckily Ela Darling (right) showed up to roll for the first time today and the dice said she ended up in Mandy's cell.

An AD&D veteran, Ela immediately went for half-elf ranger, background: charlatan.

Joey Vs Skin also showed up to help after a long night at the bar where we saw a lion and I lost my hat after hanging in a bounce castle in West Adams. That was real life. In fake life Joey made a tiefling rogue named Schweppes Mizuno and promptly picked a fight with a giant rotting insect.

True, you may know that it's "Bigby's" and Charlotte did not,
but she knows where we keep the giant wooden hand
and you do not. So: even Steven.

Also: it was a butterfly but I only had a dragonfly mini. Sucks to be a fridge magnet away from tournament quality representation, but if the party ever fights Elvis, the Statue of Liberty or Nebraska we're good.

After taking the mothrafucker out the party bumped around the maze…

...while Mandy/Tizane and Ela/Beowyn fought off vampire jailers bent on hiring and/or eating them and then played truth-or-dare ("I dare you to try to cross the protective runes""Uh…truth?"). Ela maintained her charlatan cover as some duke's friend.

Eventually there was horrible vampire-swarm trouble and Charlotte got drained for 3 levels and Ela had to take a half-hour break for an interview and Joey had to catch a plane and then everyone started talking about medical stuff.

So I left and then immediately remembered I didn't smoke so I didn't actually have a reason to leave. So I came back.

When I opened the door the girls were topless. Despite my terror at this blatant attempt to sexualize what I had, until that moment, considered a safe space, I almost managed to kill them all--knocking Caroline Pierce unconscious with mome raths and knocking Mariah the cleric down to 3 hp with rook-hucked chunks of debris while the captives looked on through the bars. But then Ela discovered or rediscovered the whole "setting things on fire" tactic and the monsters' plans went rapidly south.

Everybody got 500 xp but Ildanna the Red Bride still has Mandy's stuff.

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If You Can't Remember The Rules Just Get Them Tattooed On Your Arm

5th edition armor classes don't line up with AD&D/Labyrinth Lord armor classes, plus I can't remember any of them anyway, so I just had Connie tattoo them both on my forearm.

It's a good solution and I recommend it.

Top to bottom:

Shield

Hide/Leather/Padded

Studded/Chain Shirt

Scale mail

1/2 plate

Chain mail

Splint

Banded

Half plate

The same day, BoingBoing put out an article on the new edition of the game, the article got it mostly right.

There is little doubt* that the new edition of D&D was influenced by that loose group of stalwart players and creators that are part of a trend called The Old School Renaissance. While the OSR has no overarching mission statement, there does seem to be a common thread weaving through the many games, supplements, and home-brew adventures; an attempt to capture a flavor of gaming that emphasizes gonzo adventuring over stiff combat rules and an unabashed love for the literature and myths that inspired the earliest iteration of the game. Nevertheless, D&D 5th is much slicker than anything in the OSR, and the original DIY quality of D&D can probably never again be captured except by those producing third-party materials.

*Extremely little doubt.

The comments, as usual, were weird...

It's 2014 and they still make these.

The actual BoingBoing comments sported a genuine StoryGames supremacist who took the release of the 5th edition of D&D as an excuse to talk about how much objectively better the _____ World games, then got mad when not everyone agreed with him…

Again, it's 2014 and they still make these. Weird.

As it happens, I played Apoc World just a couple days ago because it was resident Cool Story Gamer Shoepixie's birthday and she wanted to.

It was fun, the way these games are if you have good people...

Shoe was doing naked calisthenics, because she thought it would be fun to be doing naked calisthenics.

Someone was trying to make pancakes, because I thought it would be fun if someone was trying to make pancakes.

A 4-eyed snake showed up, because the GM thought it'd be fun for a 4-eyed snake to show up.

We locked it in a derelict van, because I thought it would be fun if we locked it in a derelict van.

It was an ice cream van, because the GM thought it would be fun if it was an ice cream van.

etc.

…if you live in Los Angeles in 2014, making up post-apocalyptic shit is pretty easy.

D&D, as usual, is far crueler--

Kirin--kowtowing to the profound social footprint demanded by this harshest of mistresses came up with these for our Rappan Athuk game:

"Fort Helgar" is our HQ, named after our German wizard--deceased after a battle with a troll (because the dice thought that would be fun).

And I got out some wood glue and stuck some dungeon tiles on some leftover shelf bits because I was thinking it might be nice to have a sort of second smaller table to stick on top of our actual table so that there'd be more room for snacks.

Rock Stars play D&D. Rock Stars Play Fifth Edition.

In retrospect, it should have been obvious.
Oh dark oracle which type of D&D will rock the most?

Mmmmm….Vrock is close to rock….what else you got?

Uhhhhh…nope.

Pinching dog? That's kinda rocknroll...

Ummmm...

…oh there we go.

___

Zak: So when was the last time you played?

Rockstar: The last time it was like the 90s in Florida. We were playing ironically.

Zak: And Manson was DMing?

Rockstar: Yeah.

Zak: That's hilarious. Alllright--so you gotta pick your race, these're probably familiar like Tolkien: Elf, Dwarf, Half-elf, Gnomes suck, Half-orc,  Human, Halfling and then there's also Tiefling which is like half-demon…

Rockstar: What don't we have?

Zak: Well the girls are really into tieflings and elves…

Rockstar: Ok, let's see…

Zak: Oh and there's Dragonborn which is kinda…

Rockstar: It's not so old school.

Zak: Yeah like some people think they're a little cheesy. They breath fire and shit.

Rockstar: I wanna be old school…hmmm… (much debate)…y'know what? I like this dragon guy, it's cool. Is that alright?

Zak: Hey I'm not here to get in the way of your dreams.

Rockstar: Alright I'm this guy…

Zak: Ok, so then you pick your class…they're probably fairly familiar but there's some new ones…

Rockstar: Assume I remember nothing.

Zak: Well y'know a fighter fights, it's not rocket science…Ok, from the bottom: Wizard, Witch slash Warlock…

Rockstar: Can I be a witch, like a dragonwitch?

Zak: Well y'know 5th edition doesn't judge. Like in the old one it was like "Dwarf wizard--no way!" but now it's like you do whatever you want. In practice the way it works is you pick something like half-orc druid multiclass thief and then I like judge you for ten minutes and then you play it and you're cool and make it work and then it's fine and I stop judging you because you made it work.

Rockstar: Alright I'm a witch.

Zak: Sold.

Zak: Now you gotta pick a witch patron--this one is kind of like the Morgaine Le Fay Camelot-witch choice, this one is basically Satan, and the Great Old One is pretty much Cthulhu…

Rockstar: Cthulhu.

Zak: Now for stats you can roll 4 six-sided dice and pick the three highest or you can be hardcore and roll just roll three and you get what you get.

Rockstar: Gimme 3.

___

So the players went crawling through a dungeon from the upcoming Red & Pleasant Land…

There were several messages in bottles in the fountain. One said:

To Whom It May Concern,

I have been captured by the Red Bishops! Free me and you will be rewarded!

 Laney's ranger was able to use tracking to figure out the note had been written by a mouse. 

"Oh my god! We have to save the mouse!"

And off they went.

They found the jailer's kitchen (manned by one Meister Heincz, cooking weaselflesh and mustardcake--grateful and confused to be rescued from a life of toil) and fought a few weird Red & Pleasant Land vampires.

Now the thing about these guys is unless you stake them, at 0 hp they just turn into a lizard or something, crawl off, turn into little invulnerable chess pieces and start regenerating until they come back.

Rockstar summoned some fire elementals to burn the kitchen down looking for one of the escaped chess vampires, which worked, but actually bumping one off was kind of a pain and I don't think Rockstar hit anything with his lightning breath all day. After about an hour they had all these invulnerable wooden widgets and no xp to show for it--plus Rockstar got level-drained.

Rockstar: "These fucking things…Can I order the chef to eat the chess pieces?"

Everyone: "No!!!"

Rockstar: "Fuck it, I'm doin' it."

Zak: "Hey you worship Cthulhu--you can tell him whatever you like. Whadda you got for intimidation?"

Rockstar: "+6"

Zak: "Roll it."

Rockstar: "20."

Everyone: "No!!!"

Zak: "He's terrified of this lightning-breathing lizardwitch that talks and just throws them into his mouth."

Mandy: "They're gonna explode out of his stomach and kill him!"

Zak: "Hey maybe."

Rockstar also rolled all his spells randomly and brought donuts and sour-cream-and-cheese-ruffles.

Point is: Rockstar clearly understands how this game is played.

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As For The New System….

As for the system:  After a bit of converting, 5e worked like a dream. Combat's fast, the character sheet is comprehensible, you're always rolling high but the numbers are relatively small and the fast-at-math people don't have to do everybody's math for them and there isn't that 3.5 thing where you're like "+6…is +6 good?".

The big test for us was whether Mandy liked it--since:

A) Mandy hates everything

and

B) Having a 17th level character, she was making the biggest transition.

That went well:

So far so good, though in the interest of having some time to play I short-handed a few spells. I'm gonna try to take a closer look at the magic classes and iron them out. Gotta make sure that Cthulhu-lizard-witch really feels like a Cthulhu lizard witch.

So yeah, I'm into this.

Project: Hack Marilith is go.

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Marilyn Manson On D&D--Live From Laney & Twiggy's Wedding 2014

Our party's intrepid halfling moves from strength to strength--last week she saved everyone from a total party kill after narrowly escaping being fat and she spent this weekend marrying a rock star.

Your humble correspondent was given a great deal of whiskey by some ladies on the catering crew that he suspects were fans of his movies, got to tell Kerry King that Slayer changed his life, and discussed with the Best Manson a lot of things on a great number of topics that are best left unrepeated and a few things I can repeat about his relationship to Gygax and Arneson's baby, the World's First and Finest Role-Playing Game on this Day Before Gygax's birthday.

I could insert a long essay here about how music industry people all inevitably turn out to be weird involuted hobbyists about something very private and how talking to people at Laney and Twiggy's wedding reveals most of their friends are people who make things and collect things and how much of what was at the wedding like the birdcages and dresses and whatever was actually put together by the folks involved and then somehow loop that around to how Laney herself became a special-effects make-up person on account of Gwar and the late Oderus Ungus is such a D&D guy he wrote a module for Lamentations of the Flame Princess and how metal and D&D and special effects and performance are all kind of locked together in exactly the kind of way you'd expect despite frequent attempts to pretend otherwise because the best way to play D&D is after a long week of being out in the world drunk in the dark and really really really not playing D&D the same way it's nice to take a bath, alone, after 8 hours of soccer and then maybe talk about the double standard where everybody takes it as read that it's grown-ups-run-amuck-conservative lunacy for parents to try to police what's in a Slayer or Manson video but some third party D&D product it's like Watch Out OMG Problematic if there's a boob but either I'll save that for another day or I just wrote it.

Anyway, here's Manson on the game:

(Note for the record lately he's taken to talking in a speeded-up True Detective accent)

Zak: Laney comes over to our house and plays D&D.

Manson: Is it advanced D&D?

Zak: Sorta, it's actually kind of a hybrid.

Manson: I had AD&D, I got DMG, I gots Monster Manual, I got pewter figurines.

Zak: Did you color in your own dice?

Manson: I didn't color in mah own dice, but I painted the pewter figures.

Zak: Did you do a base coat?
(Why did I ask that?)

Manson: I did a base coat, did a overall coat--I put the paint on all wet so it went down in the cracks.

Zak: You did a wash.

Charlotte Stokely: Should I call you Brian or Manson while you're here?

Manson: Call me God, call me Overlord, call me Boss, call me…well I guess you can't call me Dungeon Master because you the dungeon master. I like that tattoo son, it's like Carcosa--I got that Carcosa tattoo too right here.

The pair of tattoos in question

(I take Manson by the glove and hold both our spirals up to Stokely's face in an attempt to hypnotize her. It doesn't work.)

Left: Charlotte Stokely, (level 11 tiefling wizard). Right: Manson

Zak: You probably haven't heard about the Carcosa D&D module--but you'd probably like it.

Carcosa

(brief pause for Laney and Twiggy to get married)

Zak: You were an elf wizard weren't you?

Manson: Nah, I was the dungeon master.

Zak: You didn't ever play a character?

Manson: I was into the drow.

Zak: Were you an elf thief?

Manson: Yeah.

_

So there you go. Everything they say about Dungeons & Dragons is true.

Brian before D&D

Brian during D&D

Brian after D&D

And congratulations to Laney and Twiggy….

Weird footnote: the same day I did this thing on Manson, his ex did a thing on me.
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