Two Dogs, A Hog and A Banshee

So, first:

One cleric was already a stomach. So Karolyn played the druid's dog.

Also:

Party thief--she's very inexperienced. Only played a handful of sessions.

Ok:

They fought some evil statues with clacky nutcracker faces who ate your stuff. They got through that fine.
Then two things happened:

-The party illusionist goes to get something to eat and the druid has to go early, leaving three.

-The players ended up fighting a weird angel in a room which had a magic portal in it.

During that fight, Mandy--the party's most experienced member--went half through the portal while her anti-magic shell was up. This deactivated the portal with her on the far side. She ended up in another part of the dungeon.

This left the inexperienced party thief and the dog. Fighting an angel. 5e stats for angels are no joke.

So...Karolyn transmigrates over to another pet in the dungeon, the illusionist's pig. One of the illusionist's pigs. One of the same pigs she bought off the AD&D equipment list at the beginning of the campaign when the player realized how much gp an illusionist has left over after character gen in AD&D.

Luckily, the angel is confined to that one room.

Unluckily, in the next room there's a banshee. A re-done banshee.

The schtick there is: the first one to see it is the only one who can see it, the first one to hear it is the only one who can see it, the first to touch it is the only one who can touch it, etc.

So first thing that happens, of course, is everyone's confused.

Second thing that happens is the pig gets killed by the banshee's wail.

Third thing that happens, is the illusionist (who's comes back from getting food) and Mandy show up from the other direction after bumping around the dungeon.

Karolyn, still lacking a character, now has to play another pet. There's one pig that they've been using as a guinea pig for all the potions they keep finding--it's got one eye and floats 3 feet off the ground--she chooses that pig. This is silly, but hey: every single part of how it got that way is Rules As Written. Oh well. Now Karolyn is that pig.

The banshee begins to wail so only the illusionist can hear, but she has her fingers in her ears.

The thief can see the banshee, but that's all. The illusionist can hear it, but doesn't want to, the cleric can smell it.

Then the pig--trying to cross the room to pick up an arrow the thief saw go clean through it--runs into it.

So: Only the one-eyed floating pig can hurt the banshee.

Because the rules. Possibly also due to this:

So...

...the banshee is a dead ethereal drowned elf so not that strong but still is tougher than a pig.

The players develop the following scheme: Everyone leaves but the thief and the pig, then the thief puts on her alignment-switching ring.

They do that. The banshee is now BFFs with the party thief and the floating pig is compelled to attack the thief.

The thief opens the door to the room with the angel in it and tells the banshee to go fight the angel. She obliges.

Then she closes the door and takes the ring off. XP for everyone!

This fucking game, man.

ONLY 55 COPIES LEFT.

I Dared Enter The Ghost Tower And All I Got Was Some Blog Entries

(Part 2 of 3: Previously)

Hello.

Hellooo mortallll (does a "spidery fingers" thing)

Are you still here, Ghost Tower of Inverness?

The Ghost Tower is immortalll hahahahahahahaahhhhhhaaaaaaa.

Yeah ok. So, anyway we've got past the outer ruins and are now into the inner tower of...

THE GHOohoooOOoooooOOoooOSt ToWerRRRRRRrrr of Innnnnverness

Yes. That. So what's first?

Each level follows a subtle thaumaturgic schema. First....Air, then......Earth, then....Fire, then......WATER!

Whoa who could have thought of that? So: Air Level?

Yes, on the air level a sphinx attacks the party from a mist!

Is there, like, a riddle?

No just it hits you.

Ok, then what?

That's all, that's the "air" level.

Do you see this palm I have on my face right now?

Also maybe after that a pteranodon.  Unless it's a tournament.

No pteranodons in tournament mode.

No! And then the Earth Level...

Do you stand on a boulder and someone throws a rock at you?

An overly-muscled monkey suddenly lands on one of your group!

A monkey?

A muscley one! While in trees!

Is that earthy?

Maybe!

Ok.

Then there's a medusa!

Yeah ok, it seems like there'd be a lot of stone over-muscley monkeys in this forest.

You might think.

Especially if it's been there since the age of forever when the peaks were...whatever it said in the intro.

Gird yourself for.....the Fire Level!!!!

Girding for this shit.

There is a looping stone path across an ocean of flame that you must traverse while a flame giant hurls boulders at you and firebats attack. Also there's a reverse-gravity trap in the middle.

Whoa it's like you put all your effort into this one room and then Super Mario just went and stole it out from under you.

Also the stairs behind the giant aren't real stairs and you have to use the anti-gravity well to get up to the next level.

Well that all actually sounds pretty fun.

GhoOoOOOOoOooost ToWwwwerrrrrrRRRRRrrr!

Ok so...

You fall upward into the chimney and appear beneath the waves in tropical surroundings!

So it's, like, just like Super Mario Brothers. And instead of jellyfish there's...

A dinosaur-fish! And the spine-chilling ixitxachitl!

Oh my spine

The evil psionic vampire cleric manta rays?

Those are the ones.

Well it'll keep you busy, I guess.

And then, beyond the xitxachitl lair..

Red turtles?

The wonder of the Soul Gem!!

Wait so there was no ghosts in the ghost tower?

None at all!!!!! Hhahahahahahahhhhaaaa!

Does the Gem fuck with you?

Yes.

How?
Totally random zaps that if they hit you they take your soul.

That's clevNo.

It is also surrounded by a field that inflicts equivalent damage on you as you chip away at it.

That's...kinda...ok. By local standards. I guess.

GhoooooooOOooOOoost ToWWeRRRRrrRRRRRR!

Yeah. Next up: Rewriting this so it doesn't suck.

GHOOOOOST TOWWWWWWWW  ERRRRRRRR!

Yeah, we get it.

Just making sure.

Ok.

Ok.

Bye.

--------

And now, a word from our sponsor:

Gold Ennie Award for Best Writing, Gold for Best Setting, Silver for Best
Adventure, Silver for Product of the Year. Only 65 copies left.

One Of Those Sunday Posts Nobody Reads

Some notes:

*Despite what I said at first, aside from the usual Gurrrls Play DnD????? stuff, the comments on the Vice article on their Facebook page were incredibly sweet and surprising. So many people just love the game and want to play--there was not a single nerd-baiting comment. In Vice. In 2015. Weird.

*Sometimes I write actual play reports because there's a point they can make--sometimes I write them because I'm afraid I won't remember how insane shit is--like remembering a dream.

*Example of the latter: on Monday my AD&D group picked up a cursed object that attracts totally random encounters. I roll…Juiblex. The players are levels 8-11. They kill Juiblex. He tried, man.

*Spike's blog--Gorgonara--is new to me, but I like this:

Shadow people. They look like Asian shadow puppets. Theyre 2 dimensional organisms from the 2nd dimension that have immigrated to the 3rd dimension. The process of going into a bigger dimension has changed they permanently to be 2.5-d, they occupy a space 3-d space like anyone else but look the same from every angle. They were sent here to colonise the 3d world, and send back messages, but they failed miserably. Because they are different now they can never go home.

*I stopped rewriting the 5e Monster Manual because my manual was getting so taped over it was literally falling apart. I need to find a new way to do it. The monsters from there I did use turned out to work pretty well.

*People troll and play shitcritic because it's fun. (If fun--or "social re-enforcement"-- weren't the motive they'd be doing something more effective.) The way we made them stop is make it unfun. Really unfun.

*I liked Patrick's Marvel pitches

Luke Cage is lost in time. While he tries to survive and find meaning in a post-apocalyptic Britain somewhere between the fall of Rome and the Battle of Hastings, meanwhile Jessica Jones and his Kid search for him.

*Arnold Punch put up all his monsters on one list. Some entries are long, but all are interesting.

Fairy

   - Candy - Turn your horrible old weapons into sugar.

   - Flower - Turn your boring old food into flowers.

   - Gem - Turn your shiny gold into awesome glitter.

   - Ice - Turn all of dangerous flammables into lovely toys.

   - Tooth - Can steal the teeth right out of your head.

*Dungeon Dozen is on-point, too, this weekend

9. Involuntary, boundless levity in approach to all things, no matter how dire, all conversation framed as hilarious "bits", great effusions of genuine or feigned laughter the glue that holds society together

*Some people want online to be a bar where they rib each other constantly but it means nothing.

Others are obsessed with civility.

They don't get along.

A third kind, the obviously fragile people who can only report on their emotions, follow neither the barfly rule of the first kind or the Always Ignore Really Bad Things rule of the second kind but are tolerated by both.

None of them can at all relate to the fourth kind: people who actually wanna get shit done.

*Harry Potter (as a structure) seems less D&Dable than Harry Potter inverted: you are the person trying to murder someone who is safe in the arms of the institution. I think this may also be true of Arthurian D&D: infiltration of stable and complex institutions is a more player-centric adventure than being invited into them and then having to ferret out trouble within. Or, at least, you get to tour more of the institution with the inverted structure. Like: you don't want to joust or drink when everything's going fine and you just wait for the trouble--you want to be the disrupting presence, so each of these events is full of drama caused by the PCs and the PCs have to examine the tourney from all the angles.

It's like that rogues-and-sandboxes thing but it also applies to anything with periodically repeated rituals (classes, feasts, etc): there's only a point to gaming through them when they become a problem, and it's better when the players are motivated to make that problem happen.

*Call of Cthulhuish dream:

In the form of a documentary trailer. There's people who believe humans and frogs and newts share a common ancestor.

This animal is currently alive:

it looks like a small fat stylized frog with a somewhat pointed hace and stubby legs, but with faces  on both ends. One set of small legs. One of the 2 janus-faces is always covered in an algae-colored goo. The dividing line is very clear and straight.

A scientist is trying his whole life to disprove that they are related to us, but also killing them in the process.

The imagery of the documentary contains an evolution-denier-style science museum exhibit, sort of natural-historyish, sort of totemic, of stacked sculpted creatures and faces, in a 1950s style. Lots of manilla-colored nameplates.

*Here's a game: Ask whoever you're sleeping with which of the Fellowship you most resemble, if they had to pick.

...and now, a word from our sponsor:

Only 74 copies left via mail order.

Notes On the Vice D&D Article

So Vice asked me to write a thing about D&D--it went up today and it's here.

Footnotes:

This picture's from this session.

Last e-mail exchange before the article went up:

Unless you relish kicking off a "fake geek girls" panic in the comments, it's probably good to note (in their credits or in my bio) that these photos are from my actual weekly game group.

-Z


Haha good point. Will make a note. 

-J

---
Ohhhh, the Facebook comments.

They're actually worse than the comments on the Maxim article, which were mostly just amused. Also there are some awesome girls fucking shit up in the Facebook comments now, so that's fun.

The Richard Lindgard quote is often misattributed to Plato.

The Ice T quote is from just after he finished doing a passage for a Driz'zt audiobook.

The character sheet and sketch are both from Connie's pig-head-helmet-wearing half-elf thief, Gypsillia.

The "spells from Tizane's brain" listed inside the ring of dots are from when she drank a potion allowing her to learn spells by eating a spellcaster brain and then ate a temporal duplicate of Mandy's character's future self.

"a three-headed god that carries a panther-skin bag and throws a magic brick for 5-50 points of damage"--No Cha from Deities and Demigods.

"Patton Oswalt played a drunken dwarf" --as related at Skylight Books.

"Marilyn Manson says he was a dark elf" --as related at Laney's wedding.

"VICE international atrocity expert Molly Crabapple played a thief" --here at our place.

"...Stoya, for a druid with a dog named George?" --ditto.

The fucked up gray factory thing was some scenery I built originally for 40k, the green guy is a Reaper ice devil, the minotaur's also a Reaper, the goblin is a Reaper deep gnome.

You can read some prime Clark Ashton Smith here.

A fine example of Jack Vance's prose is here.

My favorite Lieber is The Snow Women, for example:

This outwardly comic combat had sinister undertones. Particularly when working all together, the Snow Women were reputed to wield mighty magics, particularly through the element of cold and its consequences: slipperiness, the sudden freezing of flesh, the gluing of skin to metal, the frangibility of objects, the menacing mass of snow-laden trees and branches, and the vastly greater mass of avalanches. And there was no man wholly unafraid of the hypnotic power in their ice-blue eyes.

I was surprised to be asked to write an article about D&D for Vice, but the distinguishing characteristic of the world is that it is reliably both large and strange.

Edit: Holy shit...

And now, a word from our sponsor...

Only 91 copies left via mail order.

Dare you Enter The GHOoOOooooST ToWerRRRRR??

Knock knock

Who's there?

Ghost Tower of Inverness

Ghost Tower of Inver--

BUGBEARS HIT YOU!

Oh my god, it really is you, the dread Ghost Tower.

Yes, it is I, Module C2 conceived for the Wintercon VII tournament in Detroit in 1979, copyright 1980!

Fuck me in half.

Know you that in the elder days before the Invoked Devastation and the Rain of Colorless Fire, when the ancient peaks of the Abbor-Alz still thrust skyward sharp at majestic, there existed between the Bright Desert and the mount of the river Selintan a great fortress called Inverness....

That's pretty good actually.


White Dwarf once gave me an 8 out of 10 and Dungeon ranked me 30th best adventure of all time!

Well.........things were very different then.

Fuck you and fuck your Deep Carbon Observatory.

Can I help you?

Come inside me!

Ok, first: Ew.

Pull back my red and Roslof-clad covers. You are in me!

And second the You-are-in-me joke was played out this time last year.

Dare you seek the Soul Gem!?!?!?!????

The mcguffin is called the "Soul Gem" because in the 1970s all mcguffins were called the "Soul Gem"....

It is a gem of inestimable power!

...also all vans.

Dare you enter my upper works?

Maybe, what's there?

Wandering monsters.

Uh, ok?

1 Wight!  

Sure

2 Weretiger!

That's it? No "Disguised as a frustrated lady of the Sodden Provinces bearing beechwood wine who beseeches the party for aid in locating her lost children?"

It is ferocity incarnate!

Whatever, Tournament Module

3 Beetle, Bombardier!

That is the stupidest thing

4 Doppleganger !

Much better

5 Giant......Lizard !

"Oh I loved that part it was like a dragon only less"

6 Giant Snake !

Yeah, sure.

7 Brown Bear !

Seriously?

8 Giant ant 

Fuck anyone who uses a giant ant I don't care how many panels you've been on.

9 Stone giant 

Dope.

10 Horned Devil 

Why are a bear and the devil on the same chart?

Dare ye face the horrors on the second chart?

That depends, is it gonna have a giant badger on it?

Let us skip to the room descriptions....

Yeah ok but not the empty ones.

Room...5:

Cool.

The room has 20 squares. If you step on six specific ones, one of six monsters will appear.

Ok...

That's it.

Wait, what?

It is not more complicated than that.

That's not even a puzzle, really. Just, like, some fights that might happen. Or not.

Yes! One of the monsters that might happen is a leucrotta!

Well here it's wasted because the only good thing about a leucrotta is when you first hear it in another room because it is a creepy monster that can do a human voice and so you think it's a baby.

Room 6!

Hold on, wait: 'Fuck you, Room 5'. Ok, continue.

If you step into the room, a given number of inanimate bugbears will animate!

...and, what, hit you with clubs?

With mighty fists! They are unarmed.

In the picture he has a club.

No illustrator is the boss of the Ghoooost Towerrrr

Ok, I'm just saying, like...

And, consider this: if more party members enter, more bugbears will animate!

That's quite a...yeah. Very evocative.

And in the next room...

Super excited.

A manticore that hides.

And...?

I knew you were going to ask me that.

So: nothing.

Yeah.

Is there like even ghosts in this tower?

There is a giant ghost ball!

'Ghost ball'?

It runs over you. You're fine but all your friends think you died, because of the power of ill-yoo-zee-unn.

That's kinda cool. Why does that happen?

Crazy wizard.

Just, no reason, like: it happens and then you figure out it happened and then keep going when the guy's like "Hey I'm not dead" and then you notice, illusion over.

Pretty much.

I mean...there could be a wandering monster during that and that'd be fun.

Like a giant badger!

Next.

The Crystal Ball!!!!

A lot of balls here.

Unlike Room 5 instead of encounters being triggered patternlessly by walking across the floor, they are triggered patternlessly by saying one of 4 words carved on a pedestal. (Arches ghost eyebrow.)

Yeah.

After four are triggered it's over.

Which four?

Any...four.

Including the same ones twice?

Yes.

So it's not really a puzzle either?

One of them is an owlbear!

A. Mazing.

In the next room...an umber hulk attacks. 

I am electric eeling with shock over here at the unexpectedness of that shit.

But only if you spend more than one round in the room.

Hey girl are you the Sixth goddamn Sense because I have never seen such a twist.

And now a room, I call...

Do you know what time it is? Anyone?

...The Guess What I'm Thinking To Get Past This Beaded Curtain, Then When You Do You Are Surprised by Ogres Bugbears And Gargoyles Who Will Hit You Room!

So this is basically just hazing at this point, right?

Ok, so it's no Lyonesse, it gets better though...

I'm so hoping.

The Renowned Inverness Chess Room:

Alright.

You appear on a square on a giant chess board and have to move around like the chess piece you appeared in the starting position of or else get zapped.

That's kinda neat.

Thank you, chess gimmicks were all the rage in Detroit in 1979.

I like that, for once, it not only has thematic resonance but ways to figure out how it works other than by sheer trial and error.

Yes! Also the squares that should be white are grey, blue, green and yellow!

What does that do?

Nothing.

WTF?

Ghooooooost Towerrrrrrrrr!

I am dubious.

Now, to access the door leading to the Inner Tower, the party must collect four disparate keys!

Total hack trope. Do they have to collect a tough-talking orphan with a heart of gold, too?

It's in Red & Pleasant Land.

Shut up.

Except...in the Ghooooost Toweerrrrr the keys do not look like keys at all! Only once assembled in the proper arrangement do the keys match the sigil that marks the entrance.

Actually that's pretty good.

Aha! There's that AND the chess puzzle AND the ghost ball--might you mayhap be falling under the spell of the GhoooOOOOoooost TowerrrrrrrRRRrrrrrrr?

Uh....can we finish this tomorrow?

NOW to the Inner Works.....

Seriously. Tomorrow.

Of course, the Ghost Tower can wait...(shrill giggle)

Great.

...for eternityyyyyyyyYyYyyyYy hahahahah...

Yeah.

....hahahhahaaaaHAAAA!!

Sure. To be continued, Ghost Tower. You stay right there.

------

And now, a word from our sponsor....

There are only 102 left.

We Are 138....no, wait,135...133...

A person named themself "rollforproblematic" and
if you buy one, you will hurt their feelings

Normally I wouldn't hit you fine people with a ton of producty posts all in a row and I am currently working on a long look at Ghost Tower of Inverness but this is kind of a thing:

James only updates the "copies left" of products sporadically and so we didn't realize until this morning: of the 3000 Red & Pleasant Lands printed, there are only 130some left by mail order.

There might be some in stores, but you know how that goes. Again: with Vornheim now only available on ebay for over 100 dollars, if you or anybody you know wants a first edition hardcover, or will want one this Christmas it's time to roll up.

The Reaping Of The Tears

Last night, working, I suddenly noticed I had 25 new messages...

Hey, that's that book I wrote, winning an award.
They told me Stacey's acceptance speech was very sweet.

I figured it'd be fun to check all the twitter accounts that had been harassing us all year...

...it so was.

Meanwhile, Mandy was already at the bar...

I don't have a very good relationship with Fred, but if you do
you could explain to him that the reason his thing didn't win Best Writing
was because the writing in it was bad.

Stacy's third acceptance speech was a joke about how
she was running out of things to say. Actually it was
her fourth acceptance speech because her thing, Contessa,
won best blog.

Well, not everyone, Harassment Bunny.

(PS at some point a Japanese girl had painted a

bunch of swirlies on Mandy's face)

This, at least, is true. I entirely lack remorse.

Me too, it doesn't have 300 pages.

Responsible, grown-up commentary on what all this winning means by Stacy here. Visit booth 835 if you get a minute.

What a stupid bear.