Category Archives: Dungeons and Dragons

July 4, 2017 · 3:01 pm

When Visiting the City of Towers

This is a make-up post, written while the WIFI was down.

When we are in the vertical city called Sharn, the City of Towers, we usually choose to stay in the Broken Anvil Inn.  I strongly recommend that when you are bone-tired of slaying Hobgoblins from Dharguun or tired of running from undead agents of Karn, you stop in for a while at the Broken Anvil.  Come for the beer and the bardsong, stay because it makes a lovely base for life-and-death questing in the deadly dangerous D & D world of Eberron.

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The inn can be found in that borough of Sharn called Tavis Landing, located in the middle districts of the towers on the Western edge of the  city of towers.  It sits in a corner-tower to the intersection of the Old Tower Corner Skyway, and Tenforn Tower Skyway.  It is not hard to find, but from the base of the Tavis Landing Towers, it is about half a mile straight up.  So be sure you have your featherfall amulets and boots of levitation.

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Geezil ir’Tenforn is the owner and operator there.  He is a man full of stories of quests, adventures, and harrowing escapes.  He claims to have been a powerful fighter and knight in his adventures, but there are those who would say he was more likely the group’s rogue and thief.  After all, the money for this tavern and thriving business came from somewhere.

Geezil is famous for his Khorvairian Alchemist’s Ale, a drink that not only heals your wounds faster, but also makes you very, very drunk.

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The other thing he is famous for is the entertainment.  On stage nearly every night is the lovely Princess Anduriel, a mermaid bard with a magic harp and a mysterious past.  Of course, she usually comes to the tavern with a fins-to-feet spell already cast upon herself.  But being a mermaid, she often forgets that with feet, you also should really wear a skirt of pants in polite society.  It is possible that this is at least partially the reason her singing is so popular.

The cups and pitcher from the broken anvil, though, are said to be dangerously enchanted.  Nooz Quaffer, the pitcher is alive and aware and can speak to you.   But he knows more about everyone than anyone wants him to.  He hears everything his intelligent ear-n-eye cups hear or see written down.  It is believed that he may actually be a secret agent working for the Aundairian secret service, the Royal Eyes of Aundair.

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The second most popular bard to frequent the Broken Anvil is the lovely gnome bard, Vanira.   Vanira is a charmer.  And when you convince her to go a-questing with your stalwart band of adventurers, you soon find that she is one of the best bards at charming monsters you have ever seen.  She is also famous for her special Blink song.  Singing it can make her seem to move instantly from one spot to another up to ten feet away instantly.  Is it illusion?  Or is it teleportation?  Only Vanira knows for sure.

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And, of course, you don’t want to run afoul of the Inn’s bouncer.  Mandrick is a half-ogre known for wielding a sword that weighs almost a thousand pounds.  He has been known to go adventuring with questing parties, though you can’t rely on him to do the thinking.   And you can’t let him see you being mean to a kitten or a puppy.  He has killed men, orcs, and goblins for doing that.

We truly recommend the Broken Anvil Inn as a place to begin your adventures, especially in Sharn.  And you can take our word for it.  As a troop of intrepid adventurers we have seen a little bit of everything the world of Eberron has to offer… except, well… we have yet to see an elephant fly.  Maybe by next week for that.

This was a make-up post written for Saturday, July 1st.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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June 24, 2017 · 2:34 pm

Wizards on Ice

I need a quick and cold post for today, so I will turn to the ice wizards of Talislanta.

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Viktor, the ice-alchemist, and his son Zoran-viktor are Mirin, a sort of ice-elves who live in the frozen ice-world of the far north.  Viktor’s people are cold-resistant enough to wear bikinis in freezing weather (but smart enough not to).   So Viktor managed to become the Mirins’ most powerful user of the magic of chemistry by developing hot stuff. In the picture he is brewing a bit of the really, really hot explodie stuff that melts a Mirin bad guy.

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Juan Ruy, the Mirin prince,  built many ice castles out of his magical substance known as iron-ice.  It was far harder to pierce than steel and impossible to melt with fires less hot than dragon’s breath.  With it he built frozen castles vertically to the highest heights.  And they still stand, primarily because I haven’t played that particular D & D game for more than two decades.

But this is what I love most about the Dungeons and Dragons game.  It is a never-ending game played in worlds of shared imagination where every person at the table adds something to the story.  It is interactive, and it retains the unique twists and turns created by the players.  I created the scenario.  The player behind the character Juan Ruy created the idea of iron-ice that completely changed the story.

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June 18, 2017 · 1:51 pm

Saturday Night D & D on Sunday

Yesterday I forgot that it was Saturday.  But that doesn’t matter much in a D & D campaign.  You may not play at regular times… or at all, like this week.  But you do what you can when you can.  Just like in real life.  So let me share a character gallery, in order to give me my weekly dose of fantasy sword and sorcery nonsense.

These illustrations all come out of my D & D notebook.  They are done in colored pencil on colored paper.  Many are copied from models in catalogs, action movie stills, comic books, and illustrated Dungeons and Dragons products, but always interpreted in my own style and costumes.

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June 10, 2017 · 12:49 pm

Eberron

When you play Dungeons and Dragons the way we constantly do, it helps to have an over-all campaign, a world created by gifted imaginers to play in and use as the setting for all our adventures.

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There are good published campaign worlds to choose from.  We chose the Eberron world because it was so thoroughly magical and and steam-punk in nature and artwork.

This is a world where magic and alchemy have taken the place of science in the world’s technology.  Instead of airplanes, the magic-technicians known as magewrights in Eberron bind the living air and fire elementals to their ships and use elemental magic to fly.

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Even robot-like constructs called warforged are built by magewrights to become, not only warriors to fill out armies, but sentient individuals with personalities and complex problems and emotions.  Book in the illustration above is a warforged wizard.  Book is his name.  Warforged are very simple artificial people… but also complicated.  They name themselves after weapons, armor parts, and random things.

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A campaign world provides places and non-player characters to interact with.  As well as monsters to kill and exotic locations to kill them in.  Eberron has its unique peoples, like Shifters.  Shifters are a race of people who are the result of humans loving lycanthropes… you know, werewolves and weretigers and weresharks and other were-things.

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Our family game got involved from adventure number one with the secret service of the Kingdom of Breland, the Dark Lanterns, so Breland and it’s cities became something of a home base.

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The city known as Sharn, City of Towers, became a particularly fascinating home base.  The Broken Anvil Inn in the mid-reaches of Dura became a sometimes place to live and alwaystimes place to drink liquor and recruit weird friends.  And this is a vast city with a cluster of mile-high towers and a population of various peoples and monsters from throughout the continent of Khorvaire.

So if you have been reading any of my Saturday D & D posts, and found the place names confusing and hard to remember, now you have this post to read and confuse you even more thoroughly.  How do I, as dungeon master, keep it all straight?  I don’t.  I bought the books and I am constantly looking stuff up.  In fact, I often assign number one son the Player’s Handbook for Eberron to look up that stuff, number two son gets the Campaign Guide to look stuff up in, and the Princess handles the Monster Manuals.  (Really, I have spent a ton of pennies on the books and have too many to juggle them all myself.)

So we play the game in a world called Eberron and share the fantasies and stories of world where magic is science and science is magic.

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June 5, 2017 · 2:03 pm

Updating the Cardboard Castle

When my health is poor and my day is limited mostly to the bedroom, there are still ways to pass the time that create a tangible something.  Something I can hold in my hand.  A piece of art.

This weekend has meant more work on building my castle out of cardboard.  (I am not planning on living in it myself.  Imaginary D & D characters live, fight, and die there.)

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I actually painted the wizard in red and the Amazon in front myself.

So, I don’t draw all the elements myself.  I have found published sources of easy-to-assemble cardboard castle parts.  Then, with my arthritic fingers, scissors, tape, glue, and miniature-making muscle memory I proceed to create castles.

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This weekend’s castle-creating came about with the help of a supplement purchased at a book store, my favorite used bookstore.

It was called Map Folio 3-D and was published in the last decade by Wizards of the Coast, a publisher whose D & D products I have been buying since they published Talislanta books in the 1980’s.

It has cut-out walls and doors and details that you can cut out and slap together.

You may have noticed I even cut designs off the cover to use on my versions of the buildings they designed.

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So, that plan took me from this above to this below.

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I did the village inn and a barn/workshop.  And put into the center of the cardboard castle, it adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the scene.

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So there you have it, a little bit of the doofy art-noodling that Mickeys often do.

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June 3, 2017 · 2:16 pm

Borrowing Characters

I admit it right from the start.  You don’t have to sniff out any Scooby-Doo-like clues to get at the fact of it.  For my family D & D game, I steal characters whole.  Mostly from things the kids have watched and loved on TV or in the movies.

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These mostly ad up to funny side bits and digressions.  In the epic chase across the continent of Khorvaire they conducted when the adventure involved chasing a secret-agent vampire who had gone rogue from his government spy service, they had to receive important information at one point from a randomly generated pair of characters.  So I stole whole this pair from a Cartoon Network favorite show.

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I turned Flapjack and the Captain into a half-elf with a crazed addiction to candy and sweets and a blue goblin capable of mind tricks and random evil that he doesn’t really mean to commit.  They have only appeared in one adventure so far, but I kept them around for use again, if the time is right.

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Vanellope from Wreck-It Ralph makes a sweet gnome and convenient comic relief character for when you are journeying in the Dark Dimension and visiting places like Castle Ravenloft.  I have not actually used her in an adventure yet, but I have one prepared in a haunted cross-dimensional ghost-castle.

 

And some characters are lifted whole out of game supplements and pre-made adventure books.  Some of my favorite characters are things that you were supposed to kill in the adventure, but charmed and made friends with instead.  Like the denizens of floating Cloud-Castle Tempest.

 

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                                                                                                         The big ol’ Tempest kids

The supplement listed the giants of Castle Tempest as being evil and secretly cannibalistic, preferring to eat human adventurers.  I turned them into a widow and her cloud-giant kids lost in time (in the game world we are using giants once had a high-technology empire that fell back into dark ages, so I merely had to make them into accidental time travelers).  Not all adventures have to be about chopping the heads off monsters and stealing their stuff.  A family like this makes for interesting and bizarrely out-of-proportion friendships and troubles.

So, not everything that makes my Dungeon-Master fictions interesting is entirely my own work.  Like good comedians everywhere, I am not above stealing a joke.

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May 27, 2017 · 2:10 pm

Comedy Relief in D & D

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Dungeon Masters all tend to run their own style of game.  Some like complex puzzle-solving dungeons with complex traps and mysteries involving hidden rooms and old secrets.  I admit to having done that.  Some like hack-and-slash adventures where the slaying of hordes of mindless monsters can last for hours.  I admit to having done less of that.  And some, like me, are all about the people… even if the people happen to be monsters.  Monsters can be people too, right?  Just ask Herman Munster.

And my favorite kind of character is the random buffoon or fool who is essential to the plot.

Eli Tragedy

Eli Tragedy is such a fool.  He began as a computer character whom I used as me in a long ago 80’s computer D & D game called The Bard’s Tale.  It was mostly about collecting doodads and dimbledy-dumb in dungeons, and finding the right keyholes, eyeless idols, or shop keeper to use them with.  But later incarnations were also me, but as a very wise but outwardly idiotic wizard who always knew the answers to the sphinx’s riddles, but would never tell until it was funny to do so.  He also had a number of apprentices.  Bob was rather dim.  But he could do light spells pretty good… so Eli sent him down dark tunnels to see what might be down there that would want to eat him.  Usually over the objections of the player-characters who really wanted to know what was down there, but had grown fond of Bob and his blunderings.    And even burly fighters with a lust for treasure can actually have a heart.

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Mickey the wererat, was another apprentice who caused more than his fair share of chaos.  (A wererat, as I’m sure you know, is a lycanthrope that is human by day, but turns into a rat-man by night.)  Mickey had a penchant for stealing the wizard’s magic hat and using it to do horrendously stupid things that created really big messes for the player characters to clean up.  How do you stop an army of sentient gummibears bent on painting your castle with pink frosting?  It had to be dealt with.  (And why did Eli keep that old hat around, anyway?  He never used it for anything beyond letting Mickey steal it.)

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And, of course, there was the incident with the mermaid whom the players rescued from the Black Reef.  She was a bard with a harp and quite capable of making the magical music that helps dungeon divers  do their dirty-work deep in the dungeon dwellings of dangerous denizens.

They rescued her, and thanks to a fins to feet spell, were able to take her back to Sharn, the City of Towers, to be the bard for their adventuring group.  Unfortunately the fins to feet magic does not include a summon pants spell in it.  And how do you convince a mermaid to wear an article of clothing that no other mermaid ever needs to wear?

Walking around town with no pants, however, proved to be a boon in disguise.  (Boon as in a good thing, not short for baboon.  That would be another tangent entirely, a baboon in disguise.)

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The owner of the Broken Anvil Inn, where the adventuring team was living, asked the mermaid to go on stage for a song.  She started to sing a seriously sorcery-sort of song… while not wearing pants, and became an overnight sensation in Sharn.  She helped his business so much that he offered the adventuring party a place to park their carcass permanently.  So now, if you go to the Broken Anvil Inn in Sharn, it is pretty likely the entertainment will be the Princess Anduriel, mermaid bard, singing and playing the harp.  And she still won’t be wearing any pants.  The crowd loves her for it.

So it should be obvious to you now the kind of Dungeon Master I truly am.  And it will also help to explain why my kids are totally mortified by the idea of me dungeon-mastering for their friends.  “But, Dad!  We have to be able to show our faces in school Monday morning you know!”

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May 20, 2017 · 10:47 pm

The Siege at Castle Evernight

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I believe I gave you fair warning that I would be telling the story of how, in our family D & D game, we conquered a castle that was occupied by the forces of evil.  Well, this is it.  It happened in the castle I described as an adventure setting last week.

The heroes, led by the halfling Gandy Rumspot (number two son’s character) and Mira the Kalashtar (daughter the Princess’s character) were asked by the Kingdom of Breland to investigate what happened to their ally, the Duke of Passage, Dane Evernight, in the Kingdom of Aundair.

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So they loaded up their trusty airship and flew to Passage.  Where they immediately learned of two mysterious boys made completely of stone and, yet, still living.

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They found the two in the city square north of the castle.

Druealia the wizardess; You two boys are golems?  Living statues?

Angel statue;  We weren’t before Dr. Zorgo took us into the lab.  We were castle pages to the Duke of Passage.

Gandy the rogue;  He changed you?  Who is this Dr. Zorgo?

Faun statue; Zorgo was the Duke’s court physician.  When we woke up in the castle, everybody had been turned into some sort of golem.  Stone golems, rag golems, animated statues… even the Duke himself.  None of us remember much about our lives before our minds were put in these new bodies.

Mira the Kalashtar; We have to get inside the castle and put things right!

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So, the question became, “How do we get into the castle without this Doctor Zorgo finding out and turning us into golems too?”

The answer came from a visiting professor from Morgrave University in Sharn.  Professor Hootigan was a sentient giant owl.  Not only could he warn them about the dangers of facing a mindflayer, a psionic monster who can read your thoughts and attack your mind, which Zorgo actually was, but he could fly the two lightest members of the adventuring party up to the summit of the castle, bypassing all the many traps and defenses that Zorgo had most likely laid.  And it didn’t hurt that both Hootigan and Mira were psionically able to protect the group from Zorgo’s mind attacks.

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So up they went.  Hootigan’s flying skill roll was high enough to not only get them inside, but get them in quietly enough not to awaken the sleeping stone gargoyles who guarded the heights.

They were protected from Dr. Zorgo’s routine mind probes of the castle by Mira’s mind-shielding powers.

Once they were past Zorgo’s lab, they soon discovered two different things.  Zorgo hadn’t yet changed the Duke’s daughter, Sien, into a golem yet.  She was still imprisoned in the castle’s dark pit, called an “oubliette”.

They also discovered that fighting golems was extremely difficult.  They discovered this in a fight with three golems they dubbed Moe, Curly, and Larry for some mysterious reason.

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After a very frustrating slap-fight in which they discovered that you can’t kill or wound a rag golem with weapons, they finally won the day when they discovered all they had to do was stop the Larry golem from playing “Pop Goes the Weasel” on his fiddle.  That took away their will to fight.  And they were even helpful as former faithful servants of the Duke.  They revealed that all the golems in the castle were controlled by one golem-control wand wielded by Dr. Zorgo himself.

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First they sneaked down to the oubliette and rescued Duchess Sien.  Then they had to steal back her magical armor and swords.  Many more golem guards and gargoyles were in the way of achieving their goals, but they used a bit of trickery to turn the odds in their favor.

They tricked Major Jak Pumpkinhead into thinking that the castle was being assaulted from the front.  When all the castle defenders rushed to the front towers, Gandy closed the inner gates on them, locking them all inside their very own defensive positions.

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Finally they confronted Dr.  Zorgo himself.  This time Mira’s defensive mind shields were not so successful.  Zorgo incapacitated Sien Evernight and Gandy Rumspot with mind attacks because they did not have their own psionic defenses (and because Mira rolled a 4 when she needed at least a 10 on the 20-sided dice).  Dr. Zorgo set the golden golem that had once been Duke Dane Evernight on a course to killing Mira.  At the last possible moment, Mira threw her magic dagger at Zorgo’s golem wand, rolled an 18, and destroyed it.   The gold golem, realizing he was now free, exacted his revenge.  He grabbed Dr. Zorgo and plunged off the balcony of the castle’s summit with him to a jarring destruction at the bottom of the 300-foot tower and cliff.

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It was a mostly “happy ever after” event.  The player characters now owned a castle, provided that Fate agreed to marry Duchess Sien and become the new Duke of Passage.

The numerous golem servants, having nowhere else to go, and no longer being human, elf, dwarf, or whatever they had been previously, stayed on to be castle servants.  Duke Evernight’s golden head was retrieved from the bottom of the cliff and, still able to talk, was to be the useful adviser of the new Duke.

That is pretty much typical of our D & D adventures.  Full of slapstick humor and mindless destruction, it was a whee of a time that made us laugh and enjoy time spent together playing weird imagination games with various toys, props, and dice.

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May 13, 2017 · 7:32 pm

What Happens at the Castle, Stays at the Castle

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Part of being a dungeon master is the responsibility for creating the dungeon.  Now I do intend to fully explain the events of the siege of Castle Evernight in a future Saturday D&D post, but today I want to show you my dungeon setting, the Keep of the Duke of Passage, Dane Evernight.  This is me thinking like an insane architect to build a tall, spindly castle that no real-life king or duke would ever try to live in.  But insane as it was, it had to be drawn to scale and the inner workings had to be mapped out on grid paper where every little square represented a space of 5 feet by 5 feet.

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Level one shows the areas you would enter coming in through the front gate.  Colored-in areas represent the solid stone from which this castle is built as well as the rock spire it was precariously perched upon.   The usual dungeon-master map symbols apply.  The little empty rectangle thingy blocking passageways and interrupting walls is to be interpreted as a door.  You can also see that to visit on horseback requires your trusty steed to be able to climb stairs.  So, unless you have a verily dexterous and unusual horse, you should probably ride in griffin-back or dragon-back.

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Moving to Level 2 brings you to where the Duke’s Great Hall would receive you as a visitor.  There are also places you would like to get to, especially if you are a teenage boy, like the harem and the bathing pool attached to the harem, and maybe the Magic Lab, but you will most likely not be allowed into those places.  But you see the dark spots in the walls?  Those are the garderobes.  You probably will be allowed access there, because, when you gotta go, you gotta go, and that is the proper place to go.  Medieval castles have primitive plumbing.

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Level 3 is the level I would most want to see if I were touring this place myself.  Not only is it the place that has the library in it, but it houses the limner’s studio, and the limner is the resident painter, picture-maker, and white-washer of fences and garderobes.

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Level 4 contains the “Party Central” places that every highly social and only mildly psychotic nobleman seeks to spend his schmooze time.  There’s a ballroom for dancing, a solarium for getting sunburn when you drink too much wizard’s ale and dance naked in the sunshine for too long, and a hall of mirrors for admiring the way the sunburn makes your behind glow bright red.

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Level 5 is getting up to the top of the towers.  In a vertical dungeon like this one, this should be nearing the adventure climax.  That was not how it happened, however.  I will tell you more about that in another post.  This is where the belfry bats and the Duke’s treasures are stored.

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By the time you reach the Summit of the Keep, you are beginning to think that something is seriously and morbidly wrong with this Castle.  This is where you will find the Evil Doctor Zorgo and the animated remains of Duke Dane Evernight.   And golem labs next to sarcophagus rooms?  Something has gone terribly wrong here.   But don’t have nightmares about it, or anything.  Rest assured that Gandy Rumspot and Mira the Kalashtar have already solved this problem or I wouldn’t be telling you about it.  Dungeon masters, at least the good ones, never reveal a secret before the dice are rolled.

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May 6, 2017 · 8:09 pm

More NPC Nonsense

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A view of the D & D table in my library.

I believe I warned you last Saturday that I had a lot more stupid stuff to share about Non-Player Characters in D & D.  I probably let it slip that I really like playing all the weird parts and the monsters about to be slaughtered.  I intend to share more of those strange characters today, so you can get a real sense of why my D & D games get so out of control and my children are turning into sword-wielding sociopaths.

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Barkley is not exactly the family dog.  He’s a gnoll.  That means he’s a monstrous hyena-man who would be inclined to hate and eat humans were he not raised from puppyhood to gnollhood by a beautiful female elf cleric.  He now hates the gnolls (and probably eats them) because in the first D & D adventure, his gnoll brothers tried to kill and eat his beloved elf mother.  He traveled with the Player characters for about three adventures.  And though they treated him like a dog, they came to rely on him in several tough battles.  He proved his dog-like loyalty and learned some critical spy skills from them, so he became a Dark Lantern (a secret agent for the kingdom of Breland) and began a life of hunting and killing evil gnolls.

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Mysterious Mara was one of the few civilian survivors when the weretigers attacked the lightning rail train with the player characters aboard it.  She tagged along because she would not have survived otherwise.  She has never revealed her true identity, and it’s a real mind-blower related to the royal court of Aundair, but the player characters have been too busy with other things to look into the mystery.  In fact, she is what the D & D manuals call an “adventure hook” because following up on her essential mysteriousness would’ve led them into the middle of a kingdom-crashing conflict.  In the meantime, they have been feeding her, teaching her to make use of her natural acrobatic skills, and generally befriending her, not realizing she is the reason so many enemies of Aundair have been tracking and attacking them.

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Caitian Redfurr is a shifter, one of those half-men with the abilities of a cheetah, able to run like a rocket and use speed to best her foes.  She has been a part of the campaign since just after Barkley joined.  Her son, Night Sky, is the son of a former Dark Lantern leader whose ghostly presence now inhabits Fate’s head.  She has used her skills with a sword, and her skills with a bow, and her skills with Talaen Kara, the intelligent double-bladed weapon, to save their fat from goblin cookfires on numerous occasions.  The players are fond of her and trust her as basically an added member of the family.

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Finally for this Saturday, I mentioned Turkoman last week.  He is what is called a “patron” in D & D NPC-terms.  He’s the man with the expertise when a beloved character is cursed with frogs hopping out of their ears or is turned completely to stone by a gorgon’s kiss.  He also provides necessary magic items, spells, enchantments, and critical advice that can help bring an adventure to a conclusion.  When needed, he can even lend a hand in the actual adventure, giving the characters a chance to overcome difficult odds and find adventures that they would not otherwise have access to.

So, once again I have passed my word limit and must draw to a close with so much more to tell.  Even if you are bored stiff by D & D nerd-ism, I intend to inflict more upon you in the future.  So be warned, be wary, and watch out for curses that make frogs hop out of your ears.

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