Other notable fauna in the Forest of Fog

I started off the last post with just an idea of "Desert hyacinth monster" and it grew from there. Aaaand then I kind of went overboard with the monster description; nobody needs umpteen paragraphs on a single gimmick plant. So here's some more information on the Forest of Fog for anyone who's interested.

Denizens of the Forest of Fog

The first thing to remember is that there are no animals. Most everything that tries to kill you is going to be a plant, because the plants eat everything else.

There are the hyacinths of course. But there are some others. These are just samples; the Mad Elven King was really, really into horticulture.

Shattergrass
More of a trap than a monster, shattergrass is a delicate, transparent green grass that almost looks to be made from spun glass. From a distance, it looks normal. It grows in patches, usually in gaps in the trees (which it sometimes causes). In the dim light of the forest, it can be hard to tell from regular grass - not that there's much of either.

When disturbed by anything stronger than a gentle wind, shattergrass breaks into thousands of razor-sharp shards, like really thin slivers of broken glass. Basically, moving through a patch of shattergrass is going to cost you 1d6 hp and possibly shred your footgear or leggings.

Weeping bromeliads
Like their more mundane cousins, these live on the branches of trees. Unlike their more mundane cousins, they hijack trees.

Trees with a large number of weeping bromeliads on them will have trunks and branches stained a deep red from the juices of the flowering plant. They will also move whenever anything larger than a cat walks by, because the bromeliads are territorial and don't like invaders.

Stats as a treant, only most of the trees are sessile, and have 1d10 + 3 bromeliads all over the branches. Trees with ten or more bromeliads may even uproot themselves temporarily to chase off the party.
(7HD version, treants go up to 12): HD 7; AC 2[17]; Atk 2 strikes (2d6); Move -- or 3; Save 9; ML 12; CL/XP 7/600

Hangman's moss
Here's another trap-monster. This looks a lot like like Spanish moss, except maybe even longer. It likes to form long curtains, hanging in the air and waving listlessly on any light breeze. Close inspection will show a small assortment of insects, birds, and an occasional bat caught in the curtain and dessicated.

Anyone touching a sufficient amount of the moss (a couple clumps is fine, but a curtain is dangerous) must save vs. poison or be paralyzed. (Elves are not immune.) Anyone so caught will be slowly dessicated, losing 1hp/round as the moss sucks out their bodily fluids. Losing 6 or more hit points in this fashion at a time may cost the character either 1 CON or 1 CHA at the discretion of the GM.

Suggestive forsythia
(The name sucks. Sorry. Feel free to suggest a better one; I'll probably adopt it.) These bushes were magically bred from their mundane cousins in an attempt by the Mad King to create "someone who finally understands me!" They are telepathic.

Many are just lonely and looking for someone to talk to. However, all are subtly (or not so subtly) mad - whether from the original process or the long isolation or just their alien natures, its hard to say. 

Only 1 in 6 elves can actually hold something like a conversation with them; everyone else just gets creepy crawly feelings in the back of the skull and an occasional burst of suggestive emotion - save vs charm or be given a two-word suggestion. (Anything obviously life-threatening or morally contrary requires no save.) The forsythia are also accomplished chromatophores, changing the colors of their flowers in various different patterns. This allows a few of them to cast spells via complicated, rapid color shifts. They favor charm effects and other emotion/perception altering spells.

Suggestive forsythia: HD 2; AC 7 (9 vs fire); Atk None; Move --; Save 17; ML 8; CL/XP 2/30
Can cast 1 2nd level and 2 1st level spells per day. Example spell list: Charm Person - Faerie Fire - Phantasmal Force

Warpwood
It's hard to say what these trees look like, because anyone wandering within 50ft of them falls prey to an hallucinatory effect that subtly changes the terrain, cloaking certain objects and giving the illusion of progress when in fact they are walking in circles. Once this is noticed ("Hey, I think we passed that tree a couple times before!") the illusion is broken - in game terms, give a secret save every fifteen minutes or so. The thing that makes these nasty is that other, more dangerous plants will often live nearby and be altered by the effect so as not to be noticed until too late. (If this happens, the effect is broken immediately - it doesn't stand up to direct contradiction.

Travellers who are aware of the danger and alert get a save against the effect when they first wander in. Roll once for the leader of a party.

The bark of the warpwood tree contains a powerful hallucinogen that when properly prepared and boiled into a tea gives visions. These are usually relaxing and pleasant, but can occasionally evoke powerful emotions - fear, loathing, lust, despair. There may even be a way for a shaman to use it for a vision-quest of sorts (like use of the Commune spell, with no level requirements, but only 1 question). Overuse, especially of potent concoctions, can lead to all kinds of nasty effects best left to the DM.

One 'dose' - a given tree will have enough easily reachable bark for 50 or so, if you want to carry a bunch of bark around - is probably worth 5gp to the right buyer.

That's great, but how do I use this?

Good question. Once the players figure out the gimmick of the place, the solution is simple: stay away from the plants. They mostly can't come after you.

The solution to this is to put them near/around something the players wan to investigate and so much brave the dangers of the plants to do so, or to place them in such a way that the players don't know until it's too late that they're wandering into danger. (Warpwood is an example way to do this latter one, but if you use 'it's a mind-screwy tree!' too often, your players will probably get angry.)

Concrete examples, as well as notable areas of the Forest of Fog and random encounters should be forthcoming shortly, like in the next post.

The Hyacinths of the Mad King Undumiel

Once upon a time, in what is now the Forest of Fog (so called by the natives, who shun it and force exiles into it), there flourished an elven city. To call it a city is something of a misnomer: elves rarely live in communities larger than 300. The Forest of Fog is the remnant of that city.

Elves prefer to carefully sculpt their chosen environments (usually forests, but sometimes mountain valleys, river plains, prarie, etc.) to provide the comforts of civilized living while still appearing to be 'in harmony with Nature' by elven standards. One of the things this means is that elven settlements tend to decay quickly once the Elves move on.

 The Forest of Fog is roughly three miles by three miles, circular in shape. It looms over the surroundings on a plateau 200 feet up. This is the traditional boundary among those tribes who use it for exile. The guilty party is force to climb up at spear-point (there are plenty of easy ways up and down from the plateau for even a mediocre climber, but you'd have to leave ponies behind). Sometimes the climber chooses the spears, for legend has it that no one ever returns from the Forest of Fog.

But foggy

It is called the Forest of Fog because it is continually covered in a cloudbank

The first thing you will notice upon entering the Forest of Fog is that it is warmer than the surrounding land. It never snows here; the fog's warmth melts all snow before it hits the ground. The second thing you will notice upon entering the Forest of Fog is that there is no animal life. No birds. No squirrels. You can look, but you won't find any deer, or wolves, or anything like that. Even bugs keep a low profile and are hard to find. The reason for this is the hyacinths.

A fictional example, placed in a desert to confuse onlookers. Note the lack of leaves.

 If you travel into the forest instead of staying near the cliff edge, you will eventually see the reason for the fog and the lack of animals: a hyacinth, sticking out of the bark of one of the trees. If it's large enough, it will try to kill you.

 Hyacinths in the Forest of Fog

The hyacinths in the forest of Fog were created by the mad sorcerer-elfking Undumiel in the search for the perfect plant. During the cataclysm that ended elven civilization here, the nursery was broken open, and they have since spread through the forest.

These plants are shaped like multiple small flowers in various states of opening, ranging from the size of a human hand up to the size of a fir tree. They attach themselves to trees, rotting logs, the ground - any stable non-rocky surface will do.

When a non-elf first sees a hyacinth roughly the size of a dog or larger (smaller hyacinths are not yet mature), he must make a save vs charm or approach the plant. This effect is completely mundane; the hyacinth is the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. Beautiful enough to make an angel cry. Beautiful enough to take your breath away. You simply must stop and admire it. Those who have seen the hyacinth try to eat someone, made the save, or seen truly sublime beauty before (e.g. glimpsed Aphrodite in her bower) are immune. It's still beautiful beyond description, but you don't have to approach.

Elves are immune because they're jaded assholes who have seen it all before and it's, "just a flower, nothing to compare to what my grandmother grows in her window box at home." (But with more pretentious language.)

Each hyacinth has a profusion of flowers. These are its digestive organs. The ones at the top are usually closed because bugs are stupid and easy to catch. The ones at the bottom are often open. If a flower is open, and you're the right size, it will attack when you get within range - usually about 20ft for a human.

A tendril will emerge from the flower and seek to rapidly twine around you. The tendril bears a contact euphoric - save vs. poison each round if it hits or be paralyzed in ecstasy. The plant will then attempt to drag you toward the flower that houses the tendril and engulf you at a rate of 5ft/round. A tendril has STR 12 and 3 hit points, but can be hurt only by cutting weapons. Incidentally, this also makes the plant immune to arrow or sling fire - tendrils from the smaller flowers dart out and catch the projectiles to ingest them, only to spit them out a few moments later.

Elves are immune, because they've felt it all before and aren't that impressed.

Once engulfed in a flower, you take 1d6/round until dead, and will dissolve over several days. By accounts of survivors (or the ghosts of former victims) it feels like being in the womb. You don't even notice as your flesh sloughs away; all your cares and concerns are dissolved with it.

They look so happy right before they die

A combined STR of 30 is required to pry someone out of a bud in 3 rounds. A combined score of 40 will drop that to 2 rounds; a combined score of 50 will drop that to 1 round.

A hyacinth uses water pressure gradients to move, and each one has a small mass of water bladders buried shallowly into whatever surface they are attached to. Since pressure gradients are required, when moving the plant lets off a constant trickle of escaping water vapor, which is the cause of the fog. This means that a hyacinth will generally only be able to move for 1d12+7 rounds before it depletes its water supply and goes still.

Once the plant has digested its victim, it will eject any inedible bits (over-large bones, metals, woods or cloth of plant material), meaning that plants old enough to digest people will probably have a small cache of treasure scattered on the nearby ground.

The pollen of the hyacinth is a strong euphoric. It loses a little of its potency when taken out of the flower, but kept in an air-tight bottle can be shelved almost indefinitely. It could probably sell for around 25gp/oz to the right buyer; a plant will have a number of ounces of pollen equal to its hit dice. One ounce contains 20 doses. (Pollen is light.)

Hyacinth of the Forest of Fog

This is an example plant capable of engulfing a human. At any time it will have 1d6 open blossoms of the appropriate size.

HD 4 AC 8 ATK no damage, save v. poison or be paralyzed MV -- Save 14 ML 12 CL/XP 5/240 Special Engulf for 1d6/round; also, immune to sleep, charm, etc because it's a plant.

Edited to add: made things a little clearer above; specifically, the plant can't simply be shot from a distance with non-magical projectiles, and it requires a to-hit roll to touch a victim. The tendril never misses, but it can't poison a leather breastplate.

You can't have a post about carnivorous plants without Audrey.

Session recap 5

This is taken largely from player-written session notes. With any luck I'll be able to do that in the future.

Take heed, and read in awe, the deeds of our intrepid company.

During the last session, our intrepid adventurers regrouped back at the Keep before venturing out once again to thin out the menace lurking in the Caves of Chaos. While in town, they were joined by the large, strapping paladin Borios (and is slightly less-impressive squire, Lars), sent by his order to help root out and end the threat of the undead. Hearing of the Caves of Chaos, Borios was certain that he would be able to lend his sword to good purpose.

Borios was honestly-gotten; after Rori died, the player rolled his stats and got a natural 18 for charisma. Lars was his second character. I recommended he have one in case Borios wouldn't be able to join the party on certain adventures, due to his quest. 

 

Borios is dedicated to rooting out undead in the eastern marches. He's joining the party because his priest told him there have been rumours of occult worship and possibly necromancy at the Caves of Chaos.

 

Unfortunately the players didn't really pick up on that. Oh well.

Prior to departure, the adventurers shared meat and mead at the tavern, and learned of the tragic destruction of a merchant caravan at the hands of a gang of orcs and a hulking, monstrous ogre. The merchant was the sole survivor. Surely there was some connection to the increased activity at the caves. While at the tavern the heroes welcomed into their company also a young noble of the house Steelclan, a noted family of Dwarven metalsmiths. He spoke loudly, brashly, and drunkenly of his deeds, and since the company of heroes sometimes does the same, they brought him in.

After recruiting these new heroes to their cause, the intrepid company set out once again for the caves to continue their ill-advised spelunking, mostly due to poverty. First they stumbled upon a cave long and dank, like a corridor before a great hall, piled high with skulls and bones of animals, men, and elves. The cave ended in a door, massive, wooden, and immovable, with a sign crudely scratched out reading "We'd love to have you for dinner." Since none of the heroes were particularly hungry, and since none of the skeletons stood up, wielded rusty implements, and proclaimed fealty to their necromantic master, Borios and the others thought it best to move on.

 

This was the hobgoblin cave, in case you didn't get that from the description. The players spent a good amount of time discussing whether or not they should break down the door after listening and hearing nothing and checking out the skulls to see if there was anything valuable or informative. Borios' player, who's fairly unassertive when directly asked questions but participates well in the discussions, brought up that there are other caves, and this one seems both difficult and dangerous. So they decided to go down the hill to another cave.

 

I really like my players.

In the next cave, they stumbled upon a massive ogre, who, quickly outwitted by our elven mage Ellarion, was soon fast and quite magically asleep. Juan Pendleton, helpful as always, made sure he didn't wake up. He then shot a mattress he thought was a bear, making certain everyone knew his predilection for wanton violence was still strong.

 

The book is fairly clear: from a distance the ogre's mattress of bearskin and leaves looks like a sleeping bear. Nobody got close enough to tell the difference until after Juan shot it and the arrow just sunk in.

This was the ogre who was involved in the assault on the merchant caravan, along with the goblins who live next door.

 

The encounter with the ogre was actually quite amusing: he heard people rooting around in his other cave and came out for a look. He was suspicious, but didn't immediately attack, partly due to his mercenary inclinations and partly due to the fact that I rolled an effective 10 on his reaction roll. So Ellarion asked if he'd like to hear a song.

 

Sleep is a very powerful spell indeed.

Within the cave, our heroes discovered the fresh remains of a retinue of men and elves, surely the merchants overtaken on the road. A tragic end to good folk, though they were certainly not the only to fall victim to such a gruesome fate. The ogre kept a vast store of treasure. Coins silver and gold by the sackful, a mammoth wheel of good, hard cheese, and a cask of fine brandy, for which Pious Inebrius most certainly did not trip over the others to claim. Nestled near (or, rather, firmly beneath) the remains of the poor souls who fell victim to the ogre were also a magic scroll and several elegant arrows. Ellarion claimed these, being the only one who knows anything about runes or the proper way to use a bow.

While on the road, the intrepid company was overtaken by a pack of orcs, and Borios, fluent in orc, invited them to take the hard cheese the company found, and refrain from trying to kill our heros. The leader of that filthy band graciously accepted, and left under the slightly misguided notion that the cheese was somehow made from ogre milk.

This was a random encounter on my table for the wilderness around the Keep. The players saw the orcs first, but given they were laden down with treasure and without a sleep spell, they felt it was best to parley. These are orcs from tribe B, though the players haven't taken the time to figure that out. Fortunately for them, with the cheese in the hands of an underling the boss orc of this little raiding party agreed to say he never saw the party if they left each other alone.

Shortly after setting camp, along came a band of merchants, the chiefest of which was rather fussy, rotund, and not particularly friendly. They also being bound for the Keep. The two parties rested separately, and arrived within a short span of one another the following morning.

The dice were hot for random encounters.

Upon returning triumphantly to the Keep, our heroes conducted themselves in a properly heroic fashion. They deposited their hard-earned monetary spoils at the local bank, learning to their dismay that many of the coins were counterfeit hunks of lead in gold leaf. With the remaining coin, they reserved rooms at the local inn. Borios spoke with Theodoric, who commended him for his service, and offered lodging to Borios and Lars both (and free stabling for Borios' monstrously large steed). He encouraged Borios to continue to focus his efforts on the cave.

 

There was some talk about not turning in the coins and trying to pass them as currency around the keep rather than taking the value of the gold. The banker pointed out as gently as he could that he already knew about these coins, and would be very, very upset if they showed up in circulation.

 

Theodoric is the curate of the church in the Keep.

 

The party also decided to rent one of the Keep's apartments for six months with some of their recent windfall. I ruled this would mean that staying in town for a week would cost 2 gold each, instead of 10, meaning it would pay itself off quickly. Minus incidental expenses, of course. 

Ellarion learned from the clerics that the scroll is indeed a divine one and promised to give it to Pious, who should be able to make good use of it provided he's sober enough.

Celebrating, as always, at the tavern, our intrepid company continued to gain in popularity with the locals. They wooed away from the merchant his men-at-arms, John and Teddy, who offered a step discount for their services and promised to recruit their comrades, Otus, Langard, Sigurd, and Helga, to the cause of adventure. Pious soothed the ego of the preening merchant, Edward, and promised to give him first pick of any "liberated" dry goods the company may find amongst the caves. Edward offered an 80% purchase price, far to generous. Pious and Edward then shared in the holy rite of most-certainly-not-Bacchus, and subsequently passed out.

 

Edward is the same merchant they met on the road, and out from under whom they rented the last apartment at the Keep. Originally he was seethingly upset that the party had done so, but Pious was so persuasive that that's smoothed over now. It helps that he's also a worshipper of Bacchus, so he considers Father Pious as one of his own.

 

 Just as a side note, Langard is actually an old veteran hireling of the Caves of Chaos: he was hired by the first group I ever ran this module for. As such, he knows a thing or two about the caves.

 

There were quite a few hijinks in town with Pious getting very drunk and sharing coin and brandy all over the place, not to be outdone by Heinrich or Juan. This was the session I changed the house rules for XP: they had to spend their gold if they wanted to earn anything from it. The results were both amusing and entertaining. 

Where will the adventure take our heroes next? To the mysterious ruins to the south, setting up an expedition to explore and collect artifacts of immense and arcane power? To the town of Hommlet, to combat the growing threat of the Temple of Elemental Evil and its pernicious influence on an otherwise peaceful village? Or will they once again brave the Caves of Chaos, facing down evils both ancient and contemporary, fighting for the honor of their fallen brethren? The world is in need of their efforts, which they will happily lend in full force. After, of course, they attend Mass.

 

After discussion, the players decided to stick to the Caves of Chaos. There was a good bit of interest in the ruins to the south (which happen to be the Caverns of Thracia), but they finally decided against it after tabulating the costs: they'd have to either set up a nearby base-camp and pay their day-laborers and men-at-arms to staff it, or risk walking both ways through the swamp and jungle each time they wanted to find the place again.

House rules: Other people's house rules

I'm hoping this is the start of a small series of posts about house rules I use. Some I made up, some I snatched from other places. In posting about them, I'm not just going to re-hash what the rule is, but also give some mild analysis on how it affects the game, how it actually plays out, and so forth.

Without further adieu:

Other People's House Rules

Every one of these is something someone else came up with originally.


Ritual magic

Synopsis: This house rule comes from Semper Initiativus Unum. The basic idea is that magic users and spell casters can cast some spells outside of combat without preparation if they pay gold and take a large amount of time.

Purpose:  This gives magic users and clerics a deal more flexibility. The idea is to get their utility spells into circulation, since (especially at lower levels) caster slots are limited, and they tend to go for things that are likely to be useful in combat. Specifically, the rule is structured to make it progressively less desirable to not prepare higher-level utility spells if you want to use them.

Experience: Obviously this hasn't seen a lot of use in my campaign, but it has seen some. We've been very short on magic-users in general, but our elf has done this once with detect magic. Both I and his player appreciated the ability to do so, even if it didn't net him anything in the instance.

Verdict: Cautiously optimistic


XP for gold spent

Synopsis: This is an old one. The basic idea is that PCs earn experience not for simply bringing treasure back to civilization, but for spending it in actions that don't directly benefit them as adventurers. The Mule Abides has a pretty good writeup that ties it to The First Fantasy Campaign.

Purpose: This primarily accomplishes two things. One is splitting the PCs' resources and forcing them to make decisions about what to spend coin on, since buying e.g. armor doesn't count for xp.The other is provide some verisimilitude for xp gain.

Experience: I don't give a fig for the verisimilitude argument, but I do like forcing decisions on the players about what to do with their loot. Not only does it allow me to give them more loot, but it also allows me to restrict how much coin can be spent on adventuring supplies without the players having no recourse but to stockpile coin. Poor adventurers are good adventurers, after all. Further, there's another side effect: it increases player 'buy-in' for the world as they interact with it in ways different from just treating it like a backdrop for the dungeon. Our best session to date was mostly spent roleplaying with NPCs and finding ways to dump coin on them.

Verdict: I highly recommend this house rule precisely because it broadens the players' conception and care about the world. I'm having a lot of fun and the players are having a lot of fun.

Bandaging

Synopsis: This one's simple: if a person is down between 0 and 2 hp inclusive, you can spend a turn to bandage them up. This returns 1 HP, and can only be done once until they heal. Further, characters regain 1 HP per full day of rest.

Purpose: This provides some very limited low-level healing, and it reinforces the idea to the players that they're hurt and should consider turning back - or pushing on, but in the knowledge that they're taking a huge risk. You'd think that the numbers on the sheet would do that for you, but it's nice to have another indicator. Plus it's another chance for a trade-off: do the players want to patch up their buddies, restoring 1 HP but risking the chance of a wandering monster?

Experience: The players like it, and it doesn't seem to significantly cut into the mortality of the game; a lot of PCs and NPCs have still died. It's easy to keep track of, too - you can just do it in your head. Plus, it gives me flavor in describing hurt people and how they feel. I'm in favor.

Not dead at 0 HP

Synopsis: My implementation of this common rule is as follows: at 0 HP you're unconscious, at below 0 you're dead. However, if you go below 0 HP, and someone can bring you back to 0 or above before the round is over, you might live.

Purpose: It puts a small wedge of 'not okay' betweeen D&D's much-discussed 'you're fine' and 'you're dead' without making that wedge large enough to significantly affect vitality. It also gives the players some hope when a beloved NPC or PC goes down.

Experience: Bringing someone back up from negative numbers is a very difficult task, since most spells take the full round to come into effect, which means you basically have to anticipate when someone is going to need healing. However, the 0 HP bit has come up a decent bit more often, and it has been fun for all concerned because of the relief from surviving such a near brush - which the players actually feel is very near, since if the dice had rolled 1 higher, their characters would be dead. It has also added fun in some instances where the PCs weren't sure if someone was dead or merely unconscious and bleeding out. I'm in favor.

XP for gold hoarded

Synopsis: For whatever reason you care to justify, the PCs have to sacrifice their gold for XP without doing anything else with it. This is different from XP for gold spent above because it's not just spending gold on things that 'don't matter' - it's not spending the gold at all until they get enough to level up and make a trip to one of these sacrificial spots

Purpose: This was meant to provide an in-game excuse for the existence of class levels, because I think justifying such things inside the game is cool. It was also meant to put the squeeze on treasure, forcing the PCs to make a decision as to whether to spend their hard-earned gold on adventuring advantages or XP.

Experience: In reality, it meant that the gold either sat there being useless like a millstone around the players' necks, or much more likely they dipped into it too far and too fast, meaning they never accumulated appreciable XP-substitute. Either way, they got no experience whatsoever, so it felt to me and to them that they were stagnant. I really don't recommend this.

Alternative: I still have places I call 'navels of the world' in my game where a person goes to suffer strange and weird rituals and be granted class levels, but now I grant XP for gold spent, as above, and the rituals themselves are a mere tax - the square of your current level * 100 gp to advance.


All in all I'm happy with the house rules I'm using. There are plenty more I have that, so far as I know, aren't someone else's invention. There are probably others that are, but are so central to the usual play for the game that I just don't see or remember them as house rules.

Alternatives to the Random Encounter Clock

One of, if not the chief function of random encounters is to force the players to make decisions about what to do and what to leave alone. This is usually expressed as a penalty for taking more time or extraneous actions, and it usually is, since random encounter rolling is usually tied to time spent - i.e., actions taken.

Unfortunately, in my experience of GURPS this pretty much completely breaks down. Further, even in systems where it usually works, there are downsides. Perhaps the encounters are too dangerous, especially in a densely-inhabited dungeon where they would bring others. If handled poorly they can become a joke or a severe annoyance for the players. Sometimes they send the wrong message, or they simply aren't wanted in your dungeon.

Nevertheless the function of rewarding time and action economy is worthwhile to salvage. I originally thought of using random encounter tables along with faction diagrams to give reinforcements to the set-piece monsters, but the more I mulled this over, the less I liked the idea. One of the reasons random encounters work is because they give immediate consequences to the players. Generally, immediate consequences are better for informing behaviour than mediate. With the reinforcement idea, or any other scheme that puts off the results, players are more likely to shoot themselves in the collective foot. In the example given, they'd most likely keep doing whatever until the monster density became so great there was no feasible way to proceed, or until it maximized - and then there would be no further disincentive.

Then I had a breakthrough: why does a wandering monster system have to involve monsters at all? If the central point is to make the players economize their actions, that can be done without monsters as easily as with. Further, avoiding monsters makes it work for systems like GURPS as well, where the attrition due to combat is nowhere near as strong as it is in D&D.

To that end, I give you a few 'timers' I've been thinking over lately:

The Timed Dungeon

The essential feature here is that the dungeon itself has some integral timer which makes exploration progressively more dangerous or difficult. Some specific examples:

• The dungeon is flooding: every <interval> more and more of the dungeon is underwater. To do this you need to know the source, and the relative elevations of various rooms. I'd recommend giving rooms four states - dry, ankle-deep, chest-deep, over-your-head, completely-filled - and rate the source(s) by how many stages it can fill per interval. Generally I'd eyeball the map and flood downhill, with rooms getting to ankle depth before the water spills over to a lower place. Bonus points if you use some fluid other than water - I'm partial to mercury or poison gas.
• The Archmage is out: every turn roll a d6. Once you cumulatively roll 5 1's, he's come back. The party better skedaddle soon, because he's a 60th-level ubermage able to cast Elric's Flaming Haemerrhoids at will. This works well with archmages' towers, elder dragons' dens, demons' lairs, and generally anywhere you can stock a big nasty that the party knows would squish them flat in an outright fight. A variant has the bad guy already there, but temporarily neutralized - asleep, behind a failing barrier, whatever. Season dice and intervals to taste.
• The dungeon is unstable: maybe it's situated in the caldera of a live volcano, or in the rift between the astral and ethereal planes. Or maybe the entrance is an old mine shaft that's under serious stress. This has much the same mechanics as the archmage one above, but after a certain accumulation of rolls the entrance will be closed, or the dungeon will collapse, or whatever. A variant on this is the 'clockwork dungeon' - where the map changes every so often, making navigation difficult or impossible. Maybe the dungeon is a wizard's toy, or it's slipping through time, and staying too long will mean you have to deal with dinosaurs or barbarians where you expected your village to be.

The Timed Treasure

 Whereas above the dungeon itself was becoming undelvable over time, in these scenarios it's just becoming undesirable to do so, due to disappearing reward.

• Kingdom of the Sidhe: After a certain time passes, all the loot in or from the dungeon will lose all value. The adventurers had better retrieve and spend it beforehand! Keep a timer keyed to turns or hours or whatever. Whenever enough time passes, increment it by one. Don't forget to make sure the players know they need not only to acquire the loot, but get rid of it too! An elven favorite is turning leaves into gold, but fresh basilisk blood or psionic crystals that must be preserved by the local alchemist after being chiseled from the walls are also good ones.
• Explosive treasure: Do you really want to muck around when you have a backpack full of white phosphorous in kerosene? Make the treasure valuable but volatile. It doesn't have to be explosive; it might be an acid, or a powerful djinni bottled in a jar and yearning to get out, or carefully preserved bottles of essence of green slime. Every time the characters do something dangerous, it has a chance of backfiring.
• There goes the neighborhood: The denizens of the dungeon have decided for whatever reason to pack up and leave, bringing their stuff with them. Much like the coming of the archmage in reverse. Roll a d6. After 3 or so 1's, randomly or by fiat pick a faction; they exit the dungeon with all their treasure. To complicate matters, the PCs might be between them and the exit.
• Competition: The old standby; have another party racing the PCs through the dungeon. This takes a care and finesse which is outside my scope. I'd think at the very least you'd have structured tables and a general idea of how the NPCs will progress through the dungeon, but coming up with specifics for running this scenario is left as an exercise for the reader. An exercise he'll hopefully then publish on a blog, so I can steal his ideas.

All of these methods only work if the party knows what's going on. I can't stress that enough. Often this can be handled narratively either in the moment ("The dungeon appears to be flooding with a silvery liquid. Judging by its rate of flow, you'd expect this place to fill up fairly quickly - unless there are hidden depths you don't know about.") or beforehand. ("The old man insists that he heard strange rumblings over the last week and the Crypt of Sasura is on the verge of collapse after all these centuries, so you'd better hurry.") Still, that may not always be the case, and the players should always have at least a rough idea of how their time limits are being decided. If that's too 'gamist' or something for you, don't use these methods.

Maps of the area around the Keep

In the session reports I mentioned that the PCs commissioned maps of the area around the Caves of Chaos. One was an extremely local map, and the other a rather broad map showing things in roughly a four-day march, excepting to the west because that's where the Realm lies and therefore not interesting.

The first is just the local map with the numbers taken off, which I include here because someone else might find it useful.

Bet you can't tell where the numbers used to be

(Oh, also the Caves of the Unknown are missing, because Cedric the sage didn't know they existed.)

I really like this map from B2. It has some serious charm to it. I especially like the sudden interruption of 'standard' terrain features to show a stand of tamaracks in the swamp. I don't know why, but it shows a sort of quirky artistry to me that I find endearing. It helps bring the area alive - like this was a map actually drawn by one of the inhabitants.

One of the other things I wonder is whether the Keep is drawn to scale, and I think so. That would put it at somewhere between 100-200 yards in its longest dimension, closer to the former than the latter. It really is a pretty small place if you're treating it as a town. I'd estimate it very roughly as about the same size as Le Château de Rolle.

The other map is a sort of rough-and-ready thing I threw together in Hexographer in half an hour:

Things within a 4-day walk from the Keep

Those ruins to the south of the swamp are the Caverns of Thracia. I'm beginning to think the players will never go there, which makes me a little sad because everyone should get a chance to play in (and run) a Paul Jacquays module. However, they discussed it (in an upcoming play report) and realized they would either have to brave the swamp to and from the Keep, or set up a temporary base camp at the ruins (once they found them).

Most of the rest of the map is undetailed. I have rough ideas of what I want to put where (e.g., the cave in the moutains is an old dwarven stronghold, Limbick's Tower is the ancient abandoned tower of an Imperial archmage.) One thing I'm particularly excited by on this map is Old Isk, which is the ruins of an old Imperial trading city. I want to make it into a 'city dungeon', with a very small population living among the ruins of the old civilization - like Constantinople after the Crusades. I'm mulling over ideas for that, but it'll probably be a sort of psuedo-hexcrawl/pseudo-dungeon with a lot of random generation of buildings, treasures, and encounters.

Then if the players don't go there, I can plop it down in another campaign.

Paladins

 Scax, the player of Rori and new to the table, rolled an 18 for charisma last night for his new character. Naturally, the question came up of his playing a paladin.

I'm not sure whether or not I like paladins. Sure, the concept is fun - he's a questing Holy Knight, like Percival or Galahad or the Templars or the Hospitallers. But if we're honest, isn't that niche pretty well covered by the Cleric if you want godly powers, or the Fighter with appropriate background tweaks?

Still, with the exception of the monk (whom I find egregious) and the assassin (annoying), I'm not going to curtail my players' options. If they want a paladin, they can have a paladin. Really, I can't blame them; the role has a certain irreducible flavor.

According to S&W Complete, "Paladins will not work with characters other than those of Lawful alignment unless ordered to do so by a superior officer of the Paladin’s order, by a Lawful prince, or by the high priest  of a Lawful temple." I disagree.

First, such a restriction means one of two things in play: either it is a restriction on the rest of the players, and not the paladin, or the paladin will never be played. That's not fun. Second, it's not really how I see a godly crusader behaving.

So for my game, instead, Paladins have to have some specific goal which reflect why they're going adventuring. This can be pretty much anything that passes the sniff test, and is dependent on the creativity of the player. Some examples might include, "End the influence of the Cult of the Red Hand," "Pacify the Dagoland Marshes," "Root out and destroy the heresy of Pelasgos that is gripping temples in the hinterland," "Convert all the orcs from the worship of Tectonicus their heathen god," or whatever. Specificity is important, not only because it needs to be a restriction and a direction, but because it seems a great way to flesh out the world further. (Suddenly there's a Dagoland Marshes, or a heresy in the church, or a cult, or a general religion of orcs.)

A Paladin will not do anything that doesn't obviously and pretty directly further his goal. You want to go spelunking in those caverns you found last week? That's great. How exactly does that relate to erecting a shrine to Isel and teaching all the pagans in this land to worship Him? Well, that's what I'll be doing while you lot are off futzing around. For this reason, I recommend having a back-up character to play whenever the party wants to do something that doesn't align with the Paladin's goals.

Paladins do not, however, have any restrictions of association based on the class. If consorting with Chaotic people truly will further the goal of converting all of the elves to the Munificent Blood, then consorting with Chaotic people is what you will do.

If a paladin ever accomplishes his task, he chooses another. (Or, alternatively, he's retired, because frankly at that point you've come as close as possible to 'winning' D&D.)

Session recap 3 and 4

Late in the week of the party's convalescence, a new sage moved into town, taking residence in Father Jovian's old apartment. His name is Cedric, though they still haven't asked. His specialties are (major) old Imperial history and geography and (minor) monstrous humanoids. My rules for sages are sort of a vague nod to AD&D; sages generally have an area of major expertise and an area of minor expertise. In their major area, they can reliably answer all questions but the sort nobody would know, plus general related questions. In their minor area, sages can reliably answer questions any specialist might know the answer to, but nothing absolutely specific. Either way, it takes 100 gp and a week's time to answer questions that aren't merely general in nature, plus any costs of materials.

Once I'd explained the difference between going to a sage and just listening for rumours (more expensive, but the answer is guaranteed accurate, and if he doesn't know he'll refund your money) the players decided it would be a good idea to visit Cedric. They asked him for a couple maps of the local area; one just around the Keep, and another of the wilderness a few days beyond. He readily agreed, and they came to terms of 50 gp now, 50 gp on delivery if they're satisfied with the map. Swallowing his pride because Cedric is a travelling sage whose reputation has not yet shown itself around here, he agreed.

Meanwhile, the party has been getting a bit of a reputation as the Slayers of the Basilisk. The local townsfolk have been showing them respect, buying them drinks, and generally treating them like minor celebrities.

After their week of healing, they decided to head back out to the newly christened Basilisk Cave to see if they couldn't find out any more information or ferret out any more treasure. Since they knew the location, they could easily go back. (I didn't roll a 1, they didn't get lost.)

When they got there, they immediately noticed that the smell had changed - more musky, less acrid. Sending the elf to peek his head in, they discovered a bear had taken up residence and was currently napping. Considering the problem for a good long while of quiet back-and-forth outside the cave, they decided the smartest course was to Sleep the bear, then slit its throat. Further discussion led to spending a day smoking the bear meat and trying to salvage the pelt (that didn't go well).

Braving the cave again, they decided to retrace their steps to the basilisk room. There they found the statues of their erstwhile friends, as well as the unmolested corpse of the basilisk, still fairly fresh. Turns out basilisk is highly poisonous. Pablo had a stroke of genius, then: he jimmied off one of the lizard's scales. Pius quickly decided to help, and they managed to remove the rest after a short bit of bloody work.

Meanwhile the party bust down the rest of the doors uninterrupted, finding all the rooms to be much like the first two, with only the mummified lizard as the object of possible value. (It actually is worth ~100 GP to an apothecary for various medical preparations, but they still haven't asked anyone.)

The one room on the west wall was different. It looked more ornate, though in monkish fashion; it had a tapestry so old and rotted away it could not be discerned and crumbled into wet dust at the first touch on the north wall, and the old 'dresser' and 'bed' were inconspicuously carved with symbols of snakes and other reptilian figures. Then the elf noticed that the stone of the southern wall didn't quite meet the joint, and after a little inspection they found that it was a secret door designed to slide to one side.

Cue the search for the trigger, which took much longer than it should have because they searched everywhere it wasn't, including the northern wall (with its own secret door that they failed to find, concealing the as-yet unpillaged temple treasury). Eventually they found  press switch recessed under the lip of the bed, and the door slid back. They were unable to make sense of what was revealed: an old collapsed bed with what looked like an ancient elven mummy/skeleton on top of it. However, they did make sense of the torc it wore, and took that before leaving to explore further, neglecting to search and so not finding the box of silver handcuffs underneath the remains of the bed.

Pressing on through the bronze doors, they came to what was a dining hall, and the explanation of what became of this place. There was a hole in the ceiling, and under it was the remains of an old bronze cage. Seated at the long table were six extremely realistic statues of lizard men, albeit with some anatomical oddities - larger crania, finer fingers, and (though they didn't get close enough to see this) the suggestion of feathers.

Poking around the room they didn't find much of interest - all the cookware long since degraded, the sound of dripping water coming from the hole - but Elarian did check the doorway to the southwest. He heard snakes, lots of slithering snakes, and saw that the walkway ended in a jagged break-off not that far along. The party decided to avoid the 'snake-pit', thereby avoiding the one treasure I really hoped they'd find. Alas.

Instead they poked their way up through the ceiling, finding a natural cavern. Faced with a choice, they curved left, coming eventually to a widening cavern that something-or-other was using as a trash-heap. After poking around in the trash and getting freaked out when some of it moved, they discovered that a) it was covered with a sticky, tarry substance, and b) magic missile didn't make it stop moving.

Player of Pius: "Wait, did we just strike oil?" (No, no you didn't. You found an immature black pudding.)

Losing interest, they went further, heading straight instead of right at another fork. This is when they found a foul-smelling cavern and the source of the weeping and moaning that had been suffusing the whole place. The floor was covered with pools of green goop. And at the back of the cavern, a shambling pile of the stuff, whence the cries, reared up and started shuffling toward them. When a Sleep spell didn't put it down, they took the wise course and decided to bug out and back to town.

Personally, I'm proud of this encounter. The shambling pile of goop is actually a troll who years ago was exposed to green slime. It has been eating away at him ever since, but his natural regeneration has kept him from completely succumbing, though it is somewhat compromised now, as are his Hit Dice. He's quite insane as well from the pain. However, what he wants most of all is for it to stop, so as soon as someone thinks to use fire, he would gladly just sit down and burn to death. Perhaps not terribly original, but I like the combination.

Anyhow, back in town the players decided to wait for the completion of their map, taking odd jobs and living off the fame of being the basilisk slayers for a bit. In the meanwhile, Pablo and Elarian took the scales to the local leatherworker and had him make a pair of cloaks, for which there was just enough material because this was for an elf and a halfling.

When the maps were ready (a subject of a different post), they went to see Cedric and managed to avoid paying any more for his work by instead bargaining information and their incomplete map of the Caves of the Unknown. Cedric was ecstatic - it's not every day you make a brand new discovery - and now considers the party his friends. Which doesn't mean he'll charge them less, but it does mean he likes them and is willing to put their commissions first - excepting of course the Lord of the Keep, by whom he hopes to be kept on retainer.

Armed with their new maps, the PCs set out for the Caves of Chaos. Amusingly, they came at them backward, which is to say through the woods from the direction of the Caves of the Unknown rather than from the road as Gary intended. Because of this, the kobolds hiding in the tree don't see them, and they naturally decide to check out the first cave mouth:

 

 

 

This one right here. The one with the gnolls.

They poke their heads in and come quickly upon the gnoll guard picket. The gnolls don't immediately attack, because they want to know what these strange people want in their cave. However, two of them do go off to rouse the others, just in case. Meanwhile the party attempts to communicate once it becomes clear this isn't necessarily a fight, but it turns out none of them speak Gnollish. (This is actually a question in play; I'm using a house rule to determine language selection.) Then the elf opens his mouth to bring attention to himself, having previously been in the back.

Gnolls hate elves with a passion. So they open fire. Gim is seriously injured, but not dead. (0 hp) The party rushes the gnolls, who somehow manage to not only hold off these superior numbers but actually inflict wounds and strike down Pablo when he takes a swing at one of their shins. Morale broken, the party runs, picking up Gim but leaving Pablo's body behind. That's fine; gnolls love halflings!

After patching Gim up enough so he can walk, the party returns to town to lick their wounds and plan. They buy lots of oil, some buckets, and some rope. They also consult Cedric.

It turns out that gnolls hate and fear uncontrolled fire. Also, they have very sensitive noses with a keen sense of smell. Which means, one of the players realizes, that one way to disable them would be to muck with their sense of smell - much like how if you want to get bloodhounds off your trail, you spread cayenne pepper along the ground. The party promptly thanks Cedric and goes off to buy as much powered horseradish as they can get their greedy mits on.

An aside: the party's Magic User, Jib, is a halfling with strange ideas. Rather than considering what he does magic, he calls it 'vougence' and carries around a large, complicated, tubular piece of machinery he calls the Elliptotron. It is with this that he casts Magic Missile.

The horseradish thus acquired, it is decided, can be stuffed down the barrel of the Elliptotron and, if Jib prepares Magic Missile that day, he can shoot it out one 'dose' at a time. Or, if he actually casts Magic Missile, it will all come out in a sort of Poor Man's Dust of Sneezing and Choking. He has enough for six such 'doses'.

Also in town they run across Juan, Pablo's brother who got a letter from his dear sibling and came out to help him make his fortune. Alas, too late, but he has the family resemblance.

Back to the gnoll cave at slightly after dawn, the party sets up their trap. First, they saturate the ground outside the cave with oil. Jib, Elarian and Pius hide above the cave. Gim and Rori, a new fighter from a new player that night, flank the cave to take care of any gnolls who come out. The plan is for Juan to run in, insult the gnolls so they run after him, and then dash back out. When the gnolls are outside the cave, those above will drop buckets of oil on them, and then light it on fire.

The plan works fairly well, except that one of the gnolls is missed by his bucket. Regardless, they burn nicely. However, as before two of the gnolls had gone further into the cave to bring out reinforcements. We ended up with an archery battle across the burning pit, which was something of a standoff because, while the gnolls had more HP, they only had one bow.

Eventually it became clear to the party that the rest of the gnolls had no intention of coming out and facing the fire, which was dying down at that point anyway. Plucking up their courage, Gim, Jib, Elarian, and Rori rush into the cave to face off the ~8 gnolls gathered there, hoping to put them out of commission with Jib's Magic Missile. Unfortunately this proves to be a tactical mis-step, as Rori takes an axe to the skull and Jib is cut down before he can finish the spell. Elarian rushes to take up the Elliptotron and finish the work. One of the gnolls slices into him as well, but he manages to hang onto consciousness just long enough to loose the powder. (He was at exactly 0 HP; I rolled to see if he managed to keep the spell and if he managed to get it off before losing consciousness.) Down went the gnolls, too concerned with the excruciating pain in their noses to put up a fight, and the PCs promptly slit their throats. The final casualty list was 3 PCs to 12 gnolls; pretty good for level 1.

Then, rather than press forward, they decided to retire back to town. They were severely depleted, and it was late. We'll pick this up again in the coming Saturday, though we'll be down one player, because he moves this week to sunnier pastures. Hopefully we can find a replacement. (If not, 3 is an acceptable number for now.)

Meanwhile the gnoll chieftan has to figure out what to do about his depleted tribe. The PCs are going to take at least a couple days to recuperate, so the bugbears are going to come sniffing about, smelling weakness. However, they'll be repulsed once they find there are still 13 able-bodied gnolls. The gnolls will send to their disaffected kin in the Moathouse, but they won't arrive for months. However, all the males that are normally in the common room will be stationed in the entrance, and they'll have built a makeshift barricade out of the old burnt table, broken chairs, and mounds of earth and branches.

Start of a new campaign + Sessions 1 and 2 recap

The game I'm running now is based on Swords & Wizardry. Originally we were using the Core Rules, but I quickly switched to the Complete rules once I found out they were actually available for free. There's practically no difference; Complete has a few optional classes, and it says a little bit more about Strongholds, wilderness, and monsters. All of the mechanics I've been able to track down are the same, though.

It actually started quite a while after the GURPS DF game finished; I and a couple friends from my former workplace went to a local con, and there I convinced them to play with me in a S&W White Box game. They loved it. For this reason I seriously considered sticking with the White Box rules, but I had done a few test runs with that system and knew I wanted to eventually move to something slightly more complicated, with things like variable weapon damage and hit points. I figured making the move at first was easier than making it later.

I rustled up two extras, two of whom had never played D&D before but were interested, and I gave them the choice: they could start in Hommlet or they could start in the Keep. They chose the Keep. Since I'm all about player choice, I told them that Hommlet was a few days to the east and that there were rumours of an old set of ruins a few days through the swamp to the south. (The Caverns of Thracia.) So far they've only been interested in the Caves, which is fine by me.

The setting is intentionally vague, and at least so far hasn't diverged much from  the "medieval fantasy" background assumption of D&D. I'm running it like Points of Light, by which I mean the PCs are all from "the Realm" of which the Keep is the easternmost fortress, but the area they consider civilization they could walk across in a couple weeks. What else is out there? That's a good question, but it's not uninhabited. The Realm just considers them all "barbarians and savages with whom we sometimes trade."

A thousand years ago, The Empire collapsed as it was overrun by barbarian hordes. They left behind ruins, artifacts, etc. etc. The Church of the Realm is the Church of Sol Invictus. Alignments are based around this: if you're Lawful, you believe in Sol Invictus (or perhaps a related god, outside the Realm), civilization as a righteous thing, and all that. If you're Neutral, you don't really care one way or another. Perhaps you've lapsed, or perhaps you follow the Old Ways (druidic paganism). If you're Chaotic, you're opposed to Sol Invictus for some reason - maybe you don't believe in this civilization, maybe you worship one of the Darker Gods, or whatever. Notably, Magic Users are always chaotic, because the arcane forces they toy with twist them, and elves are always Chaotic because they're closely aligned with the Fae.

Generally, I'm going for a Dark Ages Europe feel. There's a Constantinople out there somewhere, but the PCs don't know about it.

Class levels also exist as an in-game phenomenon. In order to gain class levels, you travel to one of the 'navels of the world' - places of old power that the priests and scribes used to be controlled and sanctified by the Empire before it collapsed, and that are now sacred to Sol Invictus. If you go to a Lawful one, you come out either as a Fighter or a Cleric. If you go to a Chaotic one, you can come out as a Fighter, Cleric, or Thief. Naturally the Church doesn't admit that Chaotic navels (generally, those controlled by entities not aligned with Sol Invictus) exist, and they claim that the power of the navels comes from Sol Invictus. It certainly seems like they're partially right, what with Lawful Clerics getting blessings in line with the powers of Sol.

In order to become a Magic User, you find another Magic User to expose you to the secret artifacts and eldritch rituals.

Further, if someone has class levels, you can tell. They have a sort of mystical charisma and an air of competence - Fighters move with more grace and self-assurance than mere men-at-arms. Clerics are also obvious, and thieves are if they want to be, or to each other.

Anyhow, I have four sessions to quickly recap for posterity. I won't bother to make a distinction between the sessions at this point, but later I'll be writing recaps as they happen. (Mostly for my benefit. I don't like writing them, but they're a good place to stick information I need to keep track of that showed up in the session.)

When the curtain opened, we had:
Gim - a Lawful dwarven Cleric
Tiny - a Lawful Fighter
Pius Inebrius - a Chaotic Cleric who worships Bacchus
Elarion - an Elf Fighter/Magic-User
Buddha - a Neutral Cleric to a dead god

They spent the session meandering around the Keep, seeing the sights and meeting the locals. They heard a few rumours about the Caves of Chaos - like how the big dogmen live high in the caves, while the little dogmen live low, and how there's a huge vault of treasure in the southernmost caves, but also a wizard who would kill all trespassers - that I probably need to remind them of because it's been long enough I bet they've forgotten. They spent some time in the Traveller's Rest Inn, the name of the tavern and inn in the Keep, and recruited a few local laborers for their expedition. They also encountered the Curate of the Keep, along with the traveling priest and his two initiates, the latter group of whom readily agreed to go out with them to vanquish the evil in the Caves! These were Theodoric, Jovian, Bob, and Ted respectively. Those of you who remember the module know that Father Jovian is both Chaotic and evil, so he's coming along to make sure they fail and die.

Come the next morning they set out early, though they lost Buddha for a halfling ne'er-do-well named Pablo (who sports a Gordito moustache). They stopped by the Church for Theodoric's blessing, and he confided in Gim that he didn't exactly trust Jovian.

Off they went and promptly realized they didn't know where they were going other than 'off west somewhere near the road'. They turned north after about half a day on the road, cut through the forest, and finally found a very large clearing on the hillside. They set up camp because it was getting late, and resolved to keep searching come morning.

After a night-time diversion involving orcs that caused no casualties but netted no information, either (Jovian was the only one who spoke Orcish, and he wasn't about to tell the party that these guys were from the Caves or anything useful), they set about continuing to search. After a few hours poking through the clearing, Elarion found an opening into the hillside.

Again, those of you who know the module know that this was not the Caves of Chaos, but rather the Caves of the Unknown.

They gathered round the cave mouth and Tiny shouted inside. That's when the 28 stirges flew out and latched on to one of the laborers, Ted, and Gim. Fortunately for the party they were able to free Gim before he died. Ted and the laborer weren't so lucky, but at least most of the stirges stayed attached to them for the next few rounds, so the rest of the party managed to survive.

Entering the cave, they noticed immediately that it was quite strange, and very old. The stone was worked, but rather than being square, the walls, floor, and ceiling were all gently curved. The place also stank of ammonia and moisture, moreso when the short entryway opened into a large chamber with a tunnel northeast and another to the west that was clearly the place the stirges had been roosting. It also had a small raised area to the north, with a low rock platform that was strewn with the same bones and ammoniac junk that covered the floor. Examining this, they discovered that the thing was likely an altar of some sort, carved with bas-reliefs of snakes and other reptiles in various poses. They also found a small jade statue of a twining snake, which they took.

Deciding the take the northeast tunnel, they discovered that it opened into another smaller room at the end, with several molded wooden doors on the east, north, and west walls, and a pair of large corroded bronze valves ajar to the south. They set about busting down the nearest wooden door, which was still miraculously intact (carved with a snake sigil) but swollen into the doorframe. They sent Pablo in, where he found a large, dusty mess of what looks like it used to be plant fibers all over the room, a low dresser made of stone, and a low sleeping platform at the back of the room. The only thing of potential value he found was in the dresser - a mummified lizard, in the same drawer as a bunch of old stone knives and scalpels, some crusted with ancient blood. He pocketed it and moved on.

Meanwhile the rest of the party was looking around the main room and decided to bust down a few more of these doors to see what was inside. This much noise naturally attracted the interest of the basilisk in the next room, who came to investigate.

Basilisks in my game are very much what you might think - dog-sized lizards who turn creatures to stone. Specifically, you have to look the basilisk in the eyes, which themselves are made of large rubies. They're also immortal and don't need to eat, but constantly ravenously hungry (since most things they try to eat turn to stone before they can).

However, a properly alchemically mummified lizard is proof against this power, and in fact will turn the basilisk to stone if struck by one. Basilisks know this, and are mesmerized by the lizards when presented. (It's a sort of terror; the basilisk is caught between that and the ravenous hunger, and makes a save each round to continue attacking. I made up that mechanic on the spot.)

It took the party a good while to figure out the lizard was why Pablo wasn't turned to stone when the basilisk looked directly at him several times after he stabbed it in the kidneys. By that time, Jovian, Bob, and Pius had already turned to stone, and the surviving laborers had beat feet. It was still nearly a TPK, because they never figured out that striking the basilisk would petrify it. By the end, only Pablo and Tiny remained un-stoned, and Tiny only because he had his guts ripped out.

Fortunately, fresh basilisk blood is an antidote to petrification. It's also a very valuable alchemical reagent, mostly for Stone to Flesh unguents that manage to stretch it further. Pablo, being a worldly sort, knew this. He'd never slaughtered an animal before, but after a few mistakes he managed to get enough blood out of the creature for the four stoned party members to be reversed. (He got lucky; I rolled a d4 for doses. Originally there was a d8, but he wasted quite a bit of blood on the floor.)

After this, the party retired to lick their wounds for a week in the Keep. Turning back from stone is a physically stressful occurrence, and they needed some time off.

This post is getting really long, so I'm going to split the other two sessions off into another post. I'll also write up a little on the Caves of the Unknown.