D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 6 – My Favorite Deity

In my 4E Dromenon campaign, one of the big villains was the Ashen God, Eater of Souls, God of Undead, Decay, and Betrayal. He was served by a cult known as the Glassmakers, a splinter group of the capital’s glassblowers guild, who harvested souls for their deity to eat.

The Ashen God was originally the Apostle Iscariot, who betrayed the Messiah. He fled into the Elemental Chaos, followed by Zebulon, one of the other Apostles. When Zebulon caught up with him, a fight ensued, and Iscariot was incapacitated, pinned to a black monolith by Zebulon’s sword. Of course, you shouldn’t disturb Evil Black Monoliths in the Chaos: Iscariot merged with the entity trapped in the monolith and became the Ashen God.

My favorite bit involving the Ashen God was when the party tried to enter one of his monoliths in order to kill the high priestess inside. The smooth black surface didn’t reflect their own faces, but that of the Ashen God, who asked: ‘Who will you betray in my name?’

Every PC had to vow to betray someone, in name of the Ashen God. One PC betrayed herself, another betrayed her clan, and the third swore to betray one of the other characters. And they couldn’t get out of the deal: they had to fulfill their vows, or nasty things would happen.

Of course, this being 4E, the party fought him in the end: think Vecna wielding Stormbringer. (Literally: I based the stats on info found in the Monster Builder.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 5 – My Favorite Set of Dice/Individual Die

I never understood why some gamers like one type of die better than another. I couldn’t care less what die I roll.

However, I liked the dice with swords and the shields and the skulls in the old Heroquest board game. Also, the dice that came with the D&D board game from 10 years ago (see picture). Dice of different colors had a different number of swords on them. Weapon attack power came from different combinations of dice. Cleverly done, and should be made into a role-playing game.

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 4 – Favorite Game World

This one’s easy: Planescape. Everything about Planescape is awesome: the art, the writing, the graphic design, the monsters, the NPCs, the art… All different components of the setting were cool, and amplified each other’s coolness. A demon is pretty cool in itself, but a demon drawn by DiTerlizzi talking the chant and selling you spell-keys is a whole other thing.

I saw the original boxed set on my monthly  trip to the gaming store and bought it immediately. Even then I was bored with the usual dwarves and elves and dragons, and Planescape’s weirdness was a breath of fresh air. It reinvigorated D&D for me.

The Planescape campaign I ran consisted mostly of small adventures from Well of Worlds, with freeform role-playing in the city of Sigil between. I also ran The Eternal Boundary and some chapters from The Great Modron March. I also like Harbinger House and Something Wild, but I never got around to play them. A large part of In the Abyss is basically a hexcrawl in the Abyss. It’s pretty awesome.

I think towards the end of the product line, the quality of supplements and adventures dropped a little. A Guide to the Ethereal Plane and The Inner Planes are well-done, but they just don’t do it for me. The later adventures were all “Epic Mega-Adventures”, which I don’t like because they don’t leave much room for the DM to form his own campaign: The Great Modron March, Dead Gods, Hellbound: The Blood War, Tales from the Infinite Staircase, and Faction War all have some nice ideas, but when run take over the campaign entirely.

When it came out, the tagline for the campaign setting was “Fantasy taken over the edge” and for a while that was what it did. It took fantasy to places where it hadn’t gone before. However, a funny thing happened in the years following its release: the edges shifted. Things like Githyanki and tieflings started to pop up in other D&D campaigns, and the style of D&D fantasy changed.  Now, tieflings are in the Player Handbook (even if they are nothing like Planescape tieflings).

Runners up: Spelljammer, Al-Qadim, Time of the Dragon (but not the rest of Dragonlance. Just Taladas).

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 3 – Favorite Playable Class

I usually play mages or thieves. If I would have to choose, I would pick the thief, but it’s a close call. I like shady characters, and I like playing the thief as a scoundrel or knave. But then again, that’s how I play my mages as well.

I’ve played a number of characters that were both: magic-user-thieves, inspired by Leiber’s Gray Mouser. For one 2E character I used the tables in the Dungeon Master Guide to create a new class for a thief character with spellcasting abilities. She had to gain an enormous amount of XP to gain a level, but at the time we used a freeform system to handle XP awards (“everyone gains a level”, basically), so it didn’t matter. Later on, I made similar characters using the Player’s Option books. (multi-classing didn’t work, because I only played human characters, remember?)

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 2 – Favorite Playable Race

I almost always play human characters. I think my first AD&D character was a half-elf, and I once played a Chaond (chaos planetouched), but usually my PCs are “plain” humans. I don’t know why exactly, but maybe it’s because I don’t like the archetypes associated with the standard demi-human races. In my mind, all dwarves fight with axes or hammers, and wear horned helmets. All elves use bows, and all halflings smoke pipes. Stereotypes, instead of archetypes.

Or maybe I’m just not attracted to the archetypes these races represent: if I wanted to play an archer, maybe I would play an elf. But playing an elven archer doesn’t appeal to me: I usually play witches or thieves, both of which are human archetypes.

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 1 – How I Got Started

My first role-playing game was the German RPG Das Schwarze Auge (DSA). It came out in 1984 and it was the first RPG translated into Dutch.  At first I played only now-and-then, but later, after moving, I formed a group and we played any time we could – sometimes daily.

Then, in 1989, while visiting the American Book Centre (a well-known store selling American English-language books) I found the AD&D 2^nd Edition Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master Guide. I bought them, together with an issue of Dungeon Magazine, and went home to read the rules.

I didn’t understand them. Because of my familiarity with DSA I couldn’t wrap my head around some of the differences between the games. For example, DSA uses the term hit points for how much damage a character does, and mages start with 20 life points, not 1d4. Also, AD&D is more of a dungeon exploration game (even though the 2E books told me otherwise), and I didn’t understand open doors rolls and saving throws. The 2^nd Edition books just weren’t very good at teaching the game.

Lucky for me, by that time the Dutch translation of the Menzer Basic Set was out. I bought it, read it, and played it. I quickly hunted down all translated adventure modules: In Search of the Unknown, The Keep on the Borderlands, Horror on the Hill, Rahasia, and the solo module Blizzard Pass.

Unfortunately, no more boxed sets and adventures where translated into Dutch after that. We played the available adventures, and after that I started an AD&D campaign.

So that’s how I started playing D&D: first Das Schwarze Auge, then the Mentzer red box because the 2^nd Edition books were not good at teaching the game.

D&D 30 Day Challenge: I'm In!

A few are trying the 30 Day Challenge this month, and I think I'll give it a go. I'll be using my whole gaming past and present, which include BECMI, AD&D 2nd Edition, 3rd Edition, and even a fling with 4E.

(At the same time, I'll still be writing Lost Library of the Deathspeakers, and will start the series Faces of Pretomournon. Looks like the blog will be busy!)