D&D 30 Days Challenge: Day 12 – Favorite Dungeon Type/Location

I like to use buildings: castles, wizard towers, temples, and other above ground structures. My adventure locations are often in use, either by the original users (for example, a cult in a temple), or by new (for example, a kobold tribe living in a ruined castle). The PCs in my campaigns are often invading people’s homes (as they do in Three Sad Wizards), or raiding the headquarters of evil organizations.

D&D 30 Days Challenge Day 11 – Favorite Adventure I Have Ran

I usually run adventures I’ve written myself, like Three Sad Wizards, but less eleborate.

However, for my Al-Qadim campaign I ran published adventures only. And my favorite among them was ‘In the City of Brass’ from the Secrets of the Lamp sourcebox by Wolfgang Bauer. It’s a 2^nd Edition module, and it has the same flaws as most 2E adventures: it shows no understanding of what DM and players actually do at the table, and it assumes a sequence of events that almost certainly will be disrupted by the very first logical action the PCs take.

So why do I like this adventure? Well, for one thing, it takes place in the City of Brass. The TSR version of the city is pretty good, and gives exactly what you want from the place: fields of molten lave, golden towers of the azers, salamander slaves, and the palaces of the Efreeti.

Secondly, even if the plot is abandoned the minute the PCs arrive in the city, the adventure describes many locations and encounters that can be used right out of the book: an Efreet palazzo, complete with all the guards and treasures to be had, many encounters for characters roaming the streets, and captain Soot, who sails his ship between worlds and is a good candidate for favorite NPC.

I've written about this adventure before on this blog, HERE.

D&D 30 Days Challenge: Day 10 – Craziest Thing That’s Happened That I Saw to a Party/Character/My Players, Etc.

When in the Banewarrens, the party was caught in a teleportation trap, that teleported everybody in the room to a pit trap, doing 10d6 of damage. We barely survived, and after we were healed, a new problem arose. The Pactlords of the Quaan, an organization of weird monsters, had sent a dearch party, existing of a mind flayer, an ogre mage, a hieractosphinx, an ettercap, and a monstrous spider.

With most of our hit points lost in the trap, we were hardly in a state to fight. However, the Pactlords closed off the way back. We retreated, and decided to use the teleportation trap to teleport behind them. Now we knew what was waiting for us, we could activate our spells and magical items to walk into the trap with minimal damage. So we activated the trap, teleported to a good distance from the monsters, and fled.

I don’t know if it’s the craziest thing ever, but I think using a trap to escape monsters is pretty unusual.

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 9 – Favorite Character I Haven’t Played

Back when we often played superhero RPGs – mostly Mayfair’s DC Heroes and Green Ronin’s Mutants & Masterminds – we always made up a comic book “universe” for the adventures to take place in. This included a lot of other superheroes which we created and made stats for, but never actually played. My favorite among them is Duplica, the Multiple Girls.

Duplica could multiply herself into many versions of herself, much like Marvel’s Jamie Madrox. Every version of her came from a different concept universe, and had a different personality. When she would send the Multiple Girls away, a different girl would stay behind on this Earth.

I think the multiple personalities of the character would be fun to play, as well as examining what takes place in those other universes.

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 8 – Favorite Character I Have Played

Quinzel was the female jester I played in my brother’s Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk campaign. She was inspired in no small part by Harley Quinn from the Batman Animated Series, and

This being 3.5, Quinzel was a bard with the jester prestige class, which meant she could use the spell Tasha’s hideous laughter a few times a day, and she could play the flute. But she had a rod of wonder (for OSR people better known as a wand of wonder), and that magic item is awesome. Quinzel would yell ‘Fireball!’ whenever she used the rod, and enjoyed watching the monsters dodge out of the way of a stream of butterflies.

Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk makes use of some famous or high-profile places and NPCs. Quinzel performed at the Green Dragon Inn, and made fun of Damaris and Lord Robilar (and got away with it).

In the dungeons deep beneath the Greyhawk Ruins, she had to fight an Evil version of herself from an alternate reality. She lost, and the Evil Doppelganger took her place. I played the rest of the adventure as a Quinzel of LE alignment.

In the short-lived 4E campaign my brother ran, I played Quinzel again. I figured, if she had changed places with an Evil Quinzel of another world, this was that other world. I played her for one adventure, but in 4E, it just wasn’t the same.

After that, I made up a new world for Quinzel to live in. I was planning on using her in a novel, but after a few false starts I ended up writing another story, in which she didn’t appear. Quinzel stayed imprisoned in Limbo for a while, and I decided to make that part of the character.

So now Quinzel is a NPC. The wandering between worlds has driven her mad. She has become a disciple of the Lords of Misrule, powerful demon lords that destroy world after world. Quinzel looks for suitable worlds to destroy and leads her demonic mentor to them, all Silver Surfer-like.

Quinzel will make an appearance in the series Faces of Pretomournon, here on this blog.

Faces of Pretomournon: Introduction

Pretomournon is an extraordinary city. As capital of The Mournful Kingdom, it’s the city where the Queen’s palace stands. It’s the place of the largest and most important university in the world. And although most of the people in the city are humanotheists, the largest cathedral of the Temple is there as well.

First-time visitors to Pretomournon marvel at the layout of the city: It’s not built on, but in the ruins of older versions of the city. Crowded streets run through uninhabited expanses of debris and half demolished buildings. Some of the ruins are inhabited by the city’s underprivileged. No homeless sleeping in the streets of Pretomournon.

The people of the city are just as remarkable as its buildings and ruins. Their clothing resemble stage costumes, and many of the inhabitants act like they’re thespians, talking as if they’re orating a monologue. Every man and woman in Pretomournon presents himself how he wants to be perceived, not how he or she really is.

That is why visitors to the city never get to see the real Pretomournon. They get to see the façade – the false faces the inhabitants put forth. The real Pretomournon hides behind the façade, where the inhabitants scheme and plot against each other. Every Pretomournian is involved in a conspiracy or two.

The series Faces of Pretomournon will present 30 inhabitants of the city. Every one of these NPCs takes part in one of the many conspiracies the city has. You will learn about:

Book Trade: A librarian illegally sells books from the university library, and with the money buys terrible books of forbidden lore on the Nightmare Market.

Dead Master Thieves: A lich tries to turn the local thieves’ guild into one of the worldwide Meta-Guilds. To assume Guild leadership, he raises famous thieves from history as Dead Master Thieves.

Dreams and Nightmares: A succubus courtesan steals the dreams and nightmares of her customers, and sells them on the Nightmare Market.

Making Art: The up-and-coming artists of the Pretomournon art world center around a single art gallery, where art created by nightmares and genies

The Romanticist in Trouble: A romantic swashbuckling rogue climbs into the rooms of teenage girls at night. However, he picked the wrong window, and a powerful mage wants him dead for touching his daughter.

Sex, Spies & Murder: The Madame of one of Pretomournon’s pleasure palaces is secretly a senior member of the Secret Masters. In addition, she’s the city’s primary spymaster and conspirator.

Summoning the Anti-Deity: A small cult within the Temple works to summon their goddess to the mortal world. However, disciples of the Lords of Misrule conspire to summon one of their masters, and with it, the apocalypse.

Weapon Smuggling: Weapon smugglers bring strange, powerful magic weapons into the city. Recently, shipments are disappearing. The seller wants his money, and the owner wants his weapons.

D&D 30 Day Challenge: Day 7 – My Favorite Edition

The Mentzer sets, also known as BECMI, for Basic Expert Companion Master Immortal. Of course, this is the edition I started with, but actually I never played it much beyond the basic set, changing to AD&D. I didn’t see how great this version of the game is until I started playing it again about 5 or 6 years ago.

It’s the most complete version of D&D, with rules for dungeon and wilderness adventures, Domains and Strongholds, weapon mastery, and adventuring on alternate planes of existence. Characters can advance to level 36 and even beyond, petitioning to become an Immortal (god). Maybe it’s a bit much, and, since few campaigns will run that long, unnecessary, but it’s nice to have these options.

BECMI also has the best adventures published for it. Each set has a series of adventure modules associated with it: the Basic Set has the B-series of modules, the Expert Set the X-series, etc. This are not edited tournament modules that give a wrong picture of how an adventure fits together. Each adventure teaches DMs the rules from the corresponding boxed set. In Search of the Unknown and The Keep on the Borderlands are great dungeon adventures, and The Isle of Dread is a fantastic wilderness adventure.