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.

Al-Qadim: More Formalhaut

I’m a bit behind with the write-ups of my Al-Qadim campaign, so here’s a summary of a session 4 weeks ago.

The Isle of Hakiyah

Last time, the group had begun to explore the Isle of Hakiyah (The Isle of Arsinoi, renamed). This session, the PCs continued to explore the isle. In the ruins of a small port city, they fought killer vines, and entered the storerooms of Batrakheias. There they found the bodies of giant frogs, stored in wooden vats, an altar to an unknown frog god, and the shambling putrefying form of Batrakheias himself. While Bakri, Shihab and Zobeida attacked him, Jamal (the nine-eyed dwarf) decided to offer one of the giant frogs to the altar. It had no effect (because the frog was already dead), but when Batrakheias was slain, his body turned into a tide of giant frogs.  Of course the other PCs blamed Jamal.

In the open amphitheater of the town, the PCs witnessed rehearsals for a play conducted by a serpent demon and performed by an ensemble of skeletons and shadows. The demon was looking for actors in the play, and because the PCs were afraid they would have to fight the 45 skeletons if they refused, they agreed. It turned into a funny improvised version of Romeo and Juliet, in which old man Bakri played the female lead with the help of a change self spell.

The Isle of Molonei

So we finished the scenario, but it was still early, so started another adventure: The lookout on the ship saw storm clouds ahead, and the ship had to moor at another island. I have selected a number of scenarios from different sources for this campaign sequence, but I don’t actually have a map of the sea with the location of the islands. So I used another old school technique to decide which island the characters landed on: I rolled a die. By coincidence, I ended up with the Isle of Molonei, another one of Melan’s islands in Knockspell #4.

The island existed of two mountainous peaks, towering over thick woodlands and inhabited by pterodactyls. A city was built into the side of the mountains, still inhabited by a refuge of hedonists. Among the ruins the PCs encountered a group of lovers, which invited the PCs to join them. They refused, as id proper for enlightened Zakarans, except for Jamal, who undressed and followed the hedonists into the subterranean city. Now the others had to get them back.

The city’s inhabitants believed the PCs to be sent by Snolog, their benevolent snail-god, to see an end to the amoeboid monsters that dragged off so many. The PCs agreed that the hedonists should be enlightened, and Bakri, the mystic priest, decided to tell them about the Loregiver. He climbed the stairs to the temple of Snolog, but that put him within range of the idol and fell under it’s spell, filling him with all-consuming lust. Soon he joined the hedonists in their lovemaking, until the old man passed out from the effort and the others could drag him outside.

This was a funny session, and the players later remembered it as that session (that is, the session Bakri went sex-crazy).

The scenarios are light on detail, but they contain everything I need and they are very easy to run. Much easier than the Al-Qadim modules, in fact, where the information I need is often buried in too much more detail.

Al-Qadim: Isles on an Emerald Sea

A funny result of my DMing style is that my players never finish their missions. I run published Al-Qadim modules, but almost never as they’re written. I use the situation and the dungeon descriptions provided, but ignore the plot railroad, running the provided encounters only when they make sense. Because the PCs are free to go wherever they want, they often wander out of the current “story” and into a new one.

The campaign started with the PCs getting entangled with an evil cabal of fire mages, but they soon decided to follow up rumors of bandit activity and left town. They travelled with a caravan, landed in a sand storm and the afterlife, forgot about the bandits, and were hired to find an old man’s long lost love. In the genie stronghold where she was held, they failed to locate her but found a one-way portal to the City of Brass instead.

This gives a nice stories-within-stories atmosphere to the campaign, and it feels very Arabian Nights to me.  I can almost hear the sultan yelling to Sherezade: ‘But did they find Sita? Tell me!’

Last session, the PCs escaped on a plane-hopping ship and made their way back to the prime material plane, but instead of leading them back to one of the former plot strands, I decided to start a new campaign sequence of sea travel, inspired by the voyages of Sinbad.

Monday I ran Melan’s excellent Isles on an Emerald Sea from Knockspell #1. So far, we didn’t do a lot of exploration based adventuring in the campaign, and this module made for a nice change of pace. The adventure provided a number of very memorable encounters.

The session started with the PCs on captain Soot’s plane-hopping ship The Ebony Queen, traveling back to Zakhara. During their travel, the ship was caught in an astral storm, and the sails were damaged. Back on the prime material, the crew started repairs. Shihab, hanging over the railing because he was seasick, saw something flickering on the horizon. The PCs decided to investigate it and landed on the isle of the birds.

Bakri found narrow stairs cut in the rock and climbed it with Jamal to investigate. At the top of the stairs they found a strange, alien idol. While they examined the inscriptions on the idol, Shihab and Zobeida were attacked by giant crabs. Bakri hurried towards the fight, leaving Jamal behind. That’s never a good idea.

Jamal sacrificed some incense he found in an earlier adventure to the idol, and his player voluntarily failed his saving throw. Jamal received a boon: seven new eyes, of which only two functional, appeared in his skull. (The two functioning eyes appeared both on his forehead, so no 360° vision for him.) The PCs are still trying to decide if they should try a remove curse to get rid of the extra eyes or, according to Jamal’s wishes, they should use a regeneration to restore eyesight to the five other eyes.

They found a roc’s nest, but luckily, the giant bird was away for the moment, and investigated the ruins. In the cellars beneath the ruins they found a statue of a goddess on a pedestal, which turned out to be not one but two mimics, “served” by 16 giant centipedes. Bakri used a scroll stolen from an efreeti sorceress and decided the fight by casting a 10^th-level fireball.

In another chamber they found a well with the spectre of Osori the Creeping One bound to it. Unable to attack because of the binding, Osori begged the PCs to set him free. The PCs agreed and cast a dispel magic on the well. Of course, the spectre immediately attacked and drained two levels from Shihab. Zobeida cast a forget-spell on the spectre, causing him to forget the PCs freed him already. Thinking he was still bound and couldn’t attack the PCs, he started pleading again to release him. The PCs just walked away. We imagined Osori to stay there in the well for another thousand years, completely unaware of the fact that he was no longer bound and was free to leave at any time. Funny stuff.

Finally, a bubble of force brought them to the isle of the goddess Hakiyah, where they explored a ruined tower, befriended a pack of wild dogs, and found a mausoleum, where we ended the session.

I think it’s remarkable that the three combats this session were all decided by spellcasting: half the giant crabs were defeated with a fear-spell, the mimics and centipedes by a powerful fireball, and the spectre by casting forget. However, this didn’t feel wrong or unbalanced in any way, not even the fireball scroll which was of much higher level than the characters. At no point did it feel like the PCs shouldn’t have these abilities. On the contrary, it felt as the outcome of good play and added to the fun.

Next week we’ll finish this adventure, and more.

Al-Qadim: In the City of Brass

After 4 weeks of scheduling problems, we finally managed to play last Thursday. I ran my ongoing Al-Qadim campaign. This week’s session started with the PCs in the City of Brass, in the middle of an adventure in the Secrets of the Lamp box.

For this campaign, I only run published adventures. These have the same problem as most of the Type II adventures TSR published at the time: They are not that good, and often unplayable as written. It’s often as if the designer wrote the adventure in a vacuum, and it’s obvious these adventures weren’t written for an ongoing campaign, or even playtested. The modules make assumptions about player actions and situations that will never happen in actual play.

For example, this was the second adventure in which the PCs were supposed to be captured. I’ve been playing this game in one form of the other for more than 25 years, and I’ve never had a player character allowing himself to be captured. PCs fight to the dead, or escape. But surrender? Never.

In this adventure, an efreeti noble falls in love with the female PC and tries to seduce her. When she doesn’t respond to his advances, he enslaves the PCs and takes away their equipment. At least, that how it’s written. My players, however, were able to put some salt in the food, thereby establishing the salt bond. The efreet was unable to take them as his slaves, and had to treat them as his honored guests. It was a lot of fun, and a real accomplishment on part of the players, probably worth a lot more XP than I awarded them for it. But the adventure as written didn’t help me here at all.

So what else happened? My favorite bit was when the PCs bought a magical palace, had the bill send to the efreeti noble, and had one of their fire salamander escorts sign for it. And after they had stolen the efreeti’s albino nightmare, instead of riding it in the horserace (as was written in the module, of course) they went back to the efreeti palace and looted it, among other things stealing his other nightmares and geldings.  Good fun!