Oh good, we are in the Tomb of Horrors

I just realized that my character in Carter's Lands of Ara campaign is knee deep in the Tomb of Horrors right now.  I have never played or read the classic Tomb of Horrors 1e module, but I have certainly encountered plenty of references to the granddaddy of all deathtrap dungeons.  Well imagine my surprise when I finally tracked down a copy and had a strong sense of déjà vu as soon as I began to look at the map and read the key.  I recognized the long tiled hallway to an archway filled with green mist, and the giant skeletons that popped out of chests, but just to make sure I flipped a few pages... yup, there was the room with spheres on the walls and the room with the four-armed gargoyle statue with one arm broken off.

Our party has been exploring the frickin' tomb of horrors!  No wonder we have been frustrated by that dang dungeon!  We are chasing an ancient vampire, or possibly his not quite as ancient descendant vampire, and this dungeon below the sewers of Kaladar is his home.

I stopped reading the module and had only skimmed it up till that point, but somehow just knowing that we are in the Tomb of Horrors is a mild spoiler.  We had already realized that we needed to proceed with extreme caution in this place, so I don't think it will cause any difference in gameplay.  Still, the knowledge that we teleported ourselves deep into an  unknown section of the tomb of horrors and are trying to work our way back out to an area we have already explored is terrifying!  

sweet score at the comic shop

I scored Eric Weidanz' old copy of Runequest (2nd Edition with full color cover and detailed dragon logo)  for $5 at Emerald Comics near campus in Eugene today.

At this point I feel like I know Eric a little bit - you see, I snagged some of his old AD&D 1e stuff (a DM's screen and some Dragon magazines) last week, but I also grabbed his old DM's binder out of the free box outside of the comic shop.  I always check out the free box before I go into the shop (why not?) and I first picked up a cover-less copy of Dragon, which I immediately put in my backpack.  Then I picked up the heavy, blue 3-ringed binder.  Flipping it open I instantly knew it was a DM's binder.  The inside was stamped "ERIC WEIDANZ" and then was a 9 digit number which looks like a SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER!  Did people go around stamping their library with their social security number back then?  What a different time, before the menacing scourge of identity theft.

A clear plastic sleeve held the first contents - a bunch of envelopes, the top one enticingly labeled "Demon" (these held little cut outs of monsters xeroxed from the Monster Manual, with the average height of the monster in feet written on the back of the cutout, each envelope containing a different category of monster).

A d100 Fumble Table was the next sheet (a lot of armor straps breaking, ankles getting twisted, hitting friends, and otherwise sucking - sounds terrible, must implement immediately!).

Basic Equipment and Supplies Costs (a very comprehensive hand written list that expands upon the 1e Player's Handbook and DM's guide by the looks of it) came next.

And then the icing on the cake - type-written sheets labelled "GAME MASTER ONLY" detailing Eric Weidanz' houserules for magic users.

"STARTING SPELLS

Each magic-user gets five spells after leaving his apprenticeship.  One will be a READ MAGIC spell, one will be a [sic] offensive spell, two will be deffensive [sic] spells, and one miscellaneous spell."

He then proceeds to split the 1st level spells up into three categories, "Offensive", "Defensive" and "Miscellaneous".

The binder is awesome - it contains a bunch of cherry-picked sections from the DM's guide xeroxed in plastic sleeves, it has a bunch of Eric's locations (inns, castles, dungeons), random tables, etc.  There is a really sweet Conjured Animals Table that gives a d100 table for each HD category of animal (1 HD, 2 HD, etc.).  The table tops out with Mastodon (12 HD), Titanother (12 HD), Mammoth (13 HD), Whale (small) (14 HD) and Whale (up to 36 HD).

Eric clearly ran a bunch of 1e games - a lot of his pages had the scribbled HP deductions and notes that occur during game sessions.

I don't think Eric ever played Runequest.

The copy of Runequest I spotted today on the bottom shelf of the comic book shop was in absolutely pristine condition (well, one little oil spot on the back cover), with absolutely no marks inside.

Eric, in addition to his ink stamp with his social security number (?), got a cool embossed stamper at some point that said "Library of Eric Weidanz" and gave his address in a small town in Oregon.  He had two copies of the 1e Player's Handbook, one owned by just himself (as evidenced by both the ink stamp AND the embossed stamp, a 2nd printing) and another owned first by someone else (a friend?) and then Eric (crossed out old name and number and Eric's new stamp).

I grabbed the copy of Runequest off the shelf and took it to the counter.  While paying for it I asked if it was brought in by the same guy that brought in all the AD&D stuff the other day.  It was.

4e PHB3 review part two, and how I used 4e Monks in a 1e module

The second part of my PHB3 review was just published over at the Eye of the Vortex.  I go over each class in detail, including one of my new favorites, the monk.  I made a couple of level 8 monks to stick into the 1e module Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan that I am running my players through.  There is a room in that module with two seemingly dead but perfectly preserved bodies, and a flask on the table between them with some powder in it.  The two are monks, using a magical potion of sleep to enhance their ability to suspend their bodily processes and appear to be dead while still remaining aware of their surroundings. 

This turned into a great encounter, as one party member reconstituted the potion and drank a little bit of it in an attempt to identify it, promptly putting himself to sleep for 5,000 years, while the other two party members in the room planned on looting the bodies of the two monks.  Hammer, the warforged barbarian, decided to just behead the bodies where they lay to prevent them from animating, but the monk he attempted to behead easily won initiative and proceeded to kick the party's butt all over the place.  In the end, only the vials of liquid light (see my last post) that Hammer was carrying ended up saving them - he succeeded in splashing both monks with the substance, and even though the monks rapidly reduced himself and Vomar the bugbear cleric below zero HP and welcomed them to unconsciousness, the monks had to deal with the suffocating liquid light.  Beautiful Bob managed to wake up from his slumber several thousand years early with the help of his friend the Gibbering Mouther (who used its psychic bond with Bob to lead him out of the dream world) and negotatiated with the monks, trading them the knowledge of how to remove the liquid light for the safe passage of the party.

One thing I learned is that a couple of monks are a deadly foe for a lower level party (the party just hit level 5 at the end of the session), with the combination of high damage output and incredible maneuverability.  The flurry of blows class feature really makes the damage add up and sends people flying around the battlefield.  Good times!

Running a 1e Module with 4e rules part two

I am running a great group of players through the classic 1e module "The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan".  The group consists of an albino Minotaur Warden nature worshiper, a Warforged Barbarian who has drank from the amniotic fluid of an elder god and is rapidly becoming a strange creature of the darkness, a Bugbear Cleric who can NOT detect magic for the life of him ("Don't worry guys.  No magic in here" is his famous line after he rolls another 2 on his Arcana check), a Half-Elf  Ardent who has formed a special connection with a Gibbering Mouther which is now following him around, and an Eladrin Rogue who is equal parts acrobatic assassin and careful combat avoider.

I talked about the process of converting some of the rooms to 4e in my earlier post about running this module; what I want to discuss now is how the module has impacted the play style of the party.  To begin with, I should say that this party is a negotiate first, fight later party, but also a party that will not hesitate to muck around with interesting objects when they find them.  In a deadly 1e dungeon crawl, this tendancy can be quite dangerous. 

One example in particular is the "liquid light" that exists in a pool in the shrine.  It will cling like oil to any surface that touches it, and, in the presence of light, it will slowly expand to completely cover the object.  It will suffocate a character that allows it to cover her mouth and nose, and it can only be driven back by complete immersion in cold water.  Total darkness arrests its spread. 

Stuff like that is why it is easy to run a 1e module with 4e rules; almost every single trap in the module has its own mechanics fully explained in the text because the ruleset did not have a unified way to deal with traps like 4e does.  Because of this textual explanation of the traps, I can use them with no conversion at all!   Beautiful Bob, the half-elf ardent, stuck his hand in to the liquid light after the party had observed its properties on various other objects that they had inserted into the pool.  He allowed the liquid light to cover his body to "see what happened".  Of course, he soon realized that he was suffocating and only some lucky guesses by the party and some quick thinking saved his life.

After many such episodes, the party is beginning to be very cautious when poking around the underground shrine.  After three out of four of the party members were sent to an unknown destination by a hidden teleporter, they all viewed the long, empty hall ahead of them with suspicion.  They got out their polearms and slowly advanced into the room, tapping and poking the floor in front of them and examining the walls and ceilings for traps.

I was chuckling behind the screen (there was nothing of danger in the hall itself, and the party had managed to unknowingly avoid a trap by not examining two alcoves that I had mentioned to them when describing and mapping the chamber) because here was a group of 4e players that might as well have been playing OD&D for a moment.  How many 10' pole-using characters of bygone days were momentarily channeled by the group? 

Even better, Tilia, the albino minotaur warden, decided not to step through the doorway that the rest of the group had dissapeared while investigating.  She examined a doorway at the other end of the hall and detected a trap.  She triggered it from a distance, observing as crushing restraints burst from the wall that would have bound anyone trying to open the door.  Then, the floor slowly opened and the restraints pushed down until anyone pinioned by the restraints would have been hurtled into a spike lined pit.

Looking down at the bottom of the pit, Tilia hurled some debris down into it.  Some of the spikes broke, revealing themselves to be flimsy wood constructions and only painted to look like metal.  In fact, it appeared that the pit only appeared to be deadly.  As Tilia puzzled over this, the trap slowly reset, the floor sliding back and the restraints dissapearing into the wall once again.  Tilia reasoned that the fake trap must conceal a secret way out, probably at the bottom of the pit.  So she triggered the trap again and leaped into the pit, searching for a secret way out while the ceiling closed over her head, trapping her in the pit.

There is no secret way out of that trap.  A fake trap is genius!  It is so strange that it will make any player stop and puzzle over why it exists.  The non-deadly trap nearly killed Tilia, who did eventually manage to climb up the side of the pit and use her hammer and spikes to slowly chisel a way up through the stone flaggings.

Ah, you gotta love old-school trap filled dungeons... no matter what system you are playing with!

Running a 1e module with 4e rules - and making D&D history?

My players (unbeknownst to them) started exploring the 1e module "The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan" last night in my 4e game.  I have, of course, made a few tweaks to what was originally a tournament module for AD&D.  The biggest change is that they are going through the module backwards.  If you are unfamiliar with the adventure, it starts with the players falling through a hole into a deep level of a hidden shrine underneath a pyramid temple, and they have to find their way up and out before they are killed by the poisonous gas that is filling up the complex.  Therefore, the players work their way up from the lowest levels and finally (if they avoid MANY devious traps) emerge at the top of the pyramid.

In my game, the players are exploring a strange cavern that was recently broken into by gold miners.  The cavern contained a pyramid temple and some four-armed demon apes that killed the miners and wreaked havoc in the surrounding area.  Even worse, a giant spider with sword-edged arms and human hands later emerged from the cavern and systematically hunted down most of the surviving miners.  The party has been employed by the gold mine to investigate.  Last night's session was an eight hour marathon, so I am going to skip hours of interesting gameplay and talk about the experience I had when the players actually got down to poking their heads into the pyramid and the shrine on top of it.

I did a small amount of prep work the night before the game, mostly consisting of making a couple of notes about each encounter area that I planned to use from the module.  The PCs were starting at the end of the module, basically, and working their way backwards, because they started outside the shrine on the pyramid and entered the shrine from above, entering its upper levels first.  I liberally hacked out some areas that I just didn't feel like translated that well, as well as a few areas that made little sense if encountered from the wrong direction.  I also made a note of each creature that might be encountered and spent a few minutes typing names into the 4e Monster Builder to find a rough equivalent for each.  Finally, I inserted my human-handed spider into a secret location (not sure if any of my players read this blog, but they have no idea where the spider is so I shan't spoil the surprise here...).

A few notes - 

The end of the module (and the first thing the players encountered) is the altar and mural on top of the pyramid.  In the module it is a bat altar, in my game I made it a spider altar.  The players carefully examined the place and noted two odd things: the mouth of the spider in the mural was an actual hole that seemed to be lined with real sharp mandibles; there were handles on the bottom front of the altar.  More careful inspection revealed that the entire altar might be able to be lifted by the handles, pivoting on its back edge to lift up.  Hammer the warforged barbarian and Tilia the albino minotaur warden tried to lift it and realized that they needed a little bit more muscle.  Luckily for them, they started looking around more carefully and realized that the legs of the spider which extended all around the alter were edged with razor sharp blades and there were some strange indentations in front of the handles on the floor by the altar.  Tilia made a mental leap and suggested that the entire party kneel before the altar and lift on the handles.  They succeeded in tipping the altar up and back and the spider leg blades whistled harmlessly through the air over their heads.  Trap number one, avoided!

The party then began investigating the mouth of the mural.  Everyone was pretty certain they were supposed to stick their hand in but were understandably reluctant to do so.  Finally, Hammer just did it but he unfortunately does not have blood so after taking some relatively minor damage and being stuck in the jaws of the spider mural for four rounds, the jaws opened and nothing else happened.  

Next, I think we might have made D&D history.  You can never be certain what wacky things have gone on in all the D&D games ever ran, but somehow I think there is at least a chance that Rhaziel was the first character ever to purposefully root his finger around in his nose until it started bleeding.  He started off by warning the party, "This could get dirty", then proceeded to give himself a nose bleed.  Many off-color jokes later the entire group was convulsed in laughter and Vomar the bugbear cleric's player was literally crying from laughing too hard.

Rhaziel collected the blood from his nosebleed and stuck one of the arm bones of a beheaded skeleton the group had found in the treasure pit under the altar into the mural's mouth.  When the jaws closed, he poured in the blood.  This was actually a good idea, as the mechanism was triggered by liquid weight, but he simply didn't have enough blood for it to work.  Finally, Vomar just bit the bullet, stuck his arm in and watched as his blood slowly drained into the hole.  Then the legs of the spider in the mural swung up and back and revealed a set of stairs that descended into the dark...

The next thing they encountered were the secret doors leading to the alter-ego encounter.  Tilia almost immediately figured out how to open them when she leaped up to grab the lintel above the door to pull herself up and look for a mechanism.  Of course, the lintel above the door was the mechanism, so in the party went. 

Hammer went in first, and discovered a statue with his face on it holding a golden scepter.  After other party members tried and failed to move the scepter, Hammer picked it up and was instantly petrified while the statue animated and tried to convince the party that it was Hammer, that he had just been switched into its body.  One of the changes I made was that I decided that the player of whichever character was petrified would get to control the animated statue.  So I pulled Hammer aside, gave him the little sheet on which I had scribbled a 4e conversion of the statue, and told him that he had all of Hammer's memories but clearly knew he was not Hammer.  I told him his goal was to convince the party that he really was Hammer and to continue exploring the dungeon.  I also told him that if it came down to combat, the scepter had a special property that if he scored a critical hit with it, it would petrify the victim, the statue would become an image of that new victim, and the real Hammer would become unpetrified.  Then the new statue/PC would have to play the part!

He did an AWESOME job of roleplaying this, and I had a lot of fun watching the obviously distrustful party try to poke a hole in the faux-Hammer/statue's logic.  They carefully asked him what he remembered, and tried every way they could think of to prove that it wasn't hammer.  Finally, Rhaziel casually scooped up the basket with anti-magic properties that the party had discovered a few sessions back and meandered over... until he was close enough to try to cover the scepter with the basket.  He succeeded, but nothing happened.  Hammer/statue tried to pull the  scepter out of the basket, and Rhaziel tried to yank the scepter out of his hand.  I had them roll off against each other with opposed strength checks (Rhaziel, an Eladrin rogue, has a poor strength score.  Hammer, the warforged barbarian, is a beast in terms of strength and I was using his strength as the statue's strength).  Their first rolls resulted in a tie, so they rolled off to break the tie.  Rhaziel got a natural 20 and the party all cheered as the scepter clattered to the floor.  Hammer/statue then began attacking the party, using his gaze attack to disarm them and clawing around wildly while he attempted to regain the statue.  Ultimately, the party managed to destroy the statue and Rhaziel tried wrapping the scepter in a blanket, picking it up carefully without touching it, and touching the scepter to the statue of Hammer.  Well, this is exactly how you restore the petrified character, so trap #2, met and dealt with!

At this point, Tilia's player mumbled something about, "Why would you make a secret room that is nothing but a big trap?  If you are trying to trap somebody, wouldn't you want them to find the trap?  Why make it hidden behind secret doors?"

Well, thats the beauty of a 1e tournament module for ya.  Traps around every corner...

The party soon encountered what in the original module would have been a centaur mummy.  I made it a spider-taur mummy, motionless on a slab in the middle of a room filled with cheap baubles and crappy jewelry.  The party did find the hidden treasure in the bottom of the urns full of river rocks.  So far, I have been very impressed with how thorough and "old school" my 4e players have been; maybe next time I will try the Temple of Doom on them...

The party was very suspicious of the mummified remains of the spider-taur.  Two party members flanked it while Tilia cautiously opened the door to the only exit from the room and took one step backwards down the stairs that were revealed beyond it.  Of course, the mummy flung its heavy bronze spear at her and the melee was on.

One REALLY hard fight later (I made the mummy-taur a reskinned Mummy Guardian, bumped it up to a level 9 brute for the base stats, then gave it some extras - an at will that was the ability to make two slam attacks in a round instead of one, to simulate both the human and spider halves being able to attack at once, and a special move action that recharged on a 5 or 6 that enabled it to shift 3 squares through enemy squares to simulate its ability to spider climb right over everything), Vomar was one HP a way from his negative bloodied value and absolute death and both he and Tilia had mummy rot.  The session ended there as the party retreated to try and find help to cure the disease (they had taken an extended rest first, and the disease had gotten progressively worse for Vomar so that he was one bad roll on an extended rest away from dying from the disease, and in any case was at -10 HP permanently until the disease is cured... the party is 2d level... ouch...).  

Thus ended session one of using a 1e module in 4e, and I have to say it worked great.  The rooms were plenty large enough for 4e combat, especially considering that the squares in 1e equaled ten feet so each translated into four 4e five foot squares.  I was most impressed with the party's logical trap solving ability, and I now know that I can throw an old school deathtrap style dungeon at them and have a good time!