Grim portents/dungeon moves for The Keep on the Borderlands

Grim portents/dungeon moves for The Keep on the Borderlands

Grim portents/dungeon moves for The Keep on the Borderlands

This is the list referred to in the latest Fear of a Black Dragon, which I wanted to share at least in part to draw your attention to Dunkey Halton’s online demon generator.

– You hear the distant tolling of a sinister bell, somewhere within the mountain.

– A portion of the floor falls away to reveal the labyrinth – irregular tunnels that connect all the “regular” levels of the caves

– You hear the sound of battle in the tunnels somewhere (hohools and wormlings fighting)

– Spell of confusion: The party find themselves lost in the labyrinth (even if they have stuck to the ‘regular’ tunnels)

– Crude drawing scratched on the wall of a creature with a flower for a head. (See Dunkey Halton’s Yoon-Suin demon generator: http://rememberdismove.blogspot.hk/2017/07/yoon-suin-demon-generator.html )

– The scent of acrid incense wafts down the tunnel.

– The Great Bell is rung

– The demon patron, Vorb the Wise, arrives

This is the recipe for my Celebrity Big Brother Dungeoncrawl, as mentioned in the latest FoaBD.

This is the recipe for my Celebrity Big Brother Dungeoncrawl, as mentioned in the latest FoaBD.

This is the recipe for my Celebrity Big Brother Dungeoncrawl, as mentioned in the latest FoaBD.

Ingredients:

DCC#67: Sailors on the Starless Sea http://goodman-games.com/store/product/dungeon-crawl-classics-67-sailors-on-the-starless-sea-2/

Purple Sorcerer 0-level party generator (using default settings): http://purplesorcerer.com/create_party.php

Format:

Every day, the dungeonmates are assigned a task. If they don’t do it, they get only basic rations that night (- 1 to a randomly determined stat each, until they get full rations again.)

The GM must announce the start of each day in their best/worst Geordie accent. “It’s day 4 in the Big Brother dungeon, and the dungeonmates have a new task…” etc.

Every evening at 6pm, unless 2 or more dungeonmates have died that day, each player (not PC, to keep things simple) nominates 2 dungeonmates for eviction. The two dungeonmates with the most nominations go to a public vote – the dungeonmate with the fewest votes from the viewing public will be evicted from the dungeon.

Public vote:

Your public vote score = Popularity Points + Personality modifier + 1d20.

Popularity Points

Each PC gets 1 PP for:

– Killing a monster

– Defeating a trap

– Collecting a treasure

– Completing a task

– Talking to Big Brother in the Diary Room* (max 2 players per day, 1 PC each)

– Causing a scene*

– Escalating romantic involvement with another player’s PC*

* = max 1 per day

Players must check with the GM if an action gets a PP and record as they go. If you forget, too bad. We’re not sitting there at voting time trying to remember what happened a few dungeon rooms back.

http://purplesorcerer.com/create_party.php

The real Lombardi School in Bari seems less attractive than our fictional one in Rome, in the MotW AP.

The real Lombardi School in Bari seems less attractive than our fictional one in Rome, in the MotW AP.

The real Lombardi School in Bari seems less attractive than our fictional one in Rome, in the MotW AP. Nice wall mosaic, though.

We played Hearts Blazing on Saturday: http://www.gamesbyplaydate.com/hearts-blazing/

We played Hearts Blazing on Saturday: http://www.gamesbyplaydate.com/hearts-blazing/

We played Hearts Blazing on Saturday: http://www.gamesbyplaydate.com/hearts-blazing/

It seemed a little woolly around the edges but I would certainly like to give it another go.

Our story was about a team of interplanetary troubleshooters zipping around the solar system at exactly the speed of light, solving issues relating to inter-planet conflict and/or the “Bridger” alien refugee population. Some different aliens (or were they?) also showed up and crashed our space station into the sun.

http://www.gamesbyplaydate.com/hearts-blazing/

The discussion of Halloween LARP on the recent podcast reminded me of this: the Talisman pub crawl, a booze-fuelled…

The discussion of Halloween LARP on the recent podcast reminded me of this: the Talisman pub crawl, a booze-fuelled…

The discussion of Halloween LARP on the recent podcast reminded me of this: the Talisman pub crawl, a booze-fuelled semi-LARP based on the fantasy adventure board game of that name. I’ve played it on two occasions, once as the Scout and once as something else I don’t remember.

edit: Looking at the character options, I think I was the Knight. That would explain some of the things that happened.

http://web.archive.org/web/20041209134450/http://www.gla.ac.uk/~clubs/gaming/stuff/talisman/pubcrawl.htm

Here’s a session of World of Dungeons we played last month. Jason-style GM notes are below.

Here’s a session of World of Dungeons we played last month. Jason-style GM notes are below.

Here’s a session of World of Dungeons we played last month. Jason-style GM notes are below.

Characters

PCs

Thamer (aka “Silk”), a ranger

Casimira, a strange foreign priestess

Salloo (player not present for this session) a ranger with a red panda companion

NPC sidekick

Faraz the court wizard

=============

2m The monsoon — this stranded the boat for a while and “forced” the PCs to have a side quest; but I would have been happy to let them simply wait out the rain and move on without leaving the boat if they so chose.

6m20 This question didn’t work at all! If I had thought of this before the session and thought it through, I would’ve skipped it. Never mind.

9m30 A stranger arrives

I was surprised at how tense this initial meeting turned out to be. The PCs were very suspicious. I quite liked it, though.

36m To the village

The adventurers encounter the children of the naga Qelong. I enjoyed how this went from tense stealth stuff to overt action.

Although this is arguably a diversion from the mission-oriented story, I wanted to portray more of the surrounding countryside. In episode 1 we travelled up the river and I felt we hadn’t seen much of how the land was suffering the effects of war and monsters and whatnot. So this was an opportunity for the players to see what was happening to ordinary people (being kidnapped by naga-kin, mostly).

1h06m Someone dies. Someone we like, I mean.

1h10m A question to set up a sense of foreboding, and which gets brought back in later by the player to good effect.

1h11m – 1h25 BREAK

1h28m Meeting the village shaman.

I had hoped for this meeting because I wanted the missionary PC to have an opportunity to do some proselytising.

NPC names:

Improv teachers recommend that you “be obvious”. Here I do that when in need of an NPC name. “Kuping” is Indonesian for “ears” — I think it sprang to mind because I’d described him as having tufts of hair on either side of his head.

Similarly, I paused for a moment before saying the name “Nowruz”, because I was thinking “I’m sure this is something religious” but couldn’t remember what. Turns out it’s a Persian spring festival.

1h51m The adventurers encounter a spellburst

Also, I bust out my ridiculous wizard voice again.

This doesn’t work so well with World of Dungeons — in Lamentations, you have saving throws to handle this stuff, but in WoD I felt it fell a bit flat. Nevertheless, spellbursts – the magical equivalent of unexploded munitions – are a feature of the setting, so I did want to make sure they showed up at least once.

1h55m – 2h05m Admin & BREAK

2h05m The Cylinder!

2h07m – Casimira reveals what the naga-kin said to her before it died.

I had totally forgotten about that whole thing by this point, so it’s great that Casimira’s player brought it back in.

2h08m – Read A Person

I regret asking for this roll. It removed the “who’s side is Silk really on?” suspense from this last part of the adventure. I should’ve left it for the players to decide.

2h20m Meeting the Guardian of the Cylinder

The combat portion of this pretty much writes itself. I found it more challenging to provide the non-combat, magical challenge of dealing with the Cylinder: these things can often be undramatic because the stakes aren’t clear.

The ranger, Silk, got very lucky in this fight. If the monster had rolled even average damage, he would’ve been dead, dead, dead before long.

3h08 The triumphant return to the city of Qampong.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbQ_HF5RHAE

I ran my scenario “Two Scoundrels of Verona”, which is to say I took the House of the Medusa from Vornheim, put it…

I ran my scenario “Two Scoundrels of Verona”, which is to say I took the House of the Medusa from Vornheim, put it…

I ran my scenario “Two Scoundrels of Verona”, which is to say I took the House of the Medusa from Vornheim, put it in vaguely 16th century Verona and ran a single 1st-level World of Dungeons PC through it while a big fancy party was on.

Say what you will about OSR-style play, there’s an unmistakable tension to having a 2hp character roll a d4 for damage when they fail a jumping-off-the-roof-onto-a-tree roll.

Saturday PM in Asia-Pacific, Saturday AM for Europe. Join us!

Saturday PM in Asia-Pacific, Saturday AM for Europe. Join us!

Saturday PM in Asia-Pacific, Saturday AM for Europe. Join us!

JOIN US.

Originally shared by Tom McGrenery

There are a couple of player slots remaining for session 2 of 2!

It’s fantasy Apocalypse Now in Ken Hite’s Qelong setting, using the World of Dungeons rules. Aug 27 (Saturday): 9am GMT, 5pm HK, 7pm Melbourne, 9pm NZ.

Pregens provided, or roll your own – you’re a local hero joining the mission to head upriver and stop the magic that’s poisoning the land.

https://www.meetup.com/Gauntlet-Hangouts/events/233180585/

I totally forgot to post about the first Gauntlet APAC session last weekend.

I totally forgot to post about the first Gauntlet APAC session last weekend.

I totally forgot to post about the first Gauntlet APAC session last weekend. We played World of Dungeons in the fantasy South-East Asia setting of Qelong.

Our heroes fought some brightly-painted guardian statues, talked three pythons into being their friends, helped several boatloads of destitute refugees and totally failed to sneak past a river blockade (but got out of it thanks to some help from the pythons).

I enjoyed GMing with the hexcrawl rules presented in Qelong — but next session I will prep some more-fixed scenes, since short runs mean you’re not rolling enough times in total to get all the cool stuff on those encounter tables.