Category: The Gauntlet: Our Games

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

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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