As promised in my last post on the matter, I'm bringing you the latest holiday adventure news from The Castle of the Mad Archmage by Joseph Bloch, aka. Greyhawk Grognard. When we left off, our intrepid adventurers had, after slaughtering most of an orc outpost, formed an uneasy alliance with the surviving members in order to take on a hobgoblin posse on the 3rd level. Since my memory of the exact events has eroded considerably, this will be a succinct report.
Bob and I decided that having a mission--in this case, killing off hobgoblins to foster an alliance with orcs--was not what where we wanted to take this game. So we developed an exit strategy: the orcs drew up a rough map of the adjacent terrain, led the party down to the 3rd level, and... slunk away at the first sign of trouble. But not before they slipped a shiv into Quisling's ribs. Quisling, an orc that we charmed during our assault, survived the attack and was very thankful to the party for nursing him back to health and saving him once again--or so he believes--from the treachery of his own clan. He's such a sincere and trusting chap.
It was at this point that Godraviel, the elfmaid who had charmed Quisling in the first place, could handle the crushing guilt no longer and revealed to him the truth of the situation. That is, he was under a charm spell and that we had killed his former colleagues and lied to him in order to secure his assistance in defeating the rest of his clan. She told him that she was releasing him from the spell so that he could choose his own fate. Since he was not actually released from her spell--I decided that it is not actually within her power to do so--and since she was so sincere in her speech, the end result was to further Quisling's infatuation with the elfmaid. We rolled up his stats and made the orc a full fledged party member. Now we have to figure out the characteristics of the Orc character race in S&W...
In the end, we did honor our deal with the orcs by killing the 12 requisite hobgoblins, but it cost us dearly, as Brodsky the cleric was left for dead and Glebberd the Halfregnome and Polvo the dwarf--who, through their quick wits and upbeat personalities have overcome their diminutive stature and become the very heart and soul of the party--were nearly done for as well. On our way back to the surface, we ran into the Bandits again from our first encounter, and, pointing out that
we still didn't have anything worth stealing, and
we would be back later,
they agreed to let us pass, though they insisted, for inventory reasons, that Quisling must remain in the dungeon. A quick sleep spell to even the forces and some tough talk from Polvo about where they can shove their dungeon rules, and the bandits agreed to let us pass, though, in order to allow them to save face, we paid 10 GPs for Quisling's liberation, and agreed to leave still-heavily-wounded Sigurd in their custody to assure our return to the dungeon. Little do they know that everyone in our party hates Sigurd.
From here on out, I'm running the bandits not as opportunistic ruffians preying on honest adventurers but as legitimate dungeon bureaucrats in the employ of the Mad Archmage. Responsible for such things as dungeon inventory, revenue, and customer service, they can be counted on for dungeoneering assistance to adventurers--extra torches and the like, limited dungeon intell, or even a bunk to rest the wounded in--but who also require an accounting of monsters killed and traps sprung for re-stocking purposes; and exact a tariff for anything removed from the dungeon edifice.
Inspired by Carjacked Seraphim's (excellent blog name, by the way) recent foray into Joseph Bloch's Castle of the Mad Archmage (CotMA), I've decided to kickstart my own narrative of said dungeon.
It's hard to believe that I haven't gotten around to writing up the 2nd session but here it is mid-July, summer is almost here (in Seattle anyway), and I'm reporting on events that happened in January. Actually, knowing me, that isn't hard to believe at all.
For those who haven't read the earlierposts on this matter, my friend Bob and I are sort of tag-team DM-ing this thing, so, in many regards, we're playing D&D as a board game, and we often end up both simultaneously DM-ing and running the party. One of the odd results of this clusterf**k approach to dungeoneering is that, as often as not, we are working together against our own characters trying to figure out how the dungeon would react to this invasion by an adventuring party. But, since we haven't read ahead in the dungeon, we don't really know what's around the corner which makes such conspiring somewhat ineffectual.
Anyway, our 2nd session occurred about a week after the first session, which is to say, nearly 6 months ago. This time I came prepared; in addition to the S&W core rules PDF, I’m packin' the S&W Monster Compendium, AD&D Monster Manual (piñata dragon version) and the C&C Monsters & Treasures tome, and I’ve also downloaded the OSRIC and Labyrinth Lords rules. We’re still out of luck if we run into more olive slime or anything from the F[r]iend Folio, but we’ve definitely got a lot more ground covered this time out.
Unfortunately, you'll have to bear with my memory a bit as, sadly, my notes from this session are less than helpful; they read thusly:
“CotMA Session 2: ”
One thing that I do recall is that this is the session when the now infamous slope discussion arose, but since that’s been covered at length elsewhere, I’ll move on. Before embarking on session 2, we added two more humble adventurers to our number: Barkurp the Wise (a fighter with a 17 wisdom, though he’s only got a 6 intelligence),* and a magic user named Cleavebourne, who, thanks to his 13 strength, supplants Borrance, the other magic user, as the strongest member of the party.
*We used the fatalist approach to character generation: the character's name, race, and class are determined before we roll 3d6, keeping the results in the order rolled, for the 6 abilities.As a result, in addition to the aforementioned hellaciously wize fighting man, we have a dwarf with an 8 constitution but an 18 charisma, and 3 spell casters (an Elf and 2 MUs) whose intelligence range from as low as 10 all the way up to a high of 11. But, OD&D/S&W being what it is, these stats have almost no significant consequence on game play.
This time out, the courageous party selected a different entrance from the 3 options available to intrepid CotMA delvers. They stumbled down the stairs into a room occupied by a giant tick and... I have absolutely no recollection of this encounter. I do remember that they opened another closet full of (2) skeletons, though these were much less impressed by our cleric’s pious stance than in the previous effort. In fact, they showed some serious undead combat competence by hacking the crap out of our front line: Sigurd was once again knocked to 0 Hp--man, he's a lightweight--and Polvo the dwarf was gimping around with only 2 HP before the magic users finally stepped in and knocked the grins off those skeletal mugs. After so many years of AD&D in my system, it’s hard to grasp the combat effectiveness of low level OD&D magic users. At 1st level they use the same attack charts as fighters and get 1d6 HP—only slightly less well endowed than a fighter’s d6+1. Add to that the lack of combat bonuses for strength in OD&D and the only real advantage 1st level fighters have in combat is 1 additional hit point and their unrestricted choice of armor.
Anyway, a little while later our brave party was listening at a door when they heard orcs--a bunch of ‘em. We devised a plan wherein we would bust in and cast a sleep spell on these bozos before they could beat the crap out of us. With a little luck of the dice, we achieved surprise and put all the snouty suckers to sleep before they could even let out a peep. We dragged one of 'em out in the hall and cast Charm Person on him while the rest of the orcs were knifed in their sleep. The Charm seemed to work because he was rather endeared to Cleaveborn, the new magic user, or was it Goldraviel the elf?* Anyway, he informed us that the other door in the room lead to 2 more rooms inhabited by 6 more of his clan, a clan which also occupied several more rooms on a lower level of the dungeon. We fed him some BS story about how we had saved him from his colleagues who were traitors and had been about to kill him and steal the clan’s treasure blah blah blah; he agreed to help us deal with the other guys.
*Another consequence of our peculiar gaming method is that the characters are not really achieving a great deal of individuation; they really function as a communal entity most of the time.
Back in the orc room, we tipped over a large table and some cots near the wall opposite the unopened door to provide shelter for our archers Glebberd the halfthing, Polvo the dwarf, and Goeatyourveal the elf. Sadly, our best archer, Sigurd the near-dead ranger, was resting in an empty room down the hall. The rest of the party hid in the alcove in which the entry door was set, while the charmed Orc lay down amidst the corpses on the floor and sprung the trap by calling for help. A moment later the door flew open and 3 orcs burst into the room. If they were shocked to see the decimated ranks of their colleagues, they had no time to show it; a flurry of arrows pelted into them—the dice were on our side!—and 1 orc lay dead and the other two were injured before they even knew what hit them. The survivors turned to run and were cut down by another volley just as 3 more orcs entered the room, one of whom was unfortunate enough to catch an errant missile in the chest. He survived but with the rest of the Adventurers now surging out from the vestibule, capitulation was the only answer. He threw down his arms and fell to his knees even as his two unscathed colleagues turned and fled back to the room they had just left, slamming the door and locking it. Thanks for nothin’, chumps!
What followed was a drawn out stalemate between our party and the 2 orcs behind the door; one of whom, it turns out, was the leader of the group. Eventually, with the help of our charmed orc and some begrudging assistance from the captured dude, we brokered a peace. We would agree to help them fight some posse of hobgoblins that they are constantly sparring with and they would provide us with some CotMA intell. As a token of respect, we agreed to pay them a weregild of 12 hobber heads to offset the 8 orcs we killed; we argued them down from 4 for 1 to a mere 1-1/2 : 1. Silly orcs. Still, half of our party was opposed to dealing with the orcs at all and is awaiting the first opportunity to commit an act of treachery against them, a feeling that is no doubt shared by the orcs--except the charmed guy, whom we are now calling "Quisling."
As this is already overly long, and this seems as good a stopping place as any, I'll call it quits here for now. Look for Part 2 of Session 2 which, at this rate, should be out in time for the Christmas shopping season!
It’s been an awfully long time now since I mentioned my ongoing foray into Joseph Bloch’s Castle of the Mad Archmage (CotMA); in fact, there’s a new version of said dungeon out now.My friend Bob and I started out sometime before the Olympics and though we played 2 sessions in rapid succession, we’ve only managed one session since.What follows is my vague recollections of these sessions—bolstered a bit by some notes I took in a rare show of foresight on my part.
Whence last we ventured, the party was picking on some skeletons in a closet...and only right now do I finally get the joke.Oy veh.Anyway, suffice it to say that our boys polished them off and continued their quest for dungeon dominance.
As we continued, we met up with a statue of an ape whose secret I shall not reveal here and some olive slime and its offspring.I assume this must be a Monster Manual II critter cuz I can’t find it in any of the sources I’ve checked (AD&D Monster Manual, OSRIC, S&W Monster Compendium, Laby Lords, Castles & Crusades) and it's far too sensible sounding to be a Fiend Folio creation.And since I don’t feel even slightly compelled to purchase the MMII--or the Fiend Folio for that matter--it shall remain a mystery to me until some beneficent OldeSchewle scholar provides a description in their freely downloaded bestiary.
Anyway, since our fearless party already blew off the troglodytes a few rooms back out of sheer ignorance (at the time of this session, we had only the S&W rules pdf on hand), we felt compelled to take action.We extrapolated a bit based on the info in the module and our knowledge of the more famous green slime and decided to torch the stuff and it’s offspring.More fudging was necessary a few rooms later when we were surprised by giant frogs.We surmised, given their hp totals, that they must have 3 or 4 hit dice and, based solely on ancient memories of the murderous frogs at the Moat House in T1 The Village of Hommlet, I gave them 1 attack for 1d6 plus, if they hit you, they grab you with their tongue and automatically do an additional 1d4 dmg/round thereafter.
This is a battle we barely survived intact. Because we were surprised, Borrance the MU took it for the team before he was able to cast the sleep spell that might have saved our asses.Sigurd the ranger, Glebberd the Halfling and Borrance all got knocked to 0 hp.Only with S&W’s optional wound-binding and Negative Hit Point rules did we manage to drag the entirety of our party back to the surface alive.First level clerics without Cure Light Wounds are not worth all the sanctimonious posturing.
Since it was now getting late in the real world, we decided to clear out of dodge rather than leave our party to sleep in the dungeons.On the way out we encountered our first wandering monster: a “Floating pearlescent bubble.”We had a moment of silence in memory of Patrick McGoohan and then loaded it full of arrows.Our first day of adventuring yielded us a massive total treasure haul of 15 silver pieces!Not too impressive, especially at the cost of 3 near-dead characters.
As far as Old School gaming goes, my cohort Bob and I are strictly amateurs. But between the two of us, we're sitting on a pretty big gob of experience and training in construction design and planning. As such there was one incident during our recent foray into The Castle of the Mad Archmage that piqued our professional interests.
So we’re blundering through the dungeon in our distinctly ignorant fashion when we head down a long passage to the next level that’s labeled “slope 5°.”
Bob: What’s the elevation change between levels?
Me: I think it said 30'
[We do some math: 5° is equal to a 1:9 slope, which means there needs to be 270’ to get down to the next level. Feel free to check our work.]
Bob: Let’s see if this ramp is long enough ... [gleefully counting 10’ squares] ... Oh he’s got it made, well over 300’ here. Even accounting for the landings at the turn and the intersecting corridor.
And, satisfied that our dungeon creator is on top of his game, we move on.
About halfway down the slope there’s a numbered encounter.
Bob: What's that say?
Me:"slope in the corridor is too subtle to be detected under normal circumstances. Dwarves etc. have their normal chance to detect”
Bob: [chuckling] I guess that makes us dwarves.
To put things in perspective for any non-math nerds out there, a 5° slope equals a vertical change of ~1' (rise) for every 9' of horizontal (run). This is significantly steeper than the maximum allowable slope for an ADA (handicap access) ramp, which is 1:12. Without belaboring the point, a 5° slope is not at all subtle. A consultation with the Joe the Dungeonmaker—isn’t the internet grand?—assures me that it should read 5% slope not 5°. A 5% slope is a much more reasonable 1:20, but no biggie either way, Megadungeon rules apply; if it says it’s too subtle, then so be it. And besides, Bob and I are both looking at the dungeon plans anyway, the cat was already out of the bag.
But then, even if the corridor were perfectly level, the cat would have snuck out in its own surreptitious fashion. There’s something about long, unbroken corridors, you expect to come out of them in a place that is somehow different from the place you just left. Maybe they don't realize that they've left one level and arrived in another but they're expecting a change of one sort or another. Think about going to the zoo: you’re walking along a path with a bunch of savanna animals on either side, then you hit a stretch of path where there are no exhibits for a stretch. Then you find yourself in a new cluster of critters, chances are, these exhibits are somehow different from the savanna you just left. Maybe they’re monkeys--you’ve entered the jungle portion of the zoo. Or maybe the savanna predators are here, isolated from their prey in the previous exhibit. If it was just more gazelles and zebras, you would wonder how they’re different from the critters you left behind, and you might start to think that this zoo needs to diversify its collection.
Just walking that distance gives you time to exit one experience and prepare yourself for something new. It’s the concept behind labyrinths—as opposed to mazes—that the journey itself is transformational. And this works the same in table-top play as it does whether you’re walking through the zoo or traversing the pattern underneath Castle Amber. Even if your players have no idea that they have technically just entered a new dungeon level because they didn’t notice the elevation change, they already know that they left something behind. Walking the length of the passage has provided them a moment of cautious respite, and they’re prepared for something new.
That said, I wouldn’t advise a dungeon designer to redraw his map. Unless the sole purpose of your design subterfuge is to confound the player’s mapmaking efforts—it would be fun to watch the confusion unfold as their map starts bumping into itself in the Southwest quadrant—one needs to not only disguise the elevation change but also hide any other signs of transition as well. Say, if the entire first level, rooms and all, were juuuuuuust so ever slightly sloped—0.5°, 1:100, 1%, choose your labeling convention—toward the northwest,until the party opens a nondescript door off of an unassuming room and, unbeknownst to them—POW!—they’re facing a whole new wandering monster table!
Following up on our hockey night/character generation session Bob and I actually got together the next night to get started on our Old Style quest for 1.6 oz. coins and positively integered magical armaments. Bob has approved my decision to use Joseph Bloch’s Castle of the Mad Archmage (CotMA) based on the high quality of his blog posts over at Greyhawk Grognard and the nice price tag of his module. Actually, those are my reasons for choosing it; Bob’s reasoning goes more like this: “Whatever, let’s just play.”
And to Mr. Bloch I owe a humongous apology for the butchering his handiwork receives here. Please folks--and thank goodness there are few of you reading this--don’t allow my experience to taint what, in the hands of a competent DM, is a fine adventure.
I should explain our methods a bit, as they’re more than a little unorthodox. As discussed previously, we rolled up 6 characters, one from each of the classes (Fighter, Magic User, Cleric) and races (Elf, Dwarf, Hobbit-gnome-leprechaun) available in S&W who we’re pretty much running jointly, like so many pieces on a chess board. And for various reasons that don’t seem at all reasonable now that I'm trying to type them up for public review, we thought it would be perfectly ok if, rather than having one DM, we would alternate the task at each encounter, depending on a roll of the dice (low = Bob’s the DM, high = Me). Neither one of us has read the module, so we’re going in this blind and stupid. And oh yeah, we’re calling the DM the “Reader.”
Essentially, we are co-playing 6 players while simultaneously co-DMing a dungeon that is unknown to either one of us. Let me know if anyone cares anymore.
To make matters worse, neither of us has a functional printer to print out either the rules we’re using (Swords & Wizardry) or the module, and we’re way to cheap to print them out at a copy shop, so we’re just reading the PDFs straight off the screen of Bob’s laptop. Holy crap is this annoying, but here we go!
We skip all the traditional meeting up in the tavern business and head straight down the stairs to the 2nd level: and a huge spider drops on our asses. Actually our heads, but it misses. We don’t know for sure how a huge spider differs from any other spider, but neither of us has rolled a 20-sider in combat since the Mulroney administration, so we have at it with extreme gusto. The party retaliates, both of the fighters in the front row (Sigurd the Ranger and Polvo the Dwarf, for those following at home) hit for some pretty hefty damage and the spider immediately realizes that it’s in over its head and skitters back into its web. We break out the missile weapons and take pot shots into the web until the critter’s corpse falls to the floor. We ended up breaking a lot of arrows this way; next time we’ll torch the webs like good old schoolers, but we really wanted to roll them 20 siders. [Edit: one of the ways in which huge spiders differ from the other varieties is that they are not web-builders. Insert blushing emoticon here. --Dice-chucker, 5/29]
We randomly chose one of the two doors out of the room, walked down the hall and popped open the first door we found on the left: 2 armed dudes. This time I am Reader and, reading that they are part of a posse of brigands who normally steal from half-dead stragglers wandering out of the dungeon, and that they have cohorts in several adjacent rooms; I decide that they will try to parlay until they can set off the alarm that I’ve decided is in their room, thus alerting the rest of their gang. They manage to engage the Party in conversation and trip the alarm. Suddenly the doors to the other rooms open up and the rest of the brigands come out in the hall.
Then this happens:
Bob: Hold on! You aren’t the Reader of all those rooms, only this one!
Me: But they’re all part of the same group; they act as a team!
Bob: Too bad, that wasn’t in the agreement. We’re supposed to roll for each door.
Bob is having none of my loosey-goosey rule adherence tonight—he hasn’t had anything to drink and there’s no hockey game to distract him—so we roll for each of the rooms that the brigands came out of and more or less split them. We decide that upon hearing the alarm the party backed out of room 35 and prepared weapons. Suddenly faced by 10 brigands instead of 2, they brace for combat.
Bob and I quickly confer about what kind of strategy these brigands would have in place and agree that our party looks far to fresh and are conspicuously lacking in bulging sacks of coinage to be of interest. So the brigand leader calls out: “Ahoy, wayfarers, welcome to the CotMA; don’t be alarmed; we’re dungeon security. We make sure none of the critters wander out and stuff. Let us know if you need anything, we’ve got torches aplenty if you find yourself in the dark.” And they let us pass. We decide that the party is dubious and decides to return down the hall to the spider room rather than risk an ambush as they pass through the midst of this gang. "Suit yourself, and have a happy adventure” yells the Brigand leader as we beat a cautious retreat toward the spider room.
Ok, so the incident itself was pretty uneventful but here’s the bizarre thing, our co-DMing thing had lead to us actually working together as a team to determine how the dungeon would react to the presence of the players within its confines. We were playing the part of the dungeon! Man, this was mind blowing. My enthusiasm for this experiment just went through the roof!
So we turned tail and retreated down to the spider room and proceeded through the other door, wandered down and popped open another door. Roll the dice: Bob’s the reader.
Bob: There are a bunch of troglodytes in this room and in two adjacent rooms, how should we run them? [it’s now assumed that any multi-room encounters shall be run cooperatively]
Me: Troglodytes? I don’t remember much about them. How smart are they? Are they neutral?
Bob: [does a search on the S&W PDF; now that’s kinda’ handy] uuuuh… no troglodytes here.
Me: and I didn’t bring my Monster Manual.
Bob: You wanna fight them?
Me: Not feeling it, no.
Bob: Me either. Screw it, these rooms are empty
And so we moved on. Lesson for the kids: A little preparation here would have really helped the situation.
We come across the little closet of a room off the main hallway—remember, we’re both looking at the maps. The dice say that I’m the reader:
Me: Two skeletons in here, and they attack!
Bob: Should we have Brodsky [the cleric] turn them?
Me: There in a freakin’ closet, where would they go?
Bob: I don’t know; I say we do it and find out.
Me: Your call, I’m just the DM around here.
Bob: [rolls a 17] Sweet! Can you change them to wraiths; I would have turned them too!
Me: They turn tail and run… to the furthest wall of the closet and try to climb it.
Bob: We bash them to bone meal to put on my rose beds [merciless—though inept—dice rolling ensues]
Me: Does attacking them break the spell?
Bob: You’re the Rules Fascist.
Me: Having survived your onslaught they turn to attack
Bob: Asshole
Me: You called me a fascist, what’d you expect?
Bob: You relished it last night.
Me: I still do.
Now we’re back to a more traditional approach; when faced with a mindless opponent, Bob and I are no longer a team running a dungeon, we’re merely alternating the DM role on a room to room basis. This seems a lot less intriguing, especially considering that neither one of us has an idea of what’s going on in here—we didn’t read the front matter of the module and, although we can see the entire layout, we don’t have any idea who or what is behind each door. It kinda’ feels like we’re playing Dungeon, which shouldn’t be surprising since we’ve injected all of the interest and complexity of a Parcheesi piece into this event. I think I'm gonna' have to take some drastic measures to bolster the atmosphere around here, like maybe read the front matter before we play again.
