D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 13

Favorite Trap/Puzzle

This one, which I wrote for the “Tomb of Horrors” super-adventure. (Spoilers!)

An open archway reveals a massive cubic chamber with a 3-foot-high white stone altar at its center. The characters know that this chamber contains a hidden exit leading to their goal, but there’s no sign of secret doors in the floor, ceiling, or walls. On the altar sits a skull whose eyes and teeth are gleaming jewels. No sign of danger can be seen in the room — but if the characters specifically search the floor along the walls of the room or along the bottom of the shrine, they notice a thin seam.

Any tests of the floor reveal it to be solid, because it is — a solid stone slab set at the top of a 90-foot-deep pit. The white stone altar is actually the top of a 93-foot-high stone column, around which the floor is set.

If the altar is touched, the magic holding the floor in place is disrupted, whereupon the floor shatters and falls. Any characters in the room drop 90 feet, taking damage as they hit the ground within several tons of tumbling rubble. A minute later, a false stone-slab ceiling at the top of the pit also falls, shattering to drop several more tons of loose rubble to the bottom of the pit and on top of the injured characters scrambling around in it — or those savvy enough to have triggered the falling floor remotely, and who are in the process of smugly descending, convinced that they’ve outsmarted the DM.

The central pillar is hollow, and the exit from the pit can eventually be located through a cleft halfway up its side. Assuming there’s anyone left to find it.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 12

Favorite Dungeon Type/Location

Ruins. I like ruins. I like things crashing down and falling apart. I like the threat of fixtures breaking when you touch them. I like hallways that end in walls of rubble, and adventurers squeezing through fault cracks that have opened up new routes taking them to places they were never meant to go. I like the floor covered in a layer of scree so thick that every time the fighter rolls a Stealth check, it sounds like he’s running a rock polisher.

I like crumbling keeps and decaying castles whose original function is long gone, and which have been repurposed a hundred different times by fifty different armies and fifty different groups of monsters before the PCs ever set foot on the threshold. I like a dungeon that has its own dungeons, which in turn have their own dungeons, which neither of the groups who built the first two levels of dungeons had any knowledge of.

I like ruins because I like history. I like the idea that each generation of exploration and imperialism in a campaign world is forced to walk over and across the bones of the kingdoms and empires that rose and fell before it. I like the idea that adventurers can touch this history — and that this history can often touch them right back, in ways that aren’t always pleasant.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 11

Favorite Adventure You Have Run

The old Saltmarsh series — AD&D adventure modules U1 to U3, by Dave J. Browne and Don Turnbull of TSR UK — are far and away the best set of adventures I’ve ever played as a DM.

“Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh” is a perfect example of how to create a multilevel mystery narrative and marry a site-based adventure to a story without railroading the characters. “Danger at Dunwater” (besides having the coolest AD&D cover art ever!!!) is a great lesson to PCs and players alike about why you should never take a straight-up hack-and-slash dungeon crawl at face value. “The Final Enemy” marries a stealth infiltration mission to monstrous political intrigue and moral dilemma. Oh, and your characters are underwater the whole time.

What are you going to do?

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 10

Craziest Thing That’s Happened to a Party/the Characters/the Players

The time a character used the last ring in a ring of three wishes to escape a sticky situation, then worded the wish: “Get me the hell out of here! No, wait!”

The dungeon so ridiculously deadly that the DM didn’t bother giving the NPC hirelings names; he just gave them numbers.

The time we played “Steading of the Hill Giant Chief” with 4th-level characters. Because how hard could it be, right?

The time a PC was badly dismembered in a flooding temple that the rest of the characters had to desperately escape. But needing to grab all of his body parts for raise dead, they opened up a bag of holding under the water and vacuumed up a sanguine cocktail of his watery remains. When they later opened the bag to pour hi out at the temple, it wasn’t pretty.

The time an eight-armed stone golem armed with scimitars of sharpness hacked apart an NPC cleric who had gone temporarily insane and tried to desecrate an area of the dungeon that the golem was guarding. Only the cleric was wearing a ring of regeneration, so after the golem dismembered him, he’d start to come back to life again. So the golem would hack apart his still-regenerating remains once more, and the cleric would start to come back again, so the golem would hack apart the even more finely diced remains again, and so on. This went on until there was nothing left of the cleric but a fine paste.

The time a troll was wearing a ring of fire resistance that the PCs never bothered to search its body for after they killed it and set it on fire for good measure. So even after burning, enough troll-stuff was left clinging to the ring that the troll eventually regenerated from it, and went off in pursuit of the party. Whereupon they killed and burned it again, once more not bothering to search it for rings. Whereupon it would regenerate again and come looking for them, even more ticked off about having been killed each previous time. This went on for about a week before they figured it out.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 9

Favorite Character You Haven’t Played

When talking about characters I’ve rolled up and wanted to play but never had a chance to play, there are too many to name and remember, owing to my having started out playing AD&D. That was a system whose character creation rules were so simple that you rolled up new characters every few days just for something to do — and whose survivability at low levels was so tenuous that it was good to have extras on hand when your current PCs inevitably dropped dead.

From the sketchy notes that survive from back in the day, I remember Gedron Shadomage, who was created for a foray into the Caves of Chaos but set aside in favor of another PC (Morgan, from yesterday’s post) at the last minute. I also remember Endolas the Unknown — a half-drow fighter/magic-user who was lovingly rolled up but never used. And this back before everybody and their dogs were playing drow, because there weren’t actually any rules for playing drow. Then there was the paladin Ayrthond, a disinherited knight based loosely on Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. A monk named Armir. A halfling thief named Bogie Broadfoot.

Because the thought of all these wannabe adventurers never getting their shot at glory makes me sad, I choose to believe that they’re out there in the campaign world somewhere, basking in the glory of as-yet-unwritten exploits. Or maybe they all got smart, sold their weapons and armor to open up a crossroads tavern in the heart of adventuring country, and made some real money.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 8

Favorite Character You Have Played

Morgan, AD&D fighter, who wasn’t the first character I ever played but was the first character who stuck around long enough to become important to me. This was 1982, and he was modeled after the character Travis Morgan from Mike Grell’s The Warlord. Not specifically for the look (and my version always favored chain mail; the spandex-and-loincloth wardrobe range that the comic version sported never did much for me), but for the ethos of the character.

The Warlord was Grell's take on the classic modern-warrior-in-a-barbaric-world trope that went back to Edgar Rice Burroughs. However, in place of the detached-hero-of-destiny archetype in the John Carter of Mars vein, Grell made Travis Morgan a resolutely human warrior, carving him out of equal parts violence and morality. Morgan could hack his way through a cadre of enemy lizardfolk with Conan-like ease, but when he was done, he would talk about how his purpose as a warrior was more than just the base pursuit of blood and gold. In an oft-heard refrain, Morgan spoke of a world in which the credo of the strong wasn’t “Might make right,” but “Might for right,” and that changed my view of the world.

(It’s a simplistic philosophy, to be sure, but I was in high school; cut me some slack.)

For me, translating Morgan from the comic to the world of D&D as I did, that credo and the ethos it was built on perfectly exemplified the core tenets of neutral good, which has always been my favorite and default alignment. Ultimately, Morgan as I played him had only a few things in common with the comic character. But that sense of characters fighting not just for gain and glory, not for crown or country, but for a better world and a greater personal purpose became a key component in the way I like to play D&D, and in a lot of the professional fantasy world-building that’s followed it.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 7

Favorite Edition

Excellent question! And no potential for controversy at all!

In general, I think the best edition of any game is the edition you’re playing and having fun with at any given time. Original AD&D was the D&D I started with, and it was exactly what I wanted it to be while I was playing it. I skipped 2nd Edition AD&D (for reasons having nothing to do with its quality; I think it’s a great revision in its own right), and when I picked up 3rd Edition, it was exactly what I wanted it to be while I was playing it. I worked on a lot of 4th Edition D&D and loved its focus and mechanics. I’ve worked in some way or another on pretty much every official release so far for D&D 5th Edition, and I can attest that it’s as great a game as everyone else is saying it is.

But stacking all the editions up against each other, my favorite would be D&D 3rd Edition. Because 3e was a game that I thought captured the feel of the best AD&D rules in ways that made narrative sense, and I’m a big fan of things making narrative sense. AD&D said, “Your magic-user can’t wear armor and your thief can’t use a shield; that’s just the way it is, suck it up.” 3rd Edition said, “Your wizard can wear full plate and your thief can use a heavy steel shield if you really want them to; but you really don’t want them to, because the following penalties will weigh you down.”

I personally loved that approach, just as I loved the way the 3rd Edition mechanics extended so naturally from AD&D — even when the mechanics were turned upside down, as with the conversion from combat tables and THAC0 to ascending AC. I loved that 3rd Edition saving throws were technically very different than in AD&D but that they felt the same. I loved that the magic items of 3e were the same as those in AD&D, except now there were properly codified rules for how they worked and how they were made. I loved that  even as 3e took the game along very different paths than AD&D trod (and I’m the first to admit that some of those directions were ultimately more complex than they needed to be), the gaming journey felt the same as the journey I’d taken all those years ago.

(I also loved the Open Gaming License, with a passion that knows no bounds. After a long hiatus from gaming, it was actually the OGL that got me interested in D&D again — and specifically, the sense that came with the OGL of what sorts of creative possibilities existed within such a license. That sense of open-ended creativity jump-started my interest in the new edition, and ultimately led to me working on it. That’s kind of a side issue, though.)

(Archive post from the personal blog.)