Naughty Medieval Etchings

Castle Caldwell Explorers VIII - Goblins Come Easy and Go Fast

Saturday 11 November 2017 6:30 – 8:30 PM

The DM was Steve.

The Cast:

Everaxe, Level 2 Dwarf War Cleric of Odin played by Nate

Vuvier, Level 3 Gnome Thief played by Julie

Thane, Level 3 Human Wizard played by Julie

Ronin, Level 3 Human Fighting-Man played by Ethan

Faelin, Level 3 Human Ranger played by Simone

Ældlin, Level 3 Half-Elf Druid played by me, Scott

And

Meira, Level 2 Half-Elf Fighting-Man played by Nate as an NPC since her normal player AJ couldn’t be with us tonight.

When Last We Left Our Murderhobos…

We had just defeated an owlbear in a large library. We just missed the evil wizard Oliver and his nigh-companion (!) Sylvia, who we had been sent to rescue disappearing through a secret door! And we decided to switch up our marching order to put more beef up front.

So we dashed up to the portal where Oliver had gone. Vuvier checked for traps and found there was something ot quite right about the doorknob.  So Ældlin called upon one of his goblin lackeys to check the door. Alack! The goblin touched the knob and was instantly slain! Poison!

So that solved that door thing.

Ronin, he of Strength 18/98, casually obliterated the door with his boot and we stepped through the hole in the wall. Oliver was long gone.  Or was he? WE HAVE A RANGER!! And the dungeon complex is made from packed earth, not stone – she can track them! YAY for Faelin!

She tracked him through the compound and right into a bare wall. We checked and Vuvier found a secret latch and opened a secret door! We went 20’ in and there were bags and bags of rich stuff.

Vuvier, in spite of his better nature, went to collect the jangling, glowing coins. But he tripped a metal door trap which pinned him against a wall!  The rest of us rushed in and found Oliver was guarded by three zombies.

Everaxe the Dwarven war Cleric held his mace back and instead turned the foul fiends. Faelin shot Oliver with an arrow. Since he was cornered and apparently out of spells, he surrendered. He said he would tell us where Sylvia was if Everaxe the Cleric swore he would release him safely. Everaxe thought about it and slugged him unconscious instead.

We extricated Vuvier from the trap. He was okay. A little HP damage but hale and hearty.

We picked up 9600 GP worth of treasure in coins, jewels and jewelry (YAY!) and additionally found several potions and an interesting old leather box. We suspect that the jewels and box belong to Sylvia or were part of a dowry.

Again thanks to Faelin, we determined the bags of coins and rich stuff had been dragged into the dungeon quite recently. Perhaps the riches were Sylvia’s ransom…?

We went back to check the books. The other goblin asked us, “Where is my brother?”

Source

Ældlin told him, “I’m sorry. Your brother is dead. Poison. Oliver did it!”

The goblin jumped upon Oliver in a murderous rage! Before we could stop him, he had run Oliver’s skull through with a potato peeler! Ronin slugged the goblin and killed him.

With a dying declaration, Oliver told Everaxe where to find Sylvia: in the stockade with the men from East Reach where we had late escaped.

Ældlin gave the remaining goblin a healing potion, bringing him back to life. In exchange, the goblin turned up a Ring of Invisibility, Oliver’s spell book, a Dagger +1, and several potions.  Score!!  And now Ældlin has another goblin to hench for him – until there’s another poisoned doorknob.

Ældlin also gave Ronin the Ring of Invisibility, fulfilling Ældlin’s promise to Ronin to give him a magic item in exchange for exclusive bargaining rights for Sylvia’s.

The seven friends and grieving goblin left the dungeon complex, having killed everything and looted a heck of a lot. Ældlin dismissed the snare at the entrance and asked a squirrel if she’d seen men like those at East Reach. She had, and they had been there in the last two days.

Faelin found the tracks of dozens of men and horses heading in the same direction we were going – to Castle Clifton. They were six hours ahead of us. We were low on spells and hit points and there was no way we could reach them in time anyway. Clifton was on his own for now.

We found a secluded spot in the West Wood to bury our treasure, heal up, rest, regain our spells, and level up.

Level Ups:

Vuvier goes to 4!

Ronin goes to 4!

Everaxe goes to 3!

Meira goes to 3!

The other three gain quite a lot of good XP on their way to their next levels.

PROPS: Everybody! I think we made every roll tonight. We all used our special abilities and all made great decisions! Steve made it so fun because we all had a chance to contribute. (Granted, Thane and Meira didn’t do much but Julie had another, active PC and AJ wasn’t there to notice.)

SLOPS: Having to stop earlier than normal tonight. Oh well, we all had a chance to beat the bad guy and get rich!

Additional PROPS: The cat Rosie who was just a total luv all night, spending time in every lap in the place.

NEXT TIME: Magic up a strike team with Invisibility rings and potions and infiltrate the stockade to see just whether Sylvia is there now... or had the foul fiend misled us with his dying declaration?

Remembrance Day and Veteran's Day

If you have no one in your family to honor, remember J.R.R. Tolkien today.

For my own self: Thanks, Dad.

No Critical Hit Table Please!

No, not this critical hit table

Incidental navel-gazing: I have been finding that the more I learn, the more I question conventional wisdom. I think I'm turning into a D&D hipster. 

For this, I denounce myself! ;)

The only figures who are involved in every important fight are the PCs and their allies. Therefore they will be subject to far more numerous critical fumbles and take far more numerous critical hits than any other figure.

The balance to this - the critical hit - is not enough to satisfactorily balance the additional harm the system does to their chances. While small, this disadvantage will add up over several fights.

The solution I came upon is to give only the fighting-man the critical hit. A fighting-man who rolls the 20 drops his man to 0 hits immediately. Like hitting a home run - that at-bat is over, in his favor. It means mooks chump negligibly quicker and he has a chance to slay the nigh-unslayable dragon.

Don't like not getting the crit? Play the fighting-man!

And yes, one-shotting a dragon is pretty awesome (if possibly anticlimactic.)

The larger point is this: combat can be exciting and satisfying with few rules. You don’t need the HERO System to get it right. In early D&D especially, presuming general competence in adventurous men and adhering to simple rules like move rate, morale and attack rolls versus armor class make for perfectly satisfying combat encounters without the gimmick of a critical hit table.

Scratching That Lich

Some of the fellows on ODD74 were discussing the drawbacks and benefits of becoming the lich. In light of how "easy" it is to brew potions of longevity (3 weeks' work for ten years of life), it seems like sheer folly that anyone normal would want to become the lich! You could just stay alive indefinitely and enjoy many, many, many good years by drinking potions!

Of course you wouldn't want to become the lich. You are normal. You like life and would to have more quality years to enjoy it - even if a lot of the time is spent working. But that's only for normal people, like us and the ones you and I meet every day. 

One of my meta-assumptions is that the race of Mankind is consumed by Ambition. That doesn't mean everyone is a maniac, but rather Men are more driven to excellence than are other kinds of people in the Realm. (This assumption explains a lot of things which I won't go into here.)

But even though Men are driven by Ambition with a capital 'A', not all men have the same ambitions and not all men have the same degree of - shall we say - mania about excellence.

Some people are consumed by different ambitions. They are held together by, their life-force completely directed by, some overwhelming negative drive. Without this drive, they would no longer exist in any real sense.

This second kind of person is the one who becomes the lich. Undeath is not a horrid fate to be avoided, but rather a blessing. No longer is he tied to humanity, no longer driven by food, companionship, sleep, or bodily functions, the lich is able finally to get its work done. And it never has to stop.

Liches are really, really driven to accumulate power. More than anyone else in history.

If there were lots of people like this, then there would be an arbitrarily large number of liches due to their arbitrarily long existences. In many campaign worlds there are zero, one, two, or a few, which means there are very few people indeed who have the power to become one, and also do indeed go through with it.

You or I would not become the lich, but that doesn't mean no one would. The lich is born long before the ceremony is performed to create it - lichdom is eternal, only marked by the softness of life at its beginning. Apotheosis is but the start of everything to come.

On Personality

Personality is important! It's important in the part of the game that, earlier on, had no rules to it. The only "personality" the game demands is to play to one's alignment. Even Charisma is not so much personality as it is a mechanical stat that helps adjudicate how persuasive your figure can be,

As the import of "role-playing" as we know it today increased (and as the concept of "player" and the concept of "character" became distinct from one another), more rules were added to reward playing a role at the table.

But in the beginning, role-playing was its own reward. And that is a good thing, because not everyone likes to do it or is clever at it. But Dave Arneson invented the Platonic idea of the role-player as it pertains to D&D back in Dave Wesley's Braunstein games.

In my version of D&D that I wrote, there are no rules for RP other than Alignment (which dictates languages and the Cleric's conduct). There is still a ton of RP that goes on - there's just no in-game reward for it; I have found that the table reward is enough.

It's difficult to become attached to a particular chess piece in a particular game. That's because the pieces have no personality and we don't expect to animate them with our own. They're just machines. In the same way, a PC with no personality is a machine. He's just not going to be as much fun, nor will you become attached to him.

It is through the special alchemy of RP that we are able to turn paper men real in our minds and therefore fall in love with them and with the game as a whole.

Castle Caldwell Explorers 7.1 - The Map of the Realm

Finally! The map of the Realm!

Steve made this since it's his Realm. I had received a copy without a scale on it, but just Saturday he brought one with hexes overlaid, and then sent me the PDF.  I'm thrilled!

This little picture really doesn't do the map justice, so download the PDF and take a look!

The scale is 1 hex = 40 miles.  That means each hex from one flat edge to the opposite is 40 miles. One corner to the opposite corner is 46 and 2/3 miles.  Therefore the length of one side of a hex is 23 and 1/3 miles. Therefore the area of one hex is roughly 1400 sq. miles. That's a lot of territory! In fact, one hex is almost exactly the size of the state of Rhode Island- maybe a little bigger.

There are 17 x 11.5 of these hexes in this map. 195.5 hexes. Therefore the area of the map is approximately 276,000 sq miles, almost exactly the area of the state of Texas.

There is a river that divides the map roughly east-west, flowing from the highlands to the lowlands into Cisimins Bay. North of the river is the Kingdom of Weston. South is the Kingdom of Williamston. (I'm not clear on the names of the kingdoms, but those are the capitols.)

Right in the middle of the map you can see Castle Clifton, right between the West Wood and the East Wood, in Hex 1010. Sylvia is to marry Baron Frey over in 0704. The realm of East Reach (centered on 1310) are in the process of invading our Realm! They have established one outpost that we know about: a stockade with 100 men and one wizard between 1010 and 1110.

Examining the map, there are clear adventure hooks pulling us in several directions. 

• The people of East Reach. Do we fight them? Join them? Stay neutral?
• What about the stockade in East Wood? Should we take it or burn it down?
• What happens when Sylvia has to go to Frey? Will we go with her, and why?
• The Tabernacle of Frea is in 0611. I would personally love to visit to see what it looks like and what sorts enpeople it.
• Why are the Wildelands called that?

What is that mysterious tower in 1305...?

Curse My Fat Fingers!

Darnit, I deleted the post of the weapons! Thankfully I have the info saved, but not the specific text of the post.

I'm working on armor today. The most interesting thing is that full plate armor didn't exist until perhaps the year 1400. The "plate" that existed c. 1200 was mail-and-plate or half-plate, with iron plates and splints supplementing chain armor. By 1400-1450, plate armor was steel and less expensive than chain because it was less labor-intensive.

So I think what I'll do is like this: 

Gambeson: AC 8

Brigantine: AC 6

Chain and Gambeson: AC 5

Half Plate and Gambeson: AC 4

Buckler: -1 AC

Shield: -2 AC in this narrow setting but -1 AC in other settings as normal.

Replica gambeson. I was unable to find a photo of an original.

For the record, here is our current Weapons table:

Click to enlarge

Castle Caldwell Explorers VII - Some Lizardmen Peed In That

Saturday 10-28-17 6:30 - 10 PM

The DM was Steve.

Dramatis Personae: 

• Everaxe, Level 3 Dwarf war Cleric of Odin, played by Nate.
• Ronin, Level 4 Human Fighting-Man played by Ethan.
• Faelin, Level 3 Human Ranger played by Simone.
• Ældlin, Level 3 Half-Elf Druid played by me, Scott.
• Vuvier, Level 3 Gnome Thief guy played by Julie.
• Thane, Level 3 Human Magic-User played by Julie.
• Meira, Level 3 Half-Elf bow Fighter played by Alexséya (AJ).

Our fellowship returned to Castle Clifton to find the assembled craftsmen to have reached numbers into the dozens. Clifton is moving ahead swiftly with the fortification and staffing of his new castle. He was harried and distracted and quite upset that we were back without his niece Sylvia. You might remember that she is to be wed to a Baron, the Baron of Frey, a hundred miles to the Northwest.     

Vuvier with wolf cap and ancestral hand axe

We told Clifton about the incursion of the men of the North, from the barony of East Reach by their heraldry. Despite getting little to no sleep, he was insistent that we set off again and not return without his niece.

Ældlin begged Clifton to replace Everaxe's plate armor. Lord Clifton vaguely agreed he would do it later, but probably just to shoo us back to the rescue attempt. I won't forget.

We did stop briefly at the pavilion erected to Freya on his grounds, presumably there to consecrate the land or something. It was unclear. For donations, they healed us. In addition they gave Everaxe a Cloak of AC +1 because of his misfortune, and due to his clerical devotion to Odin, a fellow god of Freya.

On the path back to the hole where we believe Sylvia was taken, we learned that Everaxe the Dwarf Cleric and Faelin the girl Ranger are in the employ of Baron Frey and were there in the first place to secure Sylvia's safety. (Actually Steve told me that he had already explained that but for the life of me I have no memory of such an exposition. Oh well, this is my story so I'll tell it my way!)

We also saw some Men of Eastreach on patrol, but were able to avoid the few groups we came across thanks to Faelin's scouting.

When we reached the cave entrance, we reconnoitered the area at Ronin's suggestion. We found no other entries. Ronin then suggested we trap the entrance. Ældlin cast Snare among the flora near the entrance and the fellows entered carefully.

Thankfully Eevraxe had point. His Dwarf senses detected new construction. Vuvier the Gnome Thief found a pit trap and directed us around it. There was a chair, but no guard. Perhaps we had slain them all?

We went this time to the Western passage and found ourselves face to face with three Lizard Men!

Give us a nice, wet lickery-kiss

...Three Lizard Men!

That's more like it!

Everaxe gallantly dashed in, tripped over his feet and fell flat! The sleestacks Lizard Men pounced and brought him low with their spears. In the mean time, Faelin and Ronin teamed up to bring two of the enemies near death. Ældlin charged in to protect the fleeing Dwarf! They slammed into one another and now it was Ædlin who found himself seated in the dirt!

The several heroes did make short work of the three Lizard Men, who had bupkis for treasure.

Backtracking then, we found another barracks room with three more Lizard Men!

Again, we took them out fast and again they had nothing good on them.

We found a small passage down a slope and into a room with a pool. It was completely dark, so Everaxe poked around. He considered drinking some of the water to see if it was magic, but decided against it.

File Photo

Up the hallway a ways we heard a loud obnoxious goblin. Those of us who speak goblin could hear he was moaning about having to peel potatoes and carrots. Everaxe had an idea! 

From the hallway in Goblin he said: "I'm here to take over for you! Your shift is over!"

The goblin asked, "Who you are? Where you come from?"

Everaxe said, "Who is none of your concern! We come from the pool at the end of the hallway with the Lizard Men!"

The goblin said, "Oh! You come from the Lizard Man rooms! They no have to cook! They get to fight! And they get their own bathroom! I HATE the Lizard Men! Okay! Come in!"

The pool was their bathroom. And Everaxe almost drank it!

Everaxe said, "I need help moving this cask of fine Orcish wine!"

The goblin squealed with delight and dashed out! Everaxe grabbed him and we tied him up!

His name was Whichgoblin and we negotiated his services as a guide and mercenary guard for three gold coins - more money than he had ever seen - as well as a promise that he would never have to cook for anyone else ever again.

He led us up to the next room, another kitchen with another goblin caterwauling away about making stew all day and night. It turned out this second goblin (whose name I forgot, darnit) was the brother of the first, and agreed to the same deal as before. They showed us a secret passage to where Oliver laired. Oliver was the name of the Man who ran the dungeon complex and presumably held Sylvia!

Vuvier figured out how to open the passage and we entered Oliver's study while the goblin brothers held rearguard. 

Our new mercs. Sculpts by WizKids

No sooner did we cross into his vast study then our two meat shields, Ronin and Everaxe hit the deck, victims of a Sleep spell! Worse, an owlbear picked up the hapless Everaxe and tossed him twenty feet across the room! Worse yet, Everaxe had no backup weapon and his morning star stayed on the ground where he had fallen!

Within the room we saw a laughing Man, likely a mad wizard of some kind: Oliver! 

In the back corner we saw a maiden in a chair: Sylvia!

We woke up the dudes, beat the Owlbear, but lost Oliver as he dashed out a secret door... followed, seemingly of her own free will... Sylvia! 

While we gathered ourselves, Ældlin and Ronin stuffed their packs full of rare books from a large bookshelf on the wall.

And that was the end of the session tonight!

Two thoughts: I cast Charm Person or Animal on Oliver - twice - and twice he made his Save. This might have been good luck, but it's making me think.

From 5e

Earlier on we had found the illusion of an Owlbear and a Maiden in the main common area. I wonder if Oliver and/or Sylvia were illusions? It seems odd that they were able to dash off, together, through a door we didn't see when we came in. And was the whole thing an illusion? Is that why we didn't see the door?

It remains to be seen!

In The Works

Stonegazer vs Boobgazer by KT Andersson

No finished product to share tonight. Tomorrow is our game night so I'll write an actual play report for Sunday or Monday.

The next couple of Welsh Marches posts I'm working on are

1) I am deciding which weapons and armor will exist in the Welsh Marches. It will be a narrower selection than in D&D, but not by much. I am also thinking about making all the hit dice and weapon damage d6 instead of the several polyhedrals.

2) Fixing a weapon type versus armor type table for those weapons and armor, starting with the tables from GREYHAWK and modifying them for our purposes.

3) Based on my terrible misadventure with Some King's Kent and the Yeoman class, the idea has been percolating that the several "units" for the wargames part of the setting ought to be outfitted with uniform armor and weapon types based on their country of origin and social class.

4) Then based on those unit types, making up several narrow fighting-man classes like the Knight we made earlier on.