Beyond Vinland, session 2

The adventure opens with the warriors three (Erik the Conqueror, Hjorek Hafgarson, and Grandfather Thorne) chillaxin' down at the meadhall. Erik is doing his best to impress Inga Vast-tracks, the barmaid, with his tales of how he almost conquered the kobolds last session, while Hjorek is dropping some mad Norse rhymes. Meanwhile Grandpa is eyeing the Mysterious Elf sipping wine in the corner. No one knows for sure where Zoyd Sampson is to be found, but there's a rumour floating around the Keep that the local lord's daughter has taken a shining to him.

Suddenly, an ill wind starts blowing in from the direction of the Canyon of Chaos. On its accursed breeze floats an eerie chanting. Kuvartma! Kuvartma! Tekeli-li! Kuvartma! Ia! Before the full import of this omen may be ascertained, there's a crash like thunder as a huge inhuman thing bursts through the rafters of the hall will a howl from the very pits of Hel itself. It's shape is not completely unlike a great ape, but with the additions of curving horns and batlike wings. The barmaid screams.

The assembled adventurers spring into action, but they are caught unprepared. They have no armor girding their loins and their fiercest weapons are not at hand. Still, they mount what defense they can. The enigmatic elf has a bow at hand and immediately begins firing arrows into the nightspawned abomination, but most of the volley bounces off the creature's preternatural hide. Hrojek and Eric, unprepared though they be, leap into the fray, engaging the hellbeast in close combat. For that they pay dearly. Each of these braves heroes is struck down by claw and fang.

Hoo, boy. This was heading towards a TPK and it was all my fault. Being short a man and not having their armor on really hurt the ability of the PCs to fight Kuvartma's Messenger. At one point Erik was legally dead, but since I had engineered this disaster I felt duty bound to undo that. I'm usually not shy about these things, so I announced "The elf pours a Potion of DM Fiat down your throat and you're not quite dead."

While the two fighting men are down the winged monster reaches out a mighty paw and grabs the girl. Her screams echo throughout the keep. In a moment the thing takes to the air with its captive and wings its way through the moonlit sky towards the caverns. Most of the heroes want to immediately stage a rescue on the monster's home turf, at night. But cooler heads argued that the party is already grievously wounded and such a task would be suicide. Everyone begrudgingly agrees to the wisdom of this strategem, despite the additional danger a delay might pose to Inga.

The three heroes set out for the Canyon at the first light of the next day. The Mysterious Elf is nowhere to be found. The fresh tracks in the mud in front of the kobold-occupied cave are much too large for any small humanoid to have made. Entering the cave, the adveturers are pleasantly surprised to find no guards posted in the first room. In fact, an exploration of a large portion of the cave complex shows several areas to be empty. There are even some signs of rooms being recently cleared of contents. Several mysteries are investigated but not fully understood, such as kobold-barricaded door with nothing but a strange corpse beyond and a single horizontal metal bar across a passageway entrance (which they figure out later was an old curtain-rod).

Finally, our heroes see some action. The come across a large chamber with a sizeable pool in the center and two other ways out. At the pool are four kobold women filling buckets of water. At the double doors across the room are two kobold guards. As the washer-women flee up the stairs one kobold guard charges Hjorek while the other summons help from beyond the guarded door. Grandpa Thorne judiciously chucks a spell grenade (sonic burst, IIRC) up the stairs and into the guardroom where the kobold females had fled. Meanwhile Erik and Hjorek were across the room dealing with enemies appearing from beyond the doors. Eerie chanting could be heard from the other side as kobolds in ceremonial garb rushed out to engage the heroes with their wicked little spears. The robed leader of the kobolds eventually appeared, firing laser beams of pure anti-matter from his hands.

While Thorne the Dwarf's sonic attack had delayed enemy action from the stairway, it did not halt it. Eventually a dozen or so hardy kobold warriors rushed down the stairs and Thorne drew a line in the sand, intent on holding them off so his allies would not find themselves surrounded. At an opportune moment Erik used his magic to enlarge the dwarf, but still the kobolds attempted to outmaneuver him. Several waded into the water, but they were cut down by Thorne's axe, turning the pool into gorey chum.

Hjorek, channeling the might of ancient heroes, pushes through the kobold mob at the doors to engage the sorcerous leader. But this old kobold is canny, and falls back while blasting Hjorek with mystic flames. Eventually our hero can see into the room down the hall. It is an unholy shrine of some sort. Two kobold acolytes chant over a naked Inga, who is chained to a bloodstained altar under a crude wooden statue of a winged gorilla. Later these two altar boys would attempt to sneak through the melee and flee, only for Erik to take time from his busy kobold-fighting schedule to brain the both of them.

After much hullabaloo the spellslinging kobold is slain, along with one of his two elite warrior cronies. The other elite kobold, grievously wounded, offers a truce in crude Common "Spare me. Show treasure." Erik hesitates for a moment and Hjorek walks up behind the poor little bastard and knocks him out with the pommel of his sword. The six or so remaining kobolds are slain, with the exception of a single kobold warrior who dives into the pool of water and is not seen afterwards.

The post-battle party was kinda rough around the edges. In keeping with his personal goal of ridding the continent of all the monsters, Erik dispatched all the non-combatant kobolds he could catch. It was suggested that he had sex with Inga on the altar. While it strikes me as ridiculously unrealistic to think she'd be in the mood under the circumstances, the idea did fit in pretty well with the Conan groove we were operating under. I took 'the monster grabs the girl' right out of the R.E. Howard playbook, so we might as well see the situation all the way through.

The spared kobold really did lead the party to the secret treasure trove. The wee git is killed when the party insists he open the chests. The first three go just fine. They contain copper pieces, silver pieces, and rock candy. Kobolds love rock candy, didn't you know? The fourth chest was full of trap, and the kobold fell over with a face and chest full of dart wounds. The last chest had some gold in it. The kobold leader also had a wand of cure moderate wounds and a magic amulet on a chain that has the properties of giving a +1 natural amor bonus and as well as a refillable necklace of missiles.

The party ended the session by travelling to the town of Osvar, where they sold the kobold's ape-idol to Osala the Sagess. She's got a passing interesting in the religious practices of humanoids.

Other than the near-miss with the Total Party Kill, I had a pretty darned good time. The players seemed to be digging it as well. Now that the kobolds have been eradicated we can turn our attentions to other parts of the Canyon of Chaos. Doug also suggested that an eventual goal for the party should be to found their own settlement. That sounds pretty cool to me, and well within the scope of our Viking colony theme.

Odinsday Update #1

[I emailed this to the players of my new D&D campaign.]

My plan is to send all you all an email on the Wednesday that we aren't playing, as a way of outlining what is happening between sessions. If you have any master plans to pursue responding to this would be a great way we could keep track of that stuff.

Between forays to the Canyon of Chaos your hardy adventurers are staying at the wilderness keep/hamlet of Lord Beppo Rust-Axe. Lord Beppo is away on business at the moment and the keep is in the hands of his loyal castellan, Sigurd the Half-Jotun. While Beppo is known for being a pretty hospitable guy, his castellan is rather wary of ne'er-do-wells such as ye. You will have to choose between staying for free at the keep but eating, sleeping, and drinking with the lowly guards (the absolute minimal hospitality Sigurd can get away with) or whooping it up at the Traveller's Inn meadhall in the adjacent hamlet. If you choose the meadhall cut your cash on hand in half, but you generally have a better time of it. Let me know which arrangements you prefer before next session begins. You are not required to all choose the same lodgings, but we will start the next run with a little action in town, so you might prefer to stick together.

While staying at the keep you hear four rumors regarding the Caverns:

1) A wizard called Umanno the Summoner is said to reside in one of the upper caves. He hails from Hyboria but is neither Aesir nor Vanir (i.e. not a viking dude).

2) The hobgoblins of the Canyon are a mercenary unit looking for work.

3) Many centuries ago the caves were used as tombs by a prehuman civilization. On certain nights ghosts of these dead not-men still haunt the canyon.

4) "Bree-Yark!" is Goblinish for "We surrender!"

Beyond Vinland: the party

Here's what the players came up with for my new campaign.

Doug took advantage of my pantheon clerics house rule to make Erik the Conqueror, a badass Cleric with the Death and War domains. The rest of the party subscribes to the Norse pantheon as well, so he was busting out a lot of faith healing last night. That's a new spell that work's like cure light but you don't roll dice. It does a flat 8+caster level. The trick is you have to be a believer in the cleric's faith. Erik dubs himself the Conqueror because he sees the new world as a land that rightfully belongs to men, not the inhuman monsters that presently occupy it. He plans on doing something about it.

Stuart whipped up Hjorek Hafgarson, a Bardic Sage/Warblade. Bardic Sage is a brainier, slightly nerdier bard variant from Unearthed Arcana. Warblade is the hot new class from Book of 9 Swords. Hjorek's deal is that he isn't the bard his daddy (the famous bard Hafgar) tried to raise him up as, but he spent a lot of time studying the legendary feats of great heroes and gods. His nifty Warblade powers represent his ability to mimic the deeds of past heroes. Pretty cool.

Jason created Zoyd Sampson, who wins the award for the least Viking sounding name in the group. But hey, I don't really care. We're not shooting for authenticity here, but awesome-osity. Zoyd is a Battle Sorcerer, another Unearthed Arcana variant. These guys trade in some of their spells slots to get a better hit die, better BAB, and the ability to wear light armor while casting. Zoyd desparately wants to be a sword-swinging hero even though his talents naturally lean towards sorcery, so he spend much of his time using his spells to make himself a buffer fight guy.

Pat's dude is Grandfather Thorne, a dwarf Fighter/Archivist. Archivist is a sweet class from Heroes of Horror. The main deal is that it's a divine casting class that uses a wizard-like spellbook. But viking wizards in this game don't use spellbooks. They use staves covered in runes. In Thorne's case he actually carves his runes into the haft of his bigass axe. I can't tell you yet exactly what Thorne's deal is, except that he's a grumpy old dwarf.

So that's Our Gang.

I'm jazzed.

My new Beyond Vinland games starts tonight. Here's where we are starting:

Beyond Vinland: Viking PC rules

Here's the info I emailed my players for creating totally authentic pseudo-Hyborian viking types. Additional notes appear in brackets.

Viking Cultural Info

Alignments: Any

Races: Human, Elf, Dwarf, Half-Elf, Half-Giant, Troll, Half-Troll (If I can find a decent Half-Troll write-up)

[I have the half-troll from Bastion's Minions, but I'm not entirely satsified with it.]

Bloodlines allowed: Fey, Giant, Hag, Troll

Classes: No Monks, Samurai, Ninjae, Wu Jens, or Shugenjas. No psionic classes except Half-Giants may take levels in Psychic Warrior.

[The races list is pretty small, so I wanted to be wide open with the classes. But viking Ninjas and Psions is a little too wide open for even my tastes.]

Traditional Enemies: Giants, Drow, Serpent Men (Yuan Ti and such), Dragons & their kin, Trolls

Weapons of Choice: Shortbow, Shortspear, Swords, Axes

[The Traditional Enemies and Weapons of Choice fields have no mechanics attached.]

Pantheon Domains: Air, Animal, Chaos, Charm (SC), Courage (SC), Death, Destruction, Dwarf (SC, dwarves only), Elf (SC), Fire, Glory (SC), Glutton (SC), Good, Knowledge, Law, Lust (SC), Magic, Ocean (SC), Plant, Portal (SC), Retribution (SC), Rune (SC), Strength, Trickery, War (shortspear, longsword, warhammer), Water

[SC stands for Spell Compendium.]

Additional Clerical Note: Spiritual Weapon is always a hammer.

[Both the mighty Thor and tradition demand it.]

Miscellaneous: Big horned or winged helmets. Loud. Like to brag. Men wear beards and/or moustaches, often elaborately braided.

[Again, no mechanics here. Just window dressing.]

Note to PCs: The Dungeon is Dangerous

When a DM sends the PCs on a specific mission, I think you have an obligation to play fair. If Ganmerlinster sends you out to retrieve the Great MacGuffin the expectation on the part of the players is that the beardy guy won't ask you to do something you can't handle. It might be a tough gig but no DMPC should ever send the party on an unpossible quest. (And any DM that sets up a quest where only a pet NPC can finish the job ought to be tied up in a burlap bag and beaten with sticks.) To me, this issue goes straight to the trust and responsibility implicit in the DM role.

But the Dungeon is a different matter. I'm talking about the classic big, sprawling, multi-level underground complex, places like Castles Greyhawk and Blackmoor. I feel a different sense of obligation when it comes to these nightmare underworlds. For one thing, I don't feel like the DM has to be fair in the sense that all challenges are meant to be overcome by the PCs. If first level PCs take the elevator down to level 5 whatever happens next is on the players' heads. No one should ever be in a big, multi-level dungeon and say "We can take the Troll King! The DM wouldn't throw him at us if we couldn't handle him!" Sometimes in a big dungeon enviroment the right thing to do is to run away to live to fight another day, preferably after leveling up and buying some scrolls.

If I'm reading him right my Prussian homie Settembrini looks at these too different states ("Challenge but don't overpower the PCs." and "If the PCs tug on Superman's cape it's their tough luck.") and sees too different styles of play. The first he might call Tactical Gaming, which emphasizes setting up fair fights and pushing around the pieces on the game board. 3rd edition D&D really brought Tactical Gaming to the fore. The second he calls Strategic Gaming, which hinges on taking unfair situations and working to overcome those handicaps through smarter outside-the-box thinking. Earlier editions of D&D (going back to OD&D, Basic/Expert, and 1st edition Advanced) maybe weren't always clear on the importance of strategic play, but they were written implicitly with that play style in mind.

Maybe Set is right and D&D has (at least) two distinctive styles of play, but I would suggest that a hybrid approach is possible and perhaps even preferable. In my experience few players want to constantly face the challenge of strategic operations. I know personally there are many nights when I just want to the DM to line up some orcs to fight. But to know that every encounter will have the CR crafted to your party's level eventually leads to boredom. I relish occasionally finding myself in over my head. One of gaming's great thrills is to escape an untenable situation by the skin of your teeth. Even greater is the satisfaction of going back prepared and giving the bastards what for. Hey, undead dickweed! We're back and we brought wooden stakes!

I started this blog entry as a way of putting the players of Beyond Vinland on notice. Don't get cocky. There may be balrogs at the bottom of those stairs.

I feel like crap, but here have a map!

So I've been home sick today. So sick it wasn't even until this afternoon that I considered getting online. Too sick for the internet is pretty sick, at least for me. I spent couple hours this morning watching the second greatest movie in the history of cinema. There are parts of that flick that choke me up a little on a good day, but at a low ebb like today I just started crying my eyes out near the end.

On a totally unrelated note, here's the first draft of a map of the Five Seas region, the central area of my new campaign.

(Click to see a larger version.)

The scale is 1 hex equals 30 miles or so, I think. The settlements in the southeast corner mark the westernmost extension of Vinland. Any Vikings found west of those regions will be fellow adventurers, renegades, hardy traders, or explorers. The town on the map edge is Osvar, the largest Norse settlement this far west. The ruler there is the son of the founder of the settlement. He's a nasty little fellow whose favorite sport is troll-baiting. The tower is the domain of Randolf the Red, the greatest wizard in Vinland. He is rumored to possess both manrunes and godrunes, whatever that might mean. He's also known in wizard circles to be a bit of a perv for his fetishistic insistence on wearing pants, as opposed to the mumus, robes, and skirts so popular with normal, well-adjusted arcane masters. The village just east of the town and across the sea from the wizard's tower is called Ingvoll. It's little more than a trading post with a lawless Wild West vibe. The keep at the western terminus of the sea sits firmly on the border of Vestland, past that it's mostly unknown territory. Some sort of monster-infested cave system is rumored to be located near that keep. The village on the other side of the forest is inhabited and controlled by locals of some sort. I'm still working out the details.

I made the map with HexMapper, a little doodad you can download from here.

Beyond Vinland house rules

This new campaign of mine will be run mostly with standard 3.5 D&D, but I do have a few tweaks I'm making. I'll bold the text I sent the players, with my explanation following afterwards.

Wizards' Runestaff: Instead of spellbooks wizards utilize quarterstaves with runes cut in them, one rune per spell. They function exactly like spellbooks normally do. Any book of spells found in play will be more less like Elminster's Happy Recipe Book and more like the Necronomicon. Also: Wizards wear big pointy Gandalf hats. Believe it.

I thought staffs covered in eldritch runes fit the theme much better than musty old books. Since mechanically a wizard's staff functions exactly like a standard spellbook, there is little effect on gameplay. A runestaff can also be used to thwack people or can be enchanted with other magical properties, but I don't think there's ever been a rule against doing those things with a big book. Doug notes that one big difference is that you can really pimp over a wizard by swiping his staff and breaking it across your knee. One of the reasons I like to game with Doug is that he thinks like that.

Pantheon Clerics: Cleric's are not required to pick a patron deity, but instead serve an entire pantheon. Clerics may be of any alignment and may pick any two domains available to the pantheon. (See the Viking Cultural Sheet attached.) One domain must be from the PHB.

Everybody bitches about the fact that following one patron deity to the neglect of all others is historically inaccurate, but I went and did something about it. Does widening the domain and alignment choices make clerics even more powerful? Sure. Do I care? Not really. I'm not exactly sure why I demanded one domain be from the standard list.

Ale & Wenches Rule: At any time the DM may demand payment of 'miscellaneous expenses'. Expect to pay at least 100gp times your level when visiting Viking towns.

I'm not that concerned about draining coinage from the players. I just wanted to clearly establish the default motivation for the PCs to go on adventures.

Buying stuff: The biggest Viking settlement this side of the Atlantic only supports magic item purchases of 3,000gp or less.

In my email to the players I almost wrote "this side of Atlantis" but ultimately resisted the strong temptation to name drop when it wasn't necessary. Anyway, the point of this rule is to notify the players that most awesome magic items will have to be made or found. I am going to try superhard to include more cool, flavorful magic items in this campaign. My hope is to avoid the same boring old mix of magic items that comes from a fully functional magical economy. Andy Collins discusses the problem here.

Special campaign rule #1: Unless otherwise noted by the DM, time passes between sessions at the same rate as in the real world.

Uncle Gary actually advises this in the 1st edition DMG. The big thing we're looking for is to fully address seasonal changes in the local weather. The campaign world will loosely be divided into three regions: the Five Seas (the Great Lakes region), the North, and the South. The weather in the Five Seas region will parallel whatever is happening outside the window of my game room. Unless the PCs spend summer in the North and winter in the South, they will be expected to face the wrath of the inclement weather rules in the DMG.

Special campaign rule #2: The game ends no later than 10pm, even if that means stopping in the middle of combat.

Seriously, I am tired of running late because we tried to squeeze in one more fight. The DM and/or players will devise some narrative excuse why that last battle ended prematurely, even if we have to resort to "they got away". Not only will we all get to bed at a more reasonable hour for a campaign that meets in the middle of the work week, but I hope that this rule will shake loose a couple of spontaneously recurring villains.

Special campaign rule #3: As is usual, all 3.5 D&D books I own are legal fodder for character crunchiness.

I just don't see a point in owning all these shiny books if I'm going to not let people make use of them. My special Viking cultural rules (which will be the subject of another post) do place a few restrictions on PC construction, but I also give the players an out on that. As long as they design a true weirdo, they can play a local. Like the one friendly caveman hanging out with the pulp expedition to the lost land of the dinosaurs. Or Hawk in the second season of the Buck Rogers TV show. One player is seriously investigating this option.

Unearthed Arcana exception to special campaign rule #3: I don't like the races in this book. All class options but Gestalt are allowed. Otherwise only the following sections may see play: Spelltouched Feats, Metamagic Components, Incantations, Taint. Are the players interested in Contacts, Reputation, or Honor?

I can't let all of Unearthed Arcana into the game. What is already a nearly unmanageable mess of rules would break down completely. And we're all burnt out on managing Gestalt characters. The raw power is nice, but the number crunching is a major pain in the ass.

So far none of the players have taken up my offer to discuss using Contacts, Reputation, or Honor. That sort of stuff can be handled without a dedicated subsystem, so no big deal.

My new D&D campaign concept

Pirates require a bit finagling to work into standard D&D. In the previous outing we had to mess around with crazy things like Defense Bonus and gunpowder weapons. Then there was the whole ship problem. How much focus does the boat get? How many skill points should PCs spend on being able-bodied hands? How much time should be wasted on crunchy boat rules? Are we really pirates if large chunks of the campaign are spent away from the ship and messing around in dungeons?

One word dispels the confusion and provides a handy answer to all these questions. And that word is vikings. I'm not talking about the historical vikings here. I'm talking about the vikings in the modern imagination, guys like Elmer Fudd in What's Opera Doc? or Marvel's Warriors Three. You know, just loud, stupid medieval dudes with horned helmets out for plundering and partying. A mythical viking can get away with wearing goofy Kirbyesque platemail. A mythical viking doesn't even need a boat. And clerics are suddenly not just playable, they're awesome.

The name of the campaign is Beyond Vinland. The basic conceit at work is that in some sort of crazy Nietzschean cyclical history of the world the Norsemen tried to explore/conquer/colonize the Americas during the Hyborian Age. They didn't find the Native American types that later expeditions encountered, because those folk hadn't yet crossed the Bering Strait land bridge. Instead, these Ur-Vikings (or whatever) discovered a continent full of shattered and dwindling prehuman and nonhuman empires. The political and cultural landscape is almost post-apocalyptic in nature, as the Americas are chock full of ruined cities abandoned by enigmatic prehuman races.

All of which is an excuse for totally retrogade D&D play. There will be unknown lands to explore, dungeons to crawl, and Norse colonies to defend. And it will go down largely outside the normal faux-European context of baseline D&D. That Tolkienesque baseline will be used to construct the PCs and their allies, but the rest of the world will be more along the lines of pulpy Lost Worlds or Sword & Planet fiction. Most of the nuts and bolts of the setting will be developed over the course of actual play. We're gonna start with a dungeon delve and the assumption that the characters are 'somewhere' in the Great Lakes region. And that they're vikings. The goal is not to build a coherent masterpiece of world construction, just a place for some people in silly helmets to have adventures.

(Doug, Pat, and I knocked this concept out over the space of an hour or two, so whatever credit or blame should be accorded these ideas must be shared.)