Honduran Ape City

This is one of those articles which inadvertently acts as the elevator pitch for a GURPS campaign:

Lost City Discovered in the Honduran Rain Forest

Or to put it better - Lost APE CIVILIZATION Discovered in Honduran Rain Forest, And For Some Reason We Need Former SAS Bodyguards. You know, for reasons.



Gee, GURPS Action anyone, combined with a crypto-zoological/Planet of the Apes bent and a crazed Bond villain with his ape army? Monster Hunters, finding all-too-horrible proof that apes ruled us in the past and were-apes walk amongst us?


You could easily re-skin this for an 19th century explorers campaign set in Space:1889, a Call of Cthulhu-type investigation game, a Cliffhangers game, or peel it all the way back for fantasy gaming (although you wouldn't have archeologists.)

It is kind of sad, though, to see that King Gorillicus the Great's great empire went the away of Ozymandius's mighty works, though.

Partial Party Kill II - Now What? I'll Tell You

Pretty much universally, my players went with Option 1.

Option 1 being, make up some 250 point guys and set aside the two top-point PCs for the moment.

One conceit of the game has been that players can have as many PCs as they want - but they must run those PCs in order to interact with them. In other words, no making up Expert Loot Disposer to get you more value from your loot, Expert Healer to heal you back in town, etc. But otherwise, you can make up multiple guys if you want and pick and choose which one to run each session.

Some players did make more than one guy, not all did, but generally, people have leaned on their main character to the exclusion of all others. Vryce's player has long had a necromancy-focused Wizard ready to go, but each session that it seemed a good chance to bust him out, no one showed with a front-line fighter and he felt he needed to bring Vryce.

I think one reason was best articulated by my friend Tom - if everyone has new guys, they'll feel less like "spectators." With Vryce and Dryst around, there was simply more value in helping them do their thing than in doing your own thing. In high-risk fights only they could truly risk heads-up engagement (trolls, purple worms), and in low-risk fights it was easier to just let them handle the load (orcs, most other critters fought recently.) They were just too far ahead of everyone to make encroaching on their niche a fun way to play. Even if their niche was also your niche - you were condemned to be second-best at what you did best.

Plus it gives Vryce's player a chance to run his zombie-master, and Dryst's player a chance to run whatever crazy thing he's got in mind.


So how will we do this thing?

Everyone at 250?

Well, not exactly. Other than Vryce (close to 500) and Dryst (close to 400), and Galen (372) no current PC is worth more than about 310 points. So anyone with a character of 300 or less points, roughly, would not be so overwhelming as to make others useless. A little higher might be okay. So Honus Honusson is around 302 points - he'd be fine. So would Borriz, at 308, marginally - the real issue with him is Axe/Mace-28 makes it tough to fight at his side because he doesn't need you. Galen (372 points)? No way.

But if Galoob's player can make it (256 points) he can run him, same with Bern (265). Chuck (303 points)? Sure. Raggi - I have no idea how many points he is, but no, he's a death machine. Asher (270)? Looks like he'll be in hock to Vryce and his church for a while, but otherwise this is his side trip to try to earn cash to pay off that debt. That's a good hook for gathering a group, too - church says, you owe us, go do this thing and pay us with the loot.

In general, though, it's a great chance for people to try something new or build up the guy they have on the side without worrying about being overshadowed.

Is the end of Felltower?

No, why would it be? The game has never been solely about the megadungeon. This isn't even a break, or a B-Team. It's just a pool of adventurers with overlap with the existing group of PCs, but some of the veteran PCs aren't going to be coming. Thinking of it as an end to Felltower, a break, or as a B-Team is pretty much saying that the "A-Team" are Vryce and Dryst (and when his player is back) Galen, and everyone else is second-rate. That's pretty far from okay in my mind, because it essentially says this game of killing monsters and taking their stuff until your paper man dies is a game for 2-3 of my players and their best guys and everyone else is there to help. That even makes it sound less fun.

This is just us saying, hey, good time to admit mixing guys with a 150 point disparity isn't always going to work so well, let's not do that but otherwise keep playing exactly as before. Next session will be Session 58, it just won't be Felltower 48.

Will their adventures connect to Felltower?

Yes.

Maybe even yes, literally connect.

Originally my campaign was going and then I wrote up Felltower. Since I'm going to do any side areas with Felltower in mind, I can put connections to Felltower in the new places. This means rumors, similar concepts, thematically similar places, etc. Instead of putting things in Felltower I wrote up in my conversion of B2, I'll put stuff from Felltower in whatever I convert.

Where will this take place?

Not sure yet. Depending on the setting, the players will either have an entirely new temporary base (maybe a small town near troll-plagued Molotov, say, or near the desert oasises of Morthand) or be back at the Falcon's Keep. Maybe they'll be in Stericksburg, but ranging out somewhere that isn't Felltower. We'll end up based in Stericksburg and raiding Felltower soon enough.

What about Dryst and Vryce and the others?

They'll wait. It's not a big deal. They may have learned that they don't have what it takes to crush either the orcs or the trolls right now, and need to recruit better allies. Since they're coming off a big failure and recently Felltower has torn up some of the recruiting pool, they might not able to get them.

In game, the pool of volunteers has been thinned - a lot of NPCs willing to adventure have either been killed off, went on too many dry delves, or otherwise have been discouraged. Two hired healer priests died permanently, veteran adventurer Gort was eaten, and others have made out fairly poorly. It's hard to recruit a quality party on high casualty rates and poor pay, they don't have the resources to pay bonuses or recruiters, and they can't promise much except a lot of death vs. the orcs.

Short version: they need more and better co-adventurers for Felltower, but those sorts aren't available right now. They'll have to wait.

Why not accelerate development?

In other words, why not give more XP per session to catch people up, or just start them at more points?

Nah.

I don't want to do that. I want to keep playing with the same ground rules for characters we establish originally. If you want to pack on enough points to equal Vryce, you'll need to put in the 45 or so sessions his player put into doing that. No one gets a speed-up here.

Any other changes?

Same races, same templates are available. A few extras might make the list - I'm debating allowing the Swords Against Evil swashbuckler variants, but I haven't decided (after all, no one has even tried a regular Swashbuckler yet). I'm allowing a variant template or two I wrote up for publication but which I won't discuss being, well, it's for publication (my players are playtesters, basically). I made one minor rule change about gear, which I'll post about eventually.

We did amp up the pestering of one of my former players to try to get him to join the game - this campaign is 100% of what he wanted the previous campaign to be. We reached out to someone else to offer a trial invite and it's looking good. We'll see how it goes.

But yeah, it looks like while Vryce and Dryst sit around bemoaning the lack of quality adventurers to lead to their deaths in Felltower, Asher and company will be out building themselves up to that level . . . and then we'll get back to dying in Felltower itself.

What I'm Looking For, for my DF Game

I think I've settled on on a few options for my DF game's side mission.

I won't say what until I have settled on it, and got the game going.

What they have going for them:

- they are micro-sandboxes. My game overall is a limited sandbox. But I need a small play area, not a single adventure.

- they're a combo wilderness area (to a small extent) and a dungeon area.

- they're potentially lethal. It's DF and I expect lethality. I learned from my experience with B2 that the dungeons need to be tougher for starting guys.

- they're expandable, if necessary. I can add more to the area.

- they're all potentially "assigned missions." Much as Inquisitor Marco was sent to find the evil temple in the Caves of Chaos and smite it most fiercely, all of the options can be explained by the priests of the Good God telling the PCs to go and smite something. That makes the setup easy, but also gives a focus besides look to keep the PCs from wandering too far afield.

- they have some thematic connection to Felltower, even if only "raid out from a base." Something like X1 is very cool, but depends more on ending sessions in mid-play and won't work as well for the way we have sessions structured.

All of those are things I'd like to have.

Basically, I'm looking at one of a badlands, a cold and nasty swamp, and a mountainous area studded with trouble. All of them I have some faith in the entertainment value of what I have but also a way to tie them in with Felltower. None of them are O1-3 Against the Orcs, though, although I could see how that would be entertaining. I'd rather not precede "go back to Felltower and settle up with the orcs" with what boils down to "ORC1-7 Against the Orcs."

And yes, once it gets going I'll review what I chose, and what I looked at hard but discarded.

Can you make a zombie troll in DF?

Serious question from my game on Sunday.

Can you make a troll into a zombie?


Here is the problem:

Zombie requires a "relatively complete dead body" and takes 1 minute to cast. So far, so good.

A DFM1 troll has Unkillable 3, with an Achilles' Heel of corrosion or fire damage.

Now, it depends on how you rule, here.

If you rule that any remaining little bit of a troll will grow a mouth and become a new troll, the only was to finish one off completely is to totally reduce it to jelly with acid or burn it to ashes.

If you rule that all you need to do is short-circuit Unkillable with a death blow (even a point or two) of corrosion or fire damage, then you can end up with a "relatively complete dead body."

I rule the former - you need to destroy a troll utterly to keep it from coming back. It's vastly creepier that way and emphasizes that "nature" doesn't play by the same rules in fantasy gaming. Trolls are mundane creatures, except they are like athlete's foot - leave a little, end up with a lot.

But is there a way around this?

One suggestion one of my players had was that if you take a troll to -10xHP, it's "dead" until it heals. Keep it there with constant chopping up of the corpse. Your friend casts Zombie on it while it is still technically dead. Bang, zombie troll.

The flaw in this one is of course that Unkillable means you don't die - so you are never a dead body. Even if you are a body, you're not dead.

So in my games this is impossible. Funny, but impossible.

You can inflict undead status that doesn't require death (ring or armor wraith, vampire), or have trolls come back as undead post-destruction (ghosts, spectres, etc.), or are self-inflicted on a living thing (lich.)

So technically, the "horde of vampire lich-trolls" I used to threaten the PCs with in my old game is possible. So are ghost trolls, wraith trolls, spectre trolls, and maybe even shadow trolls. But no zombies.

Scant pickings if I re-used a D&D/AD&D adventure

One major downside to having long-playing players is that I can't just go and re-use adventures.

I was thinking of converting a fun D&D/AD&D module I miss running and playing that as the intro for the new (and semi-new) crop of PCs seeking to get some experience before joining the high-point vets in Felltower.

But amongst my group, just counting the current regulars and recent regulars, I have:

- one guy who played AD&D with me in high school.
- two guys who played with me in the 90s
- one guy who's new-ish to me, but played and ran a lot of AD&D
- one guy who's played and GMed AD&D extensively since before I was gaming.

So this kills a lot of my go-to adventures.

UK1 Eye of the Serpent - not great for a big group, and one guy played it solo with his monk.
UK2/3 The Sentinel / The Gauntlet - starting point for my last campaign, two guys still are here from that game.
U1-3 - the "Saltmarsh" series? - Used U1 to death. U2 and U3 aren't fun without the rolling consequences of U1.
A1-4 - everyone has been through it, and the supermodule version too.
B2 - Used in this game, and it would be boring to just restock it.


How about some others?

B1 In Search of the Unknown - used bits of it (the pool room, for one) in Felltower, the rest is pretty vanilla, honestly.
B3 Palace of the Silver Princess - both versions are interesting but kind of a strange hodge-podge. Maybe. I'm sure a couple of them remember going through it, too.
I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City - would be perfect, but it's a campaign on its own done right.
N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God - possible, if Bern's player doesn't play or hasn't run it.

Most of the others need to be "higher level" to be interesting - if I ran G1-3 what is the fun of dealing with the orcs in Felltower after you've butchered a hundred giants? S1 is just a death march, even if it can be a fun death march. WG5 Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure - nice, but I think it would be better as a higher-point PC adventure.

There are others I'm considering, but sadly the nostalgia I have for these adventures I mentioned will have to remain that - I can't see a way to re-use them, or not yet. But like I said, I have other plans going on.

GM's day

Or maybe it's DM's day.

It's March 4th ("march forth") and it's DM's Day. There is a sale over at RPG Now:



. . . and although there doesn't seem to be a sale over at SJG, my books are up on Warehouse23, too.

Partial Party Kill - Now what?

After Sunday's session, we lost a couple of PCs and a substantial amount of gear.

The PCs already realized they had no business being down as deep as they went, and were thinking about spending their time on the orcs. The fact that the 275 point PCs couldn't hold their own against the trolls and purple worms made it pretty clear that the group needs a wider base of powerful delvers to be down in that mess.

But I presented a few options for going forward (aside from a bonus option for an unrelated mini side game, which still might happen.)

1) Vryce and Dryst step aside for now, taking some time off (in game, nominally to rest and recruit). Everyone makes up new 250 point guys.* We put Felltower to the side, and the new guys adventure off in some locale more suited for beginning DFers until they build up some experience, fill out their gear, and otherwise develop into guys that can handle the foes in Felltower. Maybe a handful of sessions, maybe longer. The campaign has always allowed for people to have multiple PCs for each player to be selected from on an as-needed basis, and even with my encouragement this didn't happen.


* Actually, Vryce's and Dryst's player already have at least one backup guy each they've been itching to bust out and play, but it's always been a bad time. There was never a good session for Vryce not to come.

2) Continue as usual - new guys at 250, they join Vryce and Dryst, and deal with either the new guys handing lots of loot over to Vryce and Dryst to keep their XP gains up or V&D accept that they will progress slowly for a while.

3) As #2, but not in Felltower.


Right now, we're kind of rolling around what #1 would mean. Vryce and Dryst would be in reserve and come back out when the other PCs are more ready for their "level" of threat. I'd need to either write up an adventure locale, or run Mirror of the Fire Demon (again), or convert an AD&D module or something. All are equally likely, in terms of what would temporarily replace Felltower. Having everyone be 250 again for a little while would be a good break all around, perhaps, and mean that it's hard to fall into the role of "make my guy the best possible Vryce buffer and Dryst supporter I can!" when you have to develop on your own to survive on your own. And in the long run, that might help.

Felltower itself would lie fallow, and when the PCs were ready to tackle it again I'd do one big restock. Probably the orcs would get more powerful, but not terribly so. Some monsters would show up or grow in numbers, some destroyed areas might be repaired more fully than would be in a normal two or three week lull, etc. - but the PCs wouldn't be racing a clock where each session away mean the orcs got more powerful, like the fevered concerns of Captain Willard. It would just mean a change of venue, and then a somewhat changed Felltower when the more lived-in PCs were back to see how they fare. And Vryce and Dryst would be waiting.

That's kind of what we're mulling over right now.