Selling Dragons - did it come up in your game?

One thing from AD&D that we never had happen - not once - was selling a dragon.

We didn't have people fight to subdue, either, which is probably the primary cause of not having dragons to sell.

But overall, it's one of those things I found odd. There isn't much of an economy for monsters. A few - mostly ones that can be trained as mounts - have valuable eggs or young. But you don't have a sale value for orc slaves, owlbears you trapped in a cage, that roper you charmed, etc.

But dragons have a standard market value - and it's not even that terribly high. 1d8 x 100 gp per HP. That huge, ancient red dragon that seems to come up in every campaign somewhere is worth a whopping 88 x 100-800 gp or 8800 gp to 70,400 gp. Not low, really, with an average of 39,600. But how high is that when the average gp value of its monetary hoard is a bit above 80,000?

Potentially it's a way to increase the value by 50%. Or realize profits when you catch the dragon out of its lair and can't find it or get to it.

Yet I've never seen it done. I've read about it in Gary Gygax's columns in Dragon magazine, and in the AD&D books, but never seen it done in play.

Just another element AD&D spent a lot of time on that just didn't impact my gaming.

Game Inspiration: The Fallen Sky Castle

My previous GURPS campaign was set on the Known Worlds of the D&D Expert Set, using much source material from the Gazeteer series plus my own spin.

One of the spins I put was the wreckage of a fallen multi-dimensional sky city in the northern parts of the Principalities of Glantri.

The PCs never visited it, nor did they follow up on it. I'd largely forgotten about it until I started re-reading Michael Moorcock's "The Knight of the Swords."

Here was the weed-grown wreckage of the vast sky city that, during the month-long battle [. . .] had careered from one plane to another, rupturing the fine fabric that divided the different dimensions of the Earth until, crashing at last upon the gathered ranks of the Vadhagh and the Nhadragh, it had destroyed them. Bring of a different plane, the tangled metal and stone of the sky city still retained that peculiar shifting effect. Now it had the appearance of a mirage [. . . ]

- Michael Moorcock, The Knight of the Swords, First Book of Corum

The book states shortly after that the ruins look differently viewed from different dimensions, and they are sprawled out in an area 20 miles in circumference.

That description really grabbed me. It also reminded me then and now of one of the ghostly "wrecks" in Stewart Cowley's Spacewreck. So I had to put it in.

I'm not sure I ever had written notes on what I intended to do with it - I may have had little besides a description. But I sure would have done something with it eventually.

But it started life like a lot of my ideas do - vague sketches based on bits I liked elswhere, as stub-ends for eventual adventuring use.

Playing with Tenkar's Wrath's "treasure"

Erik Tenkar posted a monster with a neat idea in it. Actually, the whole monster is nice:

Wrath

But what grabbed me was this special power from the valuable gemstones contained in a Wrath:

1 in 6 such gemstones are permanently imbued with stolen life essence. These stones heal the bearer 1 hit point per day on top of other factors, such as rest and magical healing.

Okay, so you kill this life-sucking semi-undead being that wounds people badly enough to force them to recover by rest or just simple piles of healing spells. You take a gemstone out of it which is "permanently imbued with stolen life essence." And this heals you 1 HP per day.

From someone else's life essence.

Whose?

Does this add up over time, day in, day out, as injuries are healed by it, slowly letting that personality accrete into yours.

Perhaps, in GURPS, this would mean you eventually add on disadvantages from the new personality. Or eventually add Split Personality.
If the stolen spirit is evil, this could be warping. If it was good - say, of a saintly or genuinely good person - it could be reinforcing your positive nature. Maybe these eventually come with positive traits, too, tied to the bad ones. Or at least, traits useful to the bad ones.

Maybe it doesn't come with a downside . . . but you can use that gem to Resurrect the slain victim, or perhaps just to speak with him, her, or it by Summon Spirit. Or perhaps even without. Maybe it's a conduit to the afterlife in both directions - you heal more easily, but your hold on life is just a little more tenuous because you've got a two-way street to the afterlife. A penalty on recovery rolls when Mortally Wounded, perhaps?

Or maybe it's just me? Have I been given too many poison cookies and frogurts with sodium benzoate in them to just take a gem like that as a reward for killing a monsters?

That's where the ____ lives

One of the things I here while the players are going over the map of Felltower is "that's where the ____ lives" or "That's where the ____ is."

That's not always true, though, and it can mean the players are put off of their plans when they arrive and it or they are not there.

The architecture is really the most fixed element in Felltower. Even that's a bit changeable.

With a megadungeon I feel like you need a good base of consistency, but that consistency can't mean that what's in one room when you arrive the first time will forever and always be in that room. While the orcs may always be in one area, the undead may congregate in another, and that one area always seems to be plagued by rats and slimes . . . that doesn't mean you won't find those things in other places.

And it doesn't account for wandering monsters or reactive monsters.

A good example of that was the werewolves. They were dwelling in one area until the PCs showed up and cut down a lot of them. They went back to finish the job and they were gone. Well, yes. They'd taken some very heavy casualties and moved to a lower-risk area (at least as they perceived it to be.) They didn't move far enough, but it may be that something was keeping them in that area instead of another.

Sometimes you can make the mistake of thinking that where you ran into something was where something lives. That kind of error is why "the Lord of Spite's apartment" actually turned out to be stairs down to a whole level where the Lord of Spite actually seems to "live." Turns out he was out for a stroll, not living behind that one door.

Plus the state of monsters changes. The dragon isn't always sleeping, the orcs are always on alert by the main entrance, and so on.

The terrain is largely consistent, much more so than the monsters, but even so . . . sometimes hallways are blocked. Sometimes they're open. Doors are open or they are closed. Bars get installed. New tunnels get dug, by animal-intelligence monsters and sapient dwellers alike.

You can depend on many things in Felltower, but over time things change. You can't always expect to meet or find the things you met or found where you met or found them. Usually you do, but you can't bet your trip on any one thing being as it was. Or especially on all of the things beings as they were.

We Are Clones (in Autoduel 1st edition)

"I'm a clone, I know it and I'm fine.
I'm one and more are on the way."
- Alice Cooper, "Clones"

The Car Wars universe dealt with character death by making it curable - sort-of - with money.

I decided to go back and take a look at it. It seems like a textbook case of Extra Life - you purchase a backup "you"for cash.

The details are on the sidebar of Autoduel 1st edition, p. 75, and basically copy Car Wars in costs:

$10K for the initial clone growth
$1k/month to maintain
$2K to reprogram, and it needs to be reprogrammed monthly unless you get a MMSD.
MMSD storage of your memories is $25K but the data never disappears and can be used repeatedly. So much so that you can get a new clone for $5k as long as you've got an MMSD. Cheaper than maintaining a clone, really.
Direct upload from a corpse is $K.

So this adds up very, very quickly even given the high-value cash of Car Wars. It costs 1-2 Div 25 cars per year to maintain.

And you lose any XP gained between the time when you last updated your clone (or MMSD) and when you die . . . so you really don't want to die without leaving an intact corpse to upload into your close or you lose XP.

This costs no points, however. It's purely a monetary transaction, just like a Resurrection spell but one that will work even if you're utterly annihilated . . . assuming you maintained your backup.

I have to pull my copy of Autoduel 2nd edition out of storage and see what they did there. I was right near when it's boxed up today but didn't think of this clone issue until I was listening to the song quoted above on the ride home. Oh well. I'd listened to it many times prior and didn't think, "Hey, what about Gold Cross?" until today's stray thought. I'll take a look when I get a chance - or if you've got it, say what it has in the comments. Is Gold Cross an advantage or, essentially, equipment like in 1st edition?

Random Links for 8/16

Here are some things that caught my eye this past week:

Doug has a nice rack!

Gonzo History: Gaming Edition has Sharpie-"painted" Daleks.

All Bones About It reports that the next Bones Kickstarter is delayed.

DFT3 Artifacts of Felltower sales update

About a month ago I posted the sales numbers for DFT3.

My most recent royalty statement indicates another 49 copies sold. So that's 143 copies so far. Thanks to everyone who has purchased. It's a small amount but your sales mean a lot to me.