Welcome to the Deathtrap

Thursday, October 29, 2020

Solo Game: Pacts and Blades II: The Jester's Return Pt.3

The Bandersnatch

I am going to roll the rest of the details for the Bandersnatch now, and test to see if the details they have learned are true:

Body Structure: Organic (⚀ - false), it is actually 1d12: 7: Alien

Size: Large (⚅ - true)

Basic Type: 1d6 - ⚀ Animal

Pact or Blades: Claws and Nature (⚁ - false), it is actually d44: 33 roll three times: 43: a Pact with a fear entity, 11: A Pact with an elemental entity, and 41: Blade: thorny tail

Distinctive Features: Bifurcated Tongue with two heads - one has sentience (⚄ - true)

Motivations: d8: 7: it needs to lay eggs in your dead body

Special Skills: Can bend Time (⚃ - true)

Ye gads, this thing is a horror!

The Thing

(Rolling BD&D-style Surprise: Bandersnatch ⚃, Adventurers ⚃; Monster Reaction⚄⚄ = 10: Neutral; Initiative: Bandernatch 5, Mirdon 6, Shanix 6, Lorenz 6, Walken 9)

Shanix stood on an ancient stone balcony overlooking the lava flows below. All around her was a carpet of luminous blue moss and brightly glowing white flowers. Their perfume overwhelmed the stench of brimstone they'd been breathing for hours. Glowing orange fire bees leaving heat trails behind them moved from bloom to bloom, studiously ignoring the human intruder.

For a moment, her permanently chiseled-on smirk fell into open-mouth wonder. She walked slowly, like a child in a yuletide snowfall, to the edge of the balcony and a broken rail. Below, across a broken stone bridge, was a dome of precious metals surrounded by glowing fungus. There, the orange lights of the fire bees shimmered brightly. Strains of alien music came up from below barely audible under the roar and hiss of geysers.

She shook herself from her trance and forced her face back into a scowl. Walking back to the foot of the rope she called up:

"Get the lead out of your asses! I think I can see the hive."

The twisted, hunchbacked dwarf Mirdon was next, surprisingly nimble coming down the rope. Then the featherweight Lorenz; too pretty and delicate to be a farm boy to her mind. They too, went to the edge to look at the hive as Walken came down last.

He was halfway down when her mind began to stutter. Colors became too bright and all at once muted and washed out. One moment Walken was coming down too fast, the next he seemed to be going up the rope. Time echoed forward and backward assaulting her ears with echoes, some of them sounds not yet made, or that would never be made.

She forced her head towards the origin of the pain and sound and distortion, and saw a horrendous parody of life slithering from a nearby archway.

The Bloody Engines of the Dinosaur Men

I am flattered by how many people have already read and played the adventure that I put together more-or-less in real time on my blog last week in my 6-part plus Building an Adventure Series (1, 2, Rationale, 3, 4, 5, 6). I am glad that it has already hit the table!

Today it is my pleasure to announce the release of The Bloody Engines of the Dinosaur-Men. This is a fine-tuned, edited, refined, version of the game written in 'Zine format.

The Bloody Engines of the Dinosaur-Men

An OSR-compatible adventure for 3-6 characters

Levelled 3-5. Made with Labyrinth Lord.

A Sinister Dungeon Full of Hazardous Environments and Brutal Traps!

Solo Game: Pacts & Blades II: The Jester's Return pt.2

This is part 2 of my solo play through of Pacts & Blades with the Salamandur Household supplement. In part 1, I decided a highly randomized adventure based on the setting and scenario that I rolled up using Salamandur Household. I will divide the play report into two articles. For a more pleasurable reading experience, I will save commentary for a separate article, and game mechanics stuff will be marked in teal or easy skipping.

And So We Begin...

Images Created in Hero Forge & Photoshop
used in accordance with their EULA

"Are you sure about this, Merry man?" Walken looked outside at the Carmine sky. The first of the brimstone shards were beginning to come, carving bright golden streaks in the sky between the grey flakes of ashen snow and shimmering embers.

A partially armoured hand clapped down on his shoulder. "I thought your people were fire-proof, Wak," Shanix chided.

He contemplated her light brown fingers against his mottled red skin. He hated having nicknames. He didn't much care for Shanix' attitude, nor her smirk. If adventuring work were anything like war, he knew that would change... providing her cockiness didn't get her... or him killed.

"We are. But we aren't immune to falling rocks. The storm's just getting started. They will be the size of fists in an hour."

"Merry!" replied the Jester, chuckling as he hitched up the last of his gear, "But sure? Never about anything! Hardly pays to be sure. I will say I am mad enough for this expedition, and Madness is a far finer thing than Certainty! And madness tells me we should make haste afore the rocks are fists, for I have been told I have a punchable face."

"And so you do," Shanix snarled, pulling away from Walken.

Solo Game: Pacts & Blades II: The Jester's Return pt.1

Mirdon Returns! Back in July I played a couple of solo adventures to take Lucas Rolim's Pacts and Blades: Moorcockian Fantasy for a spin. I put the journal of the second one up on the blog. Lucas liked it enough that it will be included in an upcoming Pacts & Blades supplement. It also let me show off the dungeon generating tools on Donjon.

I said when I released it that I would do another one as a follow-up. And right now I finally have the time to start a solo play. And, like last time, I plan on using it to discuss ideas that are relevant to people planning, designing, and running games.

I am also showcasing Lucas Rolim's new sourcebook Salamandur Household with expansion rules for Pacts & Blades.

The Last Adventure

Mirdon and his friend Doraleous were searching the Vault of Gloomy Chaos for clues to the location of the lost Dwarf fortress of Koganusân. They won a solid victory against bugbear and goblin in the frigid tomb, but then blundered into an ogre's lair. The Ogre pounced on Doraleous and beat him to a gory pulp in seconds. Mirdon fled for his life narrowly escaping his friend's fate.

Since Then...

Mirdon has sworn vengeance on the ogre and hopes to give Doraleous a proper burial. He has used the pittance of treasure he found on the bugbear to recruit a team of young, would-be adventurers to help him purge the Vault. A veteran of two adventures, Mirdon hopes to use his wits to get his revenge. However, first he wants to prove them...

The Cast

Lorenz is a character made With Hero Forge
& used in Accordance with their EULA

Over the last 6 articles, I have built an adventure in something close to real time. I wanted while I was doing it to explore the decisions you make and the mental processes, as well as the tools I can make the job of adventure planning easier.

I wanted to finish with a few thoughts about making your adventure memorable and making it part of a living campaign.

If you liked this adventure, an updated, cleaned-up and slightly expanded version of it is now available on DrivethruRPG.

Making an Adventure Memorable

Making an adventure memorable is by far the more important to those two ideas. At the end of the day, you have limited time to enjoy this hobby. If you are a Game Master or a creative involved in preparing materials for a tabletop role-playing game, it pays to make sure that time is spent very well. And unremarkable adventure is a lost opportunity.

This isn't to say that every encounter has to be full in technical complications, tactical considerations, or be weird and wonderful. Sometimes a baseline game of kick in the door, fight the monster, steal it's treasure, repeat is very fun and memorable. A lot of it has to do with delivery and play at the table. However, a well designed set of encounters definitely makes it much easier.

Borrow from the Best

Building an Adventure (pt. 5): Background, Rumours, and Intel

'Woman & T-Rex' by Darksouls1 from Pixabay

Now that we have the meat and bones of an adventure, it's time to give it a skin and the spark of life, in this case the information and background offered to the PCs. It's how we frame the adventure that gets initial buy-in and makes immersion easy.

You can have an almost perfect adventure written, but if you don't frame it effectively then the player characters are not likely to engage with it. Your beautifully-designed dungeon will sit unexplored by players who would rather go off to be pirates.

You frame has three major parts, the hook, rumours, and hard Intel.

Hooks

In order to make sure your dungeon has enough appeal to get player characters into it, you need a hook. Something that will get them wanting to explore that location.

Hooks for Plot Heavy Home Games

If you have a game where characters have complex story arcs or intrigue, writing a hook is mostly about tying the adventure into something the characters already care about. Whether that is a loved one, a rival, the power of a certain faction, or the safety of their Homeland. These are going to have to be highly personal to the campaign.

Example: My latest home campaign involves people transplanted from Earth to a bizarre fantasy world. That the dinosaurs are recognizable form of Earth life, and with hints of modern technology, I could easily hook that character into wanting to investigate a possible portal to her own world.

Hooks for Other Rationales

When you are writing a module, for, for that matter, writing for a "beer-and-pretzels" game where the players don't particularly care to spend time on heavy role play and plot development, you need to have a handful of hooks ready that will all point to your adventure location as worth going to.

Tinkering with Animated Character Portraits

I haven't been able to share this on Twitter of Discord, so I thought I'd put it here: my animated character portrait of Róinsach having a freak-out using Hero Forge, Photoshop, and Ezgif.

Róin is a level-zero character with delusions of grandeur in the World of Weirth campaign run by Stephen Smith over at Stephen's Hobby Workshop.

Hero Forge just added the ability to colour your minis, making creating portraits with them way faster than when I reviewed them last week. Here are a couple of other portraits I've made of the characters I am playing from that campaign.