I think I stole that from Chris Bennett
Originally shared by Chris Stieha
Ran my game of RND + Macchiato Monsters at Weird Realms in Cleveland, Ohio. The photos show the start of the adventure (clean map) and the end of the adventure (scribbled on map).
Zag the Druid and Arlock the disgraced wizard professor wanted to sell four urns of ashes to the Worm King. Kain the dwarf trader told them he knew how to find the Worm King in the crypts below the city. Shrutan the Mushroom person was the muscle for his creator Zag.
To reach the crypts through the library, Zag used his library card +1 to get Kain in. Shrutan was required to show his skill as a translator and penned the beautiful poem of the two asexual fungi who no longer wanted to be asexual. Kain negotiated with a vampire dog into letting the group into the crypts and gained a buddy. In the crypts, Lothar the barbarian crashed into the group, but not before causing the floor to collapse. Shrutan used himself as a bridge to allow everyone to cross. After a run in with a group of monkeys (and some monkey-talk) and a dance-off to convince the Worm King to show himself, the group found out Kain was only out for loot and that Zag and Arlock wanted (and gained!) magic and wisdom from the Worm King.
Lothar and Kain started a Mouser-Fafhrd relationship and blew up one entrance of the crypts on their way out. Zag and Arlock were going to use their new wormy abilities to take over the town. Shrutan, having been cursed by the Worm King, now inhabits the crypts.
I really enjoyed running for this group. A lot of great players with strong imaginations. They made my life easy.
Beckett Warren Eric Nieudan Dyson Logos
I'm glad it went so well. I see your RND settings turn out just as gonzo as mine! This is reassuring somehow =)
ReplyDeleteSo what was the procedure? Who would interpret the symbols for each room? Did you come up with the initial goal, or was it a collegial idea? Were the characters created before any of the symbols were shown?
Norbert G. Matausch Thanks!
ReplyDeleteEric Nieudan It didn't help that the players said they wanted to mix genres of fantasy, contain a criminal element, have anthropomorphic anything, and have traitor as a theme. Traitor was Zag's ideas.
ReplyDeleteI used the Five-Room Dungeon framework (think of rooms as stages in adventure) to start things off. I was going to run a simple fetch quest (where they interpreted icons to determine who wanted what fetched), but two characters rolled funeral urns, so they decided that they had to sell them the Worm-King (worm-king came from title icons at the top). Every time the dungeon die went below d4, I triggered the next "room," but by the third stage the players actually drove the stages themselves. I can't stress how great these players were. They really pushed things forward themselves, so they made my life so easy.
We interpreted the theme as a group, but they quickly got on board. I picked a map with three entrances and showed a group of icons for each entrance. Someone would jump in and say they had an idea, which led to some back and forth to expand it. For examples, the monkeys were a random encounter, so they interpreted that with some back and forth. If the icons were something an individual encountered (like the dwarf going in to the room alone), that player interpreted the icons.
Characters were created before any icons were interpreted. We talked about what type of game we wanted before character creation, so everyone was on the same page.
If you have more questions, keep asking. I can't talk too much about the rules. They talked their way out of combat, so we mainly did stats checks. I did try to use the risk die in interesting situations, like the dance-off, the crossing the fungus bridge, and as a way to solve the puzzle. I will share my character creation handsheet with you.
Got it, thanks!
ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting process you have here. I think I'm going to take one of the RND maps and try running something similar.
What die did you use for dungeon encounters at each stage?
And yeah, avoiding combat is start smart players do =)
They started at the entrance, so they got that room first. I then used (or attempted to use) a d8 and reset it back to a d8 each time they entered a new stage. I rolled the dungeon die after each turn. I guess this is more of a story die than a dungeon die, but I still used it for random encounters.
ReplyDeleteI think you could also make it time-based, where after 30 minutes, this stage happens.
Character creation took about 30 minutes. We played for two hours (because I had to leave).
That's a great amount of story for two hours!
ReplyDeleteWith a 5RD framework, it would be easy to design events-and-encounters dR tables for each stage.
There was a lot of great story in the two hours. In my write-up, I didn't include the moving gate puzzle and the summoning ritual, including a worm language spoken by dance.
ReplyDeleteI guess I have kind of started those dR tables with my tables in RND issue 4, but we should definitely flesh them out more and better.
I have only glanced at #4 (which arrived on Friday btw, thanks!). But looking now, it's basically what I had in mind. Make them dR12 based and make the setting specific (in the case of RND adventures, you could just add symbols and let the juices flow =)
ReplyDeleteOh god of holy DR, i'm really impressed by your idea ! It's exactly how I want to play my next MM dungeon. Thanks for sharing it
ReplyDelete