For Halloween 2016 I wanted to do something special. After an eight year run of weekly gaming, we have recently been reduced to a series of monthly game nights, split between dnd and board games, due to some people moving away and others getting busy. It is getting harder and harder for me to get my dnd fix, so on these special occasions where we have a chance to play for 4 or 5 hours, I like to make the night unique and memorable.
Last month, we had a game night that corresponded to the Release of the Middle Earth Players Guide. I came up with a short adventure that involved a fellowship, travelling on a journey, and the exploration of a Wight’s Tomb. Not to spend too much time on that episode, it is worth noting that the game was fun and that middle earth roleplaying with official licensed Dnd products is now possible, entertaining, and worthwhile. The rules otions seem solid.
My favorite part of that episode, after half the night was spent making characters, was when they came across an ancient battlefield and stumbled into the tomb of an elf who was killed by an Orc’s cursed sword. I had been reading stories about some hideous idea to dip bullets into pig’s blood prior to shooting Islamic terrorists so as to keep them out of heaven or something. Anyway it gave me the idea of this cursed orc sword. Whenever it strikes an elf, a sliver of the metal is lodged in the elf’s body, so that when the elf dies, they do not go west, but their soul is trapped in the world as a ghost, or poltergeist (can’t remember which stats I used.) So After millennia of being trapped, the elf ghost has gone mad with interminable pain and attaks all who enter. The PC’s had to figure out what was wrong with him and save him while he tried to kill them! They were able to remove the sliver and end the elf’s suffering…. Which promptly caused the barrow to collapse, nearly crushing them all! Good times.
But that was last game, what have we done lately? Well, this time I gave into one of the player’s most requested type of game – an evil campaign! This was going to be the game night for Murder Hobos to finally get a chance to shine. In the past, the character have done some pretty nefarious deeds, but always with the thinnest pretext of not being evil. Well, this time the gloves were off, and the characters had a requirement to choose one of the three evils for their alignment: chaotic, neutral, or lawful. On top of thet, we pre-made the characters before game time so as to minimize prep, and I broke another cardinal rule of my own and allowed the characters to start at fifth level rather than first. This may be the first time I have ever allowed that, and it seems to have worked out.
The premise was sweet and simple. Each character had a chosen demon lord patriarch, and they were being sent to the world to refill their master’s armies of darkness. Every kill that each PC made would go directly to that demon’s army. Kill stealing, backstabbing, and any other nefarious activity were allowed and expected.
To get up to the world from the underworld was not so easy, however, and for the opening scene, the character found themselves stuck in a force field around a pentagram, having been summoned by a snotty and inexperienced drow wizard to do his bidding and assassinate the scion of a rival house. The drow mage would only release them if they agreed to his quest, and would be unable to harm the wizard while on the quest – standard Geas fare. The perceptive character however, noticed a few flaws with the set up. They discovered that a stalactite had made the force field imperfect, and that 40 simultaneous points of damage would destroy it.
Destroy it they did, in a surprise assault on the force field. It broke under pressure of the combined attacks of all five characters. We then rolled initiative and the character focus fired on the wizard, taking him out before he even realized how doomed he was. Ironically, the five basic drow mercenaries who were with the wizard, passed a morale check and put up a really tough fight. They used a little bit of focus firing themselves, and reduced the bard to single digits.
Then the necromancer pulled 8 skeletons out of his bag of holding, and they began to whittle down the drow with arrows, but not before they got in a few licks against the wizard, who also went into single digits. He became alarmed for his skin, so he leapt into his own bag of holding to escape the punishment! The nearest drow scooped up the bag of holding and dropped it into a nearby cauldron of burning oil. (I am evil like that.)
The battle was won before the wizard burned up or suffocated (because I am not evil lie that) and the bard decided, grudgingly, to give back the bag of holding he just found and release the wizard.
The characters peeked out the door the were in to find themselves in a drow city. It is a suburb of the main drow capital, called Melanie Bonet (which is a shout out to Moorcock’s Elric and his corrupt city of Melnibone.)
The city is ancient, and it is formed by eons of stalactites dripping down to form narrow alleyways and streets between long tall walls of stalagmites. They immediately encounter a group of drow children playing the fun game of “Last One It is Dead,” and one of the drow kids makes a mistake of provoking the warlock, who blasts off a head-exploding spell. The drow children run off with their little knives, and cause no further problems.
They are walking through a poor section of the city and come across a diseased elf who begins coughing, releasing spores. The warlock is infected by Zugtmoy’s spores, but the rest make it safely through the quarantined area until they are stopped at the gates by four more drow warriors, with spears and riding giant lizards. The battle went well and they made it out of the quarantined district, and that is where we left off for the night.
We played a game called Secret Hitler afterwards, which I am incurably bad at. I just cant be sneaky I guess. It was a great game night, so much fun after a month of no gaming.
