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Drakevarg
2011-05-15, 12:03 AM
The handful of you who know of my tendency to post the goings on of my campaign in order to solicit advice/create an opening for criticism might've noticed that I haven't posted in a few weeks. This is because up until now, things have been running pretty smoothly. Of course, no good thing lasts, especially when I'm at the helm. Everybody's dead, Jim.

So for the last few sessions the party has been making their way through a buried city. After taking out a mob of zombies, they decided to take shelter in an old university from a sandstorm. Inside, they met a whole host of nasties including my infamous Chained Man, who strangled and beheaded one of the PCs in two rounds. After they got the hell out of his basement I elected to not send it after the surviving party members, since he was slightly more insta-gib capable than I had initially expected. Also in the university was a pack of gargoyles, the building's guardians.

Lesson learned? Creatures are MUCH tougher than their CRs would indicate when their one (normally quite common) weakness is completely unobtainable by the PCs. Originally I had pegged these things as tough-but-beatable XP-fodder, since although they had DR 10/Magic, most of the party fighters could hit over 10 without much difficulty. (The one who couldn't was an idiot who took a light weapon as his only armament.) Unfortunately, they only actually managed to roll that high about twice, and as such were promply torn to shreds.

Here I offered them a choice. I had been expressing a growing disinterest in the campaign for a few weeks now, citing a nostalgic desire to simply have a straight-up, fun, high adventure type campaign for once instead of this gloomy crap I'm always doing. The only reason I didn't drop the campaign like hot coals was because the PCs were liking how cerebral it was. (Their words, not mine.) But once they were all slaughtered, I offered the following option:

Either continue this same campaign with new characters after a timeskip of a few months, or quit and do a simple, "anything you can find in the books" fantasy pastiche. After assuring them that eldritch abominations and gruesome deaths would be inevitable simply by having me behind the DM screen, they agreed on the latter.

So, next week we'll be starting session one of this new campaign, with the following characters:

NN Tiefling Cleric of Nerull 2
CN Tiefling Warmage 2
?? Warforged Monk 2
?? Gnoll (No class levels.)
NE Changling Bard 3
NN Shifter Rogue 3
NG Human Fighter 3

The session I have in mind is a Cube-esque series of trapped rooms. Only thing still on my mind is whether I should throw in a few save-or-dies or not.

Undercroft
2011-05-15, 02:16 AM
i'd throw in a couple, but give some forewarning in the form of town gossip or something ("there's rumors of a banshee in the haunted woods" = get death ward).
As long as they have some way to stand a chance against it then i find it fair game.

Re'ozul
2011-05-15, 02:23 AM
Throw in some save or dies, but leave clues as to which rooms those are.
Maybe have an initial guide (down on his luck family father who took this highly lethal job to help his sick wive and kids in this famine) who promptly gets killed by the first of those. Depending on how much you play up this tragic backstory you might also get a glimpse of how the players plan to interact with happenings.

keeperoflore
2011-05-15, 02:39 AM
YOU TRICKED ME!

i thought this thread was going to have something to do with an game based off of Adventure Time with Finn and Jake(which is actually going to be the setting of my next campaign)

i cant really add to anything having to do with the actual topic here, but i just wanted to let you know that i came to this thread with high expectations that where completely destroyed.

Drakevarg
2011-05-15, 02:53 AM
YOU TRICKED ME!

i thought this thread was going to have something to do with an game based off of Adventure Time with Finn and Jake(which is actually going to be the setting of my next campaign)

i cant really add to anything having to do with the actual topic here, but i just wanted to let you know that i came to this thread with high expectations that where completely destroyed.

The implication occurred to me, but I couldn't think of a better phrasing.


i'd throw in a couple, but give some forewarning in the form of town gossip or something ("there's rumors of a banshee in the haunted woods" = get death ward).
As long as they have some way to stand a chance against it then i find it fair game.

Sadly they won't get any forewarning at all, since I'm starting this campaign with "You all wake up in a room with no memory of how you got there." Though I suppose I could throw in a few Apocalyptic Logs (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ApocalypticLog), since they're nowhere near the first ones to wake up in this place.

On the other hand, I've mapped out the entire Cube-esque section of the dungeon and while there are no literal save-or-dies, there are:

100 Total Rooms in this section,
72 of which are trapped,
16 of which are CR 2,
48 of which are CR 3, and
8 of which are CR 4.

Oh, and the rooms loop back on themselves so they could very easily just wander forever and die by hitting the same traps over and over. Though I do hope I don't kill them all before they even get out of there. Would be an awful waste.

...a Groundhog Day loop until they get out might be handy (and traumatizing).

Demonix
2011-05-16, 12:44 PM
I had toyed with the idea of making a cube-like adventure, but i got stuck on how to model the shifting rooms without using blocks; also, the number of rooms past a 4x4x4 cube got daunting (64 rooms in a 4x4 vs. 125 in a 5x5). How do you plan to model the shifting rooms and what kind of clues are you going to make available to the PCs to give them a chance of figuring it out?

As a side note, I wonder if this would make an interesting Call of Cthulu post-modern one-shot.

Re'ozul
2011-05-16, 01:22 PM
I had toyed with the idea of making a cube-like adventure, but i got stuck on how to model the shifting rooms without using blocks; also, the number of rooms past a 4x4x4 cube got daunting (64 rooms in a 4x4 vs. 125 in a 5x5). How do you plan to model the shifting rooms and what kind of clues are you going to make available to the PCs to give them a chance of figuring it out?

As a side note, I wonder if this would make an interesting Call of Cthulu post-modern one-shot.

The easiest way (easy being a relative term here) to do a CUBE dungeon would be to make a program that randomly sorts the number of rooms (27,64,125 etc for whatever size) and then orders them in a number of arrays depending on the cube. So a 125 room cube would be 5 arrays of 5x5 with first being the bottom and the 5th being the top. That ways you only need to keep track of the room they are in and each shift of the cube would be a simple resorting.

If you want there to be an easily understood order in the shifting though, you'd better be good at either matrix computation or vector algebra.

Drakevarg
2011-05-16, 01:25 PM
Shifting felt like too much work and this is only supposed to be a sorta-short gauntlet anyway. Were I to pull out all the stops with it (which seems excessively cruel to do to a 3rd level party, even for me), I'd probably follow Re'ozul's trick. (Thought you could ninja me, eh boyo?)

Drakevarg
2011-05-16, 11:47 PM
UPDATE: So today the absentee players rolled up their characters. Our new additions are:

NN Shifter Rogue 3
NE Changling Bard 3
NG Human Fighter 3

The Fighter is a newbie player, the Rogue's brother. Chose what he chose because it was simple and easy to learn. The Rogue is aiming for Shadowdancer and the Bard is planning to cross into both Dirgesinger and Mindbender. His original plan was just Mindbender, but had to throw in the second prestige class at the mere mention of raising the dead with the Power of Rock. The Warmage from the OP also rolled his character today, and is planning to go into Elemental Savant.

In the meantime, I finished mapping out the dungeon they'll be running right off the bat. It's a Kobold den, meaning gratuitous traps. I even used the standard treasure tables for once. Doing this one old school. :smallamused:

Daftendirekt
2011-05-17, 12:03 AM
YOU TRICKED ME!

i thought this thread was going to have something to do with an game based off of Adventure Time with Finn and Jake(which is actually going to be the setting of my next campaign)

That crossed my mind, but a CUBE-inspired dungeon is just as good. This thread is full of win.

I actually just watched Cube for the first time a few weeks ago, but it was pretty awesome. I'm pretty sure the Saw series got its idea from that movie.