Morghen's Monday Night HackMaster Log

[Morghen]

So it occurred to me that since I like hearing about other people's games, the same may hold true for other people. So, a campaign log.

General Stuff

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• This is not a game I run, but a game I play in. We play once a week on Monday night.
• The game is HackMaster.
• The youngest player at the table is 31. Oldest is 40. I joined the group about 1.5 years ago and we've been back on this high-level game for about 10 months.
• We say that it's an "evil campaign", but really we're just morally flexible. We're generally not running around eating babies or raping people, but if there's a problem to be solved... Well, no options are off the table.

Things You May Need To Know About HackMaster

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• There's a stat called Honor. It accumulates as you do cool things or diminishes if you do uncool things (back down from a challenge, pee yourself in court). You can burn a little bit to affect a dice roll here or there but the only time we ever use it is to change something that just happened. Usually used as a "get out of crit free" card or to unfail a save. Purging your Honor reduces you to 10% of your former total, can only be done one time per level and until you regain a certain portion, all of your rolls suffer a -1. Saves, damage, skill checks, HP rolls, everything. And you earn reduced XP when you're in dishonor.
• Damage and healing explode when you roll the max. If you roll a 4 on a d4, roll again and subtract one... unless you roll another 4. Keep rolling until you roll something that isn't the max and then subtract one from that.
• Skills are based on a percentage system.
• People say that HackMaster is what 2nd Edition should've been.
• HackMaster is nowhere near as high-powered as 3, 3.5, etc. At 1st level, you're probably not going to be soloing... well, anything. It's also far more deadly.

The Party

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I don't know crap about people's back stories. Yeah, we'll RP to the hilt in-game when the situation calls for it, but I can't tell you anything about where the fighter grew up. See #3 under General Stuff above.

Sheba Sugarfist - Human Monk 7/Charm Specialist 11 - Check that name. This guy's character concept was based on the blaxploitation honeypot. She's pretty and can charm you... and then whoop your ass. Likes to get into combat probably too often to be healthy at the level of bad guys we're running into since she's only leveling as a caster now.

Brunt - Half-Ogre Fighter 15 - Dual-wields gigantic clubby things that do sick damage. Pretty much just muscle and doesn't do a lot of tactic-y kinds of things. Tracker.

Arinon "I'm not tellin' you ****ers my last name" - Grel Ranger 12 - Prefers to use a bow. Tends to like "animals" that aren't so natural. Grel are a sub-division of Elves that are antagonistic to pretty much every civilized race. Guerrilla tactics, slaves, torturing prisoners. I've been told that the character used to be a constant pain in the ass (as in, "I stab the innkeeper") until the party told him he was going to end up in a ditch if he didn't knock it off. Note - This player has the most ridiculous luck with dice I've ever seen. He'll take the d20 you just used to roll 4, 18, 11, 1, 15, 7 and roll 15, 16, 14, 20, 20, 19. This guy is a RL detective and works every other Monday.

Shallyn "Just Shallyn. Like Madonna" - Elf Thief 18 - "Where's the loots?"

Marcus Liger - Human Thief 14 - Pessimistic. Mostly concerned with saving his own ass most of the time and would probably sell us out to do so.

Giovanni Vilano - Half-Elf Magic-User 13/Cleric 13 - Think of a Lex Luthor or Victor von Doom. Chief Executive Badass. Primary damage-doer.

Vagodra Banbar - Human Alteration Specialist 11/Chosen One 7 - Me. I mostly focus on movement spells. The character started as the leader of a small unit of casters in a different campaign and with that skill-set I branched into being the tactics guy for this group. A Chosen One is a Cleric-based class that happens when a god chooses you to be their chief emissary for a particular part of the world. Usually meant to spread the word about how great that god is and get stuff done for them, but occasionally meant to be boiled in oil or nailed to something to later be used as a symbol. So I'm excited about that. I'm a multi-class human! Whee!

Things As They Stand

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The world is based on Earth around 1300-1400. The group was operating out of Istanbul (in-game: Zanbytium), getting involved in politics and other high-level stuff. [I couldn't tell you a ton about what was happening with them because I hadn't joined the group yet. I'll check with the group to get some history.]

I joined, and then this stuff happened: The group got a heads-up from a diviner buddy that the world was going to end (For GenCon 2009, KenzerCo tagged our GM to write the Word Championship Tournament specifically to blow up their official HackMaster 4thEd setting. Like, War of the Gods and whatnot.), so we started looking for a way to get off-plane. After a bit of looking, we found one and stole it. We didn't really know how to operate it, so we ended up plane-hopping for a bit. I missed most of this because my RL wife had our second child, and by the time I got back the group was settled pretty comfortably on Tartarus with a daemon prince's compound as a temporary base of operations. We did a number of odd jobs for him in exchange for room and board as we practiced with the plane-hopping device. After a couple more sessions of tinkering with the device, we knew how to operate it enough to get back to our home plane and world. So we gave our boy on Tartarus a "Later, dude" and zipped back home.

Things were bad. Think Mad Max. Any item that was magical anywhere in the world had exploded (even minor magic items (potions, scrolls, etc.) basically went retributive strike), killing everybody who had been in power, everybody who had a stockpile of magical gear, and basically 99% of NPCs worth a damn. There were a very few others who had gotten a heads-up, but we've only heard about them. Zanbytium went from being a region-dominating city of 500,000 people to a ruin with 5,000 survivors and refugees in very short order.

So. Since we were just about the only show in town, Giovanni's god (Hecate, Roman goddess of magic) told us to start building a library and storehouse for all the magical knowledge we could get our hands on. We started doing that and then ran into agents of Isis who were trying to do the same thing. Isis is the Egyptian goddess of magic, so we were pretty bummed to find out that her people were much more well-organized than we were. Fortunately, her organization is based on tons of very low-level dudes and ours was based on us being globe-trotting badasses. So we struck a deal and we're working in tandem.

Around this time, we had a humorous encounter with an unknown beastie or beasties.

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See, we went looking for a pirate in the Black Sea. This particular boat had been screwing with shipping that one of our little outlying villages depends on, so we let word get out that something valuable would be going by boat on a certain date from place X to Y. We were about an hour into the voyage when a humongous storm approached from directly ahead of us. Skill checks were made and it was determined that this was a magical storm. Like a bunch of dummies, we sailed right in. As soon as we got into the storm proper, the sailors working topside near the front of the boat started dropping over dead. A couple of us (Giovanni and I) were standing near the back of the boat and decided that whatever was doing this was being concealed by the storm so we decided to take no action and let this thing come to us. Right about then, we started taking damage. The GM rolled some dice, but we didn't get to save or dodge or any of that. Just, "You take X damage." We didn't like that very much, and since we both wear Boots of Flying on the job, we took to the air. The next couple of rounds was us flying around in this stupid blizzard taking a bit of damage trying to find this thing that had done non-negotiable damage to us and killed the crew. About that time, we noticed that the boat was, um... coming apart. (The two party members belowdecks had been dealing with it for a couple of rounds, but Giovanni and I were on the wrong side to notice it.) So. Boat being disintegrated, party taking automatic damage, and whatever was doing it was STILL COMPLETELY INVISIBLE. So the belowdecks guys got topside quick and the four of us just Teleported the hell away. That was particularly not awesome and was the genesis of a TON of searching (over the next few sessions) for some bit of knowledge as to what it could have been. We talked to a number of our NPC allies and finally found out it was an Elder Orb. (And that it must have been using Dust of Disappearance.) Look that thing up. They're SICK.

Shortly after we got our negotiate on with Isis, we discovered (I don't remember the source of our info) the greatest consequence of all the magic exploding. Guess who doesn't like magic and would jump at the first chance to see all of it go away? If you guessed "barbarians", you get a cookie. Our information told us that we were looking at an actual army of light cavalry barbarians from far to the east, but we didn't actually know anything about them other than the fact that they were a ways off. (They'd already been on the move before the cataclysm removed any serious resistance to them, and when they heard that we had set up shop in Zanbytium they put a big target on it.) We went out flying one day to go see one of their encampments and see what we could determine from a tiny bit of scouting. They spotted us and gave us a signal that they wanted to talk, so we landed and talked a bit. They knew exactly who we were (Giovanni and "those other guys") and we told them that we wanted to talk to somebody close to the top of their chain of command. The commander of that encampment told me that he'd send word that we wanted to talk to a diplomat and told us that it'd take a couple of weeks. So for the next two weeks we kind of piddle-farted around, trying to get our city in order, looking for high-treasure critters to kill/loot, gathering resources/people for our city, etc. Finally, the diplomat shows up and he's basically got a sheet of paper that says "Will you be subjugated? Check YES or NO." He had no room to really negotiate anything, just orders to tell us what's up. The Mongols wanted us to stop spreading magic outside our area of influence and to pay them a tribute. We told the diplomat "Thanks for the offer, now go **** yourself" and he told us we'd be exterminated. So that was that.

As soon as that was done, we knew that we were going to need fat loots to pay for fixing our city and raising/training an army out of the rabble/refugees that were left. We did some hunting and during this time we had an encounter that began with us trying to kill/loot a dragon and ended with us making an ally of an old-ish Swack Iron Dragon.

It occurred to us that we needed to find out exactly what we were up against, so we threw a bunch of cash at our pal Zymon and told him to find out as much as he could about numbers of Mongols, locations, leadership, etc. After a couple of days, he came back and told us that we're ****ed. A little over two weeks to the north and north-east are approximately 200,000 troops and a little over a month to the south-east and east are 300,000 troops. Also, they have high-level clerics and the whole invasion thing is really a power-grab by their (CE) god and his demon cronies. So that sucks.

As soon as we found out that we were facing not just two armies of mundane barbarians but all the rest of that stuff, we realized we were going to have to pull in a bunch of super-powered allies of our own. We knew that the only thing that would suffice would be a meeting of superpowers. We talked to Hecate first, primarily because she already likes us and secondly because she's one of the goddesses of magic. Then we talked to Isis. Even though she's a rival of our goddess, she's still a goddess of magic. After some skill checks, it was determined that we know that daemons, demons, and devils are all caught up in an eternal war against each of the others. Since we were already pals with a daemon prince, we talked to him and found out how we could get to the fortress of his boss. That would be the biggest baddest daemon Anthraxus. So we went and sought an audience and fortunately for us, some of his underlings had heard of Giovanni Vilano. So we chatted him up and convinced him to come to the meeting. Then we jumped over to [plane], but this time Asmodeus (the biggest baddest devil) had heard of Vilano. He agreed to come to the meeting too, which meant that we were just about done gathering allies. That old-ish dragon that I mentioned above (the one we got all buddy-buddy with) was pals with some kind of dragon council and he'd been working to locate any of them that were still alive. Unfortunately, he was only able to find a few, and most of those went all super-bunker-mode after the cataclysm and didn't want anything to do with us (dragons have great loots). He DID find a decent number of young dragons, but those are kinda "meh".

Oh. I should clarify. We're completely aware that any attempt to actually wage war will result in us losing. They've got 500K troops nearby and a decent number of infernal pals and oodles of clerics and all the other armies scattered across the rest of the empire. So all of our efforts will be spent on NOT having a war.

We needed a place to have our meeting, so we also invited Diana (yes, the Roman goddess), because she's Lawful Neutral and we could have it in her controlled area without any of the other superpowers feeling like they were being slighted or favored.

Diana, Hecate, Isis, Anthraxus, Asmodeus, and a contingent of dragons represented by one swack-iron dragon. And us. Instead of the GM RPing out a discussion in which we'd barely get to talk and he'd be RPing six different characters by himself, he hand-waved it and said that the meeting was successful and the people we'd aligned ourselves with had agreed to put some of their moxie into stopping the annihilation of magic/demonic power-grab that was underway. But they did make clear that it wasn't going to come cheap and that we'd be in charge of financing anything that came up.

So now it's lootin' time.

If you're just now seeing this through a link I provided in another campaign log and you have questions or a "What the hell were you guys thinking?", it's prolly best to ask it in the new thread.

[Greylond]

Heh, good post. I knew a little bit about some of this stuff cause I know the GM(he stole my HM GM and she moved to Memphis about 5 years ago and then I became the local GM around here)...

Keep this going, I for one will enjoy it!

[potatocubed]

I also like hearing about other people's games - especially systems I haven't played, like Hackmaster.

Do go on...

[Morghen]

4/11 Game

Because of stuff I explained above we're in desperate need of lots of cash or cashable loot. We did some looking around and found a temple in [Germany] devoted to one of the gods who died during that whole cataclysm thing. We entered, snooped, found a tunnel, followed the tunnel, followed the tunnel, followed the tunnel and seven miles later found an illusory cavern. We (Brunt, Giovanni, Sheba, and I) investigated a bit and saw it was really just a crappy cavern full of bats and rats and a statue. We flew in all silent-like, Detected at the statue, and discovered that it was a succubus. Giovanni hit it with a spell, killed it, and the bats went ape**** on us. Suddenly Giovanni started getting hit with a level-drain attack while these bats were flying around (but we've got devices that give us a save to avoid the level loss). Our basic response could be summed up with "ZOMG WE'RE IN A CAVERN STUFFED FULL OF LEVEL-DRAINING BATS!" so we threw mean spells at the cloud of bats until they all died. After some investigation, it turns out that only one of the bats was level-draining and that was the vampire mate of the succubus. So that was the end of last session.

We had all seven members there last night, so we started kind of late and didn't get a lot done due to the vast quantity of table-talk [**** jokes]. We started off in the cavern where we ended session last time. We looted the place and found a decent amount of loot and a half-dead sverfneblin. We healed him up a bit and pumped him for information and he gave us a bunch of info on the gear that we found and he filled us in that we were getting close to drow territory. [At this point we were all ignoring the fact that the GM was holding a copy of Vault of the Drow.] Turns out he was charmed by the vampire and was kept around as their gofer. We brought the sverfneblin along since he was the only one there who was a native of the Underdark. Our guide pointed us to the correct tunnel, and we went on.

We traveled another six or seven miles until we calculated the time and realized that it was getting close to the end of our day, so we stopped and rested. (During the course of that last leg, we came across some tracks. Skill checks told us it was a group of eight small bipeds. (Yes, they were Medium. Just small.))

To be continued.

[Greylond]

Heh, Topher is a sneaky one! Going to have to steal that Vamp Bat in a bunch of normal bats trick for my game... ;)

[potatocubed]

Heh heh - as I recall, the vamp/succubus thing is actually from Vault of the Drow. Or one of the D modules, anyway.

[Morghen]

Sorry for the delay. RL.

We traveled another six or seven miles until we calculated the time and realized that it was getting close to the end of our day, so we stopped and rested. (During the course of that last leg, we came across some tracks. Skill checks told us it was a group of eight small bipeds. (Yes, they were Medium. Just small.))

We had another RE-free night and continued through the tunnel. I should mention the tunnel. I forget the exact dimensions, but it was something like 100 feet across and 50 feet tall. I should also mention one of the items we found in the vampire-succubus lounge. It was a pair of non-magical lenses that let the wearer see as if the darkness was merely dusk. Unfortunately, there was only one pair and even though several of us have engineering, geology, etc., we couldn't figure out how they were made or what they were made out of (blown skill checks).

After another couple of miles of travel, we came to an enormous cave. Like, six-miles-across big. Out in the middle is a tower. It was circular and from where we were, we estimated it to be about 80 ft tall (iirc). The tower is a little over a mile from the entrance to the cavern, and about 50 feet into the cavern is a sign. We approached and read it and found that it said (in three languages) "All visitors must report to the tower."

We stood around the sign for a while, debating the merits of actually reporting versus going around it versus assaulting it. After a few minutes, the guy with the glasses noticed that a patrol of eight drow was approaching. One of us has a flying carpet (capacity of four) and the rest have... other means, so we took to the air and headed toward the patrol. We were about 50 feet up and about 150 feet away when they stopped and asked us to identify ourselves. We debated for a moment (Giovanni Vilano is famous and not for good things. Also, he was behind the genocide of an entire drow town.) and during the debate Sheba took a shot at the patrol with her crossbow. So that was that.

Sheba's shot told us that the drow had Stoneskins on, so our immediate tactic was to fly near them and toss a handful of coins at them. They returned fire at us, a couple of us (on the carpet) joined in the shooting, and the rest flew toward them for coin-dropping. I keep a bag of Continual Light coins, so I tossed a handful (10) at one of the drow in the middle of the group (they were arranged 2x4). No damage, but they were all hit with super-bright light. The responded by dropping their little Continual Darkness spheres, but since there were only eight of them, that left two coins still shining. The drow immediately scattered. Three went toward one wall, four went toward another wall, and the last one headed straight back toward the tower... at movement speed 96. All but one of us (Sheba) had taken our action for the round, so she shot at the runner. Stoneskin. And after that the runner was out of range of our missile weapons.

The next round opened with us picking our targets and giving chase. Sheba, Brunt, Arinon, and the sverfneblin went after the four, Shalyn, Marcus, and I went after the three with our missile weapons, and Giovanni tossed a long-range fireball (Sidewinder Fireball: max range - 1 mile) at the runner. Magic Resistance saved his ass, and by the end of the round he was at the tower. We plinked away at the drow for five(?) rounds before they were all dead. I felt pretty stupid for remembering WAY too late that I had Transmute Rock to Mud ready that day, so I dropped it and all three of the drow on our side (the AoE is pretty big) dropped into the mud... until they just levitated out. But at least they were restricted to up/down movement after that. I should've dropped it on the whole group at the very beginning, but I was so in love with my clever Continual Light coins that I forgot about looking at my spell list. Dumb.

So we stood around looting and high-fiving for a few seconds and then got hit with fireballs from the tower. That made us feel dumb, too. Giovanni responded with another Sidewinder of his own at the very top of the tower and then we got out of range for healing and facepalming. And then we ended the session.


I should post somewhere in here that I'm totally open to questions. If I haven't explained something properly, let me know.

[Morghen]

Nothing behind the following spoilers is actually a spoiler. This will be my info dump for items/spells/NPCs so I only have to explain them once and can link back here. The only things that are going in here are things that aren't obvious from the name. Fireball? No. Spy of Derijnah? Yes.

Items

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Bracers of Mapsense - They give you a top-down view of everything within 50(?) feet. BUT. It only gives you a view of things you can see. So it would show you the tunnel branching up ahead but it wouldn't show you a secret door. Most useful feature: The map is marked like a radar display where "enemy types" can be found. A bigger ping is a bigger critter. This description is mediocre at best. I'll borrow a GMG and make it right later.

Spells

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Manor's Mindsight - Lets the caster see everything within 20 ft + 5 ft/level. Caster can see through/around walls/barriers, but is subject to existing lighting. Requires concentration, but caster can stop concentrating and resume again later. Divination spells can be layered on top, but must be cast before Mindsight.
Stoneskin - Blocks 1d4 + (1 per 2 caster levels) physical attacks. Magical or non-magical, all weapon attacks get blocked. Fireball laughs at you. Magic Missile laughs at you and removes one "block" per Missile. Greatest weakness: A handful of coins.
Phantom Armor - Catches the first (1/caster level) points of damage and provides a tiny bit of AC.
Wings of PanDemonium - Adds large temporary bat-wings to the caster's back which are composed of thousands of tiny screaming vortices to demonic realm blah blah blah. Provides flight class A and a movement rate of 70. (Standard human walking speed is 12.)
Rope Trick - Cast it on a length of rope. The rope will rise straight up into the air. At the top of the rope is an invisible doorway into a small extradimensional space large enough to hold eight people. Spells cannot be cast through the doorway, and any occupants are undetectable by most scrying. Duration scales with level.
Heat-Seeking Fist of Thunder - Cast it at a flame and the flames explode for d6/level, hitting everything within 20' of the flame with sonic damage. Also extinguishes the flame. Useless without a fire source.
Windwall - It's a wall of very serious wind. Any missile that doesn't have a bunch of weight is going to be deflected upward and miss. Negates dragon breath.

NPCs

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Rybax - This is the daemon prince I mentioned above. He's not quite a patron, but almost. He's one of our go-to guys when we need to research something and our #1 guy when we're looking to gear up or fence something.
Zymon - Human Diviner Specialist. Knowledge pimp. He's the guy who told us to get out of town before it went kablooey. He lives a few miles north of Zanbytium with a gang of other specialists (Invocation, Illusion, Alteration, Abjuration) in a super-bunker complete with library, sno-cone stand, and bowling alley. Those last two are made up, but the place is pretty sweet.

[Morghen]

4/18 Game
Characters present: Brunt, Marcus, Shalyn, Giovanni, Me.

So this week: I had another Transmute Stone to Mud memorized, and I told the group that I wanted to sneak up, cast it and either make the tower topple or just sink straight into the mud. The tower was 50’ diameter and 40’ tall, but the area of the spell is one 20’ cube/level. So I was thinking about casting the spell about five feet under the surface (the spell can’t be cast on worked stone) and having the super-heavy tower break through that and either topple over and crush the drow inside or sink straight down and drown everybody except the ones on the top. The only problem was that the drow’s MR was cutting right through our Invisibility and the range on the spell is 130 yards. That meant that even with Wings of PanDemonium the drow casters would get a couple of rounds of tossing those long-range fireballs at me. So we were in the middle of coming up with diversionary tactics when Marcus said, “Hey. Why don’t you cast it on the ceiling, instead?”

We were all quiet for about a quarter second before we had a general freak-out about how awesome this was going to be.

Our final plan for eliminating the tower full of drow: Everyone gets covered with Dust of Disappearance. Giovanni gets within range of the tower for that long-range fireball spell and blow hell out of the top of it. At the same time, I take off for a spot directly above the tower (at movement rate 70). Getting to the spot and casting the spell will take four rounds, but by the time Giovanni is done blasting them they’re not likely to be looking up anyway. He’ll drop a couple of those fireballs and then step back out of range. I cast the spell, the tower gets crushed, and we move in for the loots.

Here’s how that worked out: AWESOME.

Round 1, Giovanni drops a mean-ass fireball on the top of the tower. GM asks him to make a MR check, he passes it and rolls a silly amount of damage. I take off flying.
Round 2, Giovanni drops a mean-ass fireball and fails the MR check. Fireball explodes in front of the tower. I keep flying. Giovanni gets hit with three fireballs. MR cancels one, he saves against the other two and takes a little over 55 points.
Round 3, Giovanni has been running for several segments. He’s out of range, and three fireballs blow up where he’d been standing. At the end of the round, I get to the spot.
Round 4, Giovanni is near the rest of the group. On segment 5, my spell goes off. GM requires a [skill] check and a to-hit roll. I’m successful with both and proceed to drop 5,000+ tons of mud on the tower. The spell causes an area of stone that is 20x20x260 to drop straight down onto the tower. The tower gets a save vs. crushing blow to see if it holds together and fills with mud or if it's just completely crushed. The tower fails the save and we all do a happy dance.

So we all headed over to where the tower had been and Giovanni popped a Detect Magic. We spent about 30 minutes digging through mud to grab what we could before we decided that something was probably headed our way to investigate all the noise and explodiness. Giovanni used some item to summon an earth elemental and set it to work gathering all the debris and piling it up in one spot for easy Detecting and retrieval later. So we returned to the air and went looking for whatever was going to come looking. (Of note: The tower had a magical ballista that survived the mud. We took it with us. Flying carpet, remember?)

After about 30 minutes, a group of eight drow and 12 bugbears came around a bend. Since we still had that Dust of Disappearance on us, we just flew over and Giovanni hit it with a fireball, I hit it with a Lightning Bolt, and Brunt beat the two survivors to death with his min-maxed club things.

We decided that sitting in one spot wasn't going to work for very long, so we headed toward a huge structure that I saw when I was up in the air. We got closer and found that it was a 40 foot-tall, 1000 foot-long wall with a huge gate patrolled exclusively by female drow. Inside the wall was a compound of 11 buildings and a large number of drow roaming around. I passed a generic "all of the military skills" check and determined that this was the central military compound for the area. We decided that we'd DEFinitely need to be at full strength to go at that, so we left and went looking for easier targets.

We returned to the cavern entrance (at the southern edge of the cavern) and started around the outside edge going counter-clockwise. Before long, we encountered a large manor house with a stable and a couple of smaller buildings. All of that was surrounded by a 10-ft wall with a large-ish gate. They hadn't seen us yet and since a couple of the others were itching to try out the ballista, we landed the carpet and they started prepping it to fire. Meanwhile, I flew up high enough to see over the wall (boots of flying) so I could get some kind of intel on what was inside the house. I saw drow of all ages as well as svirfneblin inside the area going about their business. There were some kind of lizard mounts as well, but we weren't particularly concerned about those. The drow didn't seem to be prepping for war (because there were kids walking around), but we don't really know anything about how drow operate.

So our ballista crew hit the gate with a bolt and wrecked it without completely destroying it. The next round, Giovanni hit the house with a fireball and killed about 60 of 'em. A few segments later, I hit the house with a spell called Heat-Seeking Fist of Thunder. I get the feeling that it's meant to blow up torch-bearers and extinguish fires that you don't want around because the target heat source is completely obliterated and deals (d4/level) sonic damage to everything within 20 feet.

So we blew up a house full of drow men, women, and children as well as svirfneblin slaves and then called time.

[TopherKersting]

Since I'm the GM, I'll fill in a bit of the background...

The campaign started in 2003, and my intent was to start the game five years prior to the fall of the Byzantine Empire and play it out. None of the original PCs are still active, but there are connections to that initial party. In 2008, we played out the war between the Byzantines (humans) and the Ottomans (dwarves), with the additional twist that the war was actually instigated by drow treachery--essentially, the drow were conducting guerrilla raids against both sides to draw them into a full-scale conflict.

The PCs played the humans against the dwarves and vice versa until they realized the drow were doing the same thing. At that point, they attacked the drow stronghold and eliminated it through the skillful use of commanded spectres. The Byzantine government was decapitated, so the PCs were finally able to act without government interference/massive bribes. Fortunately for them the dwarven kingdom was severely damaged and was in no condition to make the final push. Giovanni Villano built a monastery/temple and Markus Liger built a thieves' academy, while most of the other PCs did their best to live it up.

For the summer of 2009 the group playtested my modules for the HackMaster National Championship "Hacknarok" in which it was my job to blow up Garweeze Wurld Prime. The Diviners Syndicate discovered that Ragnarok was coming, because prophesy spells reaching out beyond two weeks stopped working. In an attempt to try to limit the destruction, they hired adventuring parties to acquire and destroy the artifacts the diviners could locate. The final round of the "tournament" involved the PCs swaying the battle between the divine forces of Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil until Odin finally got fed up and cast the last remaining copy of Fireball: Nuclear Winter on a magical ley line rift, destroying that world along with the Norse and Aldrazar pantheons.

I decided that the consequence of that event in my world was that all non-shielded magic would detonate, killing the overwhelming majority of high-level PCs. Not wanting to be a jerk, I did allow my players to act on the foreknowledge and try to find a way to get off-world before the cataclysm. After figuring out a slippery little time-travel puzzle I devised, they did.

The cataclysm turned Giovanni's temple into a lake--using an Everflowing Flask to spew gallons of dragon blood does have the side effect of creating a significant amount of magical energy--but left Markus' academy intact. Most Western governments are non-existent, but the barbarian (Mongol) horde is intact and on the offensive. Morghen's description of the ambassador-level meeting with the Mongols is mostly accurate, except that they really should have taken the deal (50,000 gp per year and an agreement not to spread magic in Mongol territory), at least until they had time to rebuild Zanbytium's defenses and raise at least a minimal army. Right now, if the Mongols decide to invade, they'll succeed.

During this stretch, the party had a little side adventure where they encountered Lolth (technically Zyandal in HackMaster terms) as a freak random encounter roll. Lolth killed one PC (subsequently raised) and barely escaped before she herself was killed. Obviously, a drow goddess has no kind feelings toward an adventuring group that obliterated one of her strongholds. Because it took the PCs three tries to accomplish that goal, the ill will is mutual. As such, the party wants Lolth dead, so running them through D3/Q1 was an obvious choice, even though it means me running a published module, albeit with heavy modifications, for the first time in about twenty-five years.

As far as Monday's game was concerned, Marcus' idea to rain mud from the ceiling was brilliant, but the party also made what I think was a huge tactical error. I'm sure Morghen will let you know if they get away with it...

Topher

[Greylond]

Hey Topher, yea, I was surprised that you were running a published module.

But I like the updates and your game sounds fun,...


...even if you stole my GM.... ;)

[Morghen]

No game last night.

Two of the three casters (and both clerics) were unavailable (that's Me and Vilano's player). So instead of four or five melee characters getting murdered by a city full of pissed-off drow, the group decided to play board games.

[Grendus]

Shame, I was looking forward to it. Oh well, next week...

[Morghen]

Okay, so it's Thursday and I still haven't updated.

I swear I'm not letting this thing fall by the wayside. The last two weeks have just happened to be games I didn't attend. See, my wife and I just had our 10th anniversary and went to D.C. and so preparations for that kept me out of the game on the 25th. Then we got back and since our kids were with my mom until Tuesday night of this week, we decided to go to a movie since we NEVER have kid-free weeknights.

So. I swear I'll be back next Tuesday with new game stuff.

(And if I can find out what happened this week, I'll post it.)

[Morghen]

The entirety of a text I got from the guy playing Sheba:

Yeah, we are balls deep in drow.

I asked for clarification and I got this:

[Brunt], [Vilano], [Shalyn], and I were fighting four groups of twenty drow.

So while at first glance it seemed like things were going GREAT, things are, in fact, going terribly badly.

[Greylond]

Okay, so it's Thursday and I still haven't updated.

I swear I'm not letting this thing fall by the wayside. The last two weeks have just happened to be games I didn't attend. See, my wife and I just had our 10th anniversary and went to D.C. and so preparations for that kept me out of the game on the 25th. Then we got back and since our kids were with my mom until Tuesday night of this week, we decided to go to a movie since we NEVER have kid-free weeknights.

So. I swear I'll be back next Tuesday with new game stuff.

(And if I can find out what happened this week, I'll post it.)

FAIL! Lame Excuse. j/k. ;)


To prevent this you just need to get your wife to game with you! Last GameCon Memphis was on our Annversary and this year it falls on the same weekend!

[Morghen]

Update from the GM and it don't sound good:

OK, here's the situation:

After fireballing the trading house manor, the party decided to leave it and explore the other direction. They flew past the cave entrance to find some other caves on a bluff. Once they found that the tracks were barefoot large humanoids (bugbears), they decided to ignore them and continue.

A little ways past that they found a series of long buildings with humanoid activity (mostly drow and bugbears). While they decided what to do, one of the drow security guards on the ground spotted them, despite another dose of Dust of Disappearance, and set off the alarm. The party decides that discretion is the better part of valor and heads back toward the entrance to the Vault.

Unfortunately for them, four companies of drow clerics stand between them and their escape. Worse, the drow vision is much better than that of the PCs, so the party was within longbow range well before the PCs can even see them. Even worse, the drow knew the party's tendencies to use large area-effect spells, so they weren't bunched together--no more than three could be hit by even the widest area Fireball spell.

By the end of the session the party was completely stripped of their Stoneskins and Villano had fumbled away his Staff of the Magi. Sheba had been critted multiple times but had captured one of the drow clerics and flew with her to altitude, where the cleric's sudden infatuation with Sheba's good looks started to make things interesting.

Shallyn took out multiple drow with her crossbows, and Brunt did a very successful dive bomb maneuver by flying down, grabbing a drow, returning to altitude to break her neck, then returning to drop the drow at high speed onto another drow, killing her as well.

When we left the party, Villano was trying to find Sheba to throw her some healing, Brunt was preparing to make another dive bombing run, and Shallyn was continuing to pepper the drow with bolts. The drow were down about half a company.

[Morghen]

5/9 Game
Characters present:
Shalyn, Brunt, Arinon, Sheba, Vilano, Me

So last night was pretty damn frustrating. The team felt bush-league all night long. We generally start around 6:30 or 7 and play until 10, but last night we started at 8 and wrapped up before 9:45. On the other hand, we got a ton of REALLY great table-talk in. So... yeah.

Bleh. I generally dislike bitching, but jeeze.

A note on HackMaster:
HackMaster has seven ability scores instead of six. Comeliness is #7. If yours is super-low, people will react poorly because of how ugly you are. If yours is super-high, you can end up having an effect like Fascinate if the person you're interacting with fails a Wisdom check.


The game
We started with the party spread WAY apart and since we'd all dosed with Dust of Disappearance, we didn't really know where anybody was. Brunt and Arinon were on the ground. Brunt was ready to start clubbing people to death (he got Enlarged last session and was something like 15 feet tall) and Arinon was prepped to start up his Rapid-Fire Crossbows. They knew they were near each other, but DoD doesn't just work on bad guys. Sheba was about 300 feet up in the air making out with the Drow cleric he'd grabbed. Shalyn was also flying, shootin' some fools with her Rapid-Fire Crossbows. I was about 100 feet up, fairly centrally located. Vilano was about halfway between two of the groups of drow, on the edge of what was happening. Right at the very end of last session, he managed to drop (whether he rolled a fumble or got critted, I don't know) his Staff of the Magi.

Because I knew what went on last week (even though I wasn't there), I spent a chunk of time trying to figure out a way out of the colossal mess. I came to some conclusions.

1) This group of 80 drow weren't the things that got summoned by the alarm. They were stationed there to keep us from leaving so that whatever scary thing they had prepped could get to us. My guess was MUs with some kind of flight.
2) Fighting the mooks on the ground was a losing proposition. We might have been able to kill all 70 of 'em, but I was convinced that something way scarier was heading our way.
3) Deciding how we wanted to get out of the situation was the only real discussion to be had.

The session started with the GM calling for initiative.

Brunt started by beating on the dudes near him, Arinon started one-shotting some guys, Shalyn started by shooting some dudes, Sheba was making out with her new girlfriend, I pulled out a Continual Darkness coin for even the tiniest bit of protection and started yelling for the party to gather up on me, and Vilano cast his final Stoneskin on himself. Vilano had been flying in direction X and he immediately stopped when he lost his Staff. He decided that he was going to cast his Stoneskin, drop straight down as soon as he could move (five segments later), cast Truesight to find the Staff, and grab it/fly away five segments later. While under HEAVY fire. Longbows fire on segments one and six, and there were 16 drow firing at him.

So on segment one, everybody did the things I described above (including Vilano casting Stoneskin on himself). With the roll, Vilano's Stoneskin blocked 10 attacks. Then the drow fired and tore through every single one of them and took off 30-something HP, leaving him with 50+ (down from his max of 135ish). And then on segment six, he could move again and dropped straight down. The drow fired again but Vilano got lucky and they only took off about 15 HP. On segment one of round two, Vilano cast Truesight and the drow fired again. He got lucky again and they only hit him for another 15ish. Vilano's Truesight took effect and he discovered that the Staff (after the GM made a grenade-effect roll for direction and rolled a d30 for distance in feet) was literally within arms reach of him. So that was lucky. Oh, yeah. When the drow fired on 1, Vilano got critted and ended up with a couple of broken ribs. By this time, Sheba and Shalyn had gathered up with me and we'd gone to about 300 feet. Getting shot sucks. So then segment 6 rolled around and Vilano could move again. And he did. While getting pincushioned again. After that round of arrows, Vilano was down to 16 HP.

So Vilano flew straight up to get away from the archers and the GM gave him the heads-up that since he was moving fairly fast, the archers were going to get their regular shot on 1, but on 6 they'd need 20s to hit him.

Brunt and Arinon were still on the ground killing people.

Round 3, segment 1 (since PCs go first), Vilano cast a spell called Wraithform. Wraithform, in this case, is basically a "physical attacks don't affect me" spell. Fireball and such will still affect you, but totally mundane attacks pass right through you.

Sadly, the drow were all firing Arrows +1. And they shot his ass for another 35ish points.

-20 HP isn't much fun, so Vilano's player spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out a loophole or some kind of instant magical thing to get out of being dead. But he couldn't find anything so he had to purge his Honor. When you purge your Honor, you get to decide how you get out of the jam, so Vilano's player decided that the bowstrings of the five drow who shot him suddenly broke simultaneously.

Spoiler

Show

There's a stat called Honor. It accumulates as you do cool things or diminishes if you do uncool things (back down from a challenge, pee yourself in court). You can burn a little bit to affect a dice roll here or there but the only time we ever use it is to change something that just happened. Usually used as a "get out of crit free" card or to unfail a save. Purging your Honor reduces you to 10% of your former total, can only be done one time per level and until you regain a certain portion, all of your rolls suffer a -1. Saves, damage, skill checks, HP rolls, everything. And you earn reduced XP when you're in dishonor.

So that'll be a pain.

By the end of round 3 we had Vilano, Sheba (and her new girlfriend), Shalyn, and me hovering at 300 feet waiting for Arinon and Brunt to finish what they were doing. By the end of round 4, they'd finished killing the drow near Brunt and they flew up to the rest of us.

I introduced several plans for getting away from this stupid situation and we decided that instead of doing a temporary escape, resting, and returning to **** **** up, we'd use spells and items to tunnel up through the mile of rock back to the surface and just leave. (I cast a Wall Passage with double the area of effect, walked to the end of it, cast Poly Self to turn into an Umber Hulk and started burrowing. Vilano had a... Spade of Excavating or something and he ended up doing most of the work.)

So we got topside, flew a while, rested, and teleported back home. And ended the session.


Sigh. Like I said, bush-league.

Questions? Complaints about how stupid it was for Vilano to not tank up before he dropped back down? Anything?

[Grendus]

Flying directly in to a mass of Drow... not that bright. Then again, purged honor can be regained. A very expensive staff (I assume it's a powerful magic item... never played Hackmaster before) might be harder to come by than a few more opportunities to be a badass.

I'm definitely loving the story though. You have good narration skills, and your DM is great at making things up on the fly. Much more interesting, imo, to have realistic effects than to stick to straight RAW.

[TopherKersting]

That brings the party to 1-3-2 vs. the Drow. I'm calling this one a draw since they took out a total of 17 Drow vs. the loss of one PC (negated with the honor purge).

When we left off, the party was deciding whether to return to Drowopolis* or to take some side adventures to raise some much-needed cash, so I have to prepare for both.

Topher

*Drowtown was utterly destroyed during their one victory (after three previous attempts) against the Drow. The one other tie was their grudge match vs. Lolth (Zyandal) where one PC was killed but it cost Lolth a level in the process.

[Greylond]

, and your DM is great at making things up on the fly. Much more interesting, imo, to have realistic effects than to stick to straight RAW.

Topher is one of the best GameMasters I've ever met and played with in 30 years of gaming.

Morghen, great story! I love hearing how other groups go through some of the same stuff that I put my group through.


oh yea, did I mention that Topher stole my HM GM? it's ALL Topher's Fault... ;)

[Morghen]

A very expensive staff (I assume it's a powerful magic item... never played Hackmaster before)

AFAIK, it's exactly the same as a Staff of the Magi from the AD&D universe. I can't be certain because I don't own a HM GMG and haven't cracked an AD&D GMG for something like 15 years.

You have good narration skills

Thanks.

That brings the party to 1-3-2 vs. the Drow. I'm calling this one a draw since they took out a total of 17 Drow vs. the loss of one PC (negated with the honor purge).

Haaaaaaang on. THIS encounter was 17-1, but before this last one we were approximately 200-0? 150-0? The tower and manor house were both stuffed silly with drow.

When we left off, the party was deciding whether to return to Drowopolis* or to take some side adventures to raise some much-needed cash, so I have to prepare for both.

Also frustrating. If everyone would just put on their big-girl panties and get their game-faces on, we could walk through this ****ing thing.

I love hearing how other groups go through some of the same stuff that I put my group through.

Send 'em this way for a "Please play smarter than this."

Okay, that's too negative. Before that session I skipped we'd been doing mostly fine. Sheba's "I shoot the scouts" was kinda dumb, but other than that we were pretty much on point.

[Greylond]

I would actually put my group, The Red Shirts, up against anyone. They've learned their tactics the hard way... ;)

[TopherKersting]

Haaaaaaang on. THIS encounter was 17-1, but before this last one we were approximately 200-0? 150-0? The tower and manor house were both stuffed silly with drow.

The record is by adventure, not by encounter. Besides, everyone knows that male drow are completely expendable. ;)

Topher

[Morghen]

5/16 Game
Characters Present:
Shalyn, Vilano, Sheba, Brunt, Marcus, and me.

The Game
We started the session with me arguing for going back to the Vault of the Drow. I'm certain that we can finish this thing fairly easily as long as we pull our collective head out of our collective ass. Flying AT the crowd of drow was super dumb and as long as we can avoid goofy **** like that, we'll be fine. So we were gearing up for heading back underground and one of the things that Vilano said was that having an undead army to help things would be awesome. We'd already told the GM to hang on to the one-or-two-session thing he'd put together, but when we started talking about rounding up an undead posse he asked us if we at least wanted to hear the hook. Turns out he'd written up a crypt-crawl with a lich at the end of it. So we scrapped the drow-prep we'd been doing and zipped off into the wilderness of Sicily to go lich-hunting.

We got to the island (with that plane-hopping device we used to escape before the whole world went kablooey) and the only immediate sign of ANYthing we could see was a little blown-up town. We headed over and started asking around. The locals at the only remaining bar told us to go talk to the priest at the temple. We went to the temple (of Apollo) and the guy there told us that Ararac (spelling is definitely flawed) had been a wizard and he'd built a big tomb up on the mountain and he had died, but that the town hadn't seen him. In hindsight, I may have misunderstood some of this. I can't swear that the priest told us they knew that Ararac was a lich. Either way, Ararac had never given the town any grief, but the priest did know that his tomb was up on the mountain. So we went.

We flew up the mountain and saw two entrances in the side of the thing. We looked in each and found that one was 20x20x70 and the other was 20x20x50.


Frick. I lost track of time. I gotta go pick up kids. I'll be back and finish this tonight-ish.

[Greylond]

dang... just when it was getting good...

[Kaun]

Ow cliff hanger!

[Greylond]

as long as it doesn't get cancelled in mid-plot like my favorite TV shows tend to do... ;)

[Morghen]

AND WE'RE BACK!


We flew up the mountain and saw two entrances in the side of the thing. We looked in each and found that one was 20x20x70 and the other was 20x20x50. The longer one had a big double door at the end and the shorter one just had a bare wall at the far end. I convinced the group that the short tunnel was OBviously the way in. A super-smart lich wouldn't just build a door so you could walk in, right?

So we had our thieves check for traps and found that the walls had 100 gems total stuck in them. The gems were concealing some kind of trap, but there was no way to tell exactly what the trap was. Fortunately, the floor was completely untrapped, so we just walked down to the end of the hall. We got there and found a perfectly bare wall. Oh. The walls all the way down (both sides) were covered in your standard "demons eating people" murals. We checked for secret doors and got nothing, Vilano cast Stone Tell (it lets you talk to any kind of stone or rock) and found out that only one person had been through in the last few years (and that person had walked down the hallway and walked right back out). No entrance there. So as it turns out, I was completely full of ****. Oh. On the way out, I popped one of the gems out of the wall with my sword (that goofy cleric-ish class I have gives me proficiencies (in anything I want) at the same rate as a cleric) and the little gem (a diamond as it turns out) fell on the ground and just laid there. We looked at it for a second and when nothing horrible happened, we moved on.

And then we went to the longer tunnel. The longer tunnel had the same murals (an Artistic Appreciation: Painting check told us it was the same artist) and a big double door at the end. There weren't any traps in this hallway until we hit the big door. The door was trapped, but we couldn't find a way to deactivate it (apparently all the machinery was in the ceiling or walls or something). We could tell (Find Traps spell) that one of the huge block of the ceiling was part of the trap and it appeared that the thing would fall when the trap went off. So we tied a rope to the knocker, backed out of the tunnel, and pulled the door open. Or tried to. The door only opened about two inches and the gigantic block slammed down, totally ruining a perfectly nice rope. We stood around debating for a second before the GM called for passive Observation checks. We heard a hissing coming from the tunnel, so we backed out a ways and waited for gas or something. Nothing happened for a bit, so we went back in the tunnel to investigate and found that the block had risen back into the ceiling. And we found some liquid on the floors and walls. Skill checks (and IIRC, trap checks) followed to tell us that the trap works like this: Door opens, block falls about 10 feet away from door, 10-foot gap fills with acid, acid drains back into receptacle, hydraulic system kicks in and gradually raises block back into ceiling. Marcus convinced the rest of us that the door would only ever open about two inches and that this was a total red herring, so we left and headed back to the other entrance to retrieve those gems.

Shalyn was being all super-cautious and stuff, but the gem trap wasn't doing anything to her. Until the 50th gem popped out. Then all 50 of the open holes shot little poisoned darts out. But we ALWAYS have Stoneskin on when we're on the job and Shalyn was only hit by four of them, so we kind of shrugged and she kept at it. And then the same thing was repeated with the last 50 gems. Four more Stoneskins got taken off, but all three of the casters have 2-3 extra castings on hand.

Appraisal: Gems told us that Shalyn had just collected 100 1,000 gp diamonds so we did a little dance at our tidy little profit and decided we should check out the rest of the mountain. Oh. First, we put all the diamonds (~5 karats apiece) in their own separate bag in case they were radioactive or something.

And then we found another entrance a little higher up the mountain. [Facepalm]

This entrance was 20x20x120, and the first 50 feet or so weren't trapped. Right about there, we found a colored path on the floor that lead around some floor traps. Basically, the gist was that as long as you stay on the path, you can avoid traps. Until there was a floor trap that covered the width of the path. We flew over the traps and got to the end of the hall. Oh. The walls were covered with the same "demons eating people" murals. At the end of the hall was a big painting of a demon with an open mouth. The mouth was about three feet across and was an actual hole in the wall. The other side was completely pitch black.

Infravision had no effect, Dispel Magic had no effect, two Continual Light coins had no effect. Sheba sent an Invisible Servant in there to bring back anything it could find. It brought back a humanoid femur. He sent it back in and it eventually brought us an entire skeleton and standard adventurer clothes.

We spent the rest of the session (about 20 minutes) sweating and trying to decide what to do about getting in.

Things that have occurred to me since then:
-Trip those traps and see if they go anywhere.
-I need a spell called Sonar.
-Rock to Mud doesn't work on worked stone, but 95% of the mountain is unworked stone.
-We're covered in Stoneskin and have really good saves. Shut the **** up and jump in.

[Greylond]

Topher is running 2 Published adventures? Really?

Topher, are you feeling Ok?...