The party:
Human cleric 8
Human barbarian/sorcerer 1/6
Elf fighter (archer) 7
Human cleric 4 [NPC]

Important note about the campaign: The PCs are “Eternal Heroes”: they can raise themselves from the dead the morning after they die. They all know this, and the barbarian/sorcerer has risen from death twice before this game session. (The penalty is identical to the raise dead spell, but they can come back even without a body.)

The group was searching a sewer complex for the McGuffin, and they’d had an unpleasant experience so far. They came to a chamber where they fought and killed two gibbering mouthers. Beyond that chamber was another, in which they saw a large chest surrounded by a shifting dark cloud. In the cloud they got glimpses of eyes, tentacles, claws, mouths, and chaotic colors. The 8th-level cleric identified (Knowledge Planes) the cloud as a planar bleed, but didn’t know the plane.

They stayed back out of the room and lassoed the chest. When they started pulling it, the cloud belched out a mass of tentacles and claws: a chaos beast (though the 8th-level cleric failed to identify it). The fight was short (just two rounds), but the barbarian/sorcerer got clawed and affected by the creature’s corporeal instability. He fell into an amorphous blob, flopping around on the floor. Everyone in the group was stunned—no one knew anything about the creature or its powers.

After a few rounds, the barb/sorc pulled himself together (with a Charisma check), but he had lost some Wisdom. There was discussion about the situation, and two Players considered the end result of whatever was happening to the barb/sorc might be worse than death—especially since he can come back from death. The suggestion of killing the barb/sorc was mentioned, but no one attempted to act on the idea. The 8th-level cleric deduced (Spellcraft check with help from Knowledge Planes) that a restoration spell might help, but he didn’t have the spell prepared for the day.

After a minute, the barb/sorc fell back into the blob state, but made his Charisma check again after just a few rounds. The barb/sorc ran from the chamber and through the sewer tunnels. The elf followed on his heels, but the clerics were held up by environmental obstacles. The barb/sorc, with the elf following, ran all the way back to the entrance of the sewers. The elf then suggested running out into the sunlight. They both ran out into the city street, but nothing changed.

The elf had a weapon ready to slay the barb/sorc, but held back using it. The fear that the barb/sorc would eventually turn into a chaos beast was mentioned at the table. When the barb/sorc dropped to blob again, still the elf held off killing him. The barb/sorc had never consented to being killed.

A couple rounds later, the barb/sorc went from sloppy blob to chaotic monster and attacked the elf. The brief fight ended with the elf falling to a blob state, and the new chaos beast running off into the city.

The elf eventually made a Charisma check to take his normal form. He asked how near the local temple was (for a restoration spell), and I had him roll 1d6 for the number of minutes it would take for him to get there. Three minutes. He ran through the city but fell to a blob after the first minute. He managed to make another Charisma check, and took off again toward the temple. But then he fell to a blob after another minute of safety, and a couple rounds later, he became yet another chaos beast loose in the city.

By the time the two clerics emerged from the sewers, a general alarm had sounded through the city. Citizens were hiding in their homes and businesses, and the town guards and soldiers were patrolling looking for the dangers. I described a scene of a guard patrol killing a “blobbed” soldier.

I called the session to end at that point. Now I’ve got to consider what happens when two chaos beasts run amok in a populated city. The results could be catastrophic. I’m considering have the “secondary” beasts die after an hour or something. That way the “plague” is limited to only a few people. I never, ever, considered that the PCs would bring a chaos beast into the city, much less bring two!

They had the answer to the problem, but no one did what they had already admitted was necessary. Why didn’t they kill the barb/sorc when they talked about it? Why did the barb/sorc run out of the sewers and into the city? Why didn’t they kill the barb/sorc in the city street? Why didn’t the elf kill himself when he had two chances?

Now, I could understand if they were playing low Wisdom (the affliction drains Wisdom each round), but no one mentioned they were doing that. No one mentioned anything about the lowering Wisdom other than to speculate what would happen when all their Wisdom was drained.

* * *

Several years ago, as a Player, myself, my party encountered a chaos beast in my first D&D3 campaign. We were a group of five 5th-level PCs, and none of us knew what a chaos beast did. But when the monk got afflicted (my dwarf cleric got hit twice, but made his saves) and turned to a blob, we had the same concern that the above Players had: would he turn into a chaos beast? We decided to execute the monk. We then took the monk’s body to a temple and had him raised.

I remembered the encounter as very exciting and memorable. It didn’t affect the world outside our party; it didn’t wipe out half the party and set the stage for a city-wide epidemic.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

The characters in this campaign:
Human barbarian/sorcerer 1/6
Human cleric 7
Elf fighter (archer) 7 [absent this session]
Human cleric 4 [NPC]

The adventurers in my Eternal Heroes campaign just delved beneath the streets of a large town. Exploring a secret section of the old sewer system, they encountered an otyugh, a gibbering mouther, another gibbering mouther, a mimic, another otyugh, four ogre zombies, a phantasmal killer spell trap, and a vacuous grimoire.

The barbarian/sorcerer died to the phantasmal killer trap, and the cleric lost 2 points of wisdom from the vacuous grimoire. The barbarian/sorcerer self-raised the next morning, and the cleric is getting the wisdom drain fixed with restoration. When they came out of the sewer complex, they were stinky and nasty. Both PCs ended up in the brown “water” of the tunnels at least once, were slapped and bitten by the otyughs, and were vomited on by the mouthers.

They both role played the situation very well, and it was all good fun (at least for me, the DM). Adventures like this, where the PCs come out of the dungeon with somethings nasty to show for their efforts is really fun, compared to the kinds of adventures where they come out showing no sign of any kind of struggle or trouble.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

Thursday night are game night with my friends. We were intending to play Dungeons & Dragons, but we did more talking and joking than any real playing. Some non-game talking and joking is pretty normal for our game nights, but last evening, we probably got in only an hour of actual play time.

My current group consists of four guys between 31 and 51 years old. We’ve had as many as seven people in our group, two of them women. But when it’s just us guys together, we seem to revert to being 13 years old. Our jokes are juvenile, or topics of conversation aren’t polite, and we generally act like pubescent boys.

We talked and laughed till midnight. We usually get plenty of gaming in among our joking and talking, but last night we spent more time ragging on one guy’s home state than we did any gaming.

I prefer to play the game, whatever game, on our game nights—I look forward to these evenings each week—but occasionally, guys just need to be silly. A man who outgrows, or has no outlet for some silliness, becomes boring. Our game group allows for plenty of silliness. We might be boorish at times, but we sure as hell ain’t boring.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

The party is 3 PCs and 4 NPCs (1 NPC party member and her 2 personal bodyguards, and 1 guide). The group is traveling in the wilderness with a wagon, 2 horses, and a mule.

They needed to reconnointer an army location, so 2 of the stealth-capable PCs (read: lightly armored and unarmored, but not rogues) left the rest of the group. The 3rd PC and the NPCs concealed their camp to avoid detection while the group was split up.

The 2 scouters looked the army situation over and was returning to camp when they were spotted by a patrol, and a fight ensued. The patrol was not an overwhelming encounter, but the fight could have gone badly for the 2 PCs. As it turned out, the 2 PCs won and returned safely to camp. Now, after the game session, I’m awarding xp.

Normally I award xp according to who was in a particular encounter. For instance, I’d just award the patrol xp to the 2 PCs in the situation, and call it fair. They risked the danger, they could have died, so they get the reward.

But this is rewarding the 2 PCs for splitting up the party, and is in effect penalizing the 1 PC for being willing to sit out the scenario for the good of the party’s success. The 1 PC stayed out of the scouting because:
1- She is not at all stealthy (plate armor, no big Dex bonus).
2- The NPCs would be outclassed alone against any of the patrols they had so far seen and encountered.
3- The horses and wagon have gear and loot they’d be dumb to leave completely unattended.

The Player willingly sat quietly, yet attentively, for 10 minutes while the other 2 PCs scouted. All the PCs took effort to find a concealed camp location.

When I randomly rolled the patrol encounter, rolled spot checks to see if the PCs were seen, and then began the encounter, I considered “duplicating” the encounter for the 1 PC’s location. But that would mean ignoring the party’s effort at specifically concealing the camp so that such an encounter would not happen. Kind of unfair to overrule that, and would teach the Players to not bother with such effort in the future — “The DM will make an encounter for us whether we try to conceal our camp or not.” Plus, just as the encounter was dangerous for the 2 scouting PCs, it would have been dangerous for the camped PC and NPCs — “Whoops, I just killed the PC who specifically played smart and stayed behind and concealed.”

So I’m wondering if I should just include the 1 PC in on the xp for the encounter with the 2 PCs:
1- To show that they are all “in this together” even when one PC willingly allows him/herself to be sidelined for the good of the situation.
2- To not reward anyone for splitting up the party and/or going off on their own to get more xp.

But, I also like rewarding xp to the PCs who actually earned it:
1- To reward those who actually take the risks/dangers.
2- Because one or both of the PCs could have died, but the other PC could not have. (Essentially reward for no risk.)

If things had gone better in the stealth for the 2 PCs, they would have had no encounter. But, as it turned out, they’d have been better off if the 1 PC had gone with them — they still failed the stealth attempt, and they would have had more help on their side. But, of course, they didn’t know this before starting out — they *tried* to be stealthy, and the 1 PC *tried* to help by staying at camp.

The xp award for the one encounter was significant — the 2 PCs would get around 50% more xp than the 1 PC would get. Having typed all this out, I’m thinking, now, that I’m going to award equal xp. This supports the “all in it together” factor, and the 1 PC (cleric) did help heal the wounded PCs when they returned.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com