We’ve started a new D&D campaign, with one of the other guys as DM. (I was burning out, and need a break.) This new campaign is set in Freeport, a few weeks after our previous Freeport campaign ended (about two years ago, real time); the previous campaign had us running through the first three Freeport adventures.

For this new campaign, we’ve all decided to play psionic characters: two human psions and a human soulknife (my character), all brothers of a gypsy clan. Where our previous campaign had [some of] us playing heroes fighting the evil and chaos of Freeport (I was playing a paladin), this new campaign has us playing less than good characters out to take over the town’s seedy operations. We’re not playing evil characters (I wouldn’t like that), but we definitely aren’t heroes.

We’ve only played one game session so far, but it looks like this campaign direction will be fun. The psionic side of D&D is interesting, and new (to me), but it’s basically very similar to standard D&D magic. The psions are like standard D&D sorcerers, and my soulknife is like a standard D&D Dex-fighter. It’s all just different enough to feel different, but not so different to play differently.

I don’t know nearly as much about psionics as I do standard D&D magic, so I’m being mildly surprised by some of the things the other characters can do. I’ve always had a dislike of the concept of psionics in D&D — psionics feel more like science fiction than fantasy, to me — but I think this change of mechanics is interesting in actual play.

I still doubt I’ll ever bring psionics into any of my own campaigns, but it’s good to see and feel how they actually work in play, in a situation where I’m not running the game.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

Our Thursday game nights got put on hold for a couple weeks during the holidays. Last night was the first time in three weeks that we all got together, and it was good fun. We played Dungeons & Dragons till 11:00, and then we just sat around in the den talking about D&D and World of Warcraft until 12:30.

I love my game nights. It’s so much fun to hang out with my friends, play games, and talk about our hobbies. We guys communicate some through emails, but sitting around playing and talking face to face is really much better. It’s so fun, in fact, that nearly every time, I end up staying and talking much later than I should.

It’s a 40 minute drive back home, so staying till 12:30 means I don’t get home until after 1:00. Then I write this post, upload it, and it’s nearly 1:30 by the time I get in bed. Six o’clock comes early in the morning; it’s really dumb of me to stay so late.

But hanging out with friends, talking and playing is just so much fun. And now that job and family responsibilities restricts that time to just once a week (at most), I like to stretch the time out as long as possible. Oh for the teenage and college years when I could hang with my friends for hours a day, several days a week.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

I was first introduced to the author Rose Estes through the Endless Quest book series of the 1980s. The Endless Quest books allowed you to control the decision making of the main character. For example, in the book, Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons, the reader is the character Jaimie, a wizard’s apprentice:

Throughout the story, the reader must make many such choices. Walk down the dark tunnel or head further down the lighted hallway. Take the jeweled pendant off the pedestal or leave it be. Talk to the strange creature or run away or attack with your dagger. As a Dungeon & Dragons player in the 80s, I found these books moderately entertaining. At its core, D&D was a game of these kinds of choices, but the books could never match the intricacies and imagination of the game. Plus, the books use no game mechanics (rules and dice), so there was no way to replicate the real game experience with just static text.

As literature, the books were for children. The writing was weak. J.K. Rowling’s writing is much better even in her first book. But I read several of the Endless Quest books. They are all very small: less than 200 pages — and you may only read 50 pages depending on your choices through the adventure. Usually I’d go back and read them a second and third time to see where else the story would take me through making other choices.

I never really thought about the author. But then one of my favorite fantasy worlds was tainted by this children’s author. The World of Greyhawk (WoG) is a classic fantasy fiction setting from Dungeons & Dragons. It was created by E. Gary Gygax for the D&D game, and I experienced the world’s evolution through the game publications and with two Gygax novels. From the mid 70s to the mid 80s, WoG was the quintessential D&D game world.

Gygaxian prose is dense with unnecessary archaic language, but it had a specific style; it was “serious” and “adult.” In the mid 80s, Gygax lost ownership of WoG (as well as D&D in general). The first new book for WoG, after the Gygax-D&D separation, was written by Rose Estes.

I was excited for a new WoG book; it was my favorite fantasy world — even better to me, as a setting, than Middle Earth from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. But Rose Estes’s writing was . . . disappointing. Abysmal. Atrocious. Crap. I was actually shocked by how bad it was — the writing style, the story, and how it was ruining such a great fantasy world. But someone at TSR (the publisher of D&D and WoG at the time) loved her, because she was allowed to write five or six more WoG novels.

Among WoG fans, Rose Estes is a hack — a bad children’s author who sucked the life out of a great fantasy setting. I really can’t say that I blame her too much, though, because she just did what she does: she wrote books. The villain in this “setting character assassination” is the jackhole who hired her to write for WoG. Once could be considered a mistake, but six times is villainy.

I recently rediscovered one of Estes’s Endless Quest books — Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons — among my stock of books, and upon reading it again, I had all these sour feelings come up again.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

Classic D&D adventure module review

Dwellers of the Forbidden City, by David Cook – Advanced D&D, 1981

An adventure for character levels 4-7

28 pages plus the separate cover with a map of the Forbidden City on the inside faces. The adventure covers 13 areas of the city, each consisting of from one to a dozen encounter areas. There are seven maps from a quarter page size showing small locations to a full page showing small, but long locations. None of the maps are full dungeons, but are rather just lairs with several areas or long passages with several areas along. The main map, though, on the inside of the covers shows the whole of the city from a 45 degree height. They city is in a valley surrounded by very high cliffs, so it is essentially a self contained environment with many encounter zones (which are shown in the other maps).

At the back of the module are four pages of new monsters: the first D&D appearances of the aboleth, mongrelman, tasloi, and yuan ti; and reprints of two creatures from the AD&D1 Fiend Folio: the pan lung dragon and yellow musk creeper. The last page has 20 pre-generated characters.

Parts of this adventure were used in a major tournament, but this version has been expanded considerably for use in a general campaign. The tournament parts are the entrances to the city: underground passages through guards and monsters. But these entrances are not the only way for campaign PCs to get into the city, and the module explains the monsters and difficulties for going over and down the cliff faces.

The city is basically a monster-filled ruins, with no organization or single control. Different sections of the city are “owned” by different species and factions, but there is nothing like a city civilization. It’s all pure chaos, and walking the crumbled city streets is like walking down a dungeon corridor—wandering monsters will attack you (and each other).

Only 13 areas are detailed in any way, so most of the city is assumed to be empty buildings prowled by wandering monsters. With a creative DM, spending time fleshing out the rest of the city, this could be a campaign setting to occupy PCs for several levels. Without fleshing out the “empty” parts of the city, still, the PCs could spend a few weeks exploring, fighting, and dealing with the various creatures of the city (all of which are wicked and vicious). Near the end of the module is a two-page section on “The Forbidden City In Campaign Play.” This gives hooks and ideas for expanding the adventure. This module does not need the DM to expand on it, but the setting concept just begs for it.

The initial adventure hook to start the adventure is a basic “find the bandits and gain their treasure,” but in the chaos of the location, it would be easy for a party of PCs to forget that and end up expanding their mission to any number of objectives. I’m not sure if the official adventure hook can even really be solved in any certain way. Because the setting is so big, and everywhere so dangerous, and getting into and out of the city so difficult, it could just turn into a survival adventure where the PCs have to worry about food, water, and attrition of comrades.

This adventure is a big concept, and it gives enough content to satisfy, but it is also wide open for industrious DMs to expand upon.

Bullgrit