Wednesday 10 December 2014

Retrospective 3 - The First Christmas

Continuing the theme of running things I'd really been wanting to run for a while, the next few months contained Hammers of the God, my pet Rune Dungeon, and Dwimmermount.

I'd placed the map to Hammers of the God in a previous dungeon, I think in The God That Crawls, and that's something I really should do more of.
These days I tend to seed maps through people's businesses which works quite well.

This was also the first time they'd left my Gate area map since arriving there, so I suddenly had to work out what scale I wanted to have the Mountains area at! I'm pretty sure it was pretty loosey goosey there for a while, especially since I hadn't made a Mountains encounter table yet.


Things were pretty healthy group-wise at first, but a four week holiday ruined some of the momentum that had built up and sent me into a bit of an OH NO WHAT IF IT FALLS APART spiral.
Two players in a session means that it's quite intimate and tense and they get quite a lot done, but I can't trust that I'll be able to even run a session that evening.
Renzo, thankfully, could be relied on to come every week. He saved the game.

At Session 30 I left for a trip to Australia, honestly apprehensive about whether I'd be able to scrape the group back together afterwards. Such a cliffhanger.


I eventually got round to making a map on a much larger scale

Mini Reviews:

The dungeon itself is a bit shit in comparison to the rest of the LotFP oeuvre, honestly. Two linear dungeons spliced together for the reasons noted in the Author's Notes.
But the history, ah! Such history! The books alone! One of the players sequestered herself in the stone library and spent the rest of the session devouring the tomes. She had the index, so kept asking for different things. A great way to dispense lore.
Hammers of the God forms the basis of my world's alt-history, and coupled with Dwimmermount (which the party entered some weeks later) it created quite the interesting backstory.
I attached the Rune Dungeon (see below) to a caved-in dead-end down the bottom, which made the place feel truly immense.

A rejigged and remastered version of a dungeon I'd made back in 4th edition.
Luckily a couple of players really got into the runes, so the whole thing was this big juicy journey of discovery for them.
I have quietly retconned the dragons blasting out of the crystal at the end, nobody's still around from back then so that's ok right?
Like much of the campaign world around this time, it was very fuzzy around the edges. I "know" a lot more about the world now.
This was actually the third time I'd run the same dungeon - once in 4th when it was linear as fuck, once in Labyrinth Lord during the Australian portion of the campaign, and now this time.
A year or so later another party would come back here, and integrating all those changes was a lot of fun for me. The final boss was a Goblin character who got so mutated that her player left her down there, which the latest (and now current) party were amazed by.

Ah! Dwimmermount! Dungeon of Gods!
They never mapped beyond the first level, but they changed the balance of power a lot.
I love Dwimmermount's strange backstory. As mentioned before, it's another major building block in the alt-history of my world.
Giant spiders were enough to make them bug out (harr) because Renzo got Save-or-Die'd by a spider that one time.
Dwimmermount's great, I hope my current players go back.

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