Retrospective 7 - The Party Turn Evil For a While

Ah yes, the famed Evil Era.
Mysteriously this all began after Charles entered the game... I wonder if these facts are related.

Charles is the guy who turned the group from "a bunch of people who meet up to play games" into "a bunch of mates" so I owe him a lot!
Mostly by the simple expedient of adding us all into a facebook group chat. Great value.

The other Big News was that the group had become far, far too big.
David began running an overflow game, thankfully. I remember there being some quiet jostling for who would get to stay. Somehow Charles survived despite being the newest, thank goodness for that!
I kept giving David bonus thanks-for-running-overflow exp for a while, under the assumption that he'd be able to come back when the numbers died back down.
But it's London D&D, the numbers never die down.

We had a real struggle with venues around this time. The Meetup's regular pub venue got cancelled because they wanted to use the rooms for Christmas, fair enough I guess but they were real dicks about it.
Handily players in the group (chiefly Ollie and Charles) were good enough to book venues and tables for us! That's when I knew we'd made it.

The Evil Era began when the party decided to rinse the Bloodworth Estate of Death Love Doom fame.

This was actually the second time I've run it.
They made the fateful decision to sleep overnight in the coachhouse, then loot everything else in the mansion in the morning. Unfortunately this gave the cops time to show up, and a Guy Ritchie-esque comedy of errors led to sundry murder of guards and fleeing the city by rickety coach.

The next few weeks would involve lots of fleeing from society and chaos being sown, culminating in a ridiculous scheme to clear the party's name by pretending to kill Priscilla Theratrix the surprisingly friendly evil Vivimancer and blaming their behaviour on demonic possession.
It worked, too.

Mini Reviews:

Death Love Doom - Review from the first time I ran it here.
Some people are apparently too weak to run this body horror bad boy. Don't listen to them. Listen to this review from drivethru:
I could never run this in my circle of players, and I would never want to subject them to this tripe. The malicious artifact central to the adventure is just cheesy and designed to be a huge extended middle finger to the adventuring party. The fights with Grandma, Dad, Mom & Baby, and the Nanny are TPKs/permanent disfigurement and damage waiting to happen, and only designed to screw with the heads of players and butcher their characters. Players may think they can rescue the family and resolve the situation. I hate to break it to you...you are virtually unable to do anything, besides rob these poor accursed people and flee, and let Scotland Yard investigate and burn down the house to save England from the curse...for the time being. Play fifth edition. Save your patience.

He gives it one star when that review clearly denotes a five star module!
Anyway, read this first before running negadungeons, but I do honestly really rate DLD.

Flesh for the Witch Queen
Spooky one page dungeon by Jason Sholtis, mildly switched up. Nice vivimancery thing. I had the Witch Queen herself with like a pale featureless egg with several thick hair-tendril things to see with. She gave them that head to prove her death, and when they came back she had a whole cat for a head instead.

Anyway, yea it's a good'un.

Death Frost Doom
Enough of this has been said, but the Zak-and-Jez revamp elevates an already-classic to even greater heights.
I ran it as a Halloween special, a Thulian Echoes-esque flashback to the Australian group's original doomed expedition. Same characters as back then but obviously the UK players, and using the updated edition.

Doing it as a flashback prequel was a lot of fun, since they got to find out exactly why all these undead were pouring out across the land.

Fortress Deathfrost
My attempt to put Mt Death Frost on a war footing. Big ol' castle apparently grown from vegetation somehow transmuted into black stone. Faces stretched onto doors scream at Lawful characters. Infinite undead to drown players under waves of deadly and joyless combat if someone sounds the alarm.
A real shit place to invade.
It's interesting running a dungeon that's actively in military use, because my player's usual dungeon exploration routine tends to make a lot of noise. They've tried reindeer-powered air strikes, unstealthy infiltrations, and direct assaults with equal failure.
I don't really know why they keep coming back, but they know that the vampire leader of the Undead must be up here somewhere.
Also I add more defences to the fortress every game month that passes. Ha ha ha.