Tuesday 24 January 2017

Retrospective 12 - Halloween Gimmick Season

Coming into Halloween, I sought to give the players a choice.
Which Halloween module do you want to do?
They chose both.

But it was good times! Albeit they spent so long in the Cursed Chateau that we had the Christmas Gimmick dungeon in there too.
Luckily for them, the Halloween dungeons got in the way of their planned assault on Fortress Deathfrost, giving their characters a few extra months lease on life.

I got a bit bored of the "You're trapped in a dungeon!" gimmick at this point. Not only had they spent a long time in the Vagina Dungeon, they'd previously been trapped in the Grinding Gear and would go on to be trapped inside the Tales of the Scarecrow field (by a tentacle monster) and the Cursed Chateau (by a forcefield).
I let Dispel Magic cut a temporary hole in the chateau forcefield just to prevent them being completely trapped, not that they ended up taking that option.

We see Tom go through a few characters. He's died a fair amount, but he tends to cycle through new characters until he finds one he likes. Ludovico gets eaten by possessed chairs, so Jade is created and does well for herself!

On the same theme, we see a few people retire characters in order to try something new. 
The "glass ceiling" of high level play does tend to put a dampener on level-based progression after a while, mostly because my players refused to go into the dangerous high-risk high-reward places. For good reason, it later turns out!

We also had the frog monster session! The Cursed Chateau has a pool in the basement that goes down to an ancient city of the Deep Ones. A character decided to grab one that was running away and follow it down.
Rather than just instant death, I told everyone that they could save the guy by rescuing him from the Deep Ones! In the end, retired characters were brought in for what ended up being a suicide mission.
One of the more brutal Bad Ends, because everyone who went down there ended up being living wombs for the Deep Ones.

I don't think we see any actual new players in this time frame though, which is good! Usually the group's up to 7-10 players per session, so it's at breaking point.

Session 120 sees the party STEAL A SHIP! For the next week I was on maximum overdrive trying to work out what gameplay changes I'd be seeing, only for them to break it the very next session. Oh well.


Possibly the most classically artistic art attack to date

Mini Reviews:

Real cool little can-be-placed-anywhere adventure.
Spooky heretical book is an awesome bit of worldbuilding - it's an MU spellbook that has a chance of containing Cleric spells, castable by an MU. If the MU casts a Cleric spell in the vicinity of a classed Cleric, that Cleric loses the ability to cast that spell forever. If he tells another Cleric about what happened, the same thing happens to them. Brutal.
I made a little booklet with excerpts on the nature of Law/Chaos in there which was really fun, especially since the party Cleric immediately started saying "ooh that's interesting" and saying a lot of heretical stuff after reading.

The Cursed Chateau:
A very socially-oriented haunted house. Lots of ghosts to talk to, but also lots of spooOOoOOooky atmospheric random encounter effects like "you hear a child crying" and "a painting falls off a wall" and stuff.
A few people died in here, notably to the ravenous furniture (!) and the twin guards.
Having previously-killed people coming back like nothing happened (since they're ghosts and all) was a fun thing to have happen.
Notably, the ghosts here are corporeal because they're partially undead and partially some sort of memory construct of the master of the manor, at least how I played them.
Oh yea! That's the best bit. This bored French guy possesses the chateau and is constantly commenting on the action. As players get hurt and die he gets more and more gleeful until you finally cure his ennui and he lets you go. Great fun!

Dungeon of IAXWW
So topical! I made this dungeon as a 2016 "how weird was this year though?" showcase which was actually real fun.
Trump grabbed someone's pussy so hard that they died of a crushed pelvis. Good times.

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