It’s been a while since I made a post of any sort. Thought I’d catch you up on what the party’s been doing lately.
They’re hunting for the Horn of Tirea, a holy artefact designed to battle demons–even destroy them utterly, if their true name is known. The dungeon it is contained in is a deep series of levels, around a deep, potentially bottomless pit.
In one area, the party encountered heavy resistance from a lot of Drow, and learned that there is an entire Drow city down there, on the other side of a Khazad-Dum style bridge. In the first encounter with the Drow, I totally forgot to apply their magic resistance, so they all got fireballed to death. Every fight after that, though, ended up being fairly skin-of-their-teeth escapes for the party, except for the last one, in which the Illusionist/Assassin PC was totally awesome. First, he sneaked up behind the Drow leader while she was praying with her armour off, and backstabbed her to nearly dead (with the d30 rule), then let loose on the rest (still resting in their barracks) with a Wand of Ice, rolling nearly maximum on the spell penetration. One small negotiation (admittedly at the fangs of some giant spiders), and the Drow fled, leaving their loot behind.
In another area, there are crumbling corridors and collapsed rooms. Open-air cells look out over the pit, and the players have found what appears to be a subway system. At the top of the deeps, the dungeon was a dwarven mine, but now the architecture has changed dramatically, and there’s ancient writing all over. Oh yeah, and in an arena in the centre, there’s a chained demon who says that he knows where the Horn is. Whoever unchains him, he’ll tell them how to find the Horn, and also give them their greatest desire. It took a while, but I finally have something for all the PCs. Now, if they decide to deal with the demon (which the cleric is very much against), I can watch them all fight for who gets to do the deed.
In other news, I’ve been working with a generic RPG called LORE (available here), outfitting it for use in a sci-fi campaign I plan to run someday. LORE is quite a lot like GURPS, but simpler, with elements from other RPGs thrown in. There’s no sci-fi sourcebook, so I shamelessly ripped off Stars Without Number, GURPS Space, d20 Future, and whatever else I could find. I hope it ends up being palatable. I would have been fine with SWN, but I think the guys want a change from the D&D system. The only problem is that, now that I’ve finished it, it’s probably going to be months (if not years) before the current campaign ends. *sigh*
Dragon at the Dinner Table 