MALCHOR'S DARK HOUSE - SESSION 1

Five characters congregated in the SE corner of Tino Rorschach's depot, that is, the namesake of the settlement, Nevergreen Depot. The characters: A human fighter named Arnor, an elvish ranger named Leif, a halfling thief named Gilleegan, a gnome cleric named Norman, and a gnome fighter named Bogwater. Gilleegan purchased a magic dagger from Tino for 50 gp. Otherwise, everyone gathered around the table while Kentley Oaks poured a few rounds of his brew, the Gremlin. Hilary Huckabee, a cabinetmaker who lives at the settlement, was also there. It was 4PM.

Speaking with Rorschach, Oaks, and Huckabee, the party hears stories of dark figures recently traveling through ND and down toward White Widow Abbey and Octopus Lake, also that undead have been recently seen more frequently outside of town to the west closer to the ancient barrows there. Ultimately however, the party becomes most interested in the historical figure of Malchor, a magic-user considered the founder of the settlement, and his now-abandoned house across the path from the depot (which sits next to the old stone tower, known to be the oldest structure here, dating back to the Great War with Fezco). Also, rumors have been going around the settlement that some orcs have been seen entering and exiting Malchor's Dark House.

After their second round, the party indeed decides to move out and explore Malchor's Dark House. As it is still light out, almost 5PM, the party eyes the double door entrance to the house, as well as boarded up windows, etc., and decide to move around the south of the house for a possible alternate entrance. As they are coming around the south wall, one of the gnomes (I believe it was Bogwater?) detects that the south wall here is unusually weak, though this cannot be seen. With this information, Arnor suddenly runs and jumps into the wooden wall with all his might, crunching through it fairly easily as it appears to give way, leaving a perfect hole where he traveled through it horizontally. He takes no damage (*20*).

As the others come through the hole, they see four dwarves in the room, standing there next to an altar, perplexed by Arnor and what just happened. Standing at a distance, the dwarves look on. The party tries to hire the dwarves, but are unsuccessful. The dwarves tell the party they have been here for some time, using this room as a base-of-sorts, and have made it down to the third level of the dungeon below the house. They also point out to the party, a mural on the south wall, now ruined by Arnor's hole. It was a mural of the Dawnbringer--related to an orcish religion--and therefore this room had been an altar room for worshipers.

Drawn by Randall (aka Bogwater)

Leaving the dwarves in peace, the party moves deeper into Malchor's Dark House, lighting Arnor's lantern. Moving into a spacious room with a few tables and some couches on the south wall, they notice some somewhat-recently prepared food rotting on a few plates atop tables, flies zipping about. The thought is that this ties back to the dwarves, and they move on to the east down a corridor. As it opens into another room they come upon 10 orcs, standing about, holding clubs and machetes.

While at first the party is fearful, and considers running, they hold their ground, and the orcs do not attack. Gilleegan decides to offer a few of the orcs a puff of his Rat's Meow weed, which ends up lightening the mood a bit, and while not making friends with the orcs, it does suspend any violent reactions, and eventually allows the party to move through the room without having to engage in combat. They move on to a hallway at the SE, which leads them to a staircase down.

Once down the stairs, and coming around a hallway into another room, the party comes upon five hobgoblins. The hobgoblins do not attack, and seem quite amused by the party, a few of them chuckling. Gill offers them a taste of his weed, but they seem to find it disgusting, and are not interested. They laugh, and look at one another as if they are in on a joke that the party is not privy to.

Leaving the hobgoblins, the party travels west down a corridor, where after a bit they come to a closed door. Opening the door, they enter a sizable room with a dusty statue at its center. It is a statue of a magic-user, in pose, and inscribed at its base, in human, reads: Malchor, the Greatest of All Magic-Users. Aside from the dusty statue, there is also a lot of mold in the room.

Noticing another door on the west side of the room, the party moves into another room, a library of sorts, with books broken up into various subjects: History, Alchemy, Geology, and Trees. Bogwater notices a book that interests him, The Dream of the Blue Mountain, pulls it down, and puts it with his things. Gilleegan finds and keeps, Creating Your First Potion. Leif takes Blisterwood Companion.

With doors at the north and west, the party moves west into a new room. There's an open hallway on the west wall, and strangely, there is a sizable bunch of mushrooms growing on the floor at the opening, but inside this room. Gill moves toward them, bends down, and investigates the shrooms, picks and pockets one, but ultimately, they appear to be common growth. Arnor, who has been leading the party, steps upon the shrooms moving toward the corridor, and suddenly the rotted floor gives way and he finds himself falling 10 feet onto a spike that deals 4 damage. Barely alive, the party pulls Arnor back up to the room with a rope, and then Norman casts Healing of Light Wounds on him, bringing Arnor a bit more health.

It's 6:40 PM

NEVERGREEN DEPOT

Nevergreen Depot is a small community in the southwestern part of Furthermoor. While its history goes back to a wizard named Malchor, its becoming a way station/supply station extends into now with Tino Rorschach and his amazing selection of supplies ("if you can think of it, we might have it").

In the SE corner of the depot building (1), Rorschach keeps an open tap going that's brewed by Kentley Oaks (9), who happens to be here now, hanging out. A woman named Hilary Huckabee is also here.

It's the 24th day of the month of the Hummingbird. 4PM.

NW FURTHERMOOR

WATER & WINESKIN BLUES

[This post is from five years ago--just pushing through now]

With Furthermoor on hiatus, I recently started playing in a game, and the DM is using 2nd edition AD&D. Outside of how long it takes to make a character, it got me thinking a bit more about the differences between B/X and AD&D. First, this post has nothing to do with the AD&D game I was playing in, but something that came to mind while looking through the 2nd edition PDF.

Video Games and AD&D

While I can enjoy a video game like Skyrim for what it is--knowing I will never actually finish it or care that much about the story--it's simply the video game equivalent to AD&D. In other words, while folks playing AD&D when it first came out could enjoy a game of Zork on their Radio Shack computer, Skyrim (I'm using Skyrim as the all-encompassing example here) brings AD&D to the video game console in a modern way that works, though the game is the same for everybody, and let's face it, like many video games today, it looks extremely realistic (versus, say Minecraft, which is also obviously heavily influenced by D&D), even if it's in a fantasy world. Though Skyrim looks realistic, however, a player can technically walk for days without sleep, can walk for days without eating food (even if they have tons of it), etc....

If food and sleep don't matter much to Skyrim, why include them? Perhaps for the budding chef gamer who prefers to play Skyrim to collect food items and cook up interesting stuff? Why not? For me at least, none of these realistic elements really make the game any more fun, in fact, these tend to be the parts of the game that seem most like real life and work (no, I am not a chef, but just sayin'), exactly what one is generally distancing themselves from when playing a game. This is why I prefer B/X (I'm using B/X as the consensus here, despite the fact that on this blog I'm generally focused on a weird mash-up of Holmes/Mentzer) when I'm DM, versus anything too much more complex. From my experience, at least, complex tends to mean more realistic, and while I can love realistic in say a hex-and-counter Mexican War game, it isn't what I enjoy about D&D at all, in fact, I find that the more complex D&D gets, for both the players and the DM, the expense is the fun, and the spontaneous nature that the game originally came from.

Water and Wineskins

Take a look at the wineskin. In Holmes, the equipment list takes up the bottom third of a page in the back of the book. There's a "Water/Wine Skin" that goes for 1 gp. A quart of wine is the same price. Furthermore, standard rations cost 5 gp for one adventurer for a week.

It's only with regard to encumbrance, that wine and water are mentioned elsewhere in Holmes, and it's during discussion of where things are on a character's body, however, this appears to simply highlight editing to Holmes with regard to the imminence of AD&D ("1 quart wine (in pack)... 1 water skin, shoulder slung, right side,"), for the whole of this encumbrance section is missing from Holmes's original manuscript.

This seems telling with regard to various playing styles of D&D. Holmes, an early admirer and passionate player of the game, respected the players themselves to come up with the game that suited them, but then the published rule shift into more complexity, which meant more realism. In Holmes there are no rules for water consumption, ration consumption, etc. It's left up to the DM. One can assume a beginning character will buy a week's worth of rations, but what if they don't? Does it really matter? It could... What if the DM knows the character/group doesn't have water, they've been delving for a while, and they may soon enter a room of pools (B1: In Search of the Unknown came within the initial Holmes boxed set)? If they are thirsty, and told they may die because they have no water, this room of pools could be super interesting, and a highlight, especially given they therefore have a solid reason to test more than one of the pools. Though the rules say nothing of this deeper angle to the puzzle, that is the way of the Basic... This is a wonderful example of how thirst/lack of water, while yes realistic, is interesting simply because of the possible repercussions gamewise.

Take a look at Mentzer, specifically the section of sample characters in the Players Manual which stresses their use in "group adventures": a cleric equipped with 2 full waterskins; a dwarf with 1 full wineskin; a magic-user with 1 waterskin and 1 wineskin, both full; an elf with neither; a thief with neither; and then a halfling with 1 wineskin and 1 waterskin, both full. While it may be assumed that the elf and the thief would be members of a party with a water or wineskin, who knows... Furthermore, similar to Holmes, with no other rules present, the rations and water/wine options end up more for the DM to play on versus the deepening of character realism. It should also be noted that Mentzer suggests the possible use of water and/or wine in disarming some types of traps.

In other words, what makes dealing with rations/water/wine fun, and somewhat interesting, is not realism. It's because a thoughtful DM perhaps has certain puzzle pieces in their game that could possibly fit in with those factors. Otherwise, it's a pointless wash...

BROWN & RED WORM

[sometimes encountered in the wilderness of SW Furthermoor]

 

MOOR'S END - 16 & 17

Party comes upon a Carpenter's Cave of sorts, lots of woodworking tools, hand saws, stacks of 2x4s and ply wood, the frame of a chair, and a table top are against the east wall in the north section, and old wood chips are scattered about the east section of the south part. In the west portion which joins the north and south, sits an old, rusty table saw.  The party turns it on and it starts sputtering loudly, issuing an excruciatingly high pitched squeal. Though quickly turned off, two bandits come rushing in. One of them is killed, and the other, named Joey T, succumbs to questioning about the nearby bandit hideout, etc. Eventually, when the party enters a room full of statues, they let Joey T go.

The statues are mainly of goblins and dwarves frozen in running poses, perhaps running toward the small passage, and door, at the south side of the room. One of the party locates a bag with 300 sp hanging from one of the dwarf statue's hands. Mattie notices a tiny passage in the east section of the room that leads out into a hallway. Other than that the party spends much time debating the door to the south. They decide to skip it for now, afraid of what may lie on the other side. Other than the goblin & dwarf statues, in the middle of the room is noted a statue of a hooded figure.

The party heads north and locates a den where Joey T and his buddy may have been hanging out. Some fairly nice chairs of wood with upholstery, a divan, two tables, 75 cp spread about each, on one table some dice, on the other, a pack of cards. Also, on a small table in the west part of the room next to a recliner chair is a corn cob pipe and a Common translation of Count Falconer’s novel, As I Lay Writhing. Jin grabs the book and Gil grabs the pipe, quickly smoking the contents, feeling a bit high now, though the smoke had a repulsive odor.

Heading out they move NW to work on their map and come on four fire beetles. Backing up, they use the cave & the den to their advantage battle-tactic-wise, victorious. They move east, entering another large room, coming upon two Bugbears, scarfing food around a table. A fight breaks out, and though the party has a bit of trouble with the male, the bugbears are not a match for such a large party. The party sets about searching the large room.

5:10 PM, Sunday, 17th day of the month of the Hummingbird, Moor's End, Furthermoor.

THE SPIRIT OF HOLMENTZER

"Dungeon Master, I'd like to be a Chef Magic-user Weretiger, please."