The Creepy Crawl Chronicles - Session 7

Meet Morgus the Malevolent and his morose mob of minions.

When he finds Count Gore De Vol’s crypt has been looted, he’s not going to take it very well.

Attendants:
Vlad Draculastein – Lvl 4 Dampyr
Greed – Lvl 5 Homanculus
Arongoth of Hogendaus – Lvl 5 Cleric
               Gruff, Snuff, 2 zombified rat creature minions
Rael – Lvl 6 Thief

Henching:
Richard Darkmagic – Lvl 5 Magic User

Monsters Mashed –
4 Rat Creatures – Beheaded, Mauled, Arrowed thru the Head, and Strenuously Abused in the Nut-o-logical Area.
               200 EXP

TOTAL EXP AWARD – 200/4.5 Players = 45 EXP Apiece

Commentary:

Have a double helping of horror today, seeing as I missed posting a Chronicle last Friday due to attending fabulous Helgacon XI! I'll be blogging more about that in the near future. But for now, lets keep digging up the dusty old bones of this campaign. 

Replete with riches from Gore De Vol's crypt, the party headed in a northeasterly direction in the catacombs. They managed to avoid getting overly entangled with the sinister Morgus and Co. but I don't rightly recall if they simply avoided them via stealth or bluffed their way past them. He and his crew of thugs had tunneled down into the underground maze to dig up the very wealth that the characters had recently looted. As I hinted at in the session email, Mr. The Malevolent was not very happy at all to be scooped on all that sparkly swag, and proceeded to become a persistent thorn in the party's side once he'd put two & two together. 

Moving on from Morgus, the party struck east and found their way into the main nest of rat creatures. They dispatched four of the beasties, some in more painful ways than others.

Y'ever see the nuts on a rat? Gruesome... 

Stay tuned for more. Can't say that it'll get any pleasanter.

The Creepy Crawl Chronicles - Session 6

Who ya gonna call?

Attendants:
Vlad Draculastein – Lvl 4 Dampyr
Greed – Lvl 5 Homanculus
Arongoth of Hogendaus – Lvl 5 Cleric
               Gruff, Snuff, 2 zombified rat creature minions
Rael – Lvl 6 Thief

Henching:
Richard Darkmagic – Lvl 5 Magic User

Monsters Mashed:
The Spectre of Count Gore De Vol – Exploded by a magic missile (with a big red d30 roll for damage!)
               820 EXP
8 Skeletons from the Count’s Legion – Variously turned, smashed, and magic missiled.
               80 EXP

               EXP AWARD: 900 EXP

The Big Score!
Count Gore De Vol’s Treasure:
2400 GP worth of century old coins

2430 GP worth of gems [(1 Star Sapphire (100 gp), 1 Azurite (10 gp), 1 Amethyst (50 gp), 1 Aquamarine (100 gp), 1 Large Citrine (500 gp), 1 Large Topaz (500 gp), 1 Pink Rhodochrosite (100 gp), 1 Olive Green Peridot (50 gp), 1 Turquoise Bead (10 gp), 1 Black Jasper (50 gp), 1 Large Alexandrite (50 gp), 1 Tiger Eye (50 gp), 1 Violet Garnet (100 gp), 1 Piece of Crimson Coral (10 gp), a Star Rose Quartz (50 gp), 1 Spinel (50 gp), 1 Large Piece of Pink Coral (50 gp), 1 Deep Blue Spinel (500 gp), 1 Fire Opal (100 gp)]

1 Fine sword with skull shaped pommels and a thorny rose engraved on the blade. (300 gp)

1 Small porcelain bottle on a silk lanyard, containing a citrusy smelling liquid.

               EXP AWARD: 5130 EXP

TOTAL EXP AWARD: 6030/4.5 Characters = 1340 EXP apiece

Commentary:

In this session the party finally hit pay dirt. Working their way north in the catacombs and giving the flooded room and its oozy occupant a wide berth, they found their way to an iron doored crypt that contained a magnetized coffin full of treasure, guarded by the specter of the very late Count Gore De Vol and the animated bones of his Legion. You'll note that I tend to be very specific and descriptive with my treasure, so expect to see plenty fancy loot lists from here on out. I just think it's neater when treasure has enough personality to make players actually covet it.

At the time I was firmly ensconced in the Old School Renaissance (still am, honestly) and was using a lot of fun house rules I'd found on various OSR blogs. One of these was Jeff Rients' Big Purple d30 Rule. (Although my big d30 is red.) Since we were only playing an hour or so per session, I limited its use to every 4 hours of play. The players generally used their roll with the big d30 on attacks, especially magic missile spells from the mages. 

I'm not 100% sure I'm happy with the results of that one. I guess it was doing its job, in that the players loved to dump so much damage on my big scary monsters and would get big grins on their faces when rolling that big honkin' dice, but sometimes I think it eroded the challenge of the game a little bit. Ah well, as long as they were having fun what's a kerploded specter or two? Plus it helps keep the dice in my dice bag. 

My brother made it for me when we were kids. I will use no other bag for my dice.

The Creepy Crawl Chronicles - Session 5

Attendants:
Vlad Draculastein – Lvl 4 Dampyr
Greed – Lvl 5 Homanculus
Arongoth of Hogendaus – Lvl 5 Cleric
               Gruff, Snuff, & Squeeky, 3 zombified rat creature minions, 1 economy sized
Rael – Lvl 6 Thief

Henching:
Richard Darkmagic – Lvl 5 Magic User

Monsters Encountered (but not defeated):
1 Gray Ooze – Shot by arrows and clawed, struck by sword, last seen sinking back into flooded chamber whilst dissolving Squeeky. Still a menace.

Character Corpses and Casualties:
Squeeky the zombified rat ogre thing – Dissolved by a dredged up Gray Ooze and left to its fate in the flooded room.
Greed – Head severed by half corroded scimitar embedded in the Gray Ooze’s noisome mass. Later revived by cure spell & Lightning Bolt from Arongoth & Richard. Sometimes it’s good to be a homanculus.

Also lost: Vlad’s sword, padded armor, and bits of his pretty face.

No exp earned. Lesson learned: Oozes, Slimes, and Jellies ain’t no picnic.

Commentary:

The party worked their way eastward through the catacombs, and came across a flooded room with an empty coffin floating in it. I think they took some 10' poles and tried poking around the floor for treasure. Unfortunately for them, instead of riches beneath the murky water there lurked a protean menace that surged to the surface and thoroughly traumatized the poor lambs. 

After a brutal, boneless beatdown, the party beat feet toute suite, leaving Squeeky to his final fate as a jumbo sized portion of rat flavored slime chow. In addition to the pseudopod slamming and general dissolving that was going on, Greed took a critical hit and wound up temporarily separated from his head thanks to my deadly Dodecahedrons of Doom tables. Luckily for him, homanculi bounce back pretty easily after a little first aid and a few thousand volts. The party, however, never quite got over this encounter, and they were genuinely terrified of oozes, slimes, and jellies for the rest of the campaign. Heh heh heh.

Beware of the Blob!

Little Big Score

While we're on the subject of the history of my mini-collection, I suppose I ought to talk about the foundation of my fearsome (and perhaps farcical) force of figurines. Most folks who know me and have gamed with me have heard this one a few times. I might have even talked about it here on the blog before.

Well, long story short (pun intended), in the last post I talked about seeking a "DM's Set" of minis, a bunch of placeholder goons that players with their unique and personally chosen minis could go up against in my games. I got that modest boxed set of skaven for that purpose. And eventually I bought that one undead expansion for HeroQuest, which gave me a nice selection of skellies, zombies, and mummies to throw at them. (I'll pull those out and post a shot of 'em here eventually.)

But my big score, as it were, was acquiring a copy of the Battle Masters game just as it was getting remaindered at KayBee Toys at the local mall. I paid all of $10 bux for it. My memory is vague as of the time frame, but I wanna say it was around 1994-95. I remember setting about painting 'em all up over the subsequent summer break from college, with a bit of help from my brother. I spent an additional $10 on individual bases from the hobby store, so all told that adds up to 100 miniatures for around 20 cents per guy, which is good value any way you slice it. (Especially considering the ogre, all the mounted figs, and the cannon crew.)

I painted most of them, with the exception of the orcs with the skulls on their shields and the good guy knights, which were my brother's handiwork.

The human soldiers made a pretty good contingent of town guards, with a crossbow auxiliary to boot. The cannon crew pretty much hung out on top of the tower as tchotchkes on various shelves thru the years. As you can see we kinda ran out of steam before we got the main force of knights painted up, and I have no idea where the other two mounted human lords got to. The archers' faces were kinda flat and featureless, and I never really liked 'em too much, so while I painted 'em, they wound up in storage without bases. I dug 'em up for this shot and stuck 'em down with fun tack.

On the monsters' side, you'll note we left the riders off the wolves, because they were more useful to me as just dire wolves without goblins on 'em. I often wish that I'd just painted 'em up all black like I did #5 in the middle there, but since they're pretty much relics now there's no goin' back. No idea what became of the gobbo riders. I did the chaos archers up in those kaleidoscopic colors and have always called 'em "dragon men". Never used 'em much 'cos I don't tend to have a lot of use for archer figures in a dungeon setting. The beast men I did up in animal skin patterns and have always used them for gnolls. As I've said, the standard Games Workshop green skin on goblinoids and their ilk kinda bores me stupid, so with the orcs and goblins my brother and I went with skin tones reminiscent of shrunken heads or bog mummies, so that the eyes and teeth would really pop. The shields on the orcs and the doom guards were originally drawn on with fine point marker, but that faded over time, so recently (around last year or so) I dug up a bunch of WH shield decorations I had in my bits box, painted 'em up, and glued them on to gussy the old goons up a bit.

And of course, most of the massed marchers got their own rub on numbers so I could keep 'em straight in combat. 

So that's pretty much been the backbone of my mini collection for a while now.

Skaven and Me.

Waaay back in the day, back when I was a fledgeling DM just out of high school in the early 1990's and running games for friends in college, miniatures were kind of scarce, and I was kinda growing frustrated with the vagueness of "I attack the nearest one" when running combats in the dungeon. Most players could scrounge up a figure to represent their character, but massed mobs of monsters were a tough thing to conjure on the tabletop.

So to rectify this situation I purchased a box set with the idea of having them be general purpose dungeon goons. This was back when Games Workshop was just getting into plastics. Even back then goblins and orcs bored me to tears, so I decided to go with this old box set of GW skaven, since I liked their look and there were 10 of them which is a serviceable number for not a lot of money. (How times have changed. Games Workshop's products and "not a lot of money" don't tend to wind up in the same sentence these days. Bah.)

The way things were at most hobby shops, you just couldn't cheaply or easily get a large number of the same thing if you were buying blister packs of metal minis. (I think by now you've noticed that I've perennially been reluctant to spend a lot of money on minis. Well, to be clear, I mean not a lot of money PER mini. I still buy enough minis for it to be a minor material vice. Say what you will, buying toys makes me happy. My sweet spot right now is between $2-$4 dollars per dude, unless they're especially large or unusual.)

I wasn't quite the ultra-literalist mini-user I am now, so I figured they could do duty as anything from goblins to orcs to gnolls to whatever the encounter tables coughed up. As long as I had some consistent baddies to act as tactical tokens, I was satisfied.

These guys are some of the oldest minis in my collection. Alas, poor #2 got cronched by a friend's parents' hyperactive Australian shepherd when my minis case was left open on the floor of their house in a moment of inattention. (His mom felt so bad about it she got me a gift certificate to a local restaurant as a weregeld, which was totally unnecessary but still greatly appreciated.)

I have a bunch of these old style Warhammer Quest skaven in my copious unpainted pile. I could do up a replacement for him. But I dunno. He'd stand out. My techniques have evolved a lot since I painted these guys. (I think they were actually painted with my art school acrylic paints out of tubes, rather than the bottled craft store paint I work with these days.)

Actually, the one thing about these guys that was truly irreplaceable were those rub down numbers. They're really hard to find these days. (At least for cheap. :-\) A lot of art supply and hobby stores just don't stock 'em in that size. I dearly wish I still had that sheet. It was lost in the endless shuffle of papers I've always been surrounded with long, long ago.

The numbers were my big solution to "I hit the nearest one." Now I could have my players tell me what number they were aiming for.

A lot later, I bought a box set of Rat Ogres and Giant Rats, when I was filling out my assortment of dungeon dangers. I blogged about it a while ago here. I was inspired by Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition when I painted up the Clan WhateverblahblahWHFluff handlers. Because if I'm anything at all, I'm a huge nerd.

And that's that about my rats.

The Creepy Crawl Chronicles - Session 4

 

Here’s the breakdown from Wednesday’s session.
Attendants:
Vlad Draculastein – Lvl 4 Dampyr
Greed – Lvl 5 Homanculus
Arongoth of Hogendaus – Lvl 5 Cleric
               Gruff & Snuff, 2 zombified rat creature minions
Rael – Lvl 6 Thief
Richard Darkmagic – Lvl 5 Magic User

Monster’s Mashed:
1 Giant Rat Monster – peppered with magic missiles, slashed, shot with a crossbow, then had its head split open with a bastard sword. Subsequently zombified by Arongoth.
               250 EXP

Total EXP Award: 250 EXP/5 players = 50 EXP apiece

Commentary: 

In this session we'd convinced another co-worker to join us, and he rolled up a Magic User. He didn't stay with us too long, as his job responsibilities eventually dragged him away. We kept his character as a henchman for a few sessions. I can't say much about Richard Darkmagic beyond a bit of foreshadowing that his eventual death was one of the most spectacular character demises I've ever seen. All I'll say about that, for now, is Ecchhh...

Game wise the party has delved back into the catacombs that extend under the graveyard. The entire south and west of which were infested with these horrible, humanoid rat creatures. (What can I say, I somehow have a lot of Warhammer Skaven minis. More on this soon.) 

This particularly massive and monstrous specimen was kept in a large cave that could either be accessed from under one of the crypts, or via tunnels from the west, where you'd encounter its "keeper" stationed next to a fortified iron door. (This was the rat creature they'd encountered in the first session, with the gold earring and the baldric hung with coins. Hazard pay from their as yet unmet master for dealing with the big critter.) 

There was a funnel through which slaughterhouse leftovers could be poured, and a water barrel with a pipe leading inside, a la the water bottles on normal rat cages. (If you read some of the earlier Creepy Crawl reports, you see this is a good way to dispatch the beast thru poison and guile. The keeper kept a jug of extra strength sleeping potion handy.)

I think the party simply busted down the iron door and mobbed the big brute, based on the rodent rending rumpus I'm seeing in the report. Then they zombified him and had another lumbering, chisel toothed meat muppet shambling ahead of them. 

The bigger they are the harder they fall, I guess. He didn't last very long in the party's service either, as you'll soon see. Tune in on Wednesday to see how it went down.

Happy Easter!

Christ is Risen!