Mystara Monday: Module X5 – Temple of Death

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This week we have part two of the Desert Nomads module series, adventure module X5: The Temple of Death. This adventure is a direct continuation of the previous one, picking up at the entrance to the Great Pass which leads from the Sind Desert into the land of Hule, where the Master reigns.

Mystara Monday: Module X5 - Temple of Death
Bright red crab-pincered elephant monsters absolutely
appear in this module.

Where the previous module's Sind was inspired by Hindu mythology, this module is a bit reminiscent of Lovecraft's Dream Cycle. Hule would not seem out of place in the Dreamlands, and a couple of the new monsters have a distinctly Lovecraftian feel to them. The hideous elephant-thing on the cover is a malfera, which is described as being native to 'The Dimension of Nightmares'. This module also introduces the Spectral Hound which is basically a Hound of Tindalos and hails from the 'Dimensional Vortex.' For now that just means they're extra creepy and unnatural, but the Immortals Set will eventually work the Dimension of Nightmares and the Vortex into a cosmology unique to Mystara.

Mystara Monday: Module X5 - Temple of Death
The bite of a spectral hound can cause a character to fade from reality entirely.

The first portion of the adventure covers the trip through the Great Pass. As with Master of the Desert Nomads there are encounters to be used no matter which way the adventurers travel, but there are also a number of placed encounters including a fake dragon head being used to guard the entrance to the pass, a tribe of geonids (small creature which look like boulders), and a mammoth that falls from the sky and has a chance to crush a character (a roc dropped it). Also there's the Well of the Moon. The Well has a number of powers, but the most fascinating is that on nights with a full moon a ladder of moonbeams appears and the characters can climb it to reach the Kingdom of the Moon. Said Kingdom is left to the DM to create and the module states "If you do not want the players to go to the moon, you may ignore this power." It seems to me that travelling to the moon might get the party a bit sidetracked, but what do I know?

Once through the Great Pass, the part reaches Hule which is rather dark and unpleasant. Hule is described as a hagiarchy, ruled by "holy men." The Master is the ultimate ruler, watching over things from the Temple of Death. A group of secret police called the Diviners search for criminals, both of the traditional sort and those guilty of having "wrong thoughts." It's portrayed as a fairly functional country on the whole, although one unwelcome to free thought.

As their mission is to seek out the Temple of Death, it's assumed the adventurers will do that and attempt to find and destroy the Master. If they investigate enough, they can piece together bits of information telling of a holy man named Hosadus who is connected to the Master and may even be able to determine that they are the same person. The Master is actually an avatar used by Hosadus to rule over Hule while his real, ancient and scarred, body lies in a casket in the Temple's mausoleum. To truly destroy the Master the party will have to find and destroy the body of Hosadus. It's possible, though unlikely, that the party could avoid having to face the Master entirely if they figure this out early enough.

Temple of Death is a solid module that presents a challenging foe as well as a new country that can be connected to the existing maps of the Known World (it hooks on west of the map from module X4), and adds a lot of fascinating elements to the cosmology of the world. Hule is also described in sufficient detail to give a good DM a base to work on to use it as a setting for more adventures. It's not surprising at all that Hule and the Master get revisited in a later module, as this one and its predecessor were very well received.

Mystara Monday: Module X5 – Temple of Death

by
This week we have part two of the Desert Nomads module series, adventure module X5: The Temple of Death. This adventure is a direct continuation of the previous one, picking up at the entrance to the Great Pass which leads from the Sind Desert into the land of Hule, where the Master reigns.

Bright red crab-pincered elephant monsters absolutely
appear in this module.

Where the previous module's Sind was inspired by Hindu mythology, this module is a bit reminiscent of Lovecraft's Dream Cycle. Hule would not seem out of place in the Dreamlands, and a couple of the new monsters have a distinctly Lovecraftian feel to them. The hideous elephant-thing on the cover is a malfera, which is described as being native to 'The Dimension of Nightmares'. This module also introduces the Spectral Hound which is basically a Hound of Tindalos and hails from the 'Dimensional Vortex.' For now that just means they're extra creepy and unnatural, but the Immortals Set will eventually work the Dimension of Nightmares and the Vortex into a cosmology unique to Mystara.

The bite of a spectral hound can cause a character to fade from reality entirely.

The first portion of the adventure covers the trip through the Great Pass. As with Master of the Desert Nomads there are encounters to be used no matter which way the adventurers travel, but there are also a number of placed encounters including a fake dragon head being used to guard the entrance to the pass, a tribe of geonids (small creature which look like boulders), and a mammoth that falls from the sky and has a chance to crush a character (a roc dropped it). Also there's the Well of the Moon. The Well has a number of powers, but the most fascinating is that on nights with a full moon a ladder of moonbeams appears and the characters can climb it to reach the Kingdom of the Moon. Said Kingdom is left to the DM to create and the module states "If you do not want the players to go to the moon, you may ignore this power." It seems to me that travelling to the moon might get the party a bit sidetracked, but what do I know?

Once through the Great Pass, the part reaches Hule which is rather dark and unpleasant. Hule is described as a hagiarchy, ruled by "holy men." The Master is the ultimate ruler, watching over things from the Temple of Death. A group of secret police called the Diviners search for criminals, both of the traditional sort and those guilty of having "wrong thoughts." It's portrayed as a fairly functional country on the whole, although one unwelcome to free thought.

As their mission is to seek out the Temple of Death, it's assumed the adventurers will do that and attempt to find and destroy the Master. If they investigate enough, they can piece together bits of information telling of a holy man named Hosadus who is connected to the Master and may even be able to determine that they are the same person. The Master is actually an avatar used by Hosadus to rule over Hule while his real, ancient and scarred, body lies in a casket in the Temple's mausoleum. To truly destroy the Master the party will have to find and destroy the body of Hosadus. It's possible, though unlikely, that the party could avoid having to face the Master entirely if they figure this out early enough.

Temple of Death is a solid module that presents a challenging foe as well as a new country that can be connected to the existing maps of the Known World (it hooks on west of the map from module X4), and adds a lot of fascinating elements to the cosmology of the world. Hule is also described in sufficient detail to give a good DM a base to work on to use it as a setting for more adventures. It's not surprising at all that Hule and the Master get revisited in a later module, as this one and its predecessor were very well received.

Interweaving Narratives

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When I write tabletop campaigns, I tend to write in two layers, which I’ve touched on briefly before. I’ll write the background layer, all of the stuff that’s happening behind the scenes that may affect what’s going on with the player characters, but likely won’t be seen directly until the very end of an arc. I’ll then write “moments” that intersect with that background narrative, and generally just enough connective tissue to link those moments together.

Interweaving Narratives

I tend to structure my tabletop RPG narratives in arcs, which are big sweeping stories with some major change or victory (or defeat) at the end. I break these down into Acts, which establish a kind of temporal lockstep with my background narrative, and then each Act is made up of scenes, which are the moment-to-moment bits that get strung together. I tend not to be picky about the order in which scenes show up, as long as they make sense within the Act.

Scenes are there to move the story forward, establish a bit of the setting, offer choices to the party, or resolve some conflict. They’re my little hints at the overall background story, and their outcomes affect how that background goes. The nice thing about breaking things down this way is that if the party makes some choice I don’t expect, I’m very rarely put in a position where I don’t know what to do next– I just pull a different scene out to move things forward. In a sense, I’m always fanning out a bunch of cards and letting my players pick the next one, at which point I set off whatever chain of events makes the most sense.

As a bit of an example, this weekend’s session of Star Wars was five scenes– two major ones, two minor ones, and one throwaway. Having acquired a starship, the group is working their way towards a particular location in the Deep Core. I figured they would either go straight for the Deep Core or take a side trip to better establish themselves. Each of these was set up with pros and cons– going straight for the Core would have gotten them closer to their goal quickly, and they’d at least be able to approach while under the Empire’s radar, but they’d be going in to a very dangerous area mostly blind. Going for more supplies / establishing relationships gets them more XP and resources, but increases the chances that they’ll do something that calls attention to themselves.

The first scene played out twice, as throwaways, and involved simply transmitting codes to Imperial checkpoints to get past. Pretty simple, but there’s still the possibility they could choose to do something crazy. Mostly it sets the scene for checkpoints as a regular occurrence. The second scene was a hyperspace interdiction– the party’s ship got pulled out of hyperspace by pirates. This could have played out in a variety of ways; it could have gotten them salvage, it could have put some damage on their ship, they might have gotten ahold of a rare and extremely valuable interdiction device, or (what they did) was talk their way out of it with some pretty fantastic social rolls and a bit of blind luck. Bel wanted his character to have something of a reputation for being bad luck, and a couple of deception checks and a name-drop later (and a successful Underworld Knowledge check on the part of the pirate captain), the party got away scot-free.

The third scene was a major one, as the group made a contact within the Rebel Alliance. This is where I start weaving in the background narrative, and the various things that are going on in the background. Their contact was intended to come off as sharp and perceptive, but friendly, and send the party on a side mission while she looked into some of their interests for them. She’ll be doing background checks on them and getting them resources in exchange for a search-and-rescue job on Nar Shaddaa, leading straight into the last major scene of the session: the rescue mission. This was interlaced with the last minor scene, another Imperial checkpoint but with a much more hostile agent. Nothing unmanageable, but not trivial either.

One of the things that I’d been tracking was the time spent by the party, both traveling and otherwise, mapped against the timeline of the background narrative. In this case, it’s the original series, so I’ve been keeping an eye on when specific major moments in the OT occurred, and what the party was likely to be doing at that time. In a delicious (for me) twist, the destruction of Alderaan coincided with the party’s rescue mission. I had a feeling it was going to occur, but I wasn’t sure how the group was going to approach the rescue. When they went in guns blazing, I knew things were going to be interesting. They did have the foresight to jack into the area’s cameras and get a view of where their enemies might be, though, which likely helped a lot.

About three rounds into combat, I asked everyone (in a party of force-sensitives) to make a Presence (Willpower) check, and got a few horrified sounds at the intense difficulty of the roll. A few people were getting a bad feeling about things when they saw the roll, and only two of the group managed to pass it. Then:

“You feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if a million voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were silenced.”

Psychic backlash is a real jerk, and I considered that in the original movies, Obi-Wan Kenobi was nearly incapacitated by the wave sent out by the destruction of Alderaan, and he was a serious badass. For my (much less powerful) party, anyone failing the check instantly passed out from the shock. Bad times in the middle of a firefight, but the party pulled through and made their rescue.

Now, it’ll be interesting to see how they deal with the aftermath of all of that, and if anyone will consider that they didn’t turn off those cameras. Hopefully no one of importance will happen upon a recording of an apparent gang fight where lightsabers got drawn and a bunch of people pass out at the exact moment a nasty ripple through the Force occurred. Surely there’s no one out there who might put two and two together…

Misfortune Mordren

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Boring Post Material

Misfortune Mordren

This morning I am struggling a bit to remain conscious.  Neither myself nor my wife managed to get much sleep last night, because in our partially finished state…  the rain kept dripping off a metal plate just outside our window.  Which meant either try and sleep through this loud irregular dripping pattern, or sleep with the television loud enough to hopefully drown out the noise.  We did the later which means we never really slept that deeply, kinda like we do when there is a tornado warning and we end up with the weather blaring all night hoping we would wake up if we needed to take shelter.  As a result I am struggling a bit when it comes to stringing together thoughts into a sentence.  This is absolutely the sort of day that I would just say screw it and not blog…  but after several years of this madness I don’t really want to break the chain.  That’s the funny thing about doing the daily blogging thing… is after a point you really don’t want to do something to break the pattern of posts.  It is like the pattern itself becomes the important thing and not so much what I am writing about.

This weekend also was one where I did a surprisingly small amount of gaming.  We recorded the latest episode of AggroChat on Friday night this week, and during that I piddled around in Fallout 4.  Then as usual I stayed up way the hell too late wrapping up some minor details on the podcast.  Then Saturday we had the very first of our family “Christmas” activities, I say it in quotes because it is technically a dual purpose Thanksgiving and Christmas that we have with my wife’s dad and step mom.  They are snow birds and spend the winter in warmer climates… so for the last decade or so we have had this dual holiday day around Thanksgiving.  Thing is they keep pushing it up so they can get down South “before it gets cold”, and admittedly they have a really nice place down there so I don’t blame them.  It just ends up making for a strange holiday get together… when I am absolutely not even in Thanksgiving mode yet.  When I got home from that… I had every intent of taking a nap, but instead the contractors were banging on the wall of the bedroom which would have made sleep impossible.

As a result I pretty much sleep walked through the day until we went to bed that evening relatively early.  This is the point at which we realized that the drip was a thing… which woke us up about 4 am Sunday morning.  My wife just stayed up, and I attempted to sleep through it…  which I am guessing I eventually succeeded because it didn’t wake me up again until around 7:30.  Over the last several years we have pretty much ignored we had a back yard.  The siding had gotten bad and honestly everything back there was just overwhelming in that it all needed attention.  With the bedroom door thing leading out there, my wife has become determined to fix the problems back there and reclaim it as usable space.  Since we had a dumpster thanks to the construction folks…  she was damned determined to use that to take care of some stuff.  We had a few hour break in the rain, so my wife and I were trudging through the muddy back yard picking up things and carrying them to the dumpster.  I am surprisingly sore from this, even though all I really did was act as the person moving stuff from the backyard to the dumpster, and she did a lot of the brute force gathering stuff into piles for me to move.

Star Wars Pen and Paper

Misfortune Mordren

The highlight of yesterday has to be our Star Wars pen and paper game.  The AggroChat crew and a few friends have been doing a fantasy flights Star Wars system game through Roll 20.  The way that game integrates with Roll 20 is amazing, and quite literally if you fill out your character sheet correctly all you have to do is push a single button when you want to do an attack.  I am assuming there is a lot more going on behind the scenes that Tam is doing to run the game, but for the most part… this is the best possible remote pen and paper experience.  Essentially we are a group of force users during the A New Hope era, with one significant monkey wrench thrown in.  My character is the one that does not fit…  I am not a nice person…  I never claimed to be.  My character has pretty much spent his entire life working as a Bodyguard/Hired Gun/Enforcer for one Hutt cartel after another.  The problem is… I get these “bad feelings” and often times my employers don’t heed my warnings and end up dead.  As a result I’ve developed this persona in the underworld of “Misfortune Mordren”, and it has been interesting to see how that is working out.

I built this persona because I thought it would be interesting to play… but apparently I am some sort of underworld bogeyman.  We had an instance yesterday where our craft was about to get boarded by some pirates, and the mere mention of my name…. and some really high deception rolls on the part of Kodra…  caused them to back off because they wanted absolutely nothing to do with me.  Apparently I am considered to be so “Bad Luck” that even after interdicting our ship…  it was not worth their time to try and take us on.  Then again there is a whole other side to this tale, because I am racking up quite the body count.  While I am playing a character from Edge of the Empire, we decided to make things easier and put me on the Force and Destiny conflict system.  I feel like I am not understanding this system… because every time I take conflict I cheer out loud.  Much to the horror of my otherwise party of “goody two shoes” that are trying desperately to avoid the Dark Side.  We walked into a gang base yesterday, and I opened fire before they had time to even speak.  To my defense though… I figure if you are in a gang on Nar Shadda you have made some poor life choices anyways.  Also to my defense Kodra did ask me to create a diversion…  so yeah I was just doing that.

Essentially I am becoming somewhat of the conflict sponge for my party, and I am perfectly fine in that role.  The thing is… I never said I wanted to be a light side character… and additionally I never said I was a “good guy”.  My character has spent his entire life living in Hutt territory, and in truth I am turning over a new leaf.  As a Hutt enforcer I would have been expected to torture every single one of these people I took down… just for good measure, because that is what Hutts do.  I have yet to feed a single one of them to some bizarre creature we are keeping in a pit to entertain the boss.  So simply taking them out cleaning… is a bit of a mercy from what I have been used to.  It is going to be interesting to see how my character and the rest of the party play out… as they so carefully use their stun settings…  and mine has dust on it because it has never been used once.  The game usually runs for several hours… and by the time it wraps up I just have enough time to grabs some food and head downstairs for my Sunday evening television time… including Walking Dead, Talking Dead… and now maybe Into the Badlands.  I watched the first episode last night and I have to say so far I am digging it heavily.