Sunday, March 29, 2009

Our Year With The Dragon

A BIT OF BACKGROUND FIRST

If you have ever seen "Planet of the Apes," you have the starting point for the setting and basic premise of my tacky new shared world 4th Edition D&D campaign, except replace "Apes" with "Reptiles," and replace "Planet" with "Endless Dungeon." It's a shameless hack 'n slash, but that's kind of the point. It's really fun, and kind of liberating. At the start, kobolds and lizardmen have enslaved all of the mammal races to mine, build weapons and ships, and to enlarge their already enormous underground empire. The humans, elves, halflings etc. are completely deprived of any freedom or education and have never seen the light of day and in fact this campaign has yet to set foot on the surface. Is it a big cliche? Yes it is.

As the party has ventured deeper, both the slaves and their masters have become bigger and more powerful. Further down the group have encountered cold blooded shahaugin, evil dragonborn, and giant lizardmen--and the heroes have freed warm blooded ogres, giants etc. from slavery. Greater amounts of magic continue to appear in the dungeons themselves (yes, even in the walls and floors), as a more impressive level of affluence reigns with the powerful who reside in the deep levels -- and there is no end in sight to this dungeon. In fact, it may BE the entire world for all the party knows.

So it was inevitable that in this campaign the party would encounter dragons, and sooner than would be usual. Now don't get me wrong here. In the past, (and I have been DMing since 1980) I have been very sparing with my use of dragons because I always felt they were over-used in other campaigns. In fact I have deliberately gone in other directions (golems, conspiracies of elves, etc.) whenever possible, and most adventuring groups in my campaigns haven't even seen a dragon until at least 15th level, or more likely higher. Why? Because when I run a dragon, I want to run a DRAGON! Dragons should be city-destroying forces of supernature that strike fear and respect from those poor souls unfortunate enough to encounter them. Dragons should regularly end the lives of entire parties of adventuring heroes, or even cause the end of a campaign with "Oh well, too bad, the dragon got you. Okay, I already have plans for my next campaign. What are you thinking about for your new characters?"

Not that mine is the only campaign going on within our group. Rod's new 4th Edition D&D campaign (actually I think he has more than one) so far seems to center around an undead villian, Skull Lord Kromdor, a guy with three skulls who seems to continually manipulate the party, march armies of undead on us and then laugh at us with his three skeletal jawbones. It's awesome. Robby's new 4th Edition campaign is more military in scope, and our characters in it are very young (my dragonborn cleric is 15, but really about 315 because he and his city were turned to stone 300 years ago). Some part of me gets a sense of Mordheim/Warhammer from the style of Robby's setting, which is something different that I really like, touches like a city pointer sign made out of a skeleton. My characters (yeah, I've actually been playing more instead of running lately) in all three of the above campaigns have so far been Dragonborn, which I initially thought I was going to hate but I actually really enjoy playing because it's something new, fresh and well-written.

Anyway, I was saying dragons can really be a terrible cliche. But they also happen to make really cool encounters, even for low level characters in 4th Edition D&D, as Rod proved last night, when he ran the session in my endless dungeon crawl setting that I described above. (Phil had his turn running in this shared world a couple weeks ago and did a terrific job, by the way). Phil picked up where I left off, and Rod picked up where Phil left off. Here's a recap that's bound to be off a bit...

THE SESSION

So it was me, Shawn R., Carson, Phil, and Rod (Shane came later). Shawn, who is new to our group, played an awesome halfling rogue named Shadow. Carson played an elf Shaman "To Darwin," Rolen. Phil, who played well last time but had a character die anyway from bad luck, had another new character, Krug Nument, a really tough half orc barbarian (from the PH2). The party's other rogue, Robrik Willikers, is a super nasty drow Rod built and Carson played, then Shane took over when he arrived. I played my same old Dragonborn Warlord, Shamash Kriv, who specializes in inspiring his allies to be even more powerful than they already are, and killing enemies up close and personal. Currently (but not for long) the party are all at 5th level.

At the end of Phil's session, we had seen an old green dragon (if I recall, we had thought it was a statue earlier...) with glowing red eyes, right at the end of a big encounter with dragonborn and drakes, if I remember. Anyway, Rod started the new session it from that point. The dragon turned out to also be a vampire. Her name was Lady Viza(something). She had a young green dragon son (who was not undead). She dominated my character to throw my Shield Guardian amulet into the Aboleth tank. Then, she taunted the party and left. Knowing we were likely to be heading for an ambush, we followed her anyway once Shamash could clear his head, because we heard people screaming in that direction. Besides, none of us felt much like going after the amulet anyway.

We came to a hallway that opened up into a large rectangular chamber with an area coming off one side filled with coffins and a strange purple glow. A couple of us noticed that the wall on the left looked a bit unsteady. Two pools of boiling blood occupied positions in the middle of the hallway, their purpose unknown. Undead, possibly zombies or worse, seemed to be everywhere here. Leading from the rear was a humanoid vampire with scaly skin. Glowing red eyes stared at us from every direction.

Krug slammed his weapon into the wall on the left, collapsing an area onto some of the undead but also himself. Robrick snuck around, and ended up getting some good dagger attacks in on the enemy. Shadow also snuck around, and seemed to have excellent timing and luck, continually downing opponents in the most amazing ways. Rolen at one point ended up admiring Shadow from a vantage point upside down, within a gelatinus cube, saying "who is that amazing little man?" or some such thing. Shamash wound up fighting a swarm of rat-sized dinosaur looking things who turned out to be really tough. The vampire commanded a minion to activate the dragon statue at the end of the hallway/chamber, which then spewed slippery poison all over most of the party. He then retreated to his zone of power, which glowed purple, in the center of the room with coffins. Krug defeated him but he came back. Shadow took him out the second time and then Krug wrecked the coffin and whatever else was bringing the vampire back.

After a brief reprieve, the party continued past the statue. Here we encountered the vampire dragon, Lady V. The large cavern almost gave the feel of being outside. It featured swampy areas that occasionally flared up in gaseous explosions as well as briar brush, spore molds, and a giant red crystal atop a building in the distance, among other features. The main thing were the curious blue crystals which one could reach through, and poke a hand (or a weapon) out of another blue crystal of your choice. They weren't big enough to teleport you, but you could use them to attack anywhere next to any of the other crystals - and there were a lot of them. After Lady V. charged the party and breathed her acid on us (ouch), Shamash was able to give himself combat advantage by attacking her rear flank with his Glaive, as it reached nearly 10' poking into one crystal and out another to strike. Zombies appeared in the swamp, menacing, and Rolen dispatched some of them with his magical bear of winter's wrath or whatever it was, that kept re-appearing. A yellow crystal teleported party members back and forth across the cavern. Robrik managed to get to the red crystal, which turned out to be an effective weapon once mastered, focusing a red beam of agony on Lady V., who had herself inflicted her poisonous breath, mind-warping glares, and flesh tearing claw and vampiric bites upon the party. Yet somehow, supporting each other, attacking, moving, retreating, attacking again... the group were ultmately able to somehow, eventually defeat Lady V. in an epic battle of wills, wits and weapons...

The building contained the shield guardian, as well as its amulet which was in the process of being altered in some way. Our group also found treasure there.

Good session Rod, you were really on. Thank you for coming everybody, see you in a couple of weeks.

-Dave