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Showing posts from January, 2023

Adventures in a Doomed World: Session 24

I'm playing a mashup of  Scarlet Heroes  and  Basic Fantasy RPG  with a few supplements to turn it into a solo fantasy hexcrawl in the world of Eilobar, a doomed land entering its end times. I'm using the  Level 0 Character Tumbler , Hexcrawl Adventures and some homebrew rules. The characters started as level 0 peasants and have since levelled up to become heroes. Introduction I'm constantly adjusting my homebrew rules for this game. From now on I'm awarding 1D20 XP for a successful check. I'm also going to simplify the rules for movement rate in the wilderness and be a bit more forgiving since they're on horseback. Here are the new movement rates: Plains/Trails/Wasteland: 2 hexes per day in metal armour or 4 on horseback Desert/Woodland/Hills: Half a hex per day in metal armour or 1 on horseback Jungle/Dense Forest/Mountains/Swamp: A third of a hex per day or half a hex on horseback The Adventure The party goes back into the circular chamber, Stilda c...

Dungeon23 in Four Against Darkness: Week 4

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Day 22, Room 01.22 Choosing the door at the east of the T-junction in room 01.21, the party opens it into a large cave with doors in the north and south walls. Shambling around here are six corpses with ragged clothing hanging from them: zombies. Grobern charges the slow moving creatures and cuts down three of them in one go (exploding 6!). Rorri follows, smashing the head of another one. Malia sneaks around behind the remaining two and skewers their heads with her shortsword one after another (exploding 6!). They had no treasure so the heroes move on. Day 23, Room 01.23 The party opens the door to the north. More undead! There are nine skeletal rats in a short corridor here. Grobern charges in and smashes six of them in a frenzy (2x exploding 6!). Rorri destroys another, Malia kills one more and then Gerda gets the last one with her staff. They were vermin so they had no treasure. Day 24, Room 01.24 There's a door to the north but they follow the tunnel west around a curve. Day 25...

Adventures in a Doomed World: Session 23

I'm playing a mashup of  Scarlet Heroes  and  Basic Fantasy RPG  with a few supplements to turn it into a solo fantasy hexcrawl in the world of Eilobar, a doomed land entering its end times. I'm using the  Level 0 Character Tumbler , Hexcrawl Adventures and some homebrew rules. The characters started as level 0 peasants and have since levelled up to become heroes. The Adventure After moving Helia's body outside the heroes search the cultists' bodies, finding a cheap pewter amulet worth 30GP. I've rolled a feature for the next room. The tables say "A dangerous intruder or beast who has entered the site", and for the motivation, "Rescue another person within the site". The heroes follow the spiralling tunnel deeper into the earth until it opens out into a cavern. They can hear the sounds of fighting so they move further in, walking past an underground stream. They can see the acolyte who fled from battle, and he's in combat with a man not dress...

Dungeon23 in Four Against Darkness: Week 3

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Day 15, Room 01.15 The party walks west down the tunnel into the darkness before reaching a crossroads. Day 16, Room 01.16 Taking the south tunnel at the crossroads they open a door into an L-shaped room. From here a door to the south opens into corridor 01.05, and another door leads east. In the centre of the room is another statue, this time of a half man half snake creature holding a pair of scimitars. Malia approaches this one and touches it like she did the other, but it starts moving and attacks the party! It's a level 4 boss with 4 life points, immune to magic. Grobern attacks it but it parries, then Rorri smashes his maul into it, cracking it a bit. Malia jams her shortsword into its arm joint and wrenches it, delivering another wound (exploding 6!). Gerda smacks it with her staff but it bounces off the hard stone. It fights back against Gerda but she nimbly dodges out of the way. Grobern is parried again, but then Rorri whirls his maul around and smashes the snake part of ...

Adventures in a Doomed World: Session 22

I'm playing a mashup of  Scarlet Heroes  and  Basic Fantasy RPG  with a few supplements to turn it into a solo fantasy hexcrawl in the world of Eilobar, a doomed land entering its end times. I'm using the  Level 0 Character Tumbler , Hexcrawl Adventures and some homebrew rules. The characters started as level 0 peasants and have since levelled up to become heroes. Introduction I'm continuing with my Scarlet Heroes campaign after a long break. As a recap: This is the Kingdom of Lond in the world of Eilobar, a medieval world entering its end times. The age of heroes is long over and passed into legend. There are no adventurers. Our party was formed from peasants as the result of a funnel adventure. They've since levelled up into heroes. Monsters are awakening in the deep places of the earth and beginning to terrorise common folk again. Stilda is a female human level 3 fighter with a longsword and splintmail. Previously a barber from the isolated village ...

Dungeon23 in Four Against Darkness: Week 2

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The heroes arrive back at the nearest town and rest up for a few days. They visit the market to sell the gems they found. Grobern sells the green garnet and carnelian for 48 GP, and Rorri sells his two onyxs for 24 GP (they get 20% better prices on gems and jewellery due to Rorri's appraisal skills). Grobern buys a vial of holy water for 30 GP. A couple of house rules for life in the town: Let's say it costs 1 GP per day for food and lodging at the inn (per character), and they can heal 1 wound with each day's rest. Rorri needs to heal 4 wounds so they'll spend 4 days resting. Malia is broke now so she'll have to start getting involved in combat more often to earn her keep! They need to see who's available at the tavern to join them. I'm going to randomise things a bit and say we'll roll a D4 to check how many adventurers are hanging out that day, then a D8 to determine each one's class. Today there's a barbarian, a dwarf and a wizard. If they ta...

Dungeon23 in Four Against Darkness: Week 1

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Session zero of this campaign is here . To see all the Dungeon23 posts click on the label in the sidebar. Day 1, Room 01.01 The heroes arrive at the entrance to Zozu's Domain, an unassuming cave mouth in a mountainous region. Grobern the warrior and Rorri the dwarf are in front with Malia the rogue and the wizard Brima behind them. They are immediately faced with two tunnels leading north into the gloom; one on the left and one on the right. Day 2, Room 01.02 The heroes choose the left hand tunnel, which leads to a door. Opening it the tunnel continues north. A black robed woman stands there, a hood obscuring her features. "I am Thonia of the Medusae, guardian of the domain of Zozu the Unmentionable." she says. "Somewhere on this floor is my rival, Lord Abag. Slay him. Bring me his head and thou shalt be greatly rewarded." A pair of snakes writhe out from under her hood; she is indeed a medusa. Grobern the warrior replies "Aye mi'lady, we will return wi...

Dungeon23: Session Zero

Dungeon23 and Solo Gaming The creator of Mothership RPG, Sean McCoy wrote a blog post last month where he came up with the idea for Dungeon23, a challenge to create a megadungeon by drawing one room per day in a diary, with one dungeon level per month. Then at the end of the year you have a huge 365 room dungeon that you can run for players in 2024. I thought about ways to get involved with this and decided that instead of designing a dungeon I'd generate and play one in a solo RPG with random dungeon generation. Enter Four Against Darkness. It's a really quick and fun dungeoncrawler - it's a dungeoncrawler rather than an RPG as there's no roleplaying in it. It's more like Advanced Heroquest. It's quick to create characters, generate the dungeon and have fights, with monsters being slain left right and centre by your party of four adventurers. It also has a lot of expansions that add variety to the dungeons with new monsters and quests. I'll be using the fo...