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| pic accessed at Rexque Futurus |
For the second week of Adventure Games Camp, I was scheduled to run 20 more hours of tabletop role-playing for a fresh batch of a dozen rising 6th-8th graders. I knew I wanted to continue exploring the ruined city of Bawal Bayan in its pulp jungle setting, but wanted to keep things fresh and interesting too ... it couldn't all be frolicking with white apes ...
So I flipped around in B1-9 In Search of Adventure, that often disappointing 1987 digest of Basic-series D&D modules, and realized that for all the acclaim that it gets among the old school gaming crowd, I'd never actually run Tom Moldvay's B4 The Lost City -- heresy!
What better opportunity to mend my ways?
I yanked B4's step-pyramid out of the desert, plunked her down in the temple district of Bawal Bayan, and dispensed with the "lost and dying of thirst" railroad opening (which is swell as railroads go ... water as treasure is a nice twist), just leaving a secret door open and letting teenage curiosity run its course.
I made a few other decisions at the outset:
- I'd only deal with the first 5 tiers of the ziggurat
- I'd tie this adventure to the emergent plotline of the prior week: the Yuan-Ti ritual interrupted prior was a rite of Zargon. With the temple well now collapsed, the degenerate serpent-men were seeking a new way below Bawal Bayan to reestablish contact with their foul patron.
- All the Cynidiceans would be warped into inhuman monsters to sidestep some ethical questions. They were twisted by the influence of Zargon, but maintain a facade of humanity, assisted by their custom of never uncovering the face.
- I'd use a random chart to determine reactions when Cynidiceans met strangers with "naked faces": disgust, fear, titillation, etc.
- Apart from some cosmetic changes, I'd run the 50 keyed encounters as-written (monster placement, AC, hit points, attack routines, treasure, save or die poison, etc.), all dice rolled openly.
- The adventurers could leave the ziggurat and go explore other parts of the city if they so desired -- nothing but curiosity and excitement would hold them there.
- We'd use Dagger for Kids as our rules set. Apart from equipment, characters would only have three stats: armor class, hit points, and a saving throw (15+)
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| The topmost level of the ziggurat. I enclosed the three statues within a shrine and ruled that the doors were corroded shut. 1' x 1' air shafts perforated the sloping walls ... the perfect invitation for giant bees. |
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| Left of the stair, a secret door stood slightly ajar. |
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| Closer inspection revealed that the body pinned in the threshold wasn't human. |
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| Beyond the door, their first trapped room! No fatalities yet, but a lesson in caution. |
Down the corroded rungs of the ladder,
the next layer of the ziggurat
felt like a maze.
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| Dangerous creatures had crept down the air shafts to propagate in the darkness. Were they birds, bats, insects? |
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| Not everything left behind by the ancient builders was foul. Limbs extended from the copper orbs and they tried to talk in scratchy, unintelligible voices. [ I replaced B4's sprites with these modron-inspired fellows ] |
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| Like their masks, the statue of their god showed far more craft than the "Gormites" seemed capable of. |
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| The hunched, masked acolytes claimed that the world beyond the ziggurat had been destroyed and believed the giant bees were divine messengers. |
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| It was easy to trick the slow-witted Gormites and subdue them with a sleep spell. Beneath their masks, however, they weren't human at all! |
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| The 3rd level down contained a rotating corridor. Defeated Gormites made checking for traps easier! |
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| Serpent-men, apparently servants of a power called "Zargon", trailed the explorers into the ziggurat and laid an ambush. |
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| Another cult of degenerate remnants from the ancient city, the Children of Usamagiras were diminutive and could only speak in whispers. They feared the daylight, but their system of bronze mirrors allowed them to reflect starlight onto their pentagonal altar. The explorers dubbed them, "creepy wizard babies". |
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| The Daughters of Maradura were xenophobic and warlike. They also wielded the sharpened bones of their severed left arms as ritual weapons*. They agreed not to attack, but only if the explorers brought the heads of slain Zargonites as tribute. [I lifted this disturbing little idea from Monster Manual Sewn From Pants] |
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| Where to find Zargonites? Down below the catacomb level of course! The very first tomb was that of a court fool. His spring-loaded sarcophagus hinted of the decadence that had rotted the city from its roots and the explorers most certainly did not approve. Magic, brass urns teleported their contents back to the fool's tomb. The clever adventurers pried the urns loose and rolled them along with the party to provide a ready-made escape hatch! |
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| A labyrinth of trapped tombs nearly proved more trouble than it was worth, especially when the novice explorers had their very first run-in with ghouls. |
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| The jaguar-club was guarded by animated skeletons. What was special about it? |
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| Five levels down now ... things were getting increasingly dangerous! Animated, magnetic iron warrior-statues, living stone dragon- gargoyles who couldn't be harmed by mortal weapons, more traps, and when the wizard tried on that strangely preserved robe, he was dominated by the mind of an ancient priest from before the fall, obsessed with destroying the leader of the "new" heretical cult of Zargon. |
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| The wizard's face began to turn silvery and smooth. |
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| A shining mace, recovered from the catacombs, helped the dwarf pound his way through foes until the gargoyles tore him to bits. |
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| At last, only an elf (she utterly fearless) and the possessed wizard (he compelled) dared probe deeper into the ziggurat. Their walk below the earth became increasingly dream-like as they entered the halls of the ancient city's last remnants. |
Wizard: Okay yeah, we're so funny, ha, ha.
Elf: Should we cast a sleep spell on them and sneak past them?
Wizard: I don't have any first level spells left, do you?
Elf: I can only cast web.
Wizard: Let's just play along and head for that door.
GM: As you pass through the room they start to applaud.
Wizard: We love you too. Hail Zargon.
GM: In the next room more masked figures are gathered around a wheel playing some type of strange game. They seem to be gambling based on their spins of the wheel, but the evidence suggests that apart from winning piles of jade tokens that sometimes the players are killed. [rolling dice] "What do you want?"
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GM: "Nonsense. Everything is as it should be here."
Wizard: Oh, I doubt that ...
Elf: Well maybe if you gave us something, we'd say that the inspection is over and we could just go.
Not only were the explorers successful in bluffing their way past the gamblers but, through their questioning, they also identified the bottle that they had acquired earlier as a potion of "Eternal Slumber" (its match, along with a potion called "The Delight" was being used in the game and gamblers were sometimes required to drink the poison).
Soon they had bluffed their way into the heavily guarded Shrine of Zargon to confront the evil priest. Even as they entered, the wizard's face completed its transformation into the smiling, silver features of Usamagiras, the Star Sage, foe of Zargon!
GM: There are about fifteen masked figures in the room, being led in hymns to Zargon by their black-robed, gold-masked priest.
Wizard: We bring a message from Zargon!
GM: [rolling dice] "Why do you have the face of our enemy? How dare you enter this place?"
Elf: He was cursed to have that face until he delivers Zargon's message.
Wizard: Yes, Zargon will show that he is supreme over all the other guys ... like Gorm ... and those other guys.
Elf: Zargon has a special message, but it is only for the high priest. The rest of you must leave.
GM: [rolling dice] "Do as he says."
Wizard: Zargon says that an entire new world is coming -- that Zargon is going to make a new world and he has chosen you to be its leader, but first you must pass a test. (I give him the potion of Eternal Slumber) You have to drink this.
GM: "That is the potion of Eternal Slumber."
Wizard: Yes, if you have enough faith then Zargon will allow you to overcome its effects. He will give you the power to rise again in a more powerful form. Only then will you be worthy to rule his new world.
GM: [rolling dice] "Um, okay ..."
One dead priest of Zargon later, and the wizard had pulled on the gold mask and raiments of the evil cleric. The pair confined their looting to the body itself, realizing perhaps that they had used up more than their share of luck already. A quick reverse march was executed and each encounter was begun with an authoritative "Hail Zargon!" to clear the way. Before long they escaped back up to the third level and from there they were able to beat a hasty retreat out of the ziggurat.
Some take away:
- B4 The Lost City made for an incredibly fun romp
- weird creature placement was easily handled with a few cosmetic changes
- the traps, while basic, were surprisingly engaging and varied
- the coin-based treasure was boring but was easy to re-skin on the fly
- I assumed that, with the average character having only 5 hit points, that this would be a bloodbath. Instead, out of 12 characters, usually venturing down in groups of four, we only had 4 fatalities.
- By handling the ziggurat and chambers beneath like a Half-Life bunker, it can be dropped into just about any setting
- While I've already shown that Dagger for Kids can get the job done, there was no point at which it couldn't do everything that the writer required of it to run this module -- in fact, after the first session or two, I basically forgot that we weren't playing D&D
- Saving throws = great catch all. Though I never used them this way in years past, I think Ray "Dungeoncraft" Winninger was the first I heard suggest using saving throws as more than a way to decide if the poison was lethal. Trying to jump a pit, bluff an enemy, catch a handhold while slipping, avoid a green slime, pull a magnetized sword free? Make a saving throw! It becomes a sort of level-based, generic dungeoneering skill.
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