The After action report, from the Dungeon Master's point of view.
The backgroundI got a late start this week. I came up with a basic outline the night after last week, and then didn't really get around to doing much module -making until Friday. Friday night I spent probably 8-10 hours and got a lot done. At least, it
felt like a lot, and the general structure what I wanted to do was more or less in place.
Then, I'm not entirely certain what happened but at one point I remember looking at the clock and thinking, "oh, it's Sunday." And then I remember thinking, "Oh, that means TOMORROW is game night."
So I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. In fact, while I don't remember exactly what time yesterday I started working on it, I remember it being at least 8am-something before I went to bed. Now, I'm late-night gamer anyway, so this isn't as bad as it probably sounds. But even I'm usually asleep before the sun gets all bright and shiny again. And, even still...the module wasn't done yet. There were a few minor details. You know...things like making sure the quest givers acknowledged quest turns ins. Making sure that the mist that kept the party away from the orb actually disappeared when quests were completed. Minor things in terms of code volume, but important in terms of making sure that things actually work.
But I needed sleep. So I slept, and was back to working on it around 4. I figured three hours would be enough to finish to loose ends and confirm that everything was working, and I think it actually took me more like two. So it all worked out.
The adventure beginsOk, guys...remember that first dungeon? Brownie points to whomever recognized the collossal caves/zork reference, by the way. Well, here's the map with a few landmarks:
So, couple important items of note. First, the monsters were not completely hard coded. There is some randomness to the encounter system. For example, the first time you went to the room marked succubus, there was no succubus. That was generic "demon encounter" and sometimes it gives you a bunch of low level stuff, while other times it gives smaller numbers of high level stuff. First time you got a bunch of hell hounds, second time you got a succubus. The rooms with nothing listed were rooms that were not particularly notable from my point of view watching through the night. Second, not only were the monsters semi-randomized, the quest targets were also.
BeatYes, see how there are two quest targets listed? Well, I did a very Fun(tm) thing, or so I thought. See that room where the sign is? That's the entry point to the mines. And I set it up so that if you went
west, then the quest gem would spawn in the extreme northeast corner, and if you went
east, it would spawn in the extreme northwest corner.
So what did you guys do?
East --> north --> northwest --> north
Out of
all possible permutations, you chose
the fastest possible path to the quest gem. No backtracking, no wrong turns, no mistaking rooms without monster spawns for rooms you'd already cleared...nothing. Just straight shot, BAM quest item.
Fortunately you decided to explore a bit more before returning to the quest giver. Otherwise it would have been a fast night.
And then Beardocles happenedI'm sure some other things of note happened between then and here. But from my point of view, as the Dungeon Master, not constrained to travelling from room to room or staying with the party, the next event of note to me ws Beardocles.
Apparently he decided to run back out on his own. Maybe he thought that a room, once cleared, stayed cleared. Maybe he just didn't care. When I finally found him he was running through that room south of the Minotaur room and somehow he'd managed to get some kind of giant spider (phase spider or dire spider, not sure which) chasing after him. I'm not sure he even noticed.
But I followed the two of them to the entry room, and watched as he ran right out. My memory is kind of hazy at that point, because I still had 5 party members all...you know, being a party together, and I didn't want to ignore them too long lest they stumble onto a module error or something without me there to fix it. So I bounced back and forth for a while, and so far as I could tell, Beardocles made it out of the mine, and the spider followed...somewhere or another he'd picked up a bunch of stirges and deposited them in the entry room next to the sign, the dire spider was stuck on the portal outside the mine, and Beardocles himself was chatting up the sexy Drow scroll merchant babe back in town.
Well, it seemed a bit unfair to me that the spider was stuck, so I helped him along by dropping him into town and went back to the party, who by now was starting to wonder where Beardocles had gone. And by the time I went back to check up on him he'd managed to get the spider into the DM's ring, presumably expecting her to zap it.
As if.
But, fortunately for him, the
merchants weren't about to lose a good customer to some random evil magical spider, and they had the benefit of plot tags that made them unkillable. So they finished off the spider and stood around for a nice happy pow-wow in the DM's ring.
Then some other stuff happened. Let's skip ahead
Tale of two villagesEventually the party moved onto the second subquest. Or rather, they tried to skip it by completely ignoring the town and attacking the Plot locked mausoleum door to go straight to the dungeon without, you know...talking to anybody. Eventually they realized it wasn't going to break, so they moved on into town, where somebody walked up to the various quest givers and spammed keys as fast as possible to skip through all that, you know...yucky backstory and stuff. And somebody whispered me a "Pro tip" about how to design my signs so they didn't clutter up the chat channel.
...oh dear, I am
so sorry that during the previous 20-some hours of frantic coding and lost sleep that I didn't take the time to make streetsiggs more aesthetically pleasing.
*ahem* where were we?
Oh, yes...so with those pesky quest givers out of the way the party was headed back to the dungeon where all the loots were. Or rather,
half of the party was leaving town. The other half was just arriving, tryign like mad to keep up with the people trying to rush through things as quickly as possible.
For those of you who missed it, here's the backstory:
The two villages were founded by two members of an adventuring party after they retired. The northern village, Fruvia, was agricultural and grew the food consumed by both villages, whereas the southern village, Talsia, had more developed industry, traded with the northern village for their food, and others things with other villages.
When a climate change hit the region and buried it in years of snow, Fruvia lost the ability to feed both villages, so Talsia simply traded for food elsewhere, leaving Fruvia with nothing. Fruvia tried to negotiate, but Talsia didn't listen...so in the depths of starvation, Fruvia raided Talsia for food, leading to a five year war, arms dealers feeding on the frenzy, and eventually one one survivor from each village, both bitter and angry over the whole affair, btu too tired to go on living with it.
So...in a, admittedly massive simplication of what was originally intended to be a philosophically complicted ordeal with multiple valid solutions...basically the two of them each asked for the party to commit an act of vengeance on their behalf by breaking into the tomb of their ancestors...who were entombed together, because they were friends, and desecrate the tomb.
So, once inside, suddenly the party decided to be supercautious and check for traps. In the place where there actually weren't any traps. *facepalm* Eventually everyone made it into the tomb proper, where so far as I can tell nobody noticed that the door closed behind them, and proceeded to debate over which sarcophagus to loot. A debate that took several minutes, if I recall. Eventually the deep question of "which letter do you like less, T or F?" was posed, and the obvious answer of "let's loot them both" was agreed upon.
And this brought us to the curious quirks of the NWN encounter spawn system. For one sarcophagus, it examined your collective total of about 23 character levels and concluded that 4 level 1 skeletons with a challenge rating of .33 would be an appropriate challenge. And 2 seconds later after you'd slaughtered them, for the next sarcophagus it examined your collective total of about 23 character levels and concluded that 3 level 12-20 LICHES with a Challenge rating of 17 and the ability to cast level 9 spells would be equally appropriate.
Yeah, DM intervention on that one.
Anyway, before long you were on your way, stomped on the two ghoul lords who were the risen forms of the adventurers whose tomb you'd just looted, and headed back to town...just in time for the lead one of you to see the weapons merchant explain that he was leaving and that both the quest npcs had killed themselves since their ancestral tomb had just been desecrated by some nasty adventurers. Of course, only one of you saw that because everyone else was still half a map back. Though they did eventually catch up just in time to see no-one and nothing left in town and to complain that it was odd.
I suspect that was a case of Beardocles strikes again, but I actually didn't get to see who it was who brought that on, and whomever it was didn't stick around long enough to see much.
ConclusionSo from my point of view those were those most memorable events of the night. Or at least the most entertaining ones. I'll leave others to tell about the various party breakups, getting lost, being ambushed by swarms of monsters aggroed by Beardocles, running through the mines a second time and turning LEFT instead of right but nevertheless stumbling into the correct randomly chosen location for the gem spawn rather than, you know...going to where it had spawned the
previous time and expecting it to be there...the fight with the succubus, the fight with the time stopping liches, the chests guarded by huge swarms of monsters that kept insisting on dropping 1 gold coin, the awesome magic axe that was somehow guarded by a single low level mephit, and maybe even a few other things I missed.
AddendunOh, quick other thing: remember those two ghoul lords
outside the mausoleum? Because you'd just looted their graves? Beardocles, I guess you missed this, but on the second run through you went outside to go rest or something, and you took a seat
right in the middle of where they spawned. And then ran back inside about three quarters of second before they spawned. And then when I went back to check on them later they were just gone.
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Topic: Ongoing Neverwinter Nights Campaign, Monday nights 7-10pm PST (Read 11663 times)