PHILIP TAYLOR's page

although the character is a worshipper of vecna the labrynth shouldnt be any different for her. remember that in the information on the ebon triad it states that these worshippers are an offshoot of the normal region and that true worshipers of the various three religions involved are disgusted and distrustfull of threre bretheren who are trying to worship an abomination. If anything the whispers of vecna could help the assasin to take out this misguided cult and keep the worship of vecna pure and true.

I think the answer depends on how you want to rationalise the dynamic relationships between the cults, and of course how much work you want to put in. Another consideration is the strengths and weaknesses of your player characters.

If you rationalise it as written then the doors are locked and the players follow the order as the adventure is written. The rationalisation behind this is that the three cults have an uneasy alliance at best, they are fearful and distrustful of each other. why post guards in the temples? Who are they guarding against? Obviously each other, the chances of a party of heroes descending down the lift into the heart of evil is slim at best. even though it has happened, the evil cults consider themselves too well hidden from the outside world. The three cults are only in agreement on one thing; that the Overgod must be raised to bring about the age of worms. This way is a little more safe and controlled for the PC’s, it is structured and if for example the PC’s make a big noise in the Hextor temple then the grimlocks wont come running to the rescue. This also gives the PC’s resting time between temples. not much time but enough for a few healing spells.

You could on the other hand you rationalise that all of the temple doors are unlocked, and the PC’s can pick and choose where they will go. This way is a bit more frenetic and epic, for example if the PC’s make too much noise descending the lift and taking out the tiefling guards then potentially all three temples may throw open their doors and come out and you could have the PC’s facing up to about 20-25 opponents, (a time consuming affair that can quickly turn into a slash fest) if the PC’s survive that initial battle the players are going to be bored later when they have three temples to search with no danger or challenge. The three temples have their own individual tactics to eliminate intruders. This also serves to give a different feel for the three temples cultures, this will be lost in a mass battle, which would be a nightmare to run logistically and would probably result in a TPK.

In my campaign I am using the locked door rationalisation with the proviso that the players can go to any temple they want, for example there is nothing to stop them bashing down the door of the Vecna temple first or picking its lock, The other temples are used to hearing noises and screams from all the torture and sacrifice that happens down in the main temple and so will not run to help. Even if say the Hextorites know the temple of Vecna is under attack would they rush to help? They may think the kenku’s would do their job well, too well and shrug it off. In my campaign the PC’s have descended into the temple on the eve of the festival of the blood, if the PC’s dally around until the actual festival then all of the temples will converge into the main temple room in worship of the Overgod who will rise. I wouldn’t want to be the PC’s then. So I am using the first rationalisation but with a time restriction of one day,which if reached will allow me to switch to the latter rationalisation

Before I go into my own darkness, I thought I'd point out one thing. In 3.5 the darkness spell doesn't make thing completely dark. In fact, it creates shadowy illumination. It is just enough for a creature to hide in, but doesn't completely obscure vision.

Yeah i know, thats what makes it evil.

So when darkness was cast i did described it as magical shadowy darkness, but i wanted a show stopper, a gimick, you know a dm prop, and moving to a hidden board was the answer. i wanted them to experience something fearful about being in the dark. it really did do the trick. i still followed the rules and gave a 20% miss chance and allowed the characters to attack anything that moved passed them or near them for example but it was all roleplayed blind ...or with the players in the dark as you might say
So while the darkness wasn't really pitch black i figured that as one of the characters has the murkey eyed flaw, and the others were suffering from the effects of Taint....(yes i added Taint too...all of the dead people will rise as zombies in 1d4 hours,)and given that it is the eve of the festival of blood, i figured that these shadows were perhaps more shadowy than usual....see im evil

ps my skeletons were mindless, however they do like to keep the door shut and locked it makes for good housekeeping.

Sure most Dm’s play fair,
Most never pull punches unless absolutely necessary,
And some even cast the dice and let them fall where they will….

Some DM’s occasionally allow the gloves come off,
Most DM’s play their NPC’s as challenging as their stats allow,
And some DM’s spread their reputation as a Total Party Killer…..

But all DM’s at some time have been down right evil towards the PC’s
Nasty, filthy evil with great big fangs and smelly eldritch warts!
Yes! You know who you are.
Come on fess up and spill the beans….You know you want to…

Tell us about the time you were really evil towards your unsuspecting players.

I had such a moment last night in the Three Faces of Evil. The party carefully approached the chamber with the waiting skeletons in the Hextorite temple. The players didn’t use the knock code to open the door and so the skeletons had a free surprise round. The scout in the party who was considered a front line fighter steamed into the room on his own, the other party members retreated back down the corridor 5ft, Why? Who knows? I took advantage

So the skeletons got a surprise round they move to surround the lone scout while one went to alert the six waiting cultists and one went to alert the two tieflings.

The evil part
The skeletons attacked but one of them had a really evil purpose to fullfill, it shut the door, locked it and left the key in the lock effectively cutting off the scout from the rest of the party.

More evil
The rest of the party had to spend the next few rounds trying to break the door down, when they finaly got the door down their friend was still alive, barely, however the cultists and tieflings were now joining the frey with one of the cultists untying the padlocked door to unleash the beast, (a Dire Lion in my campaign),

And still more evil
The teiflings then cast darkness on the whole melee, chaos ensued as I removed the minis onto a hidden board so that the players were playing blind. The players really feared for their PC’s lives last knight and we almost had a TPK! Awesome.

My group have just descended in to the temple complex in THFoE and have killed the Teifling guards and three Gnoll worshipers (an extra story plot in my campaign) I have added also Taint to the whole complex and extra Gnolls and given one word of the dark speech (Book of vile darkness) to the faceless one to wield as a weapon should the party find things too easy. They have gone into the temple on the eve of the Festival of Blood (11Th coldeven) so things could hot up there; what with taint, rising zombies, ebon aspect, and the dark speech, however if a TPK looms I can cull some of these extra niceties.

So far though my group have avoided a TPK but they have had a couple of deaths and a lot of near misses. My party made use of the abandoned mine hut and rested there a lot and made frequent stops into Diamond Lake to recover, they even hired a few healers to go with them and have them wait outside the cairn.

The Grick claimed one of our clerics and the Owl Bear savaged the other cleric so they were probably the toughest encounters but the encounters that scared my group the most were the Mad Slashers / Spider Swarms (switched for the beetle swarms given the lack of beetle swarm miniatures) yep! poison is just as effective as acid!! I put an extra Mad Slasher in as a wondering monster given all the resting they did.

The brown mould while technically not a monster almost wiped out the party, they kept trying to burn the stuff away and it kept doubling in size and they kept getting too near it, the cleric was first in using a torch to burn it away, it multiplied and he collapsed from extreme cold and frostbite the other players rushed in to save him, also taking cold damage, then the other Mad Slasher comes a wondering by…..the players learnt a hard lesson the hard way, they now hate moulds spores and fungus!!!

The most memorable fight though was the Wind Warriors. The players really crapped themselves when a wind warrior grappled the rogue lifted him into the air 60ft and dropped him into the chasm to his death……. only to realise the character was wearing the ring of Feather Fall….. priceless!! The screams and cheers woke up my family. Fearing a similar fate the rest of the party pulled out all of the stops to kill the wind warriors.

I am currently running the three faces of Evil for my group and i have included Taint in the temple there. the reasons are

1. Vecna himself discovered the temple and so like lingering evil there is a taint
2. Tripart god is almost ready to rise which lends a potency to the evil there
3. My campaigns current date is the 10th of Coldeaven. On the 11th is the Festival of the Blood a time when evil cults are particularly powerfull.
4. i didnt want the players to treat this temple like any other dungeon crawl

My players pc's all now have a taint score for merely decending the lift into the temple.the players have been texting each other this week talking about the taint...and what it forbodes for the party..they are scared stiff of it.. they have just killed the teiflings at the foot of the lift, they have no idea (i think) that they will rise as zombies (throw in a few green worms for good measure)in 1d4 hours.

the only thing to look out for is that evil is not immune to the ravages of taint so for example theldrick will have succumed to the taints effects, unless that is like me you rationalise the taint as having only just manifested itself of a sufficientl level to affect people due to the timing and the god stiring

the other thing is to allow some down time after the adventure for the players to clense themselves of it, i plan on delaying the blackstone keep installment for a month of game time. time enough for a side trek adventure to locate a sacred spring that only the bronzewood lodge druids know of.

im also giving the faceless one, one word of the dark speech to know and use on the party, this will set up the dark speech ready for when they fight Kyuss much later.

It’s always a delight to hear about other parties and how they have played the same adventure. It gives a great sense of a dynamic game, where there many possibilities and no two games are ever the same unlike, say, computer Games. My group did something entirely different.....

The youngest and most inexperienced player, (playing a knight from PHB 2), decided to challenge Kullen to a fight in the middle of the town square during market day. Kullen being …well Kullen wasn’t shy in answering the challenge. A fight ensued and Kullen lost and died Toderick now the new leader of the gang, (which is reason enough not to have helped Kullen), raised the town guard and the players knight was arrested. The knight resisted arrest but was quickly overcome and taken to sheriff Cubbins cells.

I will point out at this stage that I gave the knight plenty of hints and opportunities to the player that this was not a good course of action, I even at the end had Kullen hang on staggered at zero hit points to see if the knight would have any mercy. None was given and Kullen lost his head. So as a dm I’m faced with a player character locked up, and my main NPC and plot hook to filge dead. So what do you do….?

You have a raucous game of Three Dragon Ante in the Feral Dog. I had brought the card game and had been smarting to get it out and play it with the group. In fact I had planned to use it as a foil with Kullens gang and the players anyway for them to bluff the info they needed on filge over the game.

Kullens death wasn’t too much of a problem for the game in the end. I had Tordrick as the gangs leader now and he knew everything (or as little) as Kullen did. Seeing Kullen killed they headed for the Feral Dog to drink themselves into a sullen stupor and ponder there future under new leadership.

The other (more experienced) players followed the gang into the feral Dog and Roleplayed their way into Tordricks company and joined his game of Three Dragon Ante, got the info they wanted, won the game of three dragon ante (with the players using the actual cards) and then Tordrick having lost his leader and mate, his money and the game got angry and threw the over the table showering the taproom floor with over 80gp, …bring on the bar brawl it got nasty and Tordrick lost his head too. Gambling games often turn nasty in the Feral Dog and so the law wasn’t brought in this time.

For the knight justice was swift (Cubbin style) he was tortured and sold to Ragolin Dourstone as a slave to work in his mine, which sets up a new Roleplaying hook for the Three Faces Of Evil. We are now on the Three Faces and the hook really paid dividends a thousand fold. The player has been allowed to resume playing his knight character now the party is in the evil temple.

My group had a blast here too. I had switched the bettle swarm for a spider swarm and the giant bettles for giant spiders. i put a few huge cracks and creaveses in the lower part of the complex to rationalise where the spiders might have come from in a suposedly sealed dungeon. I also littered the place with dead beetle carpaices and shells and strung up lots of webs. I did this purely for table top effect as i had the spider swarm miniatures and i had also been out to a local hobby store and purchased some large plastic spiders. they looked great on the table and spooked crap out of the players. I had also purchased two mad slashers off ebay and so i was all set up for this encounter.

My group really struggled against the spider swarm and tried all sorts on it. they got the swarm down to one hit point and then fled away to recover. ha ha ha enter fresh spider swarm 'B'
on the second attempt one player opened the sarcophagus and took the trap damage but then he pushed the lid completely off and it cracked in two.(the player who did this is normally very cautious and checks everything twice for traps, but the urgency of the situation overtook him and he forwent the usuall checks and tripped the trap to his complete suprise). The mad slasher appeared and fear set in when they all grabbed for the miniature to read the underside, they were still no better off when they did. and when it whirlwinded the party they all looked at me horrified, they were scared! as a dm i had them all excited and worried for their characters lives. it was sheer joy. The party finally scattered the swarm and defeated the slasher to massive cheers and whoops from the players that woke up my wife and kids, (at about 1am, thanks guys!)but then i got my revenge later....let me tell you of the tale of the party who didnt know anything about brown mould....hah hah

Hi
the title pretty much says it all.

how do you pronounce Aaqa?
i can't get it to roll of the tongue.

cheers Phil

So make sure the trusted torch bearer drinks the first laced potion, give them that 5% luck opportunity to immediately vomit, then a Fort save to realize something solid just went down the hatch and watch the panic spread like fire through dry grass.

Thats fair....evil...but fair....

However giving the players a chance for survival isn't IMO detracting from the vilans diabolical plan. Once the potion has left the villans hands its out of his control. Things can and should go wrong for the villan, afterall he is the villan and the heros are well ....hero's, they deserve a break.

now if an NPC drank the potion then the villan would definately triumph and the NPC would meet a horrible death with no saves....but only to set the scence villify the villan or create athmosphere.....those poor Red Shirts....

Im not soft on my players either but character deaths and party deaths usually happen because they did something silly, and not because they drank a potion that smelled and tasted and looked like a cure potion.

Phil.T

Hi
I’m about to start running age of worms and I am just preparing my campaign handout for the players. I was looking for some advise on problem that has dogged my group for a long time now. Character Death.

The problem arises when you are in the middle of a campaign or adventure and one or all of the party members dies What level does the player introduce his new character.? Or party.

Basically I don’t want to have to shelf the adventure due to Total Party Death or constantly scale the adventures down to give the party a reasonable chance.

My group has always start afresh with a new character at one level lower than the party average, but players still grumble at the lost levels saying that they haven’t earned those levels and feel like they are cheating.

So I was toying with this idea that the character or party roll up the same level as they were but with zero XP points, then they have to earn the required XP to reach the next level as normal. I think this would allow the character to survive along side the existing characters (or a new party to survive the level of the adventure) long enough to earn the required XP given the self correcting nature of the system. I am aware that may take some time.

What are your thoughts and best practices on this topic?
I would like to present a few tried and tested methods to my group before we decide

Phil.T

Excellent gavgoyle....
and that same shade can then wail pointing into the heart of the Mistmasrsh "help them..... save them....our brothers have been taken" or something to that effect.

Stick a smashed back door in the keep and voila! adventure back on track with the PCs heading to the enclave. or the players later find out that the prisoners were taken under a shroud of mist from a fog spell. They weren't watching the front of the keep anyway.

Allustan could bring a cleric with the rienforcements who could comune with the dead to find out more about the prisoners.

The only thing i would have done different in my running of the adventure would be to not roll for all of the NPC in the battle. You would have had far more flexibility if you had narrated the flow of the battle from either the players somewhat distant perspective or using cut scences like a movie would. Sometimes leaving your story to chance is well a dicey thing....heh heh

remember you are in control of the game you don't have to justify a hit on a Npc with the roll of a dice.

Phil. T

My PCs just arrived at Blackwall Keep in our game last night (Eberron AoW Session 11). The party left Diamond Lake in the morning and with a packmule as their slowest mount they covered 16 miles in day 1 (random encounter was a small group of pilgrims). On day 2 a group of halfling farmers pass their camp as they finish the last 2 miles of their trip. It is late morning when they arrive at Blackwall Keep.

The ranger and rogue scout ahead and are undetected by the lizardfolk. They relay the battlefield to the party, who decide to fall back a quarter mile and get into a defensible position. Allustan leaves for help and one of the wizards in the party sends his hawk familiar to watch the field for preparations of battle.

In the evening the lizardfolk appear to be preparing the assault. The party, on horseback, assembles just beyond where they can be spotted. They are coming from hills north of the keep and the lizardfolk are south of the keep. On the first round of the attack the lizardfolk assemble into their 6 groups with 4 attacking and 2 staying behind (the ones with the druid and warrior). The ranger, with his eyes of the eagle, sees the group with the warrior and the group with the druid. He spotted the snake around the druid's arms and the party assumed it was the BBEG magic user.

Rather than move to the keep and defend it, the party decided to use the first two rounds to buff and then headed directly to the druid. By the third round the other lizardfolk were at the keep. 10 of the soldiers assembled outside to shoot the approaching lizardfolk. Before the session I prepared an excel spreadsheet to help with this battle. The spreadsheet included rolls for the archers above and rolls for the lizardfolk attempting to break the door. The archers did a horrible job, only killing 3 of the 20 lizardfolk before the 2 groups scaled the wall and made it to the balcony ledge. All of the garrison soldiers on the ledge died the following two rounds.

Meanwhile, the party focused on the druid. ...

I haven.t started age of worms yet so i cant give any specifics but i can offer advise from one DM to another.

first it sounds like you all had a blast. thats the main thing. the way you described what took place made me want to join your group. thats good. you shouldn't be beating yourselves up because the players did one thing and you thought they'd do something else, and the players shouldn't be upset about moral dilemmas. This sounds like a great encounter in a great adventure. The way you left it is just like a great cliff hanger from old b-movies. superb.

The solutions should be simple now because of where you left things, time is on your side you have a week to get things sorted (presuming you game once a week.) remember you have the advantage at the start of the session, you will be resetting the scene, and them moving it forward before the players get to act. so you have a lot of options

the lizard folk could ask the pcs for help

the chief lizard could give himself over to the players as hostage

the lizards have been duped, exploit that, have one of the lizards a doppleganger revealing himself and the fact that he duped the lizardmen,

perhaps the lizard men all wear magic controlling devices

have all of the lizard men collapse as if a spell has been lifted and then they come round unaware of what has happened.

have a cleric npc hiding in the keep who can a) speak with the dead and b)knows that the lizard folk have been tricked.

have one of the fallen warriors appear as a shade and set things straight.

remember this is fantasy anything can happen and should
Your players didn't make the wrong choices they just made different ones. you didn't do any thing wrong either players have to realise the cost of not going down path A as apposed to path B

now i've rambled on but there it is, every one had fun and that should make you all happy and fuzzy all over

Phil.T

continued from my last post....

did they say "thankyou at the end of the night"?
did they say "wow, i had a great time you really changed that adventure"?
did they even bring Pizza?

you aught to smack 'em round the head with a +5 rubber monk

Phil. T

Hi

I know this is an old thread but i have a solution to the drinking of the nasty potion dilemma.

Dm's could give the pc who drank the potion a constitution save and if the character suceeds then he vomits up the slow worm.

also there is a Spot check to notice the worm in the glass

once the worm has been ingested then perhaps a paladins cure disease ability could rid the pc of the infection

allow a cure serious wounds spell or potion to kill the worm, neutralize poison etc

allow knowledge creature checks to help identify solutions

allow heal check to draw out the infection

fudge every other fortitude roll during incubation to draw out the time for a solution.

create an antidote for the effects and place it in the adventure

when the character is overcome allow him to take a zombie template and retain his alignment and mental facualties the constant struggle to fight madness would be awesome to roleplay and the character would be truly different.

if the character does die there is always ghostwalk source book.
allow the pc to take a ghost template from there that way he would be on equal terms with alastor. Heh Heh

As i under stand Dming practices its always fair to give characters who are about to die a save chance.

Phil.T

Have they no respect?
as Dm's themselves they must understand the sheer amount of time and energy and money it takes to prepare these games. While they swann off on their nights out your stuck at home preparing, if your at work your constantly thinking about the upcomming sessions. while they stit at home watching movies you are hard at work in your study or bedroom planning and preparing, checking and rechecking,

You are a good DM you tailored the campaign, you pressed ahead with it once the penny had dropped,and you swatted aside thier misgivings, You are a generous DM

They shouldn't be allowed to play or DM they are wingers and cheats and i wouldn't want a DM like that running my games. The one true calling of a DM is that they should be Fair and entertaining.

I bet they even cheat on their character sheets.

Get rid you don't need the hassle, they probably never knew they had it so good sat at your table probably in your house.

Phil.T

Hi
I know this is an old thread but i have a solution to the drinking of the nasty potion dilemma.

Dm's could give the pc who drank the potion a constitution save and if the character suceeds then he vomits up the slow worm.

As i under stand Dming practices its always fair to give characters who are about to die a save chance.

Phil.T