PBP in The Styes

[NorthWindSpirit]

I just dropped by to mention, for anyone who may be interested, my Play-by-Post campaign set in The Styes (running The Styes and The Weavers). It's underway, though not that much has happened yet, and of course at PbP speed it will take a while to get through these two adventures. But if anyone wants to take a look either for ideas or just for the fun of reading it, be my guest.

http://www.dndonlinegames.com/forumdisplay.php?f=3657

Almost all of the threads are public and there is not much hidden text, so you can read along with it at your leisure. The Prologues, obviously, come first, and then Chapter 1.

The party is, fyi:

Human Knight9
Half-Elf Beguiler9
Human Bard7/Shadowdancer2
Human Cleric9 of Wee Jas

We were originally going to have a dwarf Rogue9 as well, but he dropped out before getting started. A human Rogue7/Fighter2 is going to be joining in the next few days, hopefully.

If no-one is especially interested in this, then my apologies for cluttering up your message boards. Please move along...

[jasonduke]

Nice to see a fellow DnDog gamer on these message boards. I'm running a game myself on that site. My user name is, you guessed it, jasonduke. I've noticed quite a few Dungeon adventures are run on DnDog, especially the adventure paths. True, pbp is slower than pnp tabletop (well, much slower!), but pbp games are just as fun, and in ways more creative because of all the writing involved. I'm glad to see you're running the Styes and Weavers -- I don't think anyone has started these games yet on the DnDog site, so I'll definitely drop in and check out your game.

[Richard Pett]

Sounds fun, I'll pop over and have a gander to see how poor misunderstood Dory gets along:)

[NorthWindSpirit]

Dory's name has hardly appeared yet... though it may feature quite a lot in the next few days.

Basically all that has happened so far is the four characters getting hooked. I've had to build in quite a few additional elements, the most obvious of which are an expansion of the tension between Thornwell and Dory (one of the characters had a friend who had been employed by Thornwell to spy on Dory, but in the first day or so of the adventure is ambushed and murdered by Dory's skum), and the addition of some chelicera (MMIII? iirc) as an unrelated side-plot.

As written, chelicera are useless, because they're only cool if they can use their Improved Grab but as Medium creatures they can only IG Small targets. So I've advanced them to Large, which means they can IG Medium PCs. They seemed a good fit for The Styes, so I've had them lair in an abandoned warehouse in the Merchants' Quarter and start abducting and killing people at random. Aside from being a good fit in terms of habitat, the reasons they work well with the adventure are: (i) they have nothing at all to do with the plot murders, but the PCs will undoubtedly think they do...; (ii) they are good for misdirection because their effects sort of look like vampires (drained bodies etc), which then makes the PCs wonder whether vampires might be behind the domination of the Lantern Man murderer; and (iii) they're spidery, which means after finding and killing them, the PCs are likely to end up talking to Antobury about them. Which means that a few months later, when Antobury has a small problem with some spiders, he'll know who to call... and hey presto, there's my hook for the Weavers.

So far the adventure has mostly just been investigation, and the only combat has been the cleric checking out the Mortuary on her own and running into one of Sliris' wererats (that's in a hidden thread at the moment but I should be able to make the thread public within a few days).

Anyway, I've rambled enough. Check it out if you're interested. And thanks, Richard, for a great pair of adventures...