During the Search for Varla the players quickly realized that they were dealing with a foe who could reanimate the dead, so they made a point of incinerating the corpses they left behind.

(Fun fact: In OD&D, a fire ball spell has a duration of 1 turn. The only possible explanation is that the spell creates a raging inferno that lasts for 10 minutes.)

I decided, however, that the powerful necromantic energies surrounding Atarin’s Delve were capable of raising even these insignificant remains. This prompted the on-the-fly creation of ash wraiths — animate clouds of corpse ash.

They particularly appeal to me because they provide an incorporeal form of undead that can be used in a fashion similar to skeletons and zombies. (In other words, minor undead that aren’t mind-searingly terrifying in their level-draining devastation.)

As with the lycanthropic ghouls from yesterday, the ash wraiths use a combination of AD&D stat block and OD&D verbiage.

Frequency: Rare
No. Encountered: 3d10
Move: 12″
Armor Class: 6
Hit Dice: 1+1
Attacks: 1d6
Special Attacks: Nil
Special Defenses: +1 or better weapon to hit
Magic Resistance: Not subject to fire-based attacks
% in Lair: 40%
Treasure Type: Nil
Intelligence: Low
Alignment: Neutral

Ash wraiths are born from the burnt remains of corpses. They are most often found haunting ruined crematoriums or lingering near the horrors of execution pyres, but there are also tales of woods being haunted by ash wraith animals for years or even decades after the devastation of forest fires.

Ash wraiths cannot properly be said to have any corporeal body, which makes them totally impervious to all normal weaponry (although they can be struck by all magical weapons). Their touch, however, retains the passionate heat of their deaths and is scalding to mortal flesh.

In “Tales from the Table: Gems in the Belly” yesterday, I mentioned the use of wererat ghouls in my restocking of Atarin’s Delve. Here’s what those look like (using a mixture of an AD&D stat block with OD&D verbiage):

Frequency: Rare
No. Encountered: 4d6
Move: 9″
Armor Class: 6
Hit Dice: 2
Attacks: 1d3/1d3/1d6
Special Attacks: Ghoul touch, vestigial lycanthropy, surprise on 1-4
Special Defenses: Immune to sleep and charm spells
Magic Resistance: Standard
% in Lair: 20%
Treasure Type: B
Intelligence: Low
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Ghoul Touch: Wererat ghouls paralyze any normal figure they touch, excluding elves. Any man-type killed by a ghoul becomes one.

Vestigial Lycanthopy: Anyone seriously wounded by an undead lycanthrope (assume about 50% of total possible damage) will be infected and himself become a similar lycanthrope within 2d12 days unless they are given a cure disease spell by a cleric. A saving throw may be made, with a +4 bonus due to the vestigial nature of the lycanthropic infection.

I’m preparing to run some combat stress tests in order to put the monster creation rules in Legends & Labyrinths through their final paces. In order to do that, I would like to get my hands on high level character sheets from actual play.

Let me explain what I mean by that: What I want are actual 3.0/3.5 characters who are 10th level or higher and reached that level by earning experience points at the gaming table and leveling up in an organic way. They don’t necessarily need to have started at 1st level, but I’d prefer to see characters who have seen at least 4-5 levels of actual play.

What I don’t want are pregens or characters that were freshly rolled up at higher levels. I’ll be doing some testing with those, too, but they’re easy to find or create.

(Why do I want ’em? In my experience, characters who are created at higher levels tend to look significantly different than characters who have leveled up to those levels.  The organic process of gaining loot and shifting your intended character build in response to the campaign’s events creates different characters than those who are given an equipment budget and allowed to build to a focused spec in a single sitting. And while I’ve got samples from my own games, I’m specifically interested in getting a wide sampling of what the organic processes at other tables created.)

If the sheets are online, you can link me to ’em in the comments. Otherwise drop me an e-mail with “[Character Sheet]” in the subject line. (You can find my e-mail address on the About page.) I don’t particularly care what format they’re in, but I’m particularly interested in the equipment lists so don’t leave those out.

Also: The more the merrier. And if you’ve got multiple versions of the same character at different levels, send ’em all.

If you send me a sheet, I’ll be crediting you as a “Playtest Assistant” unless you tell me not to.

Thanks!

(I don’t need additional external playtesters at this time. When I do, I’ll be posting something about it here.)

There are quite a few older D&D modules that feature various creatures with gemstones or gold coins or magical items lodged in their gizzards. I was never a big fan of the idea: First, it seemed weird. Second, it seemed improbable that any of my players would actually hack open one of these creatures and find the treasure. Third, if they ever did find one of these treasures it would only prompt them to go around systematically gutting every corpse they created.

Admittedly, the “kill ’em and loot ’em” mentality has never been particularly heroic. But advancing that into the territory of butchering your enemies in the hope that something valuable might be squeezed out of their intestines just seems to take things to a new level of tastelessness.

But this is the tale of how, after twenty years of gaming, I ended up putting a gemstone in a gizzard.

And it’s not my fault.

SPOILERS FOR MY PLAYERS BELOW THIS LINE

(more…)

As I’ve mentioned a couple times recently, I’m in the process of playtesting some rules for hexcrawling. This is something I’ll probably be talking about in more detail at some point in the near future, but one key element in testing the system was figuring out how do characters move through the wilderness.

In most traditional hexcrawling systems, this question is resolved by navigating the hex map: You move through the wilderness by indicating the next hex you want to go to.

I, on the other hand, specifically wanted to play “hex blind”. I find the abstraction of hexes useful as a GM for mapping and keying a region, but I don’t want the players to “play the abstraction”. But once “I want to go to that hex” was taken off the table, the question became (a) how do you navigate the wilderness and (b) how can we resolve that in an efficient and interesting way? What we slowly hashed out is that people navigate the wilderness by:

• By going in a particular compass direction (“I go north!”)
• By heading towards or following a visible landmark (“We’ll take the road” or “I’ll head toward the mountain I can see on the horizon”).
• By using a map
• By aiming for a familiar destination
• By searching for a location they think is nearby
• By searching a general area looking for anything interesting.

And so forth.

Eventually I figured out that all of this could be mechanically boiled down to two methods:

1. Navigation by compass direction
2. Navigation by visible landmark

Accompanied by some guidelines on “how you find something” in the wilderness (based on whether it’s a familiar, unfamiliar, or unknown location). So far these core guidelines seem to be covering our bases.

(Of course, this assumes that wilderness exploration is the desired mode of play. If exploration isn’t desired, then there are easier/better ways of structuring a journey from Point A to Point B.)

DUNGEON vs. UNDERWORLD

I mention all this merely as a prelude for my main point of interest this afternoon: Navigating the underworld.

Let me quickly explain what I mean by “underworld” by contrasting it to the traditional “dungeon”.

In a dungeon, the players’ navigation of the environment can be handled in an essentially literal fashion: They see a door and can go through it. They see a hall and can go down it. They see a corner and they can turn it. (This is one of the reasons why dungeons are great for new DMs: They don’t need to worry about framing, transitions, or pacing.)

But this only works in dungeons because there is a certain density of cool stuff within the complex. Poke around a corner or two and you’ll find something interesting to interact with: A monster. A trap. An inscription on the wall. Strange tracks. A magical effect. Whatever.

So by “dungeon” I’m referring to any complex where the density of cool stuff is high enough that navigating the complex “room by room” is interesting. It should be noted that this has nothing to do with the size of the complex: A megadungeon can be very, very large indeed. But it’s still a dungeon, because it rewards that “room by room” method of navigation.

By “underworld”, on the other hand, I’m referring to a complex where the density of “cool stuff” is small enough that “room by room” navigation won’t be rewarding. Consider Moria from Lord of the Rings, for example: It’s a vast complex that takes the Fellowship days to traverse, but in all that time they only find a half dozen or so interesting things. Running that on a turn-by-turn, room-by-room basis would be incredibly boring.

NAVIGATING THE UNDERWORLD

Okay, so let’s pretend that we’re standing at the entrance to an underworld complex. The first question the needs to be asked is, “Why are we going in there?”

• You’re trying to find some specific location within the underworld.
• You’re trying to get through the underworld to the other side.
• You’re following the trail of someone (or something) which has gone in ahead of you.
• You’re just mucking around down there and hoping to find something interesting.

First question: Anything I’ve missed on that list?

Second question: How would you go about doing any of those things? I mean this from a purely in-character perspective, for which a few thoughts occur to me:

• You have a map.
• You generally know that your destination is in a particular direction. (For example, in Lord of the Rings Gandalf knew they needed to head generally east and up to reach the far door.)
• You can follow tracks or other signs.

Other thoughts?

This is all the foundation stuff on which mechanics can later be built. Such mechanics seem to be fairly trivial if you’re willing to remove player agency (“gimme some Dungeoneering checks to see if you find the Golden Crypts”), but more complicated if you want to let the players actually explore the complex by making choices about how they’re proceeding.

Another key element of all this is the handling of transitions to the “dungeon”-type complexes within the underworld. (See Thunderspire Labyrinth or the original D series of modules for a couple different approaches to this sort of underworld exploration.) This seems to be fairly easy if you’re just willing to fall back on the metagame and say, “Okay, you’ve reached the interesting bit.” And then transition back to the more familiar room-by-room sort of thing.

But this can be limiting and jarring. What sorts of things would “naturally” attract greater attention and, thus, provide a more natural transition between exploration modes? Finding recent tracks? Noticing a glint of gold? Encounter creatures?