Into House Perilous

Our 5e Land of Azurth game continued last night with the first session in an adaptation of X2: Castle Amber. While the PCs had been getting used to their being a new mayor in town and tying up loose ends from previous adventures, the Elf Ranger Shade had received a visit from her mother, Oona whom she hadn't seen in one time. Oona told her it was time for her to visit her family in their manse and fulfill her familial obligation to house Sylaire (obligations her mother had notably fled herself all those years ago) and perhaps set right what has gone wrong.

Art by Tony DiTerlizzi

Shade is reluctant to reveal all of this to her companions but ultimately, she does. They accompany her to the Aldwode on a night of the new moon to find the phantom House Perilous, the home of the Sylaire clan. To save her from the unwanted marriage they are sure is coming, they do a hasty marriage of dubious legality to the bard Kully. The party finds an iridescent salamander in a clearing and the creature tells them to walk widdershins around the area, then sleep the night with no light sources. They do as the the creature bids them, and they wake up in the foyer of the house.

art by Dana Guerrieri

In the salon, the rakish Jereth and his waxen pugilist offer them a wager. Against Shade's warning, Erkose takes him up on it, and knocks the creature out in under 2 rounds, winning them 500 gold. Jereth suggests to Shade that the grand matron, Carmilla, might wish to see her and "do a reading of the cards."

art by George Barr

In the study they encountered strange cat men who wanted only to sleep and warned the party off with hisses and curved daggers. In the banquet hall, the party declines to eat with the elegant, fancy-dressed phantom dinners. Waylon and Erekose did feed some roast beef to the cat men, to no visible effect.

In the Mirror Hall, half the party is blinded for an hour. They encountered a leprous looking servant (a thoul) who leaves them be when Shade invokes her mother's name. They avoided the other rooms in that wing and went into the indoor forest. Again, they mostly stayed clear of trouble, keeping to the path.

Erekose's greed was enticed by a chest ensconced beneath the gargoyles in the fountain, and he and Waylon contrived to get the chest without entering the water. The chest scraping across the bottom, however, roused the ameba lurking there, and it attacked. The party lit it up with blasty cantrips and drove it back. As the party peered at the riches in the chest, a feminine voice from behind them asked just what they were doing.

Sneak Attack on the Planet of the Apes

"THE MUTANT SHRINE" 

Player Characters:
Justin Davis as Conrad "Rip" Ripper
Billy Longino as Olsen Potter Graves
Lester B. Portly as Eddy Woodward
Jason Sholtis as Francis La Cava

Nonplayer Characters:
The memory of Jarrett Crader as Aurelius
Alfonso Arau as Lope
Wardude
Broh
assorted Kreeg

Synopsis: The astronauts launch a raid against a Kreeg religious shrine in a White Sands Missile Range museum and acquire a new weapon.

Commentary: Google maps makes getting a map of a real world location a whole lot easier than in the pre-internet days--if only they had a hexgrid overlay! The White Sands missile Range Museum is, of course, a real place. Through the magic of suspension of disbelief, it was buried by sand rather than eroded by the millennia and the mutants were able to dig it up.

LaCava (aided by Woodward) was able to steal another Kreeg vehicle: a walker that looked like a more Mad Max version of this:

With it's machine gun the gang turned the Kreeg church meeting into a lower budget version of the climatic gun battle in the Wild Bunch.

Modules in an On-Going Campaign

This is an adventure I've thought of using but would spend too much time changing it

In my gaming career, I haven't ran too many published adventures. When I was younger and had a lot of time, there didn't seem much point. These days, I can definitely see the appeal. I've run more since starting this blog than I did in all my gaming years prior, I think.

The problem is, either I'm too particular or my settings are such special snowflakes that it still takes a good bit of forethought and prep for me to be happy with them. In my Weird Adventures game, Castle Amber only wound up serving as inspiration to swipe a couple of rooms from for a sprawling, haunted estate. Jason Sholtis's Zogorion, Lord of the Hippogriffs was so freely adapted that the session served as the basis for Mortzengersturm, the Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak. I tend to alter them so much that I'm pretty picky about the fodder I start with, if only to minimize that tendency.

I wonder if other people have that problem? Do other folks with particular settings/campaigns just alter them to accomodate the "facts" of the published adventure or do adaptations like I do?

An NPC from the Land of Azurth

Art by Jeff Call

Cog was mentioned in my play reports previously.

Wednesday Comics: My Recent Collections Haul

Will take a breather here in the Storm series, before heading off to Pandarve to consider to comics collections I scored in my holiday gift haul.

I've been (slowly) picking out Fantagraphic's E.C. Seegar's Popeye collections, and I got the last two volumes I needed. Volume 4: Plunder Island includes the titular storyline, often considered to be the best of the series, which features the Sea Hag and introduces her goon henchman, including Alice. Volume 6 is the last one and features a return of the Sea Hag, among other things. Both collections are original size and up to Fantagraphics usual production standards. Popeye's Depression era adventure fantasy was an sinspiration for Weird Adventures.

The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu Omnibus was not technically a gift, but I picked it up during my holiday shopping, so it was kind of a gift to myself. This reprints material from Marvel's black and white The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu magazine. It features Shang-Chi, Iron Fist, and the Sons of Tiger, and the usual Marvel magazine topical articles. The stories feature art by the likes of Paul Gulacy, Rudy Nebres, and Jim Starlin.

Thirty-Three and A Third

by Lester B. Portly

Circus registry 331/3 (called by its operators Thirty-Three and A Third) is a Universal Standard Transport LS1517 series space hauler. The LS1517 series is often used as a pilot engine for a train of container pods with the primary motive power coming from a secondary drive at the end.

The series is an older design with a higher crew (or more sophisticated nonspohont mind) than new models and only one axis of container attachment, but it has better armaments (ostensibly "space debris protection") and a more powerful engine.

The above diagram will appear in Strange Stars OSR.

Colonial 5e Rogues

Continuing my look at adapting 5e/Adventures in Middle Earth for a low magic game set around the time of the American Revolution. The fighter types are fairly usable as is; the spellcasters need some adaptation. Now it's time to look at various roguish sorts:

Rogue
The base Rogue class in 5e works fine as does the thief & assassin archetypes. The Arcane Trickster has so nice features that could maybe form the basis of a "magical trickster" or charlatan (wherein the magic is feigned or pretended), but as currently constituted it's too magical. The Mastermind and the Swashbuckler archetypes from the Sword Coast Adventure's Guide work too, the the latter would be a bit of a relic. Rogues would also be the class of choice for "Thief-takers" working on the opposite side of the law.

Bards
Obviously musicians and performers have always existed, but the inspirational "powers" of this class seem better suited at a time of revolutions for rabble-rousers, speechifiers, and pamphleteers: your Samuel Adamses and Thomas Paines.. The Warden class of AiME seems to get closest to this range of types without the use of spells, so it's probably a good bardic substitute.