Actual Play x2: Moon Men and Peasant Rebels

Both of my A/D&D campaigns ran within two days of each other, so this is a double dose of actual play.

In my AD&D game, the PCs finished exploring a map that we had started way back in September. The dwarf got turned into green slime, but the cleric and paladin did nicely. The magic-user that the dwarf's player rolled up came with a fresh rumor (I'm as subtle as a brick, right?) of a dungeon to the northwest with orichalcum. The characters went in and saw a lot of statues, some of which caused intense delusions, but mostly didn't interact with them. The PCs had their first encounter with a dungeon chicken. Then there was a room with beastmen which prompted the comment: "Far be it from me to make presumptive comments about the tastes of wolf-headed men."

A non-encounter encounter with the dungeon cat preceded a pair of Selenites. I played them up as hostile, and they had a paralysis ray that zapped both the cleric and the paladin before the men-at-arms made short work of the moon men. This got the PCs the paralysis ray as their haul for the dungeon so far.

This morning I ran Sunday AM D&D, and prepared two potential adventure sites; of course the PCs didn't reach either. There was a non-encounter encounter with giant ferrets before they ran into a lot of difficulty getting across the river. I rolled up a troll on the encounter list, so of course it was living under an old bridge. The PCs wound up in a war of words with the troll but they were mounted and it didn't pursue them out of range of its bridge.

They went upriver and found a hillbilly named Bartto willing to row them across, but he couldn't take their mounts. They went further up and found a ferry, but it had been taken over by militant peasants (or bandits depending on who you listen to) who were immediately hostile and suspected them of being royalist spies. They went back to Bartto's crossing and overnighted, when I rolled another encounter - a giant crocodile - and rolled that it surprised them. This turned into a nasty shock when Bartto was rolling across the river, and the dwarf managed to get the boat across the river, but Bartto and the party's Magic-User, Treb, did not make it. They made their way down to the river town and found that this part of the world had a lot of tension related to the uprising upriver.

But these posts are about the lessons learned from running games, so here they are.

1. Encumbrance is a pain, but it generally works. AD&D 1e has a particularly brutal encumbrance system in terms of its requirements, but it makes players very conscious of what their characters are carrying and wearing around. My players look for ways to lighten their loads actively, including it as a factor in choosing armor and so on. I know it's a pain in the ass to track, but in an exploration game - which is what I'm running at its core - it really makes it feel more like you're making meaningful decisions.

2. It was a coincidence that both a chicken and the cat from the encounter list came up (and yes, it's a chicken and the cat) but both had good interesting effects. The players were freaked out properly. (There's a good reason for the chickens; the cat is special.)

3. The encounter charts in the Rules Cyclopedia are great. They encapsulate a lot of the ideas of the B/X / BECMI line, and feature some really neat animal encounters. They're a very good tool for wilderness hexcrawling. They've really fleshed out the world of the Sunday AM D&D game in a way that is fun to run.

4. So much of what actually happened in these games was driven by random encounter tables and reaction tables. For instance, the ferret non-encounter was a sequence of rolling "neutral" on the encounter charts, and played out with both sides avoiding each other. The insurgents, on the other hand, immediately rolled a "hostile" result toward the PCs. When I don't have a particular answer to a player question, I assign a percent chance to it, roll percentile dice, and improvise something from the result. I'm very happy where I am with this in exploration games.

5. It was fun to have both the full dungeon experience (which the AD&D game went into) and the full hexcrawl experience (as we hit it in the Sunday AM game).

The last thing to note is how good it is to be gaming regularly. And regular games, of course, mean more frequent blog entries. I'm not exactly at a regular clip but this January has been pretty good for a recent month, and I hope to keep the current pace up.

Mythic Underworld: Cerberus and Mysteries

The story of the twelve labors of Heracles is simple. Driven mad by the goddess Hera, he killed his own children. Since this was such an awful deed, he was given ten labors by Eurystheus to expiate himself; technicalities allowed Eurystheus to add two additional labors. The twelfth, capturing the hound Cerberus, is the one we're interested in.

Cerberus (the "C" is hard) is the guard-dog of Hades, who prevents unwanted access to the underworld. He is usually depicted with three heads, although in connection with the Hecatoncheires (100-handed giants), may have had 50 or 100 heads, some of which may have been snake heads. And he had snake tails, or several backs. In any case, you've got a nasty beast that stops the dead from escaping the realm of Hades.

As Heracles prepared to enter the underworld and retrieve Cerberus, he was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries. This was a rite of knowledge, granting Heracles insight into the secrets of Persephone and Hades, and is certainly notable because it is the earliest reference to Greek mystery religions. So armed with new understanding, Heracles descended into the realm of Hades.

It's not exactly clear how Heracles got Cerberus out. Some accounts have him wrestling the beast and beating it, possibly involving the impenetrable skin of the Nemean Lion that Heracles used as a cloak. Others say that Persephone, who thought kindly of Heracles, gave the hero a chain, or possibly that she herself chained the beast and handed it over. The fight makes the more obvious of the two stories, but it's intriguing to think about the hero winning the fight by getting Persephone on his side.

Of course, Eurystheus did not actually want Cerebus, and Heracles returned the beast to its proper place in Hades after having brought it up to the surface. This last bit is probably the most amusing part of the tale; unlike the Lernaean Hydra or the Nemean Lion, Cerebus is not a menace to be slain. Hell is supposed to have a three-headed dog-beast who eats anyone trying to leave.

If all we got for gaming from the tale was Cerberus as guard-dog, that'd still be an interesting twist on the dungeon guardian. After all, Cerberus was not there to keep intruders out, but to pen the denizens of the underworld in. I really like the idea of a formidable monster that is not necessarily an immediate threat for PCs to overcome, but plays a role in the dungeon's ecology nonetheless. Some groups will try to kill simply anything, but that can always be solved by a powerful creature that refuses to offer direct combat. Of course, at some point the PCs will have to deal with the creature – but by that time it will become a strategic obstacle to overcome.

Then there's the little matter of the Eleusinian mysteries. This is a secret initiation ritual that gives hidden knowledge; in many cases this hiddenness was quite literal, and the content of the mysteries have been lost to the ages. Such an initiation is a way to integrate player characters more deeply into the setting. We are used to scriptural religion in the West, but introducing a mystery is an opportunity to create literally esoteric knowledge about the world, which can be revealed to players only when their PCs make a particular commitment. PCs, of course, will be inclined toward the mysteries that grant knowledge of the dungeon underworld they face.

The last idea that I particularly like is the loan of a chain from Persephone. This is a good way to have a taste of powerful artifacts in the campaign, by lending them instead of permanently giving them to the PCs. Most artifacts throw off the ability of PCs to be meaningfully challenged, but having them given on short-term loan lets them flavor the game without dominating it.

However many heads Cerebus has, the story of Heracles subduing him has a lot of interesting wrinkles for the D&D underworld. I do want to tackle more Mythic Underworld segments, because Greek myth alone has a lot to offer in this regard.