RPG Stuff

Author: Luc Lacier

  • Minotaur Lair

    Minotaur Lair

    This underground lair is home to a nasty brute: Kevin the Undead Minotaur! Kevin has been down here a looooong time and died centuries ago and is now a Mummy Minotaur.

    A one-shot for 4 level 3 characters.

    In the game I was running, I located this dungeon beneath the Onyx Hill Ruins by Dyson Logos, but of course, you can put it anywhere you want.

    Note: There are no light sources anywhere in this dungeon except for those the characters bring with them.

    Level 1

    Level 1 has a large square obsidian column in the middle which slightly tapers towards the top. It is 10 feet wide at the base. The column has an ancient script carved into its surface. If translated, the script tells a tale of ancient battles.

    The four Living Statues’ alcoves, two to the north and two to the south come to life as the party enters and start attacking.

    There is a pressure plate trap (DC 12 to spot) on the ground as the players enter the room which drops a net on anyone who triggers the trap. Effect as per Net from the PHB equipment.

    The spiral stairs at the west end of this level go down to level 2.

    Level 2

    The obsidian column is larger here, 15 feet across at its’ base. There are more statues here, running down each side of the hall. The statues look exactly like the ones on level 1, but there are 18 of them! Fortunately these just regular normal statues. The real danger here are the 5 Shadow creatures in residence here.

    At the East end of this hall is an alter, carved out of the same obsidian as the column. There’s nothing particularly interesting about the alter except for the dark stains on it. Right in front of the alter is an open pit. It’s a 40 foot drop down to the next level but the pit is the only way to get down to the next level.

    Level 3

    Level 3 is covered by a permanent darkness spell in all areas except for the room in the middle where the base of the pillar is. Lots of bones are scattered on the floors of the various caverns down here.

    Kevin The Mummified Minotaur lives (exists?) down here. Between its Blindsight and Labyrinthine Recall, it has no problem with the darkness down here. With nothing better to do, it just wanders the caverns.

    Whenever the players enter a new cavern, there is a 1 in 6 chance the Minotaur will be in this room. It isn’t very hospitable and will attack straight away, starting with its charge attack unless the players can somehow get within 10 feet of it before it attacks.

    If the Minotaur isn’t encountered by the time the players reach the central room, the Minotaur will be there waiting for them and will start attacking using its’ Dreadful Bellow and then charging them.

    The obsidian pillar is quite wide here (20 feet across at the base). There are more inscriptions on the pillar here, telling the tale of XXX. There is a secret door in the pillar which should be relatively hard to find (DC 18). Inside is a stone bench with a small golden bull statue on it. It’s a  figurine of wondrous power, and can become a bull for 8 hours but can’t be used again for 5 days. The bull can be ridden, pull a wagon, and can attack if provoked. See below for stats.

    There is also a scattering of coins of different denominations on the bench worth 223gp

  • Chapel

    Chapel

    An old chapel lost in the woods. Only ruins of the ground floor remain.

  • Korenia

    Korenia

    Here is a selection of 3D-rendered images that I played around with quite some time ago. I think they were done with E-on Vue. It was fun to play around with 3d rendering software, but very time-consuming and with a steep learning curve.

    The location is a town called Korenia in a harsh desert. It’s built around a freshwater spring and is the only water source for some distance. A wicked ruler has monopolised the water supply and controls the small population by rationing the water.

    He lives in a palace with a golden dome that shines brightly in the desert sun. The palace is surrounded by a lush lawn. To keep people away, the lawn is actually blades of grass and will cut people who try to walk on it.

    A covered market bisects the town with the newer, wealthier part of town to the north, closest to the palace. The older, grittier part of the town lies to the south of the market.

    There is a cistern system beneath the town which could be used to covertly access the dome.

    Rough sketch of the town.

    View of the palace, looking back at the town across the killer lawn.

    Cutaway view of the cisterns under the town.

    Cisterns from a different angle.

    View of the market, sans buildings.

    Interior of the market, sans buildings.

  • Cult of the Evil Snake Dudes

    Cult of the Evil Snake Dudes

    In a mosquito infested swamp where the Cotton Mouths slither, there lies an abandoned temple. Nobody knows what happened to the Snake Cult that lived here and there is little left to mark their passage.

    A one-shot adventure for 4 level 2 characters.

    In addition to the main temple building, there was once a dorm building where the acolytes lived together and four smaller dwellings where the priests each had their own space.

    As the swamp waters rose, the dorm and the individual dwellings became partially submerged in the waters. The doors are swollen shut but are rotted to the point that it wouldn’t take much effort to break them down. Anything inside these buildings of any interest rotted away many years ago.

    The main temple had been built well up from the ground and is still above the water level and is currently home to 5 Giant Poisonous Snakes that are concealed in the leaves and debris that litter the floor, and they are very territorial.

    At the back of the main temple, behind the altar, are some stairs leading down to the underground level. The stairs exit into area 4 in the below ground map.

    The floor in this area is flooded with murky water about 1 foot deep. The water is deepest in the “tail” end of the map (near room 1). The floor level raises a bit towards the “head” end of the map (room 13) where it is only a few inches deep.

    Since this dungeon has been long abandoned, the only inhabitants of this place are the undead and some snakes.

    Room 2 is a library but all the books are rotted away. There is a secret door (DC 10 to spot) to room 1. The door triggers a poison arrow trap (the cultists were fond of their poison) that fires when the secret door is opened (DC 15 to find the trap. Dex save DC 12 to dodge. If hit, DC 12 Con save. On a failed save, applies Poisoned status for 1 hour. Successful save means no poison). There are more library books in room 1 as this was where the priests kept their more valuable books. Again, most of them are rotted away, but there might be a few salvageable books or scrolls here suitable for the characters level.

    There is a pit trap at location 3. Keep in mind that nearly 1 foot of murky water covers the trap, so is very difficult to spot (DC 16). Fortunately, being underwater means that the pit is full of water and you only have to swim to the other side. Just watch out for the 4 Poisonous Snakes that come out to say “hi”.

    Area 4 is the staircase to the temple above. There is 1 foot of murky water at the bottom of the stairs.

    Rooms 5, 6, and 7 are old studies and bedrooms for the highest-level priests. This would make great spots for some skeleton priests.

    (I honestly forget what I had planned for the trap at location 8. Another pit trap would be boring, so maybe a Gelatinous Cube living here instead of a trap.)

    The trap at location 10 (DC 14 to spot) is a combination alarm and Net trap. The net falls from the ceiling covering the 5ft by 10ft area indicated on the map. The net restrains anybody under it when it falls, while the alarm bell alerts some skeletal warriors in room 11 who come out to attack while the party is distracted by the net. If the players enter room 11, more skeleton warriors emerge from rooms 9 and 12, attempting to surprise the party (DC 12 stealth).

    Room 13 is where the treasure is, on the raised platform in the centre of the room. The water is only an inch deep here and the platform is raised above the water level and is dry.

    The trap in room 13 is another water-filled pit trap, but since the water is much shallower here, it’s easy to spot (DC 11). Spotting the trap might help because it is where a Giant Zombie Constrictor Snake lives. The snake is not a pretty sight, with layers of skin peeling off and snake rib bones poking out.

    Map of the above ground temple. Note the insert in the top right of the map also shows the location of the dorms.

    Underground map

    Underground Snake Cult Lair

  • Face to Face

    I’m just about to run my first face-to-face sessions in a long time.

    COVID’s had us all in lockdown so all of our games have been online for months.

    I’ve developed workflows for online gaming. Let’s see how everything falls apart when we are sitting around the table. Combat will be the biggest one. The Avrae bot on Discord has been brilliant at moderating combat. Now we are going to have to remember the applicable bonuses etc.

  • Hedge Maze

    Hedge Maze

    My sons D&D game is now in a Fey palace for a while. A curious thing about this palace is that depending on which door you go out of, it’s a different season. This Hedge Maze is outside the west door where it is Winter. I kept thinking about the hedge maze from The Shining when I was drawing it.

    This 300dpi image is 70px per square and should fit a VTT system. Each square is 5 feet, and the hedge is meant to be a significant barrier and 15 feet tall.

    Hedge maze
  • Free Material

    Free Material

    Public Service Announcement: Wizards are making a bunch of gaming resources available for free during the COVID-19 lockdown.

    Have a look at their Free Material site for a heap of modules and stuff.

    Alas, this content is no longer free. No lockdown = no free stuff 😭

    I’ve been using some of this free material to get my sons’ campaign started before I get into some of my custom stuff.

    I love world-building, but I have to say it’s been nice to have a few side quests up my sleeve that have already been written and are ready to go 😀

  • Beyond

    Beyond

    Following on from my last post, I’ve been running D&D games for my son and his friends online every week during lockdown for the pandemic and I’m really getting into it.

    My current setup is to use Discord for voice chat combined with the Avrae bot to manage combat. The Critter DB site is great for building and storing monsters and NPC. I still use Roll20 as a virtual tabletop, but I ignore almost all it’s features except for the maps. I’m also using D&D Beyond more and more.

    At first, I chaffed at the idea of buying digital copies of books I already owned print copies of. I’m not a huge fan of digital copies of any kind, but that’s a whole other rant. Having used D&D Beyond for a while now, I have to admit they have one slick product.

    The integration with the Avrae bot means that character sheets can be pulled into Discord directly from D&D Beyond. All their gear and spells and stuff is all there and it’s mostley tracked. Creating characters in D&D Beyond is easy. They’ve clearly put a lot of work into the character sheets.

    The catch is that you can’t use anything unless you’ve paid for that content. SRD stuff is available free, but to get any of the interesting races or classes, you need to buy them. Fortunately, they have options for buying only the content you want. For example, the Sword Coast Adventurers Guide is listed at $29.99, but considering it’s mostly fluff, I chose to just buy the spells from that book and only spent about $4.

    I bought the entire Players Handbook, because it’s hard to DM without a lot of the contents of that book. But for books like the DMG, I only had to buy the magic items.

    The other nice thing is that as the DM, I can start a campaign and share any content I’ve purchased with the players. This is a huge plus for me. The players, who in this case are all kids, can just sign up for a free account, and then access any of the content I’ve purchased without having to pay for it again.

    I know I’ve been suckered in and spent more money on stuff than I’ve intended to, but that’s their business model. I’m aware it’s a kind of sunk cost fallacy, but I’m ok with it because it currently makes for easier game play.

  • D&D in a Virtual Environment

    D&D in a Virtual Environment

    I took a little break from gaming after last Christmas, but then life happened and here I am, 3 months later, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, no longer able to play face-to-face even if I wanted to.

    My son, who I was running the game for, is chomping at the bit for some game time with his friends and I’ve been investigating how to do this.

    In my last post, I talked about some of the tools I used to help run games, and many of them were already online tools, but I still need to bridge the gap a little to allow for a fully online game. I’ve seen numerous articles online about this, but at the moment I’m thinking of a combination of Roll20, which I’ve mentioned before, and Discord.

    I know I’m slow on the uptake where Discord is concerned. I only recently created an account as a result of World Anvil and GM Binder having channels, and to be honest, I thought it was just another chat program and I kinda dismissed it. But then I saw an article online somewhere pointing out how cool Discord bots were and that there was a D&D bot called Avrae that does all sorts of cool stuff.

    I haven’t got my head around all of it yet, but you can create character sheets in Google Docs (amongst other things), and import them into Discord. Avrae can keep track of combat initiative and track dice rolls. It knows the stats of all the monsters in the rule books (I think it gets this data from Beyond D&D), plus you can create and import critters from CritterDB and use them in fights.

    I’ve still got a ways to be comfortable using all this, but I’m hoping to run a game or two over the Easter break with my son and his friend.

  • Gaming Workflow & Tools

    Gaming Workflow & Tools

    It’s been about six months since I got back into D&D, running games for my son. I have learned a lot in that time, including how to be a better DM, but that’s a story for another post. I thought I’d take a moment to go back and reflect on an earlier post I made on a different blog that I use for tabletop gaming (I hadn’t started this blog at the time).

    I continue to be more and more impressed with the selection and maturity of the tools available online for gaming. There’s some really great stuff out there. So here’s my updated rundown of the tools I’ve been using and how I use them:

    • Typora. Writing is first and foremost the main activity I do when planning D&D sessions or designing new content. I’m a huge fan of basic text editing tools like the Atom editor (Atom is no longer being maintained. Visual Studio Code is the new kid on the block), but Typora takes it one step further by using Markdown formatting. It’s not a full-blown word processor like MS Word, but I don’t want that either. Typora sits nicely in the middle ground where I want it. I end up with many small documents on various aspects of the game. Best of all, Typora is free (Actually it’s not free anymore but it’s not expensive so I was happy to pay for it.).
    • GM Binder for keeping notes. As stated above, I love Markdown as a simple formatting language and GM Binder uses Markdown as its native format and adds some serious styling to make all your pages look like good old fashion printed D&D rule books. I don’t keep ongoing game notes here, but if I come up with a new spell, monster, magic item, etc, I publish it on GM Binder. I’m liking this tool so much that I help fund their recent Kickstarter campaign.
    • WorldAnvil. I only just discovered this site and fell in love with it straight away. This is where I plan to keep all my ongoing running notes for the game. The tool lets me build out all the elements of the world, including places, people, histories, etc. There’s also a virtual DM screen section which I haven’t quite got my head around yet but looks very promising to help me run games.
    • Encounter Calculator. This might be a bit specific for D&D5e, but I find judging encounter difficulty to be hard for me. I seem to always either under or over estimate how hard a fight is going to be, but I’ve found this tool really helps me get better at it.
    • D&D Beyond. This site has great resources for looking things up. I can find a spell reference quicker here than by flipping through my books. The only thing I don’t like about this site is that some of the detailed content is locked until you by the digital version of the book through this site. I already have the hardcover physical versions so I have no intention of plonking down another $40 just to get access to content I already own, but I don’t expect their business model will change, and even without this, I find the site super helpful.
    • Roll20. I’ve gone off this site a bit. I do love the ability to upload (or draw) maps in the online tool, apply a Fog of War, and log the players into a second computer for the player map. But without at least two proper computers, this just isn’t working for me. I can run the virtual table from my laptop just fine, but the app version of the site is limited. I want this tool to work, but I just don’t know if it will do it for me.
    • Mapgen4. I used this to generate the world map for the campaign. I love the style it renders the maps and even though I’ve now got the map I want to use, I could happily sit for ages randomly generating new maps just to look at them.
    • Fantasy City Generator. Maybe I’m being lazy here, but this tool is great for banging out quick and usable town or city maps. Once again, I could play with this for ages just having fun with all the settings, and seeing what it comes up with. I have found that I’ve gone back and hand-drawn some of these maps for a different look, but I still use this site to get an initial layout of the towns.