Day 20: Amazing Adventure
Once again for the sake of fairness I'm going for two. One I played in and one I ran.
My early days of D&D were dominated by two DMs, both of whom ran games at the club in town. They took it in turns to write adventures for our party. There was some sense of a background (the same priesthood set us tasks, and frequently Raised fallen comrades, and the geography was consistent), but it was largely a campaign by virtue of the cast of characters.
One DM, Jonny, was responsible for the massive dungeon we played over a weekend, see Day 19 for details, but the other, Martin, produced some memorable dungeons too. I should say that for us back then, adventure and dungeon were synonymous.
The best was probably the Halls of Anubis, a massive underground complex that started out in a system of desert caves before we reached the long abandoned priest's quarters.
Then down to the mummification chambers (and a mechanism that sent coffins down to a subterranean lake). Then those that avoided the chute descended down inside a statue of Anubis to the lake and had to find their way across to the Maze of the Dead. Alas, the funeral barge had sunk, but remember those coffins? They float. Just mind the Sacred Crocodiles.
At last we reached the Maze, fought or avoided various mummies and finally faced the Demon Ghoul King.
Looking back, it was quite linear, but we didn't care. As long as we were moving forward, we felt we were progressing.
And the memories it leaves, priceless.
"Sarcophagus Ahoy!"
Now for one I ran, or jointly ran.
It was for Call of Cthulhu. I've run 'Music of the Night' several times, set firstly in 1920s New York, and then in Arkham. My daughter expressed an interest in running Call of Cthulhu and requested a scenario to run. Now I'm a firm believer in trying to anchor games set in a version of our world somewhere that I have at least a passing familiarity with. So we relocated it to her university city and brought it up to the modern day.
The scenario is a simple one, designed to introduce new players to the game, yet provide sufficient interest for old hands.
It involves a music student (Michael Spencer) who has stumbled upon fragments of a late sixteenth century score. Unknown to him, the notes contain a Summon spell.
He transcribes the notes and gathers a small group of fellow students to practice. I usually start the investigation just after the creature has appeared, killed one player and driven the others mad. Spencer has fled, and in his madness seeks to undo what he brought about.
There's a clue trail with the opportunity to recover the original MS, which contains a dismissal rite, but I purposefully leave the ending open for ingenious players to come up with their own solution. To hurry them along, the creature is hunting down the people present at the summoning, and there are reports of a huge bat seen at night.
The adventure went extremely well. As my daughter was new to the system she handled the narrative and the determination of investigator actions, I merely filled in with rules queries.
Although it was her last bit of Keepering so far (she's gone on to other systems) I was impressed. I wish I'd been that good a GM at that age.
If you're interested, the group did manage to track down Spencer, but they didn't bother with the Dismissal Rite. They reasoned that the creature had only been seen in the dark, and seemed to deliberately avoid bright light. Using Spencer as bait they lured the thing on to the moor and flooded the area with lights, thus banishing it.
Everything neatly wrapped up in one session.
Of course, one of the characters later passed a club and recognised a familiar discordant note sequence...
Everyone had fun, so much so that a couple of the characters got ported over to my Delta Green campaign (which I realise hasn't yet been mentioned in this series).
No comments:
Post a Comment