TridentCon Recap: Brief discussion of my Event, and Some Magic Items

 

After this post I really want to drop some more nerd theory. But, here we go I went to a con and the only pictures I have are of the pregen character sheets from my adventure.

Character sketch added by the player.

I ran my adventure “The Artists Who Became Monsters.” It went well. I noticed some things that went wrong in editing and some things that could be organized better.  I do not think it is at a place yet where someone other than myself would have an easy time running it. There are a lot of moving parts. The ghouls are Lovecraft ghouls and if you have not read Pickman’s Model you are going to be confused running them. There is a new monster with a new mechanic that is based on The Hunters From Beyond by Clark Ashton Smith. If you haven’t read that you would have a hard time understanding what is going on with the new monster. On top of that none of the encounters start out as combat so you have to think of every monster as an NPC. There is not enough support for that right now unless you are already well steeped in source material.

The love letters From an acolyte to a goat were not used.

The main thing I did right was get lucky with players. I had a dude in a Bauhaus t-shirt whose name I forget and Noah Stevens, who won a prize at the con for best free adventure (congratulations). Everyone else was great too (but I am not going to start putting names up of people who have lower internet footprints unless they want me to). My players had no problem breathing life into lower detail old school characters.

The ugly sketches along with an art history book were used
to convince a servant to give a tour. The jar of ants was used to torture an NPC.
The Sausage links became the characters raison d'etre

I think that was helped by the second main thing I did right. I added stuff to their equipment list that suggested idiosyncrasies and a prior history. In older versions of Dungeons and Dragons characters are mainly defined by their adventures and their stuff. The greatest hit was 50’ of sausage links and a jar of ants. These are the main ones, which saw play. I recommend adding weird stuff to the equipment of your characters in cons, things that could only have been gotten through play. I tried to give characters weird magic items if I could think of them. Here is an example:

Angry stones: Stones that when thrown do an additional 1d4 points of damage and can worry targets, slowing their move rate. On a critical miss the stone bites the wielder for  1d4 points of damage.

Here is on for a character that did not get picked:

Idol of the Lying God: Answers one question with a lie per day. I guess no one thought this was cool.

The Treatise on Northern Art helped the party befriend a servant 

who was later killed in a tragic piggyback lantern accident

I went with my wife and we played in DnD Adventurers League. The Adventure was called a Walk in the Park. That was ok. The dm was a good guy. DnD Adventurers League taught my wife what a railroad was. She had never played in a game where all choices outside of combat were meaningless before. I also had some problems with it. The Adventure was framed as an investigation and I bought into that conceit. I had assumed that the adventure was going to, like a poorly written Call of Cthulhu adventure, depend on finding certain clues to travel through the predetermined points of the Adventure. This led to my complicity in prolonging a needless and fruitless encounter with an NPC. Turns out all you had to do was walk to a shop and then leave. I mistakenly thought we had to get some information from inside the shop. Oops. Next time I will know that the minute something outside of combat presents a challenge, to just move on.  Well, there isn’t going to be a next time; Adventurer’s League is boring.

Boring thing I learned: You should have pregens. Why wouldn’t you have pregens at a con? I know everyone already knows this, but for some reason some people didn’t have pregens for their games.

The blanket was used for some bizarre performance art involving the servant's burning corpse.
an angry rock did wind up biting this character.

A Corridor

15. The Restoration of the Mural

4 ghouls work here defacing a fresco that runs along the hallway. What once depicted a pastoral scene filled with shepherds and little horn blowing boys now features opwn graves, screaming bloodied babes and feasting ghouls. Jars of tempera paint line the floor along with ruined brushes. The ghouls employ a crude but frenzied artistry. Anyone who looks at the painting long enough to find Hunters from Beyond dotting the landscape gets 2 spooky points.

The ghouls will continue working unless disturbed. They take it very seriously. They whistle a strange melody back and forth. If this melody is repeated it can be used to get +2 on reaction roles when parlaying with ghouls. A scholar will pay up to 100gp to document the melody.

If attacked the ghouls will try to paralyze and capture victims who will the be mocked and painted before finally being killed.

A Room

Here is a draft of a room description for an adventure I'm writing:

22. Pillaged Library

                  The bookshelves (built into the wall) are now mostly empty.  The furniture is tattered. There is an unlit silver oil lamp on a table. It looks like a nude woman. When lit her hair is the flame.

                  Sitting in a chair next to the table is an ancient desiccated corpse dressed in wizardly robes (also desiccated) and wearing gold rings on each finger and a gold necklace.

                  There is a harpsichord pushed against the bookcases with a piece of sheet music on it. If the sheet music is played the corpse will animate. If the music stops the corpse stops. His name is

                  The corpse is Kerf Memlock, ancient demonologist. He will answer any questions put to him about the monsters. He does not know how to banish them. He does know how to attract them to this plane. He can teach someone how to do this in 1d4 hours. His stats are identical to a wight’s

The sheet music is magic and worth 1,200 gp or more to the right buyer. The harpsichord is well made but non-magical it is worth 400 gp. The gold rings may be worth a lot but they are cursed anyone who steals any of the rings will be hunted down by 1d4 ancient spectres in 2d4 days unless they remove the curse before taking the rings. The rings radiate evil and magic. The necklace is worth 200 gp, but Kerf Memlock will attack if animated and the party has stolen his necklace.