Aliens (Promptober 2025 #23)

Fantasy Aliens Within?

In a fantasy setting, we rarely see instances of extraplanetary high-tech aliens. Early on in TSR's history we have Metamorphosis Alpha, set aboard a generational ship gone haywire, with mutated creatures and forgotten technology. We also find the classic module S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, where the party discovers a crashed alien ship containing robots, odd life forms, and laser weaponry to find and use. After that, things get a little more limited in the classic D&D canon: UK4 When A Star Falls has the party recovering a meteorite for a deep gnome sage, but no actual life forms.

I tried aliens once, back in my Adris campaign. (Good gravy, that game ended about 20 years ago now.)

Getting The Band Back Together.

So I just ran my first game of D&D 3.5 in Adris in about 5 years. I was a little nervous going into it - all the "What if I lost my GM mojo?" fears battled in my head. I shouldn't have worried - it was just like putting on the comfiest, rattiest T-Shirt I own. It's nice to know that my GM skills haven't atrophied much at all, and that the players are just as into the game now as the last time we played.

We had 5 hours to work with, and we hired our nanny to handle the kids (three 5-year-olds, and one at 19 months). The first half of the game was reading through character sheets and catching up with what the heck is going on to figure out what to do next. They decided to go for the Black Cube, so they did what research they could and tracked it down to the Astral Plane using both the directional ability of the cubes to find each other and an augmented Find The Path spell. So they Plane Shifted the next morning after gorging themselves on chicken at Martha's. They also found a small shrine set up next to the 10' section of wall they called into existence with Major Creation on Adril's grant of land. They also found a column of cavalry heading east, assumedly to help fight off the goblins the next morning.

One Plane Shift later and they hit the Astral Plane with its endless swirling grey mist. They went that-a-way toward the cube. Eventually they saw a lump of land floating in the void. They got closer and discovered a castle on a piece of land. It had 3 boats moored around the base, so they decided to teleport under one of the boats. As luck would have it, it was a drow ship that could carry about a hundred troops across the trackless void. They found two other makes of ship, and it wasn't long before they discovered humans and githyanki running around.

They spotted a tunnel further "down" under the castle, so Team Sneaky (Mei and Kelsik) went invisible and took out the two guards. A lockpicking and brief scuffle with 4 more guards brought them into a room with a corridor leading out to a central shaft going up and down. They went up toward the castle and the cube. Asalia scouted ahead with her bound crystal shard, and found a large room filled with three camps of troops: 30 drow, 30 githyanki, and 20 humans.

They teleported further up the shaft to avoid the carnage and loss of surprise. At the top of the shaft they found a courtyard with even more troops hanging out. They triangulated their detection spells and figured out which balcony use. Pandora altered her appearance to look like a drow soldier, and Team Sneaky followed her invisibly up to the balcony and through the door. Inside they found the quartermaster's office, bustling with 10 drow and 2 githyanki. 2 drow sentries floated by a closed door in the ceiling. Detections pointed through the ceiling door, so they decided to engage.

The room had 4 doors and the ceiling door. Each could be barred from the inside, so Team Sneaky did just that. Pandora shoved a drow out the door to the courtyard, and everyone barred their doors as the rest of the party teleported into the room. After the surprise round and one round of carnage, the party owned the room and contemplated the ceiling door. They're on a clock now since everyone in the courtyard now knows there's something odd happening in that room...

And we decided to pick it up next time.

One thing I noticed tonight: only two offensive spells were cast the whole night. There was a lightning ball in the guard room when they first entered the room in the basement, and a wall of fire to clear out the guards by the ceiling door. Magic flew around thick and furious, but it was mostly divination, teleportation, and sneaky stuff like invisibility. This group has no aversion to blowing things up, but I found it interesting that more magical air time was given to avoiding combat than dominating combat.

Let's see if they can recover the Black Cube this time, or will it slip through their fingers again?

Adris: Adventures Agogo I - Around Adris

The characters have been through so many adventures in the years we've played this campaign. I thought I'd get a rough timeline together for reference. Here's a partial list of what the party did for their first few levels, mostly spent within 50 miles of Adris.

• The Burning Plague (L1) - I renamed the town Logan's Pass, and they let the goblins escape with a bag full of silver each.

• Goblin Raid! (L1) - Goblins raid Adris at night under cover of an unseasonably early blizzard and steal a few tomes from the Council of Mages. Pandora's Aunt's shop is partially burned by goblins. 
• Inrin's Workshop (L2) - They investigated the tunnels under the blasted remains of Inrin's tower, discovering mephit defenders, most of whom they freed, and a spellbook called Liber Elementalis, which allowed them to learn the Elemental Substitution feat.
• Temple of Set (L2) - Nestor, the local High Priest of Tyr, accompanies the party to check out the cave containing a Temple of Set that had been raided by the other party in town last week. They find a Dwarven sage's skull and an underwater passage to another cavern containing an orc cult.
• The Goblin Base (L2) - The party finds the goblins' raiding camp in a cave on a mountain. They have a bugbear cleric with them, and a goblin illusionist passes himself off as a human prisoner, then escapes.
• The Burning Fist (L3) - The characters go back and take on the orc cult. Turns out they're training orc Cleric/Monks under Set's supervision. Favorite tactic: Cause Light Wounds (effect: black flames surround hands) and Stunning Fist in the same attack. Party learns to loathe black flame, symbol of Set.

• The Stoneclaw Clan (L3) - I wrote up 3 outcast orcs who started their own clan to research dwarven history looking for lost artifacts. They created some Ogre Skeletons using the skeleton template from WotC. They had camped outside Balder's stronghold and were trying to navigate the maze. The wizard escaped and later transformed to human form as Dr. Josten's alchemical apprentice.
• Balder The Mad's Stronghold (L4) - Under the direction of Chalyk, the Dwarven sage skull that they used Speak With Dead to contact, the party goes to talk with a long-dead dwarven smith for information. The party navigates the Shadow Maze (a maze with shadows and spectres attacking through the walls) and discovers Balder has a Sage Throne, a Dwarven repository of knowledge.
• Saving Miranda (L4) - The party met Marc, a local druid investigating some bad things in a grove nearby. He checked it out with his ranger friend Miranda. A Barghest dominated Miranda, Marc escaped with injuries. The party set things to rights, found the Barghest was protecting young Displacer Beasts.

• Party Change: At this point, Nasir disappears. The party meets Thorolf, Asalia, Nimala in Treedorn when they start investigating The Assassin's Knot.
• The Assassin's Knot, Module L2 (L5) - I took the premise and the maps, and renamed the town Treedorn. I cleaned up the assassins and gave each a better cover story while updating the whole shebang to 3E stats. The party meets Sarah after something splashes into the lake and she washes up on the docks. And the Cleric of Poseidon's sanity was inside a giant octopus at the bottom of the lake.
• Of Goblins and Giants (L5) - On the way to the Dvarfheim, the party discovers and defeats a goblin warband who recruited some hill giants to help the cause.
• Commandos Raid the Goblin Army (L6) - The party teleports in the middle of the goblin army camp, lays waste to as much as possible, escapes with 6HP total across 5 PCs.
• The Last Goblin Raid (L6) - The party defeats the White Dragon causing the blizzard during the goblins' final raid on Adris. There's good eating tonight. Adril harvests components for his first transformation potion.

• Shaxalar's Brood (L6) - The party discovers the White Dragon's lair and her 4 children. Further in, they discover a drow experiment - splicing together spiders and dwarves as a lesser form of driders.
• The Summit (L6) - The party comes across an odd meeting in an old dwarven outpost in the mountains. Goblins, orcs, and hobgoblins are meeting to discuss war plans. The party breaks the meeting up and salvages arms and armor to outfit Adris's defenders.

Again, these are just the big, easily-identified adventures. This doesn't take into account the discussions amongst the characters to decide what should happen next, nor the side quests I pulled out of a hat when we were shorthanded. I remember an adventure where Robin pushed the characters through a waterfall for a quick visit with the Rugathi. Hopefully I can organize those a little more - I'm finding my notes are scattered and lacking, though it'd probably help to find the most up-to-date timeline document.

There's more to come, so stay tuned. But now, back to Traveller adventures for a bit.

Adris: On Society and Culture

I wanted to start talking about society in my previous post, but got completely sidetracked. I think getting the lay of the land would be helpful, so I'll focus on the various countries before diving in to cities and adventures. Let's try exploring the world again with slightly more structure.

The Kingdom of Arket
Arket covers the plains in the interior of the world's main continent, akin to the American Great Plains or Asian Steppes. Its landscape consists of grassland and slight hills punctuated with rivers and small stands of forest for as far as the eye can see. In the heart of the plain rises a steep hill with a river snaking around its base. Atop the hill sits the capital city of Kelton, resplendent with a vast castle (loosely based on Edinburgh Castle) inhabited by the king at the peak, noble houses clustered around the castle, and social strata descending in power and elegance relative to altitude.

Arket's culture mashes up aspects of Norse, Germanic, Mongol and American culture. Imagine Norsemen who learned horsemanship from the Mongols, then moved to the fertile lands around the Rhine and balanced rigid structure and personal freedom in an explosion of innovation. So if you can picture hard-working, horse-riding (though this is more of a noble or military pursuit recently), hardy, efficient intellectuals and you have a picture of the general populace. Arket still reveres the Norse pantheon of gods, though Tyr has moved into the role of a monotheistic central god at the expense of the others. Set's influence has crept north out of the desert and subsumed Loki's role in godly matters, so the main divine conflict is between Tyr and Set.

There's trouble afoot. King Rinthus was assassinated a few months back. He's been resurrected, but ancient laws of succession give him a year to get his affairs in order before abdicating. Any king who lets himself die can't be trusted to maintain the kingdom. With all the hoopla around the young bachelor king choosing an heir and regent, the Duke of Barbary recently declared his independence, taking with him Arket's only direct ocean access.

Adris sits on the easternmost tip of the plains, so not much regal drama has reached the bustling town. Lydia Darke, newly appointed Duke of Adris after her predecessor Xavier lost his life as the adventure seed of the Assassin's Knot, has been holding closed-door meetings with her advisors as of late. Nobody's quite sure what's afoot, specifically if Adris will make a bid for independence as well. At least the palisade around the town is complete thanks to labor organization by the elven general Garamond, so if the goblins or the abominations attack again the populace will have an easier time fending them off. Things have been quiet with the Earls lately - a battalion of royal troops camped out in town really puts a damper on the local thieves' guild, though the merchant's shantytown called Troopmarket has more than its share of wheeler-dealers.

Dvarfheim, The Dwarven Kingdom
Dwarven culture has been stable for centuries since they have several institutions to help keep order. Moradin holds sway over most dwarves, though some worship the Norse pantheon without animosity. Every dwarf has a family and a clan - you're born into your family, but you choose your clan. Dwarven society supports well over a dozen clans, each one loosely focused on a particular profession or group of professions.  The kingdom contains several Wards, each with its own leadership structure, but everyone ultimately swears fealty to the Mountain King.

Dwarves were at war with Arket until the treaty about 50 years ago. Many dwarves still remember the fighting, but most humans who fought are well into their dotage. Dwarves typically have a hard time giving humans a fair deal since human settlements in the mountains originally touched off hostilities. The constant attacks from orc and drow invaders and the resulting attrition has caused some reconsideration of this attitude.

Ancient dwarves created artifacts known as Sage Thrones. These ornate chairs usually cause madness in non-dwarves, since they contain the collected memories of dwarven leaders and heroes. Anyone sitting in a Sage Throne gets this knowledge rammed into their brains, and if they're lucky they can ask a question and filter out a relevant answer. The first time Wulfgar used a Sage Throne, he got the first level basics of wizardry crammed into his head, but he forgot how to speak Common in the week that his brain needed to assimilate the new information.

Dwarves have unlocked the secret of weapon bonding, where the spirits of weapon and wielder feed off each other in a symbiotic relationship. Not everyone has the capacity to bond with a weapon, but nobody refuses if the opportunity comes up. In game terms, bonding with a weapon lets it level up with you. In Wulfgar's case, his axe went from +2 Ghost Touch to +3 Ghost Touch, plus any worn armor gains Ghost Touch, plus it vibrates in the presence of undead or incorporeal creatures. I think it's due for a new unlocked ability to boot.

The Emirate of Sindar
Sindar occupies the plains and desert to the south of Arket. A mainly arabic culture, their cities cluster around water supplies, like the main river flowing through Rivergate from Arket to Sindar. I basically took Egypt, had the pharaohs die out and get replaced by Islam as taught by the prophet Isa. Unfortunately, some meddling has taken place and a dangerously militant faction has been making decisions contrary to the Emir's wishes. Malik, the party's merchant friend in Sindar, fears that there may be a military coup soon. Several religious factions exist, a few of which may be crazy enough to do something drastic to destabilize Sindar even more. The internal struggle continues, fueled by recent warfare with Arket.

Most recently, Arket troops took back the city of Rivergate from the Sindari using some sort of magical killing wind. Reports from survivors detailed a swirling demonic fog that killed everything in its path, and since Arket occupied the city immediately afterward, everyone assumes that the Mage's College developed some sort of artifact. Everyone hopes that it never gets developed again given the devastation in Rivergate. This incident got the Emir to agree to a truce for now, though the party has discovered that someone wants Arket and Sindar at war and whoever that is can forge official documents from either land with ease.

The Elven Wood and The Citadel
The elves maintain a policy of healthy xenophobia, so non-elves remain in the dark about them and their odd ways. Elves don't put up with anyone destroying their wood, and they don't tend to venture out much at all. Most elves tend toward druidism rather then deism, so their culture focuses on reverence of all things natural.

The elves maintain a huge fortress on the westernmost point of the forest as it fades into plains and desert, near the city of Rivergate. Trees grow together to make the fortress out of living wood, and it has held off endless invaders over thousands of years. Everyone calls it The Citadel, and the elves use it as their military academy. All four pieces of art on the Elven Fortress card from Magic: the Gathering's Fallen Empires set inspired me to come up with this massive, living version of West Point for elves. Janik lost his hand to a Sindari ambush, and he was taken in by elven healers at The Citadel before the game began.

Lands Farther Afield
The Fisher Kingdoms contain small city-states of mostly humans tucked in a temperate seaside niche surrounded by the Dwarven Kingdom. They're loosely based on the early days of ancient Greece, but these city-states focused on laid-back debate rather than warfare. They worship the Greek pantheon with a particular emphasis on Poseidon. Most children in the Fisher Kingdoms can sail better than adult sailors from other cultures. They don't have a standing army, though every citizen must contribute to defense in some way, usually as a member of a militia.

The Gnomish Confederacy has recently been overrun by goblins, except in the capital city of Grond where the giant iron golems keep the invaders at bay. The Wild Lands sit in the frozen wastes north of Dvarfheim - only hardened Norsemen like Throrolf and Hoffman are crazy enough to live there. Rugathi occupy the Barbary Mountains on the western edge of Arket. The mountains plunge directly into the sea, making a red elf navy all but impossible. The Green Children consists of an ancient rainforest dotted with human and halfling settlements in a society based on Aztec and Maya civilizations.

I ripped off India and used Hindu culture to populate Mumbai Taru. The party hasn't visited, so it's the vaguest of sketches at the moment. Humanoid monsters inhabit the Empire of Skotos far to the south, currently under gnoll rule. The Union of Dwarves oppose these monsters, though their culture centers around communism instead of capitalism. The dwarves are allied with their neighbors the winged folk who call their home Havenaerie. The Shires contain the last bastion of halflings in the world they once dominated. The Magocracy of Timonius postulates a draconian Roman society where wizardry became all the rage, the sort of place where the Order of Hermes ran amok and took over everything

Far across the ocean on the smaller continent, the Empire of the Yellow Throne embodies the Chinese philosophy of the Celestial Bureaucracy reflected in the human rulership structure. Magic has been rigidly codified into the five elements, and monks are common. To the east, Koroku consists of mostly mountainous terrain left to nomadic herders drawn from Nepal and Mongolia. Dragonhold borders the Empire to the northwest. Their aristocrats revere dragons above all, and they're starting to mobilize an invasion force.

There are other lands with descriptions even sketchier than Mumbai Taru, but if the party ever visits I have enough hooks to give each region a unique flavor. If the party sticks around, they'll get into trouble and find adventure among those natives who want things to change. And isn't that the soul of roleplaying?

Thanks for reading!

Adris: The World Expands Organically

Way back in 2001 when we started playing in the town of Adris, all I had was a sketch of the main street and a vague idea where the three roads out of town went. But, true to the First Rule of Dungeoncraft, immediate relevance only extended as far as Adris's main streets and the tiny mining village of Logan's Pass up in the mountains. And that's where the adventure began.

I decided to embrace a new approach. I typically operate top-down instead of bottom-up when designing. I had an idea of where the universe fit into the bigger planar picture, but that's about all the detail I had when I started. I let the game tell me what needed attention, and I tried to design one game ahead of the players. I think I pulled it off fairly well, though there were times I just hit a creative wall. Hopefully those times weren't painfully obvious.

The first adventure in Logan's Pass (The Burning Plague for those playing along at home) introduced a warband of goblins who were basically caught between the human villagers outside the mine and the bigger baddie further in. From that one feature in a prepared adventure, I postulated that the goblins were expanding their influence. And how do goblins expand? They do it the old-fashioned way: they invade places.

And just like that, there's a race war happening in the background as the gnomes have been displaced by the goblin hordes. Grond will remain in gnomish hands for as long as they can manufacture ammunition for the giant iron golem that the city was built on, but that's the only city the gnomes have left. Every other gnome has become a refugee.

Boom. That's how you add a feature to your world. Go big or don't bother.

The world grew from the PC's perceptions and the players' decisions about which hook to follow next. So we looked at the Gnomish Confederacy and how it got screwed by hordes of goblins. We took a trip to the Dwarven Kingdom and discovered that the drow experimented on dwarves to splice together a dwarf/drider abomination which angered Wulfgar to no end. A band of orcs were setting up shop in the no-mans-land between the human kingdom of Arket and the Dwarven Kingdom, a 50-mile border that the dwarves abandoned by treaty after the war and which the humans didn't have the numbers or motivation to settle. Some orcs were gifted by Set with special powers to keep the tribes working together - the Cult of the Burning Fist was born. Dragons came into reality early as some goblins bribed a white dragon into creating an unseasonable blizzard to cover the theft of magical tomes from Adris's local Mage's Guild. Pandora's elven mentor fell victim to Lycanthropy and the party needed to dispatch him. All of these hooks came from or were expanded by the characters' backgrounds.

We had a basic lay of the land, but then we started adding details that made the world pop. The town of Splitrock had a druid circle and healer's college, which sprang from a random roll on the NPC level table from the DMG. And since I had just returned from Watkins Glen and a wonderful eating experience at a place called Mr. Chicken, I made a restaurant in Splitrock that served the best chicken in the world. Everybody looked forward to debriefing over a table of chicken at Martha's. You can't buy details like that, but if your players buy in to something you've created and give it life, you win.

Then the party discovered the Druid Bowls. These scrying devices were scattered throughout the world so druids could keep up with natural happenings and help each other out. And they talked to people thousands of miles away and started learning about the world. They found problems across the planet and teleported hither and yon to try and deal with a few of the larger issues.

They met Sarah and Bob. Turns out Sarah broke the quarantine and came to this planet to discover what the heck was happening and report back to her bosses via Mind Link. With the party's help, she discovered that someone was breeding displacer beasts and somehow using them to cloak mechs. She died trying to prevent a shuttle from leaving the atmosphere. Later, under a pyramid in the Sindari Desert, the party found a robot dwarf named Bob who maintained a library of all the knowledge in the universe. Bob interfaced with the elf-maintained library planet to keep up to date, though he had been told to hide as much as possible while doing so. The party saw a satellite map of the world and started asking questions of what was beyond the sky. Turns out there's quite a bit happening out there with hundreds of populated worlds to explore and an ancient enemy resurfacing to start a war between the stars. And Bob maintains a communication chamber to talk with representatives from other planets.

Right about then I could hear the players' minds blowing out. I love that sound.

The moral of the story? Keep ahead of the players, but don't get too attached to what happens next. You'll be more sane. I'm working out how to communicate and organize Schrodinger's Gun GMing, so stay tuned for more in-depth theoretical discussions in that vein.

An aside: I love how these posts just spill from my head. I try to internalize as much of the adventure and the world as possible for flexibility's sake. It's much easier for me to improvise if I don't need to refer to notes. A side effect of that approach comes out in posts like this - the info is still in there, it just needs an outlet. Oh, look - here's an outlet now!

Thanks for reading!

Adris: House Rules for D&D 3.x

I'm not sure I ever wrote up anything about house rules beyond a few bullet points in an email, and there are a few rules I'd like to share. Details follow, so read on if you're interested. Better late than never, I suppose...

Character Creation
Stats generation for characters uses my standard roll of 4d6 and drop the lowest die unless it's a 1, then assign as you see fit. Yes, that means you can roll a 19 in a stat with three sixes and a one, and you average slightly higher stats than normal. It's not a huge imbalance, especially given the overclocked power level the party has earned over the years.

I punted supplements in general after the mass of splatbooks started feeling like an arms race, and I eventually ran the game almost entirely from the System Reference Document. I was so trendy, I had the entire SRD available on my Palm - if only the search time was faster... Since I used the SRD, prestige classes didn't come up often at all, though I used the Assassin class to death when updating The Assassin's Knot. I'd rather stick with a base class and model your idea of your character's abilities using feats, swapping class abilities, and outright adding cool stuff. I've tried to be consistent over the years, and I hope I managed to pull off at least a workable balance.

Quirks and Flaws
Everybody got a chance to pick a drawback or quirk in exchange for a little power boost that made sense. Wulfgar latched on to hydrophobia and eventually got paid back with weapon bonding to his axe that gains power as he levels. Asalia took "locked up by her father which caused some psychological issues" and got paid in wonderful role-playing opportunities. Pandora's quirk was her compulsion to make Trail Mix (now with Real Trail!). She'd make a batch in the morning out of whatever ingredients were handy, then roll a d20 to determine roughly if it was good or bad. Anyone eating the Trail Mix rolls a Fortitude save and has something minor happen - usually a +/-1 to a stat or a save, and possibly dry heaves. Given the fickle dice at the table, Wulfgar eventually swore it off since the Dwarven Fighter couldn't make a Fortitude save to choke the stuff down.

Character quirks give you hooks to make play more interesting, and I highly recommend using them for any character.

Detection Effects
When starting out with a Paladin in the party, I needed to get a handle on "Paladin Radar", otherwise know as the Detect Evil ability. I made a couple of changes which seemed to work out pretty well. First, Janik's eyes would burst into flames when he used it, so everyone around him knew every time it went active. Second, I changed it to Detect Motivation to introduce some grayness to play in.

I wanted to give more detail than a simple "it's evil so you can kill it" answer to handle situations like a good person doing evil things to save their family. I wanted the character to make the call, not me acting as their higher power. So I let Janik see into people's hearts and get an impression of a person's motivations rather than just see the taint of evil. I think it worked out really well, and Janik still got to use his Paladin Radar to chase down goblins in the middle of a blizzard caused by a white dragon.

Upgrading to 3.5, or "The Magic Ty-D-Bol"
Wizards had the unmitigated audacity to upgrade the rules to 3.5 while the campaign was running. It smoothed over some rough patches in 3.0 and added some things I liked, so I decided we should probably switch over. But the spell nerfing in 3.5 needed to be explained in the context of the game world, so I made an adventure out of it.

The party discovered that the drow were doing something magical and nasty. They decided to investigate. Eventually they found a room filled with a swirling vortex of arcane energy being attended by several drow wizards. It seemed to be sucking the magic out of the surface world and storing it in the Underdark for later drow use. The party immediately dubbed the vortex "The Magic Ty-D-Bol", and it stuck from that moment on. Since most of the party cast spells, this vortex simply would not do. True to form, Asalia tied a rope around herself and flung herself into it to disrupt the ritual. It worked, but not before the nature of magic changed and reality along with it.

Voila! New rules implemented with an in-game reason to make the change. It satisfied me immensely. I don't think I can pull the same trick with an upgrade to 4E - the structure of the rules has changed a little too much to do it without recreating the characters from scratch. We'll finish it out in 3.5 and move on from there.

Runecraft
As a Priest of Odin, Thorolf could use runes. He could easily cast and read runes as an impromptu Augury effect once a day. In some cases we actually pulled and interpreted runes during the course of play. My jaw dropped at how well the random pulls actually fit the situation and the question every single time.

He could also scribe runes to enchant items for specific purposes. The permanence of the item depended on the materials he had to work with. A simple Alarm spell for a night could be scribed on the wall with chalk, but if you wanted that flaming spear to last more than a single hit you should probably invest the money and rework the spearhead to hold the runes permanently. He had a pool of uses per day which he could use to power effects, including permanent items. Eventually he could wean the permanent items, but he would be down a few slots while the enchantment took hold.

I modeled this ability by creating a Runecraft feat which gave access to the Int-based Runecraft skill. He'd need to make a skill check any time he wanted to kick off a power or enchant an item or create his boat. It fit easily into the existing system, and I could dovetail runecraft uses into the item creation rules with no problem at all. I typed it up, and I probably should have submitted it to Dragon at some point. I didn't, and someone else published a take on runecraft for 3.5 in Dragon. C'est la vie.

Ignoring Spell Failure, Swapping Elements, and Other Options
I introduced Spellswords into the game when they rescued a Rugathi Spellsword from the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief. Rugathi are also known as Red Elves. They only live about 200 years because they don't need to sleep, trance or rest at all. The Spellsword trained Wulfgar on working spells while wearing armor and tying a spell to a weapon so it would detonate on a melee hit. Both manifested as feats.

Early on the party investigated a summoner's tower that blew up just oustide Adris. They discovered mephits guarding his underground complex, some mad, some reasonable. They managed to Dismiss most of them, and they even met up with Icy and Steamy much later on in the game. It took some time, but they deciphered some notes and found a metamagic feat that would let spellcasters swap elemental effects on the fly for +1 level. I allowed swapping in Force effects for +2 levels since there's no Resistance to Force anywhere. Did your sorcerer learn Fireball, but you're headed to the Plane of Fire? No problem! Cast it as a 4th level spell and make it an Iceball, or maybe a 5th level Forceball.

Parting Shots
Generally, I think I'm pretty flexible as a GM. I believe that the rules should support the game and not limit it. If you want your character to have an ability, let me know and we'll work something out.

I'm still going through the pile of loose notes, the box and a half of home-printed index cards, and the two notebooks to get up to speed on Adris and The Bickering Eight. I'm sure I've hacked the rules in a few other places. If so, it'll come out in future posts.

Thanks for reading!

Adris: The 30,000 Light Year View

Origins and Goals
Back in the summer of 2001, there was this newfangled set of D&D rules called 3rd Edition (3E). I picked up the rules when they came out in 2000 and decided to run a test game with a few friends to see how it played. I flipped through my scattered notes and found a setting that I worked with back in college and abandoned for reasons which will become clear in another post on the setting. I had a sketch of the main street of an outpost on the eastern tip of the human kingdom (Arket) wedged between the dwarven mountains and the elven wood called Adris. Three roads and a river led out of town, and I had a vague idea of where they ended up. I had a couple of bars, a keep, bad things happening to a merchant named Johnson, a temple of Tyr, and a cave where Set's cultists set up shop. Plot hooks galore.

Perfect. Let's do this thing.

I wanted it to be casual. We were all busy people, so we scheduled around life as much as possible and made do when people couldn't make it. I wanted it to be engaging, so I took a page from previous games and kept throwing plot hooks at the PCs to see what they'd pick up and run with. I wanted it to be epic, so I started giving them prophecies and put them on the path of finding the Cubes. Most of all, I wanted it to be fun.

Five years later, the characters had advanced from 1st to 16th level. We tried a game with three infants in attendance. Yes, 3 babies came into the lives of 5 members of the group within 2 months. That was a little much to juggle, and the distraction of 3 sets of new parents dealing with constant interruptions wasn't quite as fun as it could have been, so I chose to be Dad and put my Gamer self on a shelf for a while. Five years after that, here I am blowing the dust off the game and picking up right where we left off because the story needs to resolve.

What's the game about?
Exploration. Possession. Discovery. The restoration of old divinity and carrying the world forward to new heights. The realization that the planet is part of a larger galactic power structure and that plots are afoot on that level. Power, and combining flavors of power in new ways. Politics. Prophecy. War. Peace. Intrigue. Cults. Secrets. Meetings of the minds. Letting the self be tricked by false promises.

But mostly it's about the members of The Bickering Eight coming together and doing awesome things despite their differences.

Personal Transformation
The theme of personal transformation took center stage in the character development realm. In some cases the transformation manifests in a very literal way, like Adril beating up dragons to distill their giblets into a potion that he drinks to actually become a dragon. In other cases the characters figure out what they want to be when they grow up, like Asalia's move from Wiz/Monk/Psion to more purely Psionic pursuits. In still other cases the character unmasks a Cosmic Truth but still needs to maintain the charade for the masses, like Thorolf coming to grips with the fact that Odin is simply a mask that Monad wears. Or it can be as simple as finding your niche and enjoying contentment, like Pandora rising above her self-doubt and taking on the role of Party Mom.

Each character aligns with one of the old gods through their particular Cube (see below), and each character embodies an aspect of that god. Take Wulfgar who aligns with Aberroc, the craftsman. Wulfgar learned metalworking at a very young age in his clanhold under the mountains, but he took it to new heights with the item creation feats he learned while studying wizardry, and now he's madly creating useful items in the party's downtime.

The Gods and Their Cubes (Gotta Get 'Em All)
Yes, to some extent the game revolves around a big MacGuffin Hunt. The Cubes are artifacts of the old gods. There are 7 (or 8?) cubes to find, each a different color tuned to a different god. They are:

Kreigan - Red - Power, Fire and Battle
Aberroc - Orange - Creation, Matter and Justice
Puck - Yellow - Mind, Air, Perception and Trickery
Tremas - Green - Life, Earth, Growth and Healing
Shoshen - Blue - Water, Emotion, Curiosity and Transformation
Dreiden - Purple - Magic, Ether, Logic and Learning
Darro - Black - Darkness, Negative Energy, Obscurity and Secrets
Monad - White - Benevolence, Positive Energy, Leadership and Community

They've found 6 cubes so far. As for what the cubes do, I wrote up an overview over on Stack Exchange's RPG site which should give you an idea of how the party combines their powers to create some spectacular effects. Nutshell: each cube has a keyword that the party can riff on. For example, the Red Cube represents Fire, so anything related to Fire (or heat or light or consumption or dryness or even agitation) works when using the power of the Red Cube. If the player can justify a power to me, it happens. Sometimes it's not quite what they expected, but that's the magic of using artifacts.

The cubes fit together in only one way with everything attaching to the Purple Cube, so that means only 7 cubes fit together in a giant 3-D plus sign shape. Nobody is quite sure if there's supposed to be an 8th cube for Monad stuck on in a non-symmetric way or what. Time will tell.

What About Adventures?

I'm planning another post with a rough game timeline that touches on adventure selection with a brief overview of each, but suffice to say that I've used published adventures from previous editions, downloadable adventures, and pure home-grown adventures. The first adventure I used was the official D&D site's first available adventure PDF for 3E: The Burning Plague. Other canned adventures included The Tower of Deception, The Assassin's Knot (L2), and Baltron's Beacon (I7).

I took every adventure and retooled it to hook into the story and the game world somehow. In the Burning Plague, the party let the goblins escape with their purloined silver. Later a group of goblin wizards came raiding the Mage's Guild in Adris, and each one had a silver dagger. Coincidence?

I had already introduced the concept of Black Flame with an elite group of Orc Cleric/Monks known as the Burning Fist. Tweaking the Black Flame written into Baltron's Beacon to make the two consistent with each other was well worth the effort.

Some of the home-grown adventures rocked. The Bickering Eight got a little cocky and bored, so they decided to teleport into the headquarters of a goblin army numbering 6,000 troops. The goblins brought their Worg Riders, Archers and Wizard Corps to bear in about 2 rounds, so they teleported away at the start of round 5. In 4 rounds they had taken apart most of the Priests of Maglubiet, mowed down a few wizards, killed a few dozen goblin troops, and had a total of around 6 hit points remaining across the 5 of them.

We all laughed long and hard about the sheer ballsiness of that stunt.

More to come, so stay tuned!

Adris: Please Start Here

Welcome one and all to the Bickering Eight in Adris cover page.

I'll be maintaining a list of links to the Adris background posts here for easy reference, so if you only want to bookmark one page and still read all the campaign background, use this page. I'm writing things as they come to mind, but I may try to put more of a logical order to the text as it's published.

I bid you welcome. Please comment if you're so inclined, otherwise please enjoy!

The Adris Posts

• The 30,000 Light Year View (8/19/11)
• House Rules for D&D 3.x (8/20/11)
• The World Expands Organically (8/22/11)
• On Society and Culture (8/25/11)
• The Bickering Eight Roll Call (8/18/11)

As always, thanks for reading!

Adris: The Bickering Eight Roll Call

In order to bring the players back up to speed on the Adris game, I'm publishing some notes of what has gone before. I'll only do a very general summary - the game ran from 1st to 16th level over 5 years of play. My game timeline is about 40 pages of bullet points, and I haven't even typed in about half of my chicken scratches. But I'll cover that in the adventure log post.

To whet everyone's appetite, here's a very brief overview of...


The Bickering Eight: PCs Past and Present

Adril - Half-Elf Sorcerer 16 - His transformation to Dragon through consumption of potions concocted from various defeated dragon parts is almost complete. The rest of the party stands behind him with catcher's mitts, waiting for his hoard to shoot out of his butt. He favors electrical spells since first level, and he loves to maximize electric bursts (lightning-flavored fireballs) to clear chaff from the battlefield. He tends to command attention given the fact that he's A) a freaking dragon, and B) has a Charisma score in the high 20s. He and Pandora got married in a simple ceremony during the course of the game. Everyone wonders what the offspring will look like, given Pandora's Wild Shape ability.

Asalia - Human Psion 14/Monk 2 - After starting Wizard training as a young girl and running away to a monastery, then dealing with her daddy issues and learning psionics from someone who fell from the sky in a falling star, she's finally settled on becoming a gestalt Psion/Monk. We're converting all her levels to Psion, but she'll retain most Monk abilities. She's also embedding crystals to grant special abilities as the Crystal Master prestige class. She still has something of a martyr complex. Her favorite tactic involves an anti-magic amulet, ridiculous Monk speed, jumping on and grappling the big monster, then cooking off Eel Touch as often as possible.

Hoffman (Thorolf's Cohort) - Human Fighter 13 - Thorolf got tied up building his flying boat, so he sent his second-in-command to help out the party for a while. Translation: Tom wanted to play a more front-line character for a while. Hoffman is very nordic, and very happy to go back to administrative duties for a while given the beatings he took during almost every adventure.

Janik (Dead?) - Human Paladin of Tyr 8 - Janik made some assumptions about leadership early on which didn't work well with the party. The Janik years were the origin of the party's name: The Bickering Eight. My favorite Janik moment was when one of the assassins from The Assassin's Knot befriended him and taught him Bluff, and he didn't know until later thanks to a Ring of Mind Shielding blocking his Detect Evil ability. The internal struggle when he discovered the deception was priceless. The last the party saw of him he launched himself toward a flying machine (a shuttlecraft carrying light mechs and displacer beasts) and brought it down into the sea with a large firey explosion.

Kelsik - Elf Rogue 16 - Kelsik has an artifact called the Glass Bow and a Ring of Elemental Command (Fire). He thinks he has a Glass Jaw and a Ring of Summon Enemy Melee Combatants. He's built around helping combat from somewhere outside the combat, preferrably measured in hundred-yard increments. If you want something set on fire or peppered with arrows from a half mile away, call Kelsik. Favorite line: "So I'm blind, but I can hear the enemy priest fighting the party, right? I'll take that shot. *twang* Critical hit!"

Mei - Human Rogue 5 / Monk 11 - The latest party member from the far-distant Empire of the Yellow Throne, Mei is still getting her feet underneath her. She's suffering from culture shock and the sudden burden of taking up the Blue Cube, but she's holding her own and figuring out how to contribute in interesting ways. Talking with a disembodied Rein makes learning Common and Latin much easier. Plus, she has access to Rein's Bardic Knowledge. She occasionally needs to put the Blue Cube in a bag to get some sleep, since Rein won't stop talking because she doesn't need to breathe.

Nasir (Missing) - Human Rogue 5 - He came from the Emirate of Sindar to the south, and given the on-again-off-again war between Arket and Sindar, he was never treated with much respect locally. He learned disguise to make life easier for the party, but he always spoke in a curious monotone. He disappeared one night and nobody was able to discover what happened to him after that. Hopefully his story will come out soon.

Pandora - Human Druid 16 - "The Druid is Wise," and she'll remind you with those exact words the next time you do something stupid. She was shipped off to study with her Aunt in Adris after botching tracking so badly that she almost got her brother killed. Her family is disfunctional, so she decided to create her own family with the party, especially Adril. She can control Green Juju (Life Energy), which she used to great effect when making out with a succubus. The rest of the party was stunned for a round in arousal, and then revulsion as the succubus shriveled into a withered husk. Plus, her parents invented Peep Mail. Anyone can summon these astral birds to carry written messages to another person recognized by PeepNet. The birds always peep when they pop onto your shoulder. The party is working on a mute function, as Peeps have drawn unwanted attention in the past.

Rein (Dead, but soul resides in the Blue Cube) - Human Bard 12/Cleric of Shoshen 1/Fighter 1 - Another victim of Multiclass Mania alongside Asalia, Rein embodied the spirit of curiousity. The party found her turned to stone in the Temple of the Black Flame and restored her. Unfortunately, she didn't age in the 50 years she was a statue, and she found she had no life to go back to. After some negotiations, she fell in with the party and good-naturedly put up with Wulfgar continually calling her "Stray." During the course of the game, she found a 2-handed sword and decided to train as a fighter in order to use it effectively. She fell in a battle with Drow and managed to inhabit the Blue Cube to prevent her soul from being consumed. Outstanding question in the party's mind: Did she actually go into the communication room and talk to people off-world, even after the rest of the party told her not to in no uncertain terms?

Thorolf - Human Cleric of Odin (Monad) 16 - He built a flying boat with the power of runic magic, and he'll invite you aboard just to show it off. He came south from the mountains of the far north to see the world. He ran into the party when they unraveled The Assasin's Knot and never looked back. He discovered that Odin was a mask of Monad, and one adventure involved travelling to the Astral Plane to restore the connection to Monad's home plane at the cost of one of his eyes, which he grew back at least cosmetically. He's back from building his boat and ready to skewer what needs skewerin' and heal what needs healin'.

Wulfgar - Dwarf Fighter11 / Wizard 5 - How cool is it to have a fighter who can cast spells and have them detonate on whatever his axe hits? That's Wulfgar. Yes, he gets ridiculous damage on a critical hit, aided by his bond to his artifact axe named Spirit Cleaver. And yes, the axe exists to remove incorporeal undead from the face of the planet. Oh, and he's debilitatingly hydrophobic. My favorite Wulfgar moment was the time the party had to cross a river to keep a bad guy from escaping. Wulfgar resisted the crossing. Adril got in his face, said, "I'm sorry about this," then hit Wulfgar with a quickened Hold Person, scooped him up, and took off across the water. 3 failed saves later, the party was on the other side carrying a hysterical but still-Held Wulfgar. Fun times.