I run a monthly
AD&D game for my friends, and because of this, I try and make it an occasion for my players. Those of you
that have seen my table can attest to this. But our last game I thought I would
do something different, something…simple. If we were a band then this session
would be our unplugged album instead
of our usual full-on, theatrical world tour complete with smoke, lasers, dancing
Ewoks, and a stage rider FULL of brown M&M’s.
Why the sudden change I hear the crowd, roar?
Well, because I wanted that night to be just plain and simple and fun. Nothing
more, nothing less.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying our regular
games aren’t a barrel of laughs, they are, I swear, but that
night I wanted us to be KISS… KISS without
the makeup. Why? So we could just focus on the music for a change instead of
the show.
It’s partly my fault. I tend to get caught up a few days before the
game and create these fekkin’ elaborate missions and set pieces, and then I sit
there trying my hardest to make sure that everyone else is having fun, that I
forget to have fun myself.
So, as I said,
this night was different. I bought some large bits of cardboard, colour-copied
some dungeon tiles, gathered all my Hirst/Warhammer/LOTR bits-and-bobs and made
a huge dungeon for them to go through. I pulled out all my Mantic/LOTR/Reaper miniatures
and went to town. We had Beholders, Serpent Gods, Zombies by the score, Statues
breathing fire, and Statues breathing cold, to name but a few.
The premise was
simple: Seven Keys need to be collected for them to enter the Tomb of the
Foreign God. Each key was around the neck of a Boss type creature that they had
to slay to get the key. Every room had a monster, every corridor a trap, it was
Hack and Slash in its purest form. And? It was glorious.
Everyone knew where
they stood from the outset because I told them that it was going to be ‘Loot
& Scoot’, nothing more complicated than that. If it moves? Beat it. If it
sparkles? Take it. If it looks like a trap? It probably is. I also let them
roll for their own treasure using Kelvin Green’s really cool Drop Table. My
players had never seen one before so there was the added excitement of that as
well. I rolled in the open too, and that really
made them sit up and take notice.
The result of that night? Well, it was carnage on both fronts. The thief got
sneak-attacked by a vampire of my own creation and lost four points of
intelligence. We lost a fighter/squire to a
Crypt-Keeper, (a level draining Mummy type beastie) who also managed to drain
two entire levels from the ranger as well as the already maimed thief.
One of the
mages went off wandering where he shouldn’t have been wandering, and woke what shouldn’t
have been woken. It slithered, cast a sleep spell, and is about to eviscerate
him, oh, and I almost forgot, I used my Mask Table. I rolled, and they found
the Mask of the Whipping Boy. This promptly got stuck on Felonious’ face for a
joke… well, let’s just say that no one’s laughing now!
In short? A
great time was had by all, and I felt that I got to relieve a little steam from
the pressure cooker. You couldn’t do this for every session because you’d just
get bored with it, but for once in a while? I highly recommend it.
No comments:
Post a Comment