Skylands session reports

So, I’m not big on character sheets for games as simple as classic D&D, but my son said he wanted one and thought the other players would too. So I whipped this one up for the Skylands campaign. (And for those looking for a character sketch area, that’s what the back is for. ^_^)

Some Q&A that I prepared for the players before starting the Skylands campaign.

+Brendan Strejcek pointed out that the pre-gen 1st-level wizard in the latest D&D Next packet starts with eleven spells. (Counting both cantrips and 1st-level spells.)

Which got me to thinking about how things are going in the current (heavily house ruled B/X) campaign, which I will share...

In the Skylands campaign, the mage started with up to 6 cantrips and up to 4 first-level spells. The elf started with up to 4 first-level spells. I ended up handing out Read Magic “for free” too. And I’m letting them “translate” scroll spells into book spells, so they’ve gained a couple from that. They’ve done some spell-trading with a sage, which has gotten them a couple others. Results: The elf and mage now have, I think, 8 first-level spells, 1 second-level spell (that they can’t use yet), and I don’t even know how many cantrips.

For the most part, I’m OK with this. I wanted the “seek scrolls and books to expand your repertoire” thing. And I didn’t want to limit trading spells among PCs if they chose to do it. They’ll probably soon have all the 1st-level spells from the book. Higher-level spells should take longer to collect, because I intend to make them rarer.

Long term, though, I could see new PCs having pretty easy access to a wide library of spells collected by older PCs. Again, part of the idea here is to have a long-term campaign world that the PCs really shape. So, I’m OK with that.

Would I have done it differently? I think I would’ve started them with fewer spells. I’m undecided about whether to make access to Read Magic easier or harder. I certainly should have thought through and written up how mages/elves and acquiring spells and such would work and given that to the players up-front. (I had the combined issues of one player having a lot of assumptions from all the D&D he played in the past and another not having any experience playing a mage/elf in D&D and not knowing what she didn’t know.) I’m also undecided thus far whether unlimited casting of cantrips was a good or bad idea.

I would consider putting additional limits on how spells can be acquired. (e.g. Limits on how many spells a caster can have in their books. Not allow acquiring spells from scrolls.) But part of that is just that I’ll probably want to do something different with the next campaign world than I did in this one. If I was starting the Skylands over, I probably wouldn’t do that.

The discussion after last night’s Skylands session emphasized for me the way my group—many of whom really like D&D3e—completely understand that classic D&D isn’t obsolete; just different. And they happily embrace the differences.

Some minor items, some magical and some not, from my Skylands campaign.

Let’s see...summary of yesterday’s gaming...

...or Why Robert’s exhausted...

PART THE FIRST

Two of the PCs in the Skylands campaign spent some time “looking for trouble” in the city of Towers while the rest of the party travelled to Cloudhaven to consult the sage there and report to the archbishop.* (The activities in Cloudhaven were resolved last session.)

A homemade parachute was test-driven. It almost worked.

A mage was visited. He has a somewhat wizard-of-Oz setup to protect himself from the clientele. A few 2nd-level spells were traded and a map to a location where mandrake can be harvested was acquired. (The mage’s supply is getting low, and he’ll pay or trade for some.) A visit to the library of the late necromancer’s turned up some info about mandrake. (The “myth & legend” section of the Wikipedia article.)

The next day, they looked around for a strange guy they’d seen on the street a few times eating cats, rats, and more. They found him sleeping, but when they disturbed him, he morphed into a Type IV demon. They fled before the transformation was complete. (That one is straight out of Vornheim.)

They went to the market and found an alchemist and priced some potions the group might be interested in. He gave them the name of a poison distiller in town. They were also approached in the market by a woman who had overheard them asking about magic items for sale. This woman said she could take them to a magic shop and quoted a few prices for them. She said they should be able to find her here at the market when they had the coin and were ready to buy.

PART THE SECOND

A session of the Rathkin Abbey campaign was 50% trying to set up the Battle Map 2 app so that our two teleconferencing players could see the map, and 50% two of the players (my kids) arguing over whether they should investigate the cavern before them or go back to investigate other parts of the dungeon.

(I’d be using the Encounter Elements to “sketch out” the part of the dungeon the players are in during this game. I’m trying to use Battle Map 2 for the same purpose...not for combats. In so many ways, this app is just shy of being good.)

PART THE THIRD

When the rest of the Skylands campaign players arrived, we resumed that game. The group had decided to explore the ruined town of Ostgard outside the ruined temple they’d previously explored.

The dice decided they’d have a random encounter just as they were entering the town, and that the encounter would be a cockatrice. A few of the PCs had heard tales of such creatures and how they could kill you by looking at you, breathing on you, or touching you. They’d also heard that it would die if it saw its own reflection.

Ammut the thief stuck her mirror into the slot on her ten-foot pole designed for that purpose. She snuck up on the cockatrice and held the mirror in front of it. It looked at the mirror, pecked at it a couple of times, then ducked under it and continued on its way. It had started wandering in the opposite direction of the group at this point, so they decided to move along.

They found a few buildings intact enough to explore. A money-lender’s yielded some coins in a pile of rust and white dust. A rust monster surprised one of the crusaders (i.e. cleric) in his full-plate. While the rust monster made all its morale checks, it also failed all its “to hit” rolls, so the PCs still don’t know that its the reason they aren’t finding any ferrous metals in the town.

They searched an overgrown park for mandrake, but only found archer bushes. One of the crusaders then rid the park of archer bushes while everyone else was searching. Also discovered was an extremely lifelike statue of a squirrel.

Things ended there, with lots of town left to explore.

*SOME SKYLANDS BACKSTORY

The PCs all grew up on an island floating in Loftgard, one of several islands floating in the sky. An age ago, a remnant of civilization had been brought there as the forces of chaos overran the lands. The PCs found and dealt with a necromancer and found the magic portal he had used to get to the Skylands. They used it to travel to the necromancer’s penthouse in a city called Towers. (Small island with lots of building upwards.) They’ve been learning about life on the ground. They also found the portal could also take them to a ruined temple, and it’s the ruined town near that temple that they are now exploring.

One of the PCs, Ammut the thief, is avoiding Cloudhaven (central town in the Skylands near the primary temple) because she’s discovered the person she’d stole a bag of holding from is the sage that the party regularly consults.

I may have made a G+ post about this, but here is the “about the Skylands campaign” post for the blog.

Stuff from the Skylands campaign