Game Translation: This War of Mine

Generally its a rare game that goes the full simulationist / slice of life route.  The grand majority of games are plotted.  There is some major conflict that you need to weave your way through, defeating a succession of obstacles of increasing drama and tension to defeat some Big Bad (or more rarely to merely survive and escape).  Therefore I have little experience, but loads of ideas, for how to accomplish This War of Mine through a roleplaying lens format.

In This War of Mine you don't play elite soldiers out to cleanse the city nor do you play rebels seeking to overthrow the government.  You're not even a single Action Hero Father trying to rescue your kids.  You could well be an old teacher, handyman, and sneaky girl from the wrong side of town.

You also don't shoot up bad guys unless you want to risk an easy road to death.  Instead you sneak through abandoned (and not-so-abandoned) locales picking up spare parts so you can spend your daytimes constructing various appliances, gardens, and water purifiers to allow you and your friends to survive a few days while occasionally thugs and desperate civilians make armed raids on your home.

It's a different sort of game.  It's a touch depressing.  And it would make for a very interesting roleplaying game.

If you have Narrativist players, then you probably already  know how you can run this.  You could simply focus on the relationships with some moments of rising tension, perhaps randomly drawn from a deck of cards to represent what is heard on the radio or what occurs during the night or on scavenging runs as a launch pad for ideas.  Players could then interject with what they think would be most entertaining - "I've caught a cold...."  "A sniper wings me...."

Simply watching the various characters interact as things slowly get worse and they struggle to put together enough to make it through the war could be perfectly entertaining for one or more sessions with the right crowd, but if you're a full Narrativist who have played a number of games in this style you probably don't need much advice on that front and as I've never run that sort of game I'm really not in the position to advice you on it.

So what if you're used to running the more common sorts of games with a GM in full control of the world around player controlled characters used to dealing with GM created obstacles while interacting with each other and NPCs in character?

Well you'll need to make sure that everyone plays pretty low-powered and ordinary characters.  So think small, think weak, think hopelessly out-gunned just like if the average office worker suddenly had to survive in an urban environment without proper stores.  Ensure the rules work with that and be sure the players are open to it.

You can play "This War of Mine" with more capable folks, say ex-emergency services personnel, and you can play the setting within a different style - even slice of life it with emergency services dealing with call outs within a besieged city but as that doesn't focus on the style of the videogame, just the setting, we won't be looking at that.  So make sure the players are onboard with creating utterly normal people with one particular specialty - good cook, good craftsman, etc.  I'd recommend each player make three such characters so that they can replace them quickly.

Ensure that wounds won't heal without medical attention and that sicknesses get progressively worse without warmth, food and rest.  When the characters get too hungry, too sick, too wounded or too tired, their movement speeds should be cut to a walk and then a stagger.  Every effort should take them longer and they should no longer be much use scavenging.

As with any good sandbox game you could get a map showing identified locations which they can travel and some basic rumours about them.  Danger levels, likely lootables, and possible NPCs should all be described.  You could even make it a bit of a hex crawl if you like by allowing PCs to spend a night in different blocks looking for places that haven't been revealed to them yet.

Unless you're willing to have a full group traipsing about to every location (increasing the chances of a TPK and reducing the sense of desperation), you'd need to keep the missions themselves quite short and sharp to allow players to guiltlessly split the party.  Ten to fifteen minutes per supply run should generally be enough.  Twenty to thirty if everyone seems enraptured.  Let the players know that they will need to split the party in advance so that they can protect their homes in case of looters.

I'd use a randomised system - like dice or card draws - to decide whether they're attacked.  You can either roleplay the attack or resolve it with dice or simply matching the defences against the attacker's skill and desperation, if you like.

Be mindful the PCs may crave revenge after a successful raid on them.

Inventory management is important as well in any game based on scavenging.  Firstly you'll need to determine the build phases - what they can build and what they need for it - then you can decide what they find.  You could do this board game style by putting tokens on a map and making them navigate the location or you could just decide it on the fly.  It's up to you.

During the build phase, you need to decide how many items they can build and if time will factor into it or simply what they have in their inventory.  Bear in mind how long you want it to take for them to purify water or grow crops.  You won't want this to occur in real-time as it would be very dull to have to get through fourteen days to make things happen so maybe have each phase represent a week of activities.

What they build should also have meaning during the gameplay and roleplay parts as well.  You could assign bonuses or penalties depending on what they have but other than slowing the PCs down when things get too rough I would focus on adding roleplaying pressures.  Describe the aches and pains of sleeping poorly ... describe the taste of dog food when they lack vegetables for soup ... describe the pangs of thirst ... describe the aching cold ... describe a day spent with nothing to read and nothing to do ... describe the maddening lack of information on how things are progressing for lack of a radio.  Each day, no matter what they have got and what they have recently built, describe what they lack and make it ache.

When the characters don't eat, simply progress them through categories that are easy to understand.  Slightly Hungry.  Hungry.  Starving.  Starving.  Dead.  Same thing with a lack of sleep or creeping sadness.  Reinforce the sensations of it most of all by describing the physical issues within each problem.  That will be the most galvanising thing for the players. 

When it gets cold, you could make one of them them draw from five cards to see if they get sick - increase the number of illness cards if they are exhausted, starving or if the temperature has gotten quite low.

So that it doesn't just become a depressing spiral of angst, ensure that there are some moments of levity as well.  People request for help and offer it.  People repay their debts when the PCs help them out.  Some of the locations are open to trade.  Some are robbed.  Some are cruel.  Most are just trying to survive.

Anyway, a campaign based around This War of Mine or including elements of it, should appeal to -

Communicators who find personal interaction and psychological horror interesting may enjoy it quite a bit though anyone who's main desire is for politics may find it sorely lacking unless they can affect alliances and recruit NPCs over to their way of thinking.

Explorers may enjoy the voyeuristic thrill of poking through people's homes and businesses while on scavenging missions so play it up and ensure little secrets are found here and there.  Keep it lively and keep the descriptions full of unqiue moments.

Action Heroes will stick a target on some of the bad guys and want their revenge.  If they succeed, they will love it.  If they fail, or fail too often, they will become frustrated.  They may be able to do it for a session as a favour to other players but this is not a good game for them long-term.

Tacticians will find it irritating because there's no win condition other than base survival.  Every decision they make is as bad as it is good.  Oh you built a cage to trap animals?  Well now we don't have a heater ... or a vegetable garden ... or an upgraded machine shop.  Some may enjoy this, plenty won't.

Investigators won't have much in the way of questions to solve and cases to follow.  They, like the action heroes and tacticians, could enjoy the setting but not the style of This War of Mine.  They may well find it dull.

So if you want to check out the trailer, you can find it here.

For the next Game Translation (which will be in a fortnight's time), you have a choice of these: Wastelanders 2, Wolfenstein, Dead Space, or Vampire: the Masquerade (Bloodlines).

If you want to see the list of games I've done thus far, you can find the Game Translation series starter over here.

How The LARP Went

When I initially planned my LARP back in January, my plans revolved around an expectation of between 25 - 35 players.  I don't know why I was so ambitious.  I suppose because I knew I had a ridiculous amount of both interactive and decorative elements and I knew that hundreds of folks in my home city have LARPed before over the years.  If they had gone to LARPs that had fewer (sometimes even no) props, phys-reps and interactive elements that you could touch and discover, surely they would be eager to come along to my LARP simply to bathe in the ambiance if nothing else.

No such luck.  Whether due to LARPer burnout or a lack of interest in vampire, or the shortcomings of free advertising, we ended up having only 12 tickets purchased.

Or should I say, loads of luck ... because this ended up being a really awesome LARP and it could only have happened with a small but wickedly awesome bunch of LARPers, first timers and experienced.

Sometimes things work out for the best when they don't go according to plan.  After all, a 30 player adventure-style game is difficult indeed, especially when you're using dice and therefore going more down the path of murder mystery style clues than boffer weapons and swinging traps.

Still the realisation that I had fewer players meant I couldn't put all my reliance on simply giving a bunch of players opposing goals and letting them "have at each other" for 6 1/2 hours.  A dozen players can easily make amends or choose to quietly hold a grudge after a couple hours.  While thirty folks will get in each other's way often enough to make peace (or at least a new status quo) hard to grasp, a dozen individuals will get enough time to resolve their differences if they need to.

And yes, this is a vampire game, but without crazy levels of escalation, you also run out of things to do.  There's only so many folks you can give a rumour to and so many ears to whisper "Don't trust him" in before you've done it all.

So I needed a plot framework *and* I needed a capstone ending. 

And I only realised I needed these things two weeks before the LARP began.

Naturally I only discovered what the framework would be on the Monday before game and I only discovered the ending on Tuesday.  And yes, yes, I've heard that you don't need to come up with endings in LARPs because the players will all mystically come to a fitting conclusion that is mutually satisfactory and needs no GM involvement and HOGWASH I say.  Pure hogwash.

Creating a game with no ending in mind works for *some* LARPs but not for *all* LARPs and it certainly would've rung a death knell for this game which was otherwise great but really needed something to keep it from trailing off into speculation and confusion.  But I'll discuss that more tomorrow.

Worthy Link: Play-by-Post

In place of reading more stuff from me for the week, check out this awesome Paizo Thread on running a decent Play-by-Post!

LARP Preparation Trumps Game Translation

All right, I admit it, I was wrong.  You won't be getting a Game Translation this week as I'm still too busy preparing for my LARP.  What with a player meet up yesterday, GM meet up tomorrow, and player meet up on Friday evening -- and full time work every day but Wednesday (a half day), I'm a little flat out getting everything re-jigged for Saturday.

Luckily all of my research into various LARPs has finally paid off as I not only have a pretty good framework to keep people thoroughly occupied but I also have an ending.  A real bona fide ending!  And I don't mean an "outro" where the GM narrates a conclusion which can be great fun but always functions more of an epilogue than an ending due to player passivity.  I mean something the players can do which involves real dramatic tension!

This is a major relief for me because if you have played dice LARPs before where you use randomised rolls (or card draws or whatever) to settle combat, you can't just have a hoard kick in the door and up tension that way.  I mean, you *could* but unless the combat is over quickly or involves a small number of players (doable with 12, I suppose) it often turns into a grind that can still make for a satisfying conclusion but it's not something I would want to rely on with *this* game.

On the other hand, generally you can't just throw a final puzzle into the mix (few players involved) and social wrangling can work but you need a sizable cast (which would go against the theme of this session) so instead I went with the core definition of player interactivity.

Decision making.

In the end, everything (even combat, especially *interesting* combat) boils down to making meaningful decisions.  So why not make that the main attraction?  Strip it to its core and let the players decide something that truly matters.  Naturally spending a full 6 1/2 hours making one decision is hard to pull off outside of Nordic LARP so I have another plot line that is meaningful and adds shading to the final decision but isn't wrapped up in it per se.

With a real ending, everything is falling into place but it needs a little extra work to ensure that it has the support it needs for the players to make a real decision on the matter.

More details to come once the game is done!

Vampire LARP ... eep

So my first big vampire LARP as part of the Adelaide Roleplaying Community Incorporated is due to kick off this Saturday.  I'm kinda nervous.  It was initially slated to run with 30 people so all I had to do was ensure we had enough Floor GMs and Assistant GMs.  We had a nice hall, fancy decorations, and some really neat character goals to keep things going for the six and a half hours and to justify the $16 non-concession door price.

Then we had 12 people purchase tickets.

Ye gads....  You can't rely on 12 people to entertain themselves for 6 and a half hours.  Well, you can, but you shouldn't, because they won't be very entertaining 9 / 10.

So I'm having to shift things around, take the original advertised concept and mould it a bit so that everything I said about the game remains true but there's more stuff to do and keep them occupied.  As it's a dice LARP I can't rely on drumming up buddies to charge in there as bad guys because, well, dice LARP combat even between 12 people is pretty boring, so I need to find ways to keep them entertained that doesn't rely on NPCs.

For a little while, I panicked.  I won't lie.  I considered swapping venues and building up a real murder mystery style game, very Lovecraftian, lots of props, but swapping venues a week beforehand is generally a bad idea.  It looks sloppy.  Plus I didn't have enough time to really do all the props and handouts that would make that work.

So I stole a couple Nordic ideas through a lens of Vampire: the Requiem.  We should have more than enough stuff to keep folk entertained and busy.  6 1/2 hours.  12 players.  The time allotment works brilliantly as well.

Naturally I can't discuss it upfront as some of my players will read this but I will be able to give you all of the details next week.

Also sorry I've been slack with this blog.  I've been busy with LARPs and life and stuff.  I'll do up a Game Translation this Wednesday on This Is War to make up for it.

Wrath of the Righteous: New Encounter (Children of Drezen)

Story Summary
Yaniel was a bright-eyed paladin who made frequent forays into the worldwound atop her mighty steed and but for a few tumbles with an aasimar paladin she was focused on her work.  Her focus caused her to ignore certain signs of pregnancy until it was too late and she had been snatched by Abyssal forces and granted to the Invidiak in 4694.  He soon discovered her pregnancy and took great delight in wearing her while describing the symptoms of her pregnancy and the guarantee of her child's soon-to-be warped nature.

Although she knew that her child would be tainted, Yaniel could not help but call out to a gentler goddess for assistance in granting one wish.  She prayed to Shelyn to ensure that her child would know her love, no matter what would happen later, for the child was blameless in its affliction.  Shelyn could no more get involved in rescuing Yaniel and her child from their fate than Iomedae but this wish she could grant.

While Yaniel survived the birth, she did not survive long for soon after she was taken by another demoness and cocooned so that the demon could wear her likeness.  Her child, on the other hand, was passed into the communal nursery with all of the others.  There was some concern that he would consume the other children but none would deny the Invidiak's wishes (at least, none who would care).

The child's celestial blood would normally have been entirely extinguished but for the ever present love he felt from his mother.  Instead it interwove with the Abyssal infusion of essence just enough to allow the son a tiny crack, a mere sliver, of human conscience.  This was never enough to make him a good person, or even neutral, but it allowed him to have human attachments fostered by his understanding of a mother's love for her child.  This makes him redeemable with the same strength of chaotic evil alignment as would be found in tieflings on the nastier side of the band.

It is now 4713.  The child, Willem, is now seventeen, though he has aged more slowly and therefore has the mind, build and maturity of a thirteen-year-old.  Rather than being treated as impressive or special, he has lived his life much like any other tiefling - albeit one who was more dangerous to cross.  He is a 1st level expert who spent much of his life in the mines being treated as simple by the other humans who didn't realise that he was simply aging more slowly.

Introduction

Once the PCs' army finish taking apart Drezen's defences, Willem will approach them from the cover of the one of the buildings and offer information on the whereabouts of the two nursery and mine/school.  Willem doesn't fancy his chances out in the open with them, presuming he'll be destroyed, and will attempt to flee out the back window and fly away if they approach him. 

Any attempts to Sense Motive (DC 15) him will reveal that he isn't leading them into a trap, that he fears for his own safety and that he doesn't trust them an inch with his own life but believes that the children have a better chance with paladins (whom he assumes will execute them) than with the cultists (whom he assumes will ritually slaughter them in agonising rites of apology to their demonic masters). 

Attempts to Intimidate him into surrendering will automatically fail unless they can surround / trap him (which is hard to do with his incorporeal options, see "Half-Invidiak" template in Demons Revisited).  Attempts to Bluff him into giving further information as a distraction while others circle around behind him may work (his Sense Motive is +6) but only for 1d4+2 rounds (enough for a single question and answer).  Attempts to use Diplomacy into gathering his trust is particularly hard (DC 35 as he is hostile / terrified for his life).  It is easier to use Diplomacy on him once he is captured as by that point he will feel that there is no point fighting them.

If they attack him, they will likely immediately kill him with an attack or two so do give them a Sense Motive check to determine his motivations especially once they see what he truly looks like.  It's hard to confuse a half-demon with a tiefling, after all.

Capturing him alive will net them 1d6 goods and 1d4 potions as he tries to curry their favour.  He will remain with them for a single night before whisperings among the paladins spook him into trying to flee again.  He won't run if they win over Mr. Fiprac (located in the school) as he trusts the man as a sort of father figure.  Instead he will want a sword and the chance to join them in an attack against his father.  He won't survive a delve into the basement so it's best they leave him behind.

Deskari Nurseries

Due to the risks of raising children around surly, hostile and aggressive demons, the humanoid and tiefling armies have taken to hiding their children away within two underground nurseries built into basements -- halving the chance of a bored demon choosing to murder all of the cultists children at once.  The children's tiefling lineage is the only thing that protects them from rickets due to lack of sunlight and the clerics that look after them are harsh but not particularly abusive for fear of angering the various parents of such children.  After all, only the children of important cultists are raised in relative safety here rather than with their families.

1. Deskari Temple Entrance: Five lvl 3 clerics (see Scholar Priest, NPC Codex) kneel on red cushions around a bowl of haemophagic locusts placed before a carved idol of Deskari.  They frequently make offerings of blood from their own wrists to the swarm.  The locust swarm will remain in its bowl unless the intruders attack.  While diplomacy is an option, it will only work on a DC 30 roll.

2. Living Area: This area simply has a hearthfire, table and two bench seats capable of seating three people each.  There are cooking utensils and a small open scullery and pantry beside the hearthfire.  The pantry contains enough supplies to keep the toddlers and clerics fed for a week.  Should the PCs choose a genocidal answer to these children, they can gain 3 points of consumable food for their armies instead.

3. Bedroom: There are three bunk beds in this room as well as an elaborate stone altar to Deskari with a few old blood stains upon it.  Depending on your player's sensibilities (i.e. trigger warning), you might include a flip up lid revealing a chamber full of flesh eating beetles with a stack of oddly shaped babies' skulls and bones forming a decorative mural on one wall.  The clerics ritualistically murder children who have some visible disability.

4. Nursery: Thirteen tiefling babies lie in make-shift cots with a range of different tiefling aspects - including the odd qlippoth marking due to certain primal abyssal energies rather than bred heritage.  Three bottles of breast milk sit on the dresser.  These self-cleaning conjuration bottles can each provide sustenance to a baby seven times per day. 

5. Playroom: Eight toddlers play together with makeshift toys on dirty bedding.  There is a cage in this room for disobedient toddlers.   All are tieflings due to the contamination of the Worldwound.

NOTE: These tiefling babies and toddlers are all Chaotic Neutral though they are by no means easy to raise (i.e. babies are demanding, frequently cry for no real reason, rarely sleep through the night; toddlers are destructive, stubborn and throw more tantrums than normal).

Schoolyard Mine

These clerics are less considerate of their charges.  All but one fully enjoy inflicting unfair punishments for random irritations to keep the children on their toes as any claimed child would have been returned to their parents for training at this point.  Once a tiefling child turns approximately five years old they are sent to 'school'.  There is a miniature celebration for the new attendees who are fed cake and apple juice and allowed to play in the front room.  They're even allowed a night's stay in real beds (otherwise occupied by the cultist slave drivers). 

The following morning, though, the previous day's lies are ripped away and they are bullied mercilessly into the mines.  Once the kids hit puberty they are drafted into the army (if needed) or left to work the mines.  The half-invidiak, Willem, was an exception to this because he chose to remain in the mines despite the ill-treatment of others, finding safety and succor in the darkness.

Only one individual, Mr. Fiprac, has been good to the children.  Mr. Fiprac is a true neutral level 8 elf ranger (see Orc Slayer in NPC codex but amend favoured enemy to humans).  During a sortie into the wildlands, he was startled by a fiendish bear and fell into a crevasse during a sandstorm, breaking his leg.  Against all odds he managed to crawl / hobble back to Drezen but found the demons less than friendly, barely managing to hide in the school mine.

Although he is a capable ranger, Mr. Fiprac lacked friends among the cultists and therefore couldn't get his leg injury healed.  Since demons have little patience with those who show weakness around them, he knew that leaving the school for long would be a short route to death.  He managed to retain his position in the mine as a teacher, using his obvious patience and guile to successfully ensure the school made its quote of distance per day, even through bedrock.  This proved vital to the cultists as failure to meet requirements meant a cultist would lose a limb and two of the kids.

When the invasion happened, Mr. Fiprac faked the children's escape and instead hid them in the furthest section of the tunnel system.  They managed to roll two barrels of water with them when the fighting broke out but are now desperately hungry but too scared to leave in case the cultists sacrifice them to please Deskari. 

The cultists themselves retreated to the upper areas once it became obvious the city would fall.  Now they surround Priestess Halla, a vicious 8th level cleric of Deskari (base off the Death Priest in the NPC codex), who had been making a deal with some of the lower ranking clerics when the armies attacked.  Finding herself cut off from the rest of the battle above, she decided to wait below until the paladins were defeated.  She has summoned two Incubi to her side and is in the process of sacrificing her cultists so that they might arise more quickly from Abyssal larvae.

Front House: Entering the mines is relatively easy if you know where it is.  The house is one of many taken over by cultists and the door to the mines has a bracket where a heavy wooden bar would be slid into place each night to keep the children inside.  There is currently no bracket in place.

Cellar: The uppermost room within the mining complex was once a cellar that has been updated with a large table and benches, shelves along one wall containing various tools, a few barrels of food and ale, and a wardrobe full of tattered children's clothing and the sleeping mats they use at night.  The clerics themselves slept upstairs.  There is no light source in here.  The children are expected to live by their darkvision.  A long ladder leads down at a ramp-like angle for forty feet over a deep gap to a ledge-like protrusion.

Ledge: This thick six-foot-wide ledge contains down and around the edge of the hole, occasionally broken up and requiring another ramp, with a couple of passageways snaking off of it.  The hole is far deeper than this ledge (created by earth shifting magic) reaches.  The low intonement of prayers to Deskari can be heard in one of the side passageways.

Chanters Room: Halla believes that Deskari can be appeased by sacrificing one cultist a night for their cowardice.  She first carves the group's sins into the sacrifice's skin before bloodily butchering them upon an altar.  The sacrifice itself is pleased to be so anointed and chants alongside the rest.  There are no children in this room.  When Halla sees the PCs, she will attack as will her Incubi and five remaining cultists who have the same stats as those in the nursery.

Bolt Hole: This room is at the end of one of the abandoned passageways.  The cultists assumed there was no one here because they figured that the children would have gotten hungry and gone to find them.  Instead they all crouch in one small partial tunnel that branches off a long and winding one, using another such room as the latrine.  They are hungry and desperate.  Mr. Fiprac defends them with his life but if they clearly serve the paladin army or a good God, then he will throw himself at their mercy and hope that they may all be freed.  Since the PCs are likely to outright attack him, it's best to give them a Sense Motive DC 15 roll to identify his defensive and protective demeanour, otherwise they may slaughter him before realising their error.  There are 35 kids - all tieflings.

 

Wrath of the Righteous: Sword of Valor: Part C

I was extremely excited to run this book as it meant we could play with armies ... something my solo player would be quite keen to do.  So when we grabbed the Armies Character Sheet and popped in the Heirs to the Wardstone paladin army and his custom tiny Rosethorn Army, we were excited to see how it played through.  I wasn't as sure about Part C as I tend to find dungeons quite boring but this one worked out pretty well.  My only petty gripe is that there were a number of blank rooms in the dungeon and I had no idea what they might been used for beyond defensive measures.  It wasn't such a big deal as I have a vivid imagination but it still made me occasionally pause to think.

I'll admit it.  I don't have a head for rules.  I can deal with the basics but I'm likely to forget the meaning of certain feats and spells.  Rather than have my head in a book for most of the game, quickly cross referencing and checking, I either ignore it, query my player (who has a better head for rules) or use the online SRD quietly while he's busy setting up his four characters' next actions.

 

That's right.  Four characters!  He doesn't roleplay them all, only Alfie and very occasionally the new guy when he can think of something snippy to say to the dragon (now a very young dragon rather than a wyrmling).  He does control them during combat and level them up occasionally.  Other than dealing with their inventory, he's enjoying it pretty well.  Taking Sosiel in the second strike at Castle Drezen tipped him over the line on occasion a few times but as that cleric was only Level 5, he was relegated to walking healer anyway.

 

So who was the magical fourth helper?

 

I thought this game was heavy on demons and light on celestials, so I threw in a Vulpinal as support - sent by Shelyn herself.  After all, why is the Worldwound *only* a mortal concern?

 

It's not a fault with the adventure path, which focuses on players actions after all, but I saw an opportunity so I took it.  My player therefore equipped the Vulpinal, Harri, with some of the loot that he found and the game progressed.

 

So the first strike at Castle Drezen found them badly affected by the fireballing brimoraks in the gatehouses and they only survived that because the Vulpinal teleported into one of the rooms and unlocked it from the inside, allowing them all to flee inside and heal up while the brimoraks came out of their room and entered from the outside.  They took out the vrock with better ease this time, in part due to the dragon's increase in damage die and number of attacks. 

 

They had to fall back after the encounter with the succubus - she managed to charm them all after suggesting that the vulpinal state she isn't evil and then commanded three of them to wait outside in case of enemy attacks while she had a conversation with Alfie.  She proceeded to try to find his resentment toward Drezen but, failing that, decided to simply seduce the fool.  She inflicted four negative levels before he managed to succeed on the Suggestion roll to stop kissing her.  Realising he'd been injured by her broke the charm effect and he grabbed her in a grapple and started damaging her.  It was a rough fight but he managed to kill her in a nook, using her as a defense against the charmed crusaders. 

 

They then headed back to base with Alfie feeling very sorry for himself - having lost his first kiss to a demoness!  Lex, the Umbral Dragon, didn't help when she regaled him with how those who die from a succubus' kiss are damned to the pit and their bodies rise again as undead.  She also poked fun at his obvious anxiety about discussing sex, calling Mendevians prudes.  Then she grew bored and went to sleep, leaving him to have a heart to heart with Eliska.  Eliska tried to coax out of him any aspects of his tiefling nature, but other than a destructive and impulsive personality, he was pretty good.  Gooder than good almost.

 

She pronounced him an aasimar in disguise and they had a little laugh about that, before she mentioned that she and her team were once Nidalese slaves who had been washed in negative energy as babes in their mothers' womb so that they could work a particular mine.  She was the most dhampyr of the lot of them (the others were a variant dhampyr of my construction - they gain darkvision and negative energy affinity but retain the bonus skills of a human).  She stated that their inhuman nature draws them to depression and suicide, which was a sobering thought.

 

Once fully healed and rested, they had to face a tiny army of man eating aurochs who were part of a herd just outside Drezen.  They won, easily, and Alfie took his team back into the castle - choosing the tower entrance rather than enter that gateway again.  The dragon flew up a knotted rope and it was an easy climb.  Once inside, Lex declared that she should be allowed three nights to sleep on all the treasure as payment for her work and that she should also be allowed to keep the tower.  Alfie promised her a new tower but she wanted that one.

 

I also realised that just as unintended evil actions pull someone toward evil, so should unintended good actions pull someone toward good, so since Lex was raised as a hatchling by Eliska and hasn't had much opportunity to do many evil things (other than take real sadistic pleasure in the kill as desecrating bodies can hardly be a sin to a carrion eater), I'm shifting her toward neutral.  She'll still have evil urges but they've been weakened by the wardstone.  She still thinks of herself quite proudly as Chaotic Evil, though.  I doubt she could ever become good.  She wouldn't see the point.

 

Anyway, they found the succubus who self-charms herself so that she can look like a charmed victim and swashbuckler tied to a bunk and chose to keep her in manacles but release her from the bunk and temporarily suppress the charm spell using Protection from Evil.  She trailed after them up until they defeated Joran's babau guards and were attacked by Staunton Vhane himself who rode in on his wasp (10 foot high ceilings, remember) and threatened to kill Joran for his weakness.

 

On the second turn, just before she would have attacked, she was approached by Harri with a clearly helpful look on his face as he reached out to cast Dispel Evil on her to help against the charm....  She failed her Spellcraft roll and thought he was about to release her from the manacles.  Instead she abruptly failed her save and was banished to the pit.  Surprise all round but it significantly prevented this battle from becoming a slaughter.

 

The next surprise was that after Staunton Vhane struck Lex for some crippling blows, he then failed his roll against Joran's suggestion to drop his weapon and flee the castle.  Lex and Alfie followed him, striking him in the back for two rounds before he came to his senses and attacked them in turn (as his previous command became obviously fatal).  The others focused on the two fiendish minotaurs but, proving how much weaker they were at combat than Lex and Alfie, they still needed those two characters help to end the battle.

 

Finally they all retired to Staunton Vhane's room to regroup, catch their breath and read Staunton's diary.  In desperation, Joran has thrown his lot in with them and renounced his god, Droskar, for failing to provide him with any real benefits.  And that's where I've left these daring heroes ... with Lex curled up on the bed, Alfie reading, Harri on guard, Joran moping on the edge of the bed, and Eliska reading over Alfie's shoulder but wishing she could just drink some dwarven ale and head to bed.