30 Day D&D Challenge: Day 15-Favorite Monster (Undead)

I'd say my favorite undead monster has always been the ghoul.  But the kind of ghoul I've preferred has matured over the years.

The first kind of ghoul I encountered and loved to hate was the old AD&D kind, the kind that is a major terror to low-level parties due to its overpowering ability to Paralyze with a touch.  A paralyzing touch power combined with its claw, claw, bite triple-attack and lack of any need for a morale check (undead traits) left many a 1st-level fighter seizing on the dirt floor while the beast took its time to kill off the weaker members of the party (except the elves, who were somehow immune and able to run away). Of course anyone killed (but not totally devoured) by a ghoul becomes a ghoul.  And if that wasn't enough, those nasty bastards traveled in packs of 2d12!  Yipe!

But since those days I've found other kinds of ghouls in rpgs that I've come to appreciate.

There's the Call of Cthulhu ghouls who are goat-legged dog-headed beasts who only eat dead bodies and prefer not to mess with the living.  In fact, if you disturb them in a tomb where they're feasting on freshly-exhumed corpses they scurry away into the darkness.  This paints a much more interesting picture in my mind, because as you explore the tomb you know they're out there.  How long until they get fed up with your interference before they decide to take back their territory?  How long do you have to find the crucial clue you need hidden amongst the ruined sarcophagi?  Will they come back when your back is turned?  These ghouls are even semi-intelligent and can even speak under the right conditions.  Not only that, some of them are actually people who're just so depraved they live amongst the ghouls and feast with them!  Spooky stuff, and even though they sound weaker in stats, they are much more foreboding and interesting than just a pack of two-legged carrion crawlers.

But I've since found a third type of ghoul.  The "ghul."  This is the desert-dwelling creature that takes the shape of the person it most recently devoured, and likes to lure children to abandoned places and slay them.  I like the idea that the ghoul actually changes form into the person it ate last.  Like, not a perfect copy, its still all dead and zombified-looking, but perhaps in a low light setting could pass for your friend...until its too late!  You can imagine this somehow being more horrifying than actually encountering a ghoul-ified version of your friend, because then you'd be at least "putting them to rest."  But if you kill a ghul that just looks like your pal, you realize that their body is still out there somewhere, just be rotting in some mud pit not at rest, or possibly even being eaten by other ghuls...

30 Day D&D Challenge: Day 14-Favorite NPC

I gotta go with the Scottish/Irish Bartender for Favorite NPC.  You know the guy, every DM everywhere uses him.  99% of the time the players never ask his name so he rarely ever needs one.  And every single DM can do the voice.  Its a cross between an angry Sean Connery and that one Blacksmith from Diablo 2.

"Whut can I do fer ya?!"


Sometimes he's a dwarf, sometimes he's a human, but he's definitely always bald, and always at least has a mustache (if not full beard).  Depending on how much I want to move the players along, and how creative I'm feeling, he could also run the Inn, the Blacksmith shop, and the General Store.  Basically, this guy can be found wherever things need to be purchased in a town.  One-stop shop merchant for every lazy DM everywhere.

30 Day D&D Challenge - Day 13-Favorite Trap/Puzzle

Traps are some of my favorite things in D&D, and while I've put forth a number of puzzles, riddles, and nefarious traps as a DM that I might describe, I can't help but think of one of the simplest yet most-effective traps I've come across as a player.

It would be the time our old 2nd Edition D&D group was hunting down a Lich's phylactery (I think?) and we came to a Well we had heard was an entrance to his tomb.  As we discussed how to knot the various sets of 50' rope we had brought along and who to send down first, Marcus got impatient and decided to jump in the well since he didn't have any paper on him that could get wet and ruined (our DM was very strict about those sorts of things), and he wanted to move the game along.  Upon hitting the water, the DM rolled a handful of dice behind the screen and said "You take 26 points of damage!"  This almost-killed or immediately-killed (not sure) poor Marcus, so Quinn decided he had to act fast!

Assuming the water was in fact acid or some magic death-water, and having on him a 'Protection from Water' scroll (in 2e anyone could use Protection scrolls), Quinn pulled out the scroll and slid down into the well while casting it so he could rescue Marcus.  The water was repelled, and Quinn saw the entrance to the Lich's lair, as well as Marcus's body laying on the ground. But it was covered in Crawling Claws!  The Lich had filled the well with Crawling Claws, which is what tore Marcus to pieces.  So simple of a trap, yet so effective. The claws immediately lept on Quinn and his only option was to drink his treasured Potion of Gaseous Form to escape, not only using two of his extremely-rare one-use Magic items in two rounds, but also leaving the body of Marcus at the bottom of the well to be torn to shreds by the animated hands for his final death.  It was a sad day in the Forgotten Realms.

30 Day D&D Challenge: Day 12-Favorite Dungeon Type/Location

I gotta go with the classic "Ruins-in-a-dark-wood" for this one.  I mean, its timeless really.  Its a picturesque setting, it can house both giant spiders and undead monstrosities, and the ruins always have cool names like "The Dungeons of Thraxgar" or "The Tower of Ulthuun."  And at the bottom there's almost always some sort of Vampire.  Like I said, classic.

While exploring the "Venom Woods" we found one set of dungeon ruins called "The Ruins of Kroclakah."  Inside I believe we fought a rust monster, gargoyles, ettercaps, a gelatinous cube, a mimic, giant preying mantises, ran into an entire room of brown mold, and at the bottom fought a Death Kiss Beholder, which is like a beholder except its eyestalks are replaced with blood-draining hooked tentacles for extra grossness.  Yeah, you really can't go wrong with the classic Forest Ruins for the sheer variety of beasties you can fit in there.

30 Day D&D Challenge: Day 11-Favorite Adventure You Have Ran

This one has to be the Castles Forlorn boxed set campaign set in Ravenloft, but admittedly that may only be because its the only successful campaign I've ever run to completion in Ravenloft.  I actually ran it as a 3e module and had to do a lot of stat conversions, plotline adjustments, and re-writing, but still it was oh so worth it.

This campaign had crazy stuff!  Hyper-dangerous face-eating Goblins (called "Goblyns"), Vampires, Ghosts, (including one Vampire-Ghost), wild mean Druids, a Loch Ness Monster, and Time Travel!  Yes, the campaign features a mechanic where while the players are exploring the main big-bad's castle, there's a percentage chance every time they enter a room they will travel back-and-forth through time 300 years.  This sounds messy, and it was difficult to keep track of as a DM at first, until I made three physical copies of the castle map for the various time periods and just switched between them so I could keep all my notes straight.  After that the time travel part played itself.  I even shoe-horned in a magical MacGuffin they had to find called "The Chronostone" to help justify the time travel effect (the original campaign didn't explain it as anything other than a "Ravenloft Curse").

Castles Forlorn is gotta be my favorite Adventure/Campaign I've ever run as a DM, and if you ever see it in a used book store I recommend picking it up and checking out the time travel stuff.  Anybody know of other great campaign boxed sets out there?

30 Day D&D Challenge: Day 10-Craziest thing that’s happened that you saw (to party/character/your players etc)

I'm going to keep this one strictly on D&D just to narrow it down some. I've played so many games with so many systems with hilarious events that I can't possibly pick the "craziest thing" out of all of them, especially when Paranoia is on the table.  So D&D only.  Here we go.

The first one I can think of is when a Paladin (hey Wes!) in a new game I was running mistook a Cockatrice for a Basilisk.  What's the big difference, you ask?  Well, I already wrote about the hilarious results on my old blog back in the day, so I won't retread old ground.  You can check it out here.  Serious lulz.

I guess I'm going to go with a game I was running where the players were running an espionage/sabotage mission, each in separate area of a "dungeon" (they were actually inside a giant mechanical golem, but...nevermind that), and a player in my game, Valgyar the Monk, who was invisible, flying, and Bull Strength'd, decided he'd sneak/float up to a Minotaur that was standing at the edge of a ledge and push him off in a surprise attack.  He could've just snuck by him, but the temptation was too great.  I added up the ridiculous bonuses he had and realized it was like a +16 for a DC 15 attempt (3e rules).  So I smirkingly said:  "Sure, roll anything but a 1." (on a d20)  However, this is the same player who played Marcass (the Carcass) all those years ago.  Naturally, he rolled a 1.  The Minotaur snatched him out of the air (canceling his invisibility) and beat the hell out of him.  Oh, and all the alarms went off, alerting all the guardian monsters and ruining the sabotage attempt, and the other players had to rush through traps to get to him before he died (again).  It was a ridiculous (and incredibly unlikely) failure that led to the entire carefully-crafted sabotage plan by the players to end up being a 3-hour straight up survival brawl (and near TPK) inside a giant metal golem/dungeon.

30 Day D&D Challenge: Day 9-Favorite Character You Haven’t Played

I'm not clear on the question being asked for this one.  Is it a character I made but haven't every played a game with, or is it any character I've ever seen but haven't played as?  I'm going to say it can be any character I've seen, just to open up the field.  But I'm also going to say it can't be an NPC I created or used as a DM, because that kind of counts as 'playing' them.

There are a lot of good characters out there I've seen my friends create and play.  There's Marcus (the Carcass), the human fire mage who couldn't ever get past 4th level (due to dying).  Buster Pelgrande the backstab-happy halfling thief with his magical dagger "Spinethruster."  Serpico, the Lawful Good Necromancer in Ravenloft just trying to keep his village safe from evil monsters and his family from the G'Henna secret police.  Tersus, the scheming Lawful Evil mage/thief, leader of the local Assassin's guild and always sporting his signature magical red cloak he would use to escape trouble; the "Cape of the Montebank". There's Fignor, Fulthor, Drogar, and RustyGuts; the four dwarf warriors in our sporatic but really fun Warhammer Fantasy campaign.  Those guys are like the three stooges but extremely violent towards kneecaps and groins.  Wait, does Warhammer Fantasy count in the D&D Challenge?  Yeah, I'm going to say that it does.  Blog.

Okay, it is a really tough choice, but after careful consideration I've come to the following conclusion.  My favorite character I haven't played in a D&D campaign is:

RatThrasher!

A Goblin Ranger (?) we originally encountered in the sewers of Luskan while infiltrating the city to rescue a political prisoner from Neverwinter.  We paid him handsomely to lead us through the twisting passageways under Luskan and get us to the prison tower.  He carried a rusty-looking shortsword and spouted short dumb statements in a high-pitched yoda-like screech (that surely made the DM's throat hurt after a while).  We thought he was just the comic relief for us until we ran into a group of acid-spitting giant slugs in the sewers.  Quinn lost his shield that day to the metal-eating acid loogies from multiple slugs, and it looked like Marcus was probably going to die again to another.  But RatThrasher came up behind the slug and leaped onto its back, chopping it deep with his rusty-(looking) shortsword before running to help Quinn.  After the battle he said nonchalantly something along the lines of "Slug makes good eat when sick of rat!" or something, and we all knew we had just met the most bad-ass Goblin in the Realms.

Later RatThrasher was actually played by people in the DM's gigantic dungeon crawl adventures, but I've never played him myself.  He's my Favorite Character I Haven't Played.