Retreat Forward

It seems that each journey to Dwimmermount is taking a heavier and heavier toll on our heroes. Every member of the party was wounded last session, with Decanus Marcus Petillius Nepos and Bael suffering the most serious injuries. After a week recuperating in a private room at the Green Dragon Inn (paid for with newly won gold from Dwimmermount), the group was more or less back in shape, though Marcus found that his near death experience had left him weaker and more easily winded, and poor Bael was feeling a noticeable stiffness in his back. [After rolls on the Permanent Wounds chart]. On the night before the party set out on their third journey to the dungeon, they stopped in to the Flask and Scroll Tavern for a hearty meal, and found the place crowded with people. Zazik asked another patron, a swarthy farmhand named Colter, just what the commotion was about. Colter explained that Typhon’s Fists, the famous adventuring party who had first gained access to Dwimmermount’s dungeons ne...

Pardon my pun in the title. I strolled over to check on the Silent Legions Kickstarter yesterday and noticed something... Oh good, they're up to 666 backers. Wait, WHAT? Quick, nobody else back this project. Ok, so that's not what I actually want. I wish Kevin Crawford (whom I secretly suspect to be a caffeine powered robot) as much success as possible. Still...if this project had stopped right there it would have been a very poetic coincidence.

On the day I backed the most excellent Silent Legions Kickstarter , I had first contemplated buying the brand new 7th Edition of Call of Cthulhu. Thanks to a cool group of gamers I met in Korea, I finally got to take Chaosium's version of the game off my always growing list of "games I own but have never played" last year. We played in a food court, under florescent lights, surrounded by Burger King and Taco Bell patrons, and it was still fun. Better yet, my oldest son played with us and had a good time. I passed on the original Kickstarter but was watching with great anticipation for the new edition to finally see release. For those who don't know, Call of Cthulhu is not a game that changes much from edition to edition. Unlike, say D&D, which is basically a totally different game every ten years or so, a new edition of Call of Cthulhu basically just means cleaned up typos, maybe a format change here, a little rules tweak there, and some new cover art. Wit...

INTRODUCTION James Maliszewski, the creator of Dwimmermount, felt that halfllings were too closely tied with Professor Tolkien’s Middle-Earth to really fit with the pulp-inspired adventure he was creating. Rather than merely eliminate halflings, however, James replaced them with a playable goblin race. Unfortunately, goblins didn’t make the final cut in the published Dwimmermount megadungeon. According to the authors, they were counting on the fan community to fill the void with their own take on goblins. In that spirit, I present this class, compatible with the ACKS version of Dwimmermount and inspired by the original goblin description as it appeared on Grognardia. Scroll to the very bottom if you'd like to download the PDF version. For an insight into my design, check out this thread . GOBLINS The goblins insist, with scowling stubbornness, that theirs is the only intelligent race native to the world. All the other sentient races are either visitors from some other pla...

The short version: Even though a goblin NPC played a role in the original Dwimmermount campaign, the published version of Dwimmermount doesn’t contain rules for goblin PCs, so I wrote some and put them  here .  WHY GOBLINS? The original Dwimmermount campaign included a goblin hireling named Brakk, who died when a bucket of acid fell on his head. James envisioned goblins as a replacement for halflings, which didn’t fit his vision of the pulp-fantasy inspired setting he was creating for his megadungeon. These goblins were less the twisted monsters of the Lord of the Rings movies and more the puckish fairy-folk of pre-Tolkien fantasy novels. I always really like the idea of altering D&D in subtle ways to make it better fit your vision of a campaign. Especially with original D&D and its imitators, the rules are just light enough to allow you to fill in details, taking the game in different directions while not deviating from the spirit of the rules. Outlawing halflin...

(An ongoing series in which I chronicle the adventures of my two oldest sons, ages 14 and 11, as they explore the Dwimmermount megadungeon.) Before We Begin This one's a little late. I'm not as prolific as some other bloggers, I know, but writing must be practiced to become a habit. Session 3 will probably appear in a couple of days, as we played that one last week. Also, I've had a few requests for my GM sheets. I'm not sure that it's in any kind of usable state at this point, but I do plan to eventually share it. For this session, I had hoped to spend a little more time in prep than I was able to. I’m not complaining here, but I do want to give you an idea of how much I’m putting into Dwimmermount and how much the product itself is helping me run things. To this end, let me say that the Dungeon Tracker has been a tremendous aid. This was one of the Kickstarter Add-on products. While I didn’t opt for a printed Dungeon Tracker, I do own it in PDF. It c...

A long time ago, I began to cobble together some GM aids that put all of the pertinent rules of ACKS into a 7 or so page document. Don’t get me wrong, ACKS uses OD&D as its base and is hardly a complicated game. The crunchy bits it introduces to that rules set are all things that I enjoy, such as clear mechanics for hiring henchmen and mercenaries. However, the book’s organization is a wee bit scattered, and I found myself flipping around more than I would have liked. Some of that will go away with experience, of course, but I’m now very motivated to finish said GM aid. As a further thought on organization, Dwimmermount has a few warts. Some of the important general information is set aside in its own chapter (doors, wandering monsters, etc.), which is very good for finding what you need during GM prep, but not so good when you’re trying to find something in the heat of the moment. For example, Zazik’s coughing fit was supposed to call for an encounter throw each round that ...