GaryCon XIII Post-Con Report

I attended GaryCon XIII virtually these past four days. I also worked two of those same days, so it wasn't a full convention for me. 

Thursday

Day 1, slot 1 of GaryCon was my first of three games I was running over Zoom. It was the classic AD&D module A3 Assault on the Aerie of the Slave Lords - part 1 (getting to Suderham through the salt mines). I had eight players sign-up and eight players show, which was a great start. After three hard-fought battles, the last two just barely won, the Slave Lord Hunters succeeded in clearing their way through the salt mines.

Some fun notes about our game session:

Elwita the Dwarf was played by Jonathan, the player who had been in my Lost Caverns of Tsojconth/Tsojcanth game at virtual GenCon last year.

Karraway had a Scroll of Remove Fear, but was the only member of the party affected by Fear (and while paralyzed). He cast almost none of his spells (so he has them for next time), and was the PC who came closest to dying.

I wasn't keeping track of Blodgett's Strength loss from those shadows, but since he started at a 9, he must have been very feeble by the end of that fight. Between that and being held and chewed on by the storoper, he was likely the second closest to dying.

When we were turning shadows at the end, we forgot that Eljayess was also a cleric! Eljayess was played by Neil Christiansen, one of the early players in the Hobby Shop Dungeon campaign, who also taught us that Eljayess stands for LJS, Larry J. Schick's initials!

We also learned that Phanstern's name was combined from two Shakespearean characters, which made it, coincidentally, even more apropos that I had replaced the "to be read out loud to the players" prologue for the adventure with one based on the famous "O for a muse of fire" prologue from Henry V.  

Despite being forewarned that limited resource management was going to be critical to surviving both rounds, the spellcasters Delgath and Phanstern had to burn though a lot of spells, and in Phanstern's case all but two spells!

Design Notes (SPOILERS, if you ever plan to play this as-is!)

I took the final encounter, dissembled it, and spread it around. Wimpell Frump, instead of being the powerful illusionist masquerading as Yeenoghu, became Wimpell Frump the slave accountant (and minor illusionist, not that he ever got a chance to cast a spell) the PCs had encountered first. Instead of being an illusion of an ankylosaur (and how would Frump even know what one looks like...?), the ankylosaur became real, their second encounter, and what I thought was a logical explanation for the Earth Dragon alluded to later in the module.

As written, the salt mine had gnoll guards, but they aren't guarding any prisoners/slaves/miners, so I did add those throughout and the PCs heard some of them murmuring from the gnoll lair they didn't visit. As-is, the gnolls aren't supposed to reinforce each other. I planned on having the gnolls from one room come and aid the other, but could not have anticipated that my players would lure one group (although unintentionally) back into the tunnel with them, so they would encounter both groups in the tunnel -- probably the toughest way to fight that joint encounter you could have possibly chosen.

As-is, the map railroads you through every encounter area one after another; I shook up the map and added tunnels that crisscrossed and let them take the rooms out of order or miss some altogether (plus I had added a few more!). By then I thought Wimpell would have been able to escape, but they were way too good at keeping him prisoner.

The storoper is supposed to be able to inject that paralyzing poison that makes it look like it petrified you, with no save, twice only -- but as the storoper's most interesting attack form, I decided to ignore that limitation. To balance it, I took away how you fight for the storoper after the initial paralysis wears off. Wandering aimlessly is only supposed to happen after the storoper dies, but moving it up made the "heh heh, you're stoned, guys" joke more obvious. This battle nearly did in the party, with over half the party wandering around "stoned" before it was over.

Yeenoghu and his attendant gnolls and ghouls were illusions in the original version, but the gnolls needed a leader better than Frump, so I invented Goom the Gnoll King, a gnoll 8th level fighter, with his 3 HD gnoll vassals. As the spawn of Yeenoghu, he could save vs. spells as if a magic-user and summon his vassals' shadows (the ghouls got a little upgraded). I figured the PC clerics would turn the shadows easily. Oops! It turned out to be a very hard battle, only barely won.

Friday

This was my one all-play day, with no events I was running. And, ...well, let's take them one at a time.

In slot 1, I was supposed to play "Lowdown in Highport," an original AD&D prequel adventure to the Slave Lords modules, which seemed highly apropos for me to play. However, it was run over a new site called Fantasy Grounds, and I could not get my computer to play any sound from that site. This had happened to me before, last year, when I tried playing a game over Discord, so I was ready with backup this time and tried listening over a laptop -- but I could not get sound to work over that device either! The DM did try cutting and pasting descriptions into the chat for me, but I couldn't interact with the setting at all, so I quit in frustration. Not a good start to the day -- and NOT a good first impression of Fantasy Grounds!

In slot 2, I played another original adventure (this one for Swords & Wizardry) called "Green Fire," over Skype. Skype worked okay, but it seemed to lag more than Zoom. It was fun playing a magic-user with a 5 Charisma and everyone was very appreciative of me choosing to memorize Strength to boost the already-strongest fighter in the party. The scenario was extremely simple -- travel away from the village and find a hut that a seemingly endless number of goblins pour out of and kill them until the time runs out and our DM had a very slow, leisurely pace to him. 

To be fair, it's possible that we weren't supposed to do that; I had suspected from the start that we were supposed to interrogate the prisoners in the village and find out more information of stuff to do in-town, and that the House of Endless Goblin Spawning was a red herring that got retconned into the end encounter after my vote was overruled by the party, who all wanted to head straight after the goblins. Either way, the point of the scenario seemed to be to introduce us to the DM's campaign setting, in the hope that we would want to revisit it.

Slot 3 of day 2 of GaryCon was Tim Kask's "The Wheel of Blame." Because of technical difficulties, it started over an hour late, but still ended on time.  One of the thrills of GaryCon is the chance to play with the Old Guard, the chance to walk back in time and see what it would have been like to game with them in the Early Days. 

But. 

But....What Tim ran was five unconnected escape rooms, and I hate escape rooms. Now, some of the time he was obviously flexible about what the escape was, but other times he was more adamant that we had to think of his way or we weren't getting out.  Interestingly, I played with my afternoon DM, from "Green Fire," so that was quite the coincidence. The best part was the few minutes I got to talk to Tim one-on-one after everyone else left.

Saturday

Slot "1" was not a real GaryCon event -- I ran my OD&D campaign's 20th session, wherein the Company of the White Oak (all 1st-4th level PCs) started exploring the Temple of Elemental Evil! Brigands were fought, treasure was found, and an attack on the Town of Hommlet was averted!

Slot 2 was part 2 of the Assault on the Aerie of the Slave Lords. Seven players (not all the same ones as last time, plus some new ones) explored Suderham, the middle third of the adventure that is all city-based. I had planned on tweaking Suderham, as I had the dungeon parts, but I had run out of time to do so and had to run this part as-is. Well, mostly as-is; getting into the city proved more interesting, as we roleplayed out the part only summarized in the module, where they capture some merchants and then pretended to be the drivers and guards working for the merchants to get in. Once they were in the city, the players, all or almost all of whom knew the adventure already, tried real hard not to use too much player knowledge, but easily followed the clues to get to the sewer entrance in one of the bawdy houses. And, again, we spent a good amount of time -- what amounted to more than our first hour -- on roleplaying through all this.  

More SPOILERS

When they found the dungeon (and then found it again, because they had overshot the concealed door in room 1 that led to the rest of the dungeon), they had a rough go of it with the flesh golem, which I treated as an almost full-strength flesh golem and not the watered down one found in the module. This sent them fleeing to rest and heal, which was tough on the scenario because it was supposed to be timed and their ability to regain spells was supposed to be limited. I did cop out and gave them some cleric spells back, and then they felt brave enough to go back and tackle my tweaked version of the sewer dungeon. 

They found the secret door that, in the original version routes them straight to the big boss battle, but I detoured them to the minotaur maze, as we had lots of time left. They spent what felt like a lot of time in the minotaur maze; the thief wanted to search every single 10' x 10' square for traps and I had to talk him out of it, for the good of the rest of the night. Things picked up when they found their way out of there. The gelatinous cube trap I kept as-is and that was very deadly. They also encountered some extra encounter areas I had added to the scenario, including one that gave them a chance to find a much-needed healing potion -- but of two potions they found, which was the good one? The ranger solved it by mixing them together and drinking both, so it both healed him and made him sick. They dodged the shambling mound in the "Grotto of Terror" by slowing it down with a Slow spell and floating across the water. Because we were now running out of time, I skipped the last encounter areas and got them to the final big boss battle.

As written, this was meant to be the Big Boss Battle of all big boss battles, and yet I had run this fight with the Slave Lords before and they always lose. So I fixed things -- the five figures on the thrones were the hirelings of the real slave lords, all half the level on the original versions. The two sides lobbed fireballs at each other first thing and the party's fireball did more harm, killing or knocking out three of the fake slave lords right off the bat, while only two of the party were seriously hurt. Captain Feetla and Brother Milerjoi went down in round three. Thinking it was all over, the PCs went around decapitating their foes and looting treasure.

And then the first of the REAL Slave Lords started arriving. Lord Feletheus, for example, was a 9th level fighter with a -5 AC, 77 hp, and hit the ranger with a Rod of Smiting, held with Gauntlets of Ogre Power, and struck her dead in one hit, with maximum damage -- 39 points. NOW the Slave Lords were going to be a tough fight!

The real Nerelas the Assassin teleported into the room, invisible (they could tell because magic chessboard squares were serving as teleportals in the room and lit up when used; the chessboard had become a repeating motif in my tweaked version). It was getting late, I was getting tired and making mistakes and, as the party's magic-user looted the fake Mordrammo, I accidentally read off the real Mordrammo's long list of magic items to him, then said, "Oops -- that's the real Mordrammo who's coming..." This only helped to make them very afraid. Overwhelmed, they distracted Feletheus and Nerelas with an illusion and fled up the stairs -- straight into waiting cages. Trapped! And ready for the Dungeon of the Slave Lords, just the way the module was meant to end. 

Everyone had stayed 30 minutes late so we could wrap up the whole thing. I was told that my version of the ending was better than the published version -- high praise indeed!

Sunday

Day 4 had one event today, Hideouts & Hoodlums: Assault on the Aerie of the Nazi Slavers -- taking what I ran using D&D and updating it to 1945, the Ore Mountains on the German-Czech border. 

Although H&H had done well at GaryCon two years in the past, it was not popular this time; only three people signed up and two showed to play. Those two were Lee and Timothy LeMaster, both experienced with H&H. I gave them the option of two heroes each, but they each wanted to play only one character. To try to balance things, I gave each of them two really good healing pills they could take in a pinch. They chose Superman (the Czech version of Superman) and Golden Guide, a mysteryman (woman, actually). 

Both this and my AD&D version of the scenario began with a Wimpell Frump stand-in being encountered first thing in the adventure, but this time the LeMaster's missed the fact that Wimpell (or Vlastimil here) was leaving them but not heading back towards the camp. Missing the shortcut, they planned a direct assault on the German-controlled Czech mine camp outside the mine entrance, with just one big diversion for cover. It used up their one stick of dynamite, but it was a very big distraction when it blew up the ammunition supply point building. Superman wrecked them through the fence and they dashed into the main building, fighting their way past guards to get to the bridge from that building's tower that led to the ancient gatehouse that was the mine's entrance. They had to fight their way past a dozen armed guards, eating up some of the superhero's better (but not best) powers, and even then I was already going easy on them, having planned on their being twice that many defenders at the gatehouse if the heroes tried this direct route. 

Once in the mines, it was more like a straight D&D session, with them exploring two caves, running into small guard patrols in two of them (as originally planned). Superman burnt through more powers and Golden Guide had terrible luck with her guns jamming a lot, but they finally found their way to the big boss battle. This time, King Goom was replaced by Vlastimil, an ultra-mad scientist, his Nazi lieutenant, six bestial Nazis (oh yeah, in this version, the guards weren't gnolls, but they had been surgically altered to be more animalistic and 2 HD), plus six more that had been fully transformed fully into beast-men -- ghouls -- and there was a three-man crew manning a Panzer II tank in the room. The chamber was no longer an audience chamber, but had been converted into a mad scientist's laboratory (or at least the back half had). 

They played pretty smart, trying to wreck the tank (with the superhero's wrecking things) and shooting at the lab equipment to blow it up. But they were badly outnumbered and the ghouls paralyzed Superman. Golden Guide led a lot of their opponents away, got them into a fight with miners the heroes had liberated earlier, then left the miners to get slaughtered as she doubled back to save Superman. By now, Superman was being hauled away down an escape tunnel, kept chloroformed by Vlastimil and his lieutenant. Golden Guide caught up and, while a firefight went on between Golden Guide and the lieutenant, Superman recovered and broke the man's gun. But then Vlastimil used a hypno-monocle to charm Superman and set the two heroes against each other! Golden Guide kept dodging to stay alive until it wore off, but the two leaders had escaped ahead of them to warn the Slave Lords in Dresden...and there we stopped, just 15 minutes over our time slot. They said they want to play the rest some time. If they get some help next time, I won't have to fudge so much to keep things easy for them!

And now GaryCon is done for another year. It was a great experience, but really more for the games I ran for the players I had, not the games I played. I'm glad I get the opportunity to play other people's games, but I don't think I'd ever do a campaign again as a player only, just in case. 

Addendum: But wait -- it still wasn't over! At 7, there was 

Jay Scott

's Twitch show, which was a who's who of famous Greytalkers! 

Anna Meyer

, who remapped the Flannaess! 

Denis Tetreault

, who remapped the City of Greyhawk! 

Mike Bridges

, who drew the World of Greyhawk! 

Allan T. Grohe Jr.

, seen by many as the ultimate authority on Castle Greyhawk and Old School publisher! Eric Boyd and Erik Mona, who parlayed their early entry into Internet fandom into long publishing careers that extended well beyond Greyhawk! And 

Gary Holian

, who practically invented Greyhawk fandom online!

And that still wasn't the end because, while I was watching the show, 

Arch Zenopus

 messaged Facebook and revealed that there were open spaces in "Temple of Diklah and the Helm of Valasdum," the second part of the GenCon IX Dungeons, and it was starting soon!! Having long owned it but never played it, I longed to see if my assessment of how much of that tournament needed a complete overhaul was accurate. Casting the Twitch show and my laundry duties for the evening aside I jumped in! And I daresay my dwarven king was vital to keeping the game entertaining, as inexperienced gamers in the group slowed us down in a railroad of encounter areas that betrayed the primitive game design skills developed by 1976, with just occasional flashes of ingenuity. Everyone was half-asleep by the time we reached the big boss battle with the lich and, as the game dragged on past midnight, I was not prepared to reach 12:30 still in the game, so I curtly bailed on them just as the lich and two golems had two members of the party cornered!