Monday, March 15, 2010

Vampire Doppelganger Monk Follow-Up

So I talked a bit about one of the games I ran in high school yesterday, in the pre-amble to the recently re-discovered write-up of my vampire doppelganger monk. (Which I still think was a pretty rad character.) Kept it short in that post, since the point was to share the madness that was me at sixteen, but today I've got a few notes on the subject that I want to run through real quick:
  • This was a game I ran every day at lunch for . . . maybe three months? From March until about June. We met outside of school at various people's houses at least a few times, and I ran it for at least a few sessions over the summer, but the main bulk of the game happened at school, fifty minutes at a time.
  • The vast majority of that consisted of a dungeon made out of a flowchart with monsters and treasure written on it, the "tower" that the vampire doppelganger monk notes refer to a couple of times. So a typical lunch-time session would go "kick in the door, fight a monster, pick a door to kick in next time." Sometimes it would get more complicated than that--I got into the habit of putting little sigils on the door, so they'd have something interesting to base the decision on--but the group was mostly fourteen-year-old guys, and that kept them pretty happy.
  • The yak folk sorcerer started out as a regular ol' evil sorcerer. Everything about him being a yak folk, and why he was out in the desert in a tower full of monsters, came later. Like I said, simple.
  • I say "simple," but there was also some reasonably complicated stuff going on in the background--different monsters were in the process of moving in or out of "the deep desert" with the seasons, things like that. The werewolves had some internal politics that also intersected with I think it was ogres? as well as the "sand monkeys" I was slowly building up as a plague upon civilized folks.
  • The game actually started out with an entirely different setting and set up. Halfway through the first session, I got bored with it, attacked the party with ghouls and an airship, and zapped them to a different part of the campaign world entirely. I jotted down a few notes on the new setting over the next few days and ran from there.
  • I really regret not seeing where this campaign could have gone. Looking back on it, it was clearly in the process of becoming one of those games really spiffy campaigns that start from a dungeon and a sketched wilderness and grow into an epic fantasy adventure with a detailed setting, but it got cut short due to social problems. I didn't even intend to go anywhere really complicated with it. I just wanted to run some D&D, and I noted things down as ideas struck me.

2 comments:

  1. It sound like a cut-above the typical high school D&D I remember others running.

    You've got a good head on your shoulders. :)

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  2. HEY! I wanna start a revoloution against Wal-mart, looked it up on google and this came up. R u goin to actually help?

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