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PostPosted: Thu Sep 10, 2015 8:53 am 
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Just started a home-made and hand written campaign for my wife and daughter. The kid is autistic and has difficulty in recognising emotions in others so a little spot of DW in a very gentle setting allows her to see a wide range of emotional response in others via the NPC interactions. As she is only ten the campaign centres on rescuing fairies stuck in spiders webs and resolving conflicts without resorting to violence, usually, but she did stab a bandit under the ribs with her dagger after things got heated when the bandit demanded all her silver coins and her staff. This took me completely by surprise and had to think quick as the GM because she is the last person on earth you would expect to attack anyone but her erstwhile bodyguard did grab the poor chap by the throat and throttled him as he slid to the ground with his lifeblood draining into the earth from the gaping wound to his side.

I never quite look at my loving family the same way now.... :shock:

We play on a Friday night with the usual snacks and supplies and for atmospherics we use large candles to illuminate the dining table and I try to print out or draw maps on parchment for handouts. Lots of work but I try to make it really special because I remember as a kid myself how much I loved DW and how it drew me in. What's good about this little campaign is that I am able to play test my own creations of professions and see how they evolve so I get a fair bit out of it and I certainly hope the players do too!


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PostPosted: Thu Sep 10, 2015 9:22 am 
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Marn wrote:
... and for atmospherics we use large candles to illuminate the dining table and I try to print out or draw maps on parchment for handouts. Lots of work but I try to make it really special because I remember as a kid myself how much I loved DW and how it drew me in.

I try to make an effort with handouts, too, as they really add something to the gaming experience. Sadly, a couple of my players are too clumsy for candles - I can't tell you how many character sheets have become unintentionally tea-stained over the years...

If your budget will stretch to it, I can recommend Campaign Coins and Rare Elements for in-game currencies. The look in your players' eyes when they loot the bandits and you hand over a purse of coins for them to count is a lot more satisfying than just reading out a number for them to scribble on a character sheet. And, on occasion, you can throw in an odd coin from another set and see if the players notice... You can also get replica pirate coins from Amazon, although I've not had first-hand experience of these.

Have fun!

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PostPosted: Thu Sep 10, 2015 10:41 am 
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That is an excellent idea! I did toy with the idea of putting down real currency coins so my daughter could "earn" her pocket money via adventuring but I would be bankrupt in a matter of weeks!

I have yet to encounter the tea-stained character sheet as yet with my bunch but it's bound to happen... or more likely Cola stained character sheet but that would look more like Orc blood so I guess it's all good :D


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PostPosted: Thu Sep 10, 2015 11:38 am 
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This may be confusing...try to bear with me...

I play homebrewed rules, but stick to the DW setting. My group was two experienced (though new to DW) players, and a couple of total novices (who, to their credit, really got into it and came up with great characters). The characters were (for the purpose of simplicity, we shall say) a Mystic, two Barbarians and a Knight.

The campaign started with a hacked-up version of Shadow on the Mist as an intro. They failed to find evidence of Sir Beorn's treachery; and panicked when they met him on the road and got into a fight - killing him and his men. They fled north.

After a number of adventures (fights with goblins and spiders in haunted forests, trying to recover the body of a Christian man taken by faeries, a tense cat-and-mouse chase with the unquiet dead in a ruined castle), they were employed by a corrupt Abbot to reclaim a magic cauldron from an old hermit (actually a sorcerer). The abbot sent one of his monks to accompany them (The monk was a magical construct - a gholem). Some good played allowed them to work out he was not all he seemed (they asked him to say funeral mass for a man killed by bandits and he muddled the words, plus a few other tidbits). Finally, they decided to jump him just as they reached the sorcerer's home. They lost hard. Thankfully, the sorcerer bailed them out - befuddling the gholem and allowing them all to escape.

The sorcerer told them that they would need to find a weapon with the power to touch creatures from beyond. I rarely give out magic weapons - the ones I do give are storied things with their own identities and secrets. After consulting a loopy wise woman (and some stuff happening that's too complicated to explain here) I gave them the choice to go to Cornumbria to try to find faerie ore and a smith to forge it into a worthy blade; or to go to Ereworn chasing Ysingdur, the mythical blade of the vanished High King. They elected to go to Ereworn.

The Ereworn campaign was based very loosely on Elven Crystals. Ereworn was in a simmering state of civil war. Wild tribesmen from the Pagan Mountains ("orcs" haha!) stalked the roads and besieged smaller keeps. A few of the noble families loyal to the old king clung to their castles in the south, as Duke Darian's black riders spread terror elsewhere.

I repurposed "A Goblin Grim" - the main point of the story to get them to encounter the spectre of the murdered Queen and swear to be the agents of her revenge.

They got dragged into the Ereworn civil war on the side of the old nobles; including the aloof but charismatic Baron Gudrun, cousin to the murdered High King who dreamed of deposing Darian.

After my players got overexcited by a bit that was supposed to be a very minor pit-stop, they retook a minor fortress by stealth (a clever bit of team play - distractions, diversions and a couple of improbable Stealth rolls), and managed to get one of the chiefs from the Pagan Mountains to the parley table, where Gudrun promised him lands for his help in marching on Darian.

While Darian's black riders were being mustered to halt Gudrun's advance; the characters snuck into Darian's castle. After dispatching a few minor horrors, they encountered Darian and a swarm of hellrots, who nearly TPK'd them (two of them unconcious on -2HP), until one of the Barbarians managed to pull off a big crit and cleaved Darian's skull.

Through all this, they managed to track down the crystals, finding the last one in Darian's room. Through the campaign, I had slowly fed them the legend of Barael, the First High King of Ereworn, who had rescued the Faerie King Elvarond from a mighty giant. As thanks, Elvarond granted magical protection to Ereworn and Barael's line "As broether is troe to broether"; and the great blade Ysingdur. They were sure that Darian's murder of his brother the king and the subsequent fall of Ereworn was due to the loss of this magical protection. They worked out that the crystals were a gate to Elvarond's castle.

However - when they worked out how to use the gate, they found a faerie castle of lunacy, filled with crazed fae enacting some kind of cod-parody of the Court of Ongus. Elvarond sat at the middle of this on a great golden throne. What sense they could get out of him revealed that Barael hadn't been the mighty tribal chieftain who saved Elvarond, he'd been a bandit who'd caught him sleeping, stolen his sword and menaced him with it till Elvarond weaved some semi-magical woo-woo to make this gullible rube go away. Ereworn had never been under any kind of magical protection, and Ysingdur wasn't a particularly special blade; but Barael had with an uncanny nose for opportunity and was very good at building his own legend. He'd managed to gather together a mass of disaffected tribes into a kingdom.

Sort of stumped by this news, the characters elected to go back to Gudrun and lie outrageously. They entered his court with great pomp - saying that Elvarond hadn't forgotten his promise, and that he had remade the wards of Ereworn, so long as Gudrun would stand as High King. There was some grumbling from the other nobles, but there was obviously strange magics at play - and one shouldn't trifle with such things.

It all ended happily - the characters made Baronets of Ereworn and granted lands.

At this point, I moved cities, and missed the chance to see how that played out. It was a pretty fun campaign though.


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PostPosted: Mon Mar 21, 2016 9:11 am 
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I am currently running a campaign for my wife and four of our friends. As my wife is the only one who has played Dragon Warriors before I’m using the default setting of Northern Albion. The party consists of:

Sir Garen - a Knight who never shuts up about his honour and heraldry, but with a very shaky grasp on the finer points of chivalry.
Morgana - a Mystic in search of spiritual enlightenment and better dice (she fails most of her psychic fatigue checks). Loves spell mastery of See Enchantment, having acquired a magical shortsword without anyone else noticing.
Edrik - Albion’s least dangerous Assassin; frequently misses even the easiest of targets in combat.
Diacoptes - a Warlock from the New Selentine Empire; in search of a long-lost relic last seen in Albion. (We thought the Slayer’s Sword from the Player’s Guide would be a good fit.)
Linea - a Sorcerer from Krarth; in search of powerful magic while keeping out of the way of her murderous siblings.

The players have all played D&D before but they have realised that their assumptions about how the world works aren’t always helpful. They’re slightly paranoid about what’s a supernatural threat and what isn’t; I’m hoping to get them to the point of being unsure if the beady-eyed crow watching them is a witch or familiar, or really just a crow after all.

So far we have played through a number of scenarios:

1. The Darkness Before Dawn: started badly with the party critically failing their first two rolls; Edrik snapped the string of his crossbow and Diacoptes dropped his sword. Fortunately Linea frightened the wild dogs away with an Illusion of a giant serpent. Otherwise everything went well enough; Linea briefly distracted Queen Fhionn with an Illusion of Lady Angela and her baby, and they actually managed to destroy her. Amusingly, they didn’t realise that they had defeated her and were terrified that she was going to be resurrected.

2. I repurposed Mike Page’s In Search of Falsifal as a search for a herb in Helfax Wood that would heal Maxim Le Cloche’s adder bite. They found the herb and rescued the monk from the brigands. Edrik couldn’t hit a bandit sprawled at his feet, and Sir Garen distinguished himself by cutting down one of the bandits and then falling off his horse.

3. They solved a murder inspired by a Harn plot hook. Diacoptes had remained in Axbridge as his player was absent during the previous session, so I had him conduct the initial investigation and explain the problem to the rest of the party in character. They managed to figure out the identity of the murderer (a local woodsman), whom they naturally assumed to be possessed. Bretwald grudgingly performed an exorcism; unsuccessfully as the murderer was insane rather than possessed. He was dragged before a court, protesting his innocence, convicted, and hanged. This wiped the smiles off the players’ faces; I offered to let them stage a rescue attempt but they wisely declined (and he was guilty).

4. Before leaving Axbridge they agreed to assist Bretwald in the exploration of Vallandar’s tomb once they had delivered Maxim Le Cloche to Baron Aldred’s court for justice. En route they traced the source of mysterious happenings in the village of Igham to a local farmer, and befriended a goblin who was in love with the farmer’s wife (subverting their preconceptions about goblins). The farmer turned out to be a necromancer although they didn’t realise this at first, only finding evidence of his crimes after Sir Garen had left with him, intending to take him to the village and have him locked up. As soon as they were out of sight of the farm Sir Garen unexpectedly found himself in single combat with a sorcerer and he was lucky to survive; he won’t go wandering off on his own like that again! Terrified by the inexplicable disappearance of the necromancer’s body when they returned to the village they took his wife and his treatise on necromancy to Osterlin Abbey for protection.

5. As they were now in Osterlin Abbey I ran A Box Of Old Bones. They were suspicious of Notker and his party from the start, but were most interested in the possibility of stealing their stuff. When the Relics of St. Giles cropped up in conversation they considered stealing those themselves! That would have been such a sweet scenario, with the two groups both trying to steal a set of fake relics, but they decide against it. They mounted a watch overnight, and Linea and Morgana saw Notker’s party putting their plan into operation. They went downstairs, initially thinking that Notker was trying to steal the necromancer’s treatise from the scriptorium, but when they realised that his group were in the church they crept closer to see what was going on. Linea used a Peer spell to find out what was happening but they were very slow in realising the need for backup, allowing Notker’s party to make short work of Ruttgur and Cedric.

Notker’s group escaped through the church doors into the orchard, where a fight ensued. The party made short-ish work of Einhard, Grost, and Denchille but Sir Garen grew increasingly frustrated by the difficulty of landing a blow on Notker. When Adamnan activated the Astral Gate Notker made a run for it, but was blinded by a well-timed Dazzle spell, stumbled around blindly and fell through the Gate, which promptly collapsed. Marianne, running off with the relics, critically failed a Reflexes roll, tripped over and was hacked to pieces by Sir Garen in a fit of murderous rage (so much for chivalry). They captured Admanan, broke the fingers of his left hand, and then interrogated him. Once they had a confession they turned him over to the Abbott with the suggestion that he be burned as a witch. I thought ‘why not?’, so that’s what happened.

They now hate Notker’s guts with a passion (the feeling is mutual no doubt), so he’ll make an excellent a recurring villain. They were so frustrated with the fight that I haven’t yet told them that the relics are fakes; I’m saving that joyful news until another time.

The plan for the future is for them to take Le Cloche to the Baron, and then I'll run Cobwebbed Dragon’s fine updating of The King Under The Forest and A Shadow On The Mist. After that, we’ll see; as long as they’re enjoying playing Dragon Warriors I’ll enjoy running it. I’d like them to befriend Almeric so that his eventual death comes as more of a blow, and perhaps stumble across Doron of Glissom as well.

(Apologies for such a long, but comprehensive, post!)


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PostPosted: Tue Mar 22, 2016 7:22 am 
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I enjoyed that Doc!

Cheers,

-Kyle


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PostPosted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 10:02 am 
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Thanks. :D

In A Box of Old Bones I gently nudged them away from breaking into the guest house to steal their stuff. Retrospectively, this may have been a mistake, as it would have been fun to have them break in while Notker's party were getting ready to leave, or while the guest house was empty because they were in the church committing the theft.

I didn't mention that my wife (Linea the Sorcerer) came up with the brilliant idea of using an Illusion of St Giles to frighten the thieves. For everyone who failed to see through the Illusion I resolved this as a fright attack which, regrettably, they all passed. She keeps doing things that make me think "Oh, that's clever, I hadn't thought of that. Now what do I do?" :o

Sir Garen's player, having saddled himself with a difficult combat two sessions running (he deliberately targetted Notker for his magical amulet) is now agitating for more Health Points and complaining that "I can't be a tank", despite the fact that he actually was a tank during that session!


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PostPosted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 12:20 pm 
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Doctor Doom wrote:
The plan for the future is for them to take Le Cloche to the Baron, and then I'll run Cobwebbed Dragon’s fine updating of The King Under The Forest and A Shadow On The Mist.

I'd be interested in your feedback on them. I ought to mention that I wrote them for my group/house rules, so you might find that some of the stats/spells referred to in some of the area descriptions will need adjusting back to be DW canon.

Enjoy!

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https://www.cobwebbedforest.co.uk/
https://www.dragonwarriors.uk/
https://twitter.com/CobwebbedDragon
Now on YouTube!


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PostPosted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 1:29 pm 
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No problem. I'd noticed that they would need tweaking a bit.

I have to admit, I've already swiped quite a few of the house rules you've posted on your website, which I have found very useful!


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PostPosted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 2:20 pm 
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Doctor Doom wrote:
I have to admit, I've already swiped quite a few of the house rules you've posted on your website, which I have found very useful!

Always nice to hear, thank you. I have my second round of playtesting planned for this summer, when I'm hoping my gaming group will return to the Lands of Legend for another bout of adventure, so there will probably be a flurry of updates following that, plus the usual slow, steady trickle of stuff to my site that I've already got waiting in the wings and just needs organising/formatting/uploading. I think I need to give up one of my full-time job, full-time relationship, or full-time gym addiction to spend more time on my gaming :).

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https://www.cobwebbedforest.co.uk/
https://www.dragonwarriors.uk/
https://twitter.com/CobwebbedDragon
Now on YouTube!


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