Author: Dixon Trimline

I was deeply moved and impressed by the raw honesty of Chris’s article, I’m Home, Finally, from a few weeks ago, which was inspired by Chatty DM’s article, Lessons from Day Jobs. Here were a couple of devoted, talented gamers who were cracking open the mysterious black box (Red Box?) and allowing an intimate look inside their lives. We all know how the internet is supposed to work, cloaking us in anonymity and as we say anything we want through a persona that we invented.

In person, I might be an awkward, gooney blob with no friends and the social skills of a cutting board, but online, I can be clever and sharp, witty and engaging, brilliant and striking. We just need to make sure that we keep everything inside and hidden, that the readers only get to see exactly what we want them to see. But Tourq and Chatty pulled back the curtain and got all autobiographical on our buttocks, and that made me think, “Huh, that looks fun. I think I’ll do that.”

Introduction

As I think back over my professional experience, I marvel and shudder simultaneously. I’m pretty sure, had I listened to bald Mr. Pepp, my school guidance counselor, he wouldn’t have recommended this particular route. Neither do I. Okay, okay, this long and winding road prepared me for the job I hold now, a job that I really do like, a job I’m good at. Had I not experienced all I’ve experienced, I wouldn’t have this job. It’s as simple as that. But even my foulest and most flatulent enemies–you know who you are, and if not, I’ll be releasing a list later in the week–even these rotten people don’t deserve a history like this. You wanna get it, you gotta pay it. I paid it.

It’d be nice to create a fancy graphic of the jobs I’ve held, a timeline showing the spans in bright colors, but unfortunately, for such a timeline to be meaningful, it’d have to be to scale. That presents certain difficulties, given that I’ve held one job for 5 years and another for 1 week. Anyone wanting to look at the graphic would need a monitor the size of a garage door, and I can’t ask that of my readers. If, however, you have a monitor the size of a garage door, give me a call because I want to play video games on it.

First things first, I need to get my pre-Army jobs out of the way. While each served a purpose (mostly giving me money that I could waste on food and D&D), I’m not going to count these because 1) I’d never put them on a resume, and 2) I have no idea of the start and end dates. I was young and stupid and the word “tomorrow” meant as little to me as the word “fiduciary.” I’m now older and stupid and I’ve got a pretty clear understanding of “tomorrow.” Fiduciary? Something about money, I think. Which I don’t have much of, so it’s still pretty meaningless.

First Job Ever

Not sure, actually. It might have been my near-week stint as a dishwasher at an ice cream-based family restaurant (Heffies), or it might have been my one floundering weekend with a friend at a gas station (Texaco). The former had me walk off the job, because either it was horrible work or I was hopelessly lazy. Probably both. The latter, I was frightened by credit card sales, I was unable to pump exact totals (“Uh, that’ll be $10.03”), and I consistently forgot to reinstall gas caps. Now that I think about it, I continue to struggle with these deficiencies.

Next Job

My big one, my defining job, my Burger King. It lasted four years, out of high school and into assorted flirtings with college, and it introduced me to the pretty girl who inexplicably would agree to marry me, though not right away. Pretty and smart. It was Burger King where I met some good and wonderful friends, and even to this day, I maintain contact with none of them. While I’ve always been irritatingly introspective (I had my first identity crisis at age 4), it was during the Burger King days when I started wondering, “Is this all there is?” As it happens, the answer is a definitive yes and no.

First Semi-Professional Job

Right around the time I proposed to Wendy (pretty and smart, see above), moved out of my mother’s house (and into the apartment above the business where she worked), and pursued a degree in something I hated (architectural drafting, though I didn’t figure out my hatred until about a week before receiving my degree), I interviewed at JobPro, a temp agency that offered two employment tracks, office and warehouse. Warehouse sounded very hard, so I did their office testing and they placed me at a company called Brown & Sharpe, which did something involving large, noisy machines. I did data entry for some months, wearing a tie and uncomfortable shoes, and so impressed my supervisor there that she offered me job there. And I would have taken it, except for one tiny commitment, and I don’t mean my marriage to Wendy in September ’90. No, the commitment I’m talking about is…

HUA (2/91 – 12/94)

The US Army. And so my career began. I signed up in July 1990, to begin Basic Training in February 1991. Right in between those dates, right around the time I started thinking that this decision might not be the best one I’d made in my 22 years on the planet, right around the time that Brown & Sharpe offered me a non-military, non-shooting, non-grenade type job, the Gulf War started. So when I approached my recruiters to admit I wasn’t so keen on the Army after all, they informed me that the Army was still pretty keen on me. I would get out of the Army on December 2, 1994, to return to college and this time, I’d get a degree in something I loved…

B&S Redux (4/95 – 5/00)

Or not. I did get out of the Army, and I did return to school, for a short time, but with a son and a newly-hatched daughter and no recognizable income, I scuttled back to work. I got in touch with my supervisor from Brown & Sharpe, just to catch up (wink wink), and wouldn’t you know it, she had some stuff I could do. I started part-time there, 20 hours a week, and then 30, and then 40 but without benefits, and then 40+ without benefits, and finally a full-time salaried position, with benefits and everything. I’d broken through, I’d found my professional job. My Architectural Drafting degree was really paying off. I was full-time and salaried April 1995, and would stay there until being unceremoniously fired in May 2000. You know how managers talk about Open Door Policies? They don’t really mean it. If you have a problem, an issue, a concern, or a worry, you best keep that pink mouth shut.

Dream Job (5/00 – 5/01)

After receiving notice at Brown & Sharpe, I set to seeking a new job. It took exactly one week. A friend asked if I’d consider writing for a living, and because I had not recently suffered any major brain injuries, I naturally said yes. I started working as a technical writer for e-Business Technologies on May 30, 2000, and enjoyed a year of the best work I’d done since I’d started working. This was a pure software development company, just this side of a DOT COM, with free soda, free coffee, free bagels and danishes, a pool table and ping pong table in the cafeteria, a great big bucket of legos for anyone to play with outside of one office, pizza-laden training sessions, and some of the coolest technologies I’d ever seen. This was the sort of software–content management, web-based, workflow, neato neato neato–I’d buy and use. I was working with people vastly smarter than me. Not that big a deal, except this was a case where I couldn’t help but acknowledge it. Real, honest-to-goodness scientists, people with lots of little letters after their names, people who were sitting on the W3 board and getting patents and inventing stuff no one had ever seen before. Naturally, the company went under. On May 17, 2001, we were all called into the cafeteria and told we were out of work. At the time, looking ahead to 9 weeks of severance pay (getting my paycheck? for doing nothing???), and possessed of an unnaturally high opinion of myself and the job market, I thought I had no worries.

I was seriously wrong.

Unemployment (5/01 – 7/02)

Unemployment sucks.

Really, really long unemployment really, really sucks. How could I have possibly known that after the dream that was eBT, I’d be scrounging for work for 14 months? We scrimped and we scraped, our church and friends and family helping us pay our bills, and I sent hundreds and hundreds of resumes to all corners of the earth, all of which generated a baker’s dozen worth of interviews. All for nothing, nada, naught. I did find out a lot about myself, most importantly that I didn’t like being unemployed.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did manage to snag a few contract jobs, defined as short-term, unreliable, and just a little terrifying:

• OmniCom. 10/01-11/01
• Red Bridge Interactive. 12/01-1/02
• Tzell Travel. 5/10/02-5/15/02
• New England Medical Center. 5/02-6/02

A few of these opportunities hinted at “bigger and better things,” but it was the one I was least interested in that panned out. See below. There are people out there, adventurous people, daredevil people, life-on-the-edge people, who love this kind of life. Where’s the next paycheck coming from? Will you have work next month, next week, tomorrow? “Who cares, dude! Live in the now!” These people ain’t my people. Also, these people probably don’t have kids.

Underemployment (7/02 – 1/03)

It turned out OmniCom, a tiny little division of a company called GBA, liked the contract work I had done, but couldn’t quite hire me full-time. GBA, which really wasn’t that much bigger than OmniCom, considered me for a good long time before offering me all the slavish toil of a real job but with half of that unsightly salary. And, just for fun, crummy benefits. But you know, beggars, choosers, etc. On July 16, 2002, I started at GBA. I’d be doing something brand new for me, training, which evidently required interaction with other people. As I am a paralyzingly introverted person, this seemed rather a challenge. But once I started, it turned out to be only a nightmare.

But that’s not entirely fair. Remember how I said about eBT, here is “software… I’d buy and use?” Well, GBA was selling software I wouldn’t cross the street to spit on. I had to learn a new and bewildering industry (health insurance), an old and dreadful software, and an agonizing and draining skill (training). I quite hated it at GBA, but what choice did I have? I didn’t want to go back to unemployment. Thankfully, GBA spared me the horrors of suffering them for too long, and fired me on January 30, 2003, for a crime I didn’t commit. Back to unemployment.

Unemployment II (2/03 – 5/03)

Unemployment still sucks. See above.

Yonder (5/03 – 9/03)

It came time for me to move. The technology opportunities had played out in the northeast, so on May 12, 2003, I took a job with Columbia Research Corporation in Virginia, figuring there’d always be work in the DC area. CRC was a job placement agency, so they placed me at a company called Titan Secure Solutions, which wanted me to write proposals for work with still other companies, and it was all pretty confusing. It hardly needs saying, but I’d never written proposals before, so here was yet another skill I needed to learn.

A job in Virginia meant living with a friend for a few months, and then orchestrating the whole house sale, apartment rental, family relocation, school registration, and house hunting joys that are more than sufficient to drive a stable man to uncontrollable weeping. And I wasn’t stable to begin with.

Once my family settled in (more or less), I began looking for new work, figuring that I couldn’t do any worse than the job that brought me to Virginia. At Titan, I had a good boss and a reasonably good environment, but the work was soooooooooooooooooo dull. I sent a few resumes out, and got a snag. One interview landed me a follow-up, but one of the company’s co-owners called me and said, “Never mind the next interview, do you just want the job?” I said yes. My last day at Titan was September 12, 2003.

Dream to Nightmare (9/03 – 1/08)

Fairfax Imaging started so well, as most new jobs do, with interesting work (documentation and training), fascinating people, and bucketloads of travel to all over the United States (and both ends of Canada). This was a privately owned company, with one owner being the day-to-day president and the other owner being a brilliant developer. The former owner never failed to annoy me, putting out fires with a sort of manic glee but never actually solving any problems, and the latter owner was a vast, seething pool of intimidation, always reducing me to grinning idiot status.

Unfortunately, the Fairfax Imaging experienced growth, much as a cancer patient does, only more painfully. The owners saw value in making lots and lots of money, but decided to do it without upgrading the 1998 software or growing the Mom & Pop infrastructure, which resulted in record low morale and a grossly dissatisfied customer base. Since these customers couldn’t take their anger bats to the noggins of the owners, they turned on the person they saw for weeks at a time… the trainer! And yes, that would be me.

As my irritability and frustration mounted, and as I watched other talented rats flee that ship, I cast out my resume net and found a new job, this one where I would only be writing, for a company that looked like it saw its employees as valuable resources instead of coal for the engine.

Current Dream (1/08 – Present)

I started as a technical writer for InfinityQS at the end of January 2008, and have had the opportunity to do some interesting, important, and exciting things. I’ve come face to face with new technologies (and yes, this software company sells a product I would use, just like old eBT from back in 2000), I’ve faced all kinds of challenges, and I’ve found myself well-respected and appreciated, something I haven’t always experienced in the past. This is a good company, and I hope to stay here with these good people, but, you know… you know…

My timeline of work suggests a certain pattern, and it’s not just me growing tired of a particular environment and wanting to move on after five years or so. It’s the reality of work, even when it’s good, forever and always being work. It’s something you need to get up for, it’s something you need to go and do, it’s something that’s there and demanding when you don’t feel like doing it. I am the dog that’s been smacked on the snout enough to grow fearful of my owner, even when he is loving and kind and generous.

This is a job I want to keep, but talk to me again in a few years.

In the earliest of the 1980s, as I approached the yawning abyss of adolescence, I discovered Basic Dungeons & Dragons, and it rang a note in me that I’d always been listening for. Here then was a game that would allow me to step outside myself, to be something great and heroic, to be someone valuable and significant, to be a person that was not me. My entire life, I’ve been nearly paralyzed with introversion, wrapped around the tiniest chip of self-loathing. Once I took a personality test that put me so far into the introvert’s block, they had to staple an extra paper onto the report.

If I may speak for my group, you should know that we introverts wouldn’t mind being the friendly, chatty, genial life-of-the-partiers, but we just can’t. We lack that gene. And I had the added benefit of suspecting that maybe, just maybe, all those people didn’t really want to talk to me anyway. Finally, I had a found a forum where I could be better, different, clever, funny, charismatic, witty, and important.

While D&D had rung that much desired note, it didn’t give me exactly what I needed, but it sure came closer than anything else I’d ever experienced. These were hints, ghosts, echoes, but they were soothing and lovely on my psyche, and I poured my whole self into the game. I played through all the various incarnations, but stopped right around the 3rd edition – and no, this wasn’t because of any silly “this isn’t my game” disdain. Rather, I had become awfully busy having a family and pretending to have a career, and that sword and magic lobe in my brain withered and atrophied. My books and modules, my characters and dice, all those pencils and gum erasers, they all went away, but that craving never did. It went deep, but it never disappeared.

When I first got my dirty little fingers all over the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, not just reading the books, but actually playing the game, I immediately realized it was the system I’d been waiting for my whole dice-rolling life. This wasn’t because of the manifold powers, though I did like them quite a lot. It wasn’t because of the conscious move away from the 5-minute adventure day, though that was pretty tasty excellent too. And it wasn’t because of the durability of the characters, meaning they might just survive into the second encounter.

No, what leaped out of the system and directly into my heart is the aspect that may least appeal to other gamers. The Monopoly tycoons, the Risk tyrants, the Chess masters, these are all players who revel in rivalry, who thrive on challenges, who define their leisure in wins and losses. As kids, they raced around dark backyards in lethal matches of Manhunter. As teenagers, they picked up CO2 pistols and raced around heavy woods, risking eye damage and severe pricker lacerations. As adults, they… I don’t know, compared stock portfolios, Mercedes features, and colleges their kids attended.

Competition. That’s what lights their bulbs and spins their wheels, that’s what sweetens their treats and makes their lives worth living. And it’s the one thing that has never appealed to me. Back some ten or more years ago, when I finally figured out the arcane connectivities of the original Quake game, my friends and family were all in on the Deathmatch, and there was my sad and weak little voice, mewling, “Don’t you want to play cooperative?”

Forever, I’ve been looking for the game that not only allowed me to be someone better than I am, but also afforded me the opportunity to develop relationships that were formed and forged in fire and blood. I’ve never wanted the center stage, because it’s way too lonely out there under all those lights. I want to be part of a unit, a unit where the individuals rely and depend on each other completely, where success requires everyone giving everything they have. My favorite memories from any of the games I’ve ever played were the back-to-back scenes, the we’re-in-this-together scenes, the lean-on-me-and-we’ll-get-out-of-here scenes.

When I started playing 4th edition, that’s all I saw on every page, a game built for the whole party and not the lone player. I have finally found the game that I wanted when I first opened that blue book in my basement, a game where many hands come together to create a solid unbreakable bond, and I have my value in belonging.

*This article was presented in two parts, with Part 1 describing the construction of the adventure and Part 2 providing a report of how the adventure played out.*

PART 2

Realizing the players were relatively new to the game, I spent some time during the introduction explaining to them their characters, the foundational rules of the game, how combat runs, which one is the 20-sided die, and lots and lots of other things.  …I should resist this urge.

The party (Thorkel, dwarf shock-priest of Abbathor; Skaag, warforged inhabited by the ghost of a dead commander; and Blackleaf, elf hunter and sniper) deserts their military unit and flees east across the land, looking for a place to rest and get out of the steady, soaking, drumming rain that shows no signs of letting up.

When they finally spy the little village ahead, it’s the middle of the night, and there in the road, a figure shuffles towards them through the downpour, calling something they can’t quite make out.

The party moves forward cautiously, and Blackleaf hears the person clearer than the other two, realizing it’s not a voice but a deep, gutteral groan.  Blackleaf nocks an arrow in his greatbow and advances, sliding to his right, peering through the sheeting rain… and knows something is very wrong.  Most of the figure’s lower jaw is missing, having been raggedly torn away, and its tongue waggles free as it vocalizes its horrible call.  It’s a living corpse, the walking dead.

Blackleaf fires a pair of arrows, drilling the zombie through the throat, dropping it instantly.  “Nice shot,” Skaag says, and that’s when the mass of undead claw their way from the sodden earth all around them.  “Crap,” Skaag says.

Using their own bows, the undead graze Thorkel with a pair of arrows and hit Skaag in an ankle joint, but the party easily handles the abominations – Blackleaf picking them off with his deadly aim, Thorkel pulping them with his craghammer and throwing hammers, and Skaag hacking them with his halberd.

The party continues on to the modest village, which is very dark and eerily quiet, except for the constant, maddening rain.  They move through the village, the roadway turning into a stew of black mud, and they glance about at the small buildings, looking for signs of habitation.

Introducing a setting element like rain is an excellent idea, unless you constantly forget about it, which I always do.  If you are going to do this, either staple a note to your eyeballs that says RAIN RAIN RAIN RAIN RAIN, or, less painfully, find and play a repeating audio clip reminder during the scene or adventure.  Loud, noisy town?  Play a clip of lots of people chattering, shouting, laughing.  Monastery setting?  Play a clip of bells and chanting.  Constant rain?  Play a clip of a downpour.

One house catches their attention, light flickering through its wooden slats, maybe from a guttering candle, and they head towards it.  As they arrive, about to peek into a window, the silence is shattered by a hound’s ragged baying, and undead surge from the buildings.

At first, the battle goes the party’s way, Skaag slashing with his halberd, Thorkel swinging his hammer and calling upon the dark power of Abbathor, Blackleaf flashing out his paired scimitars, and they put down a tougher zombie with a paralyzing claw and a corpse-dog with a nasty, dripping bite.  Unfortunately, the undead just keep coming, zombies crawling from every dark corner, including two that blaze with hellish flame and fling explosive fireballs.

Just as the battle becomes desperate, two men appear from a distant building, attacking the zombies from behind with sling bullets, and a woman clutching a silver symbol blasts apart one of the fiery zombies in a burst of holy light.  The remaining zombies fall on her, tearing her to pieces, but the party and the men close quickly, destroying the undead.

I combined the second and third encounter into one, and even amped up the third encounter, since the characters turned out to be extremely effective and dangerous.  When constructing encounters, I recommend using the Experience Point Buy method, but always BUY HIGH and scale down if necessary.  Also, I’m going to jump on board with Dave Noonan and say there ain’t no way minions should be worth 1/4 of the experience points of a standard monster.  At most, minions should count towards 1/10, and I’m not just saying that because the math is easier.

The two men run up to the party, barking, “Come with us, NOW!” They lead the party across the village square and into an abandoned building.  The larger man gives a little whistle, and a trapdoor pops open from the floor and a woman peers out, saying, “Who are they?”

The men say, “Come on, come on, get in, get in,” and they hurry through the opening, slamming the trapdoor behind them.  The party finds space in the cramped basement, and then talk with the survivors as the village overhead fills with inhuman howls and hungry screams.

The two men introduce themselves as Seth and Ferris, and tell about the skyfire that fell around mealtime.  Seth says it was a streak of light that crashed to the north of the village, and Ferris tells about the mayor calling the people together in the meeting hall, naming the skyfire as the Tear of Orcus, and saying that it foretold dark days.

The mayor took several volunteers to investigate the northern field.  Nobody knows what the mayor’s group found, but it was something terrible, something dark, and it spread through the village like a disease.  Since then, these survivors have been running and hiding, killing the undead where they could.  Ferris says, “We wanted to go out to that northern field, but… not with all those creatures running around.”

One of the women objects to sharing the story with strangers, but Seth shakes her off, saying, “Look at them.  You’ve got an elf, a dwarf, and something that must have been a human once.  They’re straight out of the stories of Corranae.  They have something to do with this, and I think it’s something good.”

Thorkel and Blackleaf recognize the name Corranae, explaining that over two centuries ago, this was where an army of humans, elves, and dwarves waged war against a demonic host.  Thousands were lost, but the host was destroyed.  They realize that their undead enemy today doesn’t only include the transformed victims from the village, but also the countless fallen from the battle of Corranae.

When dealing with some kind of mystery or information-gathering game, you must dole out the information generously and repeatedly.  Not because the players are moronic toddlers, but because… hmmm… No, seriously, they’re not moronic toddlers.  It’s just that being in a life-or-death situation is very different from sitting at a table talking about being in the situation.  Players forget.  Players get distracted.  Players will listen to all your exposition and then say, “What was that?  Could you repeat that?  What were we supposed to do now?”

They settle in for the night, Skaag taking motionless watch, the others finding fitful sleep full of nightmares.  They rouse after six hours, and one of the women prods open the trapdoor and reports that morning never came.  It’s still as dark as midnight, and the rain continues to fall.

As the party discusses their options, Seth offers his father’s enchanted greatbow and hide armor, which Blackleaf gladly accepts, and also distributes three healing elixirs.  They decide to go north to investigate where the Tear of Orcus fell, asking Seth to lead them.

This was a stupid move on my part.  When determining the treasure, I figured Blackleaf the archer would take the bow and someone else would take the hide armor.  Only no one else could effectively use the hide armor, so Blackleaf got both magic items.  Duh.

After confirming the village has quieted, Seth takes the party to the edge of the northern field, where they can detect a faint blue glow coming from the distant edge, almost like a sunrise glaze.  Across the ravaged fields, blackened as though by fire, they see the source of the glow, a large partly-buried sphere, and jutting from the mud are clusters of skeletal limbs, as though an army of dead had attempted to pull free from the earth but couldn’t.

I decided to skip the undead battle here since it felt like it would just be more of the same.  The party had already fought zombies and skeletons and knew what that was like.  By setting the scene but skipping the battle, I got my atmosphere (after all, they didn’t know something wasn’t about to happen), and I could just let them do their investigation.

“Go check it out,” Thorkel tells Seth, who makes a terrified squeaky noise, and Skaag says, “Don’t listen to him.  Blackleaf, do you see anything?” Blackleaf notes the tracks of a large party that moved through this field, a directed march straight to the glowing sphere, though the tracks that came back from the sphere seem disorganized, shuffling, and unfocused.  A unit marched to the sphere, but something not unified came back.  Thorkel examines the skeletal limbs jutting from the ground, determining that they were recently animated and, based on the broken and gashed bones, had first died many years ago from combat wounds.

Whenever you introduce any interactive NPC, there’s always the risk the players will want to employ him as cannon fodder.  This is understandable, if a little anti-heroic.  You’ll have to remember that not everyone plays the game to realize his inner hero, and take appropriate steps.  If it comes right down to it, you can tell the players, “Hey, you guys are the heroes here, not them.  You should go check it out.” In this case, it was another player who let my NPC off the hook.

Skaag thanks Seth for his help and sends him home, and then the party moves cautiously toward the sphere.  They immediately note that the sphere is the source of the explosive devastation, that it must have struck the ground in a powerful blast.  Also, the sphere looks perfectly smooth, like a pearl, and doesn’t appear to be any manufactured material, like glass or steel.  Its glow is soft, almost lulling, consuming, and it gives off the faintest breath of cold, though Thorkel is pretty sure the chill isn’t caused by a change of temperature, but rather a kind of absence.

Stepping forward, Skaag extends his halberd to lightly touch the sphere, which makes a soft, wavering chime.  He tries to move, lift, or break the sphere, but can’t, even with Thorkel’s assistance.  When called over, Blackleaf immediately spies a shallow tear-shaped cavity in the sphere’s surface.  Though unable to find the missing piece around the sphere, Blackleaf does notice signs that a large party stood nearby, and one of their number knelt beside the sphere, right where the cavity is located.

This may have worked well as a skill challenge, but I let it play out as pure investigation with Perception, Insight, and Religion skill checks here and there.  They players were entirely engaged, examining the setting carefully and talking to each other about their options.  They only turned to me when they had a question about one of their conclusions.

Blackleaf points out that while the movements of the large party became very random and disorderly at some point, the tracks of the person who knelt marched straight out of the field back to the village.  Thorkel and Skaag exchange glances, saying simultaneously, “The mayor… he must have taken the missing piece back to the meeting hall.”

I did not lead the players to this conclusion.  It was one they came to on their own as they evaluated the evidence.  It was one of those rare moments where you get to see the light come on in their eyes and they figure out exactly what’s happening.

Despite the rain and darkness, Blackleaf easily follows the tracks to the meeting hall, Skaag and Thorkel close behind.  The tracks march through the huge front doors, which are hanging open and unguarded.

The party circles around to the back of the hall, where Skaag hefts Blackleaf up on his shoulders to look over the 10′ tall palisade.  Blackleaf sees a large open area with smaller buildings, and there are several zombies shambling about through the rain.  A wooden parapet runs along the inside of the wall, connecting the four corners of the hall.

Blackleaf grabs hold of the wall and slips up and over onto the parapet, slides his enchanted greatbow into his hand and begins picking off the zombies.  The darkness is shattered by a horrific scream, and the battle is joined.

This turned out to be an extremely multi-dimensional battle, with lots of movement, strategy, and heroic moments.  I felt like it translated easily into story, and there’s absolutely no cheating here in the conversion.  What you read is what happened.

Skaag helps Thorkel over the wall onto the parapet, and then climbs up after him, as zombies swarm from the buildings towards the ladders that lead up to the parapets.  One hideous undead creature, a wight, bursts from one of the buildings, scrambles up onto the roof, leaps across to the parapet, and races towards the party.

Skaag calls, “Blackleaf!” and Thorkel shouts, “Kill that one!”

Blackleaf fires arrows at the wight from his position on the parapet, setting it on fire with his enchanted bow, while Thorkel runs toward it, taking a moment to smash one of the ladders before the zombies can climb up it.  Skaag leaps to the ground, attacking the zombies with his halberd.

The wight blasts Thorkel with sizzling black bolts, locking him into place, while zombies close from all directions, climbing up onto the parapet around Blackleaf and Thorkel.

Zombies claw into Thorkel, even as the wight unleashes a soul-searing howl, draining life force and summoning a pair of black mists with bright yellow eyes, foul residents from the Shadowfell.  Thorkel’s craghammer slips from nerveless fingers and the dwarf staggers and falls.

On the one hand, you want the drama to be through the roof, but on the other, when a character falls, there’s very little for that player to do.  It’s a tough balancing act, which I rarely get right.

Blackleaf nocks an arrow, sighting down the shaft with perfect aim.  Time grinds to a halt.  He breathes in, breathes out, and then let fly, and the arrow streaks across the meeting hall and buries itself into the wight’s left eye, blowing out the back of the creature’s skull.  The wight tumbles over backwards, dying for the last time.

An absolutely brilliant use of a daily, which just so happened to destroy the big bad.  I love moments like these.

Enemies move to finish the fallen Thorkel.  Blackleaf puts a couple arrows into a zombie but doesn’t kill it.  Skaag runs over, lunging with his halberd at one of the black mists, which blows apart with a whispery shriek.  The zombie with Blackleaf’s arrows jutting from it falls on Thorkel, clawing and biting.  Blood pours from the dwarf’s wounds, washed away by the falling rain.

The zombies and remaining black mist close in on Blackleaf, and he retreats, firing arrows at the zombie feeding on Thorkel but missing.  “Come on!” Skaag shouts.  He dashes around a zombie, which turns and rakes a claw across his metal back, flooding him with necrotic energy that freezes him in place.

Skaag growls, “No,” and shakes off the icy hold, lunging at the zombie about to finish Thorkel… but misses.  “Hey ugly,” Skaag says.  “Come and get me.” The zombie looks up from the dwarf, its jaws dripping with his blood, and scrambles off the parapet at Skaag.

This was my interpretation of the fighter’s marking ability, as he drew an enemy away from a fallen ally who was just about to die.  Thorkel was very close to negative bloodied, so it was nice not having to actually kill one of the PCs.

Surrounded by enemies, Blackleaf drops his greatbow and flashes his scimitars in a deadly arc, while Skaag hurls himself up onto the parapet and gives Thorkel his healing elixir.  Thorkel’s eyes pop open as his wounds close, and he stands, saying a healing prayer over Skaag, and then calls upon all the dark power of Abbathor to blast away the nearby zombies.

After finishing off the nearby zombies, Skaag and Thorkel move to help Blackleaf, who has already snatched up his greatbow and leapt from the parapet to the roof of one of the small buildings.  Together, with hammer, halberd, and arrow, they party finish off the undead.

I had an opportunity to be a colossal jerk of a DM, since Blackleaf’s player didn’t explicitly state, “I’ll get my greatbow,” before jumping to the building.  Instead, I ruled, “You wouldn’t go without it,” and simply let it happen.  Players REALLY appreciate it when you give them the benefit of the doubt, and I say this as both a player and Dungeon Master.

With a quick search of the meeting hall, the party finds coins, gems, and jewelry, as well as discovering the wight has transformed back into a human, and is wearing a teardrop-shaped pendant on a chain around his neck.  Hearing the undead begin to stir throughout the village again, the party rush back to the northern field and slip the teardrop pendant into its matching cavity in the glowing sphere.

The sphere hums softly, spins open, and breaks apart into a thick, foul-smelling steam.  As the steam spreads, the rain eases up, the darkness fades, and the sun finds it way through the heavy black clouds overhead.  A peace settles on the village even as sunrise finally comes, and the mindless hungry howls are quickly replaced by shocked cries, despairing wails, and desperate prayers.  The village is restored, but not without loss.

Considering all the characters had gone through up to this point, it seemed like dirty pool to spring the pair of iron cobras on them (plus it was something like 2:00 in the morning).  I elected to skip the encounter, giving the players a feeling of success, but also making the victory a little bittersweet.  The players succeeded, they did what had to be done, but there was a cost to it.  It just felt right.

*This article will be presented in two parts, with Part 1 describing the construction of the adventure and Part 2 providing a report of how the adventure played out.*

PART 1

When three members of a death metal band come looking for a 4E Dungeons & Dragons game, you’d better be ready to deliver.  Sure, one of them was my son, but that didn’t leave me feeling any less intimidated, since they were each several feet taller than me and could have easily moshed me into a chunky paste of flesh, blood, and dice.  Their band, Orgy of the Damned, plays songs like Feces Fiend, Awakening That Which is Dead, and Reanimator, so I decided to build an adventure that was gritty, deadly, and hardcore, one that creaked and moaned and dripped with the darkest parts of the mortal spirit.  Thus, I had to reluctantly discard my Mr. Hoppy’s Hopland game.

Given the players’ experience, I elected to create the characters myself and avoid wading through dozens of races, classes, powers, and feats and fielding questions like, “Okay, tell me about this Scions of Zarak Initiate again.”  I decided the party would be soldiers who had deserted their military unit and were fleeing across the land, looking for a place to rest:  a dwarf shock-priest of Abbathor, an elf ranger and sniper, and a warforged fighter inhabited by the ghost of a dead human commander.  The dwarf and elf were easy picks, total fantasy standards, and the warforged would stand in as my human, since I find the concept just so ineffably cool.

For the game, I wanted to keep the complexity low but the action high to engage their attention, and also I wanted a situation that they would immediately comprehend.  I found myself thinking about a village and about zombies.  The village would be a classic medieval one:  muddy roads, a cluster of tumble-down buildings, simple folk, little defense.  And the zombies?  They would come in the form of an apocalypse – mindless, bloody, and infectious.  Additionally, I figured I’d set it at night and during a downpour, since many games take place under sunny blue skies.

My first question:  Why would there be so many zombies?  Generally speaking, a zombie apocalypse requires more than a couple dozen bodies.  The village would need a graveyard, but not just a typical, modest one.  No, it would have to be enormous to account for all the shambling dead.  So why was this particular graveyard so enormous?  Because… there was a battle.  Yeah, a battle, long ago, hundreds of years, there was a huge battle at this very spot, with thousands of lives lost, marking the place as a historic site.  And because the party had a dwarf, an elf, and a kinda-sorta human, this long-ago battle would have been between an army of dwarves, elves, and humans against a faceless demonic horde.

And the second question:  What caused the zombie apocalypse?  Naturally, I thought of a shooting star event, as in “Night of the Comet.”  I imagined this blue skyfire slamming into the historic graveyard north of the village, causing the villagers, led by their mayor, to come investigate.  They would find something, this artifact – the Tear of Orcus!  I saw it as a perfectly smooth, glowing blue sphere, three feet in diameter.  The villagers screw around with it, just like they always do, and there’s this huge blast of necrotic energy that transforms the people around it and raises the long dead underneath it.  This is what the characters walk into, staggering through a heavy, soaking rain to a dark and seemingly deserted village.

At this point, I had a story but not an adventure.  Because I can only see a thing when I see it, I went online and hunted up (AKA stole) a village map which met my requirements, and then figured out six encounter set pieces based on several GameMastery Flip-Mats  I had:

1. Approaching. Through the sheeting rain, the characters see a figure in the road, and they realize most of its head is missing.  Other minions claw up from the mud around them and attack.
2. Entering Village. After entering the village, minions and a few brutes attack the party.
3. Exploring Village. A little while after that, minions, brutes, and an artillery zombie attack the party.  The difficulty increases with this battle.
4. Survivors. Introduce a handful of uninfected villagers, hiding from the undead and fighting where they can.  This scene can be used for exposition and an extended rest, and also provide a couple magic items for the heroes.  Instead of wasting time and space writing up the NPCs, I named them and, for characterization, noted a person I knew from my life, from sports, or from celebrity.  For example, I named one Aldua, and wrote “Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island.”
5. Tear of Orcus. North of the village, the glowing Tear of Orcus rests in the middle of a ruined landscape, surrounded by undead minions.  Upon examination, the party will find evidence of all the traffic here and also a teardrop shaped cavity in the sphere.  When the mayor led the villagers here, he took a teardrop shaped piece of the sphere back to the meeting hall.
6. Village Meeting Hall. The town mayor, transformed into an undead controller, resides with several zombie guards inside the fortified meeting hall.  The characters must get into the meeting hall, defeat the mayor, and return the teardrop piece to the sphere to lift the curse.  Of course, when they put the piece in, the sphere dilates open into a pair of iron cobras that must be destroyed.

I wanted to keep the adventure freeform and sandboxy, allowing the players to move around and investigate as they wanted.  It’s a fairly scary thing for me, since I tend to be an “on the rails” DM, but I thought I’d give this a try.  I didn’t know if they’d just wander around obliterating zombies, try to solve the problem and lift the curse, or even say, “This village sucks,” and turn around and leave.  As it happened, they dipped into all three options.

Read Part 2…

This is a hard world we find ourselves in, where everyone is looking to steal our money, screw us over, and make wee-wee on our hats.  This is a world that hates and punishes naiveté, and loves and rewards cynicism and suspicion.  Trust no one and fear everyone, strike before you’re struck, an extended hand conceals a blade, the arm around your back connects to the hand in your pocket.  It’s an unfortunate reality, but this is a perfectly sensible reaction to this world, so slimy full of realtors, spammers, lawyers, and liars.

Sadly, we carry our real-world wounds into the games we play, which transforms our characters, first imagined as sweetly smiling pure souls with cartoon birds lighting on their shoulders, into gritty, hard-bitten, heartless, soulless bastards.  This may be because of experiences with a DM that shattered hope and trust like a cinderblock on a crystal ornament, and we have decided we cannot allow ourselves to be hurt like that again.

Players who are young (figure under 14 years old) or brand new to gaming can be unspoiled by distrust and doubt, which means they might actually release the defeated kobold chieftain, and might actually touch the faintly glowing altar in the middle of the cobwebby temple, and might actually believe the exotic beauty needing an escort back to her underground city.  The paragon level cynic cries, “Kill the chieftain!  Avoid the altar!  Ignore the beauty!” Each of these situations is obviously a trap.

And here’s my question:  So what?

When I first started gaming (many lifetimes ago), when I was young and dumb and full of… um… foolishness, I regularly blundered into regrets and traps and betrayals, and these were in games riddled with DM statements like, “The room appears empty,” and, “The wardrobe appears safe,” and, “The woman appears honest.” Naturally, all of those “APPEARS” rang my alarm bells, but I still got caught, hurt, nailed, and crushed.

Every villain that got away always came back, more dangerous, better equipped, and insane with the need for revenge.  Every time I didn’t obsessively prod the floor with a 10′ pole, I fell into a deep pit with poisoned spikes at the bottom.  Every femme I trusted turned out to be extremely fatale, usually working with the escaped villain and often the architect of all those spiked pits.

And despite all that pain, despite all those times I was burned, I had some real fun in those way-back-when games.  I am so careful and worried and neurotic in the real world, I could really enjoy being reckless in a fake one, rushing ahead, devil may care, and let’s see what happens.  I’ve seen it in so many games, where the party is skulking fearfully around a chest as though it were an unexploded bomb (which sometimes, it is), and then somebody grunts, “Ah, screw it,” and kicks the chest open.  In the moment that this happens, there’s always a look on that player’s face, a look of relief, a look of release, a look of freedom.

What I’m calling for here are more “Ah, screw it” moments.  And why not?  What is at risk exactly?  I’ve placed several of my characters in dangerous circumstances, and even watched sadly as a few of them died, and outside of some mild razzing from other players, I never personally suffered from the outcome.  The DM often rewarded such brash action, or, failing that, didn’t overtly punish it.  Usually, I wound up with a funny, wild, loopy story with which I could bore friends and family for years afterwards.

Happy Ending Example: In a post-apocalypse game, our group was under assault by metal-heads inside a sprawling mansion, and Steve and I needed to get across a wide hallway that ran north-south along the mansion’s spine.  We knew there were leather and spiked killers waiting for us to show our faces, so there we were, crouched and dithering inside the laundry room.  Finally, I stood up, turned to Steve and said, “Cover me,” and made my dash.  I was two strides across the hallway when a metal-head leaned from a nearby room, leveling his rifle on me.  I dove, snapping up my .357 and firing… CRITICAL!  I vaporized the top of his head from the eyebrows up, then curled into a tight ball and rolled into the room across the way.

At the table, my heart was going thumpa-thumpa-thumpa and my hands were slick with sweat, but I had my moment, all because I was willing to say, “Ah, screw it,” and try something extremely stupid.  But what if it hadn’t gone my way?  What if I fired and missed?  What if the metal-head fired and hit?  I’d still have a great story (“Remember that time you ran out into that hallway and got shot six times?”), just without a great ending.

No-So-Happy Ending Example: In our D&D game, Kevin was the quintessential “ah, screw it” player, and always acted without thinking, kicking down doors, charging into combat, and chugging unidentified potions.  He found himself lots of feet up a tree when an orc shambled into the clearing underneath him.

Immediately he said, “I jump onto it.”
We all stared in horror, and the DM, grinning in bemusement, asked, “How many hit points do you have left?”
Kevin looked down, then back up and said, “One!” He didn’t seem remotely concerned.
“How do you expect to survive the fall?” the DM asked.
“I don’t know.  But I should hurt the orc, right?” You can’t argue with that kind of logic.
So he leapt from the tree, rolled to hit… and got a natural 1.  Ker-SPLAT!
Once we had all stopped laughing, Kevin asked with a sniffy kind of pride, “Any chance my 20 oil flasks explode?”

I am issuing a challenge to every DM who runs games for me, and it is this:  bring it.  Bring your enemies, bring your traps, bring your double crosses.  I’ll buy into it all, swallow it hook, line, and spiked chain, and still want more.  I am going to live (and probably die) dangerously.  And after it’s all done, I’m going to have some stories to tell.