#Dungeon23 Tomb of the Vampire Queen, Level 3, Room 4

Moving on down the hallway, you see a light in the cell to your left.

This cell seems empty but there is a light on the inside.  

The light is a wraith that has been trapped here since imprisoned by the Necromancers long ago. It was a human-bugbear hybrid but it was too stupid to be of use to the Necromancers, it was however violent and ill-tempered.  It died and now only its wraith remains. 

It is so consumed with anger that it will attack first before any thoughts of leaving its prison.

Its stats are the same as a wight, but it is ghost-like. It still drains like a wraith and needs magic to hit.

Kickstart Your Weekend: Bloody Appalachia and Shadowdark RPG

Two new games to scratch that old-school itch. 

Bloody Appalachia - Grindhouse Rural Horror Tabletop RPG

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ericfrombloatgames/bloody-appalachia-grindhouse-rural-horror-tabletop-rpg?ref=theotherside

There are like two or three people I would pick as a dream team to make a game of rural horror. And they are all on this project.

Honestly, I didn't need to look past the names. Once I saw Josh Palmer, Eric Bloat, and Pun Issac, I knew I had to have this. And so should you.

So get this now.

Shadowdark RPG: Old-School Gaming, Modernized

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shadowdarkrpg/shadowdark-rpg-old-school-gaming-modernized?ref=theotherside

This one doesn't really need my help, but it still looks fun.  I had picked up the play-test/preview materials at last year's Gary Con and this looks like it will be great.

It is smart trying to get the Old-School and New-School players together. I am not sure it will replace OSE in my life, but it will add some nice features to it.

#Dungeon23 Tomb of the Vampire Queen, Level 3, Room 3

Moving down the hall there is another cell on the left.

This is a false cell, used to confuse those here to set the monsters free. The guards and many of the monsters are long gone, but the trap remains.

The cell bars are electrified. Anyone touching it must make a saving throw vs. Paralysis/ Petrify or take 2d6 hp worth of damage. A thief can find this trap and disable it. Failure to do either will also result in a shock, no save.

The cell opens up but there is no cell beyond. A trick of the stonework makes it look larger than it really is.

This Old Dragon: Issue #91

I thought I would turn back to pages of one of my musty old Dragons. Today's topic comes to us from October of 1984. Gygax is still at TSR. Prince and the Revolution still dominate the airwaves with "Let's Go Crazy" hitting number 1 following the success of "When Doves Cry" and preceding the success of the single "Purple Rain."  Nick Nolte and JoBeth Williams star in the number #1 box office "Teachers." All I remember from that movie was Crispin Glover was really insane in it. On the shelves in the local Waldenbooks is Issue #91 of This Old Dragon.

I did not own this one back in the day. My High School DM and I had an agreement to pick up every other issue. This was the one he got.  I found the cover to be really cool and thought that it would make for a great concept. Something we would try about four years later. 

I did finally get an issue. The one I have is beat up and missing a cover and some pages.  This image is from my Dragon Magazine CD-ROM.

We are introduced to the new Table of Contents page. It is easier to read than the older one with the gray background and will be the standard for a while.  

Letters praise the recent Katherine Kerr articles and have a few helpful suggestions. The recent Rust Monster ecology didn't fare as well. 

Nice ad for Milton Bradley's Broadsides & Boarding Pirates. Back when gaming magazines would run ads for their competitors. The ships from that game would make great props in a sea-faring adventure. 

The Forum is less praise-filled on Katherine Kerr's stance on playing evil characters. while I have played evil characters in the past I find playing them these days a bit tedious. Playing a good character was always more fun for me. 

Gary is up with From the Sorcerer's Scroll.  This one deals with some of the new demon information (and one demon) we will see in the upcoming Monster Manual II.

Long-time contributor Stephen Inniss is back with Realistic Vital Statistics. This is a new guide and system for how much a particular humanoid-like creature, from pixie size to titans, should weigh based on height.  The system certainly works and has a lot of internal consistency which is what you need in a game system. He points out some inconsistencies with the data provided in DMG and attempts to make it better. He does give practical and magical adaptations to the Square-Cube Law (though he does call his observations this, that is what it is) and it plainly sets out why giants could never have existed like described in D&D. I do like his notion there is some sort of magic at work here, maybe a low-level sort of levitation spell going on.  It is a very useful article.

Dragon Magazine MVP (certainly of this issue) Ed Greenwood is up with The Ecology of the Leucrotta. I will fully admit when I first saw this my first thought was "Why? There are so many other interesting creatures out there." Which I think is the whole point. This article and the one on the Slithering Tracker (the first Ecology of article I ever read) pointed out that even so-called "pointless" or even "useless" monsters can be interesting. It also helped shift my focus of D&D/AD&D as "character-centric" to "normal human-centric" and realizing that even a "pointless" monster can be a huge threat. This also reminds me I should do a retrospective at one point on all of these Ecology of articles. 

More Devils. More Hell. And more Ed Greenwood! Nine Hells Revisited gives us some details about the devils and hells they live in. We get some new devils, some of which I have not seen repeated since. There are even a couple that share their names with others like the Greater Devil Dagon (formerly Jaqon), the Greater Devil Azazel, and the Arch Devil Gargoth (formerly Astaroth).  This is every bit as useful as the series from Dragons #75 and #76. 

Ed follows this up with Eight Devilish Questions. This is the article than also originally clued me it to how to figure out the HD of various higher level demons and devils. I say clued me, but in reality it was more along the line of "duh, why didn't I think of that!" 

Nice ad for White Dwarf.  Bigger ad for the 10th Anniversary set of D&D books. Really, really wish I had grabbed those then. Of course, if I had they would have gotten lost with all my other AD&D books from that time.

A big overview slash big advertisement is next the first Dragonlance novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight in Chronicles: A Novel Idea. I know a lot of gamers around my age and older complain about Dragonlance, but frankly I don't get it. It did change the game, but in all ways for the better. 

Ad for Bard Games' The Compleat Fantasy Series and The Atlantean Trilogy follows.

My entire middle section is gone here. It was The Treasure Trove. I am not sure if I took this out or if it was like that when I bought this box of old Dragons.  While by the rules I invented for myself saying I could not review what I don't have, I do want to make one minor breach of that.

As I mentioned, this particular issue was bought by my DM at the time. He took all the magic items here, and a few more of his own, that rewrote all the magic item tables in the DMG. Impressive or ADHD? You decide. Anyway, we were running a small side quest for my paladin, Johan Werper II, and decided that he was on a quest (something that I later would call a "Secret Journey" that all member of his holy order had to do.  On this quest, to make a long story short, he found the sword Demonbane. It fit so well with his quest that I made it and even the Citadel of Conjurers a part of my world mythos. MY Demonbane and Citadel of Conjurers took on a different life than the ones that eventually were published in the Forgotten Realms but history was made on that cold rainy afternoon in October.

Penny Perricord is up with Spies' Advice, some questions and answers for Top Secret. Normally this particular column was written by Top Secret Head Administrator Merle Rasmussen. Not sure why he wasn't here. Maybe out watching the Top Secret! movie?

Coming Attractions lets us know what is getting published soon by TSR. An Indiana Jones adventure  Crystal Death. Some Dragonlance metal minis. The second Conan adventure. The odd one, 2001: A Space Odyssey for Star Frontiers. I never grabbed this, but I wondered with a universe like Star Frontiers with lasers and robots and faster-than-light travel, we would get one about a ship that only made it to Jupiter.  Well that is the nature of licenses boys and girls. Indian Jones, Conan, and Dave Bowman here were all part of TSR's big license push. I am pretty sure they lost money on these.

Speaking of Sci-Fi the Ares section is up next.

"Does Anyone Here Speak Aslan?" from Joseph Benedetto, Jr. covers language skills in Traveller.  It is a pretty good guide and one I would adopt for other sci-fi games like Star Frontiers. 

Sadly I am missing the next pages of Day of the Juggernaut a Star Frontiers scenario by William Tracy. I am also missing the Marvel Phile of Cloak and Dagger, two of my favorite Marvel characters to be honest.

Alex Curylo is up with Careers in Star Law. This is a follow-up to Kim Eastland's article in Dragon #87. Not about lawyers, but law enforcement. 

Not to be forgotten but we do get some new Gamma World material in Don't Leave Home Without 'em! from Scott Hutcheon. This covers new gear for Gamma World.

Our short fiction piece, The Rune and the Dragon, is by Lawernce Watt-Evans.

Paul Smith reviews the Shōgun card game. Ken Rolston is back with full reviews of Mercenaries, Spies, & Private Eyes, Death at Dunwich from Theatre of the Mind Enterprises for Call of Cthulhu (I always like the cover of this one), and The Vanishing Investigator for Gangbusters. He has capsule reviews of Dragons of Despair (he didn't care for it), Marvel Super Heroes, and Bree and the Barrow Downs from ICE for MERP.

Gamers' Guide covers all the small ads. Including an ad for Texas Instruments TI-99 programs to create characters. So yeah computer character generators are at least 40 years old. The rather infamous "Who sez dragons don't fly" t-shirt is featured twice. Lots of other t-shirts too. 

Ad for the Indian Jones RPG.  Wormy, Dragon Mirth, and Snarf Quest wrap up this issue.

All in all a really great issue. Lots of great articles, including many that can still be used today. Did Malarea ever see her diabolic plans come to light? I must know!

#Dungeon23 Tomb of the Vampire Queen, Level 3, Room 2

 The bars to this cell are long gone, and it is easy to see why.  Inside is a large armadillo-like creature. Once the PCs come close to the opening, it rushes out in a frenzy of hunger.

Inside is a Magiphagous Rust Monster. It is the last offspring of one of many failed magical experiments. Many generations of these creatures have lived over the years and this is the last one. The bars to it's cell are gone, but due to a special magic placed on the other bars to the other cells it has not tried to eat those.

  

Rust Monster, Magiphagous  (Old-School Essentials)
Magical, armadillo-like creatures with long tails and two long, antennae-like feelers. Feed on the remains of magical metals.
AC 2 [17], HD 7 (31hp), Att 1 × feeler (rusting), THAC0 13 [+6], MV 120’ (40’), SV D11 W12 P13 B14 S15 (5), ML 9, AL Neutral, XP 175, NA 1d4 (1d4), TT None

• Rusting: Magical metal that touches a rust monster (e.g. weapons that hit it, or armour struck by a feeler) crumbles instantly to rust.  Each time a magic item is affected, it loses one “plus”.  Each item gets a base saving throw of 13, plus any "pluses" the magical item has.
• Mundane damage immunity: Can only be harmed by magical attacks.
• Smell metal: Attracted by the scent of magical metals such as weapons, armors and artifacts.

Appearing as a paler and larger version of the rust monster, these creatures are otherwise exactly the same as rust monsters, save for one detail.   These creatures only eat magical metals.

#Dungeon23 Tomb of the Vampire Queen, Level 3, Room 1

 The stairs from the back of Room 28 on level 2 lead a long way down.  They end at a large iron gate.  The gate is 20' wide and at least 15' tall. It opens in the middle, and it is locked.  The rusty nature of this lock imposes a -5% penalty on opening. The gate, though, is also weak enough that combined strength of 24 can pull it open.

There are claw marks visible on the stone after the gate, but none before it. There are alcoves to either side for guards on both sides of the gate (four total).  There is an ambient eldritch glow throughout the place. 

The hallway continues on.

--

Notes about this level. This is where the Citadel of Conjurers kept their magical experiments. It has long been rumored that this is the birthplace of the Owlbear and other magical monstrosities.  When the Vampire Queen took control here, she raised many of these dead creatures as various types of undead so she could keep them as "guard dogs."

My goal this month will be to populate this level with all sorts of new monsters.

Mail Call Tuesday: Basic Old School

I wasn't planning this one today, but I got some surprises in the mail.  

Both of these will get full reviews later on.

Blue Flame, Tine Stars, or it's full title, Blue Flame, Tiny Stars: A Memoir of Early Experiences Playing the Holmes Edition of the World’s Most Superlative Role-Playing Game, is from Stephen Wendell and it recounts his experiences at the dawn of the RPG scene and with Holmes Basic in particular. I have flipped through it and it looks like a delightful read. It is available as Print on Demand and PDF.

Chivalry & Sorcery Basic Rules is also available as Print on Demand and PDF. It is a stripped-down, basic, version of the 5th edition of the Chivalry & Sorcery RPG. A great place for newbies to the C&S game.

Chivalry & Sorcery is my third of three games I want to use as my D&D 5 replacement, so I will have some characters and ideas for this game later on.