Characters (pregens) in the first group.
- GuiverMac (a Savage in Detroit)
- Merula (by Other Mike)
- Marcus ("Tim Shorts ":http://gothridgemanor.blogspot.com/2013/10/con-report-day-one.html#comment-form)
- Fox (a youngster)
- Grim Axe (brother to the youngster)
- Magnus (Joe Dominguez)
The setup was is that the PCs have cleared out most of the Caves of Chaos. They are gunning for a man named Sirius Tarn, a war criminal from the Greyhawk Wars. Each of the PCs was personally impacted by the war crimes committed. They volunteered to bring him in, but all fully buy into the mission to bring him back alive.
The reason to bring him vs. kill him is the fear that some evil power would capture his foul soul to extend his evil ways on Oerth.
Sirius Tarn, originally a cleric of Iuz during the war but eventually turned Tharizdun. The reason I chose Big T is that the descriptions in the Temple section of the Caves of Chaos is very close to trappings used in the Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun.
So I ran this across two games at a Con. The first game the group has to capture Sirius Tarn. They have (offscreen) waded through the Caves of Chaos to get to the Evil Temple section. The fun complication in all this is about half the part really would just prefer to kill Tarn vs. capture him.
A subtle event occurred in this game that had a profound impact on the second game – one of the rooms they explored was the Crypt. The loot in the crypt contained a Helm of Opposite Alignment. Now, I am running this using Savage Worlds and there is no alignment system (it uses Hindrances to help define the moral outlook). So I ruled the helm just changed their view on something very important to them at the moment. In this case, the PC went from letting him live to wanting to kill him.
The session ends in a mad rush with the PCs that are dedicated to capturing Tarn succeeding.
Now to the Tomb of Horrors. I had about 8 or 9 pregens and 6 players. The 6 PCs selected was pretty heavily in the mission as given – get Tarn to the DemiLich and somehow get him Devoured. Only 2 of the 6 were on the rather just kill side of the equation.
It was a 4 hour slot so there was no way to get them all the way through the Tomb. They did the opening area and fought the Gargoyle before I had to accelerate it. I jumped them to the Chapel area. This is where things got “interesting”. The players open up some of the pews until they hit the one with the gas. One guy goes “quick, through the arch!” So EVERYONE goes through the gender & alignment switching Arch!
The implications of that are rather interesting from Sirius Tarn’s perspective. I had modeled the stats on Lareth the Beautiful from another Con game (just changed the spell trappings). So Sirius went from a handsome and persuasive villain to a rather beautiful woman. While I did not think that much of it at the time, I did change is attitude from “I got to kill myself before we get to the end” to “I got to survive”.
From a D&D perspective, there is a very interesting implication — perhaps a divination was misunderstood – you were supposed to throw him in the arch to swap his alignment, not have his soul devoured. Also, I looked at D&D 3.5 and making some of these helms of alignment change are certainly cheaper than building prison, even if you need to up the save DC. The implication really f’s up the Paladin’s “detect evil and kill it” approach to life – they should be seeking out helms of alignment change to save evil creatures, not Holy Avenger Swords. Anyway, back to our story.
Our group now mostly just wants to kill Tarn. They throw her up on the altar and try to sacrifice her. Things go all wrong and the altar blows up. Through the magic of Soak rolls in Savage Worlds, Tarn (and the group) survives this. The few that are still “on mission” convince the rest of the group that this is a sign they should continue on.
We fast forward to the end. They opened up the area (I had it transport them into a bigger area where it was not exactly obvious where Acererak was hanging out). Now comes the interesting part. Acererak senses the group is there for an interesting reason so parlay opens. Now Savage Worlds has an interesting Social Conflict system one can opt to use and I factored that in to see if the group could sway Acererak one way or the other (so this was to help mediate between the group). The dice did some fun things – basically, when the player said something kind dumb (from A’s POV) the dice crit/failed them (like calling on another god, or implying the A is not powerful as the gods, etc). “Pff – soul sucked!” This happened 3 times for the side trying to “kill” Tarn. But the wonderful thing is that Tarn blew the PCs out of the water and basically offered to be Acereraks high priest and further his plans (the dice loved Tarn).
So we close to black and the group only knows they lost. They do not really know what final accord that Tarn and Acererak struck.
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