Into the OD&D

I've been thinking about how to OD&D with Into the Odd again, and I think you don't actually need any house rules. Just take these pregens, and make other similar ones as needed.

Fighting-Man (STR 15, DEX 12, CHA 11, HP 6, armor 1)
Heavy Metal Armor (Bulky, armor 1), Two-Handed Sword (d8, Bulky)

Magic-User (STR 7, DEX 9, CHA 12, HP 1)
Wizard Robes & Pointy Hat, Magic Book (Read Magic, Sleep, Fireball), Staff (d6, Bulky)
 

Cleric (STR 14, DEX 10, CHA 12, HP 5, armor 2)
Heavy Metal Armor (Bulky, armor 1), Shield (Bulky, armor 1), Mace (d6), Holy Symbol

Thief (STR 9, DEX 16, CHA 13, HP 3)
Short Bow, Water Arrows, Rope Arrows, Cudgel (d6, Bulky), Lockpicks

Elf (STR 12, DEX 14, CHA 16, HP 4)
Magic Book (Read Magic, Invisibility, Charm), Scimitar (d6), Bow & Arrows (d6)

Dwarf (STR 16, DEX 13, CHA 7, HP 6, armor 2)
Heavy Metal Armor (Bulky, armor 1), Shield (Bulky, armor 1), War Axe (d6)

Hobbit (STR 10, DEX 15, CHA 14, HP 3)
Sling & Stones (d6), Dagger (d6), Pipe & Magical Herbs

 

Magic Book - each can be understood only by its owner (though certain thieves have been known to trick magic books into believing they were, in fact, the owner, and steal the spells off of them). These are anchors for plasmic entities known as spells. In written form, they are dangerous and wish to be read out loud. Amateur magic-users will soon discover that reading a spell out loud without deep familiarity with the magic book and the spells within will result in terrible catastrophes as the entity is released from its aetheric binding and goes wild. The owner of the book has that deep familiarity and understanding, so he can actually spend a week (Long Rest if using classic ItO rules) doing one of these:

• Memorize and prepare each spell within the book for casting.
Prepared spells can each be cast once before they need to be memorized again.

• Copy a new spell from a scroll or other magic book into his own.
Scrolls crumble to dust after being used once, and other magic books are dangerous to use.

• Research a new spell of his own creation, having gathered the required ingredients.
Referees will tell you what ingredients are needed based on the spell's parameters.
Finding the ingredients is an (or multiple) adventure(s) itself, with the most powerful spells being worth months or more of play. As usual, adjust to suit your table's pace, though.

Odd Carcosa #3 - Dead City of the Primordial Ones

Ran some more Carocsa tonight! It was pretty fun, though I dreaded game time as I had zero energy for prep over the week - need to consume more media and spend less time studying.

Anyways, here's the charcters:

Morkoth, Blue Cleric of Oryx
Matthew Rattigan, Engineer from Earth
Big Eye & Log Breaker, White Fighting-Men (& Woman)
Turak, Yellow Sorcerer
& Myotis, Purple Pygmy (Lazuli's replacement)

What Happened
After strange dreams, the PC awoke in a cyclopean dead city inside an even bigger cave illuminated by strange amoeba-like insects.

• Following the sound of rushing water, the party goes north until they reach the "edge" of the platform the city is standing on. Down a huge waterfall they can see the flooded, collapsed part of the city. To the west is a gigantic hive with artificial illumination and to the east is a tall pyramid.

• They were interrupted in their musings by the screams of a strange old man, with sunburnt skin like that of the earth man, only much darker, with black hair and green eyes and a thick arabic accent. After helping the man with invisible, intangible bugs, he offered his help, revealing what he knew:

1. There are Bone Men in the Hive, and you could go through there and some cave systems to reach the Primordial Crater where the White Ooze the party is looking for rests.

2. There is another, slightly safer way through his old laboratory, though there is a Shoggoth in the Vault underneath...

The party decided to go with the Lab as fighting through hordes of Bone-Men might get boring or deadly.

• Going down a ladder, the old man missed a step and broke both his legs, but the party agreed to carry him to get more out of him.

• After going through a room filled with overgrown tropical vegetation and vines, the party met a killer robot with a brain-in-a-jar screaming "ERADICATE" at them, but with quick thinking and the use of a Quickening spell, Rattigan managed to get on the machine and deactivate it. Turak almost died under machinegun fire, but was quickly put back on his feet. Carcosans are sturdy like that.

• More exploring revealed a room full of fibrous pods containing humanoid figures, a flower-infested bedroom and a hidden path to the sorcerer's laboratory, which contained a door to the underground vault AND a fresh clone of the old man, younger and stronger. The party let him have his new body.

"Young" is relative for sorcerers though.

• The sorcerer having recovered his memories, was glad to reward the PCs with some more help - he lent them two of his killer bots in case they ran into the Shoggoth below, and after warning them, he let them go down the Vault.

• In the vault, the players went through a bunch of relatively unimportant rooms with stuff in them (frogs, bugs, some crocodile god alter...) while in the distant, the Shoggoth tried to lure them out with the call of a human infant, without success. With some luck and skill, the party eventually got through the vault without stumbling upon the beast.

• Deeper below, a colossal cave revealed a large crater filled with primordial white goo. Everyone resisted the strange compulsion to jump in there - yes that's the second one in three sessions, sentient goo is the equivalent of a Bugbear on Carcosa - and used the robots to get two full canisters of the stuff before going back up.

• Another safe crossing of the vault - except Morkoth found himself right in front of Morkoth right at the end! The two started fighting, with the beast immitating even the magic of the original, while the others immediately ran away towards the Sorcerer's lab (protected by an airlock). 

The struggle continued as both tried to kill each other until Morkoth had the great idea of sticking out his arm for the bot to scan and figure out which was the real one (the sorcerer took blood samples from everyone earlier to make sure no shapeshifting shoggoth would try to fool him into opening the vault for it). When the Shoggoth noticed that, it burst out into a great soup of black ichor and Morkoth barely got out of there while making use of his last Quickening spell. As everyone desperately pleaded the sorcerer to open the vault, the black ichor started cracking the airlock's doors, but everyone did manage to get through and close the door behind them before it could reach the lab.

Epilogue Matthew Rattigan got back home, surrounded by some very confused and bothered swissmen wondering why there was a smelly, weird, mutated dude in the middle of their otherwise great day.

Morkoth, the Grinding Stone of Seasons, joined forces with the Ocean of Mercy, having acquired an energy core from the aliens to power his superweapon, and using the goo to craft a new pair of arms for him through vivimancy. Whether his companions will follow him on his crusade against bone men or lead them to other adventures, we do not know. Yet.

The End for now.

Post-Mortem

I've some very "vanilla" stuff lately and thought it lacking, so I turned towards the weirdest, most high concept-yet-playable setting I knew of that I had at hand and did some Carcosa. Turns out it takes a lot of energy to prep for it, and I don't really have the time for that level of dedication right now. Or at least, only in small bursts. So I've decided to take a small break from it and go at it more safely, preparing one-shot adventures or strong situations for the players to deal with instead of inefficiently looking for all possible ways to prep and ending up stitching together 5 different adventures like a mad man. Into the Odd is still pretty cool - didn't really use most of its rules besides the lovely Luck Roll this time though.

Stuff I'm Considering Next:• Traveller Classic (some kind of space western type of deal)
• Tom Moldvay's D&D Basic Set (it's so well written!)
• "Regular" Into the Odd or some other good rules-light set.

Into the Borderlands #2 - It was PROBABLY evil

Ran another session of Into the Borderlands tonight, with three returning players of the Lawful Gang!

• Anaximenes the Elf, who got himself a very fancy wizard hat (and a fancier tabar later on)
• Jim the Also Elf, who nearly died this time around!
• Frances the Bald, may he rest in peace
• And Frances' player's new guy, a Halfling named Marcomir

What Happened (maybe NSFW, some gruesome stuff happened this time)

• A few weeks after the first expedition, our heroes discover a new way to enter the house, through a locked basement door. Bashing it open reveals rough stairs leading into a small tunnel.

• The tunnel leads them to a cave with a large pool and waterfall. Frances decides to climb that waterfall, finds something and drops his sword. The others tug on the rope he tied himself to to try and climb after him only to see his body fall into the pool. Except its insides are now outside and everything that was outside, like armor and clothes or skin, is now inside and bulging/protruding.

• Our heroes minus Frances decide to call it quits for now and spend the rest of the day mourning for their friend, who gets a decent burial and an epitaph: "a Fighter for the right cause or the right price."

• The next day, they recruit three companions: Marcomir, a hobbit carrying an oversized crossbow and wearing an eyepatch that doesn't seem to favor one eye over the other, and two henchmen - Hugo the Giant and Brother Cassius.

Odd Carcosa #2 - Close Encounter of the Third Kind

(test) Ran some more Odd Carcosa today!

Our Heroes
Morkoth, Blue Cleric of Oryx
Big Eye, White Fighter & his Companion, Log Breaker
Matthew Rattigan, Earth Man Engineer
& Turak, Yellow Sorcerer Man

What Happened
After a week in the gruesome* Citadel of the Ocean of Mercy, the party is invited to go out and get themselves useful again by bringing back some kind of power core for the OoM's hidden super-weapon (it's in the basement), and is joined by a man from another planet (Matthew) and a yellow, mysterious man in tattered rags and futuristic pajamas. They decide to seek the domed city of Turak where they should meet a man named Alaxiron, who knows where to find other Star Men, as they should probably have power cores for the OoM.

The Ocean of Mercy, telling the party to GTFO

And to get there, they must first cross the misty mountains of Thaggasoth.

• On the first day, they saw a massive spire shooting strange waves of light into the atmosphere, peopled with near a hundred bone men wielding high tech weaponry and mounting strange crustacean monsters. They decided to cautiously avoid the area.

• The second day was calm, with 2D white noise clouds in the sky and dinosaurs in the distance.

• On the third day, they reached the mountains proper and ambushed a trio of misshapen, pale green frog-like beings - amphibious ones. When killed, they burst into gory, malodorous bits and tainted Rattigan with their vile stench. One was kept alive for interrogation, which yielded the following:

1. His people have been on the planet since even before the reign of the Serpent Men.
2. Some Space Men are hiding in the Darkness Beneath Carcosa, the Great Underground.
3. One such entrance lies to the north, near the Mutated Forest.

• On the fourth day, they saw a black tower and a flying saucer! Rushing to follow it, they found a hidden village at the bottom of a crater in the mountains. There, all the inhabitants of the village (Primitive Orange Men) were holding hands together in a circle surrounding the green light of the saucer. One little grey man (STAR MAN!) slowly hovered down and looked around until he found what he wanted: Morkoth. He raised him into the air by merely thinking about it and brought him, and himself, back up into the saucer. The party jumped after them and found that the green light made them so light that they could indeed follow.

• Up in the spaceship, one of the star men (actually a star woman) asked who they were, and acknowledging them as servants of the Elder Gods and thus, enemies of their enemies, they offered (well, more like space geas'd) the party knowledge and technology in exchange for a certain artifact that they shall recover in an ancient city of Primordial Ones.

We stopped there so that I can actually prepare said City. Next time, they'll be beamed down near said city so that they can go and find the artifact the Star Men are looking for: the Primordial Jelly.
Any characters joining in on this session will have been plagued by strange vivid dreams of grey beings and pastoral switzerland lately, and wake up among the party, sharing their strange creole and immediate goal (though no compulsion controls them, and they don't get no cyberware either).

The Star Men

Referee Stuff
Some more re-reading of Bastionland blog and thinking back to earlier Into the Odd games make me think that I don't really care that much for OD&D bits after all. I'm keeping them for this campaign because it doesn't actually take anything away from the game, but I think I'll do without in future games using that system. I have embraced the quickness of combat as a good thing. It does work for "combat as war", and it's fine if there are no "fair" fights, as such. Also tried the Ganging Up rule again and it's really not my thing, at least not in online games where we can't just see everyone rolling dice and have to keep track of stuff. Doesn't really seem to change much. Also started to hand out bigger XP for hexploration and overall doing shit because this is going to be a short campaign so why not have people grow in power in a quick way.

* it's actually made of virtrified corpses and skeletons of men mixed with some kind of transparent plastic-feeling super hard material.

Odd Carcosa #1 - Grilled Wizards & Language Barriers

Today was the first session of my new Odd Carcosa Campaign, and I have to say, it went pretty well.

Our Heroes

• Morkoth (The Grinding Stone of Seasons), Blue Cleric of Oryx, the Flaming Pillar

• Lazuli, Blue Thief

• Mane (Exiled Prince of the Winds, Caller of Storms and Herald of Thunder), Orange Fighter

• Big Eye, White Fighter and his companion Log Breaker, a White Fighter

The Adventure Proper

Strangers found themselves sharing a campfire in the rocky wastes.
Language barriers (mostly) fell as interprets revealed themselves.

Awkward conversation was had, graciously cut short by shouted orders and war cries in the distance.

Two sides: hooded men riding lizards and wielding lasers ambushed by hoplites with spear & shield.

Our heroes decide to use caution and wait it out.

Careful observation reveals the hooded men to be Jale Men, the hoplites are Red Men. The latter party wins, grants a quick death (what passes on for mercy on dread Carcosa) to most but keep a prisoner for interrogation.

The Orange man, a warrior of noble blood, goes to hail the victors. They respond with purpose:

"We are warriors under the banner of the Ocean of Mercy, this land is his territory. We have been tracking these Jale cultists for many moons now, they are slaves to the Oozing Green Pool, and we are on our way to destroy this wicked sorcery and its spawns. Join us, and you may stay in our Lord's keep."

"This is a noble goal", says the priest, thinking back on the awful sorceries of the Bone Man they met in the past. The party accepts to help the Red Men.

On their way to the Jale hideout, the priest perhaps recklessly breaches the topic of faith with the troupe's leader - a man called Daikos, and luckily, he finds kinship in the Red warriors, who share their tale: they are also servants of the Elder gods and enemies of chaos, though their leader, a warlord formerly known as Ulthar. When he and his party reached the citadel in this area, it was inhabited by Dolm Men without a Queen to rule their Hive Mind, and so he took over by putting on a Helm of Telepathy which gave him control over the whole colony, but slowly burned his old spirit until nothing remained but the Ocean of Mercy. Forever loyal to their leader, the red spartans abandoned their former duty to explore the lands to defend the citadel.

The prisoner leads our heroes and the hoplites to an ancient gatehouse made of black stone, a doorway into a canyon at the foot of the mountains. There, Daikos reveals his plan:

The Red warriors will storm the gatehouse and butcher every single Jale cultist.

In the mean time, the party will carry a nano-nuke into the caves, find the Ooze, and destroy it.

[Referee stuff: at this point, I just drop the Stonehell Canyon map onto the players as I didn't want to spend too much time on mapping the area and also should have prepared more. It turned out to work well enough though and there was no real mapping challenge to be had in the areas visited.]

As soon as they stepped into the canyon, Lazuli noticed three naked bone men staring at the party from a ruined house. Operating on instinct and hatred, she peppered them with arrows. Everyone followed, and the Bone Men were soon massacred. Bones littered their hideout, but not much else.

First cave, some white lotus zombis, arrows and javelins took care of them with barely a scratch on the players' side. Deeper inside, a cenotaph covered in eldritch signs, under it is a hidden compartment with a strange pulsating fruit covered in electric blue cobwebs. Against his better judgment, Morkoth decides to poke at it, blowing it up and messing up half the party.

Second cave, the party throws a rock inside and gets assaulted by this thing:

Time for sanity damage! The orange man goes crazy for a little while, starts weeping and praying.
The others are shaken but still sane and try to run away (after Morkoth fails to turn the monster away).

Lazuli is the slowest, gets attacked, takes Critical Damage, loses her head. The party runs faster.

The monster loses interest once outside, delving into the woods below. Big Eye is scarred by the events for the rest of his life, while Mane regains his composure.

Second cave has a bone-man staring at himself in a large ornate mirror with arousal and a strange, ravenous hunger. Arrows and javelins hurt him a lot, he grabs the Orange man and gets one last javelin (which nearly misses the PCs) from Big Eye in the face. Deeper into the cave, the Great Ooze Pool lies, surrounded by green flames and with, at the bottom of it, a naked Jale sorceress looking like one of the oracles from Minority Report. She sends troubling visions in the minds of those present, trying to lure them in with promises of unspeakable pleasures. Everyone passes their save and goes like "heh, nah." Then Morkoth throws the nuke down the pit and everyone gets the hell out of dodge.

And the spartans one, so now the players have a place where they can go and rest, and meet The Ocean of Mercy.

End Session #1.

Post-Mortem

I still love Into the Odd, though there's a lot of D&D-isms (specifically OD&D) that I'm too in love with now. Classes, alignments, all that stuff adds color to the game and doesn't really make it that much complex, which is why I'm using my revised Into the Borderlands rules (see "Odd Carcosa" at the beginning of this post for link) for it. Seems solid, will need some time to see how well it holds up. Combat is brutal, with whoever holds initiative usually destroying the opposition, but that's fine, I think. Makes ambushes important. I'll definitely rely more on group intiative rolls in the future so that fighting is scarier and requires more preparation on the players' end, as I mainly went with "players go first" here by default.

Lesser Known OD&D Games

By now, everyone and their mother knows about the wonderful, wonderful game that is the Original edition of Dungeons & Dragons, thanks to Labyrinth Lord Original Edition Companion, Swords & Wizardry: Whitebox (and its descendant White Box - Fantastic Medieval Adventures) and truly scholarly Delving Deeper with its solid V4 and annotated V5 in the works.

This post isn't about these games. Instead, I want to talk about a bunch of sneaky games that didn't get as much coverage as they should have, considering how good they are. In no particular order:

Seven Voyages of Zylarthen

7VZ (SVZ?) is a re-statement of OD&D that focuses on the earlier fiction that inspired the fantasy writers of the Appendix N - stuff like ancient mythology, folklore and fairy tales. It's complete with a bestiary, spells and GM guidance (ala Volume 3: The Wilderness & Underground Adventures), with an old-school-ish layout and font but actually organized well. Here are some of the reasons why it's cool: it made weapons vs armor class easy with a nice mix of attack matrices and attack bonus, it's Death & Dismemberment table is excellent (sometimes brutal, sometimes merciful, but it's never a good idea to go down to zero hit points) and followed by surgery rules which make use of one of my favorite bit from the original game: Withstand Adversity (later renamed Survive Shock for AD&D).
The writing is evocative but not too verbose, stuff is clearly laid out so that a clever nerdy kid could figure out how to D&D from this book alone. The Electronic Edition comes as an all-in-one book but it used to be a bunch of tiny booklets about the size of the originals (except there's 4 for some reason).

Torch & Sword

 No cover, but it's FREE!

This one is all about minimalism. The presentation is extremely simple, you only get the stuff from Men & Magic and it's not as in-depth as, say, Delving Deeper, but it gets the job done with minimal word and page count. It uses Fighting Capability and some ancestor of Delta's Target 20 system. Overall a solid little bunch of rules which can be used as an example of how little rules you actually need to play the original D&D.

Treasure Hunters

 (can't find a link on the blog, you can email the author for a copy)

I just discovered this game and I have to say it's one of my favorite so far. It uses only d6s (or "dice" for non-nerds), with 2d6 combat and task resolution (ala Traveller Classic, without the skills). Its strong points: great layout, great writing, a deep understanding of the original game's flow and rules, but also a bunch of really good, unintrusive little rules that add flavor like the post-adventure roll (you're grimy now, and time to fix that dented sword!) or the Dwarven Poetry which explains how mostly-dwarf parties get bonuses to attack and AC because of how tactical dwarves be. I have yet to give the referee's guide an in-depth look but it seems pretty solid, covering everything important in great details (castles & domains rules included!) while keeping the wording simple and relatively accessible to non-gamers.

Mythical Journeys

The follow-up to Treasure Hunters, where the author dials back the house rules a bit to make a product compatible with most D&D stuff. Sadly there's no Referee's book or bestiary yet, but it's in the works apparently. No more thief, some supplement I rules are around but very discrete, the layout and writing is even better in this version than in Treasure Hunter.

Into the Borderlands #1 - The Mist Over Wickerbury

Or "The House That Wasn't There"

I've dug another dungeon, having learned a few lessons in design from Castle Redvald. This one has maps that are easier to navigate (and re-draw on the spot to show on camera), tighter levels with more things going on in each room (no truly empty room) and a strong theme to tie areas to the lore, hopefuly giving them a stronger identity.

Rules-wise, I'm using my latest hack-thing, Into the Borderlands.

I also decided to let it go and accept that there is a ton of great shit out there that I can steal and jam in there with little to no modification, so as a disclaimer: this is by no means "all me" or something that I plan to get money from, it's purely for fun.


There is a House on the hill. It wasn't there last week. Since its appearance, a thick fog has rolled over the region, and the people of Wickerbury are going stark raving mad. Brother Cassius, the local priest, is very concerned, and has offered you an impressive sum in exchange for dealing with the problem.

Enter the Lawful Gang:

• Joab the Scavenger (Lawful Rogue, or as he likes to call it, "Security Expert")
• Bald Frances (Lawful Man-at-Arms, who fights for a good cause or the right price, in that order)
• Anaximenes (Lawful Briarborn - elf - an elementalist and follower of the Blind One)
• Jim (Lawful Briarborn, an evil-hunting no nonsense spiritualist)
• and Titus, the only neutral in the lawful gang, and a dirty thief even!

For 500 silver per head and a chance to do a truly heroic and good deed, this band of 1st level adventurers assembled to help Brother Cassius and the inhabitants of Wickerbury by getting rid of whatever is causing the fog.

WHAT HAPPENED

• Upon reaching the house, which was described as a large manor by witnesses, but actually looked more like a small 2F cottage in obvious disrepair, the party checked a few entrances:

-Front Door: leads into a pit of electrically charged copper spikes, too dangerous.
-Balcony Door: spiderweb carvings on a door with a copper handle, too suspicious.
-Upstairs Windows: leads into a simple corridor with a red rug, good enough.

• Titus broke one of the windows and went in with Joab while the others were on lookout. When a strange humming noise and bright yellow light appeared around the corner, the thieves hid in a nearby room and Bald Frances glimpsed at the creatures while peeking through the broken window from up on the roof: a trio of humanoid shapes made of lightning.

• In the nearby room, the thieves saw metal plaques on the walls with names and dates carved in them. One of the names stood out: Anarios, the Blue Knight, a legendary hero of the later wars to reclaim the wilderness lost to chaos beyond the Borderlands, who disappeared ten years ago. Over the plaques, someone had painted the words: FORGIVENESS IN SERVICE in elven.

• The room facing that one contained three coffins, each stuffed with a headless, fresh corpse of a villager.

• Going west (away from where they last saw the lightning beings), the party found an arsenal room with racks of broken crossbows and a rusted trunk, occupied by a bunch of floating misshapen corpse-things that seemed harmless after further investigation and curious stabbing. Once the creatures left, Anaximenes decided to loose a bolt into the rusted trunk, blowing it up by breaking whatever explosives were inside. Luckily, the Lawful Gang's signature move is to take cover whenever they throw or shoot something in a room, as established a bit earlier...

• Exploring north-west, the party came at a crossroads with the west passage barred by a strange wall of humming light. As they bickered and argued about what to do, a huge spider-dragon beast came rushing from the north passage, stabbing walls, floor and ceiling with its scimitar-shaped legs.
Which, being six PCs using mostly ItO rules, they dealt with pretty easily, in retrospect.

•Going south at the crossroads, they found a door that looked exactly like the entrance one, and it did lead to the first room they saw after opening the front door, complete with the rock they threw inside when checking out the room. Clearly this house operates under strange rules.

• After that I believe the party went north, after pushing the Spider-Dragon corpse into the humming field, which turned the massive and cumbersome body into dust in an instant. Up north they found three rooms:

-One had a patchy copper wall and a black ceramic lever, which they pulled down.
-The next one had another lever, this one white, which they also pulled down after some shenanigans.
-The last one contained a massive copper sphere, which felt warm, welcoming and true to Joab the Scavenger after he stepped inside. After some convincing he finally let go of the PERFECT SPHERE and accepted to get out and join the others for more adventuring.

• Coming back to the crossroad, the party noticed that the walls of light were now turned off, and explored further south-west, where they found a room containing a skeleton holding an ancient sword, which went to Anaximenes, and a window to the outside. Breaking it revealed that the room was somehow the one in the north-east corner of the house, and that the outside backdoor and window led here.

• South of that room, cutting down some cobwebs led to a small altar to an unknown God - the statue and scriptures had been removed, although a small garden gnome was in a corner, which Titus broke out of loathing. The party discussed the possibility of the place having been visited by the fey (good elves don't consider themselves a part of the fey, being children of the gods, while fey are chaotic beings born of the underground).

• North-west of that area, the party stumbled upon an hyper-realistic painting of stairs going up, which Titus bumped into at full speed, shattering his ego in such a humiliating situation. He will forever be scarred by stairs and potential illusions, until he can achieve REVENGE.

• Further up north, the party saw a room full of carvings on the walls representing people lined up to enter a sphere, emerging as angelic beings. There was also a rippling mirror on the south wall.

• Before wrapping it up, Joab really wanted to go back to the sphere and see what would happen if the group closed it while he was inside. They did, despite many protests from most of the party, and Joab was electrocuted to death as he had visions of the Ungod of Spiders welcoming him to his-her realm of trickery and mad wisdom. A lightning being emerged from the sphere, which Anaximenes destroyed with magic before the new form of Joab could attempt to communicate with them.

QUICK POST-SESSION NOTES

• Gonna be running this another time today with my sisters and girlfriend, another session report will probably follow shortly after.

• Into the Borderlands is a success so far. I like the implementations of classes and D&D mechanics like alignment, titles, XP for silver and so on, and I get to keep my favorite mechanics from ItO which make combat faster and perhaps more forgiving in the sense that the tactical situation is more transparent for everyone involved.