Tower of the Stargazer One-Shot
I was at small party last night, with a few friends and some more unknown faces. At some point during a conversation, I started going off the top of my head "ok so you've heard about this cursed tower somewhere in the countryside, and the local church sent you to go and check it out" with one guy I didn't know before but overheard talking about D&D (3.5, but hey, we all make mistakes). He instantly went into Player mode and we just played some free kriegspiel OD&D like this - he went to negociate with a farmer and buy some of his pigs, ended up bringing the farmer along with him and a weird piglet with a bowtie called "Junior", and some ten minutes later we had maybe 5 players, two of which had never played an RPG before.
One of my buddies handed me his lucky die, I wrote down a few notes and started thinking about Tower of the Stargazer, an introduction module that I ran so many times I essentially memorized the whole thing and can run it from memory.
Game: Free Kriegspiel OD&D without character sheets.
Cast: Sylvio, an Adventurer, soon followed by Junior the Pig, the Knights Enzo & Sam and an Elf called something like "Elenoriel".
And so, here's what happened, in bits. It's all a bit hazy.
• Sylvio put all of the pigs save for Junior in the self-cleaning entrance room and set everything on fire, then waited for a few hours before trying the door again, hoping to see the tower burn down.
Instead he just found the self-cleaning room pristine and without a trace of damage, fire, or pigs, although there was a faint smell of bacon in the air.
• Someone broke some China and everyone was scared of a statue of a medusa for a while before realizing it was merely a regular statue and not the petrifying-gaze kind. They then went upstairs where they found the diary of a local butler, talking about how Madzob the Wizard had gone insane and how he was going to flee the tower with the other servants after sabotaging the wizard's ritual.
And someone opened a door from which blood was trickling down, triggering a Shining-style wave of blood trap that mainly caused a few bruises and a lot of blood everywhere.
• They found the Wizard Madzob and decided to murder him, which they managed to do very quickly without him ever getting the time to cast a spell once out of his magical hold. From there, they went down the "elevator" into the treasure puzzle/room and spent about two more hours on that, lost Junior to a desintegrating field and where on the verge on giving up when the elf figured out the solution.
Then they all started killing each others to avoid having to share the loot, which ended with Sylvio alive but stuck down there and slowly dying of starvation while the elf waited a few months before coming back and stealing all the loot. Which she used to erect a statue of the dead pig, Junior.
Good times.
One of my buddies handed me his lucky die, I wrote down a few notes and started thinking about Tower of the Stargazer, an introduction module that I ran so many times I essentially memorized the whole thing and can run it from memory.
Game: Free Kriegspiel OD&D without character sheets.
Cast: Sylvio, an Adventurer, soon followed by Junior the Pig, the Knights Enzo & Sam and an Elf called something like "Elenoriel".
And so, here's what happened, in bits. It's all a bit hazy.
• Sylvio put all of the pigs save for Junior in the self-cleaning entrance room and set everything on fire, then waited for a few hours before trying the door again, hoping to see the tower burn down.
Instead he just found the self-cleaning room pristine and without a trace of damage, fire, or pigs, although there was a faint smell of bacon in the air.
• Someone broke some China and everyone was scared of a statue of a medusa for a while before realizing it was merely a regular statue and not the petrifying-gaze kind. They then went upstairs where they found the diary of a local butler, talking about how Madzob the Wizard had gone insane and how he was going to flee the tower with the other servants after sabotaging the wizard's ritual.
And someone opened a door from which blood was trickling down, triggering a Shining-style wave of blood trap that mainly caused a few bruises and a lot of blood everywhere.
• They found the Wizard Madzob and decided to murder him, which they managed to do very quickly without him ever getting the time to cast a spell once out of his magical hold. From there, they went down the "elevator" into the treasure puzzle/room and spent about two more hours on that, lost Junior to a desintegrating field and where on the verge on giving up when the elf figured out the solution.
Then they all started killing each others to avoid having to share the loot, which ended with Sylvio alive but stuck down there and slowly dying of starvation while the elf waited a few months before coming back and stealing all the loot. Which she used to erect a statue of the dead pig, Junior.
Good times.
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