Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Using Dungeon Crawl Classix Magic Sword Generator and also Some Rambling

I haven't bothered up typing a session report yet; we did manage to play a game using a Dungeon Crawl Classix-style magic system in our Labyrinth Lord campaign and it worked out pretty well. The elf decided not to opt in; the cleric and the magic-user did though and they did alright, the cleric in particular rolling a natural 20 on a Lay on Hands roll and off-the-cuff I decided that doing so when healing a minor shrapnel wound would cause an unrelated bonus of granting the cleric a D&D Type Five "advantage" mechanic for the next d6 turns because her god was so hyped with her.

(This works better than you might think it would because the cleric's god is Abtu, the capricious monkey god of luck. He is typically represented in one of two aspects, the first, the Warrior, is vaguely analogous to the Monkey King,  in the second, the Trickster, he is a normal-sized monkey wearing a fez and smoking a cigar. While keeping watch on a recent journey, the elf whittled the cleric a small totem of Abtu as the Trickster in which he is furiously masturbating.)

Anyway, so I decided to use the magic sword generation table to create some treasure in the dungeon that my party is currently exploring -- a small catacomb/temple of Duvan'ku* hidden away in a larger cavern complex in the mountains west of Weaverham.

Here's what it came up with (all fluff by me, base mechanics from the DCC generation table).

The Magistrate's Nail:
Longsword +1 (+2 damage against Men), Int 8, communicates through Basic Urges, purpose is to uphold Law, can Locate Object x2/day
A blade of antique design (a sage or an especially well-educated swordsmith could identify the style as that of the Eastern Empire, although not those used by the Imperial army), The Nail is an investigator's weapon, forged in order to bring criminals to bay, including aiding in the gathering of evidence. It is dedicated to bringing the Guilty to light and if wielded by a Chaotic individual, it will act capriciously, putting the wielder at a Disadvantage at the most inopportune times as well as attempting to take advantage of situations where the blade might be lost by the wielder. Any Chaotic individual taking the blade up will feel nauseous and uncomfortable so long as they hold it. If the blade is naked when a crime is taken place, the Nail will urge the wielder to strike down whoever is committing the crime. If the Nail is being used to commit a crime, it must make a save versus Death as a first-level fighter or shatter.

* - As an aside, as much as I love Death Frost Doom, I'm going to give Death Love Doom a miss. I'm generally fine with extreme content; however, I give anything that involves children in that vein a wide berth. This wouldn't have been the case before I became a parent; now that I have, I'm utterly incapable of approaching this sort of material rationally, it just sets off an incredibly impressive series of emotional chain reactions that just make me angry and sad. This is not to say that people shouldn't buy the module. They should! And I hope they have some great game sessions with it. It's just a case where you have to be able to say This Isn't For Me, And That's Fine**.

** - This goes double for some of my players, who are not only parents; they also work with local child abuse organizations and have had to become involved with some truly hellish real-world situations; I don't think sitting down and playing through fantastic scenarios involving horrible things happening to children is exactly what they're looking for on their days off.

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