Dragons of Babylon, Part 3

by on May 20, 2019 at 10:22 pm
Belteshazzar, archmage of the Tower of the Sea

So what did we do that wasn’t in the “Rise of Tiamat” module? We filled the time with a mixture of old modules (reskinned for the pseudo-Babylonian world, as always) and whatever I wanted to throw into a D&D game, all as part of the quest to stop Tiamat, of course. Always I tried to give choices to the players, sometimes leading to argument over what course to take, and in one or two cases leading to the characters splitting and going their separate ways. (I overdid this — splitting up the party once in awhile is fun, but when I gave one player a 4-game solo adventure with the other players in the role of his NPC buddies, people started to get tired. Thankfully the heroes eventually regrouped, and got over the part-IC, part-OOC reasons which had led to the party splitting.)

Dilmun, the location of the Green Mask of Tiamat

Here’s some of the memorable things that happened in the game:

A trip to Hell and back, to rescue a friend. Elliott Chin had run a “trip to the underworld” sequence in his own 2000-2004 D&D game and I thought it was so rad and mythological I had to do something similar. Hell, in this Babylonian world, wasn’t alignment-based: it was a bureaucratic sort of place where both the good and the evil go, tended by demons, forever repeating their most vivid memories in a gray subterranean shadow of their former world.

Yeghiazar, governor of Hell, challenges the PCs to the Ur-Game
Konstantin Pogorelov, aka Sethep, inked and colored my pencil sketch

A military battle, Babylonians vs. Hittites, with military combat rules I cobbled together for the occasion (again based on rules from Scott Bennie’s eternally awesome D&D supplement Testament). To stop the White King’s invading Hittite armies, the PCs joined the troops of the Babylonian Empire and sallied forth to defend their homeland. It was fun, though I erred by having too many troops on the field, too fast… the PCs only got one session to ‘test out’ the military rules with their own small detachments before getting dragged into a huge (too huge) battle between about a zillion NPC armies, both enemy and friendly. (Having friendly NPCs assist the players is always tricky: on the one hand, you want the players to enjoy having NPC friends and not just assume that everyone in the campaign world is an enemy and/or useless, but on the other hand, there’s nothing more wanky than the DM rolling dice against themselves while the PCs watch. I didn’t always avoid the wankiness.) Still, the battle of Carchemish gave the PCs a chance to lead troops and to have some cool moments.

The White King’s forces approach the Babylonians

A dragon who spoke only in poetry. I had just read Dick Davis’ translation of the Persian national epic, the Shahnameh, and I loved the poetry so much I wanted to do something similar. Though I would love to be able to REAL-TIME improvise a rhyming NPC (and I tried to do this in many Dreamland RPG playtest sessions…), I wimped out and prepared its lines in advance. One of the musically talented players, when in the role of Zhosh the tiefling bard, stepped up even farther and wrote songs AT THE TABLE!!

The dreaded Zagros Mountains
I didn’t always draw stuff. From an email to players.

A trip to the edge of the world (which was of course flat). Here where the world’s oceans flowed to their end, the heroes went to the Gardens of Evening, with a stop at the terrifying and reality-bending Palace of Time (a reskinned version of Lamentations of the Flame Princess’s Monolith Beyond Space and Time, which I’ve drawn a poster for).

Vasculus sees the Ocean of Heaven (by Konstantin Pogorelov)

A trip to the Tower of Babel (heavily inspired by Ted Chiang’s short story). Alas, in the end only one PC, Vasculus the lizardman, really managed to climb the tower, but the other players joined him as one-shot lizardfolk, slaves imprisoned in the workers’ quarters far up in the miles-high tower.

Ammi-Saduqa, archmage of the Tower of Stars (the Tower of Babel)

A second trip to Hell culminating in a game of soccer against demons. I’ll probably post the rules for this eventually. It was the World Cup and it just seemed appropriate! Unfortunately for the forces of darkness, the adventurers defeated them in physical sports just like they had previously defeated them in boardgames.

Christmas (well, “Christmas”) presents for the PCs! Art, idea and bottle by Jumana Al Hashal

Then there were also the trips to the Elemental Plane of Plant (thank god we had plant and ‘jungle’ miniatures!!), the brief foray to the Meat Plane which grew out of one player’s offhand joke, Sethep the wizard’s business ventures, Kali’s visits to her parents, Vasculus’ trip to his homeland Nagqu City, the underwater adventure in the Tower of the Sea, and so many trips to the market (so many we made a DM’s Guild Fantasy Shopping supplement about it). And of course, a trip to the Moon.

In the next post I’ll talk about D&D challenges and problems and things I learned running the game. (And show more art by the other players!!)

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Dragons of Babylon, Part 2

by on May 16, 2019 at 10:31 pm
The Red King levitates above as swarms of Hittite soldiers pour into the king’s tent

Of course, as we started our D&D campaign one Spring evening in 2015, I didn’t intimidate the players by telling them “Now we begin a ginormous campaign that will suck up your Wednesdays until 2019!!” I tried not to burden the players with too much plot early on; like a manga or a TV show, I always kept my eye on an “escape route” by which I could bring things to a quick, more-or-less satisfying ending if people got bored.

Though of course the PCs could and did go in unexpected directions, I structured the game as a series of branching paths: for example, in the first session at the tavern, the PCs basically had the choice between:

(1) the pirate path: following a treasure map to a mysterious island —> leading to the 3e adventure “The Secret of Manjack Cay”

or

(2) the more heroic path: accepting a job to find what happened to a lighthouse that went dark —> leading to the 3e adventure “Wreck Ashore”

The Tower of Babel. One of many handouts I drew on the backs of 19″x24″ bristol boards.

To me, DMing is like DJing: you don’t have to make original music. Throughout the game I used D&D & OSR adventures I found on the internet, re-skinned to fit the general feel of the campaign. One of the design goals of D&D 5th edition was to make it easy to reuse old D&D adventures, and the designers really succeeded at this. There’s so many D&D adventures on DMsGuild, and so many OSR adventures on RPGNow and online, it’s easy to find a pre-existing dungeon/quest/city and re-skin it to whatever you need for your current group and campaign. I did occasionally make up my own maps from scratch, such as for the dreaded Temple of the Sword God.

The cruel city of Assur. The PCs actually only went here in Hell, not in the real world..

So the game went on, and new players joined as old ones dropped out. After a few weeks, I felt confident enough to lead the PCs into a longer story, for which I chose the first official 5th edition campaign…HOARD OF THE DRAGON QUEEN / RISE OF TIAMAT!

Kubabar, Queen of the Silver Dragons

“Hoard of the Dragon Queen” is an excellent adventure with lots of cool setpieces. (Flying castle! Swamp castle! Defending a besieged town! Diplomacy mission! Stealth mission!) I mostly used “Hoard of the Dragon Queen” unchanged, except for re-skinning areas into their Babylon/Egypt equivalents and putting the opening sequence on islands for pirate sailing ship action. (I also rearranged the map a bit for nitpicking’s sake… why does Rezmir spend all this effort dragging the hoard overland in one direction, then get in a flying castle and fly it in the other direction?) One other reason I didn’t launch “Hoard” till a few sessions in is because, as written, it begins with the players walking past a town and seeing a giant dragon attacking it. As other D&D bloggers posted, many player groups responded with “We run away!!” By familiarizing the players with Tarut Town a bit before I sent in the big dragons to blast it, I tried to give them more emotional investment in saving everybody. (And even so, the players very nearly turned their boat and sailed in the opposite direction… for which possibility I consoled myself by planning “If they do that, I’ll just have them shipwrecked on an island and run ‘Tomb of Horrors.'”)

Rezmir and Father Toad, the two villains I changed the least

I also tried fleshing out the Tiamat cosmology and society to move it away from the Euro-fantasy pure-good-vs-pure-evil Forgotten Realms setting. For example: where do dragonborn fit into a world where the central conflict is dragons vs. humans? Do they have conflicted loyalties, listening as their well-intentioned allies say things like “It’s not dragons that are the problem, it’s Radical Dragonism”? And since I wasn’t using the D&D law/chaos/good/evil alignment system (zzzzzzz) in the game, couldn’t the Tiamat worshippers have more interesting and varied motivations than just being evil jerks? The original adventure is just G.I. Joe vs. Cobra and doesn’t have any interest in these themes, and perhaps they don’t fit easily into an essentially escapist game like D&D where most players want to punch evil dudes without the DM psyching them out and depressing them with moral gray areas, but I played with them a bit anyway.

(For those who care, another change I made was to take D&D’s “there are 5 types of good dragons and 5 types of evil dragons” and change it to 3-7 favoring evil. It’s just more fun when the forces of good are outnumbered.)

Shahrivar, the Gold King

“Rise of Tiamat,” the sequel to “Hoard”, is sadly a bad adventure. It consists of a bunch of thematically disconnected mini-dungeons which aren’t very interesting, and (worst of all) it’s written from the assumption that the adventurers can *never* stop Tiamat from rising so all the mini-adventures end in pointless “Sorry Mario, the princess is in another castle” setbacks leading up to the unavoidable Climactic Fight with Tiamat. Basically it’s just bad writing; instead of the mere illusion of choice, the authors should have given the players the actual possibility of getting the dragon masks and stopping the cult. The only things I used from from “Rise” was the “meeting with the good dragons” encounter, the “meeting with all the kings & queens to discuss the Tiamat situation” setup, and the green dragon encounter.

Puzrish-Dagan, one of the Four Pirate Kings (one guess where I stole THAT idea from)

So for the second half of the campaign, I pretty much completely made everything up from scratch (while pillaging from pre-existing maps and adventures whenever possible, of course). In my next post I’ll talk a little about stuff that happened during the campaign, what the adventurers did and where they went.

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Dragons of Babylon

by on May 13, 2019 at 2:10 pm
The world of our D&D campaign

On Sunday we played the last session of our D&D 5th edition campaign where I was Dungeon Master for the last four years. We concluded in a 7-hour all-day game to tie up as many plot threads as possible. It was a fun ending, and left me (and, I think, the players) with a feeling of satisfaction and some accomplishment. And relief. It’s good to have our Wednesday nights free again. (And also to have more time to playtest my homebrew RPG Dreamland.)

We met up about 2x a month for 4 years, sometimes more, sometimes less, so we probably played 100-120 games. We normally met on weeknights and my spouse and I hosted and served dinner. (Being a good host is a big part of being a DM… which is a good time for me to say, to those DMs reading this, please bear with me as I ramble on a bit about DMing. I’ve posted occasionally about our game on Twitter and Facebook, but for some reason, almost never on this blog before.)

In 4 years, the player characters went from 1st to 13th-14th level. It wasn’t a very deadly campaign compared to some I’ve been in, which had more of a “you die every couple of months and bounce back with a new character” feeling; there were only 4 onscreen permanent player-character deaths. But those deaths were dramatic, and by the end, after deaths and retirements, not a single PC remained from the beginning. (Sethep, the Egyptian wizard, had been along for all but the first few months.)

Omarosa, Babylonian wizard

This is definitely the longest campaign I ever DMed and was the longest campaign I ever played — at least chronologically, if not in terms of number of games, since I played in a weekly (!!) D&D campaign for about three years in my 20s, under my friend Elliott’s excellent DMing. Before that, my longest time as a DM was a 2-year-ish weekly D&D campaign that fizzled out, just as the adventurers were given their next mission to escort a holy baby to a shrine in the African jungle. (Nyambe: African Adventures, naturally.) Of course we didn’t start out intending to spend 4 years of our lives doing this. Shortly after we moved back to San Francisco in 2014, some of my old friends cornered me and asked, when are you going to run a D&D campaign again? So we picked a time and we started in early 2015.

Vasculus the lizardman monk

As I’ve posted on this blog before, I’ve always been into historical and pseudo-historical settings more than Tolkien-y fantasy worlds like Forgotten Realms etc. And as the DM, I gotta enjoy the game too, so I offered the players a choice of two settings/themes I’ve wanted to try for a long time: Fantasy Ancient Babylon, or pirates? No one demanded Forgotten Realms, and the answers came back basically 50/50, so I decided to combine the two: PIRATES OF BABYLON IN THE ANCIENT ARABIAN/PERSIAN GULF!!

Arganda the pirate, briefly the Big Man of Tarut Town (until the PCs killed him)

And so the adventure began in a seedy tavern on Tarut Town, in Tarut Island, in the (in this world) green and jungle-y coasts of the Great Gulf. Though this was a ‘traditional’ D&D game, in which as DM I kept the secrets and guided the story and there wasn’t much outright collaboration, of course the players’ choices shaped the game as well. My original idea was to play things ‘fantasy-historical’ and keep a human-centric world where nonhumans were rare outsiders. Also, since half the party had voted for pirates, I figured it’d be a piratical game with lots of gore and looting and the authorities being absent and/or corrupt. But then in the very first character-generation session, one of the players chose to be a Dragonborn Paladin Noble! So I quickly shifted the world-parameters and decided that the city of Uruk was the home of the honorable Dragonborn, who claimed descent from the hero Gilgamesh, who (in this world) had not merely met a snake on his quest for immortality, but had met an immortal DRAGON and married that dragon and given birth to a race of dragon/human-ish creatures. And of course, the Dragonborn were socially accepted enough to be rich nobles, not merely weird outsiders. And so, immediately, the world got more interesting, thanks to the players’ choices.

That’s enough for today. I’ll talk more about the adventure in future posts in a few days!

Kali the dragonborn paladin of Uruk
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