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Gears of Ruin: Session 1, Revolutions per Machines, Part 1

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Last Friday we started our Clockwork D&D campaign.  We spent about one hour completing the Party Template I wrote about here then we played a 2 scenes mini-adventure I dubbed ‘RPM’.  🙂

Here’s the 1st game report of what I hope will be yet another awesome campaign.

Dramatis Persona

  • Nar-Beth:
    • Female Dwarven Druid from a long established dwarven colony.  Water-seeker that seeks to adapt technology to heal her adopted dying world.
    • Player: Stef.  Motivations: Butt kicking, Storytelling, Casual playing
  • Vorian:
    • Githzerai Monk.  Student of a great Gith monastary in the Elemental Chaos.  He was sent by his Sensei to this world to fight Chaos.
    • Player: Mike.  Motivations: Butt Kicking, Story Telling.
  • Magma:
    • Earthsouled/Firesouled Genasi Swordmage. A wandering soul from the Elemental Chaos that fled an unpleasant situation with his Swordmage master (and, more importantly, his wife)
    • Player: Franky.  Motivations: Storytelling, Butt-Kicking, Exploration
  • Rod Stone :
    • Goliath Warden, another wanderer walking the world, fleeing some past secret.  A creature of few words, The embodiment of the KISS principle and voted ‘best character concept named like a porn star’.
    • Player : Math. Motivations: Supercoolness, Butt Kicking, Specialist (Subverted, he plays one of his first non-arcane, non-ranged PC)
  • Holy Clank:
    • Warforged Cleric/Fighter Hybrid (a Dragon magazine option to fuse class features of 2 classes). The first self-aware machine of the world.  Fascinated with squishies as he calls it.
    • Player: Yan. Motivations: Butt Kicker, Brilliant Tactician, Storyteller
  • The Wrath of Melora (Awesome name chosen by Eric):
    • Deva Avenger Eco-terrorist. Has been on planet since the war with the Primordial was narrowly won.  Believes that technology corrupts the world further. Wants to Nuke it all and start over.
    • Player: Eric. Motivations: Butt Kicking, Instigation, Psycho-Drama

I have to confess… these are possibly the coolest characters I’ve seen in recent memory.  Not just the mechanistic aspects of them, I mean they are fairly normal, if exotic PCs mechanically speaking.   Yet, the added dimension of filling the party template together  (and nudging  players to conceptualize everything in terms of simple, powerful one-liners) has given each PC depth that would take months of gaming to achieve.

The only one that worries me a bit is Rod Stone because his ‘thing” is to play the silent, simple type.  I hope Math develops some sort of ‘Native Warrior’ feel to his PC that will transcend his tame baseline.

Game Report, Cliff Notes

As is now my usual practice, I’ll summarize the adventure and go in more details in later installment of the report.  It was a very good game yet it ended on a downward curve in terms of participant energy and climax, nothing dramatic, just something I know I can fix.

Here goes:

Amid rumours of massive revolt in the surface mines and factories of the human holdings , our heroes are summoned to the war room of the City-sized airship Castle Falkenstein (yup a tribute). They are mercenary agents of Baron Ezechiel Von Falkenstein, lord of the Skyhuman realms.  There, through the chaos of panicking incompetent generals, they learn that indeed, an out of control machine revolt is ongoing in all mines and automated factories in the Baron’s surface holdings.

Before generals get the green light to start dropping something called ‘elemental portal bombs’ on the various points of revolt, the Baron wants more data and assumes the PC can succeed where normal soldiers and intelligence agents have failed.  The adventurers accept to investigate what seems to be a strong psychic signal coming from a large military factory.

As they approach it, on a battlefield of ruined airships and siege engine boulders,  they clash with a continent of remote-controlled warforged warriors powered by some necrotic source.  As the battle progressed, the heroes are surprised by the transformation of 2 Siege engine boulders into war turrets that blast necrotic bolts of energy!

Stranger still, as the strongest warforge warriors falter, the turret boulders unfold into very large humanoid mechanical constructs while other nearby boulders open up to release swarms of mechanical insects.

The battle raged on until the adventurers figured that the constructs could be crunched back into turret mode by poking them in the chest with a weapon or a rock.  Thus were the machines eventually disabled and dealt with.  After the confrontation, all machines, including the boulder-crawlers were found to belong to  the Baron.

The adventurers found and healed a lost intelligence agent and, following his instructions, moved deeper in the occupied zone…

In Part 2: Competence Porn, D&D style!

Comments

  3. I’ve played the silent type before and it can be a pitfall if you’re not careful. But it is doable. I can offer a few pieces of advice: (not that you need any)
    1) You need a trigger or situation that makes you not be the silent type and makes you loud, out of control and/or emotional. If you’re always silent you’re just quiet and boring. If you have times where you show a stark contrast to the silence, that gives you a personality and gives others an insight into your motivations and personality.
    2) You need a partner in crime. Another character knows or has a strong interest in your past and what makes you tick. Or they may be talkative and annoying you so you need to occassionally tell them to shut up. (Donkey in Shrek) While your character may want to be silent, the other character can force you into participating or can deliberately provoke you. The silent player definitely can’t rely on the DM to provide this motivation- the DM is busy enough as it is.
    3) Take intimidate and/or knowledge skills so you can still contribute during social situations. It keeps you involved and prevents you from just hiding in the back all the time. (good advice for everyone who has a non-social character)

    As an example, consider Raistlin, a mostly quiet and mysterious wizard. There were triggers to make him lose his temper or become obsessive. (1) He always had Tasselhoff to annoy him, Sturm to argue with, and his brother to babysit him, which he reacted to in different ways. (2) And he was trained in arcana and history and could scare the peasants when necessary. (3)

  4. Actually, I wanted to say one more thing. I’m really interested in how you use and develop technology in your game, even if it’s magic tech. The turrets and mining camps sound great.

  5. Thanks for the insights on the Big/scary silent type. I’m sure Mathe will look at them.

    As for technology… from the DM’s side of the screen it truly is easy… the building blocks of Monster Making allow anything from Magic to Starships

    In the next posts you’ll see a few more details although I’ll say it now… I’ll keep the actual mechanics from the post becaus the turrets are going to go in a gaming article submission.

  7. @Marc: You are free to to adapt what I post here and play with it and write about it on your blog. The Creative Commons license under which the blog works says only a few things:

    You credit/link to me when you post on your Blog (like “Inspired by ChattyDM’s campaign (link) we decided to…)

    You can distribute (for free) any derivative of the work you do under the creative commons license while saying where it comes from.

    You can’t sell anything borrowed/adapted without reaching an agreement with me first.

    So go wild and have fun!

  8. I gotta say, the boulder-into-enemy idea is awesome. I do have a question, though. How does the party deal with having a character called The Wrath of Melora? Is the player more or less going along with his companions because the alternative would be worse? It just seems like the “Eco-terrorist” character would have a hard time fitting in with his cohorts, since he’d have major reasons to be against them.
    .-= Andy´s last blog ..A Modest Proposal, Part I =-.

  11. @Andy: The idea is that the party’s loyalty to the obvious Pro-Technology Baron has not been clearly established. And its possible that the Baron and Wrath know about each other very well and prefer to keep each other near (in the Sun Tzu way).

    Heck, I forgot to mention that this adventure is actually a prequel to our campaign. More like a test bed of the concept than anything else. 🙂

    @Wrath: Oh man, is that where the idea came from, I totally forgot about the Go-bots. I was more focused on Bakugans 🙂

    @Sian: Yeah, I get that a lot! (Just kidding!)

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