Music Dungeon

Look closely, these are not pictures of rooms.
But use them as rooms I shall.

As I mentioned last time, the skeletal remains of Ayotl's songbird head will house a music-themed dungeon.  In addition to a few monster encounters, this dungeon will consist of a series of puzzles based on music theory. Here's how it will work.

On their way in, the characters will pass under an arch bearing the inscription:  "The Way of a Warrior is to establish Harmony."*  This is a clue to solving the dungeon's final mystery, as we shall see.

The characters will then face six puzzles.  These won't be traps, per se, though some of them could be potentially dangerous.  These puzzles must be solved in order to obtain six wondrous musical instruments.

As each musical instrument is obtained, a theme comprised of low, thrumming tones will gradually build.  This will be accomplished through the Garage Band music-mixing software on my Mac, playing in continuous loop (the software gives me the ability to toggle tracks on and off).  For each instrument the characters find, I add a note to the theme.  Not loud enough to distract the players from the game, but enough so they'll know it's there.  Together the notes form a chord, but soon the players will realize that the chord is not harmonious and with each tone added is getting less so.  I will take this opportunity to explain to the kids the difference between harmony and discord, and how discord can be used to heighten tension.

The sixth item releases a demon, whose name is Mißklang or Zwietracht (German for discord), who attacks the characters.  The musical instruments the kids collected have to be placed in niches around the demon's chamber, and they have to be placed in a particular order to change the theme from discord to harmony.  The demon cannot otherwise be killed, but as harmonious notes replace the obnoxious ones, the demon weakens and is shown to be transforming into something less demonic.  Eventually, when the right combination is found, he is revealed to be a handsome prince (because it's girls playing the game, after all).  The prince rewards them by providing the first part of the key to the Black Tower of Despair.

For what it's worth, the back story on the prince is that he was cursed by his sister, the queen Esseniri whose tomb they seek, when he betrayed her in an effort to save their people from her tyranny.

So, a few days ago in the comments I promised sample puzzles.  I've already given the big puzzle for this music dungeon above, and now here is one of the six puzzles they'll have to solve to get the music instruments:

Sample Puzzle
Lava separates the party from the target musical instrument.    Three large tuning forks stand in the lava in a line leading to the instrument.  An inscription on the wall in front of the lava shows 12 figures:  7 white, and 5 black, all in a line, configured like the white and black keys of a piano.  Three are standing, the rest are seated.  The three correspond to a major chord (the second is four positions - or semitones - from the first, and the third one is three positions from the second.  These correspond to the first, third, and fifth notes of a major scale).  If someone sings a note (or if the bard plays a note on his guitar), one of the tuning forks will vibrate, making the lava ripple away from it for as long as the note is held.  If the kids make a three-part harmony (which I know for a fact my three kids can), then all three forks will vibrate and a path will be cleared through the lava to the instrument for as long as they can maintain the chord.  

Do you have ideas for other musical puzzles?
This puzzle is the most well-developed one I have.  I have two more in the works, but I'll need six in all, because that's how many notes I want the theme to have.

Any suggestions for more music puzzles?

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* "The Way of the Warrior is to establish Harmony." - Morihei Ueshiba

City in a Carcass

In my last post I talked about my goals for a big dungeon adventure I'm making for the kids.  Today I'm going to describe the background of this adventure, and then dive into the overall structure.  That will set up the context for next time when I talk about some of the puzzles in one particular section of the dungeon.

I've already given a little bit of the background for this adventure here.  Some details have changed since then.  First, the carcass of the turtle-shaped demigod is upside down, which is the position the creature came to rest in when it met its doom (incidentally, it was slain by another demigod who figures prominently in part two of the adventure path, which takes place in Nimoriél...but that's a story for another day).  Second, the animal heads have changed.  They are now bird, spider, mole, and ardvaark, for reasons we shall soon see.

Ayotl, in better days

The Micqui built their city in the remains of this beast, and they dominated the people around them for centuries.  Their last sovereign before their empire collapsed was a queen named Esseniri, and it is for her tomb - and the treasure hopefully buried with her - that the characters seek.

Structure
Since the turtle is upside down, that means its carapace, or dorsal (back) shell, forms a giant bowl.  Tectonic forces have misshapen it over the ages, but for our purposes thinking of it as a bowl is useful.  An underwater river falls into this bowl and forms Mors Aeterna, the Lake of Eternal Death, which drains out through one of the heads into another river, deeper down.

This configuration also means that the demigod's plastron, or ventral (belly) shell, forms a ceiling high above the lake to enclose the space.  The river which dumps into the lake actually cuts through some of the ancient scutes in the perimeter of his carapace and slips through the crack between plastron and carapace before plummeting to the dark waters below.  For what it's worth, the part of the dungeon the kids are in now is cut into one of these perimeter scutes, and they are nearing the waterfall.  Back when the city was still on the surface, this section served as an observatory that the ancient scholars used to create their calendar.  Over the next week I'm going to be studying Mayan and Aztec calendars for ideas to slip into this particular section.

The vertebrae for the creature's two spines, which run perpendicular to each other and intersect in the middle, are for the most part intact.  Some of these vertebrae poke out of the lake to form islands.  Rising from the largest of these at the junction of the two spines is the Black Tower of Despair, which is impenetrable except via a magical gate which requires a special key to be opened.   The queen's tomb can be found beneath this black tower, and so they will need to find the key to get there.

Each of the four animal skulls - one for each cardinal direction - contains a different dungeon.  Among the treasures in each dungeon will be idols shaped like simplified versions of the animal heads.  Together these idols can be assembled together to form the key that opens the magical gate.

The dungeons will each have a theme corresponding to human senses, as follows:

• Bird: hearing.  This will be a music-themed dungeon.
• Spider:  sight.  This will be a dungeon that features the use of light and mirrors.
• Mole: touch.  The characters will find themselves misled by their other senses.
• Aardvark: taste.   The characters will find themselves being tasted by the last living tissue of the ancient demigod! (think Millenium Falcon in that living cave)

You may have noticed that I skipped our sense of smell.  That sense is represented by a rivalry between two races who now inhabit this subterranean region.  One race, called the Dark Ones, lives on the edge of the Lake of Eternal Death and fishes its waters.  These creatures do not cast aside their attire when it becomes too old and worn; instead, they simply add new layers over top of the old ones.  For this reason, they reek terribly.  The other race is one I made up myself, and they're called Nifflers.  They have no eyes at all and get by almost exclusively with their sense of smell, so it should be plain to see why they hate the Dark Ones.  The Nifflers inhabit some of the vertebrae islands and patrol the ribs which extend out from the spines and fuse with the carapace to form a network of tunnels beneath the lake.

Both races are hunted by a wyvern who ranges over the lake, and they try to appease him by kidnapping members of the rival race as sacrifices to the wicked beast.

This is the environment the kids are entering now, and they have no idea what they're getting into.  

Next time I'll give an example of a puzzle from the bird/music dungeon.

The Start of Something Big

I've started creating a huge dungeon for the kids, and I thought I'd share my process in this space.  It's a fairly ambitious project.  I'm shooting for the stars, and there's no way to describe it all in a single post.  Today I'll cover what my goals are, but first I'll provide a little bit of the dungeon's context within the overall adventure path.

Long time survivors of this blog may recall that I also run a Pathfinder game for my adult friends, and that my homebrew world they run in is pretty much the same one my kids run in.  Sort of.  They can't affect each other's version of the world, and they can't interact with one another.  This means that I'm effectively running the same adventure path twice, first with the adults who started as level 5 adventurers, and then with the kids who started at level 1.   So even if the adult party kills a major villain in, say, the Temple of Klethnu, that villain will still be there waiting for the kids when they arrive at the same temple.  Unless he's busy elsewhere, that is.

First, a definition for the uninitiated.  An "adventure path," in the sense that I'm using the term, is the set of adventures that the characters will engage in over the full span of their career, from whatever level they start at to whenever the characters are retired.  Adventure paths don't necessarily cover the entire PC career, but they do at least encompass a set of adventures that are connected to each other to form some narrative.  This particular adventure path I'm making will be it for these characters.  Once it's over, the kids retire these characters and we play something else.

The overarching structure of the adventure path that I've created/am still creating for my players consists of four parts.  The adults started with part two, the kids with part one.  I started running the setting well before I had an adventure path in mind, though; the adventure path has grown organically from the initial adventures that I created, specifically the "part two" that the adults just finished up after a year of playing in the elven city of Nimoriél.*  But the overall adventure path is a subject for another day.  I mention it today just to give some context for the dungeon I'm making.

Which brings me to my goals for this dungeon:

1. Advance the characters from level 3 to level 6;
2. Incorporate the dungeon seamlessly into the adventure path;
3. Challenge the players mentally;
4. Teach the kids about a wide range of subjects without them realizing it.

The first goal is to advance the characters from level 3 (their current level), to level 6, which is the level they will need to achieve in order to be ready to survive the horrors waiting for them in the Nimoriél greater metropolitan area.  Three levels worth of experience points represents many encounters, so the dungeon has to be fairly big.

My second goal is for the dungeon to feel like part of the overall adventure path.  That won't matter until much later, of course, long after they have advanced to Nimoriél and points beyond.  Right now the kids have no clue that this adventure path even exists, but years later I want them to look back on all our sessions with a sense of wonder and realize how they all fit so seamlessly together into one cohesive unit.   That's my pride talking, I admit.  I want them to look back on the adventure path as a whole, and each adventure and dungeon along the way, and reach the inevitable conclusion that their dad was a total bad*ss game master.  And I want them to see how I did it and inspire them to reach for similarly lofty creative goals.

An adjunct to this second goal is that I want the dungeon to tie together with what they've done up until this point.  I want to foster the illusion that I had the whole thing planned before we even began.  Eventually they'll know the truth because I'll share my techniques, but let them wonder for awhile.

My third goal is to make this a mentally challenging dungeon, mainly from a problem-solving perspective.  My kids compete in Future Problem Solvers, and I've noticed that since starting FPS, their problem-solving skills have really sharpened.  I've got to come up with something challenging enough to keep them interested.  So this dungeon will have lots of puzzles, none of which will be solvable by mere skill rolls.  And though it will have no shortage of nasty creepy-crawlies, several of the enemies they face will not be beatable by combat.

I'm feeling even more ambitious than that, though.  What I've done is created a structure for this dungeon such that the whole thing is one big puzzle, with subsections which are also puzzles which themselves contain puzzles.  You'll see how this works when I describe the dungeon structure next time.

(Also, the adventure path itself is a giant puzzle of sorts.  Tiny little seeds will be planted in this dungeon that will be clues for unraveling the biggest of mysteries when the characters have advanced to become legendary heroes and everything they hold dear is on the line.)

My final goal (aside from simply having fun), is to sneak in some educational elements.  As always, I'll take a stealth approach to this:  if the kids are having a blast and don't even realize they're learning, then the mission will be a success.  The following are a few subject areas that I know I'll be addressing:

• Music theory
• Ancient Mesoamerican civilizations
• Astronomy
• Geometry 
• Logic
• Anatomy
• How to kill vampires

This last skill is of particular importance.  Not all vampires sparkle.

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* Spanning just three weeks of in-game time.  In other words, we met once per week and played the setting for one year, but the characters were only in and around the elven city for three weeks.

I mention this to give scale to the adventure path.  Parts two and three are the biggest, and part four is the smallest.  I estimate the whole effort could take three to four years.  This assumes we actually get chances to play.  If you've read this blog at all, you know that's a long shot.

Troll GM is Troll

In a previous post I mentioned Sophie's poker face.  It's really more like a Mona Lisa smile, especially in the eyes.  She has heavy lids, and nice lips with only the faintest hint of a smile.  When she gives me this look, I feel like she's appraising me.  It's the same look she had on her face when she entered the world, and it's as disconcerting now as it was then.

Warning: Spoilers ahead.  This post contains information about the Black Fang adventure that comes with the Pathfinder Beginner Box.

When she was running the "Black Fang" adventure, one of the treasures the party found before I arrived to play was a little wooden toy dragon with ruby eyes.  The rubies were worth something like 50 gold pieces a pop.  A nice little find.  Then the characters went on to die several times.  When they did, Sophie let them come back to life in the dungeon, with a caveat:  she placed them randomly in the dungeon.  She also instituted a teleportation trap.  Her reasoning, we learned later, was that the characters had already cleared the rooms, so she was trying to make the old rooms interesting.  She also wasn't letting the players see the whole map that comes printed on the battle mat that comes in the box.  This made sense, given the teleportation trap, and resulted in that wonderful feeling of being lost.  All of this was her invention, by the way.  Nothing new, of course, but cool that she came up with it on her own.

What the players didn't know was that Sophie had run out of treasures to hand out.

When I joined, we defeated some goblins and found their treasure chest.  Unfortunately for Sophie, the players had already cleared this room once before and taken the treasure, so she had to come up with something new on the fly.  One of the items she put in there was another toy dragon, this time with Saphire eyes.  The girls quickly pointed out that they already had one kind of like it.  "Cool," I said, thinking that since there were two such toys that it must be a clue or puzzle of some sort.  "Maybe there are more."

"Maybe together they form a weapon," suggested Livie, playing a wizard.

I looked over at Sophie, and she was wearing that old, familiar expression on her face.  No help there, but I felt we were on the right track.

A little later on we stumbled on the lair of Black Fang himself, a black dragon.  We weren't ready to take on a dragon.  He didn't see us, so we carefully withdrew.  Our plan was to clear out everything else in the dungeon and, hopefully, level up before the big showdown.

We did find another treasure later on, and what do you know?  It had a toy dragon in it.  Sophie's expression remained unchanged.  At this point our own personal maps connected all the rooms together, and the only room left was the dragon's lair.  We did level up and, most importantly in our minds, we had the entire set of toy dragons.  Off we went to face the menace.

It did not go well.  We were already faring poorly in the combat when Livie said, "What about the toys?"

"Of course!  The toys!"

Her wizard then proceeded to waste several rounds using Mage Hand to summon the toys from my possession to hers, then try to assemble the toys in some way, and even point them at the dragon and yell commands to try to activate the figures.

No luck.  They were just toys.  The dragon killed us.

...but Sophie was getting tired of us dying all the time and bailed us out (just an opinion:  this initial adventure should really have at least four characters in play, not just the three that we tried it with).   And so we "defeated" the dragon.

Afterwards I asked Sophie about the toys, and that's when I learned that she had simply made up the second toy and then intentionally added the third toy with the sole purpose of messing with us.  She had heard our musings about their purpose and decided it would be fun to feed into them to give them credence.   She even entertained the possibility of stealing our idea and making the toys special in some way, but figured it would be more fun to have them do nothing at all.

In other words, she trolled us.  Hard.  And her expression hadn't changed one tiny bit the whole time.

I am so proud.

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Note:  I tried to photograph her expression this morning to share on this post.  Although I captured the expression, her hair was all mangled and the lighting wasn't doing her any favors.  I figure if I'm going to post pictures of my kids on the web, I at least owe it to them to let them look their best.  Thus, no pic.

For the Orphans

Story time, from when I joined the Pathfinder game my daughter Sophie was running.

It seems that their characters had already died a few times in the dungeon that comes with the Pathfinder Beginner Box, so they were eager for me to play a cleric who could heal them if they got into hot water again.  So I grabbed the pre-generated cleric character, changed her sex to male, named him "Kyras," and jumped right in.  I immediately made it known that I was a servant of Serenrae, goddess of light and healing, and encouraged their characters to join me in asking for my goddess' blessings for our adventuring party.  They quickly wearied of Kyras's in-your-face evangelism.  Kyras eventually took the hint, and they got on with the adventure.

The best part was after we killed the goblin king and one of his minions.  I said, "I check the goblin king's corpse to see what he had."

Livie said, "Yeah!  Let's steal their stuff!"

"Excuse me?" I responded, admonishing her.  "Shouldn't it go to the orphans?"

Sophie squinted in confusion and silently mouthed the question, Orphans?  She hadn't mentioned any orphans.  Nora was equally perplexed and loudly demanded to know what orphans I was referring to.  But Livie, always a quick study, knew what I was up to and just smacked her forehead with her palm and groaned.

Since Nora was still confused, I elaborated.  "The goblins stole these things from the villagers they killed.  They really belong to the village.  The temple of Serenrae believes the money should be spent to feed and house the village orphans."

Livie's character did not agree.  After all, she was the one putting her life on the line to rid the village of these monstrous threats.  She lobbied for a three-way split.  When the cleric refused to budge, she played her ace.   "Ok," she countered.  "What if I just walk out of here and leave you two here alone, and the villagers all get killed because you can't kill the dragon?  How will your orphans do then, hmm?"

"You have a good point," I admitted, and we agreed to an even split, although Nora's character announced she would be helping the orphans too.  

"I couldn't help but notice you're wearing the ring of protection you found," added Livie slyly, pointing out my hypocrisy.  

"I need to survive," I retorted.  "For the orphans, of course."

Return of the Blog

Hey, I'm back!  It's been too long.

Gymnastics has proven to be an RPG killer in our home, but it looks like we're starting to ramp up again.  This summer should be especially good, since we'll have big chunks of time on the weekends that we don't have now.

In the past few months, I gave my 11-year-old daughter Sophie Paizo's Pathfinder Beginner Box.  I can't say enough nice things about this set.    Since this product has been out for awhile, and since there is no shortage of information on the Internet about its contents, I'm not going to give it a full review here.  Instead, let it suffice to say that Sophie was able to take the box and run a game very easily.  That's saying something for a game as complicated as Pathfinder/ D&D 3.5.

The best part was that I didn't have to help.  The kids wanted to play, but I had plans to be elsewhere.  They were bummed, so on my way out the door I said, "Why not open up your Beginner Box and have at it?"  They got all excited and started their prep.

Four hours later I returned home and they were still playing, with no signs of slowing down.  I joined in by taking on one of the pre-generated characters that come in the box, the cleric (because "Daddy, we need healing!"), and before long we were facing down Black Fang.

Sophie's going to be a great GM.  She is devious and has a great poker face, critical for successful trolling.  More on that next time.

The Tomb of Horrors

A few weeks ago I had a crazy idea to run my kids through a classic AD&D module known as S1: Tomb of Horrors by Gary Gygax. Written in 1975, this adventure has the reputation of being perhaps the most difficult commercially available dungeon ever created for the game. I advise players against risking their most cherished characters in the Tomb, as death comes swiftly and often. Better to create throwaway characters for use exclusively in the Tomb, and avoid becoming too attached to the doomed delvers.

I chose this dungeon for several reasons. First, I never had a chance to play it when I was younger. I was never really that alert to the RPG scene, especially back then as a kid, and so when I heard about this killer module and went to buy it, I picked up the wrong one (pretty sure I snagged this one). Oh well. I have it now, years later, but I made sure to grab a copy of the original version, rather than one of the adaptations for later editions. I didn't want the imminent threat of death to get watered down. Later editions of the game are soft on characters. Characters nowadays are heroes destined for greatness. Back then, characters were just as likely to end up as monster food. "Destiny" was a term awarded to characters only after they survived long enough to both accomplish heroic feats and retire in one piece, but I digress.

The second reason I chose this dungeon is because the way it is written, it is all about the players vs. the dungeon, not the characters vs. the dungeon. Tomb of Horrors is a series of puzzles, maps, and traps, and it is up to the players to solve these challenges rather than for the dice to do so. No passive perception checks with a d20 to see if the characters notice anything fishy, for example. Nope. The players have to announce where they look, where they step, what they touch, etc. If they want to find traps, they have a percentage chance to succeed, but they have to say exactly where they're checking and what kinds of things they're looking for. You get through the ordeal by using your brain and taking extraordinary precautions, or you get through it by having your characters die, rolling up new ones, entering the tomb again, and remembering what you did wrong last time so you can avoid death the next time around. Obviously this latter approach is very "meta" (because new characters shouldn't really have access to knowledge that the player gained from a totally different character). Normally I do not permit actions based on meta knowledge, but in this adventure I make an exception. The dungeon was created by an adult to challenge expert, adult players. I'm running kids ages 7 to 12 here. They'll need all the meta knowledge they can get.

So we were playing today during Hurricane Irene, via candlelight. Kind of creepy. Also kind of difficult. I couldn't see the map and room descriptions, and the kids couldn't read their character sheets. We used a flashlight to solve this problem.

There were six kids: my three, two from next door, and a new player from two doors down. Five girls and one boy. The new girl is 7 years old, and a real stitch. Great little role player and keeps us all laughing. This was our second session in the Tomb: last time it took us 4 hours just to find a way in and deal with the first encounter. Much of that time was lost shopping for farm animals followed by a tactical discussion around elimination in the wild. The kids' game is definitely a different experience than the sessions I run with my peers.

Today, things started out rough: kids bickering over trivial matters, goofing off, talking out of turn, etc. You know, like kids do. This irritates me to no end. After all, I was taking a peaceful nap, enjoying the hurricane. I had the sounds of wind, rain, and the oscillating fan, all at once. It was the perfect storm (pun unintended but enjoyed nonetheless). And they came and got me, not the other way around, and for what? To listen to them bicker and yell? I almost got up and left the table. Instead, I told them to roll initiative.

Nothing gets their attention like those two words: "roll initiative." Initiative usually means combat, and combat is serious stuff that commands respect. They were instantly rapt. But I wasn't thinking combat. I had something else in mind.

Based on the initiative order, I asked each one in turn what they were doing next. If anyone spoke out of turn, I politely cut them off and returned attention to the person whose turn it was. If the player used her turn to speak to another player, I allowed that conversation to occur in character. I only answered questions asked in turn, though I would have respected any that were asked politely. This approach got things going smoothly for two whole rounds! The game was finally progressing, and before long the halfling fell into a pit of spikes but narrowly avoided death.

Speaking of avoiding things narrowly, it was precisely at that moment when we heard a huge whoosh! outside. Everyone got very excited and anxious and ran to the window to see what had happened. My wife had been watching out the window and saw the whole thing: a tree fell into our neighbor's driveway, just a few feet from my Honda CRV. That was it for the kids: they grabbed the flashlight and headed to the basement. Our descent into the Tomb of Horrors would be postponed.

Click to embiggen

Lights flickering around me again right now, so I'm signing off.