Sandbox Campaign, Week 2: Assault on a Fortified Position

This is part two of my ongoing sandbox campaign, now meeting twice weekly when possible.  Click here to read the first part or refresh yourself on the cast of characters.  

The session began with the party on the run, headed north to Castle Morbis in search of a healer to remove the ghoul fever from Monty the dwarf fighter and Cameo the roc (general consensus is that a roc ghoul would be terrifying).  They traveled all night, then realized what a bad idea it was to exhaust yourself in a dangerous forest and slept in the daytime.  Upon returning to the road, they discovered a riderless warhorse, saddled and in plate barding armor, with blood on his flanks.  They calmed the horse and determined that the horse was uninjured and thus the blood must be someone else's.  In the saddle bag, they discovered a map showing a route through the forest to a big X.

Monster Monday: Giant Starfish

Today's Monster Monday is a two-fer: the giant starfish and the giant thorny starfish, two related creatures that won't fit in your average tidepool.  Use them in conjunction with the giant sea anemone for a surreal, slightly rubbery beach-party brawl!

source

The OGL, PFSRD-compatible monster is available after the jump.
The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is (C)2013 Jonah Bomgaars.

Monster Monday: Lodestone Ooze

I know updates have been irregular throughout the infancy of my blog, so I am going to try to inject a little bit of regularity with a segment I'm calling: Monster Monday.  I chose monsters because you can always use more monsters, and I have an ever-growing Word doc with about 90 pages of homebrewed monster content.  All monsters will be Pathfinder-compatible and available under the d20 OGL.

Today's Monster Monday monster is the Lodestone Ooze, a dastardly slime that builds on the rules for magnetism I established in my post about magnetism spells.  This creature is a "gotcha monster" in the same vein as the rust monster or grey ooze in that it's attacks tend to damage the players' beloved equipment.

The OGL, PFSRD-compatible monster is available after the jump.
The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is (C)2013 Jonah Bomgaars.

Sandbox Campaign, Week 1: Zombie Bombs and Shadowy Figures

This summer, I've started running a sandbox campaign.  This is my first time doing such, as I tend to have a central plot that drives the story (Choo-chooo! All aboard the Plot Railroad!).  I am excited about the prospect of letting the characters guide the story completely, taking the main plot out of my hands but still  letting me infuse the game with mini-stories and adventure hooks.  I keep telling the players, "You can do anything you want.  Well, you can try to do anything you want."  That is quite freeing for the GM as well, because there is no plot-critical event that must happen, no NPC that must be encountered, no monster that must be slain, no player character that must survive.  Not that I ever really force that stuff in anyways, just that there is a greater air of freedom in this campaign.

I'm running the campaign about twice a week, and I figured I would post short updates here for your reading pleasure.

Keeping the Mystery in the Monster Manual

Well, I made it through finals and I got my BA in history, and tomorrow I leave on a whirlwind trip through Iceland, Scotland, and Italy, so now is as good of a time as any to squeeze in a blog update.

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One of the first things I noticed about Dungeons & Dragons, while I was browsing through the books at my buddy Marc’s house way back in jr. high, was the vast array of crazy monsters.  I recognized some of them from Baldur’s Gate and some of them from mythology, but most of them I was honestly baffled by.  Beholders? Locathah? Those cheesy ice-skating dragons from Monster Manual IV? As I became more acquainted with the game, I quickly grew more appreciative of (some) of these monsters because of their history, their abilities, or the niche they fill in the game world. 

But familiarity can sap some of the mystery and marvel from the monsters themselves.  This is a problem many GMs face, even if they don't realize it.  For the most part, experienced players and GMs alike are pretty familiar with the contents of the monster manual.  Even players who are usually quite good at separating player knowledge from character knowledge can fall into the trap of recognizing a monster their characters have never encountered and immediately shifting tactics to account for what they know of the beast from the Monster Manual. 

Fixing the Weapons Table, Part 2: Swords, Swords, Swords!

Quick! Think of the last D&D campaign you played where no one used a sword! I'm going to guess that, except for a few of you who have been in an all-wizard campaign or a party of greatclub enthusiasts, you all just went "huh?"  Because swords are damn-near ubiquitous in campaign worlds, just as they were in real life.  There are tons of different kinds of swords, and both D&D and Pathfinder do a fairly good job of representing them.  Fairly good, but not good enough.  That's why I'm here.

Now, I won't go into how later splatbooks tend to start raiding the thesaurus for new swords to stat up just to fill pages.

Actually, yes, I will go into that...

Fleshing Out The Campaign World

As a GM, you always have to keep in mind that your players won't necessarily do what you plan on them doing - especially in a city, which lacks the GM-friendly constraints of your average dungeon.  In such cases, you will have to improvise.  It can be tricky to come up with something at the spur of the moment, but having a fully-realized and fleshed-out game world really helps out with that sort of thing.  If you have established the history and culture of your city, not only will it feel very real for your players, but it will be so real for you that you will have very little trouble improvising within it.

For example: