Power Score

We are rocketing towards the end of this adventure, which is a 2nd edition book that I am converting to 5e.. I'm eyeballing what comes next and I'm torn. I'd like to run the Chris Perkins planescape adventure from dungeon magazine called "Umbra", as it has gotten good reviews. I'd also like to run the sequel to this adventure - Dead Gods, also by Monte Cook. Dead Gods explains what exactly happened with the modrons.

But In September, Out of the Abyss comes out. I'd really like to run that. Not sure what to do.

The Party

(Jessie) Bidam - Dragonborn Fighter
(George) Theran - Elf Wizard

Sigil

The heroes returned from their adventure in the gate town of Bedlam, having helped a rogue modron try to rejoin the march.

The adventurers spent a few weeks int he city of Sigil healing drained stats. Bidam and Theran asked around about the Lady of Pain doll they had bought. This is an item from Planescape Torment. If the heroes worship it, they will end up being sucked into a maze. I had prepared a mini-adventure based on stuff from the game, where the heroes are mazed and meet the hag Ravel Puzzlewell.

They ended up more or less figuring out what the doll did, and decided to put it in a lockbox and hide it in their office int he Clerk's Ward.

The heroes were invited back to Heart's Faith in Celestia, to cut the ribbon on a rebuilt building (the adventurers had helped the city survive when the modrons marched through in the second adventure of this campaign).

The Spell Crystal

Then I hit them with the railroad. I made the "choo choo" noise, which the players get a kick out of. This adventure is very railroady. The heroes are summoned by a summon monster spell, and they must serve an arrogant wizard and follow her every command.

They can make a save at a -2 penalty to free themselves, but it only lasts d6 rounds. I'd imagine many players would hate this, but mine were fine with it (partly because I had warned them about it ahead of time).

So there's this cool flavor where a spell crystal flies down the street, sucks the heroes into a giant crystal, which flies them through the planes to the first layer of the Abyss: The Plain of Infinite Portals.

Plain of Infinite Portals

Dretch

This layer has a red sun, earthmotes, and dusty badlands. It is full of sinkholes that lead to different layers of the Abyss, and the landscape is dotted with iron fortresses that demons and demon lords fight for control of.

The heroes had been summoned by a tiefling named Taraere Illsmiser. She considered Bidam to be a monster, as he was a black dragonborn. Taraere treated Bidam poorly throughout the adventure, pointing out that Bidam was a chromatic creature and thus was not to be trusted.

Taraere was kind to Theran, though, and treated him more like a pupil. Both of the heroes barely hid their resentment of her, and plotted revenge.

This summoning spell had gone haywire because of the chaotic nature of the Abyss. Taraere believed that the heroes would be her servants for one week, then they'd vanish and return to Heart's Faith. The heroes instinctively knew that this chaos-altered spell would actually only last 24 hours.

The trio headed across the plain seeking an iron fortress, where Taraere wanted to claim a book called the Mors Mysterium Nominum. This giant book would give her truenames of demons that she could summon and control.

Journey Across the Abyss

Maurezhi

The journey has a bunch of encounters that were a bit vague in the book. I changed them a bit and de-powered them so they were appropriate for my 4th level PCs.

Bidam was ahead of the group a bit as a scout. He avoided a sinkhole which led to another layer of the Abyss. He contemplated jumping in to escape servitude, but thought better of it.
They met some drow who had come to the Abyss to mate with a vrock to give birth to a draegloth. I added this in because I just wrote a guide to the drow and I knew they'd get a kick out of the whole demon intercourse thing.
I used a monster I'd never heard of before this adventure - a maurezhi. They are like ghouls, except that they absorb the memories of those they devour, and they can shapechange into that person! How cool is that?! I decided that the drow were killed by demons after the heroes left, and that a maurezhi shapechanged into a drow and caught up with the heroes and asked to join them. Bidam quickly thought something was strange, as the drow had the scent of death on it (which is a trait of the maurezhi).
A pair of dretches attacked. The maurezhi chose this time to surprise the heroes, too. The adventurers killed them, and observed that the demons died a true death on their home plane.
They observed some very cool flavor as they neared the fortress:

Fortress of the Fallen Stair

Their destination was known as the Fortress of the Fallen Stair. In the entrance hall, the heroes had to overcome some door traps. Behind one door adorned with the face of a child with wizened eyes, they found some armanites (demon centaurs). The armanites were wounded badly - they'd fought in the arena below the fortress and fared poorly. The heroes were friendly to them and let them go.

Another door was magically trapped. The heroes were cautious and were able to detect the trap. They determined that if the door was touched, a lightning charge would strike them. They headed outside and spotted some Varrangoin (demon bats) flying around. They caught one and threw it into the door, setting off the trap and killing it. Tamaere was amused by this.

In the room beyond was a "chapel" full of torture devices. A door in there led to a special room with items pertaining to demon lords.

Lords' Chapel

Lamashtu

The adventure explains that this room has a few items that are trophies of demon lords who used this fortress to ascend to power. "Each piece of art shows shows the lord in its moment of triumph, which're without exception scenes of phenomenal cruelty."

It goes on to say "...a berk foolish enough to tamper with an effigy draws the wrath of that particular Abyssal Lord; the DM's encouraged to design an appropriate punishment for the offender."

On the one hand, this is awesome. On the other hand, I have to figure out the demon lords myself. Also, I know my players are going to loot this stuff, so I had to choose carefully. I went through the demon lord list on wikipedia and I chose ones with some detail but not too much. I wanted ones with cool concepts but spare enough that it left room for me to put my own spin on it.

I changed this a bit, basically I gave the heroes magic items linked to demon lords. Here's the items:

Amulet of Flowing Flame: This amulet is made by Alzrius, Lord of Flowing Glame, ruler of the 601st layer - Conflagratum. His armies carry a piece of him as a torch. I figured that this amulet carried a piece of him in it.

Rune Scrimshaw Whalebone: This item relates to Bechard, the Rotting Husk. He's a demon whale who lies on a beach, rotting under the sun. He ran afoul of the gnoll demon lord Yeenoghu, and is slowly dying. This item has the power to summon a pirate ship from his realm. In my head, I had the idea that maybe the heroes would want to help Bechard. It turns out that is what they want him to do.

Painting of Lamashtu: Lamashtu is a Pathfinder demon lord. I think she's awesome. She's the "Mother of Monsters", a pregnant women with a 3-eyed jackal head with raven wings. I decided that this painting was by Renbuu, the slaad lord who is an artist that can change the color of things.

As I suspected, my heroes looted all of this stuff. Which means they've earned the enmity of three demon lords.

Further, Bidam had the idea that he wanted to go find Renbuu to convince the slaad lord to transform into a different color! In this adventure, Taraere repeatedly berated Bidam because he was a black chromatic dragonborn.

So it sounds like next time we play, the heroes are going to go to Limbo, chaos shape a river, and sail on their demon ship from Bechard's realm and seek out Renbuu,. It should be awesome.

The Arena

Also in this room is a tunnel that goes straight down. It has weird gravity. If you jump down the middle of it, you plummet. But if you stay near a wall, you have altered gravity and can travel safely. The heroes learned this by dropping a torch down and watched, astonished, as their torch touched a vertical wall and laid on it, ceasing to fall.

Going straight down the tunnel was easy. The adventurers and their "master", Taraere, searched the catacombs underneath the fortress for the book.

They came upon a door with runes on it. They determined that the runes kept a demon trapped inside, and they decided to leave it alone.

They backtracked and found the arena, a vast underground area. There was a massive crowd of dretches, manes, shadow demons, tieflings, elves and humans watching a battle. A marilith was fighting two vrocks (see the picture at the top of this article).

This is an odd encounter. The adventurers must cross the arena floor to continue on their path. The crowd and the combatants pay no mind. The heroes only have to worry about some quicksand - which they detected and avoided. This felt like a missed opportunity for something more.

Disputed Ground

Manes

They traveled on and came to a room with an endless battle between dretches, manes and cambions battling in the name of their lords for control of the fortress. The heroes needed to cross the room without getting trampled.

Poor Bidam was trampled twice. Theran saved him with an earthshock spell and a chromatic bolt.

Then they had to cross a chaos river, which was made up of chaos stuff similar to the matter of limbo. I changed this a bit, and added opportunities to roll on the 5e wild surge chart. Theran failed his roll to chaos shape the river, so he triggered a wild surge and ended up levitating. He was able to cross over the river by levitating and using the ceiling to pull himself across.

Bidam decided just to dive in the chaos river and wild surge/swim across. First he got sucked into the astral plane for a round. Then he returned 6 seconds later, and rolled a 100 on the wild surge table. I let him pick the result due to the special roll. He chose a "random" lightning bolt that struck Tamaere and injured her!

The Arcanaloth

Then they came to their destination - a library. In it was a giant fox-headed demon reading a book that was the size of a human. This was the Mors Mysterium Nominum. The creature was an arcanaloth - a mercenary demon who did research for demons and devils int he Blood War.

Taraere angrily demanded that the arcanaloth hand the book over. The heroes could sense that the spell of control over them was about to end. They decided to attack Taraere!

She was completely surprised. She had more hit points then they anticipated. Once they had their shots, she angrily ordered them to strike themselves. Charisma saves were rolled at a -2 penalty.

Theran failed, and began bashing himself with his staff. Bidam resisted, which meant he was free for d6 rounds. He rolled a 5! He hit Taraere again while the arcanaloth watched on, amused. Taraere angrily cast a cone of cold spell, including both Bidam and the arcanaloth in the blast. Bidam made his save and took half damage. He had only a single hit point left!

The arcanoloth summoned 3 mezzoloths, who attacked Taraere. Theran tried again to break the compulsion like Bidam had, and this time he made his save. As the spell crystal faded into view, he struck Taraere in the head with his staff, knocking her unconscious.

The heroes were sucked into the spell crystal and were sent hurtling back to Heart's Faith. They had left Taraere at the arcanoloth's mercy.

The adventurers appeared back in Heart's Faith and rested.

Return to Limbo

I asked them what their plan was for next week, and they confirmed that they wanted to find Renbuu and convince him to change Bidam's color. I asked them what they planned to offer him to convince him to do this. They thought maybe handing over his painting of Lamashtu might work.

They headed back to Sigil and brought the painting to the Art Curio Galleria (another locale from Planescape:Torment) and they learned that it was worth 50,000 gold! They were torn on whether or not to sell it.

So next time, all three demon lords will exact some sort of revenge on the heroes as they seek out Renbuu, the Slaad Lord in Limbo. They'll likely be guests of the githzerai, in a very happy meeting of all my research work over the past few weeks.

In today's article, I am going to use art by Todd Lockwood, who seems to really like painting dragons. In this image above, we can see a red dragon backing up a who's who of D&D: Mordenkainen (Greyhawk), Kylie (Planescape), Elminster (Forgotten Realms), Raistlin (Dragonlance) Strahd Von Zarovich (Ravenloft), and... a space marine.

I've been doing a lot of D&D work lately. I decided to go full steam ahead on my Planescape campaign. I've been reading and preparing classic Planescape scenarios by Monte Cook and Chris Perkins.

While doing this, I was thinking about the type of dungeon master I am. I mulled over my flaws and how to improve. I am keenly aware that my group likes it best when I give them almost complete control. They "wake up" and get into all sorts of shenanigans. But when I run a published adventure, they tend to sit back and go along for the ride. They are almost startled when there is a moment that they have to make a big decision. Yet here I am running published adventures, because I enjoy running official "classic" stuff.

Common Pitfalls of Running a Game

I was thinking about the other dungeon masters I've encountered in my life, and just how hard it is to be a truly good DM. These are the types of dungeon masters I've run into over the years who've fallen into one kind of trap or another:

The DM who pummels you in every encounter, but then saves you when you should die.
The DM who is on a complete power trip but needs your praise and tries to get it through presentation of cool concepts or NPCs.
The new DM who has a lot of potential but is crippled by insecurity, ultimately second-guessing themselves right out of the DM chair.
The DM who has their pet NPC/character that is super-awesome and does everything while the PCs watch on resentfully.
The old school DM who is set in their ways, hates all new rules or ideas, and resents the modern concept of game balance.
The DM who lets their significant other get special treatment over everyone else.
The meticulous DM who is such a perfectionist that it takes them months to run a single session of campaign.

The Great Dungeon Master Conference Call

I decided that I wanted to see where other DMs of the world were at mentally. So I asked people on reddit to talk about what kind of DM they were, and I collected the responses. I have sifted through this information, looking for trends and common themes, to see if there are any particular things that most DMs have in common. What are people struggling with? What kind of games do they run?

I got about 50 responses in under 24 hours. Not too shabby! I broke the whole thing down into 4 categories. We'll go over them one at a time:

Style

I wanted to know how the dungeon masters of the world ran their games - on the fly? Beer and pretzels? Super-serious? Here was the number one response, by far:

Stick to the Rules, but Allow for Creative Ideas: Almost every single person said this is what they do. One DM cited an example of allowing a wizard to disarm a foe through the clever use of a teleportation spell.

Making It Up as you Go Along: I was shocked at how many DMs said they run their games "on the fly". It might have been 30% or more! This makes sense to a degree, as a lot of people simply don't have the time to prepare a campaign. I admire this balls to the wall attitude, but I personally am terrible at it.

One comment many of these free-wheeling adrenaline junkies made was that their method was to think about the NPCs in the campaign and what they would do. Then, they'd just react to what the PCs did, or operate on their own schedule. I've done this quite a bit and it always works out well.

Power Trip: A couple DMs were willing to admit that they ran their games with an iron fist. "I'm an asshole DM," proclaimed one. This person explained that they are the one individual in the group who does their best to make sure the group keeps going, and sometimes that requires being an asshole.

Another dungeon master talked about running a challenging game: "I'm a difficulty-oriented DM. I want my players to notice there are risks involved with every choice they make. More risks to fail, die, get eyes gouged out (etc) means the stakes are higher and the adventure more epic. Make smart decisions and you look like a hero."

I personally would love this style as a player, but as I've noted in this blog many times before, there is a massive percentage of D&D players who don't like this and can't handle it.

Another DM had a bone-chilling response: "I am a cruel god."

Overpreparing: One dungeon master made a startling claim: "I will easily spend 20-30 hours preparing a session, but I never over prepare to the point where I can't handle my players doing unexpected things."

I have always been of the understanding that you should never prepare longer than your session will last. I break this rule often, but I always keep it in mind. I can't fathom spending 20-30 hours a week (?) preparing for a 5 hour game.

Campaign

I wanted to know if DMs preferred to run published adventures or homebrewed stuff and what their campaign was like. I was utterly stunned at the response. Out of about 50 dungeon masters, all but a handful said that they run homebrew campaigns!

Homebrew Bastards: Get a load of this montage of DM responses - a salute to the homebrew:

"I refer to myself as a 'homebrew bastard'"
"All homebrew all the time"
"Almost always homebrew."
"I usually prefer homebrews, because I like control and knowledge over my lore (makes improv easier)."
"The last campaign and the most recent both take place within a homebrew setting."
"Homebrew set in Faerun. Basically one big campaign with a bunch of arcs."
"Because of my style, I just about have to home brew it (plus world building is the best)."
"I run a homebrew setting. All lore is some basic background and history, but other than that the rest are previous campaigns."
"I write fiction as a hobby, so I always come up with my own ideas and sometimes test my story ideas on players."
"I always write my own and never used published adventures. I have nothing against them - I learned to love D&D through modules and still have a soft spot in my heart for Castle Amber - but I will never know as much about Krynn or Faerun as one of my players and that lack of knowledge kills the fantasy for me."

Many of these people have said that they use the Forgotten Realms setting but make up their own adventures. A few of them will take encounters or traps from published adventures, but by and large they make up their own stuff.

Does this mean wizards of the coast should focus on supplements? Princes of the Apocalypse does have races, spells and monsters in it, but are people going to pay $50 for 40 pages of material in the back of the book (most of which wizards offers for free online)?

I feel so alone all of the sudden. I love running published adventures. They are full of great ideas and flavor. Running White Plume Mountain last year was one of the greatest things ever. I personally can't fathom coming up with cool adventures like that on a weekly basis. It sounds exhausting.

One dungeon master talked about why he hated pre-made adventures: "It just feels like me, as a DM, have almost no point in being there."

Running Published Adventures: A handful of dungeon masters claimed to run published stuff. One DM said: "I've run one homebrewed campaign, and I'm currently running LMoP online and PotA live. I'm finding published adventurers surprisingly more difficult, as there is a lot of information and NPCs to memorize."

He is right. Preparing a published adventure, especially one like Princes of the Apocalypse, is like doing homework. It's basically a textbook that you need to know backwards and forwards, and you are tested on it every week by your peers.

Another DM said: "I'm always torn on premade vs. homebrew. When I have the time and energy, homebrewing always leads to a better game. But I am prone to burnout, and the lower effort involved in premade games keeps them running longer."

Issues

I asked the dungeon masters to talk about the things that they are struggling with in their game. All of us are always trying to improve. I was wondering what some of the more common issues are when it comes to bettering yourself as a DM.

Too Easy: This was the number one response. Many dungeon masters feel they are too soft on their players. One DM said: "I'm a bit too forgiving with my PC's and will often let them pass rolls that should be failed by one or two points, but only if it wont affect the narrative too heavily."

Another chimed in: "I'm far too soft-hearted and forgiving to my players. In the last campaign I ran (very first time being a DM), I didn't want to hinder their fun but this lead to a few issues at the table so this time I'm going to be less soft on them."

One dungeon master went so far as to say that he or she was too "chickenshit" in combat.

I struggle with this too, and I have over my entire career as a DM. A couple things to remember:

Players like easy encounters. Not all the time, but more than you'd think. Truly dangerous encounters can be stressful when the player really cares about his or her character.
Put extra thought into your big encounters. Add dangerous terrain, minions, and gimmicks (example: The villain is surrounded by a force shield the PCs must destroy four statues before they can harm him). Study 4e poster map fights for ideas.

Death By a Million Cuts: There was a lot of other random complaints:

Many DMs said they simply didn't have enough spare time to prepare their campaign properly.
One said: "I get frustrated when players don't put as much effort into a world as I put into the world."
Optional side quests end up taking up the entire night, which can be boring. The DM feels pressure to make it fun.
The DM is good at numbers, has a hard time running mysteries or investigation. I suggested that this person study some old Shadowrun adventures, as they are a perfect template for how to run an investigation.
"Long sessions burn me out (4 hours is my max these days)." I feel the same way!
More than one DM said that they lose enthusiasm for a campaign but the players want to keep going.
One DM sometimes forgets something cool they were planning to do. I think we've all been there. There is so much stuff to juggle.

Player Problems

My favorite topic! I just wanted to see if other people have the same problems I do - mainly players who can't handle adversity/low die rolls. If this seems like gleeful player bashing, just know that I plan on writing a post about "DM Horror Stories" in the near future.

Cell Phones: A number of dungeon masters complained about this. The cell phone is a major distraction. I just tell my players to put them away. There was one instance in a game store where I had a really annoying player, and I'd let him play on his cell phone as it kept him quiet and he didn't bother anybody.

One DM had this to say: "Oh man, if there's something I find difficult it's making 5 people pay attention, be it D&D, school project, Organizing something, coordinating a job project, people's brains are completely burnt by smartphones and shit, that's almost like drugs for them."

Cheating: One DM realized he had a cheater, so he decided to ask the players to move closer so their die rolls can be seen.

Another DM chimed in about cheating. His player said that he was playing the game to have fun, and that "It's about fun, and I have fun not failing". So this DM ran the whole session where every time the heroes rolled, he declared it a natural 20. The monsters rolled a critical fumble every time. The players loved it. They got to the main villain and killed it in one round. This DM says that they never cheated again after this.

That seems really excessive. I have a hard time dealing with some stuff in D&D, but cheating is something I have no tolerance for. I just call the player out on it and demand that they roll right in front of me. "If I don't see it, it doesn't count". I had one player who bought these tiny metal dice that were hard for me to read from across the table. I made him use bigger dice. This is a grown man we are talking about.

Running Games Online: One DM talked about running games online with Roll20, and the players sometimes just miss a session with little warning. It seems like players are much prone to flake out when it's not a face-to-face meeting. I read about one DM who actually had players just quit out of his game mid-session!

Players Not Writing Things Down: "Among the folks I play with now if I have a pet peeve, it's when they aren't prepared. So I have the rule ;If it's not on your character sheet it doesn't exist; - and I will know if they were ever to add something that shouldn't be there."

I have this problem, too. I still have players who don't bring a pencil to the game. A pencil! How is that possible?!

Rules Lawyers: "I had one player hold the game hostage and refuse to take his turn to look something up and prove me wrong. 9/10 (times) he couldn't even find what he wanted, but insisted he was right. He would take a half hour each time, too. Eventually I ended up just telling him he would lose his turn if he didn't take it within X amount of time. He threw a tantrum over it."

I would really like to see a campaign where every single player and the DM is a rules lawyer. It sounds completely exhausting.

Epic Rant Number One: "Player Problem: Everyone. I have hardly been able to find a player who doesn't have some major deficiency. The guy who loves to roleplay can't be bothered to remember what a d20 looks like even though he's played for years. The guy who loves gaming the system can't view their character as more than a pile of numbers. Then there's the guy who takes it all as a big sketch comedy, the guy who can't make it to half the sessions, the guy who wants to continually demand special treatment, and the guy who just needs a shower."

Full disclosure: I'd probably be the sketch comedy guy.

Epic Rant Number Two: "I can't stand players who think I'm railroading them, when they put themselves in a position that can't be free. If you push the Duke down a flight of stairs, don't expect him to not imprison you for an attempt on his life. If you escape, awesome. If not, I'll happily imprison you instead of killing your character off on the spot, which only makes me happy."

Bonus Round

One dungeon master included this extra comment that I thought would be a pleasant way to end this article. I hope this has been helpful to some of you, or at least amusing in some way. Here it is:

"The night before we play, I usually spend some time making up the Roll20 boards and writing a lot of notes, and at the end of the night, I have this perfectly set up world loaded with potential energy. It's like I lock all the doors, set all the traps, and tell all the monsters, "So guys, I can't promise you what they're going to do, but if everything goes right, I'll bring you a party full of tasty PCs tomorrow, so just sleep tight, OK?"

"Then I tuck everything in and click the light off, but that potential energy is there all night, and when I go to sleep with it in my head, it makes me happy. D&D is the perfect compromise like that. You plan this thing, but you know part of the pleasure is that the best you can do is make a really good pinball machine, which is to say that it's equal parts clever design, player participation, and chaos theory."

DMing is always an amazing thing, because it's like an enormous buffet. I don't ever have to show up at a game with our group and fill one role. If I want to play with magic, I throw casters at you guys. If I want to make you dance, I put fights in difficult terrain. If I want to scrap, you fight melee monsters. If I feel like acting, we have a talky session. A Golden Corral for my mind."

Tonight we played through a homebrewed session of The Great Modron March, a classic planescape adventure. Last week, the heroes had found out about a slaad lord named Renbuu, who can change the colors of things.

One of the heroes in the party, Bidam, is a black-scaled dragonborn. Because black dragons are evil, Bidam has faced a lot of discrimination in this campaign. He wants to find Renbuu and convince him to change Bidam to the color of a good dragon.

When Jessie showed up tonight, she told us she had a dream where she was being interviewed for a job at a grocery store, and all of the questions were about the Lady of Pain and the little Lady of Pain doll the heroes bought from the Curiosity Shoppe a few sessions ago. It would prove to be a prophetic real-life dream for this imaginary game..

The Party

(Jessie) Bidam - Dragonborn Fighter
(George) Theran - Elf Wizard

Revenge of Alzrius

Demon Spawn

Last time, the heroes had snatched three items from the fortress in the abyss. Each item was tied to a demon lord, and the adventure pointed out that the demon lords would likely seek revenge for the theft of the items.

So! Our heroes are sleeping in their office in Sigil when a demon spawn servant of Alzrius, the Flowing Flame, hucks a torch through a window and sets their office on fire. The heroes wake up, come downstairs and attack. The demon spawn demands the amulet back, but the heroes refuse and fight him as a fire engulfs the first floor of their home.

The battle spills out into the street. Suddenly, the Lady of Pain hovers into the scene. She's fifteen feet tall and blades come out of her face. She glares at the demon spawn, and cuts form all over his body. Then the demon spawn vanishes - he's been mazed. The Lady of Pain turns and floats down the street.

The heroes meet their neighbors, who try to put out the fire. There's a retired couple, and a half-elf clerk. Two dabus show up. One has a magic sword on his belt (the sword is Ffazablur, a magic sword that will come into play if/when we play through the Chris Perkins dungeon magazine adventure "Nemesis"). The other dabus has a decanter of endless water and puts out the fire with it. Repairs are costly and will take a month.

Players always really get a kick out of Lady of Pain appearances. I try hard to keep her rare and special, but in 2010 I ran a campaign where the heroes got obsessed with her and there was this whole story where I came up with her origin (she's the spawn of a god and a primordial), which I have grown less happy with over time. I don't want to repeat the mistake of using her in a way that makes her less cool.

The Contract

Vrishika the Alu-Fiend

The next day, Vrishika of the Curiosity Shoppe wanted to have dinner with the heroes. She took them to The Green Mill, an elven restaurant that doesn't allow githzerai or bauriaurs. The elves weren't thrilled with Bidam, a black dragonborn, but Vrishika had clout in the restaurant, so they gave them a private room.

I did this partly to play up the fact that Bidam's black dragon scales are causing problems. I was able to create a bit of internal conflict in Jessie - should Bidam really change the color of his scales to appease other people? Vrishika commended him on his decision - she has the ability to shapechange, and had actually come to this restaurant appearing as an elf.

Vrishika wanted the heroes to sign a contract with her - she got the first chance to buy items, slaves and information off of them. As the heroes mulled the offer, she used her 2e "ESP" power (detect thoughts in 5e - which is a really well-done spell, IMO). Vrishika dug into Theran's psyche and learned of the question he wrestled with, which is: "Who decides what is good and evil"?

She also dove into Bidam's mind. The dragonborn sensed her in there, though. Vrishika thought Bidam's thoughts were amusing (Bidam's life philosophy is "Hit it and Quit it").

They ate displacer steaks - the meat of displacer beasts. The steaks were tricky to eat, because they looked like they are on one side of the plate, but they were actually on another.

The adventurers signed the contract. There was a chance in this scene for the heroes to learn Vrishika's origin, which ties into the upcoming Chris Perkins adventure "Umbra", but they didn't take the bait.

Vrishika told the heroes to do research on dragon types at a bookstore called "The Parted Veil", a location from a planescape sourcebook. Bidam got the books he needed, and decided that he wanted to become... a platinum dragonborn!

Limbo

A few days of preparations in Sigil took place. The plan was to go to Limbo, create a river with Theran's chaos-shaping ability, and sail on it with the demon ship they'd gotten in the fortress of the fallen stair.

They rounded up a crew and headed to the githzerai city of Zerthadlun through a portal in a bar known as The Ubiquitous Wayfarer. The Wayfarer is a prominent location in "Dead Gods", the sequel to this adventure. I did a lot of research and campaign planning this week, so a lot of this session is being used to plant seeds for later.

The Wayfarer is a bar known to hold over 24 portals to different planes, if the person has the right portal keys.

The heroes went to Zerthadlun, looked around, and then headed out into Limbo, created a river and summon the demon ship using the magic whalebone they'd found in the fortress last session. The ship was Becham's Cyst, a pirate ship that once hunted Becham the demon whale. Now that Becham is beached, the undead captain pities the whale and sails near him in Yeenoghu's Realm, waiting for the day that he can help Becham rise again.

The skeleton's name was Captain Ricketshanks, a supremely brittle fellow. He had an undead parrot named Mockle, who could imitate Becham's cry - an earth-shattering, hellish whale call.

The ship was magical and had some cool items from Pathfinder and Spelljammer:

Lifejammer: The ship was powered by a coffin that drained souls. A person could be chucked in there to power the ship. When they died, a new person needed to be fed to it. Currently in it was a gnoll from Yeenoghu's Realm.
Captain's Locker: A chest that was like a bag of holding. It also warped the cargo hold so that it could hold 50% more than humanly possible.
Harpoon Gun: Not magic, just seemed like the ship should have one.
Never-ending Barrel o' Demon Rum: Gives you temporary hit points and a wicked hangover.

The Crew:

Alamandra the Githzerai: Longtime friend of the PCs.
Kimaxsi Addertongue: Foul-mouthed goat-legged tiefling sensate that Bidam likes.
Kesai Serris: Mysterious sensate who tagged along with Kimaxsi.Greir Crasad: The thief who Theran saved from The Tacharim way back when.
Rodina: Rilmani who was following the modron march in the beastlands.
Karris: Bariaur bard who was folowing the modron march in the beastlands.
Stewart Seven-Fingers: Tiefling wizard following the modron march in the beastlands.

A few of the crew could chaos shape, which was handy, as chaos shaping uses the concentration rules. If Theran was chaos-shaping the river and took damage in combat, the river might be disrupted and they'd all be in big trouble.

The Journey

Gray Slaads: A swarm of gray slaads attacked the ship. A gem popped out of the head of a slaad when it died. The heroes knocked the other two slaads out. Alamandra explained the deal - if you can dig the gem out of the slaad's brain without killing it, you can use the gem to control the slaad! There's some nice rules for this in the monster manual.

After some gory surgery, Theran had himself a slaad control gem, and a gray slaad under his command.

The Modron: They spotted a small earthmote nearby. A githzerai was mortally wounded, and a lone modron was standing over him. The modron had been lost in the march through Limbo months ago, and this githzerai had been taking care of it.

The heroes met with the githzerai, who was in the final stages of chaos phage. Slaad tadpoles exploded from his chest! After a gory battle, the heroes befriended the modron. I had thought it would be cool for the heroes to have a modron to follow them around. Welp, you'll see what happens a little later with this poor fellow.

Cosmic Wheel of Fortune

The Chaos Pinwheel: The heroes came upon an un-mutable object in Limbo - a Chaos Pinwheel. If you touch it, random things happen. I took this right out of Dragon Magazine #213. The bard touched it a bunch of times, and gained the ability to teleport, along with a couple of diseases. His magic lute also vanished.

Bidam couldn't resist. He touched it once.. nothing. They were about to shove off. Bidam decided to try one more time. Jessie rolled a d100 and rolled... 100. Know what a roll of 100 is on the chart? A WISH.

We looked up the 5e wish spell. In my head, I figured that Bidam would wish to be a platinum dragonborn, and our adventure would end early. But this is D&D. Jessie asked me: "Can I use this to kill the Lady of Pain?"

I was taken aback.. no, this wouldn't kill the Lady of Pain, otherwise a god or demon lord would have used a wish to do it long ago. After some discussion, we hammered out that Bidam wished for the knowledge of the Lady of Pain's weakness, a way to defeat her or take over Sigil.

I was really not expecting that. Jessie showed up to the game tonight talking about dreams of the Lady of Pain. I thought she was a fan! So basically, Bidam's mind flooded with knowledge that will take time to sort out. I told Jessie I'd have to hammer out the details over the week, and that it would likely include involving the hag Ravel Puzzlewell, who was one of the few creatures who'd come reasonably close to defeating the Lady of Pain (Ravel brought a horde of devils to Sigil, who tried to take over the city - Ravel was mazed by the Lady of Pain as punishment).

Demon Rum: As the Cyst sailed the river through Limbo to Renbuu's gallery, the crew got together and drank a lot of rum. Ricketshanks taught them a filthy sea shanty. Kesai-Serris flirted with Theran, and talked about how she doesn't have dreams. Kimaxsi and Bidam got wasted and had some, uh, drunken romance in the captain's cabin.

The gnoll in the lifejammer died. A creature needed to be chucked in there or the ship would vanish and return to The Abyss. I thought ,"No big deal, they have that gray slaad." Nope. In went the modron. The cute little modron! Those monsters!

Theran's logic was sound, though. When a modron dies, it vanishes and a modron is reborn in the energy pool in Mechanus. So, he wasn't really killing it, but rather, he was sending it home! I was impressed he remembered that modron factoid.

Limbo Hazards: The ship survived steel rain, and then navigated a field of globules of liquid thunder.

Renbuu

Renbuu's Gallery: Renbuu welcomed the heroes to his gallery and was quite amused that they had his painting of Lamashtu. Renbuu was served by many red and blue slaads, who hoped to win his favor and be color-changed to a higher-ranking type, like a green slaad.

I had cooked up some Renbuu art objects for the heroes to gawk at:

Sculpture of modrons marching in the chaos of limbo.
Painting of a balor demon lord with many alu-fiend slaves (Karaphon, a demon lord who appears in "Umbra").
Painting of a miserable hag in a maze (Ravel Puzzlewell).
Sculpture of a black cloud wearing a sinister white mask (a visage - a monster from "Dead Gods")
A sculpture of a giant marilith with red eyes and black skin (Shaktari from "Nemesis")

A deal was made. Renbuu would change Bidam from black to platinum if the heroes would steal something for him. He shared with them that there were 100 slaad mutants chained up in a cave in the Spawning Stone. These mutants were kept there by two other slaad lords, Ygorl and Ssendam, as they feared the mutants would grow into rival slaad lords (this info was pointed out to me by Bronk, a commenter of this blog - it's from the planescape book "The Infinite Staricase").

Our heroes would have to steal a white slaad from that room.

Norsar The Many: Renbuu went with the heroes to The Spawning Stone. He saw that Theran was controlling the gray slaad with a stone, and angrily told Theran he'd better get rid of it - to control a slaad like that was greatly offensive to him.

They arrived at the Spawning Stone. Renbuu created a distraction by flying up to the many slaads at the stone and changing their colors, causing them to fight each other.

The adventurers entered the cave, and found all sorts of weird slaads that I made up:

Orange: A hovering torso with a head, no arms or legs.
Translucent: Pink brain, red heart.
Purple: A frogtaur slaad!
Pink: Flowery scent, long nails.
Turqoise: Four arms, four eyes.
Yellow: Its hide is like a onesie, underneath is a black skeleton.
White: The target of their search. He is Norsar the Many, the slaad briefly mentioned in one of the 4e books. He can summon past and future selves.

The mutant slaads were bound by chains of law - only lawful creatures could break them (except slaad lords). Neither PC was lawful, but they'd brought their entire crew into this dangerous cave for some reason. Greir Crasad, the rogue, had a paladin lord for a brother and lived in Excelsior - she was indeed an ultra-rare lawful thief. The chains were literally like putty in her hands. Norsar was free!

Reason With a Slaad: A red slaad juggernaut appeared in the exit. Norsar told the heroes to try to reason with it (so I could use the 4e "reason with a slaad" chart).

Theran proceeded to point out to the slaad that chaining up slaads was not a chaotic thing to do at all - in fact, it reeked of law. Great point! I rolled on the chart, just to see the result. I got "the slaad runs away". Perfect!

Black Slaad Entropics: The heroes made their way outside with Norsar. While Renbuu was keeping most of the slaads busy, Ygorl's black slaad entropics were on to the scheme. A horde of them floated between the heroes and their ship. Norsar summoned 100 of his selves from the past and future, and a giant battle broke out.

When the entropics die, they become a vortex that can grab and hold a person. This battle was all about the heroes trying to get to their ship. Theran actually got dropped by the entropics, but the Rodina the rilmani healed him.

The heroes, Norsar, and renbuu fled back to Renbuu's lair in an air vortex tube of Renbuu's creation.

Renbuu lived up to his word, turning Bidam into a platinum dragonborn. Then he turned to Theran, who still held the gray slaad control gem. He turned Theran into a drow! Then he did a painting of the heroes and their crew. They were all naked, in a restaurant. Each of them sat at a table opposite of an incarnation of Norsar the Many. Renbuu made a magic copy of the painting and gave it to the heroes.

The heroes returned to Zerthadlun and to Sigil.

Zerthadlun

After selling some stuff to Vrishika, they returned to Zerthadlun and told the ruler, Adlishar Ralamen, about the slaad secret - that there were many powerful mutations chained up in the stone!

Adlishar rewarded the heroes by giving them two uncommon magic item formulas (the heroes picked formulas for a tan bag of tricks and javelin of lightning). Theran planned to craft and sell these items in Vrishika's Curiosity Shoppe. Theran also agreed to sell the slaad and the control gem to Vrishika.

They were also allowed to stay in Zerthadlun for a few months and train under Belthomis, learning how to glimpse the future (gaining a permanent initiative bonus).

Future Plans

I planted a lot of seeds, and I got blindsided by a fun but challenging wish. How does one oppose the Lady of Pain? I have no idea. I guess I'll take this plot one step at a time.

What is the Lady of Pain's weakness? Love? The fact that she can't leave Sigil? The possibility that Sigil is her prison?

I've already prepared next week's session, which involves a trip to Undermountain. I guess we'll see what happens. I knew this session was going to be good, and it was.

In this article, I am going to attempt to present the collected lore of a popular NPC from Dungeons & Dragons - The Lady of Pain. This is a bit tricky, as the Lady is meant to be an abstract thing rather than a deity with hit points.

She is tied to the city of Sigil, which was originally introduced in the Planescape setting, and became a part of the core game in later editions. Sigil is meant to be a home base for adventurers exploring the planes.

The Essentials

Here's what you should know about the Lady of Pain:

She is fifteen feet tall, hovers, never speaks and has a halo of blades around her face.
She is the ruler and protector of Sigil.
She has the power to keep gods, primordials, demon lords and etc. out of Sigil.
Just a glance from her can cause cuts to form all over your body.
She is served by goat-men known by Dabus. They clean and repair Sigil, and they speak in hovering symbols.
She has the ability to send victims to a Maze - an individualized dimensional prison.
She Mazes or kills anyone who tries to worship her.

Real Life Origin

The Lady of Pain is apparently partly inspired by a 19th century poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne caled "Dolores". It is about "Our Lady of Pain", a cruel goddess who has no compassion.

Here's a verse:

"Ah beautiful passionate body
      That never has ached with a heart!
On thy mouth though the kisses are bloody,
      Though they sting till it shudder and smart,
More kind than the love we adore is,
      They hurt not the heart or the brain,
O bitter and tender Dolores,
      Our Lady of Pain. "

I bet we could use this in a campaign somehow...

"Zeb" Cook designed the Planescape boxed set. He said: "Dana Knutson was assigned to draw anything I wanted. I babbled, and he drew - buildings, streets, characters and landscapes. Before any of us knew it, he drew the Lady of Pain. I'm very fond of the Lady of Pain; she really locks up the Planescape look. We all liked her so much that she became our logo."

AD&D 2nd Edition

Planescape Campaign Boxed Set

Things we learn about the Lady of Pain:

She's not kind or caring: "On a whim, she'll aid, but more often she kills."
She is not human and not a woman. She might be a greater god, or a reformed demon lord.
She doesn't have a house, palace or temple.
Those who try to worship her are killed by her.
"Those who try interfering with her erupt in horrid gashes at just the touch of her gaze."
Nobody talks to her.

Here is a quote right out of the book that makes this article very difficult: "Bluntly put, as far as a Planescape campaign's concerned, the Lady of Pain's little more than an icon that crystallizes the mood of the campaign setting. Player characters should never deal with her. She doesn't give out missions, she never grants powers to anyone, and they can't rob her temples because she hasn't got any. If she ever does make an appearance, it should be simply to reinforce the wonder and mystery of the whole place."

She Protects Sigil: The city of Sigil is special. It is a place somewhat beyond the planes, and it contains countless portals to all of the planes. Gods, primordials, demon lords and others all want to control Sigil - but they can't. None of them can set foot in Sigil, due to the power of the Lady of Pain.

The DM Guide of the Planescape boxed set says: "The Lady of Pain's about power - the power to block the doors of Sigil to all deities. She's the protector of the whole Cage, the one being that keeps Sigil safe".

"The Lady of Pain only takes action against threats to the security of Sigil, and that means her security." Things she won't tolerate:

Someone trying to help a deity enter Sigil.
Slaughtering the Dabus.
Tearing the city down stone-by-stone.
Inciting rebellion against her rule.

Dabus

The Dabus: These creatures are servants and lords of Sigil. Some people think that they are living manifestations of the city. They repair what's broken in Sigil. They trim razorvine, patch cobblestone, and repair crumbling facades.

They sometime act as agents of the Lady. They put down riots or show up when there's a threat to the Lady.

The Mazes: The Lady makes a copy of a piece of Sigil and puts it in a demiplane. A portal of her making carries the copy into the ethereal plane. There, it grows into an endless twisting maze with no beginning or end. Then some poor sap is stuck in there, maybe forever.

Outsiders can get in to a selected maze, but it is difficult to get out. Food and water appear so the prisoner doesn't starve. Prisoners know there is a way out, as the Lady of Pain always leaves a portal back to Sigil hidden somewhere.

Here's a few past threats to the Lady of Pain's control of Sigil.

The Communals: There was once a faction called The Communals. They believed that everything belonged to everyone, including the Lady's power. One day, all of The Communals disappeared. Many assumed they were all trapped in a single maze.

Aoskar: Long ago, the worship of Aoskar, god of portals became very big in Sigil. A great "Temple of Doors" was created in the city - a church of Aoskar. The worship became so widespread that a dabus became a priest of Aoskar (!).

One night soon after the dabus became a priest, the Temple of Doors and buildings for blocks around were destroyed by a force unknown. Aoskar died. His giant corpse now floats in the astral plane.

It was soon after declared that worshiping Aoskar is illegal in Sigil, punishable by death.

Heart of Aoskar

There are two magic items related to Aoskar:

The Heart of Aoskar: A clockwork heart the size of a human head. It apparently has the power to create a portal to anywhere, regardless of normal restrictions.
The Blood of Aoskar: This resembles wine, and acts as a universal portal key - activating any portal in Sigil.

In the Cage - A Guide to Sigil

We learn a few more factoids:

Some think the Lady is one of the dabus, or perhaps she is their god. "When the dabus are disturbed, the Lady's mind is troubled."
Apparently, the Lady used to send enemies to Agathion, the third layer of Pandeonium, rather than use the Mazes.
During the time when Aoskar was worshiped in Sigil, followers of Aoskar began making sacrifices in the name of the Lady of Pain. They considered the Lady to be an exarch or aspect of Aoskar.

We also learn about some more past threats:

Shekelor: 10,000 years ago, there was a wizard named Shekelor. He wanted to seize the Lady's throne. He sought an almost-successful usurper in Agathion, but the plane's dangers killed him.

The Expansionists: Recently, there was a faction known as the Expansionists. They were led by a man named Vartus Timlin, who had a powerful sword called Lightbringer. When he began speaking openly of seizing power, he was cast into a Maze.

Uncaged, Faces of Sigil

Fell

This book details a few NPCs who have strong links to The Lady of Pain.

Fell: This is the dabus who dared to become a priest of Aoskar. He walks on the ground, unable to hover like his fellow dabus. People fear and shun him, as they are certain the Lady will soon come for him.

Fell is a tattoo artist. Sometimes his tattoos become real - a bag of coins or a gate key. He secretly gathers with the Will of One, a splinter group of the Sign of One. He tells them fervent tales of Aoskar's might. Fell has the power to cast any priest spell that relates to inter-planar travel.

The Sign of One has a person all lined up to be a vessel of Aoskar's energy - Omott the linqua. A linqua is a creature created by a god (Sung Chiang, in this case) and they can draw power from their god to cast spells and boost their strength to 19. Most linquas become "addicted" to the god energy that flows through them.

The plan here is have the linqua draw power from Aoskar, and use that energy to somehow resurrect Aoskar.

Djhek'nlarr: She is a githyanki who pretends to be a githzerai. She sells maps of the Lady of Pain's Mazes! She is trying to learn the secret of the Mazes, so that she'd never have to fear the Lady Mazing her. She even tricks people into being mazed. She goes to the Maze, maps it and returns to Sigil.

It is thought that Djhek'nlarr is able to harness psychic energy from the astral plane. She may be able to follow the psychic trail (silver cords) through the astral to the victim in the maze. Apparently she escapes the mazes by following her own psychic trail out of the maze.

Planescape: Torment

The Lady appears in the game in a few scenes. If you become too disruptive in the city, she actually sends you to a Maze. The maze is a large circular vine-choked labyrinth, where you have to pass through a series of portals to escape. The heroes also have to break into a maze to speak with the powerful hag, Ravel Puzzlewell.

Check out the animation of the Lady of Pain Mazing you here.

Pages of Pain

This is a novel written from the perspective of the Lady of Pain. In Dragon Magazine #245, there was a bit of discussion about the book:

"...Take Denning’s PLANESCAPE® hardcover Pages of Pain (1996). The editor assigned it to him in good-news/bad-news terms: “I want you to write a hardback. The bad news is, its about the Lady of Pain.”

Denning recalls the difficulty. “It had to be from the Lady of Pain’s viewpoint - which is something of a problem, since (as every PLANESCAPE player knows) she never speaks - and (this was the really good part) the reader must know less about her at the end of the book than he does at the beginning, and nobody knows anything about her at the beginning.”

Would you cry defeat? Denning rose to the task, showing his characteristic desire to improve his craft. Pages of Pain “really made me rethink the way I approach stories, and for that reason alone it was worth writing. It also ended up being a much deeper book than I had ever written before, which I think was a result of the extreme approach I was forced to take. Those who have [read it] seem to think it’s my best work. It was certainly the most challenging and - forgive the pun - ‘painful’ to write.”

I don't own this book, so I did a lot of searching and read reviews. I found a couple of sample chapters on overdrive.com.

The main character has amnesia (apparently this book is a retelling of the greek myth of Theseus in D&D form). He has made a deal with the god Poseidon to deliver a gift (a trapped amphora) to the Lady of Pain. He ends up in a Maze and that's where most of the book takes place.

It's all written from the Lady of Pain's perspective. Apparently she actually addresses the reader on a number of occasions in this book.

We learn:

The Lady of Pain apparently can travel Sigil invisibly as long as her feet don't touch the ground.
She is the source of all pain in the multiverse.
She is obsessed with mental and physical pain of different kinds.
She might be a physical incarnation of the city itself.
The Lady may not know her own origin. A question posed in the book: "Is it better to know who you are, or to forget?"
It is possible she is the daughter of Poseidon.
There are four pains spread through the multiverse: Agony, anguish, misery and despair. Apparently the source of all of the pain in the multiverse comes from the void in her chest where he heart should be.

Reaction to the book is very mixed. Some amazon reviewers call it a "classic", while others have scathing remarks, like this:

"It's been a while since I last read something as bad and deceptive as this novel. First of all, and my biggest issue with this piece of literary junk, is that the book flat-out lies to you. Yes, the book actually says that it's going to reveal the backstory of the Lady of Pain, her origins, etc. Heck, a tag line was "The silence broken!".

Not only does it reveal NOTHING about the Lady of Pain, it opens stupid and unnecessary questions about her that are actually pretty pointless. So, there goes my main reason for purchasing this new doorstop of mine."

The sample chapters that I read seemed fine and breezy.

Die Vecna Die

This is a crazy adventure meant to signal the end of 2nd edition and usher in the 3rd edition cosmology. I always liked the whole concept of a final edition-ending adventure.. I wish they'd have done it at the end of 4th edition.

In this gigantic adventure, Vecna uses a ritual to become a god, and then forces the Dark Powers of Ravenloft to funnel him into Sigil. Vecna wants to bring down the current planar order and become the supreme deity of a new multiverse in his image.

It is suggested that the Lady of Pain is one of the Ancient Brethren, as is The Serpent, an entity that advises Vecna.

Vecna holes up in The Armory in Sigil, and it is explained that the multiverse could unravel. "...should the Lady reveal herself in her true form in all its aching majesty to do battle with the waxing god, the multiverse would come undone like a mobile whose strings are simultaneously severed."

The heroes will have the Hand of Vecna and possibly other Vecna relics, which apparently means they can take Vecna down. The Lady has a dabus tell the heroes to go kill him. There's a note in the module that if the PCs try to attack the Lady of Pain, she is invulnerable to any attack and a single glance from her will cause the aggressor to vanish.

The heroes hopefully reduce Vecna to 0 hit points and he is ejected from Sigil. His avatar is sucked down a whirlpool-like conduit.

The Lady of Pain rewards the heroes with a key to the city of doors - a magic item that basically creates a permanent portal to Sigil from anywhere.

The Lady of Pain reorders reality "...while standing on the crux of the multiverse known as Sigil." Some planes drift off and are forever lost, others collide and merge. Some common spells begin to work differently.

Die Vecna Die is considered controversial as it breaks a number of established rules:

"The Serpent" had previously been more of an abstract concept, not a type of OverGod related to the Lady.
Vecna somehow escaped Ravenloft, something that is supposed to be impossible for a domain lord like Vecna. The whole point of the Domains of Dread is that the domain lords are trapped there.
Gods are not supposed to be able to step foot in Sigil.
The Lady of Pain was able to destroy Aoskar, god of portals with a thought, but somehow fighting Vecna is more difficult and could unravel the multiverse.

D&D 3rd Edition

Planar Handbook

This sourcebook has about 6 pages devoted to Sigil. It basically repeats what was written in 2nd edition. The one notable thing I found is that they gave the Lady of Pain an alignment:

From what I understand, this didn't go over so well with some fans, who feel that the Lady of Pain should never be statted out. Once she's statted out, PCs will be trying to kill her.

Expedition to the Demonweb Pits

This adventure takes place partly in Sigil. It reprints the Planar Handbook info, and also includes a pencil drawing of the Lady:

D&D 4th Edition

Manual of the Planes

This book has a nice section on Sigil and the Lady of Pain is summed up quite nicely here:

Dungeon Master's Guide 2

This book just reiterates what came before. "She is just the wonder and mystery and danger of Sigil made manifest."

The Dabus are given stat blocks:

They can shoot psychic rays that daze, and drop psychic bursts that stun.
Dabus Enforcers have a power called "psychic rend", which slides a target and stuns them.
They also have "Mind Cage", a burst that does a pile of psychic damage and immobilizes the target.

Then there's this: "It is believed that the dabus live beneath Sigil, or that the city creates them when they are needed..."

There is a massive section on Sigil in this book. I'd forgotten all about it. There's even a complete 4e adventure in Sigil, which I ran way back in 2009, which I used to lead into Revenge of the Giants.

D&D 5th Edition

The Lady of Pain is mentioned on page 68 of the Dungeon Master's Guide:

Most lore was created in 2nd edition, and the later editions don't really add much. She's a very cool NPC. Every time I introduce her into a campaign, the players light up. I have a player right now who wants to kill her, and judging from what I am reading, that is pretty much impossible.

Don't forget to check out this official D&D video about the Lady of Pain.

Noah of The Spoony Experiment talks about a player's scheme to outwit the Lady of Pain. Skip to 34:00 to bypass his explanation of Planescape and get to the minotaur's interesting idea.

This page is intended to be a resource for dungeon masters who are looking for information on what type of food and drink the adventurers of their campaign might come across in a fantasy setting. I can't tell you how many times I've had to gloss over what's on a menu at a tavern in-game. It's a hard thing to come up with on the spot.

The best resource I found was the Official D&D Tavern Generator, which includes menus. Really this is all you need for your heroes if they are in a conventional fantasy setting.

I have scoured official D&D products to pull out useful stuff. Originally I thought I'd have to pore over every sourcebook and module, but it turns out that Dragon Magazine has had a couple of articles that really cover this quite well. This will be a compilation of those articles, and some other interesting stuff I found along the way.

If you want just one article to cover all your bases (aside from the above tavern generator), go get Dragon Magazine #418. There's an article in there called "Inns in an Instant". It is utterly fantastic. It has everything: charts for making inns, names for innkeepers, lists of inn names, lists of NPCs, atmosphere charts... it's unreal. There's three pages of food and drink options. Here's an example of just one of the 9 charts of food and drink:

For 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, food, drink and lodging are covered on page 158 of the player's handbook as well as on the free online basic rules site under "Equipment". I have tried to assemble the food under the guidelines of "Poor", "Modest", "Wealthy" and etc. I also found a few articles in old issues of dragon magazine on magic food and drink. I will include them as well, following the mundane listing.

Food

Listed from cheapest to most expensive, following the "Lifestyle" guidelines.

Squalid 3 cp

Humble pie (filled with tripe or cow heel)
Acorn soup
Rice and peas
Green chili stew
Grilled snake and macadamia
Frogs on skewers
Onion soup
Lizard gruel with nutbread
Crisped worm skewers and potatoes

Poor 6 cp

Porridge
Mushroom stew with corn bread
Leg of mutton and goose eggs
Beef stew and sourdough
Squash and fish soup
Mutton meatloaf
Rabbit and baked pumpkin
Bread-bowl stew
Bog-beetle dumplings
Wayfarers' cake
Wren pot pie and cattail soup
Thistle salad with roasted grubs
Barbecued gopher legs on a stick

Modest 3 sp

Grilled wild boar chops
Broiled salmon and potatoes
Roast chicken and potatoes
Smoked sausage, goose eggs and dates
Cheese pie and onion soup
Baked boar and greens
Minted pea soup
Baked goat flank
Rabbit stew and willow crackers
Lemming and berry soup

Comfortable 8 sp

Honey braised boar ribs
Venison and bean stew
Buffaloaf and honeyed corn
Rack of lamb platter
Pork chop & curds
Elven bread
Baked loin of pork with gravy
Roasted cod and mashed potatoes
Beef steak and kidney pie
Clams and garlic

Wealthy 2 gp

Baked pheasant with leeks
Smoked salmon and wild berries
Chocolate covered ants and roast pelican
Barbecued tiger fish and papaya
Roast chicken with thyme
Stuffed trout, cabbage, succotash and plum pudding
Braised beef and pears with ginger
Meerkat dumplings with sage

Aristocratic 4 gp

Roast stag in antler sauce
Poached and peppered quail eggs
Spiced monkey tail and cashews
Roast heron and chopped sundew
Lobster in tomato cream sauce
Crab-stuffed lobster tail
Roast pheasant in oyster sauce
Poached duck with farro
Fried ostrich and egg omelet

Monster Food

This is food you might see hobgoblins or orcs eating.

Crunchy critters and grub pudding
Smashed guts and cabbage
Not-so-old rice in sour goat’s milk
Fried chunks and lard bread
Salted eyes and carrot ends
Bone and blood mix stew
Lettuce, liver, and lung pie

Underdark Food

This is stuff you might eat in a drow enclave, svirfneblin community or a dwarven hall.

Fluorescent fungus salad with cave grubs
Diced blind eel and deep salts
Amber lichen and softrock bread
Translucent crayfish stew
Crimson moss cakes and cave jelly
Crustacean broth with ironloaf
Roasted deep beetles with algae dip
Toasted salamander in mineral pepper
Arachnidumplings and fried fungus (Drow would not eat arachnidumplings, as they revere spiders)
Toadstool steak tainted with myconid essence
Lobe of grell
Deep rothe steak (A rothe is a special type of cattle bred in the underdark)

Planar Food

Feywine Raisins (15 gp) Fey grapes are so lush that even when they become raisins they retain their essence. If you put these in a goblet and stir, they instantly become wine.
Carceri snails (7 sp)
Poached stirge eggs (5 sp)
Boiled shank of bebilith (5 gp)
Death Cheese (10 gp) Made from catoblepas milk.

Magic Food

Sweetheart's Confection (10 gp) A heart-shaped fey confection that is split into two halves and shared between lovers before they part company for a time. They gain an emotional bond until they see each other again, sensing the other's emotions.

Feybread Biscuit: This is hard but nutritional, and gives you extra hit points when you heal for the next 12 hours.

Droth: Also known as “demon’s blood,” droth is a black, sticky substance made from the blood of demons. When smeared on the eyes, it cures certain sorts of blindness in some individuals, and when ingested, it can help to cure diseases. It is also effective in battling green slime.

Moonhoney: The dung of Abyssal groundworms, it is a smoky-tasting and delicious. Its name comes from its consistency and appearance , and it gains sweetness in direct moonlight. It can neutralize poisons and is an ideal trail food for wayfarers of all kinds, who can readily carve it into handy chunks.

Blood Apricots: These grow in Hell or in places where a lot of blood has been spilled. The fruit is a rich orange-red and it grows darker if given a taste of blood. You can put your own blood in it (storing hit dice). Within 12 hours, whoever eats the fruit gains hit points.

Drinks

I am going to list these by type. The player's handbook doesn't give prices for all different types of booze, so use your own judgement.

Cheap Stuff

Grog (rum with water, maybe with lemon or lime)
Dregs and water ("dregs" are defined as the sediment in a liquid, such as wine or coffee)
Goblin spit ale
Turnip wine
Miller’s moonshine

Ale (4 sp for a mug)

Dwarven ale
Spiced ale
King’s ale
Trollbane ale

Wine (common, 2 sp for a pitcher)

Desert star wine
Wight wine (I imagine this has a goofy undead wight on the label)
Rice wine

Fine Wine (10 gp a bottle)

Fey wine
Wild orchid wine
Lotus leaf wine
Stonesulder wine: This yellow-hued, sharp-flavored liquid is made by the sap from demon plants from the Abyss, which is then fermented in wooden barrels.

Assorted Other Drinks

Cactus spirits
Fharlanghn spirits
Swamplight spirits
Desert lily brandy
Berry brandy
Goat’s milk and brandy
Herb and mint tea with brandy
Peach wine
Tangerine brandy
Fireweed whiskey
Wanderer whiskey
Bacon beer
Dwarven double draft
Scorpionweed reserve
Corellon reserve
Moss mead
Lemon mead
Honeysuckle mead
Moradin mead
Silvermoon mead
Sundew mead
Sparkling Evermead
Glitter mead

Underdark Drinks

Shadow stein
Softrock spirits
Lichen liqueur
Mineral mead
Moradin mead
Algae ale
Deeps ale
Mushroom moonshine
Fungus wine

Planar Drinks

Viperwine: A drink that demons enjoy, but is lethal to other humanoids. Sometimes humanoids will take an antidote before drinking it to avoid the lethal effects.
Fekk: A strong githzerai liquor.
Razorvine Wine: Made from the sharp vines that grow in the city of Sigil .
Malefic Mead: Made in an Abyssal brewery, lethal to non-demons. On a successful saving throw, the drinker will be violently ill or roaring drunk for extended periods of time.
Deva's Bile: Made in an Abyssal brewery, lethal to non-demons. On a successful saving throw, the drinker will be violently ill or roaring drunk for extended periods of time.
Baatezu Blood Wine: Lethal to non-humans.
Greengage Cider: A potent brew from the orchard of the halfling goddess Sheela Peryroyl. It is extremely powerful.

Non-Alcoholic Drinks

Willow tea
Black tupelo tea
Plum leaf tea
Crowberry cider
Apricot cider
Plum cider
Berry cider
Cranberry cider
Spiced apple cider

Magic Drinks

Burning Bronze Rye: This are made in the City of Brass (home to the fire genies/efreet). The bottles are sold at three different ages: aged 15 years, 50 years and 500 years. The drink waters your eyes, chases away cold feelings and imbues you with fire resistance for a short time

Ghost Ale: This drink is popular in the Shadowfell. It is a dark ale that smells of musty soil but it is rich and inviting. When you drink it, you become slightly insubstantial (ignore difficult terrain and move through occupied spaces). If you drink 3 ghost ales in 5 minutes, you become unconscious for an hour. Your spirit leaves your body. It is invisible, has phasing and ignores damage (except radiant or fore). It can't attack. If your spirit takes damage, you take that damage when you wake up.

Goodale: This gets its name from the fact that it is brewed in good-aligned monasteries. It reduces fatigue (on the exhaustion chart in 5e, perhaps).

Astral Mead: A sweet sparkling beverage that restores the body. A flask has the nutritional value of full day's worth of food and water. For 12 hours you have a +2 to endurance checks and gain extra hit points when healing.

Gorgondy Wine: A gnomish wine that offers glimpses of the past to those who drink it.

Sonata Wine (fey): You cannot describe the scent or taste of this wine, which fills your head with beautiful music. For 1 hour you have a beautiful singing voice

Sweet Water (20 gp) A small glob of white jelly that purifies toxic food and drink, removing any poison or disease after one minute.

Firebelly (10 gp for a flagon) A harsh liquor distilled by the inhabitants of cold climates. It keeps you from suffering the effects of the cold.

Burrfoot's Nut Brown Ale (20 gp for a flagon) A full-bodied ale originally created by a halfling named Nedelmeir Burrfoot. It produces a mild euphoria in drinkers that will mellow even the most taciturn dwarf.

Dwarven Grave Ale (50 gp for a flagon) When a great dwarven hero dies, skilled brewmasters are commissioned to create a signature ale to commemorate his passing. It is stored in barrels that have carvings of scenes of the dwarf's great deeds.

Mage's Brew (80 gp) A thick nutty liquor that increases one's concentration and has little to no aftereffect.

Evermead (200 gp for a glass) This pale golden liquor is favored by elves. Those who drink it are imbued with youthful vigor. It negates old age stat penalties for 12 hours.

Drowned Man Stout (300 gp) A full-bodied ale enjoyed by orcs and evil humanoids. The living enemies of the orcs would be sealed into a barrel . The orcs find that the resulting beer acquires a heady quality. This drink provides temporary hit points for 3 hours or until lost.

Beer of Eternity (750 gp) This beer is infused with radiant energy that actually would damage undead if they drank it. Living creatures who drink it become invisible to undead for 1 hour. It can also help with drained stats (in 3e terms it removes a negative level).

Oathbeer (3,000 gp) Dwarves drink this as part of a ceremony to seal a pact, or as a sign of friendship and devotion. All involved swear an oath before a priest, shed blood into the beer, and the cup passed around. Oathbeer binds the drinkers to the oath, as long as they partake of their own free will. Violating the pact brings a curse upon the oathbreaker.

Other Items

Mug of Clear-Headedness: This magic mug is made from bronze and gemstone. The handle is carved to depict a dwarf chopping the rim with an axe. The mug has a number of powers:

All liquids poured into the cup are effected with a purify food and drink spell.
Once per day, drinking from the mug cures the drinker of poisons.
3 times per day, the drinker can be affected by the spell owl's wisdom, which gives a +4 to wisdom for 1 minute per level.

Greyhawk Menu

Here's how Gary Gygax did a menu in the classic Temple of Elemental Evil adventure. It includes lots of references to kingdoms near the village of Hommlet:

Links & Sources

The Official D&D Tavern Menu Generator - This might be all you need
Magical Food & Drinks, 3rd edition style
ENWorld - Food you would find in a D&D tavern
Forgotten Realms Food & Drink
More Forgotten Realms Food & Drink (great list!)

Dragon Magazine #414: "Inns in an Instant"
Dragon Magazine #334: "Drunkards & Flagons"
Dragon 323, 414, 429, 430
Dungeon 60, 164
Temple of Elemental Evil, For Duty or Deity, Adventurers Vault, Heroes of the Feywild, Mordenkainen's Magnificent Emporium.

Paellistra and Cryvistin

Tonight we plowed through another chapter of The Great Modron March, which contiues to be thoroughly enjoyable. This one actually features a trip to the legendary Forgotten Realms dungeon known as Undermountain. It has some really old school, deadly traps.

I have continued to plan out this campaign, and right now this is the plan once we finish this book:

A session based on exploring the actual dead gods floating in the astral sea, based on a dragon magazine article by Monte Cook. There's just too much cool stuff in there, it must be put to use!
"Umbra" by Chris Perkins, a well-regarded planescape adventure.
Dead Gods, the sequel to The Great Modron March. This is an entire book of scenarios and will take many sessions to complete.
"Nemesis", another Chris Perkins Planescape adventure centered around a trip to the abyssal planes that mariliths come from.

The Party

(Jessie) Bidam - Platinum Dragonborn Fighter
(George) Theran - "Drow" Elf Wizard

Last time, our heroes had gone to Limbo. Bidam the dragonborn had his scales changed from black to platinum. Theran the elf was transformed so he appeared to be a drow, with black skin and white hair.

Downtime in Sigil and Zerthadlun

We played through three months of downtime.

Crafting: Theran had been awarded magic item formulas by the githzerai. He could make javelins of lightning and tan bags of tricks. He got to work making javelins to sell in the Curiosity Shoppe owned by Vrishika the alu-fiend. It took 20 days per javelin.

Selling Magic Items: We tried out these rules. Basically, you roll an INT check to find a buyer, then you roll on a chart to see how much they offer. Being that Theran paid so much money to create the item, he needed a roll of 90+ to find a buyer willing to pay enough for him to make a profit. This actually worked out fine for him. He sold two javelins.

This is definitely Theran's thing. In real life, Theran's player George is very good with financial stuff.

Killing the Lady of Pain: Last time, Bidam had tried to use a wish to kill the lady of pain. While that was not possible, his mind was flooded with information on how to kill the lady. He learned most of the stuff that I wrote in my guide to the lady of pain.

Bidam had an interesting idea. He learned that the lady had a hole where her heart was, and that it was the source of all pain and anguish in the multiverse (material I gleaned from Troy Denning's novel "Pages of Pain"). Bidam thought maybe he could either find the lady of pain's heart, or find someone to create one for her.

This could somehow be tied to the heart of aoskar, and actual artifact. Maybe it could be used as a prototype.

Vrishika used detect thoughts to read the minds of the heroes , and was utterly horrified to find out that Bidam had it in for the Lady of Pain. The alu-fiend strongly urged Bidam to drop the whole thing.

Training in Zerthadlun: The heroes also spent 4 hours a day in a monastery in Zerthadlun, training under a githzerai monk named Belthomis. We did a skill challenge training montage of the heroes breaking boards, meditating, striking a foe while blindfolded, that kind of thing. At the end, they passed their test and gained a permanent bonus to initiative.

Bidam's Platinum: People of Sigil and elsewhere were in awe of Bidam's platinum scales. Some thought he was a child of Bahamut, god of good dragons.

Theran's Dark Elf Skin: Theran, conversely, ran into some problems. The adventurers went to The Smoldering Corpse (the tavern from Planescape Torment with the floating guy who is on fire in it) with some NPC friends. A drow priestess was there, having just bought slaves.

She spotted Theran. Drow males are subservient in Drow society. She called him over to her table and began to question him about what drow house he was with. It took mere seconds for a bar fight to break out, with her trying to use her fang whip to punish him for his insolence.

A bunch of Mercykillers jumped in, smashing people with chairs. Her two recently-bought slaves tried to make a run for it. In the end, the drow fled through a portal with her slaves from whence she came.

Let's Go To Carceri

Aach the Traitor

With all that downtime stuff out of the way, we got into the adventure. It turns out that the modrons had used some new, unknown portal to exit the plane of Carceri. The location of a new portal was valuable information in Sigil, especially when it's in the prison plane. Vrishika told the heroes about it, and they decided to go check it out.

Aach the Traitor: The adventurers appeared in Carceri and met a red-haired rogue named Aach. The heroes took a quick liking to her, as I did a really bad irish accent for her voice which was described as "half-Canadian".

The deal with Aach is that she is going to betray the heroes in this adventure, leaving them to die so she could sell the information and keep all the money to herself.

Aach has a hot air balloon made out of skin..! The heroes rode in it to another "orb" of carceri that the modrons had flown to. The modron tracks led to a pool of quicksand, which was indeed a portal.

Undermountain

The quicksand portal brought our heroes from Carceri to the Forgotten Realms! Undermountain is a vast dungeon underneath the city of Waterdeep, built by the insane mage Halaster Blackcloak.

Harpies: They came upon a room with a pair of harpies in it. The harpies sang and entranced Bidam. The harpies did a bit of damage before being slain.

The Drow Priestess: In the next room was a drow sitting on a throne, guarded by giant spiders. She said her name was Paellistra. The heroes chatted with her a bit and were honest in explaining what had happened.

Paellistra questioned Theran about what drow house he was with, and this time Theran was more diplomatic in his response.

Paellistra warned the that this was "her" section of Undermountain, and that is was quite deadly.

The Pillar: There's a huge cavern (Area H - "The Pillar of Gates" on the map). In it is a tall pillar/tower, which has seven sections. Kind of like a vertical stack of cans of tuna. Some of the sections rotate. Muddy modron tracks lead right into the door at the base of the tower.

Aach figures out the tower's deal right away: Each section of the tower has a portal to a plane, and the portals are powered by the rotation of the sections. She notices that the top two sections are no longer rotating, and she realizes that the magic of the tower is waning and it will soon stop working completely.

The Guardian: There's a guardian of the tower - Cryvistin. In the book, he's a vampire. That's too powerful for my 4th level heroes, so I made him a wizard who was cursed by Halaster to stay and protect the place.

Cryvistin gave the heroes some BS story and cast fly on himself. He asked them to follow and pass a "test" of his. He was actually leading them into a really nasty trap.

The Trap: This is brutal. It goes like this:

The heroes follow Cryvistin into a corridor. Bats fly out of a side door and harass them.
Just as the bats fly out, a pit trap pens up beneath the heroes. No saving throw! They just fall in.
The pit trap is 30 feet deep. The lid closes.
A ball of energy appears and begins zapping the PCs, doing damage and draining their constitution with every hit.
The ball of energy cannot be harmed in any way!

I knew this was a really messed up trap, and I wouldn't have used it on most groups. But these players are laid back and they trust me.

They climbed on each other's shoulders and used a ten foot pole to open the lid. Then Aach climbed up and dropped a rope for the other two to climb out, while the ball of energy zapped poor Bidam.

Cryvistin's Really Red Room: Angry, the heroes had seen Cryvistin go through a door further down the hall. They went in. The front area is full of black curtains that obscure your view, and once you move them, you see that everything in Cryvistin's room is the same shade of red. This effect is so disorienting that PCs get a -1 to all die rolls while in the room. I found this to be a very amusing idea.

Cryvistin decimated the party with a cone of cold spell, dropping Theran. Aach and Bidam rushed him and cut him down. Theran was healed with a potion, but the party was hurt badly.

Cryvistin had a nice pile of treasure, including a red spellbook loaded with spells written in light red ink on dark red pages.

The Pillar of Gates: The adventurers realized they needed to get into that pillar, as they were hurting badly. Getting up from one rotating section to the next was tricky. The hole in one section's ceiling had to line up with the hole in the floor of the next section in order for the PCs to pass through.

So basically what happened is that Aach got the PCs up to the 4th section, then heard a rumbling noise indicating that the section was about to stop rotating, and she jumped back down into the 3rd section, shouting "See you, suckers!".

The heroes were baffled. They had no idea what just happened. There was a good chance they would have been stuck in there forever, but they realized that the section above them was still rotating. They only had one choice to escape - go up there and go through the portal in there.

Gehenna: They appeared in a plane that reeked of sulfur. Nearby was a river with screaming faces in it - The River Styx. They called forth the demon pirate ship Beham's Cyst, and sailed around, utterly baffled how to get home.

They eventually realized they had a mimir that could tell them where they were, and a planar compass that could direct them to the nearest portal.

They headed for the portal, determined to get back to Sigil before Aach could get there. They wanted to ambush Aach in the city and get revenge....

I created a youtube video where we summarize the first session of this campaign. It is full of crude cartoons and a lot of bad language, so it is not safe for work. Check it out here. I am planning on doing one of these for every session.

We are just about done with this adventure! Tonight we tried some watermelon twizzlers, which tasted like a chemical bath.

The Party

(Jessie) Bidam - Platinum Dragonborn Fighter
(George) Theran - Drow Wizard

Paladins in Gehenna

The heroes were sailing on the River Styx in Gehennea, using their planar compass to find a portal back to Sigil. Vaimish Crasad, the paladin lord, spotted them. Crasad and his knights were hunting the evil knights known as the Tacharim, who had a base in Gehenna.

Crasad directed the heroes to the portal and gave them the portal key - heartwine, a wine made with razorvine.

I had thought this actual adventure was very short, so I cooked up a lot of downtime stuff in Sigil. But it turns out I made too much and we didn't quite finish the adventure.

Revenge on Aach

Last time, the adventurers had been betrayed by the red-haired rogue. She'd left them to die in Undermountain. So the heroes set up a plot to find her and take her down. They staked out the locations of Sigil's three main information brokers - Rule-of-Three, Shemeska and Estavan of the Planar Trade Consortium. They figured she'd try to sell the portal information to one of them - and they were right.

They confronted Aach in Shemeska's gambling hall Fortune's Wheel. They chased her, tackled her in the street, and brought her to their home. They were able to bluff passersby to avoid trouble.

Then, once she was in their home and tied up.. they fed her to Theran's grey slaad!

The Heart of the Lady of Pain

During the extensive planning, the heroes met with Vrishika, the alu-fiend who ran the Curiosity Shoppe. She once again read Bidam's mind with detect thoughts and saw that Bidam now didn't want to kill the Lady of Pain, but she wanted to find the Lady of Pain's heart.

Vrishika told Bidam about an artifact known as The Heart of Aoskar, and told Bidam maybe he could create The Heart of The Lady of Pain and give it to her as a gift.

Things Bidam will need (this is a long term project):

The heart of a large, special creature.
The formula for a philter of love.Godsblood, which is found on the stone corpses of dead gods floating in the astral plane.
3 sensory stones, each containing an experience that exemplifies the three traits that comprise love: Acceptance, Understanding and Appreciation.

Faction Meetings

Factol Erin

Bidam visited the Civic Festhall and met the Factol of the Sensates - Erin Darkflame Montgomery. She's a major NPC in the Planescape boxed set, and I figured she'd have heard of Bidam's encoutner with the slaad lord Renbuu and would want to hear about it.

After the meeting, Bidam tried to find a wizard to help create the Heart of the Lady of Pain, but got sidetracked. He met a woman, an NPC I took out of Planescape: Torment. Her name was Sarhava Vjhul. In Torment, Sarhava is really drunk and insults the heroes. She wears "translucent silk clothing" and exotic jewelry.

Bidam seduced this lady. I thought it might be cool for the heroes to have a wealthy friend, and I had cooked up a tragic backstory for her, but Bidam lives by the philosophy of "Hit it and Quit it" so poor Sarhava might never get the spotlight again.

The Free League

I based Rodina's treasures on this list from an old Dragon Mag

Meanwhile, Theran visited the home of the Free League - the Grand Bazaar. I wanted to show him what his faction was like and flesh out some NPCs. Stewart Seven Fingers sells spell components and is researching a cure for the burning wizard in the smoldering corpse bar. Rodina the rilmani makes monogrammed handkerchiefs. Theran bought some.

Browsing the Bazaar was Herion Lifegiver, the wizard from the very first session. He was shopping. I wanted him here so he could casually mention an evil sword he once made called Craggis. Craggis is involved in the last chapter of this adventure.

I also wanted Herion to be here in case the heroes wanted to pick his brain in both the curing of the burning wizard or to help create the Heart of the Lady of Pain. Theran did ask Herion about a possible cure for the burning wizard.Herion mentioned a ritual involving a decanter of endless water.

Theran wracked his brain, and remembered that a few sessions back a dabus had used a decanter to put out the fire in their home. The dabus also had a magic sword (Ffazablur, a sword that will play into the Chris Perkins adventure "Nemesis").

Return of the Modronoids

All of that stuff took up a lot of time. It was pretty late when I dropped the hook on them. It turns out Crasad and his knights had failed in their assault on the Tacharim. Greir, sister of the paladin lord, arrives at the heroes' home with modron parts fused to her. She begs the heroes to go to Gehenna to rescue her brother, and to burn the Tacharim stronghold to the ground.

She died hours later. The adventurers brought her to a temple, in the hopes she could be raised. Then they set out for Gehenna. Theran brought his grey slaad with him.

If you read the 5e monster manual, you'll see that slaads and modrons are now mortal enemies. That makes the slaad a very interesting NPC to have in this adventure, so I stepped up my efforts to keep the slaad in the spotlight. A lot of times, we all forget about animal companions and NPC sidekicks as an adventure progresses.

Torch

The adventurers went to the gate town of Torch, which has two gates to the plane of Gehenna:

This portal is high in the air. You have to climb a tower and jump through. If you fail your DEX check, you fall and take 20d6 damage!
This one is in the blood marshes, a disease-infested swamp.

The heroes decided to search the blood marshes for the portal. Both of them fell ill almost right away. They began to cough uncontrollably and suffer from the shakes. This disease gave them, among other things, a -2 to hit!

They searched for 6 hours and finally found the portal. They passed through, but realized that they were too sick to take on the Tacharim. They sought out the river Styx, summoned their demon pirate ship, and rested.

They ended up resting for four days due to horrible dice rolls. Skeleton pirate captain tended to them as they lay in bed. He sang them dirty pirate songs and put washcloths on their heads. The players found all of this to be hilarious, and wondered if the Tacharim had finished their evil plan - whatever it was - while the heroes were out sick.

Attacking the Tacharim

Healed and rested, the heroes made their way to the Tacharim base. It was called The Flower Infernal. The building was a giant rotating silver flower surrounded by a moat. The bad guys could lower petals to create bridges that crossed the moat.

In the adventure, it is said that the best thing for the heroes to do is to take out a couple of Tacharim, put on their gear, and then creep through the base in disguise.

But our heroes had a slaad servant (Theran controlled him with a slaad control gem) who could teleport and turn intangible. Theran ordered his slaad to go thorough the base and find the prisoners, if there were any. He ordered it not to kill anything.

Off it went, teleporting over the moat and passing right through an exterior wall.

The heroes didn't know this, but there's a number of rooms with modrons in them in the Flower. Also, one bad guy is inhabiting the body of a modron! So the slaad began to explore, spotted modrons, and was filled with the urge to kill. But he'd been directly ordered not to kill, so the chaotic creature roared in rage.

This alerted the tacharim to his presence. The slaad fled the base and 10 Tacharim chased him out into Gehenna.

The adventurers decided to cross the petal-drawbridge while it was down.

Valran Reborn

Most of this adventure as published is just room descriptions of this building. Many of the rooms are pretty dull. I decided to run this in a cut-to-the-chase kind of way. I had all of the doors have labels, so the adventurers could see what the rooms were before they went in.

There's really three main encounters in here:

Running into the modron, who is actually an old bad guy who has found a way to inhabit a modron body.
The prison, where the knights have been turned into modronoids.
The control panel of the whole base, which can be used to basically cause the place to self-destruct.

So the heroes entered the base and ran into the modron. He's one of the really freaky modron types. He's got tentacles and eyestalks.

Way back in session 5, the heroes had battled a wizard named Valran. Theran put his finger in the wizard's ear and cast firebolt, killing him. The Tacharim found Valran's body and used raise dead to bring him back to life. Valran continued his research, found a way to inhabit a modron body, and now is slowly being overcome by the modrons logical and lawful nature.

Last time Valran saw Theran, he was an elf. Now Theran is a dark elf. So at first, the modron/Valran assumed he was a member of the Tacharim. But once Theran spoke, Valran recognized his voice, went into a rage and attacked. He snatched the wizard up with his tentacles and threw him into walls over and over.

The heroes had a hard time hitting Valran's high AC. Eventually they bloodied him, causing oil/blood to spray out. They figured it might be flammable, and hit him with a burning hands spell. The modron, on fire, staggered toward a petal. It lowered.

Bidam immediately realized the petals were controlled by heat.

Theran was down to a single hit point. They decided to flee and rest. They'd have to come back later to try to rescue the paladin lord and his knights.

I jumped back on to reddit a few weeks ago and asked dungeon masters to send me horror stories. I wanted to hear about people's experiences in games gone wrong. I figured it would make for a fun blog post.

I don't want to sit here and make fun of them. I want to read them and see if I can glean any insight from them, to navigate the minefield to better myself as a DM.

The point of this is ultimately for self-reflection - to identify our own bad tendencies and to try to keep them in check. I think that by reading about what others have done, we can identify the pitfalls to avoid.

Full Disclosure

Seeing how I am about to tap dance on the graves of some DMs who committed the horrible crime of running a game gone wrong, I figure I should fess up to some of my own worst moments running games. I think all of us have made major blunders, right? The fact that we learned from them and still run games is a good thing.

Here's just a fraction of my hall of shame moments

I had a player who played a "jerk" character - he'd be nasty to the other characters and use his psionic powers to mess with them. I ran a session that he couldn't make it to. During that session, the other players took the opportunity to throw a hat of stupidity on him and throw him off the side of a ship and into the ocean. At the time, it was hilarious. There was a scene where he was tied to the mast and whipped, and the laughter was deafening. I knew I should have waved the whole thing off, but for some reason I let it happen. I tried to make it right the next time we played, but the player ended up just making a new character
I have often run adventures that were simply too high level for the characters. I always figured that they could handle anything. Well, I ran this published adventure about vampire mind flayers, and the whole party had to flee the very first encounter.
I have my own "DM PC" moment. Way back in high school, my players were being spastic and jokey. I couldn't get them to focus on the game. So I had my favorite character show up (A silver-haired elf named... Konami). He used made up psychic powers to pummel the heroes and use telekinesis to send them hurtling into the sky.In retrospect, I should have just told them if they weren't in the mood to play, we just wouldn't play.

I think that once you've realized you made a mistake, the key thing to do is to say you are sorry, make every effort to fix it, and move on. Always try to remember what it is like to be a player. It's very easy to lose perspective.

Here's some other DM horror stories:

The Unconscious Debut

A friend of mine invited me to join his group, so I went with him and made a character. The DM acted pissed off that they had to wait while I made the character and couldn't play, even though I told them to go ahead.

I made an elven fighter/mage, and my first action was to run around the back of the barn where the bad guys were holed up and cover the back window with my bow. The DM handed me a note that said 'You are unconscious, don't say anything', then proceeded to play with the group for about 2 hours, resolving everything that went on in the barn.

After the session was over she told me 'Sorry, I had written in my notes that they would try to escape out the back window, so they cast sleep on you and then killed you. There was nothing I could do'.

1) I was an elf so I was immune to sleep
2) I can't remember the details, but my character level also made me immune to sleep
3) "There was nothing I could do" is bullshit coming from a DM. I didn't return for a second session.

As a DM I am very wary of having a player sit at the table with nothing to do. In this day and age, it seems almost rude. It is hard enough to get people to come to your house to play games on a regular basis, to go aead and bore them like that seems like a recipe for disaster.

I understand that PCs go unconscious or die on occasion, but if a player has nothing to do at the table for any length of time you need to involve them somehow. Even if it is cooking up some afterlife visions the dying hero is having, at least the player is engaged and not regretting coming over, or becoming a distraction.

There is no Shadow in the Desert

3.5 Campaign. Had one DM who told us to specifically not make paladins but a mix between good and evil characters. Why no paladin? Because we made fun about the picture of the paladin in the 3.0 players handbook having 2 knees and she did not want us to make fun of a character in play.

Why a mix of good and evil characters? No idea. It never came out because there was a godlike DM PC who would stop any interaction with anyone by the evil characters.

We only faced undeads and constructs with 2 rogues, a blightcaster and a mage with focus on illusion I think I attacked a single time in the whole adventure. The only one doing damage was a min/maxed werebear who was neutral (yeah, good thing we went through with only good and evil characters).

All doors and sealed hallways had anti-teleport-protection, we could not use shadow walk to get to a desert because there is no shadow in the desert. In the last fight against the endboss who was the madking that was even feared by the gods, he stunned all of us for 10 in-game minutes when we entered the room (absurdly high saving throw no one succeeded on).

I think our wizard player was already sleeping at this point. Then one character was freed and the DM said to the player "pull this one item out i gave you and say die". At this point we all just wanted to go home, I had tossed my character sheet and was playing with the backside of a chocolate bar, the blightcaster had at some point crashed his chair and was playing wii on the couch, the not-stunned character told the mad king to die and he did and we went home.

Best thing was everything had in-game reasons. She later explained everything and we agreed that it would have been a great book to read...just the typical small mistake that players usually want a bit of agency ;)

As a DM it can be very scary to run a game for players who have a lot of spells and power options. In this DM's case, she decided rather than to try and "ride the lightning", she clamped down and forced the heroes down a particular path. I think you have to know your players and know what they can do when you cook up a scenario.

This is why I always try to start campaigns at level one. That way I get to know the character, I know what they can do, and I will understand their capabilities as they grow. So then, when I'm designing a scenario, if I know a PC has a mass teleport spell, I know that it is likely the heroes will just teleport where they need to go, and I shouldn't waste time making encounters on a road they won't be traveling.

In fact, what's best is to write adventures that depend on the PCs having certain spells and magic items. Though that might become a problem if a player can't make a session at the last minute.

DM Regret

Usually a good DM, if a little batshit insane. One campaign we were playing he suddenly decided that he wanted to undo so many cool things we had earned. We had painstakingly acquired a flying ship, crewed by, and I quote "badass dwarven mercenaries."

We park it about 60 feet above ground to go run a quick errand, we come back about 2 hours later, and immediately get fired on. I, being the only person who can fly (armour) head up to see what kind of fuckery is about.

The ship had been taken over by a group of 40 orcs. We managed to take it back through a combination of brute force (great cleave is a hell of a drug) and setting the deck on fire, but all our dwarf buddies were still dead, and I'm fairly certain that the DM didn't intend for us to take the ship back at all.

He also took away everyone's magic items through use of an enormous anti-magic wall.

Usually a great DM, but this campaign went sour pretty quick because of stuff like that.

This is another tricky spot for DMs. The party gets their hands on a cool magic item that makes it harder to write a good adventure. In this case, the DM was probably worried that the ship was cutting out the overland journey section of adventures, which makes it harder to write adventures that can fill a session.

Also, having 40 dwarven mercenaries can be problematic, because the heroes could theoretically march them into battle with them.

The concept of bringing NPCs into battle will come up in every campaign (we call them "Trap Bait" in my games). In my games, I would tell my players that if the NPCs joined in a battle, then they got a cut of the XP. So, if you take on an encounter with 40 dwarves.. you're getting no XP, and you'll probably have to split the treasure. That goes a very long way in discouraging this behavior.

Not that it necessarily needs to be discouraged. You can make a lot of cool encounters for the heroes and their 40 dwarf badasses. That might make a really cool campaign, actually.

The World is About to End

He was pretty damn terrible but his last session took the cake. He decided to blow up the world except for 3 buildings, have his weird npc send us to god knows where for god knows what, and when we got to the final boss, he said he couldn't be fucked doing the encounter and said we beat it. Then one of his gods decided to restore the world to what it once was. The plot made no sense at all.

I have no idea what was going on here, but I think the idea of a campaign where the whole world is about to be wiped out except for a single city is awesome. Everybody would be racing to that city, which only has so much space. Maybe when you get there, they're not allowing anyone else in.

The Maid Did It

Once I played with a DM that was so excited to lead a game he prepared a campaign weeks beforehand. The bad thing? He had made a great big world, but made a linear story we were supposed to follow.

As you all know, players doesn't do what you've planned and this DM learned that the hard way. He thought we, the players, would figure out a mystery in the beginning of the campaign quite quickly (we didn't! It took ages, and you could see him getting irritated about it).

It was something about a murdered noble. We were supposed to figure out it was the rival noble that was the murderer, but we suspected the angry old maid! So instead of declaring war with that noble, as our DM had planned, we rushed down to the kitchen and arrested the maid.

It's here the DM shuts down the game and says "if you're not going to play the way it's supposed to be played I will walk out of here!"

Fun guy....

I have run into many DMs who expect players to think the way they think. They'll set up a situation, and the only way out is the way they thought of. Even if the players come up with a viable alternative, the DM is baffled they can't think of the "simple" solution he or she had in mind.

I think you have to shed that mentality when DMing. You have to be loose and impartial. If the PCs come up with an idea that would work, let it work. If it throws off your adventure, ask for a 10 minute break so you can brainstorm enough material to fill the session.

The Dreaded DM PC

So I get invited to a Pathfinder campaign by a couple of friends, expecting the first meeting to be about making the characters and being introduced to the world.

We get an hour to make a character, all of them are bland and their only personality is their class. This one I admit might be a bit on me for not asking beforehand how they played the game.

Anyways, we get introduced to each other by the DM and given a quest to go explore a haunted mansion nearby. We get up to the mansion, it's the usual haunted mansion stuff, dead quiet, nothing there. We get up to one of the rooms and the door is locked so our skill rogue decides to lockpick for a collective of 2 hours of in-game time, about 2 minutes in real life time of continuous rolling the die, and finally get the door open. As we walk inside the door shuts behind us and giant maggots come out of the ground and walls, our gunslinger who is ranged dies immediately because there is nowhere to move in this tiny room, and the rest of us come out unscathed.

We decide to go back to town because we're down one member and the DM brings in a DM PC who's a Paladin, probably a couple of levels above us, with a Bag of Holding to babysit us because he made his encounter far too hard.

I talk to the other players and learn that this is commonplace for this GM, he loves killing his players and hates story.

The DM PC is the worst. I have never ever seen it done well. Just give the party a sidekick NPC to fill the role and let the players be the stars. You have enough to do as it is!

The Laugher

Played with a guy I found online, he was nice but his laugh was so loud and frequent that it would silence everything. It stopped game play every time. We'd have to wait 5 seconds for him to stop laughing, it was distracting and awful. I stopped playing with him after that.

Oh he was also just a boring DM.

Well. I don't even know what to say about that. Maybe ask the guy to mute himself when he laughs?

Avoid the pitfalls and carry on, my good friends!

In this article, I am going to attempt to take all of the relevant lore about beholders, and put them in one place for your convenience. This should allow us to have a good base understanding of what a beholder is, and how a beholder should be run.

The thing I have noticed while working on this is that beholders are really deadly. It's hard as a DM to figure out how to run them. In the older editions, they just fired off ten deadly eye rays every round. In newer editions, the use of eye rays has become more limited.

The Essential Information

Here's what you need to know about beholders:

They are spherical creatures that hover. They have eyestalks that fire off deadly beams that do everything from turn people to stone, to disintegrate them.
The beholder has a central eye that emit a cone of anti-magic.
Their ability to hover is not a magic effect that can be dispelled.
Beholders hate each other and despise variant beholder races.
They may be from the Far Realm.
They create lairs with their disintegrate beams.

The Real Life Origin of the Beholder

This goes all the way back to the original greyhawk campaign, run by Gary Gygax (which I've written about quite extensively here). Terry, the brother of Rob Kuntz, came up with the idea for the monster. He was quite dismayed when Gary unleashed it on him and his adventuring buddies.

AD&D 1st Edition

Let's see what the 1st edition Monster Manual has to say about beholders:

The beholder is also known as an "eye tyrant" or a "sphere of many eyes".
It has a globular body with a large mouth full of pointed teeth and floats slowly about as it wills.
It has 10 eyestalks and an 11th central eye.
Eyestalks that are cut off can grow back in a week.
A beholder's hit points are allocated in a weird way. You get to choose where you attack the beholder. You could try to stab an eyestalk, ot the cetral eye, or an eyestalk. Each holds a certain percent of the total hit points. To kill a beholder with 45 hit points, you can do 30 points to the main body, and it will die.

The big thing with beholders is that they shoot beams from their eyes that do different spell effects. Not all of their eyestalks can attack the party at once, unless the party has completely surrounded it. So if a party all stands in a clump to one side, only 1-4 eyestalks can attack.

This is odd considering the old vague rules in 1e about a round being a minute and that a combat includes lots of assumed movement and back-and-forth. I assume the idea here is that if a beholder is easily able to fire off all ten eyestalks every round, then most parties won't stand a chance.

Here's what the eyes do:

Charm person
Charm monster
Sleep
Telekinesis
Flesh to stone
Disintegrate
Fear
Slow
Cause serious wounds
Death ray
Central Eye: Anti-Magic ray

They can fire off Death ray, flesh to stone and disintegrate all in the same round! Unreal.

Dragon Magazine #76 - Ecology of the Beholder

This is by Ed Greenwood and Roger Moore and it is a fantastic piece of work - short, easy to read and packed full of great ideas. Seriously, Ed Greenwood has to be considered as one of, if not the best D&D designer. The only other D&D article writer that I ever enjoyed as much would be James Jacobs.

This is written in short story form, with a sage teaching students about beholders.

Levator Magnus: Beholders have a magical organ called the levator magnus located in the center of its body, surrounded by the brain, that causes the beholder to float in the air. This means that the levitation can't be dispelled. In the appendix to this article, it is noted that beholders can "...levitate themselves without limit, to the height of the breathable atmosphere".

Anti-Magic: The anti-magic field projected from the central eye is a faintly-visible beam of grayish light, extending out up to 10 feet wide in a cone up to 140 feet away. In the monster manual, the range is done in inches (as in, you put your beholder mini on a map and use a tape measure). The beam focuses on one target at a time.

Laying Eggs: Beholders lay eggs! From their mouths?! Every year, beholder lay 1 to 4 eggs. The beholder deserts them. When an egg hatches, the baby immediately grows (in a year it is full-sized), eats the shell and has full use of its eyestalks.

Strategy: There's some strategy, too. The beholder will hover high in the air, focus the anti-magic on a spellcaster and go to town with the eye rays. This is.. scary. I feel like I've never run a beholder correctly after reading this.

Other fun facts:

They eat raw meat in vast quantities. Beholders are at the top of the food chain.
They live for "nine hundred seasons". Sheesh.. so complicated. That's what, 225 years?
The article includes a chart to randomly determine where you strike a beholder. You roll a d100, and on a 1-75, you hit the main body (which has an AC 0 - in 1e, a low AC is good). 76-85 is the central eye (AC 7), 86-95 is an eyestalk (AC 2) and 96-100 is a small eye on an eyestalk (AC 7). Any hit on a small eye immediately destroys it. That sounds like a lot of fun.
Every beholder's arrangement of eyestalks is different. The DM should pick where they are located on its body prior to running the battle "...to determine which eyes may fire in which direction since the small eyes cannot point in just any direction."

What a fantastic article. It looks like part of the reason this was written was to clarify how certain things worked, and to stop players from using dispel magic to make the beholders roll around on the ground in what would be a pretty pathetic scene.

AD&D 2nd Edition

The Monstrous Manual has a massive pile of versions of beholders, known as beholder-kin. I will focus on the main ones, and I'll compile a list of the variants at the bottom of this article.

It is now official that beholders have different armor classes for different parts of their body.
The central eye anti-magic cone now covers a 90 degree arc and extends out 420 feet! No magic, including the effects of the eyestalks, will function inside the cone. Well, that's quite a wrinkle. Further, spells cast in the anti-magic cone, or even ones passing through, cease to function.
Beholders are hateful and aggressive. They attack or dominate other races, due to a xenophobic intolerance - they hate all creatures not like themselves.
This book claims that beholder reproduction is a mystery - they may lay eggs or they may give live birth.

I, Tyrant

This is a 96 page supplement all about beholders. I have never looked through this book before. I really don't like the cover art and I guess it scared me away all these years.

Anatomy: We kick the book off by getting a look at beholder anatomy. They can hear, but not well. They have two skull layers. In between the layers is a gas called tiusium that allows them to levitate. They outright threw out the "organ inside the brain" thing from the ecology article. Beholders don't have hearts, and they have one lung.

They have male and female reproductive organs, so they can self-fertilize. They give birth to 3-6 live young out of their mouths, in an "appalling" process.

Beholders love to eat rodents, roast beef and flower petals. They enjoy wine and blood. They hate hard-boiled eggs and eyes.

Diseases: Some beholders suffer from certain diseases:

Spasms (Diohurr): As they get older, beholders begin to lose mental coherence and levitate in random directions.
Mania (Edorakk): Has violent mood swings, thinks all creatures are beholders.
Meat-Rot (Malohurr): This is a type of food poisoning, they gain pustules and blisters on their skin.

History: Beholders worship the Great Mother, whose first spawn was named Kzamnal. Kzamnal gave birth to the mortal ancestors of the beholder race and instructed them to gather knowledge.

Some beholders, known as "the traitors", spawned beholder-kin that did not resemble the Great Mother. This sparked a genocidal was among beholders which continues to this day.

Deities: There are a few beholder gods:

The Great Mother: A giant beholder that travels the lower planes. She is devoid of any logic. She devours creatures on her endless journey and lays eggs (spawning beholder variants).
Gzemnid: This beholder spies on mortal wizards and steals knowledge from them.

Blindness: There's a note on blindness. Even if blinded, a beholder can still use its eye power with a -1 penalty.

Psychology: Every beholder thinks they are the ideal specimen of their race, and that those who are different from them should be destroyed.

Sometimes beholders will group together, led by a hive-mother. This is known as a "hive". When two or more hives unite, they create a city comprised of a few hundred beholders of different types. Some cities contain thousands of beholders.

There's even a FAQ. We learn all sorts of things:

Most beholders have eyelids
If you obtain a newborn beholder and try to rise it as a pet, it will see you as flawed and try to kill you no matter how kind you are to it. Their paranoia is present from birth.
Their levitation is not magical, so it can't be dispelled.
Throwing a blanket on a beholder is a dumb tactic, because it can use telekinesis to remove it or just disintegrate it. I assume this came up in some games back then.

There are a trilogy of adventures about beholders as part of the "Monstrous Arcana" series. Let's take a quick look at each one.

Eye of Pain

This adventure seems like it has a lot of problems. There's a hive of beholders in some caves underground.. A beholder wants to overthrow the hive mother by tricking the heroes into killing her. There's this whole thing where the heroes are supposed to meet a wizard in a town, but the wizard never shows up, and the adventure expects the heroes to do research rather than just go home. The only thing that really stuck out to me as cool in this was a "time bomb" magic item - an hourglass that explodes like a fireball when the sand runs out.

Eye of Doom

A human settlement is on or near a beholder holy site. A beholder uses a thieves' guild to try to take over and destroy the town. The heroes have to infiltrate the guild. There's a marked lack of beholders in this beholder trilogy.

Eye to Eye

The City of Ilth K'hinax

This adventure is 64 pages, and features the heroes finally actually going down to the beholder city and possibly killing the beholder hive mother. Ilth K'hinaxs is a city with over 2,000 beholders in it. The city is loaded with all sorts of weird monsters, like olive slimes, intellect devourers, xorn and mind flayers. Somehow the heroes encounter very few beholders in this beholder city.

If I was writing an adventure about a beholder city, it would be pretty high level and it would be loaded up with beholders and beholder-kin of all types. That's the whole point, right?

Wildspace

This is a spelljammer adventure wherein the heroes fly their magic ship through a massive asteroid complex. It's basically a space dungeon full of beholders. Each "room" of the dungeon is over two miles long.

Each of the ten rooms has an "eye" of the beholder queen in charge of the hive. The "eyes" are gems in the shape of a d10 that are about 150 in diameter. Each eye has become sentient and plays a part in the bigger story.

Here's some of the flavor from the very first room:

"...the light fades, leaving an amber glow that settles all around you. It surrounds you with a glittering aura. It also surrounds a tall, handsome man in white robes lined with gold. You feel that this man is the closest friend you have in your world or any other. He smiles angelically and opens his upper robe, above the belt. Embedded in his pale chest is a huge, red, withered eye."

In the final part of this gigantic adventure, a huge miles-long sentient ship/artifact called The Ravager becomes active. It is in the shape of a beholder and apparently it can destroy worlds. This adventure is insane.

D&D 3rd Edition

We continue to get beholders that can only aim a certain amount of tentacles in a given direction. All the rays can shoot every round, but only 3 rays can reach targets in a given 90 degree arc.
Beholders naturally levitate and fly at the speed of 20 feet per round. They also have a permanent feather fall effect going. There must have been a real swath of players trying to dispel the beholde levitate ability back then.
The antimagic cone is 150 feet long and it still shuts down the beholder's own powers. I guess the beholder does a lot of turning around. I'm not clear on whether it can close its central eye, fire rays, and then re-open the eye in the same round. Seems like it could, right?

In this ENWorld thread, the general consensus is that the eye is either "off" or "on" for the round. You have to pick one. Also, the beholder can't fly up, turn upside-down and launch all ten eye rays on the party at once. Good gawd!

One person notes that the beholder could use telekinesis to cause a hero to hover above it, in full range of the other 9 eyestalks... wow.

Lords of Madness

This book has an entire chapter on beholders.

Beholders weigh around 4,500 pounds!
They have no sense of taste at all.
They detect scents through thousands of tiny holes in their hide, known as "spiracles".
A beholder and its organs are buoyant like a balloon.
It drools its own waste, which is frothy and pink.
It lives about 100 years.
It reproduces only once in its life. The womb is below the back of the tongue.

When it gives birth: "The parent observes its young and decides which look most like itself. The others are eaten by the ravenous parent, along with the discarded womb, and the surviving young are forced from the parent’s lair within the hour to fend for themselves."

As if beholders aren't scary enough, we are given some beholder magic items!

Lens of Ray Chaining: Allows a ray to bounce to a second target.
Lens of Ray Doubling: Splits a ray so it hits two targets.
Lens of Ray Widening: Turns a ray into a cone! The saving throw is a bit lower, though.

D&D 4th Edition

There's a few different types of beholder in the Monster Manual of 4e. The 19th level "Beholder Eye Tyrant" seems to be your classic beholder.

It has an aura. When an enemy starts its turn within 25 feet of the beholder, the beholder can shoot an eye ray at it. I like that.
The beholder's powers are greatly "nerfed" for 4e. It can only shoot two eye rays on its turn, and each ray must target a different creature.
The disintegrate ray just does a bit of damage, and the death ray has to hit a bloodied target to have a chance of killing them (they have to fail two consecutive saving throws to actually die).
It does have a recharge power where they can fire four eye rays, but only when bloodied.
In the Monster Manual 3, it is claimed that beholders come from the Far Realm, and that they have come to the world"...seeking to swallow up everything with their greed and ambition".

D&D 5th Edition

The beholder shoots 3 eye rays per round, and the eye rays are determined randomly (!).
"When a beholder sleeps, it closes its central eye but leaves its smaller eyes open and alert."
A beholder's lair is likely to have space for the beholder to hover above the heroes to fire down eye rays on them. It also has lair actions, like causing the walls to sprout stalks, or even an eye that shoots a random eye ray.

Other Notable Products

Beholders appear in a pile of D&D adventures and products. While I can't read them all, I scoured the internet for mentions of cool, official beholder stuff.

The Fell Pass: This is an adventure in Dragon Magazine #32.. It's about a beholder named Xorddanx. It has 8 gargoyles at its beck and call. If a fight breaks out, Xorddanx hovers over a molten pool and abuses the PCs. Here's a quote for you:

"The handling of Xorddanx must be left mainly in the hands of the Dungeon Master, but it is intended that Xorddanx be a very dangerous character, so the referee is encouraged to show no mercy. A low-level party has no business thinking it can take on a menace as obviously great as Xorddanx. High-level parties often need to be taken down a peg. Be strong!"

Labyrinth of Madness: In this super-deadly adventure, there is a room called "Abode of the Eye Tyrants" that contains three beholders. Some of their stalks are snakes. Not only do the snakes shoot eye rays, but they also have a poison bite that kills you. One beholder can actually strap in to a suit of magic plate mail. Insane.

Beholder Dome: The 3rd Edition Book of Challenges has a trap in it called a "Beholder Dome". The floor is wobbly, and a failed DEX check will send a hero careening into a trapped door. Each one has a magic spell trap that emulates one of the eye rays.

The Shackled City: There's a beholder villain that plays a major part in the Shacked City adventure path, but I really don't want to say much about it because it's a pretty major spoiler.

Trial of Eyes: In the 4th edition Dungeon Delve book is a series of short adventures. 30 adventures, in fact! The adventure for level 17 characters is about a beholder who has come through a portal from the far realm and has claimed a magic item off of some dead adventurers.. There's these far realm insanity portals. They're orange and they "seethe with anger". They do psychic damage and they slow you.

The Xanathar

This is perhaps the most well known beholder NPC in D&D lore. He's a crime boss in the Forgotten Realms city of Waterdeep. He runs a thieves guild and only a select few know that Xanathar is actually a beholder.

Xanathar has four humanoid lieutenants who handle different aspects of all the illegal goings-on. Xanathar is into all sorts of stuff, including extortion, smuggling, burglary, and slavery.

There's a really good article on The Xanathar here.

Beholder Variants

Here's a list of all the other types of beholders I came across while working on this:

Death Kiss: This beholder-kin has no mouth, and the eyestalks are actually tentacles with hooks. It feeds by attaching tentacles to a victim and draining its blood.

Eye of the Deep: This water-breather has crab pincers, and it shoots cones of blinding light from its eyes. The eye of the deep has two tentacles which can create illusions and hold people and monsters.

Gauth: This beholder-kin feeds on magic. It can fire off different spells, and it can drain charges from magic items. It actually eats magic items.

Spectator:A spectator is a guardian of places and treasures. The central eye can reflect spells back at the caster! Spectators are summoned from Nirvana and are actually quite friendly.

Undead Beholder (Death Tyrant): These abominations have milky film covering their eyes. They are slow and strike last in every combat round. They are mindless servants of powerful masters.

Hive Mother: The "Ultimate tyrants", they are twice the size of a normal beholder. They can swallow people whole on a critical hit. A Hive Mother has no eyestalks, the eyes are embedded in the creature's hide with hooded covers! They can control other beholders, usually 5-10 normal beholders or up to 20 beholder-kin.

Director: These insectoid beholder-kin breed specialized mounts (?). The mount is usually a centipede/spider type of creature.

Examiner: These are scholars ad clerks who study magic items..

Lensman: This thing actually has a humanoid body. Instead of a head, it has a whip-like tentacle. OK, now we're getting really random.

Overseer: These guys are like fleshy trees with 13 limbs, each of which has an eye.

Watcher: Watchers have large eyes all around their body. They have true sight, ESP, and can teleport.

Beholder Mage: These guys actually blinded their central eyes so that they could cast spells.

Elder Orb: Ancient beholders of god-like intelligence.

Orbus: A pale white beholder with great magical ability.

Gas Spore: These things look like beholders, but they're just full of gas.

Doomsphere: A ghost-beholder created by magical explosions.

Kasharin: An undead beholder that can pass on a rotting disease.

Astereater: A boulder-like beholder without eyes.. ummm..

Gorbel: A clawed beholder, without magic. Explodes if attacked!

Eye of Flame: These beholders serve more powerful beholders. They have fire rays, telekinesis rays and fear rays. When they die they explode in a fire burst.

Beholder Spawn: These are 4th edition minions (they have a single hit point). They fire a single eye ray that does 11 damage of a single type (fire, force, etc).

Eye of Shadow: These beholders spent too much time in the Shadowfell. It has eye rays that blind, do thunder damage, and immobilize. It can also teleport and become invisible.

Other Links

How much is an eyestalk worth?
4e beholder cartoon
The beholder from the '80's cartoon

We recorded episode 2 of the Great Modron March youtube cartoon thing. If nothing else, skip to 5:30 and check out Wesley Powderbottom. Jessie is hilarious.

As I prepared this session, I realized that we weren't going to get through the final chapter. There was just too much material, and there was downtime stuff that needed to be done. So it looks like we won't finish this adventure until the next session.

The Party

(Jessie) Bidam - Platinum Dragonborn Fighter
(George) Theran - Drow Wizard

Disguise

The adventurers had come to the plane of Gehenna to take down the Tacharim once and for all. They'd sent their slaad in there, but that didn't work out so well. Theran had been injured badly, so they retreated back to The River Styx and rested on their demon pirate ship for a full 24 hours. During that time, the slaad returned to them.

After a full rest, they headed back to the Flower and decided to do what the adventure suggests - kill some guards, put on their tabards, and snoop around the flower in disguise.

Out in the volcano hills, they were able to creep up on two Tacharim scouts taking a pee. The ground of Gehenna is so hot it does actual fire damage to unprotected feet, so the guards had a bit of a urine steam cloud going.

The slaad ate both of these poor guards. The heroes put on the tabards and we commenced with the creeping. The slaad went intangible and hid in walls and stuff.

Sneaking Back in

I think I mentioned last time that this is a large location full of almost-empty rooms. I made what turned out to be a good decision - I labeled the doors, which kept the session from becoming a dull slog through empty rooms.

The heroes went down to the prison and found the paladin lord in a cell. He had become a modronoid and was really crazy. The adventure suggests that the heroes can calm him down, but the heroes just knocked him out, stole cell keys, and took the paladin lord with them.

They bluffed a number of guards and did a quick check of the lowest level. This is where the "control panel" of the whole flower is. The flavor: "A glistening, nine-faceted pod hovers in the air, emitting a faint and sickly greenish-purple glow."

They realized they needed to set it on fire. They decided to make the slaad do it while they fled.

Chaos ensued, and the leader of the Tacharim, Doran, accosted the heroes as they were about to cross a petal-bridge. She started slicing into the adventurers as the fire spread and knights were running around, choking on the smoke. Theran smartly launched off fire spells, figuring he could burn the place some more, at the very least.

The slaad caught up with them and used a havoc bolt to slide Doran to the edge of the petal bridge. Then she sliced into the slaad, killing him and dumping him into the moat! Theran and Bidam took Doran down and fled the flower as it burned.

Return to Sigil

They returned to Sigil an brought the paladin lord's remains to a lawful good church, where his sister's body had been brought in the previous session.

The heroes spent 33 days of downtime in Sigil. Theran made and sold a javelin of lightning. You know, what's funny about that is Theran has formulas to make 2 magic items, but he hasn't made one of either of them for the heroes to actually use. He is completely focused on making money off of them.

The heroes had some of their friends over to have feybread biscuits, moonhoney and razorvine wine. Stewart Sevenfingers was trying to flirt with Alamandra, the githzerai. I just wanted to see what the characters would do. They tried to help him, and ultimately forced Stewart to do a dance. Poor Stewart made a DEX check... and rolled a 17! Alamandra was impressed with his moves and the pair have become an item.

Save vs. Death

During this get-together, the NPCs brought up the nymph they'd met in the beastlands (way back in session 5). Bidam had vowed to return one day to put the moves on the nymph. They warned Bidam that just looking at a nymph could blind or even kill you (I am using 2e stats and concepts for the water nymph).

Of course, this meant that the heroes were in the Beastlands the very next day. The last time the nymph had seen the heroes, Theran was an elf and Bidam had black scales. Now, thanks to Renbuu, Theran looked like a drow and Bidam had glorious platinum scales.

The nymph was amazed at Bidam's scales. Bidam proceeded to seduce the nymph and the scariest saving throw of all time was rolled - save vs. death! Bidam succeeded by one point and.. well, we'll leave it at that. It was hilarious.

Lamashtu's Revenge

Later in the month, back in Sigil, the heroes got word that a giant blue demon was asking around about the painting of Lamashtu. If you remember, the heroes had taken a painting of Lamashtu in the Fortress of Fallen Stairs. The adventure specifically says agents of the demon lord will come hunting for the item.

This was a great opportunity for me to use one of my favorite D&D monsters: The Solamith! The faces of the people they eat appear in their bellies and they chuck pieces of their flesh at their opponents. Mostly I like them because you can do all sorts of fun voices for them, like a new york cabbie or a slow-talking british person.

The heroes had sold the painting to their business partner, Vrishika. They raced to the Curiosity Shoppe where Vrishika's slave, Standish, was trying to loot items off the shelves, but he was wary of magic glyphs of warding. He asked the heroes to help him loot the place and avoid the magic defenses.

I was fairly sure that the heroes wouldn't help Standish, but you never know. The glyphs have a DC of 15 - it would have been very risky. It turned out that the heroes were genuinely concerned for Vrishika.

The solamith had attacked her. She fled through a portal in her office, but the solamith went in right after her. Standish said he didn't know where the portal led to, but he assumed it was her true home.

The Solamith

The heroes activated the portal (the key was a flower of a plant in her office), and they stepped through. They appeared on a castle balcony on a mortal world. The castle was almost completely engulfed by vegetation, but it appeared that Vrishika maintained this one little section.

The Solamith was at the far end of the balcony, about to eat Vrishika. He turned to face the heroes, and they saw in his belly the screaming face of Taraere Ilsmiser, the wizard who'd forced them to go to the Fortress of Fallen Stairs in the first place.

The heroes surmised that once they ditched Taraere, Lamashtu's demons tracked her down while hunting for the painting.

The solamith started throwing explosive, necrotic flesh. Theran smartly took a good look at the solamith, and saw heat radiating off of it. He tried a ray of frost, and found that the solamith was vulnerable to cold.

It was a short, intense battle. As Theran and the solamith traded ranged attacks, Bidam charged the length of the balcony. He reached his quarry and cut him down.

Vrishika thanked the heroes. She told them her secret origin (which I made up, elaborating on what there was in Planescape Torment). The castle was her father's. She fled it when she was young, as she wasn't accepted by the people of the kingdom due to her demonic lineage. She wandered the planes, and was hunted by a demon lord named Karaphon, who collects alu-fiend slaves.

Karaphon is involved in the Chris Perkins adventure "Umbra", which I'll be running once we finish this adventure. This was a nice way to kind of foreshadow and embed Karaphon into the framework of the campaign.

Vrishika found safety in Sigil, and she stayed there for decades. When at last she realized she missed the kingdom she was born in, she found that it was abandoned and overgrown.

That's where we stopped. Next time, we'll jump into the final adventure, which has a pretty gigantic final encounter.

In this article, I am going to discuss using poison in Dungeons & Dragons. I am going to focus on the 5th edition rules, but will include looks at earlier editions. I have also dug up quite a bit of material from old issues of Dragon Magazine which has content that can very easily be applied to any edition you are playing.

Poison is, in general, under-utilized in D&D. I think DMs feel wary of handing over such a potent, potentially game-breaking device to their players. Also, no player likes to have their character taken out due to a single failed save, which is what a number of 5e poisons do.

The Essential Information

Here's the basics of poison in D&D:

There are four types of ways to contract poisons - Contact, Ingested, Inhaled, and Injury.
A weapon coated with poison will dry out in one minute.
When you are poisoned, you will usually suffer from the poisoned condition.
Poison can be bought or crafted using the downtime rules and a poisoner's kit.
Cures for poison include low level spells or anti-toxin.
Truth Serum is listed under poisons, and is something I think could be useful in your campaign in many different ways.

The Poisoned Condition

Poison obviously is often tied to the poisoned condition. Here's the definition from page 292 of the Player's Handbook:

Poisoned: A poisoned creature has disadvantage on attack rolls and ability checks.

There's four types of poison:

Contact: It touches exposed skin.
Ingested: You swallow a full dose. Swallowing a partial dose might have a reduced effect or easier save.
Inhaled: Powder or gas that creates a cloud that fills a 5 foot cube.
Injury: You coat a weapon with this stuff and stab your victim. The poison enters the victim's blood stream.

Common Ways to Overcome Poison

Antitoxin: Antitoxin costs 50 gp (PH page 151). When you drink this, you gain advantage on saves vs. poison for 1 hour.

Lay on Hands: Paladins can lay on hands, and choose to neutralize a poison affecting a person.

Use Downtime: If you spend three days of downtime, you can make a DC 15 Con save. If you make it, for the next 24 hours you have advantage on saves against one poison currently affecting you.

Magic Potons: There's a bunch of potions in the Dungeon Master's Guide that can help you deal with poison:

Potion of Resistance to Poison (DMG page 188): You take half damage from poison for one hour.
Potion of Vitality (DMG page 188): This very rare potion will cure any poison affecting you.

Spells: There are a bunch of spells that handle poison in 5th edition. There's a good chance your PCs won't have these, as in general players take the same small crop of spells for their casters in the early levels. You might want to make these spells available at a church in exchange for a donation. Here's the list of spell costs from the adventurer's league .pdf:

The important one there is Lesser Restoration. It's a 2nd level spell, and costs 40 gold. That should be a good guideline for pricing. Here's the spells that deal with poison:

Detect Poison and Disease (PH page 231): The caster can sense poisons within 30 feet. It's a concentration spell that lasts up to 10 minutes.
Purify Food and Drink (PH page 270): All food and drink within 5 feet is purified and rendered free of poison.
Protection from Poison (PH page 270): This spell neutralizes the poison affecting a target. The target has advantage on saves against poison for 1 hour.
Lesser Restoration (PH page 255): This spell can cancel out the poisoned condition.

Raise Dead and Poison
In the raise dead spell, it is stated that when the spell is cast, it neutralizes any poisons that affected the creature at the time it died.

Buying Poison

This is discussed on page 258 of the Dungeon Master's Guide. The DMG kind of leaves it up to the DM as far as how to handle if it's available to purchase and if so, where. There could be black markets or unscrupulous apothecaries who might have this stuff available. There's a few basic items to buy when it comes to poison:

Basic Poison 100 gp (PH page 153) You can use this to coat one weapon as an action. The poison is only potent for 1 minute before drying. A creature hit has to save or take d4 damage. So basically, you do +1d4 damage for ten rounds.

Potion of Poison (DMG page 188): This will look like a potion of healing, but it's actually poison. You take piles of damage each round until you make a saving throw.

Poisoner's Kit (PH page 154): If you are proficient with it, this kit lets you add your proficiency bonus to any ability checks you make to craft or use poisons. Rogues who choose the Assassin archetype gain proficiency with the poisoner's kit.

Crafting Poisons

Crafting a poison can be done with a poisoner's kit during downtime using the crafting rules (PH page 187). A character can try to harvest poison from a poisonous creature. It takes d6 minutes and a DC 20 Intelligence (Nature) check. Success means the harvester got enough to make a dose. Fail by 5 or more, and the character is subjected to the creature's poison. Risky, but very cool.

In Dragon Magazine #349, there is a poison-making guide that is pretty awesome. A lot of it deals with 3e mechanics (based on the poison-making skill from Complete Adventurer), but there's plenty of stuff that can be lifted for whatever system you use.

Buying materials to make the poison costs 1/3rd of the price of the poison. If you are in a region where the materials are plentiful, then the cost is 1/6th.

You make a check after a week of crafting, and the better the roll, the more in gp value you made. So if you're making a poison that costs 100 gp and you roll well, maybe you made 70 gp worth, so you've almost made a full dose.

Harvesting poisons from giant spiders, wyverns, etc is probably something any character with a good bonus to Nature should be doing. It seems like a fun way to make extra gold.

According to this article, the raw materials only last d6 days. You could extend this with a successful "alchemy" (Nature in 5e, I guess) check. This prolongs the shelf life of the materials for one week. Gentle repose and unguent of timelessness also can extend the shelf life of the materials.

AD&D 1st Edition Poison

The 1st edition poison rules kind of took shape as time progressed. Some found the DMG rules too sparse and contradictory. There were a number of articles in Dragon Magazine that revised and overhauled the poison rules, including an article in issue #81 by Chris Landsea which sort of took everyone to task. This article, from what I can tell, became the accepted rules method for using poison in 1e and was the foundation on which the 2e rules were built.

In "Taking the Sting out of Poison", Chris Landsea includes information on extracting poisons from monsters, which involves this handy chart:

The tone of this article is quite amusing. The author seems to be scolding the D&D community at large, including Gary Gygax himself over the inconsistencies in the poison rules. He ends it with a warning:

"It has been repeatedly stated in this article, directly and indirectly, that only assassins have the ability and the permission (in the context of the AD&D social and ethical structure) to use poison frequently and effectively. The Dungeon Master is honor bound to simulate this by making poisons difficult for most characters to obtain and employ, and by creating penalties and dangers to be coped with by those who try to disregard the laws of poison use."

Dragon Magazine #121 - "The Deadliest Perfume"

This article is for "Oriental Adventures", and details everything you would ever want to know about lotus blossoms. These flowers generate a fragrance that is either an aphrodisiac or a powerful sedative.

"As an aphrodisiac, the lotus affects any person inhaling its sweet aroma. Failure to cover one's nose or escape from the aroma causes the victim to become enamored with the first person of the opposite sex he or she sees."

Lotus flowers can be made into poison, either as a dust that hangs in the air for one to four minutes (!) or it can be ingested. Here's the basic idea of each type:

Black Lotus: Inhaling this dust will either kill you or knock you out for 1-6 hours.
Brown Lotus: The victim becomes mentally like a child for a few weeks.
Green Lotus: Inhaling this dust causes temporary paralyzation, lasting four to twelve hours.
Purple Lotus: Once digested, after one to twelve hours, the victim will suffer from a debilitating sickness for one to four days. They die from it if they fail their save.
Red Lotus: Inhaling this dust causes intense hallucinations for five to eight hours. Failing a save can cause permanent insanity.
Yellow Lotus: Inhaling this dust causes lethargy, weakening the character for several weeks.
Gray Lotus: Inhaling this causes a "state of catalepsy". This is used by necromancers to create mindless servants. The victim is basically a living zombie, with the effect lasting for up to nine days.
Blue Lotus: Causes mildly pleasant hallucinations and can give you clairaudience and clairvoyance for a time. Using this more than once per week can kill you.

AD&D 2nd Edition Poison

Check out this confusing chart. Poisons are broken into classes, represented by a letter. They kick in at varying "onset" times. The strength stat is the damage. The number before the slash is what you take if you fail your saving throw. The number after the slash is if you make it!

So a quick glance shows you that even if you make your saving throw, you are taking damage. And if it is Type O, you're paralyzed no matter what! You can't move for 2d6 hours.

A "debilitating" poison weakens you for d3 days. All of your ability scores are cut in half and you move at half speed. On top of that, you cannot heal by normal or magical means!

If you die with poison in your system, it remains active for 2d6 hours after you die. So if you are raised during that time, you'll need to make an immediate save or suffer the effects of the poison again. Wow, that's not cool.

D&D 3rd Edition Poison

3e poisons work like this: If someone tries to poison you, you make a Fortitude save. If you fail, you take initial damage (usually it affects your ability scores). Then a minute later, you save again and take more damage.

Temporary ability damage is pretty cool and scary, but in my experience calculating the myriad of effects of losing points in a stat grinds the game to a halt. In my opinion, it's better to have the poison simulate the effects of stat loss through a single effect.

Here's some of the poisons:

Nitharit: You lose 3d6 points of Constitution.
Dragon Bile: Lose 3d6 Strength.
Striped Toadstool: Lose piles of Wisdom and Intelligence.
Id Moss: Drains Intelligence.
Lich Dust: Drains a total of 3d6 Strength.
Drow Poison: Knocks you out for up to 2d4 hours.
Shadow Essence: Drains 2d6 Strength and one permanent point of Strength!

The Book of Vile Darkness also covers crafting poisons, with identical material to the Dragon Magazine article. It also includes a weird new type of poison called psychic poison.

Psychic Poison: "A psychic poison is a magical toxin that affects those who cast certain types of spells on the creature, object or area". Those who cast divination or mind-affecting spells on a certain area must make a Will save or take stat damage like other poisons. These psychic poisons have weird names like "Karadrach", "Vashita" and "Blue Unlyn".

Dragon Magazine #355 - "The Market is Bad"

This article is part of the awesome Savage Tide adventure path, and details locations in the extremely seedy pirate town of Scuttlecove.

One such location is "Snake Charmer Poisons", in the city slums. It is run by Riordan Darkly, a fellow who has a small lab in interconnected basements under run-down shacks. He's been working a few poisons that will affect yuan-ti as well as people:

Skinshedder: Strips portions of the victim's skin, causing flesh to blister as though burnt.
Skinvice: Hardens skin and causes paralysis.

Positoxins

In the Libris Mortis sourcebook, there's information on a type of poison that affects undead.

Positoxin: "Positoxins are special alchemical substances distilled from holy water and laced with positive energy." This stuff does permanent ability damage to undead. It doesn't affect incorporeal undead. Here's some of them:

Bloodwine: This is a drink meant to be given to vampires. It's got garlic in it.
Lichbane: A bone-white unguent that drains INT/WIS/CHA from spellcasting undead.
Liquid Mortality: This stuff can actually destroy undead.

The other positoxins have great names like boneshard paste, celestial essence, gravedust, and sunlight oil.

Ravages

The Book of Exalted Deeds says that the only poison that is acceptable for good-aligned characters to use is oil of taggit, because it only knocks people out. This book presents holy poisons that are ok for good-aligned characters to use, called "Ravages". Ravages deal ability damage like normal poisons.

Golden Ice: This crystalline stuff is cold but never melts. Touching it to evil creatures drains their DEX like crazy as the cold spreads through their bodies.
Celestial Lightsblood: This is holy water with jade crystals, drains INT and WIS.
Purified Couatl Venom: Drains piles of Strength.
Unicorn Blood: "Drawn from a willing living unicorn, unicorn blood retains its potency as a ravage only as long as the unicorn that donated the blood remains alive." This stuff drains a bit of Strength. I figured it would be more powerful.

D&D 4th Edition Poison

Poison in 4e is much weaker than in earlier editions. Most of the time it just does a bit of damage and maybe deals out a status effect that you save against every round until you make it. Here's a list of poisons in the DMG:

Stormclaw Scorpion Venom: Ongoing poison, immobilized.
Deathjump Spider Venom: Ongoing poison damage and slowed.
Carrion Crawler Brain Juice: Ongoing poison damage, and if you fail a few times in a row, you become immobilized and then stunned.
Ground Thassil Root: This stuff must be ingested, and kicks in 2d6 minutes after it is consumed. Immobilized and then knocks you out.
Dark Toxin: Ongoing damage.
Drow Poison: Weakens and then knocks you out (until the end of the encounter).
Hellstinger Scorpion Venom: Ongoing damage, weakened.
Demonweb Terror Venom: Ongoing damage, -2 to defenses.
Black Lotus: This must be ingested and kicks in d6 minutes later. Causes hallucinations that compels you to attack the nearest creature.
Insanity Mist: This dazes and stuns.
Pit Toxin: This is venom from the fangs of a pit fiend! It does damage and weakens.

D&D 5th Edition Poison

These are listed on page 357 of the Dungeon Master's Guide. 5th edition poisons have a very wide array of effects.

Assassin's Blood: Damage, poisoned for 24 hours.
Burnt Onthur Fumes: This keeps damaging you every round until you make three saving throws.
Carrion Crawler Mucus: You are poisoned and paralyzed for one minute.
Drow Poison: Poisoned for one hour. If you fail the save by five or more, you're unconscious.
Essence of Ether: Poisoned and unconscious for 8 hours.
Malice: Poisoned and blinded for one hour.
Midnight Tears: This kicks in at the stroke of midnight, doing 9d6 damage!
Oil of Taggit: Poisoned and unconscious for 24 hours.
Pale Tincture: Poisoned and d6 damage, save every 24 hours or take more damage. This also prevents healing by any means. This doesn't end until you make.. 7 saving throws!
Purple Worm Poison: This does piles of damage: 12d6!
Serpent Venom: 3d6 poison damage.
Torpor: Poisoned and incapacitated for 4d6 hours.
Truth Serum: Poisoned for 1 hour, and can't tell a lie (as if under a zone of truth spell).
Wyvern Poison: 7d6 damage.

Using Poison in Your Campaign

I can see a lot of fun being had in pitting the heroes against a thieves guild, with both sides going nuts trying to poison each other. Tricking foes into a room and gassing it, capturing a foe and interrogating them with truth serum, and wondering if the meal you're about to eat has been dosed with pale tincture seems like it might be cool.

Also, the idea of a character who adventures so he or she can extract poisons from monsters to sell or use seems like a really awesome concept.

Sources

2e, 3e, 4e & 5e Player's Handbook & Dungeon Master's Guides, Dragon Magazine #81, #121, #349, #355, Book of Exalted Deeds, and Libris Mortis.

Links

AD&D Downloads - Poisons and Herbs

SRD Poison list

A Poison List from Giantitp Forums

4th Edition Poison

Using Poison in 5e

I've run many campaigns over the last 3 decades. Some went really well. Some were fiascos. I've learned a lot and I want to share the insight I've gleaned from my experiences. I am going to cover what I think are the most important things to do before you actually start running your D&D campaign.

For those of you brand new to D&D, a "campaign" is a series of linked sessions. It could be anything from running the starter set adventure over a series of sessions, to running a massive adventure book like Princes of the Apocalypse.

"Session Zero"

A lot of people throw this phrase around. Basically what "session zero" means is that before you run the game, you need to talk with your players and find out what they want out of a game. You'll need to establish things like:

How lethal the game should be.
Make sure the players aren't going to abandon your whole story because it conflicts with what they want to do.
What the players like. Lots of combat? Lots of stealth? Lots of roleplaying?
Whether the characters are noble heroes or vile scoundrels.
What the characters are and how they'll interact. You'll want to nip any conflicts in the bud before the game even starts. The most common issue is a party with a lawful good paladin and a selfish rogue who steals all the time.

The thing about "Session Zero" that I don't like is the actual "session" part. I don't want to have the group come over just to make characters for next time. To me, that is a waste of precious table time.

I prefer to have all of that stuff done over the phone, prior to the game. It can be difficult working out people's schedules. If you actually have them at your house, to me it feels like a waste if you don't run a game.

Pre-game Communication

Let's say you have come up with a campaign idea that has you really excited and you can't wait to run it. There's a few I came upon recently that looked really awesome:

The world is covered in a weird cloud/mist, and there's a few cities on mountaintops above the clouds that use airships to travel between them.
The world is about to be destroyed except for a lone city. The heroes must race across the world to get to that city before it's too late.
The heroes must go on an epic quest through each of the nine layers of hell.

Before you get to work on your campaign, run the premise past your players. If they don't want to do it, then you do not have a campaign.

One time, in 2004, I bought this mega-adventure called The Lost City of Gaxmoor, by Gary Gygax's kids. I have always loved "death-trap dungeons" and campaigns where death of your character is a real possibility.

My players hated this style, but I was so excited by Gaxmoor that I kept bothering them until they finally agreed to try it because I wouldn't shut up about it.

A few of them showed up to the game with "joke" characters with passive aggressive names like "Lack". They were killed by a spider that lived in a tree stump. They pulled out their back-up characters (I told them to come with three characters, as death was very likely). They got to Gaxmoor, found barrels of flour and had a flour fight, and rolled around in the barrels, attracting monsters.

They didn't care. They hated the style and basically revolted against me.

While I was deeply insulted that they wouldn't indulge me after all the times I'd tried to accommodate them, I learned a valuable lesson: Don't bother trying to force your players to play a game that doesn't fit their preferences.

I also learned that I needed to find new players, and I did.

The Beginning Hook

Unless you are running a completely free-form sandbox, your campaign is going to have some kind of over-arching story, however loose. In order to avoid a disaster, some ideas that get you excited will need to be run by your players.

If you are running a campaign that starts out with the heroes getting captured, tread very carefully.

Skull & Shackles, the best campaign I have ever run, starts off with the heroes being drugged and forced to work on a pirate ship. The drugging must happen for the game to progress. Your best bet is to tell the players about the opening scenario well before you run the game. Tell them how it starts. Tell them it has to happen. Make sure they are cool with it and can deal with it (seriously, some people can not). When you run it, you can hand-wave the whole thing and get to the pirate ship.

Character Backgrounds

This is always tricky. I've always had a difficult time weaving backgrounds into a story. If your player comes up with a story they're excited about, go with it and try to plant it into an early adventure. Sometimes the best NPCs come out of a character's background.

If the player doesn't have any particular idea on a background, rattle off some things you know are involved in the campaign and see if anything grabs them. If you know the campaign involves a dwarven hall, maybe throw that out there and see if maybe the player wants to say that their character worked in the mines, and there was a collapse, and some entity saved him or her.

Some players just don't care about their backgrounds. Not every character needs to have a backstory. In fact, past adventures will become their backstory. It makes sense that some heroes simply grew up in a happy home and a happy town.

Flashbacks: One thing that was a huge success for me was when I started using flashbacks in-game. They have to be really short, so the other players don't get bored.

Here's an example as to how a flashback works. The heroes are told by a wizard about a legendary sword. Suddenly, the party fighter has a flashback to his youth. He's 11 years old, his village is under attack. A huge, evil knight in red and black armor is holding the very sword the wizard is referring to.

The evil knight is about to cut down the hero's father. Our hero jumps in to save him.. roll initiative. Play out the fight!

The best way to handle this is to just let the dice tell the story. Don't have it set in your head that the hero's father is slain. The only thing that is certain is that the young hero didn't die (at least, not permanently) and that he does not have the sword presently.

Your first instinct might be to run that flashback encounter thinking that the hero's dad must die, and that the evil knight must get away with the sword, but you should always leave room for twists caused by player ingenuity and the roll of the die.

If the young hero is slain, that's okay. We play a game with raise dead in it, right? Our hero is killed and once the raid is over, the town priest takes the poor boy's body to a temple and has him raised. Now our hero has a deep connection to that sword. In fact, maybe the sword is intelligent and our hero has somehow gained a psychic link to the blade - he can sense it, and it can sense him.

If by some crazy twist of fate, the knight is disarmed and defeated, that's ok too. Our hero or his father gain the blade, and it proceeds to corrupt them and cause great evil to spread.

The best flashback I ever did was in a campaign based on Monte Cook's Books of Eldritch Might. The heroes flashed back to their youth, were they lived on a beach. They came upon a magic talking book (In fact, this was the actual Book of Eldritch Might). The flashback was so well-received that I realized that I should have run the entire campaign with them as kids, as it was far more interesting.

Running Flashbacks: The thing about flashbacks is that they require careful planning. If a character's personality is well-established after 4 sessions, when you run your flashback, the story can't violate what's already been established in your continuity. You'll need to run things by your player when you are planning to make sure you know your player's vision of their character's life.

When I run a flashback, I do not run it like a normal game. I don't want to lose the interest of the other players and I don't want to eat up precious table time. So, using the above magic sword scenario, here's how I'd run it:

I tell the hero the scene. I tell him or her what is around them. I describe the evil sword, what it looks like, etc. I ask them what they do. Allow anything they can think of that is plausible. They are not restricted to a single action.

They come up with what they want to do. It could be using an object to disarm the bad guy. It could be sacrificing their life to try to save their dad. It could be going for a called shot by stabbing the knight in the eye with a flaming, sharpened stick.

Then the player makes one fateful roll, modified by stat bonuses or skills, and whatever feels right. Also, if the player came up with a good idea, maybe they get more of a bonus.

If the player come up with an awesome idea, it just happens. The d20 roll is just to help describe how awesome the already awesome thing is.

Characters Evolve

Something you must keep in mind here is that it is very, very likely that one character in your group is going to change in the first 5 sessions.

Once the campaign gets underway, you will probably have a player who will want to change classes, change their name, or take on an entire different personality. That is because once the game has started, the character is just an idea. As the game plays out, the player sees what works and what doesn't in game and they need to tweak it.

A character going from human to half-orc might might make you balk. Don't worry about it too much. Just retcon it. Having a player who is really into their character is far more important than a minor continuity discrepancy.

The funny thing about it is that in a few weeks, nobody will even remember. They'll think the character was always a half-orc. It'll be this weird piece of trivia, like a tv show where an actor was replaced in episode 4.

How Do the Heroes Meet?

You'll need to work out whether the characters already know each other, or if they are just meeting when the game starts. Talk to the players and see what they prefer.

If they already know each other, maybe sit down with them and brainstorm the things they've done before together. Remember if they are level one, they probably haven't done anything worthy of XP. Possible ideas include:

They all trained together under a grizzled veteran.
They were town guards in a town with few problems.
They were slaves who escaped their captors.
They were the only survivors of an earthquake or a dragon attack.

If they are meeting at the beginning of the first session, don't worry too much about avoiding cliches. Some tropes are used often for a reason - they're fun or convenient. The key is to put your own spin on it, make it fun.

The two most common tropes are:

The heroes are all in the same bar at the same time
The heroes are all hired by the same person to go on a quest or mission.

Tavern Clichés

I personally like the idea of starting a campaign in a bar loaded with every single cliché all at once. You could fill your bar with all of this:

A surly bartender with an eyepatch who shares rumors in exchange for tips.
A shady rogue picking people's pockets.
A hooded mysterious person sitting alone in the corner.
A bunch of people loudly gambling, accusing one another of cheating.
A well-muscled NPC who wants to arm-wrestle everyone.
A guy hitting on a waitress who clearly wishes he'd leave her alone.
A married woman looking to get into trouble.
A group of NPC adventurers looking for work, just like the PCs.
A bard singing songs by the fireplace. Her husband is probably the arm wrestler.
And of course, a wizard bursts in through the front door out of the rain in desperate need of aid.

Once your campaign is underway, now your job is to keep it fun and to keep it going.

Links

Learn Tabletop RPGs - this is very newb-friendly
Nerdarchy has a nice post on this topic here.
Ask a Gamer - How to Start a Campaign

I added a donate button on the right. I have been making plans to expand Power Score. Thanks for visiting the site!

Today we're going to take a look at one of the major artifacts in all of Dungeons & Dragons: The Rod of Seven Parts. It is a D&D campaign all unto itself. I'd highly recommend that you check out the massive boxed set adventure about this item, which is very inexpensive in pdf form.

I'm going to go through each edition of D&D and see how the rod developed over time. All of the lore is collected in this article to give you a good jumping off point for deciding what material works for you and your campaign.

The Essential Information

The rod is a lawful artifact. It was originally called The Rod of Law.
The pieces of the rod are scattered all across the world and even the planes. You can use one piece to sense the location of the next piece.
The rod must be carefully assembled. Doing it wrong will cause at least one piece to vanish and appear somewhere random hundreds of miles away.
Each piece has a magic power, and more powers are unlocked as the rod is assembled.
A demon lord called The Queen of Chaos wants the rod, so she can use it to free her demon general, Miska.
Lawful humanoids called the Wind Dukes want to assemble the rod to kill Miska once and for all.

Eldritch Wizardry

The Rod actually first appeared in "Eldritch Wizardry", a supplement for the white box edition. It is explained that the rod is also known as "The Rod of Law", and that it was used in a war between the Wind Dukes of Aaqa and the Queen of Chaos. The rod was used to imprison the Queen's general, Miska the Wolf-Spider during The Battle of Pesh.

AD&D 1st Edition

The 1e Dungeon Master's Guide has a massive pile of artifacts listed in it, including the rod.

Here's what we learn:

The first part of the rod gives you a sense of the direction of the next piece.
Each piece has a different spell-like power.
When pieces are combined, they "unlock" more spell powers.
Every time a power is used, there's a 1 in 20 chance that the rod breaks apart and the pieces teleport to random areas up to 1200 miles away.
If "out of order" pieces touch each other (the 1st part touching the 3rd, for example), the higher numbered piece teleports away to a random location up to 1,000 miles away.
Once three sections are joined, the wielder is unable to let it go until all pieces are joined.

The book actually leaves it to you to pick out the rod's powers. That seems like a lot of work.

The "Dwarven" Quest for the Rod of Seven Parts

This "adventure path" was run in a series of AD&D tournaments in 1982 at various conventions. These were written by Frank Mentzer who you may know as the "jokiest" D&D adventure writer of all time. He's the guy who included the receptionist in Lolth's spidership in Queen of the Demonweb Pits.

From what I understand, you must use the pregens in this adventure. There's 5 dwarves and a human mage. AD&D Tournaments were meant to test your SKILLS in these three essential categories:

Role-Playing
Rules Knowledge
Cooperation

The heroes go through a series of 4 modules (some broken into two parts) on a quest to collect all 7 parts of the rod:

Igex Pass/The Fiery Fortress: A combat-oriented adventure that tests players on whether they know when they should run away.

Thor's Fountain: A dungeon with lots of vertical sections. Thor's Fountain is a large geyser.

Yog's Dessert: "Dessert" is not a typo. It's Frank Mentzer. A large castle with many levels, including a 10-level black tower. It's on an island, and the piece of the road phases in and out of existence.

Tinker's Canyon: Part 1 has a battle with a family of red dragons. Part two has a wilderness journey and cave exploration. There's these magic pillars that summon guardian maidens.

Air Plane!: Yep. Air Plane. This is set in the elemental plane of air. There's a donut-shaped city of djinn (air genies). The vizier of the city has the final piece of the rod.

There's piles of great details on this adventure here, including a rundown of the version of the rod created by Mentzer himself. His rod is more focused on protecting the wielder. If you try to disassemble the rod, you must make a saving throw with a -5 penalty or DIE.

This rod has a lot of fun effects. The wielder can speak any language. The wielder grows 3 inches and 15 pounds every time he or she uses certain powers. It changes your alignment to Chaotic Neutral (?!) and you lose one level! Get a load of this. It pollutes all holy water within 10 feet automatically.

AD&D 2nd Edition

The rod is featured in the Book of Artifacts. The art of the rod is basically a pile of sticks sitting on grass.

The parts fit together in order of ascending length
The pieces are 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 15 inches in length.
Using the rod causes the wielder to suffer "...an immediate shift to an ultra-lawful alignment that would make a paladin seem unprincipled". The book actually says this would make PCs unplayable, and that the rod should only be used by NPCs. That's lame.
Bringing two pieces within a foot of each other causes the larger piece to teleport to a random location d100 miles away.

The wind dukes actually impaled Miska the Wolf-Spider on the rod. His blood covered the rod, and his chaotic essence is what shattered it into seven pieces. This caused an explosion which sent Miska through a planar rift to an unknown plane.

The powers are given, from the smallest piece (the tip) to the largest:

Cure light wounds 1/day
Slow 1/day
Haste 1/day
Gust of wind 5/day
True Seeing 1/day
Hold monster 1/day
Heal 1/day

The book also gives us the powers that can be unlocked as pieces combine:

Two parts: fly at will!
Three parts: 20% magic resistance
Four parts: Control winds 2/day
Five parts: Shape change 2/day
Six parts: Wind walk 1/day
Fully assembled: Restoration 1/day, and an aura of Law that causes enemies to have to make a saving throw or flee in panic!

Assembling the Rod: Combining two pieces is a delicate process. You have to spend a day inscribing wards an glyph on each segment.

The suggested means of destruction are interesting. Apparently, if Miska and the rod are on the plane of Concordant Opposition at the same time, they are destroyed. The Plane of Concordant Opposition is also known as The Outlands, which is a frequent adventuring locale in my Planescape campaign.

Dragon Magazine #224 - A History of the Rod of Seven Parts

Author Skip Williams thinks he may have invented the rod. He created an adventure for his group that involved collecting four pieces of a magic item called The Staff of Cynnius.

"I shared the idea with the gaming crowd in Lake Geneva, and the actual Rod appeared shortly thereafter. For all I know, I invented the basic concept."

He actually stats out the Staff of Cynnius in this article.

Rod of Seven Parts Boxed Set Adventure

This is a gigantic adventure by Skip Williams. I have tried to run this two or three times, but every single time the campaign gets derailed (most recently, a wizard tried to assemble it and scattered the pieces and we just gave up).

The box has four books. Book one has three entirely different intro adventures for the DM to pick from. This is handy, as there is a chance a rod piece will get scattered and the extra adventures might be put to use. Here's the other adventures. This has spoilers galore:

Spelunking: The lair of an aboleth. The piece of the rod is actually in the slime on the aboleth's belly.

Uninvited Guests: The rod is in a cloud giant's home. The cloud giants have a visitor, a fire giant named Siiri. She is using the piece of the rod as a hairpin. She doesn't know what the rod is, but does use its magic haste power often.

Hospitality: Two parts of the rod are in the possession of a jackalwere who has been turned to stone by a medusa. The medusa accompanies a big pile of genies in a valley.

The Forgotten Temple: The sixth part is in a pocket dimension created by a pit fiend named Ulthut. He is trying to keep the piece out of the hands of the Queen of Chaos and her demons. This dimension is odd - it's just like a tower at nighttime in a regular world. It's crawling with undead.

The Citadel of Chaos: The seventh part is guarded by Miska the wolf spider himself. He's trapped in the plane of Pandemonium. The heroes must raid his home and have a final battle.

The third book in the boxed set is really awesome. It's got pages and pages on the rod - the powers, the command words, assembling and disassembling. It's got side trek adventures that tie in to the spyder fiends and the wind dukes in very direct and entertaining ways. It's even got a game of chance called Dragonfire.

There's cards and poster maps. There's this one piece of cardstock which gives you all the information you need on the rod. To me, this was the most handy thing in the whole box.

What is the Problem: Why is this boxed set forgotten? Why isn't this adventure talked about as a classic? It's well thought out. It's beyond epic. It has piles of art from TSR legends Erol Otus and Jim Roslof. It fleshes out a central D&D story first introduced in 1976!

I can think of two reasons why this adventure gets overlooked:

It's really ugly. The box is an eyesore and the covers are hideous. A lot of the interior art is not the best. The design is just not pleasing to the eye.
It is so high level that I think few characters could handle it. The third adventure deals with giants! Not many groups ever got high enough level to play this, and if they did, high level characters in 2e were more than a little problematic if I recall correctly.

The Novel

TSR published a novel, a tie-in to the release of the boxed set adventure. I actually bought it on amazon by accident a few years ago. I tried to read it but I couldn't get into it. The reviews are less than stellar:

"This is one of the least involving books I've ever read; I kept turning the pages, but only to get the darned thing over with; this is one book you can't help but start skimming through towards the end."

This one is a bit more positive and amusing:

"Don't go in expecting the sweeping, world-changing grandiosity of the original Dragonlance saga, or the deep-rootedness of R. A. Salvatore's seemingly endless saga of Drizzt the dark elf (and long may it continue). This is a simple standalone novel about a halfling and his rod"

D&D 3rd Edition

The Arms and Equipment Guide details the rod in 3rd edition. It has the same basic spell powers as the 2nd edition rod.

A non-lawful character who possesses a single segment of the rod must make a DC 17 Will save or become lawful.
Lawful wielders can make a concentration check to sense the location of the next piece, no matter how far away.
The rod can be used as a melee weapon. As more parts are joined, it becomes more powerful, eventually becoming the equivalent of a +5 quarterstaff.
When assembled, it has the power to cast true resurrection, but doing so causes the rod to scatter.

Age of Worms

This adventure path ran in Dungeon Magazine back in the 3rd edition era. It is regarded as one of the best campaigns of all time.

The Whispering Cairns (Dungeon #124): This is the first adventure of the path. It is a dungeon set in the tomb of a wind duke who died at the battle of Pesh! The wind duke's name was Zosiel.

A Gathering of Winds (Dungeon Magazine #129): The heroes return to the whispering cairn in this adventure. They head into the tomb of another Wind Duke, named Icosiol. There's awesome treasure in here, including:

Ring of the Wind Dukes: Shoots lightning and gusts of wind.
Sword of Aaqa: Whenever this sword gets a critical hit, the target is hit by a strong wind that knocks them down or send them flying up to 40 feet.
A Strange Metal rod: The final piece of the Rod of Seven Parts!

D&D 4th Edition

The rod is quite different in 4e, because 4e is so different. The wind dukes are now 7 angels who serve Bahamut. Miska was a "demonic primordial of terrible power." The rod's goal is to be assembled, to tame the elemental chaos and to destroy all remaining primordials.

The 4e rod gives you bonuses and powers as you raise its concordance score by gaining levels and killing elementals. Flouting laws or codes of conduct lowers the score by 2. Once the score is 0, the rod shatters.

The 4e rules don't really lend themselves to the rod.

Surprisingly, the rod is not included in the D&D 5th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide. I guess we'll have to wait and see where it pops up next.

Here's some details on the entities tied to the rod.

The Wind Dukes

Also known as The Vaati. They have smooth ebony skin, velvety black hair and white eyes. They once ruled a vast empire but were nearly wiped out when the war between Law and Chaos erupted.

They can fly innately
They have various wind powers like dust devil and control wind.
They do not age, and most are at least 3,000 years old.
There's 7 castes in their society. The caste known as The Wendeam are the ones who wander the planes tracking pieces of the Rod. They actually have the power to follow a teleporting creature if they can find its tracks.

They live in an ideal place called the Valley of Aaqa. It's a secluded vale ringed by mountains. The only way in is to fly.

The Queen of Chaos

She is 24 feet tall, and has "...a corpulent humanoid torso that sits atop a mass of squid-like lower body that sports a mass of powerful tentacles". She's got blue skin. She really is a lot like the villain from The Little Mermaid.

She rules a layer of The Abyss known as The Steaming Fen. She commands demons known as Spyder Fiends and plots to rescue her general and lover (!) Miska the Wolf Spider.

Miska the Wolf-Spider

Miska is a giant drider with three heads and four arms. He has one human head and two wolf heads. His bite causes you to fall into a stupr for 2 to 14 hours. Worst of all, he can't die while the rod of seven parts exists!

He broods in a hidden citadel, imprisoned in a cocoon of Law in the plane of Pandemonium.

Spyder-Fiends

These demons are a combination of spiders and wolves. Some are as big as a pony, others are as big as an elephant. They have a poison bite that puts you into a stupor for hours! They shoot invisible silk rather than webbing. There's a ton of different types of spyder-fiends.

The Ultimate Adventure

Sword of Aaqa

To me, playing an entire campaign where you go on a quest to assemble an artifact is what D&D is all about. Travelling hundreds of miles over months or years of game time, hounded by demons along the way - it seems like it would be a lot of fun.

I know some people might think it's all a bit of a cliché. When I was younger, I used to desperately try to avoid using clichés in my games. I was always striving for something wholly original. What I eventually discovered is that certain things are a cliché for a reason. It's what people want, it's what they respond to. There's a reason almost every single movie ever made has a guy and a girl who get together at the end.

I think the trick is in making it feel fresh. That comes from you, the DM. You have to communicate a feeling. I call it the "Reading a book and can't put it down" feeling. If you can infuse your game with it, you will find success.

Mike Shea of Sly Flourish is working on a D&D rules system for "Narrative Combat". What he means by that is a simpler, swifter system for resolving encounters in Dungeons & Dragons. It's an idea that's been batted around by DMs since 4th edition.

In general, this concept is used to handle minor encounters. There's only so much time people have to play D&D, and sometimes it can feel like a waste to spend more than a few minutes on taking down mooks or minions.

I am always obsessed with getting to a certain point in my sessions. I don't want the players to get bored with the campaign and I do not want to have a session where nothing gets done. I think we've all had those "shopping" sessions, where the group goes to town and buys stuff and that's about it.

Now, don't get me wrong. Shopping sessions can be really, really awesome. But you don't want a campaign full of inconsequential stuff that makes everything feel like a drag.

"Skill Challenge Fights"

I originally started cooking up "narrative combat" rules back in around 2009, when the 4e grind really started wearing down my groups. Assault on Nightwyrm Fortress in particular was excruciating. It was just hour-long fight after hour-long fight.

Ever since then, I've adopted a simple system to resolve minor combats and keep things moving:

Roll initiative.
Present a situation to a PC.
Let them resolve it in any plausible way they can think of.
When your bad guys go, have them do the kind of things you want your heroes to do.

Emphasize that this is a movie scene. Heroes should be doing unnecessary backflips, swinging on chandeliers and jumping on moving vehicles.

Sometimes I don't even roll initiative for the enemies. On each hero's turn, I tell them what a bad guy is doing. Then the hero does their action. A fail on the roll means the bad guy hits them. A success means the hero hits the bad guy. Be careful with this. It can make the game really weird if you are not running it in a clear and consistent manner.

It's important to remember that you need to think in terms of logical outcomes. You must present a very clear picture of the scenario at the start. List who is there and what objects are nearby (tools for the heroes to put to use, like an angry caged owlbear, a ceiling that could easily collapse or a pool of acid).

I once had a character use thunderwave to send an explosive barrel hurtling at a crowd of bad guys. That's the kind of thing you're looking for.

The trick here is that you have to define the boundaries. You're stepping outside the bounds of the normal rules, which is very weird for some players.

Another thing to note is that the more rules you use in your narrative combats, the more it gets bogged down and eats up time. Remember, the whole point of this is to not waste time!

Consequences and Rewards

In 4th edition, instead of doing normal damage, I'd have the participants do damage in healing surges. You could in theory do the same in 5e with hit dice.

Being that this is cinematic combat, you could also allow disarming. You could even have a bad guy target a hero's body part. Consult the lingering injuries chart in the DMG and put it to use.

Handing out piles of treasure in these encounters will feel cheap. You should probably just keep it to gold. No hero should be getting an awesome magic item in a throwaway, minor encounter.

Bar Fights

Bar fights are the perfect for narrative combats. They are fun, relatively low risk encounters full of fun opportunities:

Hit a guy with a chair, smash a bottle over a lady's head.
Chuck a dude through a table or window.
Slide someone down the bar.
Drink some booze, hold up a torch and spit fire at someone.
Take the darts off of a dart board and pin an enemy to the wall with darts through their clothes.

Some Players Will Hate This

One of the main problems with narrative combat is that certain types of players aren't comfortable with it. I have had quite a few "numbers" players and "optimizers" in my games. They like using and knowing the rules and finding cool power combinations.

These players generally don't like narrative combats. Narrative battles completely remove all of their well-thought out strategies. Now, anybody can do anything. It feels cheap and "wrong" to them.

Also, some players draw a complete blank when it's their turn. When given unlimited options, they feel completely lost. It helps to tell them to imagine their character in a movie, but you're still going to have some players who are completely paralyzed in narrative combat.

This is why you, the DM, must always have a suggestion ready for them. Write down some ideas ahead of time. When the narrative combat starts, tell them some cool things they could do. You'll find that certain players will always immediately grab one of your ideas.

It is weird to think that in a game of imagination, some players cannot handle having to imagine something on the spot. But remember that people play the game in different ways and are at the table for a number of reasons that may differ from your own.

Narrative combat is most definitely not for everyone. If a large portion of your group isn't rolling with it well, you'd be better off not doing it.

Handling Non-Standard Encounters

I have found that narrative combat is the best way to handle mass battles, sorcerous duels and ship-to-ship combat. Each of these things have been notoriously difficult to resolve in an efficient way in the context of the D&D rules. Handling it in a semi-abstract manner seems to be the best way to go. Just be careful that you don't run it so loose that it feels inconsequential.

War: If a hero is in command of a unit of troops, ask them what they want to do. Think about what your bad guys are going to do, preferably before you hear the player's strategy. This way, if the player has a clever idea, it will legit take the enemy by surprise because you were surprised by it.

Then let them roll a single die roll, modified by whatever stat, skill or power bonus that feels appropriate. Let the dice tell the story. The lower the roll, the more casualties in your unit.

Wizard Duels: Pick the spell your bad guy is going to use. Then let the hero pick his or her spell. Both of you roll arcana checks. Whoever wins, hits. If the spells have some kind of connection, maybe that comes into play. For instance, one casts ray of frost and the other casts firebolt. Maybe those cancel each other out no matter what the roll. Counterspell obviously makes a very interesting wrinkle in these types of encounters.

If both cast magic missile, you could either make it a situation where the beams hit each other, and whoever rolls a higher arcana pushes through and hits the target. Or have each roll damage and whoever gets higher affects their foe with the overflow.

Pirate Ships: Narrative combat is perfect for this. Heroes will want to swing on a rope across to the deck of the enemy ship, climb the mast, and maybe even launch themselves in a catapult.

As far as damaging the other ship, be careful not to let this be too easy. It can be hard to think of how fast a fire spreads on a wooden ship right there on the spot. You'll need to think ahead when planning your encounter, to take in account what your heroes have at their disposal. You don't want to punish them for a clever idea, but you also don't want the encounter to come off as flat.

In the end, though, you'll know an awesome idea when it's presented and you need to run with it. That's a lot of what this is: you're digging for great stories to tell other people. Clever stuff is what this is all about, twists that take you by surprise.

Narrative Gladiator Combat

Here's an example of a narrative combat I used while running the Savage Tide Campaign. The heroes had somehow ended up in Demogorgon's abyssal lair of Gaping Maw. They were in the demon city of Lemoriax.

There was this big cage on wheels pulled by slaves. It went around a statue in the town square. Gladiator-type fights happened in the cages. Obviously our heroes ended up in there and had themselves quite a battle.

There were environmental hazards:

The cage was moving, so that made moving around tricky.
The cages had spikes, so if the heroes weren't careful, they'd get impaled.
Demons would randomly stab through the bars of the cage at whoever was close.

The heroes battled a demon gladiator in the cage. At the start, I said that the gladiator was staring down the goliath, one of the heroes in the party. I wanted to establish what the bad guy's focus was in advance.

Everyone rolled initiative. I did not. Then on each player's turn, I presented them with a situation and let them run wild. So it went like this:

Player 1: A demon stabs at you with a barbed scimitar through the cage.

The player decides to try to dodge, snatch the weapon and cut out out that demon's eye. He rolls and succeeds.

Player 2 (the goliath): The gladiator lunges at you and tries to grab you and push you into a spike on the cage.

The player tries to spin the bad guy around and impale it, but fails. Our hero is impaled on spikes!

Player 3: The goliath is pinned on spikes! The demons outside the cage are closing in on him, hoping to tear off his pouches and gear to keep for themselves.

The player casts gust of wind and rolls an arcana to see if she can catch everyone in it without harming the goliath, and does.

Start of Round 2: The cage hits a bump. Everyone make a dex save or fall prone (including the gladiator).

That's the basic idea. The trickiest thing is deciding how much somebody can do in a round. It also might feel weird to let your bad guys go on each character's turn. I generally let them do a little more, but really they just make one main maneuver per round.

I am running the final chapter of the Great Modron March tonight, so I should have the summary up tomorrow. I also posted episode 4 of the great modron march on youtube. Thanks for reading!

We finished up The Great Modron March tonight. It was pretty awesome.

The Party

(Jessie) Bidam - Platinum Dragonborn Fighter
(George) Theran - Drow Wizard

The Modron Crucible

I was worried we wouldn't finish on time, so we got right into it. The hook for this adventure is that there's rumors that the modrons have created an artifact containing all kinds of forbidden knowledge. It's called "The Modron Crucible". The heroes are sent by Vrischika to find out if it is real (it isn't), and to try to get it from the modrons.

The Plane of Acheron

The march had passed into the plane of Acheron, which is this plane where there's all these giant cubes. The cubes crash into each other once in a while. All sorts of creatures live on the cubes. There's one cube which is full of orcs and goblins who are at war with each other.

The adventurers headed to the gate town of Rigus where they had to wait a week before they were allowed to use the portal. They passed through and began following their map, walking over a sea of dead orcs and goblins.

Their journey would take them through a few portals,sending them from one cube to another. This route would eventually catch them up to where the modron march was.

Grashmog

The heroes came to a goblin city called Grashmog. They were not allowed in unless they wore special magic bracelets (the bracelets allowed the goblins to paralyze them with a command word). The heroes weren't sure what the bracelets did, and flatly refused to put them on. They were kicked out.

The heroes decided to try to sneak in to the city, but it was a fiasco. Their sneaking rolls were about as bad as it gets (I believe it as nothing but natural 1's and 2's). When spotted, they killed a pair of goblin guards swiftly and hid the bodies.

They tried to sneak some more... more bad rolls. They'd been spotted outside the temple where the portal was. The shaman in the temple decided to humiliate them. In the adventure, it is said that the shaman won't let the heroes pass through the portal until they proclaim the greatness of Maglubiyet.

So considering how the heroes had been caught sneaking through the city, the shaman decided that they needed to really humiliate themselves, by shouting all the things they'd like to do with and to Maglubiyet. What this shaman didn't bank on is the fact that these particular heroes have no shame and they will gladly shout anything, even when it involves performing certain carnal acts on the god of goblins.

Hammergrim

Our heroes passed through the portal and appeared in a duergar city called Forgegloom. They were not harassed. They got a peek at the Idiot King, who thankfully I had read up on. The Idiot King is.. an idiot. He resides in the Hall of Memory, where spirits of ancient duergar kings dwell. When the idiot king gets on this dark serpentine block, the spirits can possess him and make rulings.

The adventurers thought that this guy was fascinating, but didn't want to get in trouble so they got out of the city. From here they needed to cross The Mountains of Despair to get to another duergar city. I cooked up an encounter for each day:

Day 1: They came across a floating gem. In Acheron, every time a spell is cast, a spell reflection gem appears somewhere else on the plane, containing the opposite spell. Bidam walked right up to it and grabbed it, and received a jolt of lighting. Then it went inert. Their mimir helped explain what it was.

Day 2: The adventurers were on a narrow mountain path. There was a cave. Out of the cave came a four-legged, armor-plated creature with antlers. I didn't say the words "rust monster". Every other time I use them, I can't help but tell my players that this creature is "rust colored" with a big, cheesy grin. They immediately know what they are dealing with.

In this instance, Bidam let it walk right up to him and touch him with its antennae. Bidam's armor began to corrode! The heroes screamed and rolled initiative.

After a few rounds, the rust monster was dead and Bidam had a -2 to AC and a -1 to damage. He ended up punching the rust monster to death while Theran pelted it with spells.

Theran thought for a moment, and tried using the mending spell to repair Bidam's armor. Looking at the mending spell description, I'm not sure if this would work. "As long as the break or tear is no larger than 1 foot in any dimension, you mend it..". And: "This spell can physically repair a magic item or construct, but the spell can't restore magic to an object". None of Bidam's stuff was magical.

Mending takes a minute to cast, and it is a cantrip. So maybe it would take a series of castings to repair the corrosion? No big deal, Bidam was able to get replacement gear at the next city.

Day 3: The heroes were climbing a steep incline and a massive flock of bird flew right through them. Acheron is full of birds like crows and ravens. Both heroes rolled extremely well and avoided a potentially deadly fall.

The Mines of Marsellin

The adventurers got to the final city and passed through the portal there. They'd at last appeared in the mines of marsellin.

The mines are on a cube made of broken weapons and armor. Everything on the cube turns into iron/stone after a week or so. It is said that all things "destroyed" by a sphere of annihilation appear here. The heroes got very nervous. In our previous campaign, the heroes defeated Orcus and an undead god by using a sphere of annihilation.

As soon as they appeared near the mines, 4 zombie hobgoblins attacked the adventurers. They were wearing tabards that depicted a rust dragon. This cube is ruled by a rust dragon named Coirosis.

The heroes made quick work of the zombies and saw an obvious trail. The modrons had recently marched here.They followed the trail and caught up to the modrons. The modrons had started the march with 8,000+ members. Now, at the end, there were only about 100 surviving modrons.

They saw one modron, a quadrone, watching the march while hiding.

This modron was trictaculus, the rogue who had been forced to be a judge that the heroes freed a few sessions back. He explained that he'd been able to catch up to the march, but that the modrons rejected him. He'd been demoted to quadrone status (which apparently is what happens to all rogue modrons). In the adventure, the rogue is not trictaculus, but a modron named "8". I decided to use Trictaculus to link things together a but more.

Trictaculus said he wanted to leave with the heroes, but then... a massive army of zombies attacked the modrons. Trictaculus then told the heroes if they'd fend off the attack, he'd tell them why the modron march had happened in the first place.

The Final Battle

We proceeded to have a massive battle where I threw waves of hobgoblin zombies at the heroes and the modron. Quadrones in 5e have 4 attacks. I gave the zombies just one hit point each, as I like "minions". So basically, Trictaculus was killing 4 zombies per round (he needed to roll a 4 to hit them). The heroes were handling the rest just fine.

Slowly, the waves chipped away at everyone, actually focusing on the modron.

And then the leader of the zombie horde, Craggis, jumped in. Craggis is an evil, sentient sword who animated a suit of armor to act as his "wielder". Craggis serves Coirosis, the rust dragon. I had foreshadowed Craggis last session, but the heroes didn't pick up on it. Heiron Lifegiver had created this sword and was sort of embarrassed about it.

Craggis waded in and started slicing up the heroes as waves of zombies continued to come. Eventually, Theran was cut down and making death saves. Bidam got dropped too! The bad guys took out Trictaculus and then joined the battle against the modron march.

Theran made his death saves and was stable. Bidam failed a death save, made 2 and then.. rolled a natural 20! Bidam was awake and had one hit point!

He quaffed a potion and revived Theran with one as well. They looked at Trictaculus.. he was dying and no magic could heal him.

I asked them what they wanted to do. They knew Craggis was hurt really bad. He had two hit points left. They decided to attack!

Bidam missed a ranged attack, but Theran hit with a firebolt. The armor of Craggis was destroyed. The evil sword clattered to the ground. Craggis was defeated! The modrons mopped up the zombies as the heroes tried to help Trictaculus.

Trictaculus spoke his last words. He told the heroes that the modrons were marching because their god, Primus, was dead.

The heroes were shocked and wondered who or what had killed Primus. They carefully wrapped up Craggis and stuffed the evil sword in a backpack. They watched as the modrons got back in formation and marched to the final portal. The modron march was over. They had returned to their home plane of Mechanus.

The heroes spotted lots of weapons in the mines among the pile of zombie corpsses - including magic items! Bidam got a fancy new sword, and Theran found magic bracers.

The adventurers decided they'd better get moving before the rust dragon sent reinforcements. The heroes headed back to Sigil.

Overall

We're done! This is a very good adventure that is full of fun ideas. I have been waiting about 20 years to run this, and it was definitely worth it. To me, the best chapter was the trip through Limbo. The whole concept of chaos-shaping really made the game come to life. I also really liked the adventure in the abyss and the final chapter. There's tons of great things you can do with Acheron. You could easily run a whole campaign there.

I think overall this adventure could have used a little more structure. It would have been nice to set up Craggis somehow as the big bad guy. And the revelation at the end is cool, but I think the players might want a little more after all they went through.

I also think the adventure should have gone out of its way to make sure the heroes knew who Primus was before the final adventure, as obviously that ties into the big revelation at the end. I had caught this on my own, but it's an easy thing for a DM to miss. This book sets up the other mega-adventure, Dead Gods, so this isn't meant to be the end of the whole story.

If I were to run this again, I think I would have set it up where the heroes are part of an organization that is dedicated to protecting the modrons from the beginning of the march to the end. That would have made it easier to link the heroes to these adventures. I'd also have liked to run an adventure where the heroes protect the modrons as they pass through a layer of hell.

What's Next

Next week we're going to play an adventure based on a Monte Cook article from Dragon Magazine, where the heroes will go to the astral plane and search the giant floating bodies of dead gods. Then we'll play through the Chris Perkins adventure "Umbra". After that, we'll play the sequel to the Great Modron March - Dead Gods.

Demogorgon in Out of the Abyss

If you've seen the cover of the upcoming adventure, Out of the Abyss, you know that it features Demogorgon on the cover. As dungeon masters, our work is never done. What do you say we get ready for the adventure right now by studying all of the Demogorgon D&D lore so we can be properly prepared to wow our players when the Rage of Demons storyline hits?

Demogorgon, Prince of Demons

In Dungeons & Dragons, there's quite a bit of lore when it comes to demons and devils and it can be quite daunting to new players. In my experience, at one time it was pretty common to see dungeon masters use devils and demons together.

But they are, in fact, enemies, and each has their own epic story and home. To help my players keep this stuff straight, I always tell them this:

Demons (Tanar'ri) are chaotic and live in the Abyss.
Devils (Baatezu) are lawful and they live in hell.

Today I am going to write about a demon lord who is perhaps one of the great villains in all of Dungeons & Dragons. While Orcus is a bit more iconic, Demogorgon is perhaps the most threatening of them all.

In this article, I am going to go through each edition of Dungeons & Dragons and take a look at Demogorgon and how he was presented. The hope here is to provide a resource for those of us using Demogorgon, to have all the relevant lore in one place.

The Essential Information

Here's Demogorgon in a nutshell:

Demogorgon is the Prince of Demons - most powerful of all the demon lords.
He has two heads named Aameul and Hethadriah that secretly plot against each other.
He rules an abyssal layer called Gaping Maw.
He is close allies with the aquatic demon lord, Dagon. Dagon manipulates each of Demogorgon's heads to be paranoid of the other.

Demogorgon was originally described as having a head that looks either like a baboon or a mandril. Here's a baboon head. Here is a mandrill head.

Real Life Origins

The James Jacobs article in Dragon #357 sums it up perfectly, so here is a portion of it in image form:

AD&D 1st Edition

Demogorgon is 18 feet tall and has two heads "...which bear the visages of evil baboons or perhaps mandrills with the hideous coloration of the later named beasts". His two necks "resemble snakes". Demogorgon is insanely powerful:

He can hypnotize up to 100 creatures with his gaze with less than 15 hit dice with no saving throw!
The left head has the power of a rod of beguiling.
The right head can cause insanity, which lasts 10-60 minutes.
He has a forked tail that drains l1-4 levels of the people it hits!
If he hits you with his arm tentacles, a limb on your body will rot off in 6 rounds, which permanently removes 35% of your hit points.
He's got every psionic power, 95% magic resistance and a paragraph of spell-like abilities.

I believe that his 200 hit points makes him the most powerful creature in all of 1st edition AD&D.

Dragon Magazine #36

In this issue is a small humorous column called "Meeting Demogorgon" that is about what would happen if your party said Demogorgon's name out loud, and Demogorgon appeared. "In a loud, deep, doomsday roar he thunders, WHO CALLS UPON DEMOGORGON, PRINCE OF DEMONS, RULER OF THE ABYSSAL, THE INVINCIBLE HORROR?!?!"

There's a list of responses which includes things like:

Point to someone else in the party and say, “He did it!”
Convert to his religion immediately.
Try to convert him (“Hey, wanna be lawful good?”)
Offer up one of your companions as an involuntary sacrifice.

So yeah, that was in Dragon.

Dragon Magazine #79

This issue has an article on saints of different D&D entities. One of them is Saint Kargoth, a fallen paladin transformed into a death knight by Demogorgon.

He has a sword called Gorgorin the Shatterer. When he hits you with it, you make a saving throw or be disintegrated! He eventually lost it and has been searching for it ever since.
Kargoth travels in a glowing green chariot pulled by 6 nightmares.
He's got a massive pile of powers and abilities. Supposedly he is nearly as powerful as Demogorgon.

AD&D 2nd Edition

Ixixichitl

Demogorgon was presented in Monster Mythology, one of the blue-covered DM books. He is categorized as a "Lesser God".

He is worshiped by ixixachitl, which are a race of evil, sentient vampiric manta rays. When these creatures energy drain other creatures, some of that energy goes right to Demogorgon, empowering him further.
He can create avatars of himself, which are 18 feet tall but much weaker than his 1st edition form.
He hates Sekolah (god of the sahuagin).

The concept of an ixixichatl priest is so bizarre to me. But that's mostly what this Demogorgon entry is about.

D&D 3rd Edition

Demogorgon first appears in the Book of Vile Darkness. The art depicts him very differently.

Demogorgon is known as "Lord of all that Swims in Darkness".
Each of his heads has its own name: Aamaeul and Hethadriah. Each head secretly plots agains the other.
Aameul actually wants to split from the other head, out of selfishness and jealousy.
Demogorgon's forces are comprised of hezrous, balors, mariliths, aboleths, scrags and skum.
He wages war with Grazzt and Orcus.
The text actually says he has hyena heads.
His symbol is of a forked tail, wrapped around a sword or skull.

Why the Hyena Heads?

Monte Cook was asked about Demogorgon's altered 3rd edition appearance on his forum.

His response: "Demogorgon's heads is the result of a terrible error. I take full responsibility. I thought it said "baboon" or "mandril" until it came out and I saw if for myself."

Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss

Demogorgon is explicitly said to have baboon heads. Troglodytes worship him as Ahmon-Ibor, the Sibilant Beast. Yuan-ti know him as Siosicash. The ixixichitl don't speak his name out loud.

We get a few pages that detail Demogorgon's Abyssal Layer, "The Gaping Maw". It is a vast, primordial jungle with an abyssal sea. Monsters living here include bar-lguras, nalfeshnees, troglodytes and demonic dinosaurs including spinosauruses with scar-riddled bodies that bear the personal seal of Demogorgon.

Abysm: This is where Demogorgon lives. Abysm is two connected towers rising out of the sea, each topped with a fanged skull. They actually extend so deep underwater that they connect to Dagon's layer, Shadowsea.

Lemoriax: This is a crumbling city dotted with ziggurats that is home to tens of thousands of savage demons. Demogorgon often climbs onto the tallest step pyramid to shout blasphemous declarations. Lemoriax is well-known for having thriving, diverse slave markets.

Bastion of Broken Souls

The Cathezar

This is a high level adventure made for D&D 3.0. One of Demogorgon's heads, Aameul, thinks it has found a way to slay the other head without destroying itself. He thinks if he can slay a red dragon named Ashardalon, who is feeding on preincarnate souls, and absorb its soul, Demogorgon might survive the death of the other head.

To kill the dragon Ashardalon (who has a demon heart beating in his chest), Demogorgon needs the blood of one of the heroes of your group! Agents of one head are out to get the PC, agents of the other head are trying to help the party. Pretty crazy.

Aameul's main agent is The Cathezar. She is a half-demon, half-devil. She looks like a marilith with chains - so I'd assume she's a cross between a marilith and a kyton.

Hethadriah's main agent is Nurn, a death slaad (!!). He is a master of stealth who can magically alter himself to appear as a human male with blonde hair and green eyes.

Dungeon Magazine #120

The Lost Temple of Demogorgon is an adventure is for high level characters (14th level!). It involves a dungeon full of demonic apes that worship demogorgon and a death knight who wants to reverse his condition.

There's a magic anvil called the Dread Forge. It was created by Demogorgon to turn dinosaurs into thinking, reptilian humanoids. It is powered by sacrifices. Spellcasters can use it to bestow all sorts of enchantments on items. The Dread Forge can create flaming weapons, enchanted armor, rings of protection, and bracers of armor among other things. Crazy! All items are "demon-tainted", meaning that the items radiate evil and drain levels from good and lawful individuals who try to wield them.

Dragon Magazine #357

Demogorgon: Prince of Demons is is a gigantic, definitive article by the great James Jacobs. It covers everything you need to know about Demogorgon. It starts off by detailing Demogorgon's origin, which goes like this:

First there were the obyriths - hideous proto-demons led by Obox-Ob. Then the Queen of Chaos ran them off and created the tanar'ri (demons).

The very first tanar'ri was Demogorgon. She thought he was defective, more or less, and cast him aside. Other demon lords rose up that were more to her liking, including Miska the Wolf Spider, but Miska and the Queen of Chaos were chased off by the eladrin.

This means there was a power vacuum. Many onlookers assumed that either Orcus or Grazzt would duke it out and claim the mantle of Prince of Demons. But instead, Demogorgon came out of nowhere and took over.

Then we get a massive list of Demogorgon's schemes. One of them involves a demon lord I've never heard of before: Zuregurex, Lord of the Drowned Dead. He rules the 480th layer of the Abyss, Guttlevech, a realm of endless shipwrecks, hurricanes and blood-soaked beaches. How awesome is that?

Demogorgon's allies include his "advisor", Dagon, Zuggtmoy, and Ilsidahur, the demon lord of bar-lguras.

We even get a discussion of Demogorgon's girlfriends, which includes Malcanthet, Queen of the Succubi. They have made many hideous offspring, including a beast named Arendagrost ("The Maw of the Abyss", who appears in Dungeon #150).

Verakia, a demonic dinosaur

There's piles more - details on Demogorgon's cult (including some really disturbing stuff where a demon makes you eat part of your own brain), minions, and a demonic tyrannosaurus known as a verakia.

Dungeon Magazine issues #139 - #150

The Savage Tide adventure Path is all about Demogorgon. His followers are creating these shadow pearls, which are like bombs. When they explode, they turn the surrounding land into a realm similar to Gaping Maw, weakening the boundaries between the prime material plane and the Abyss. All of the people in the bomb's radius transform into Demogorgon-worshiping monsters.

It turns out that this plot is part of a scheme by one of Demogorgon's heads to transmute and absorb the other head.

In issue #147, there is an adventure called "Into the Maw". In it, our heroes use a magic item known as a wakeportal (a crystal tear you can embed into your sailing ship) to travel to Gaping Maw. There, the heroes explore Divided's Ire, a prison. Our heroes must break their friend out!

The whole campaign culminates in "Prince of Demons", which is in Dungeon #150, the final printed issue of Dungeon Magazine. In this adventure, the adventurers lead an army on an assault on Demogorgon's layer. The heroes' army may include Orcus himself!

This adventure is pretty much as epic it gets.

D&D 4th Edition

Demogorgon actually made the cover of Monster Manual 2! Not too shabby.

His followers now include kuo toa.
Mortal cults of Demogorgon are war bands who wander from town to town, burning and looting. They destroy all they see.
His stats retain most of the core concepts, though the gaze attacks are severely weakened. He gets two full turns each round, because of his two heads
Aameul prefers deception, Hethadriah favors destruction.
Originally Demogorgon had one head and one mind, but the deity Amoth nearly split him in two. I assume this was during the Dawn War, the ancient battle between gods and primordials that is the backbone of the 4e story.
Twins are revered by the cults, and often end up leading the cults. The cults usually destroy themselves when the twins turn on each other. What a great idea.

Demogorgon's Brother?

I usually try to stick to official D&D stuff for these guides, but in this case it involves Gary Gygax writing about Demogorgon in a Greyhawk novel. Seems worth a mention to me! Gary Gygax wrote a series of novels starring Gord the Rogue. Demogorgon appears in his "Gord the Rogue" books. In them, it is said that Demogorgon has a brother named Mandrillagon.

I don't own most of these books. Mandrillagon is described here on this fantastic Gord resource page: "This demon lord is a monstrous, blue-faced parody of a mandril. He has filthy yellow-gray fangs and speaks in roars, coughing, and barking. He controls two planes with his winged monkey demons. He is a long ally and blood kin of Demogorgon, whom he fears."

Demogorgon is a bit different in the Gord Books. His gaze attacks come out as beams from his eyes. One head shoots green beams, the others shoots maroon. He also owns an artifact known as a Venom Fountain. Seems like you might be able to do something cool with this.

Demogorgon Links

Tim Brannan has an article on his version of Demogorgon, which has some cool ideas in it. I particularly like the idea of the Blood Apes.

There is a fantastic article on Demogorgon here on the D&D site. It even covers the version of Demogorgon in the D&D basic set.

Zak S. wrote a giant article discussing Demogorgon, and he came up with a huge system of covens who read codexes to gain random mutations.

Check out this 4e Demogorgon cartoon, too.

We played through another chapter of The Great Modron March last night. The heroes are now 3rd level. This might pose a problem in the latter chapters, as I think they are made for characters of significantly higher levels. I am pretty sure I can adjust them without too much difficulty, though.

For tonight's game, I used stats from Elemental Evil. I think I based the bad guys on the air cultist numbers.

The Party

(George) Theran - Elf Mage
(Jessie) Bidam - Dragonborn Fighter

Bidam leveled up to 3, and decided to become an eldritch knight.

The Brothel of Slaking Intellectual Lusts

Fall-From-Grace

The adventurers returned to Sigil, still suffering from the beast pox. Theran had owl features, and Bidam had dog features. They bumped into the cadaver collector they'd created, who was politely handing a corpse over to a dustman collector (I wanted to show that the creature was overly-nice due to the silver sea water running through its veins).

The next day, still beast-poxed, Xaldra Miloni showed up. She needed help with a job. This was my way of trying to make them feel connected to her, and also to run them through a Planescape: Torment plot that I liked from the computer game.

Basically, the heroes had to go to the Brothel of Slaking Intellectual Lusts and find the lost/stolen veil of one of the Sensates (she's a medusa - she really needs that veil). It was stolen by a guy who was magically disguising himself as an armoire in the building. I ran him like he was a bit of a pervert.

The players really got a kick out of this, and got to interact with a few of the sensates. Remember, this is the place where beautiful women talk to and listen to anyone who comes in. I made sure to have them meet Fall-From-Grace, who is a succubus who abandoned her evil ways. She is a great NPC, maybe the coolest succubus NPC in D&D (check out my article on the succubus and see for yourself).

There's one sensate, Kimaxsi Adder-tongue, who has spiky hair and goat legs. She is very cruel. People come in just to be insulted by her. Bidam figured out that Kimaxsi likes to be insulted back, and after a few volleys of vile, profane insults, the two took a liking to each other.

The reward for finding Marissa's veil was a 3 month stay in Sylvania, the gate town to Arborea. This launches us right into Chapter 5.

Return to Sylvania

Sylvania is #5 on this map.

The heroes go to their suite at the Drunken Leaf and we commence with weeks of drunken debauchery, of course using the carousing table in the DMG.

Theran ends up losing at a game of strip poker. Bidam runs into her enemy, Titanicus, who defeats her in a game of chance and Bidm ends up having to spend a night in a rotating vomitorium.

The modron march eventually comes through the town. The people treat it like a festival, painting the modrons, putting beads on them, stuff like that.

The adventurers lost sight of their friend Xaldra during the revels, and the next day she still hadn't been found.

It turned out that she'd been abducted and brought to a wizard in the woods. The wizard, named Valrna, was doing experiments like the Tacharim from chapter 3. He was trying to merge people and modrons!

So Xaldra did return to the suite, but in "modronoid" form. She had arm blades and was completely insane with rage! The heroes subdued her and brought her to a jail where she could be held and restrained safely.

The Bleak Cabal

The adventurers asked around town. All signs pointed to some creepy, drab guys in the woods. The heroes tracked them down to a cave, and decided to talk to them. By now, Jessie understood that in most of these Planescape adventures, talking to the bad guys is an option.

The guards were wary, but the adventurers won them over. They played dice (Theran won). It turned out that these guards were members of the Bleak Cabal, a faction that believes that there is no meaning in the multiverse. They follow three main points:

Quit looking for meaning
Accept whatever happens
Look inward

The adventurers learned that the cabal was working for Valran the wizard. They pretended they wanted to get hired by him. The cabal gave the heroes directions.

Valran's Home

Valran's home is in the shape of a flower. Jessie insisted it was a mustache. They explored the place, which has a lot of neat little rooms in it. They found:

A magic stone that repels small insects (for use in a dining area).
A room with over a dozen glowing colored stones. Experimenting showed that the stones became inert when taken out of the room. They would eventually learn that these were sensory stones that held memories of the people Valran had abducted.
A tapestry that, when touched, showed different landscapes.
Another tapestry in a room with a crystal ball that Bidam immediately figured out was sort of like a security camera. It showed the exterior of the building, as well as the interior rooms.

Using the tapestry, the heroes scanned every room. They found a room with humanoid prisoners, another with modron prisoners, and a room with 7 modronoids who were held in place by a magic web. The modronoids were hacking their way out of the web and would soon be free!

Valran

The heroes then found the room with Valran in it. He was in a blood-spattered lab, taking notes in a big book.

The heroes found the room, exploded in and got the surprise on him. Bidam scored a critical hit. Poor Valran never had a chance (I gave him a few first level spells and about 35 hit points). They knocked him out and tied him up.

To their dismay, the modronoids broke out of their room and came rampaging down the hall towards them. Bidam killed two and then they barricaded the door shut. They could hear the other modronoids shambling like zombies out in the hallway.

The heroes forced Valran awake and questioned him. They learned that Valran was a sensate, and wanted to merge with a modron to experience what that was like. Valran admitted that pressing a sensory stone to the chest of a modronoid could infuse the creature with memories from its old life and restore some of the modronoid's sanity. They'd still be a hideous monstrosity, but perhaps they wouldn't be insane murder machines.

Theran put his finger in Valran's ear and cast firebolt, killing him.

"Curing" the Modronoids

What followed was a pretty insane plan. The heroes ran out into the hall, ducking modronoid attacks. They got two modronoids to chase them to the sensory stones, and then Bidam fought them while Theran grabbed sensory stones and pressed them to the modronoids, until the right one was used and the modronoid gained its memories.

Bidam has a high AC so this worked for a while, but Bidam took a few slices and then Theran got cut down! Theran was dying! There were two modronoids trying to murder him while he frantically tried to use the sensory stones.

Jessie remembered that she had belief points, and used them to pick the right stones and to render the modronoids inert. Bidam healed his trusty wizard buddy and stabilized him.

Bidam carried Theran's unconscious body around. He freed the prisoners and the modrons. Then he went to the crystal ball room. He was curious about it...

The Crystal Ball

Bidam plopped Theran to the ground and touched the crystal ball. Poor Bidam. He failed a saving throw and was paralyzed! And in this adventure, he was not paralyzed for a minute or even an hour. He was paralyzed until someone cast dispel magic on him!

Hours later, Theran awoke and saw Bidam standing there, paralyzed. He knew they didn't have a lot of time before the Bleak Cabal guards would come to the complex. He would have to get Bidam out of there....

That's where we had to stop. This was the best session of the campaign so far! I didn't think much of this adventure when I read it, but as is often the case, it comes off differently when you actually run it.

My players have vacations for the next three weeks (George next week, and Jessie the two after). I'm trying to get "guest stars" to fill in, but Sunday at midnight is a hard time for most people to make.

I spent a few hours preparing for today's session. We're finally in the temple of elemental evil, and I wanted to make sure I had the whole place ready. We're doing the air temple, aka the Temple of Howling Hatred.

I've pretty much taken all the sand out of the sandbox. I removed two exits in this temple section. They lead to the fire temple and to the Fane of the Eye, both areas much higher level than they are. I have constructed this so that the characters will march right into the water temple next, as that is for level 7 characters.

A weird thing about this dungeon is that there's a good chance that the characters will end up heading right to the big bad guy (Aerisi) right away. But they'll still have to make their way through more of the dungeon, which seems a bit awkward.

The Party

Elf Rogue: Played by a 4th grader, her character's name is Lucky and she has a black cat named "Bad Luck". Her character loves ghost peppers.
Dwarf Cleric: In real life, played by Lucky's dad. He has a scottish accent and worships Ilmater.
Drow Rogue: Middle Schooler. Wants to be evil, but Adventurer's League rules restrict this. Has a dog.
Goliath Barbarian: Middle Schooler. Really nice guy.
Human Bard: The player is about 25 years old, knows the rules pretty well.
Human Paladin: Worships Helm. Played by the bard's dad, who played old D&D and is new to 5e.
Human Rogue: A new player. Taking to the game very well.

Plaza of the Muses

The bard is in room 4.

We had left off last time with the adventurers walking through a hallway. Arrow slits opened in the walls and kenku started pelting them with arrows.

We picked up from there, and to my surprise, the heroes ran from this room into room 4, where a bard named Windharrow was playing the flute with five initiates. They were terrible musicians. The heroes ran in, one by one, and Windharrow thought they had come to audition (I swear this is in the module). So, the adventurers began to play the flute, mostly unsuccessfully. The kenku ran into the room and attacked the heroes, who suddenly had a giant pile of foes to defeat.

The characters are level 6, and today we got to see just how powerful they are. The party bard shut down the enemy bard with counterspell and then a hold person spell. The adventurers chopped up these bad guys with ease. One kenku ran, the heroes didn't follow. He ran to the temple to alert Aerisi (the prophet who is on the cover of the adventure).

The characters then explored a hallway where three guys were tied to pillars, starving. To join the cult, they had to subsist on nothing but air for days. The heroes tried to free them, but the crazed would-be cultists told them not to. Lucky finally forced a guy to eat some rations, but he declared that Yan-C-Bin, prince of elemental air, would see to it that no digestion took place.

Palace Plaza

Then the adventurers came to the main area in this place - a giant pyramid surrounded by a moat. On the top of the pyramid was a cultist (a skyweaver - powerful spellcaster) riding a wyvern!

Since they'd been warned by the kenku, the bad guys attacked. To my utter surprise, the heroes trounced these two. Part of it was some massive critical hits rolled by the players. The wyvern was very, very deadly (the poison in its tail does 24 damage!). One rogue actually did go down, but the party has an abundance of healing and they won out in a swift and convincing fashion.

The Waterfall

Then, we had... an incident. The heroes were about to enter the pyramid. They picked a set of double doors at the base of it, ready to bust in and mess some bad guys up. I narrated the nearby crashing sound of the waterfall (the moat nearby had a waterfall that plunged into a dark chasm). Lucky, whose player is nine years old, told me she was going to swim to the waterfall.

I stopped her and told her it looked incredibly dangerous to do that - the current looked strong and if she got dragged into the waterfall she could fall and die. She still insisted. I asked her why, and she said she wanted to see the chasm. I think what was going on in her head was that there was likely more to this area than it seemed. She was right!

There's a couple things to know about this moat:

The bottom of this 20 foot deep moat is littered with gold and treasure. I had rolled earlier in the day where the platinum chalice worth 2,500 gold was in the moat, and I'd actually rolled this side by the waterfall!
Patrolling the moat is a 12 foot tall dwarf statue, which is a stone golem with +10 to hit, an AC of 17 and an immunity to non-magic weapons!
When in the water, a PC must make an athletics check or get dragged 20 feet toward the waterfall - and maybe right over the side!

What followed was utter insanity. Lucky dove in. Her driftglobe illuminated the treasure on the bottom of the moat, including the chalice. She also saw the statue stomping toward her.

Other heroes dove in to fight the statue. The new guy, the rogue, got taken by the current and dragged right to edge! Others tried to attack the statue, but saw that their weapons did nothing to it.

Almost the entire party was in the moat, but for the most part they rolled freakishly high on their swim checks (every roll was terrifying for all concerned!). The statue pummeled poor Lucky, who ended up unconscious.

The cleric was able to toss a rope to the rogue. Other heroes got out of the water and were able to pull him to safety.

But now Lucky was unconscious, certain to go over the waterfall on her next turn! A rogue hooked her with a grappling hook while the barbarian kept the statue busy. In the end, everyone got out of the moat and the statue resumed its never-ending underwater patrol.

Lucky's player felt bad and was worried aloud that everyone was mad at her for almost getting them killed. I told her that if she hadn't gone in the water, she'd never have seen that goblet that was worth 2500 gold!

The goblet was still there, underwater. One rogue, an arcane trickster, had an idea. He cast mage hand. He focused, and levitated the goblet out of the water and into his grasp! The heroes have very little gold (they make maybe 30 gold per session each). This goblet will increase their wealth immensely.

We were out of time. I am so glad Lucky messed with the moat. The moat and the statue is one of my favorite parts of the air temple.

It looks like we are going to get in a special session this Sunday, so I should have a report up on it soon after.

This past Sunday, I ran a special extra session of Princes of the Apocalypse at the game store. I want to make sure we get this book done by mid-September, when Out of the Abyss comes out. Also, my great modron march game will be on hold as my players are on vacation, so I figured running this would give me something to write about.

Well, it is now Tuesday and I can barely bring myself to write this article. Sunday's game was the worst session of D&D I have had in years. When it was over, I wanted to quit running these things altogether.

I don't even know how to write this. I want to tell you what happened, but I don't know the fair and polite way to do so.

I've decided for now to edit this and leave it alone A lot of stuff is happening. As of now I am no longer running games at the game store. I'll probably have more to say in a few days when the smoke clears, so to speak.

Sorry to be a "tease", but I don't want to write things that I might regret down the road.

I run games of Dungeons & Dragons in a game store. Currently we're playing through Princes of the Apocalypse. I write about it every week in this blog.

I am using art by Jason Thompson in this article. His walkthrough maps are insanely fun and detailed

What is my Role?

I have long been confused about my role in the game store. Am I the official coordinator, or am I just a DM who reports the games in the DCI system? The store owner would sometimes address the tables as if he was running the show.

I assumed I was just a DM who did the reporting. Every few years the store would tell me that they'd take over the reporting (why, I never knew) but within a few weeks they'd stop doing it and our store would lose our gold status. Gold status means that your store gets D&D books before the release date, and it used to mean getting cool free stuff.

The communication in the store is not ideal. I long ago learned that the best way to exist in that store is to just do your thing and don't ask questions. It's a space to meet people and run games, and in that department it is pretty fantastic.

I had an ominous feeling a month or two back. It was after the store owner came up to me and made a comment to me about reporting the games in the DCI system. He said something to me about showing the other DMs print-outs of the reports, which was completely out of the blue. I didn't even know what he was talking about.

Basically, I was reporting the games, but sometimes I'd smoosh them into one big report. That meant that sometimes, a DM would be put in as a player. Additionally, sometimes I listed Encounters games as Expeditions games. I've called wizards before, and they told me as long as I listed the names of everyone who played, it didn't matter. It was true that I wasn't reporting the games completely accurately.

So I thought to myself, well, OK, let me do this right. I will report these games perfectly. I took the owner's comment to me as a challenge to myself to make this game in the store as good as I could for everyone, not just my table.

I made sign-in sheets in photoshop. I encouraged each group to give themselves a group name and to share with me what was going on in their game. I tried to assume more of a coordinator role. But at the same time, I also was getting really fed up with the whole situation.

I decided to write an article about the game store, not to post in my blog, but just to vent and try to sort out the situation. Once I had finished it and read it over, I decided that I was nearing the limit of my tolerance for this place, and if it got worse, I'd quit.

The Fateful Sunday Game

That was the situation heading into Sunday, June 7th. I was running a special session of Princes of the Apocalypse. I wanted to make sure our campaign got done by the time Out of the Abyss came out.

This session was awful. I had what I like to call a "problem player", and for almost a year I've tip-toed around the guy. His dad plays in the campaign, too. In this session, the problem player complained about getting attacked while resting in a dungeon. He tried to rules lawyer his way into casting spells on invisible monsters. He tried to claim that a djinni's create whirlwind power was a spell that he could counterspell, and then when I shot it down he laughed and said, "It was worth a try".

Most offensive to me was that he greedily snatched up windvane, the artifact spear to the dismay of the 14-year olds he was playing alongside. This player had taken the only artifact in the previous campaign as well.

After this horrible session was over, I tried to move this player and his dad to another table. His father, who plays the game with him, refused to move. He said that his son was disabled and that I was violating his "civil rights".

I had been extra tolerant of this guy because I suspected he was not well. When I worked at the movie theater, we had a lot of group homes come in. When I say group home, I mean disabled people who live in assisted living communities. Sometimes, they'd bring someone who would make a scene in the theater. We'd have to ask them to leave. So they left.

Maybe I am just wrong. Maybe my job as a DM to manage this kind of thing. I could certainly understand the dad wanting to protect his son. It is nice that the guy cares.

All I know is that a thought popped into my head during all of this: I don't want to do this anymore. All of this people management stuff has become too difficult.

The father and I ended up having a series of heated phone conversations. I explained to him that his son could still play D&D in the store, just at a different table. His father again said no, his son was playing at my table.

Now I was getting really mad (as well as slightly amused). I said, "So the next time we play, you two are going to sit at my table? And I am going to refuse to run the game for you... and so we're all just going to sit there?"

"Civil rights", he said.

I wonder if we had moved our seats to another table and left him and his son where they were sitting, if they would have moved with us.

The Store's Take

I called the store twice in between phone arguments with the dad. During the first phone call, the store owner was very receptive to me. I later found out that the dad had called the store owner many hours before. I don't know why the owner didn't tell me that up front. He already knew the situation, but he let me explain it again as if he'd never heard it.

Why wouldn't he have told me that he already knew what was going on right when I called?

The whole thing boiled down to this situation where the owner claimed they would make them switch tables, but I was wary.

This is what I feared would happen: They'd bend to the dad's will and tell me to just keep running for him. The dad was hellbent on sitting at my table, and I could honestly picture having mall security come and drag him out. Neither scenario was at all appealing to me.

If I could have, I would have just kept running the game for the dad and his son to avoid all of this conflict. But the fact is that my patience had simply run out.

I Failed My Save

Another thing hit me as I talked to the owner. Even if I did get these people switched out to another table, that leaves a seat open at my table for someone new. If I remove this problem player, there's a chance another problem player will take his place. That's the nature of public play.

So I said to the owner, "I think I should just quit. This isn't for me."

For seven years, I've been running games in this store. I built D&D in there from absolutely nothing. In 2008, there were no games of D&D going on. Now in 2015, we have five tables going and the store contains more D&D players than magic players, in a store that has massive magic events.

Would the store owner beg me to reconsider? Would he reassure me that this could be taken care of in an efficient manner? Would he give me a nice little thank you for helping him build D&D games in his store while encouraging the players to buy things to support him?

Here's what he said: "OK. See you around".

Seven years of encounters seasons, lair assaults, game days, free RPG days and my own Scales of War public play campaign which went from level 1 to level 30 (two years of weekly play!). That's all he had to say. "See you around".

What Now?

I've been talking to other players. My table in the store is going to be run by Dark's dad, and I think he will do an awesome job. I have put out feelers to certain players. I am going to try and keep going with Princes at my place. I am not sure if I will be able to make it work just yet.

I still have my Great Modron March home game, but that is on hold for a couple of weeks until Jessie gets back from vacation.

I have a number of D&D dreams, many of which were fulfilled in the game store. I was able to run a bunch of classic adventures like White Plume Mountain and Baba Yaga's Hut. I got to run a game for kids, and it was extremely awesome.

I have two D&D dreams left:

I want to form a group of all-female players and a female DM. I don't want to play in it, I just want to hear about the game and what happens in it.
I want to run a game for senior citizens. When I say that, I mean I want to go to an old folk's home with a briefcase and run a campaign for people 67-years old and up.

I don't know if either of those things will ever happen, but I'm keeping my mind open.

I will probably write a few guides in the next few weeks while I set up new games. It's a weird time but hopefully things will work out,

The Great Modron March - Camp Followers

Dungeons & Dragons - The Difficulties of Being a Dungeon Master

The Great Modron March - Return to Limbo

Dungeons & Dragons - A Guide to The Lady of Pain

Dungeons & Dragons - The Great List of Food & Drinks

The Great Modron March - Sidetracked

The Great Modron March - The Flower Infernal

Dungeon Master Horror Stories

Dungeons & Dragons - A Guide to the Beholder

The Great Modron March - Death to the Tacharim

Dungeons & Dragons - A Guide to Poison

Dungeons & Dragons - How to Start a Campaign

Dungeons & Dragons - A Guide to The Rod of Seven Parts

Dungeons & Dragons - Narrative Combat

The Great Modron March - The Last Leg

Dungeons & Dragons - A Guide to Demogorgon

The Great Modron March - Modron Madness

Princes of the Apocalypse - Temple of Howling Hatred

Princes of the Apocalypse - Aerisi Kalinoth

Dungeons & Dragons - Why I Quit the Adventurer's League