- Repair a destroyed caldera and fill it with water to make waterfront property for a condo development.
- One player is in the middle of a messy divorce. Her husband wants half her experience. His legal representation comes from a demi-lich.
- Two of the players are running for mayor in my urban setting. One is a charismatic fallen paladin – someone that doesn’t mind doing bad things for the greater good. The other is a very, very ugly orc that is gradually becoming a god.
- Another player has inherited a ton of money, but can’t get it due to a restraining order keeping him from it until his great-great-great-great-great grandmother’s will has been legitimized.
- And lastly, one of the players has recently lost an arm. He still has it, but needs to travel to another plane to get the extra-dimensional pocket that exists where his arm was, removed so he can regenerate it.
I love using stuff that everyone is familiar with. Recently Wizards of the Coast has converted the classic Tomb of Horrors to the newest edition of the game. Now back when this module came out, it was the toughest of the tough. You had to be mega-powerful to even consider going into the Tomb of Horrors. To my disgust, they ported the module so mid-level characters could run it. The port to a medium power level just sucks.
So I just threw that version of the module away. Instead I have done my own conversion and instead of converting it straight up, I have changed the Tomb of Horrors to now by the Law Offices of Redaxe, Bonenose, Gronk and Acerack. (Acerack is the demi-lich; the other three are half-orc lawyers). Instead of having just killer traps and puzzles, I have also filled the halls with powerful clientele and other hard-to-kill legal aides. It should be fun.
Once the party rescued Nate (I’ll provide the link later, but I’m continuing from my earlier write-up where one of the PCs lost his left arm), they managed to steal his severed left arm from the Monks that cut it off. Rafael the Grey (the paladin mayor) hid the arm in his safe in his mayoral office. The two Monks of the Left Arm leaders came and fought with the party to get the arm back. All this fighting was going on while Rafael was being interviewed by city newspaper -- he has to appeal to his constituency, after all. Eventually the monks were dispatched, the arm was retained and the interview was concluded.
Days later, Elani (the divorcee) was subpoenaed by the court via the demi-lich law office. The demi-lich, of course, uses powerful undead to do the busy legal work, so the party fought with deadly winterwights (first seen in the incredible Return to the Tomb of Horrors boxed set, now a nasty critter detailed in the Epic Level Handbook). This subpoena forced the party to make an assault on the law offices since they assumed more winterwights would be forthcoming.
While this was going on, Dracustous was being coerced into signing away his inheritance to a Gold Dragon that claimed the hoard to be his. Dracustous assumed that the Gold Dragon had noble intentions (in the DnD game, Gold Dragons are a paragon of virtue). Instead he discovered that the Gold Dragon was just trying to acquire a “starter hoard”. Unfortunately for the party, Redaxe of the Law Offices of Redaxe, Bonenose, Gronk and Acerack is representing the Gold Dragon.
We stopped last week’s game right before the party was going to make its initial assault on the Law Offices. Just outside Redaxe, the Gold Dragon and a winterwight legal aide were going over last minute details of the Dracustous restraining order when the party showed up. Some force walls and force cages were spelled up before we decided to call it a night -- but no weapons were swung, no blood spilled. It's a DnD Mexican standoff!
I’ll keep the blog informed when this story wraps up.
1 comment:
I still think you should have turned the severed arm into a weapon. And maybe given it life so it could be a weapon and a familiar. That would be so cool. Just think, you could throw it at people and it could have a grapple/strangle attack. Awesome.
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