Not In Kansas Anymore...

Despite the absence of Steve (who plays the heroic ranger Red), The Tuesday Knights ploughed on with our Tekralh role-playing campaign last night.

Picking up from the last session, Nick's dwarf was trapped behind a stone portal while a large, mystical winged creature posed riddles to his colleagues - to allow them access to the inner chamber.

Inside, with Wu Bao (Nick's dwarf), was a rather angry (and very magical) troll, which Nick - aided eventually by Clare's fighter Clodius, defeated surprisingly easily. That, however, was when the magic kicked in, just as Pete's half-orc druid Gregor got into the chamber, and Wu Bao was transformed into a replacement guardian troll.

Meanwhile the other troll regenerated (as they do) and was rather annoyed that someone had taken his place as treasure guardian. Great hilarilty ensued for the better part of 90 minutes, including a time when Gregor KO-ed the Wu Bao-troll and was transformed, himself, into a guardian troll.

It took a lot of heavy hinting, intelligence checks and, eventually, a Hero Point for Nick to deduce the only way to change Gregor back was for the former half-orc to 'lose' a fight against the original troll, so it would be transformed back into the guardian troll... and Gregor would be released from the curse.

The rest of the evening saw the party dodging through a corridor of spear traps and then stumbling into a cavern of strange mutant vampire bats, which took a particular liking to Gregor-vintage blood and nearly drained all the life from him (he helped them a bit by wildly stabbing himself in the neck at one point!).

Eventually they found their way out of the caverns... and that's when things got really strange!

The group had already encountered a section of the entrance tunnel that gave them all a "giddy" feeling on the way in; on the way out the giddiness returned and they found themselves no longer in the woodlands they had entered the caverns through... and that Red was walking along beside them as though nothing had happened.

In fact, as they will soon discover, they're not even in the same country they were when they discovered the Trollstone Caves.

I had already decided, when the time was right, to institute some major changes in the campaign and this particular "high magic/gonzo" dungeon proved the ideal place to make these structural changes.

In my campaign's multiverse, I've decided that the Trollstone Caverns were a "gateway" between worlds, where the laws of magic and physics were blurred and the barriers between reality were distorted by strange, supernatural powers.

The party had entered the caverns from the continent of Tekralh, but there's no telling where they have emerged (or under what physical laws their new world operates).

I shall probably be dropping more hints about the changes ahead this weekend on HeroPress, but suffice it to say, although they will be quite major (in the short term), I genuinely believe they are a step in the right direction.

There were a couple of reasons for these changes - the first, which I shall discuss more later this week, is for a simplification of our rules system. Castles and Crusades is a slimmed down version of 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons, so still retains a small amount of crunch and then I've wildly thrown in a bunch of house rules (some of which have worked and some of which have just added a degree of complication I'm not so happy with).

Secondly, I'm not 100 per cent comfortable with the actual physical structure of the campaign. I rushed ahead, when I first thought up the Tekralh setting, and hammered out a big background book with details on various countries, their rulers, various races etc etc. It must have seemed very daunting and overwhelming to my players (three old schoolers and a newbie).

Frankly there was too much information and I was expecting my players to absorb it all and construct detailed backgrounds for their characters with a host of supporting characters etc

But that's not "old school", that's a very modern approach of gaming and, to be honest, my players are all busy people with hectic lives, who come together once a month for a bit of gaming fun in a social environment (with pizza and crisps).

By changing the location, I can build up a new setting one block at a time, as it is needed. By allowing the campaign to grow organically around the players I reckon they will become more attached and involved with it.

A full, in-campaign, account of the evening adventures can be found on The Chronicles Of Tekralh blog site, while a selection of photographs from this and other sessions of our gaming nights can be found here.