First Donjon Game

[Chris Gardiner]

This is my first post here at the Forge, but a frenzy of roleplaying with some old friends at the weekend provided some material I hope's worth posting here. I ran a game of Donjon and one of Adventure!, and both went really well. I'll talk about the Donjon game first.

I used the scenario from the rulebook, 'A Fungus Among Us',  and made a few modifications. I set Amerla, the starting village, in the boles and branches of a huge tree whose highest leaves were lost in the clouds. The magic emerald became the Verdantine Stone, the power of which had grown the tree and sustained it. Grizzle the green mage usually kept the stone, but it had been stolen by blood goblins working for the Mushroom King. They got in using sporebombs to knock out the guards, and escaped on a glider made of one of the tree's giant leaves.

Now the blood goblins don't like the Mushroom King, but he paid for their services with mushrooms (special mushrooms. With spots!). The stone grants the possessor the magic word 'Grow' and gives some bonus dice to gather magic power, and he was using it to grow an army of mushrooms ("Grow my Red-Capped Legions, grow!").

As an extra complication, rather than having the forest busy with rival adventurers I had Grizzle's two apprentices trying to get the stone back. One of them was in fact allied with the Mushroom King and had told him how to get the stone. This apprentice, Mollick, was a spotty goth teen who, having tried some of the special mushrooms (with spots!) had all sorts of visions of the Eternal Void Beyond the Stars and the Cthulhoid entities that dwell therein. He was on the way to becoming a cultist, claiming that "Only the eldritch horrors beyond space and time really understand me."

This, I'm aware, is rather more plot than is necessary, but since neither the players nor I had played a game like this before, I wanted smoething to fall back on.

Character creation: God this was fun. Originally I'd intended to go for light-hearted and whimsical rather than silly, but as soon as someone shouted "I want to be Peggy the pumpkin witch!" that went out of the window.

We ended up with the aforementioned pumpkin witch, a stink-witch with a pet zombie (on which she grew her molds), a farmer who had accidentally been made a knight ("Oi shall smoite thee with moi moighty zword!"), a super-speedy quickling (main ability: "Like a Greased Whippet"), a final-fantasy-esque manga villain and a shape-shifting demonic sorcerer from another world.

There were two particular consequences from this. Firstly, 6 players is a *lot* in Donjon, and it changed how I expected play to go. Secondly, all but one of the PCs had magic. Five magic users. Yikes.

I'd set the difficulty of gathering magic power to Medium, and also required that each magic word be associated with an action, item or circumstance which had to be performed, present or possessed before a spell could be cast with it. So the manga villain's magic word 'Cosmic' was associated with the action of floating in the air and bursting with corruscatin' eldritch energies, and Peggy's word 'fire' was associated with her magic hat. For her to cast a spell with that word, she had to have her hat on, and for the villain to perform his energy build-up he had to spend another action. Each word the stink witch used required she spend an action bubbling things in her cauldron.

I'm glad I put this rule in - it made the players put a bit of thought into the trappings and special effects of their magic, and slightly reduced the spellcasting rate, which is useful when there's so of them.

The players loved inventing their own abilities, and got the distinctions between main and supporting abilities easily. Despite none of us being familiar with the rules, no-one came up with a broken character that wasn't any use.

Play: After running two or three encounters in the forest, I realised that having so many players makes each encounter take quite a bit longer, so I only ran a couple in each dungeon level. It also means that combat rarely makes it past the first flurry, because PCs get so many actions.

Players soon got the hang of using carryover dice and using facts to modify their attacks. A particularly exciting battle with the goblin king (a giant wolf) went really well. Though the group's fighter only dealt it a few flesh wounds, he was able to hold it at bay, giving the wizards (5 of 'em, I tell you!) time to pelt it with spells. I was very impressed with how easy it was to make a single villain that can challenge a party, which is normally a problem in RPGs. Some decent armour, good attack bonuses and an ability that gives extra initiative dice all make for fearsome boss monsters.

There were a couple of interesting bits in this combat:-
1) When venturing into the wolf's den, the PC knight used his "Oi feel it is moi destiny!" ability to get bonus dice on his attacks.
2) Peggy the pumpkin witch cast a huge 20-dice attack spell on the wolf (her basic attack spell turns the target's head into a jack-o-lantern, making fire come out of their eyes and mouth. Nice). Unfortunately, a flukey roll on my part meant that the wolf took no damage. Thereafter, the players used spell dice to add extra effects in preference to increasing the resistance difficulty, since then the target would have to make multiple saves and might get unlucky. I *was* getting the world's best rolls that day, which did more to encourage the player-GM antagonism than anything else...

In the Caves I made the Daolites into the Stone Clan, a family of earth elementals who the mushroom king had enslaved by kidnapping their matriarch and binding her in a pillar of fungus. To get past the first of them, the PCs distracted it while Peggy (I know I keep mentioning her, but she's a pumpkin witch! How cool is that?) cast a charm spell on it. She used facts from the charm to determine the elemental's opinions and get information out of it, so that it trusted the party were here to rescue the matriarch, would show them the way to the Mushroom King, would tell them where they could find treasure, and so on. I thought that was a good example of how the system could handle social stuff as easily as action stuff.

The final battle with the Mushroom King was brief, but fun. The party managed to sneak up behind him and snatch the Verdantine stone from his cap before the battle started (the quickling used her magic word 'Boing!' to make the stone leap into her hand), and the stink-witch conjured a huge stinky poison cloud that killed the growing mushroom legions. The fighter cleaved the Mushroom King in twain with his trusty scythe ("It's harvest toime!"), and Mollick the spotty cultist was thoroughly exploded by the PC manga-villain, for giving villains a bad name ("I'm not standing for that," he said upon hearing Mollick whining about how only the dread entities from beyond space-time could understand his loneliness, "That's just crap." and splatted him with cosmic energies. The shapeshifting demon-sorceror applauded politely).

Stuff:-
1) The players weren't wholly at ease with using facts to narrate things that might mess up the plot (bless 'em). Sometimes, they'd ask me to provide them with a plot-based fact that fitted in with the circumstance. For example, when searching for tracks at the crashed goblin glider they used one fact to say that they did find tracks, but then had me provide the other to say what made them (goblins and wolves).

This isn't really in the Donjon spirit, but people weren't really into building their own plot. They were happy to use facts to make side-quests (usually for treasure) and stuff, but uneasy when it came to adding content. Some more practice might help at this, and me providing less plot for them so it has to be constructed by all of us.

2) Provisions are the best idea ever. We had loads of fun with people rummaging through their packs for handy items like collapsible scythes and long rope. Peggy's ability "A pumpkin for every occasion", which added dice to attempts to pull pumpkin-related stuff from her pack was particularly entertaining. You never know when you'll need a floatation pumpkin.

I house-ruled that each item you found in your pack reduced your provisions by one, to prevent those with huge provision scores leaping in there all the time.

3) The core rule system is beautifully versatile and flexible. It's easy to think of things to do with extra dice, and you never have to remember little provisos or exceptions. There's this simple mechanic, and you can do whatever the heck you want with it. I loved it.

4) Sometimes, a huge bucket 'o dice avails you naught. This takes some getting used to, since players tend to associate rolling twenty dice against my 4 with guaranteed success. Similarly, the party quickling, though she got more actions in combat than anyone else, tended to get low rolls on her initiative dice, which meant the battle was over before she got many of them. This is partly a result of having so many players, but the random nature of the system means that bizarre and quirky results aren't unusual. No-one was bothered by this, but next time people might build their characters a bit differently.

An idea occured for allowing mythic actions (those with more than ten dice) which allow you to use your eleventh and later dice to negate your opponent's dice (down to a minimum of one), which would increase your likelihood of success. I think. Statistics ain't my field.

5) Myself and a couple of the players are now convinced that Donjon is the perfect game for running Final Fantasy-type games. It's just perfect for it. I shall scribble some notes down in a post on the Anvilwerks forum.

Hmm. Time to bring an end to this bloated monstrosity. We had a great time, and will definately play Donjon again. In fact, I've been explicitly told that if the player can't be Peggy the Pumpkin Witch again she'll tear me limb from limb.

So a success, then.

[rafial]

I used the scenario from the rulebook, 'A Fungus Among Us',  and made a few modifications. I set Amerla, the starting village, in the boles and branches of a huge tree whose highest leaves were lost in the clouds. The magic emerald became the Verdantine Stone, the power of which had grown the tree and sustained it. Grizzle the green mage usually kept the stone, but it had been stolen by blood goblins working for the Mushroom King. They got in using sporebombs to knock out the guards, and escaped on a glider made of one of the tree's giant leaves.

This is rad!

house-ruled that each item you found in your pack reduced your provisions by one, to prevent those with huge provision scores leaping in there all the time.

No house rule needed here.  You only roll as many of your provisions dice (plus cerebrality, plus applicable ability) as you commit to looking for what you need, and if you find it, you lose the provisions dice you committed.  So at best its a clarification... You can't make a provisions roll by taking "zero dice" from your provisions.

4) Sometimes, a huge bucket 'o dice avails you naught. This takes some getting used to, since players tend to associate rolling twenty dice against my 4 with guaranteed success.

It's actually about a 95% chance of success.  The trick with Donjon is most people aren't used to figuring odds for that sort of die mechanic.

[Rob Donoghue]

Ok, that sounded fun enough that I now want to figure out where I packed my printed copy of Donjon and start pondering possibilities.

-Rob D.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Awesome post!

I dig two things especially: your setting, and your house rules for magic. In my copious spare time (heh), I've wanted to make a Donjon resource center with characters, creatures, adventures, and house rules, and yours should definitely go in there.

Thanks for the compliments - I really appreciate it.

[Chris Gardiner]

No house rule needed here.  You only roll as many of your provisions dice (plus cerebrality, plus applicable ability) as you commit to looking for what you need, and if you find it, you lose the provisions dice you committed.  So at best its a clarification... You can't make a provisions roll by taking "zero dice" from your provisions.

D'oh! I should have read that page more thoroughly. So provisions work like Wealth, then. Got it.

Abilities that give bonus dice to provisions (like "A pumpkin for every occasion") work really well. It'd be a good way to simulate a gadgeteer or a paranoid loony who's never without a weapon

That's what I really like about Donjon - such a simple system, but so many ways to twiddle it.

[Chris Gardiner]

Awesome post!

Awesome game!

I dig two things especially: your setting, and your house rules for magic.

Those house magic rules were taken, and simplified, from my last homebrewed game, where every magician had a set of Circumstances which modified how potent their magic was. What was neat was that it meant wizards started developing signiatures (one character had the circumstance 'the colour red' and so always wore red clothing, for e.g.) and also that they tended to think carefully about what situations they were putting themselves in ("I can't go up against Oblong the Unseemly at night, when my power is at its weakest! We will meet under the noon sun, and amidst trees.")

In my copious spare time (heh), I've wanted to make a Donjon resource center with characters, creatures, adventures, and house rules, and yours should definitely go in there.

Cool! I remember reading a post in which you mentioned you were thinking of doing a variant magic supplement for Donjon, and that'd be really interesting, too. I'm pretty sure the Donjon system would be really good at simulating low-key curses and blessings magic as well as flashy fireball magic.

Plus, I've got three words for you:-

Pumpkin witch splatbook.

No, seriously.

;)

[rafial]

Abilities that give bonus dice to provisions (like "A pumpkin for every occasion") work really well. It'd be a good way to simulate a gadgeteer or a paranoid loony who's never without a weapon

It's true.  Items can also work in that role.  In our Donjon GAMMA game (post-holocaust) game, my character has a "Tinker's Pack" that gives him bonus dice to any attempt to pull tools or spare parts.  I love it.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I must see the full character writeup for the stink-witch with the petri dish zombie sidekick.

Best,
Ron

[Chris Gardiner]

Glynda the Stink-Witch

Virility 3
Cerebrality 6
Discernment 2
Adroitness 1
Wherewithal 2
Sociality 5

Abilities:-
Magic potions: 4 (Magic words: necrotic, stench, bubble and restore; all associated with the action of stirring noxious substances in her portable cauldron)
Evil glare: 2 (used to intimidate and transfix people)
Scrying: 3 (by staring into something reflective she can receive one visual image, which she gets to state, based o the subject she's scrying., per success)
Eat Anything She Can Fit In Her Mouth: 1 (and heal from it using successes)
Mulch the Stinky Pack Zombie: 4 (Carry Stuff 1, Fight 1, Grow Mould 2*)

Save vs Poisons, etc: 2
Save vs Illusions, etc: 1

Wealth 3
Provisions 5
Flesh wounds 3

* I had a house-rule for companions. You could split the number of points you put in them between their different abilities. These dice then added to the characters when the minion was assisting. The down side is that minions are easily removed from the character temprarily - each success against them from an attack stuns them (or otherwise removes them from the scene) for one action.

Mulch the Stinky Pack Zombie, then, provided an extra dice to Glynda whenever she needed to carry things, and extra dice when attacking foes, and 2 extra dice when she was gathering magic power - she would pick bits of mould and creepy-crawlies of him and drop them in her pot.

Her magic word 'bubble' got a lot of use - she used it to fish people out of rivers, and provide transportation across water.

Longest spell-title went to Peggy the Pumpkin-witch, though, for the Vengeful Fiery Curse of the Growth-Stunted Pumpkin!