OA Quasi-Session

In an effort to not completely screw over my eldest daughter and force her to essentially retire her character, I went with yet another alternate dying rule for my Oriental Adventures campaign and removed the odious broken leg result from her. Instead she ended up unconscious for an hour and losing a point of Comeliness permanently due to scarring. The party healed her up some, waited for her to regain consciousness, then entered the Moathouse proper through the broken doors to the great hall area. There were no random encounters during this time. I described the room to them, not as well as if I had found my original conversion notes, but pretty good from the actual module and my memory of what I had changed. The loss of those notes will continue to haunt me until they are found or someone admits to throwing them away because they didn't realize what they were, but I digress. I fear that I am just going to have to do it all over again, which I guess isn't a big deal, since I did it once, but it is rather annoying.

Anyway, I sketched them a map of the room and what they could see, they looked around and then quickly decided to check out the storeroom to the left, the one with the stairs down that they could not see, oddly enough with Misaki leading the way, and sure enough she heard the rats in there and started looking for them. Well the module says these rats are hungry and fearless, so I just had them roll initiative and combat began. Unfortunately, Aiko was the other person in the storeroom with Misaki and, while she actually got to attack the rats first, she got dropped by three lucky rat hits in the first round. Well, there are thirteen Giant Rats in this encounter, so I guess it's a pretty tough encounter for a (mostly) first level party, particularly in the tight space of the storeroom. It took the party four rounds to kill them all, no one else was even injured. Aiko made her save versus death, but ended up permanently deaf and unconscious for the next four hours. The party decided to retreat to Hondo and return to the strange Moathouse for further exploration later.

Honestly, it was a super short session. Lee Ann couldn't make it, which should have been OK because she died last session anyway and it actually made introducing her new PC less difficult for me. The real problem here was that my daughter Ashli was really beginning to believe that Aiko was just an unlucky character and wanted to roll up a replacement, and my daughter Ember has pretty much been dissatisfied with Natsumi the Sohei since she started playing her too. So both of my daughters spent the after the battle time rolling new characters. Ember will be playing the Human Samurai Kato Momoko, who has awesome stats; Ash will be playing Natsua of the Bear-Killer Clan, a Korobokuru Barbarian of the Forest variety.

Interesting trivia about OA Barbarians- at the top of page 15 in the OA book it says in the second paragraph "Barbarians are automatically considered outsiders and thus occupy the lowest levels of the caste system. Barbarian characters never roll on table 38:Character Birth.", then on page 31, about the middle of the page on table 37:Birth Requirements By Class- when you get down to the Barbarian class it says under Birth Table Required- Yes, it says that for Family too, but when one page tells you one thing and another tells you the exact opposite, which one are you supposed to go with? I mean, for some classes the Birth Table is not required, but is optional, but the class description for Barbarian outright forbids the use of the Birth Table, it says they "NEVER" use it. I tend to think that they mean for Barbarians to use it because they explicitly mention Barbarian characters twice under the Ancestry section, and imply how a roll could apply to a Barbarian character at least one other time.

I also killed Non-Weapon proficiencies officially today and scaled back proficiencies to their core class standard AD&D numbers, so now it's a race to see who gets their versions of all the classes and races done first and best for playtesting, Fabian's got a strong lead, but it's more B/X style because it's for Labyrinth Lord; Dangerous Brian is coming in pretty strong with a "closer to AD&D" version for OSRIC; I hate to throw my hat in too, but I kind of did today in a little way, just deleting bits of AD&D OA that were driving me a little nuts. I am still willing to let my players playtest anything that comes out from the OSR for OA, but I think they are a little scared of new material for an old game or something, or maybe just not using the rulebook and it's official classes and material. Still, I alter the game slightly every time we play, so I wonder how long it will be before the game isn't really an AD&D OA campaign anymore and just becomes a product of the OSR's combined creative talent with me at the helm.

I still haven't put anything more than holding pages up on Obsidian Portal, other real life stuff keeps intruding on my taking care of my D&D campaign time. On a completely unrelated note, here are a couple of pictures of some FASA Star Trek RPG stuff I got off EBay that arrived on Saturday and I forgot to show you all.