Recap catch-up: The Spectacular Dungeon-Crawl!

 Dungeon Crawl  No Responses »
Aug 212012
 

Back in July, we used the release of Lego Batman 2: The Videogame and The Amazing Spider-Man as fairly flimsy excuses to make out July 4 show a superhero themed spectacular!

It is the near future, a time when the heroes we know have retired or paid the ultimate price in the battle against evil. It is time now for new, younger heroes to take up the mantle; and in the city of Mega-Frankston, those heroes are:

  • Lisa-Skye, writer, comedian and ladies man, fell into a vat of mysterious radioactive super-glitter factory, giving her the ability to shoot blinding, golden sparkles, and the powers of fabulousness and sass! Her only weakness? The colour beige! What else could she call herself? She is…Golden Shower!
  • Patrick O’Duffy, writer, was bitten by a radioactive Adam West at Comic Con, becoming Batman-Man – an avenger (of the night) who has ultimate knowledge of Batman, his very own animal sidekick (Batman-Man-Bat), and the means to fund his war on crime through his secret identity as an online game gold farmer. His weaknesses? Comics, of course – and the deadly paper cuts they can deliver!
  • Brenna Courtney Glazebrook, improviser, actor and comedian, was the silent but violent super-powered French(ish) mime artist, Super Du Jour! Her power of terrible mime enables her to create invisible boxes, summon strong winds, open doors and generally annoy the shit out of people. She does have another skill, normally forbidden to mimes – she is an opera singer! But she cannot stand Englishmen.

At the Legion of Heroes Club, hidden under the Mega-Frankston dole office, an aging Spider-Man – his costume shrunk in the wash by one of the new heroes – sends our paragons of justice on their first mission to investigate a heist at a jewellery store in Collins Street. Once they arrive, the store has clearly been broken into, but none of the gems have been touched – or so it seems, until they discover the demonic Mexican wrestler El Diablo taking one very specific gemstone! Despite our young heroes best efforts, he vanquishes them and gets away with the gem, leading our disgraced champions to go through a training montage to improve their skills.

Following a lead, the heroes visit Dr. Rocks, a gem expert at Mega-Frankston TAFE, interviewing him with extreme prejudice. He tells them that the gem could be used as a focussing lens for a powerful laser, and that there are rumours that a supervillain who had killed many of Earth’s old heroes was building a superweapon in his hideout – in the old comic book factory! This useful plot-propelling knowledge led our heroes to the gates of the factory, which Golden Shower destroyed with her sass. Guarding the doors of the factory, though, was magical supervillain Captain Fantastic – in reality, Adam West – but a combined attack from our heroes repelled him. Inside the factory, our heroes again faced El Diablo, this time using all their newly honed skills to emerge triumphant!

In the heart of the lair, though, they trip a feindish deathtrap: a mind control device on display in an indestructible glass box! It forces our heroes to fight each other, until they manage to knock the glass box over, exposing the device. In the final shocking revelation, the supervillain turned out to be “The Red Cloak”, a colourblind man named “John” who had grown bored of World of Warcraft and decided to seek quests in the real world. Spurred by the citizens of Mega-Frankston, Golden Shower learned the traditional meaning of her superhero name and used this newfound…”skill” to put John right off his plans. The day was saved!

While our usual photographer Rob Young was unavailable to document the super-powered escapades, friend of Dungeon Crawl and Lisa-Skye, Timothy Zeven, took up the challenge, and you can see the amazing results below!

Fortune and glory, kid.

 Dungeon Crawl  No Responses »
Jun 262012
 

June’s Dungeon Crawl saw us head “back to the dungeon” in an homage to the old school feel of D&D Next, the new version of the game recently released for public playtest. What does that mean, you ask? Less heroic, more…opportunistic. Adventurers searching for treasure, not fighting evil. Deathtraps and fiendish monsters around every corner. And a Dungeon Master who really is out to kill all the players!

Oh, and for some reason, an awful lot of swearing and sexual innuendo. You have been warned.

Our fortune and glory seeking party were:

  • Michelle Nussey as the mighty wizard Fred Tanya, who in the tradition of early editions only knew three spells, each of which could be cast once: Detect Magic, Polymorph (frog), and a spell to summon a Bobcat. After a little deliberation with the audience, it was determined this was a Bobcat tractor, and so the DM ruled the spell was called Summon Farmer’s Ally I.
  • Sean Fabri as Rolex, a thief and graduate of the academy of conflict, where he was supposed to have learned anger management and conflict resolution. In reality, though, he’d put all his skill points into passive agression.
  • Amanda Buckley as Buttermilk, a cleric of the Domestic Goddess, Nigella Lawson. Apart from the usual holy powers, Buttermilk also knew how to make a mean white sauce.
  • Xavier Michaelides as Pundor the Barbarian, so named because when he announced his issue with “premature ragelation” – he always goes into a bezerker battle rage slightly before it would be useful – the players declared he had opened “the pun door”. And he certainly had.

Our brave adventurers arrived in the town of Boon, where an “old man” (he was 21, but the village was full of five year olds) told them of the treasure hidden in the Caves of David Boon, high in the Fucking Hills (located just beyond the Rooting Cassocks). The party set off, finding the large “entrance” to the “long cave” and unleashing a horde of sexual puns, spurred by Pundor rubbing some of the cave moss growing there on his genitals. (It was a bad idea.) For some reason they thought the cave mouth was barred by a door until the DM reminded them it was a cave, and they entered. Buttermilk created some of her white sauce, putting it on Fred Tanya’s staff so that it’s brilliant whiteness could light their way. The magic worked – but the light alerted a bunch of goblins (well, all right…a pair of goblins) to their presence, and they rushed to menace our heroes!

Rolex’s gambit of declaring “we come in peace” fooled no-one – least of all the head goblin, who stabbed him with a surprise attack! Battle was joined, but during the first round Buttermilk healed Rolex, and Pundor wasted his turn drawing his enormous greatsword, sheathed – as is traditional – on his back. Fred Tanya however saved the day, using her Polymorph spell to turn the leader into a surprisingly large frog, which fled deeper into cave! This display of mighty magic convinced the other goblin to flee. They looted the goblin’s axe, which seemed magical, though Fred Tanya was loathe to use up her Detect Magic spell so early in the game. They experimented with it, and when used to attack Pundor, he noticed it hurt slightly more than it should have. Success?

Newly equipped, the party plunged deeper into the dungeon, and came across a filthy smelling chamber – filled with the stench of troll! The troll seemed less inclined to eat them than was traditional, and was persuaded to let them pass with the promise of some delicious cooking. They looted his chamber and acquired a disgusting blanky, which Pundor takes great delight in carrying around.

Faced with two exits from the troll’s lair, Fred Tanya cast Detect Magic, figuring that the most powerful magics would be protecting the treasure. While the goblin’s axe glowed faintly, proving it was indeed magical, the plan also worked: the wizard detected magic down one of the paths. They followed that steep tunnel into another with a disgusting fetid water feature – and a giant frog! Yes, it was the previously polymorphed goblin: Fred Tanya’s spell had detected her own magic. The now larger and bolder frog proved a challenge, and the ensuing action awoke the blanky – which turned out to have been a dormant cloaker, a large, flat monster! Rather than trying to fight both of them, Pundor threw the cloaker over the frog, and it devoured the amphibian before being stabbed to death by the party. They continued down the tunnel.

The even steeper passage now featured steps carved into the rock, and halfway down the stair (it’s not at the bottom, and not at the top) they encountered…another adventurer! Climbing from the depths, he was wearing an amulet which Fred Tanya’s spell detected as magical. They tried to convince the adventurer that he should take the amulet off, since it might change him into a horse, but he was unimpressed, and stabbed Pundor, taking the magical goblin axe. Thankfully  Buttermilk invoked the motherly aspect of the Domestic Goddess, and her admonishments about “using your silly brain” allowed her disarm the adventurer – buying Pundor the time to draw his sword and attack. They took the adventurer’s amulet and dagger, and managed to save Pundor from dying due to his wounds.

The party continued to the bottom of the stairs where they found a room mostly bereft of treasure, clearly ransacked previously – except  for an unopened treasure chest. Rolex checked for and discovered no traps, and so Pundor opened it – only to find it was a mimic, a shapechanging creature disguised as a chest to trap unwary adventurers! With Pundor helplessly tangled in the mimic’s sticky psuedopods, and taken out of action with a swift punch to the balls (a running theme of the campaign),  Fred Tanya uses her last spell, and a Bobcat tractor appears – driven by Bobcat Goldthwait! It smashes and kills the mimic – and, unfortunately, also Pundor. The rest of the party do not pause to mourn him, though, and trawl through the mimic’s innards to find a bunch of treasures belonging to its previous victims. Fortune and g(l)ory at last!

It was a glorious night – and you can relive it through the amazing photos, below, taken by Dungeon Crawl’s regular photo wizard, Robert Young.

Dungeon Crawl: Rapture edition

 Comedy, Dungeon Crawl  No Responses »
Jun 062011
 

Not only did we not all ascend to Heaven a couple of weeks ago (or get left behind to suffer unimaginable torment, which is ostensibly the fate of those who play D&D), but the last Dungeon Crawl also coincided with the opening of The Rapture, a new comedy show about being transported to another dimension by supernatural forces.

So of course, that’s what happened to our party of adventurers, as captured on film by intrepid chronicler Rob Young.

While travelling through a wood, our adventurers – barbarian bibliophile Conan the Librarian (Jimmy James Eaton), Gingantulor the part-giant with low self-esteem (Brenna Courtney-Glazebrook), sexually ambiguous hands-on healer Ivana Tuchyorbodi (Karin Muiznieks) and singing wandering man of the forest Tim Bombadildo (Casey Bennetto) – come across an old man struggling to move a large rock. Promised a vague reward of “half of double of two” to help him, Gingantulor easily moves the rock – and traps the party inside a portal to another dimension! The old man has had his soul stolen, and will release the party – and hand over their reward – when they retrieve it for him.

After falling for a length of time long enough to be hilarious, but not quite long enough to be irritating, the party encounter a two-headed dog (half-played by Jess Hutchinson), cousin of Cerberus, guarding a doorway into the realm beyond. Deciding it’s too dangerous to fight, Gigantulor banishes it with the mystic phrase “Who wants a ride in the car?”

Beyond the door lies a vast expanse of nothing, a realm shaped by the will and desire of those who enter it. The party wish for a sign, and one promptly arrives, reading “Green Room”, and pointing to a small green door. Behind the door lies a small wooden-panelled room – occupied by a Beholder! The creature seems not to see too well, but manages to paralyse Bombadildo. Ivana sumons her familiars – a pair of hipsters – to save him, but the spell doesn’t quite work as planned; while Tim is freed, Ivana can no longer contact the familiars. Gigantulor and Conan manage to destroy the Beholder with the help of their companions.

There is a wooden door leading out of the room, and Tim draws on his connection with the forest from which it came to commune with it. It creaks out “fear”, but the party don’t hear it quite right and charge on through – into a realm where they must face their own darkest fears.

Tim is confronted by the horror of non-rhyming words, like “orange” and “purple”, but Conan supplies the works of Dr Seuss and his companions teach him to make up words for rhymes. Ivana faces the disapproving glares of her conservative Christian parents, but Tim drives them off through the power of bad Christian rock. Gingantulor is taunted about her size by tiny Lilliputians, until Conan helps her squash them flat. Conan is driven mad by books that won’t stay on their correct shelves, but Ivana manages to use her connection to hipsters to summon an iPad, where the electronic books can be automatically sorted.

Having passed through this harrowing ordeal, the party finally find themselves face to…well, sort of face with The Collector, a tiny undead creature who speaks through a giant of a man under his control. The Collector intends to add the adventurers to his collection of souls, but Gigantulor tries to appeal to the giant to throw off his oppressor, succeeding by seducing him one semi-giant to another.

The former slave throws off The Collector, and hands the party a locket containing the old man’s soul. Gingantulor unleashes her special “stiletto” move and smashes it open, returning them all to the forest and the old man, where they collect their reward – which they eventually negotiate up to a small bag of gold each.

@easybee))
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