| Eighteen Years of the Underlands |
[Dec. 14th, 2009|02:19 pm] |
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| |  amused | ] |
My current gaming group is currently playing through my Underlands campaign. This is a campaign that I have run several times over the course of my life, but have never had the opportunity to finish. It's very long. Very, very long.
The portion of the game that I am most familiar with is what I like to call, "Chapter One," because it's the beginning of the game and I've had the opportunity to run it at least four times now. In it, the players.
1) Try to help a town menaced by goblins.
2) Find out that there are three clans of goblins, each of which claims to be ruled by the "true" goblin king.
3) Find out that there is an evil nethramancer who has gotten control of one of the goblin tribes.
4) Find out that the real problem is the nethramancer's "boss," a demon of snakes and blood sacrifice.
For those who may vaguely remember playing this bit before and who are scratching their heads and thinking, "that's not how it went when we played it," I can only say: That's because I did lots and lots and lots of editing on the beginning bits so that it's not crackheaded.
How crackheaded, you may ask? Recently, I realized that Chapter Two was looming large for my current group, and I realized that I could not, for the life of me, remember what came next. So I ventured into the basement, where I have kept the notes from the first Underlands expedition that I wrote when I was eighteen. Reading it, I became promptly amused and embarassed.
There are parts of the adventure that are, for lack of a better term, normal. You got your fights with lizardmen, an island full of scurvy dogs, various wizards, a maze, a reclusive druid, etc., etc.. That's mixed in with a long list of howlingly ridiculous plot elements, items, people, and locations that were, I'm sure, hysterically funny to my eighteen-year-old self. I even remember my initial reasoning behind why this insanity made it into the adventure, which turned the whole read-through into a laugh-at-myself-nostalgically-fest.
In the interest of full disclosure, here's the best of the best from eighteen-year-old Geoff.
Boomerangs: Ye gods, did I have a heart-on for boomerangs. I remember purchasing one and thinking it was the raddest thing ever. That, plus the sheer awesome of the boomerang from Legend of Zelda made it my all-time favorite weapon for awhile. If I were to have written a D&D magic item book back then, there would have likely been an extensive, "magic boomerang" section, as inexplicable as the table in AD&D1E that listed all the magical bardic instruments.
A Guy with a Pacifier: He's supposed to pacify the players, see, if they get too uppity. So he has a magic pacifier that turns the players into babies. Har har.
Calvin and Hobbes: Yeah, we dug Calvin and Hobbes back in the day. So much so that Yukon, Ho! was a piece of treasure from one encounter.
The Hypochondriac: A sick guy with one HP, who would insult you if you burst into his room and then sneeze on you and give you a disease. Even better, he's the sole living person in a house full of undead.
Yuppies: One whole zone was an office building, inhabited by guys (and girls) in swank 80's suits. They fought with laser guns. Yup.
Uolian: The halfling math wizard, who had a magic calculator, who would not listen to you until you said, "Hey, Uolian, you're stepping on my eyeball." I'm sure that's an in-joke that I've forgotten about.
An Effreet Blacksmith: Yeah, because there's that one Thundercats episode with the fire elemental who is a mercenary who will serve you if you give him lots and lots of gold. That was awesome, wasn't it! Let's totally rip it off for our game!
Kimberly the Medusa: Because Kimberly is an awesome name for a medusa. See also: Dave the Owlbear, Alan the Druid.
A Hot Dryad: Whose physical appearance is based exactly on a girl you had a crush on. So much so that her name appears in the dryad's description.
Tiny, the Squid: The pet of the Guildmaster of the Guild of Thieves. Anyone thrown to him would face certain death! Unless they swam to the bottom of Tiny's tank and found the Enchanted Sword that was +1/+6 vs. Squids Named Tiny.
Glaucoma: The band, the phenomenon, the legend. A rock and roll band that might have ended the world if the players weren't careful. The players never got to meet them (meeting them was, originally, the penultimate encounter of the whole adventure), but they did meet their rabid fans. You could tell they were fans because they wore custom t-shirts and ran around chanting, "Glau-Co-Ma! Glau-Co-Ma! Yaaaay!" They were based, incidentally, on R.E.M. and had four members named Michael, Mike, Mik, and Mickey.
The Invisible Island: An island. It was invisible. For no particular reason. Oh, except that invisible islands are cool. Hell, yes! |
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