For our Tuesday session, I had prepared Sanctum of the Stone Giant Lord by RC Pinnell. I had read a review by Johnathan Bingham and decided I wanted to give it a try. Also, remember my thoughts on running D&D for mid-level play (my players have main characters on levels 7 or 8) where I noticed that I was rolling practically no dice and I wasn’t sure whether that’s how I was supposed to run things. Well, I felt that stone giants in the range from 9 hit dice up to 16 hit dice (I just gave stone giant clerics more hit dice) would be a nice challenge for my players. With up to six main player characters and up to twelve henchmen I needed a setup that would provide a tactical challenge for nearly twenty characters. Stone giants would do just fine, I thought.
Before long, and very specific to the campaign world, they started working on the giants, attacking them with a fire elemental at night, blaming a settlers of a gate to hell, sowing more suspicion, getting a good result on the reaction roll table, and so on. In the end, I decided that the stone giants would fall for it and hand them 180’000 gold pieces to equip three ships for the Astral Sea and the voyage to the hell gate of Banaqqum, to plant the stone seed that would allow them to gate there and start their new stone giant invasion project. The stone giant *lama* then used a *commune* spell to verify that the party did in fact intend to do all the things they promised and since the players were sincere, next session will see them plant the stone seed in a hellscape.
Perhaps this is what I had coming, since I’ve said in the past that I prefer not to replace social interactions with dice rolling. Now that there is a lot of social interaction, there is very little dice rolling. What did I expect?
prefer not to replace social interactions with dice rolling
I still hope that my non-player characters react to *quantifiable issues* such as the needs of the religious community in the stone giant sanctum. I still hope that my players have *choice* in how they approach the problems in the game world. When I asked the players after the game, they said they liked how the game was being run.
☯
Strangely enough, I don’t remember where I got the PDF from. These days, the only link I can find is the collection of giant adventures by RC Pinnell on DriveThruRPG.
#RPG #Old School
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You may have bought it from Lulu; the author used to release his works there.
– Ynas Midgard 2014-09-03 12:14 UTC
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Ah, that would be his Lulu page where he says: “I have been a D&D hobbyist since 1980. In 2008 I was encouraged to make my own adventures available to the public. But after years of doing this, it is time to take a break. If and when gamers want more from me, future products might appear. To all those that have been supportive of this site, and others like it, I am profoundly thankful.”
– Alex Schroeder 2014-09-03 12:27 UTC