PrinceCon D&D Rules in a Campaign Format

My husband, my father & I have have tried out the PrinceCon rules in another setting: a campaign. My friend Mr. West runs a game on Princeton's campus every Saturday (give or take a holiday or two) and while every Saturday is not something I can currently commit to, the hubby has gone back once and plans to again in the future when he's free. We like the system so much, that when my husband starts his campaign this month, we will be using PrinceCon rules.

How does PrinceCon's game differ from normal D&D? For starters, there are only 4 classes: Hero (fighter), Cleric (cleric), Mage (wizard/sorcerer - all spontaneous spell casting), and Guardian (part hero, part spell caster). Cleric spell lists are dependent on the deity you worship. The big four are Aru (healing spells - suped up healers but useless otherwise), Daglir (metals, earth manipulation, rocks), Gaia (animal and plant spells, polymorph - think Druid) and Mavor (detect lies and alignment, oaths and oathbreakers).

Combat does not happen by initiative. Everyone acts at the same time, but in different phases depending on what action you wish to take. Below is the phase order:

1. Declaration phase - mages declare what spells they are doing
2. Powers phase - if you or an item you have has a 'Power' it goes off here
3. Melee phase - first projectile/ranged, then hand-to-hand, then grapple
4. Clerical phase - Clerics do not have to declare their spells, and these spells occur in this phase
5. Spell Phase - Mage spells go off unless interupted
6. Item phase - Items may be used here for example tying someone up, activating a ring, locking a door
7. Movement phase - All moving takes place here. moving counts as an action, and you may not move if you acted in one of the above phases (except for certain Hero feats I think)

My husband is modifying these PrinceCon rules for his campaign - these were streamlined to make a 46 hour con work. For campaign use, some updates need to be made. I think he's also making the classes better to address problems he sees in power levels.

I will probably document some of these changes/additions here.

Lamm's PSA

Attention all citizens of coastal villages!

Hehheh. Here is a fun PSA that also functions as a summary of the run that Bob West did with us on Saturday. Its about 4 minutes, and features the song "Such Great Heights."

I had to create a new site in order to upload the mp3 file. LAME. I already use Yola for my Pearl City campaign, though, so I know it's pretty simple to organize and use.

The Defeat of Muirhead!!

The third run we went on during PrinceCon was with Alex. Instead of the standard recap, here is a visual depiction of how Muirhead went down. A few comments are added for clarity. (FYI Blog formatting turns these into squares. Click on them to see the full image.)

1. Sitting in hireling hall, our party (two catfolk, one eponi, a fae, and a hobbit) was approached by some chick named Asha having just escaped from being kidnapped and who needed our help.



2. We visit Zerlana who is using her ability to create interdimentional portals at will to train new students.



3. Turns out our Asha really was Muirhead's daughter in disguise! Good thing Zerlana noticed! Yay anti-magic field. Fake-Asha thinks her daddy-o is being controlled by EVIL CRYSTAL SHARDS and she needs our help!



4. We formulate a plan to keep Muirhead busy while Zerlana portals all the gas inside his Zepplin away so the protection spells his tattoo-mages are casting on him are disrupted so we can take him down!



5. Success! Even if we had to pretend to play along with the crazy guy being controlled by EVIL SHARDS, it worked! Zepplin crashed, and we got Muirhead.



6. EVIL SHARDS. Booyah.

Notes

I had a small selection of notecards with me at the beginning of PrinceCon, which were eventually all used by Saturday morning. So I had the ingenious idea to start writing directly into my ConBook. That way I'd never lose my notes. Here is the draft I made for the write-up for Bob's run we did Saturday morning. I intend to work on a picture version tomorrow.

My notes eventually progressed into random scribbles, diagrams, and sometimes incomplete phrases that now make little to no sense. And sometimes it just felt useless to even bother.

The Bad Horse campaign, and one very funny conversation

The below culminates in a brief exchange that occurred during Sunday's final run at PrinceCon. I was running on 4 hours of sleep since 5:20 am Friday morning, and I may have been acting a little punchy. The set up is long, and details roughly the plot of the campaign.

Andy (Purraku) & I (Lamm) were on the final run of a GM's campaign, and we had also been on its first run Friday night. The first time around we had stopped and investigated every small, racist northern coastal town we came across trying to solve the mystery of the vague turmoil we heard rumors about. Lamm would tromp on ahead and win over the small-minded townsfolk with her perky honesty and obvious naiveté. They would see we had a Catfolk (or two) with us, and we'd try to figure out as much as possible before we wore out our welcome. By the end, we had an idea of where the bad guy, "Bad Horse," was located, and a vague idea of what he was doing (kidnapping humans and turning them into Eponi - the half human/half-horse people).

The last run was vastly different. The previous group had found and defeated Bad Horse and removed the hammer that had been causing the race changes, and now we had to respond to disturbance in Falconberg. Our poor GM Chris probably had to finish as much of his plot as he could, because we walked into a 5-front war. I guess we made the 6th group of combatants. Turns out that not only had there been a hammer that turned humans into Eponi, there was also a blow-gun that turned people (well, at the very least dwarves) into Perrin, the otter-people, and a set of claws that turned others into Catfolk. The people (or animals) wielding these items desired the other items, and any other item containing evil magical shards of crystal. Various other races were there, too.

We had seen the wielder of the claws, a huge cat the size of an elephant, creating Catfolk from little alley cats. The last group to arrive was a rag-tag bunch of humans literally dressed in rags carrying improvised weapons. Instead of assuming that they were zombies (which only now did I think of), we assumed they were the people who had been Eponi who had turned back once the hammer was destroyed.

Now, there are only 3 of these half-animal, half-human races; the Perrin, the Eponi, and the Catfolk. They were created by an evil mage/cleric some 70 or 80 years prior. Andy was playing a Catfolk, and upon seeing this new group of enemies and hearing my own hasty assumption that they were former Eponi, he jumped to his own conclusion. Here is the rough transcript of what followed.

Lamm: So all we have to do is destroy the claws and all of these fighting Catfolk will turn back into alley cats!

Purraku: Oh no! I wonder what I am going to do when I turn into a cat.

Lamm: A what? a cat?

Purraku: It'll be great! I'll be adopted by someone and sleep for 14 hours a day and have all the fish and milk I want!

Lamm: Wait you need to be adopted by someone when you're a small, *real* cat?

Purraku: Maybe you could-

Lamm: I'll adopt you! When you're a cat I'll adopt you and you can be my pet and we can be friends forever and we can talk about all the battles we fought in - well I can talk about them and you can listen - and we'll be friends forever, because you'll be my pet! *bounce bounce hug*

As you might have guessed, destruction of the item did not cause original - or even the recently created - Catfolk to turn back into alley cats, nor did Purraku change either.

PrinceCon 36 Photos

While I was thinking of it, I snapped a few photographs of Hireling Hall and some of my early adventures. By the end I was tired, groggy, and lucky to remember where my car was parked.

The Saturation Point

PrinceCon 36 and the tale of Riza Lamm

Riza Lamm was a hobbit who ended up on the streets of Delft far too early in life. Things were often hard as a child alone, and there were times when Lamm wondered if life was even worthing living anymore. When she was still young, a cleric of Aru, God of healing and life, noticed her on the street. Within days she had been moved into the local Aru-sponsored orphanage, and a whole new world opened up to her.

People were nice. They were helpful. And above all, they valued and treasured the life of Aru had given all people. Including her. Lamm's disbelief grew to wonder at the optimism and purity of those devoted to Aru, and she strove to distance herself from her past through Aru's teachings. She took up not only the calling as a cleric, but also Aru's Oath not to harm people, even if they attacked her. An oath she would be sorely tested on once she joined the adventurers from Hireling Hall.

Lamm was determined to help others see and benefit from Aru's love and kindness as she had, and made a conscious decision to view the world with an open mind and an open heart. After all, if she had been forgiven for her past, then there was hope for anyone.

***

This past weekend was PrinceCon 36, a yearly 46-hour D&D convention that ROCKS! Players meet up in Hireling Hall and form parties, snag a GM, and go on "4-6" hour runs (see 7-9 hours) using their own house blend rules that were surprisingly easy to learn. This was my first convention, and I was not brave enough to run the entire 46 hours straight through. I arrived Friday at 6 after work, and over the weekend I was in 5 runs, leaving the building for a span of only 5 hours Friday night where I snagged 4 hours of sleep in my own bed, and some food & caffeine at the local grocery.

Upon my return, it has come to my attention that there are those out there (okay, just Tali) who would be interested in a humorous retelling of some of the adventures of this weekend - and possibly future gaming exploits as well. I hope to post some of my scanned notes on the games (not that I expect anyone to be able to read them), character "logs" and adventure summaries. Besides, it will give me an excuse to relive some of the AMAZING puns that flew around this weekend.