24 July 2011

Microlite 74 & Queen of the Demonweb Pits

I plan on running Queen of the Demonweb Pits using fresh 10-14th levelled characters using the Microlite 74 rules, because I am a silly person and also a glutton for self-inflicted punishment.

See, there's a reason I'm not using Labyrinth Lord or OSRIC or Swords and Wizardry, and that reason is: I hate making high-level characters in those games. I tried, one time, to have our group make high-levelled characters using the Rules Compendium pdf that I had (it's still kicking around somewhere, on a mislabelled folder in an unused and forgotten hard drive, I'm certain), and we crumbled somewhere between trying to figure out henchmen and getting magical items. The rules are notoriously vague concerning higher levelled characters, and it took me way too long to decipher, by which time our enthusiasm had petered out and it was late, besides, so we ended up having a couple of drinks (if I remember correctly) and playing something else.

But my desire still remains. Using what I've learned about myself and my group's (totally understandeable) impatience with character generation, I'm going to take a couple of steps towards making it easier and faster, so we can unravel the mystery of that wierd-ass magical egg thing and also delve deeply in Llolth's quivering demense. (That sounded so dirty!)

You would be surprised at the amount of softcore
spider-woman images you can find.

1) I'm going to use the Microlite rule to get character generation done in absolutely record time, and worry about the minor niggling incompatibilities with the rules in Q1 later. Because I'm a DM and I'm going to make something up when we get to it.
2) I'm going to pre-generate the magical items, make them unique to the game-world, and then go from there. All I need now is some sort of way to determine what the "average" level of magical items would have been for characters that would have gotten there "organically", by playing through them. I might see if I can find the pdfs of the rest of the series, tabulate how many and of what quality the magic items would have been, and then go from there.
3) I'll probably also pre-generate the characters, because it won't take me much longer than it'll take my players, and as long as I leave the items, name, origin, and all of that off the character sheets, it really can be just about anybody and there's not much to it, anyways.
4) I'm gonna make a binder that will house Q1 and also the character sheets and the magical items (which I might put on index cards, because that's one thing about 4e that I thought was totally ballin'), and that way when it comes time to finally run this thing (next month? I dunno), I'm just gonna whip out the binder like KCHYAAAA and there's some ass-kicking right there, look at this shit, it's so fuckin' great.


So couple of questions:
1) How much, and what sort of magic items would you give to a newly-generated level 10-14 guy?
2) Any advice on running it, you sage veterans?
3) What was my third question going to be?


Thanks in advance, guys. O-)

That's a smiling cyclops, if you were curious.

4 comments:

  1. Ha! Love the enthusiam and confidence here! Sounds like you've got it well under control. Wish I had a quick answer for your two questions, but honestly the spirit of your own #1 seems to cover it all.

    Ook, maybe looking at the roster of characters in the Tomb of Horrors (also lvl 10-14), or specifically their special items there might serve as some kind of helpful baseline - if you have a copy.

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  2. By a strange coincidence, I was able to locate online the exact graphic I'm referring to above.

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  3. You are my hero, that image is exactly exactly exactly what I was looking for.

    What I'll probably do is make those "packages" into a giant list by tier, if you will, and let the fresh characters pick, say, one item from Tier 1, two items from Tier 2, and then three items from T3 (which will be the potions and charged items and all that.)

    Then I've just gotta make the magic items have names and backstories and spice them up a little bit, and I'll be just about done.

    Did I thank you for that image yet? I really appreciate it :)

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  4. Happy to assist - Have a great game!

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