Dungeons & Delvers: Age of Worms, Episode 708

Cast

• Humal (level 12 wrathful cambion wizard)
• Corzale (level 12 dwarf war cleric/druid)
• Sumia (level 12 elf rogue/ranger/wizard)

Session Highlights

This was basically a shopping session, as we only had 45 minutes due to real-life scheduling change, plus technical issues (for some reason Hangouts does not like the computer we normally do Hangouts on).

Sumia picked up some silver arrows, because many types of undead and demons are vulnerable to silver, as well as some thunderstone arrows to give her shots a bit more oomph.

Corzale was in the market for a flying shield, so that she could have some added protection without sacrificing the ability to use her holy maul. She found one, but it was distinctly fiendish looking: blackened metal, leering face, all wrapped in chains. The guy was willing to part with it for only several thousand silver pieces, and Corzale figured she could just have Humal give it a look later.

Humal and Sumia both went looking for what the former referred to as a trapezohedron. After several hours of wandering the streets and bowels of the city, questions, dead ends, and paying for information, they finally found someone, or rather something that had one.

Neither got a good look at whatever it was, which was certainly for the better, but in lieu of money it would accept an exchange: they would both need to return with "something interesting". Given that the asking price was beyond what they could afford, they agreed, and seeing as they'd already found a mysterious, tentacled treasure broker Sumia also asked if it had any good daggers.

It did: the feather of an angel, though it would only part with it in exchange for seven favors (thankfully just from Sumia). She accepted, and when they left the room found themselves back on the streets of Magepoint. Ah, well, saved them the time finding their way back to Manzorian's fortress.

Designer Notes
The biggest change to the Black Book game is the addition of the paladin class: Kelly wanted to multiclass Corzale into paladin, so I actually had to get on it. We're using the concepts from the Dungeon World paladin, though you don't get as many virtues because then the paladin would be probably superior to the fighter (especially at lower levels).

He was happy with the 1st-level version, and from there it was easy to build onto it: we've now got a 10-level progression for an upcoming Appendix D collection (along with the barbarian and sorcerer).

On that note, we have some people looking it over to see if there are any obvious mechanics issues (and typos). It's going to have almost all of the content from the free Appendix D pdfs, just better formatted and hopefully typos ironed out. There's also going to be new content and more art. All in all it's shaping up to hit 140 pages.

The only downside is that, given all of that, it's going to cost around three bucks (and there's going to be a print version available).

Normally wouldn't let players buy magic items, but Magepoint is a big city built atop a magical nexus and inhabited by arcanists and artificers, plus there's a reason the guy wanted to get rid of it. I just used the cost of a flying shield from 3rd Edition (not the one that lets you fly, but the one that moves around on its own to protect you), swapped it to silver pieces, and rounded it up to the nearest thousand.

Adventure-wise, the big change (for this session) is that I gave Manzorian a bunch of magic robots to deal with issues and people that don't really need his personal attention. I figure he's a very busy guy and lives in a huge fortress built on a magic-energy nexus. To avoid spoiling anything, I'll talk about changes to the rest of the adventure in later posts, as the party encounters and deals with it.

Announcements

You can now get a physical copy of Dungeons & Delvers: Black Book in whatever format you want!

After months of doing other things, we turned our attention to and released The Warden. It's based on the 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons class of the same name, but judging by the responses we did an excellent job converting it over.

Dwarven Vault is our sixth 10+ Treasures volume. If you're interested in thirty dwarven magic items (including an eye that lets you shoot lasers) and nearly a dozen new bits of dungeon gear, check it out!

Just released our second adventure for A Sundered World, The Golden Spiral. If a snail-themed dungeon crawl is your oddly-specific thing, check it out!

By fan demand, we've mashed all of our 10+ Treasure volumes into one big magic item book, making it cheaper and more convenient to buy in print (which you can now do).