Daily Monster: Skeletons

In what I hope will become a semi-regular feature, today I will take a classic D&D monster and give it the Risus treatment. Given that my attention is focused on my monster-themed Pirates vs. Vampire game, I'm going to start things off with the lowly but time-honored skeleton.

[SPOILER WARNING: Players of Pirates vs. Vampires may want to skip this post until our current adventure has been concluded]

Skeletal Remnant: Disembodied Skeletal Appendage (1). 

Notes: Not really a threat in combat, unless it attacks an already weakened character. Useful mainly for establishing a mood by making the players roll dice. Such minor threats can often be represented by a simple TN roll. Failure at the TN roll would still mean the monster was destroyed but that the character was slightly wounded or lost some valuable resource in the process (or simply looked clumsy while doing it).

Skeleton Minion: Mindless Skeletal Fighter (2).

Notes: Like all skeletons, they require bashing or at least swung weapons to be engaged properly. Characters attacking skeletons with stabbing or piercing weapons would operate at half-dice for lacking proper tools. Lacking minds, skeletons are immune to mental attacks, unless those "attacks" are dirty tricks or attempts to outsmart them in some way (in which case the skeletons are going to be a real pushovers).

Skeleton Warrior: Tenacious But Mindless Skeletal Fighter (3).

Notes: A good foe to throw individually at competent fighters in the party.

Skeletal Champion: Agile Skeletal Fighter (4), Elite Undead Swordsman (5)

Notes: A worthy foe that should be able to avoid the Risus death spiral for a while and serve as a very challenging opponent for either a single highly-skilled combatant or a team of slightly less skilled fighters.

Minotaur Skeleton: Hulking Skeletal Bruiser (7), Undead Minotaur (5).

Notes: A great example of a tough boss fight where the party members will almost certainly have to team up or employ special resources or tactics. An alternate approach would be to use Funky Dice: Hulking Skeletal Bruiser (4d10), Undead Minotaur (3d10).

Bone Golem: Well-preserved and Reinforced Skeleton Animated With Kabbalistic Magic (3), Semi-Intelligent Automaton (3).

Notes: A potential Sidekick for player character Kabbalists (inspired by a discussion we had during play last Sunday).

Gang of 3 Skeletons: Grunt Squad of Skeletal Minions (3).
Squad of 10 Skeletons: Grunt Squad of Skeletal Minions (4).
Horde of 30 Skeletons: Grunt Squad of Skeletal Minions (5).

Notes: Illustrates my *rough* rule-of-thumb on handling Grunt Squads: I generally add a die for every threefold increase in numbers. Usually, I don't even bother specifying the exact number and resort to generalities (handful, dozen, dozens) instead.

Adventure Funnel: Skeletal Corsairs of the Barbary Coast

And now for a little experiment...

Today I'm going to take Dr-Rotwang's Adventure Funnel and use it to develop a scenario for Sunday's Pirates vs. Vampire game. Before I can jump in and start creating, I do need to consider my player characters:

Alaric Anchorman: Swashbuckling former lieutenant of the Royal Navy and aspiring young "privateer".

Hector Valdez: A former blood thrall and current member of the anti-vampire resistance.

John "Mad Jack" Murphy: Ships' doctor and resident vampire-hunting specialist (and my own npc/occasional pc).

(As-Yet-Unnamed): A merchant-trader with an interest in Jewish mysticism.

I'm going to assume that the characters are already serving on a privateer ship that is operating at the behest of anti-vampire personages in the British government. Young Alaric is not currently captain, but I expect that he will be thrust into that role early in the adventure.
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SPOILER ALERT [My Players Should Turn Back]


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Goal: Find and eliminate the undead threat to allied shipping and free settlements in and around the Mediterranean.

Obstacles

1. The Captain is secretly working for the other team
2. No witnesses at sea
3. Villages razed with an undead raiding party left behind
4. Galleys crewed by skeletons and skeletal warrior champions
5. Barbary pirates in league with the Necromancer
6. Notorious pirate port on the island of Al Amarja
7. Skeleton base is in a hidden cove
8. Giant Fell Beast patrols the sky
9. Giant scorpions in the desert
10. Bedouin minions
11. Secret desert lair
12. Skeletal Minotaur
13. Gladiatorial arena
14. Hulking sword-wielding henchman 
15. The Necromancer
16. Bound Ifrit 

Details

• The characters are crew-members aboard the Spear of St. George. Captain Christian Kent carries a coded royal decree from King Charles II (the year is sometime between 1680 and 1685) granting it permission to commit piracy against the interests of known vampire clans. It should be noted that the decree would only be recognized by British officials who are also members of a secret anti-vampire organization and is thus no guarantee of clemency in the case of capture.
• Captain Kent is being blackmailed/extorted into working for an unidentified vampire aristocrat, identified only as "R" in various correspondences locked away in his quarters.
• "R" has ordered Kent to continue on his mission but that he must find the source of the Necromancer's power [the bound Ifrit] and deliver it to "R".  
• The party has at least heard rumors of skeletal raiders. Several allied ships have gone missing and at least on anti-vampire sanctuary has been obliterated.
• Possibility of stumbling on at least one burning wreck left behind after an attack by skeletal corsairs. The ship is the Comet, another anti-vampire privateer ship out of Port Royal.
• Possibility of encountering smoke coming from the village of Salernius. The party is too late to save the town, but they will certainly stumble upon a stranded skeletal raiding party. It will be a grizzly scene and human survivors will be very difficult to find.
• Certain Barbary Pirates (by no means all of them) have struck deals with the Necromancer and will challenge foreign ships.
• The port of Al Amarja (yes, that Al Amarja for those of you familiar with Over the Edge) is considered to be a free city. That doesn't mean it is a friendly city... the words "you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy" certainly apply. Members of the resistance, foreign spies, vampires, smugglers, ninjas, warlocks, and (of course) pirates can be found in abundance.
• The skeletal corsairs launch their attacks from a secret cove on the Tunisian coast. Undead replacements are continuously marched over trackless dunes and through twisting canyons from the Necromancer's secret lair. Stray from the path and face giant scorpions, wandering undead, or worse.
• The Necromancer's lair resembles Jabba's palace from Return of the Jedi.
• The Necromancer is fond of gladiatorial games and will seek to capture foes for use in the pits. His ultimate prize is an enormous skeletal minotaur of his own construction (which resides in a labyrinth below the slave pits). 
• The Necromancer's right-hand man is a scimitar-wielding blood thrall of prodigious size known only as Armando. 
• The Necromancer himself is a vampire of uncertain age with Mediterranean features. He is the scion of one of Europe's foremost vampire clans and hopes to use his skeletal fleet to amass enough resources to reclaim his rightful position. Despite his name, he is only a middling sorcerer who owes his power to an Ifrit bottle that he discovered shortly after being forced into the dessert. 

Assistance and Rewards

• Hector may have resistance contacts in the pirate port
• The Necromancer has captured and is in the process of turning Lady Magdalene Aston. She is eager to escape and will assist the player characters if possible.
• The Ifrit, bound to a brass bottle, is a dangerous reward as it is a malevolent entity who will pervert its instructions unless the person issuing the orders knows what he is doing. It could be used to help bring down the Necromancer.  

I could keep going and going but I am specifically trying to minimize my advance preparation so as to leave room for organic development. I'm also quite sure that we won't get very far into this particular adventure on Sunday so there will be plenty of time to revisit and re-funnel at a later date.

Monster-Themed Campaigns

Entering the planning phase of my upcoming Pirates vs. Vampires game, I am just starting to consider themes. Even though I will be world-building as I go and possibly using the Mythic Game Master Emulator to drive the game into unexpected directions, I would like to incorporate one or more recurring motifs. Themes are a great way to focus adventure design and they can really give a campaign a unique character.

[Spoiler Alert - My Players Should Turn Back]
In Pirates vs. Vampires I'd like to use a monster-based theme. Specifically, I'd like to feature the various "traditional" undead types from the D&D Monster Manual (edition is irrelevant). This is a game about vampires and vampires should be involved (directly or indirectly) in every story. But as we proceed from adventure to adventure, I'd like to successively move through the various D&D undead types as a way of marking the progress of the campaign. And by making a particular type of undead the focus of an adventure, I can incorporates all sorts of related thematic elements.

I've done this before with my sadly aborted Dragonspire campaign. Inspired by the Dragonlance modules of old, I wanted to create a campaign that walked through the various chromatic dragons in order of their deadliness. Of course, I only actually completed the white dragon adventures in both my online and face-to-face games. But those adventures were fantastic. Set during the height of winter, the characters ventured into snowy peaks and faced down many of frost-related challenges. Each adventure concluded with an exciting set-piece battle with an appropriately scaled white dragon "boss". And though the campaign was discontinued due to scheduling issues, the black dragon-themed adventure was going just as well.

To start things off, I think I'll start with the lowly skeleton. What comes to mind when one thinks of skeletons (especially as they relate to pirates)? Off the top of my head, I imagine a Ray Harryhausen Sinbad-esque adventure along the Barbary Coast.  Images of skeleton-crewed galleys and scimitar-wielding skeleton warriors practically leap into my head. No doubt there is a vampire necromancer who is using these skeletal minions to control the Mediterranean. Already, the simple choice of a skeleton motif has moved the setting out of the Caribbean and into a Arabesque North Africa.