Iron Dungeon Master

The party of mismatched races and adventuring archetypes had traversed the dreaded dungeon of Wrathrone, the Dragon Aspect of the Night. After a dangerous corridor collapse leaves them stranded in the dungeon’s depths they discover the throne room of Wrathrone is largely abandoned. A young girl with cyan skin cries in a cage. A mound of treasure waits for an eager hand to take it. A dragon sized pathway leads behind the throne.

The party’s wizard and druid investigate the strange girl, learning that she is also a dragon and the Aspect of Knowledge, capable of knowing all things. They are hesitant to release her.

Behind them, the bard starts playing a song to calm everyone’s nerves and the rogue starts dipping his hands into the treasure pile. What’s this? The treasure pile is a mimic! Time for action! The party burns the mimic down quickly, It really only got about a turn to act. Why did it back into a corner and whimper? Was it scared? Was it trying to escape? Wait … are we the baddies?!

Phoenix Comic Con can be a real hoot and a half (that’s nearly two full owls worth). Last year I got to stalk Patrick Rothfuss at his many panels and buy some cool artwork and basically waste a weekend doing nothing important in an awesome way. It was great.

This most recent Comic Con was bogged down by security issues, the banishment of lightsaber vendors, and a series of guests that I just couldn’t get excited about (got to shake Timothy Zahn’s hand, though. That was sweeeeeet).

What I did get excited about was the Charity Poker tournament (23rd place!) and the Iron Dungeon Master competition. Today, we will be discussing the latter event.

If you’ve ever seen the Food Network Channel original television drama known as “Chopped” then you understand a group of cooks with tragic backstories are given wild and outrageous ingredients and asked to turn them into various meals for a panel of judges that are able to discern tastes I have never heard of. The ice cream machine is usually broken. Someone usually cuts themselves. Their plating is terrible. Oh no! One of them forgot one of the ingredients. Now they’ll never get the $10,000 prize to appease the ghost of their grandmother that haunts their kitchen until they get a better island and a gas range. Grandma ghost’s are picky about kitchens.

At Comic Con they did a similar style of competition but for Dungeon Masters. Eight of us were corralled together against our better judgment and presented with ingredients we would have to mix into a 4 hour long D&D/Pathfinder adventure to entertain and entice a group of players that were randomly selected for us. I didn’t get to hear anyone else’s tragic backstory but I just really needed to win this year so that my Dungeon and Dragon’s themed food truck, Rolling for Initiative, could get off the ground and I could take my traveling tavern on the road.

The ingredients:

• A picture featuring a beautiful sunlit forest scape. Within the forest there was a mighty tortoise, trudging along. Within the turtle’s shell was a starlit, red veined mountain with a great and mighty dragon surging alongside it.
• A phrase. I don’t remember it exactly but something along the lines of “who are the true villains?”
• An NPC: “The child that knows.”

We got 30 minutes to help players make characters using our preferred system. I had a great group of men and women who were excited to play and had very wide ranging degrees of familiarity with Dungeons and Dragons.

We then got 30 minutes to design our campaign. I decided to drop them in the lair of a mighty Dragon that was also the spiritual embodiment of the Night who had captured and imprisoned the childlike embodiment of Knowledge. In the dungeon the player’s found a turtle statuette that turned out to be the embodiment of the Day, imprisoned by the dragon to maintain his control over the darkness. Darkness had overtaken the land for days and weeks at this point and they were hoping to find a way to cure this problem.

Every conflict or NPC they interacted with was largely neutral or just doing their own thing. The mimic they murdered wanted to be left alone. They didn’t give it a chance to really show that, being a bloodthirsty group of murder hobos like any good Dungeons and Dragons group, but they definitely felt bad after the fact.

The next major conflict they ran into was a room filled with Wrathrone’s dragon eggs. Anytime they got too close to one or touched one it made that egg more likely to hatch. They had a fun time trying to figure out ways to safely cross this room and when the rogue landed face first in an egg they started to figure out that this wasn’t a usual “good vs evil” kind of campaign. The baby dragons had no scales and couldn’t see. They whimpered and whined and were easily hurt. They attacked the group but it was wild and uncontrolled. They wound up healing the baby dragon more than they hurt it.

When they came upon the cultists that worship Wrathrone they learned that they really just enjoyed the beauty of night time. They didn’t despise the day and they knew that the day would have to return at some point. They just wanted the world to see that the night is beautiful and to appreciate it. So the players snuck past them, pretending to be cultists.

When they released an illithid prisoner from an eternal magical cell they didn’t kill it. They just pointed it toward a room of unsuspecting cultists. Morally grey, right?

They added a plot twist in the final hour and half that we had to incorporate: “The players will learn the true cost of friendship.” What am I supposed to do with that right? Force one of them to sacrifice their identity to gain dragon powers and fight a larger dragon? That’s totally what I did it was awesome.

The finale was an intense dragon battle. The dragon child revealed that one of the party members could take on her aspect, becoming the embodiment of Knowledge and gaining a dragon form, while other aspects arrived to help them battle Wrathrone long enough for the turtle statuette to hatch and bring about the new day.

Players got to ride on dragons and use their breath and claws as though they were their own. One player got to turn into a dragon. They fought a creature way, way above their skill set and brought it down. It was rad and climactic and awesome.

I got 2nd place.

Still netted me a butt ton of swag (books, dice, some minis, some more dice, a DM screen, some dice). It is the main reason I’m going back to Comic Con next year and I hope as many of you go out as well. They need players as much as they need DM’s and the players got prizes for creative thinking and being valuable at the table. The co-writer of this blog won MVP at her table and got a dice necklace and a gift certificate. It was pretty sweet.

Here’s what I learned and what I want you to learn from that awesome day.

• Improvisation can lead to some really cool moments: I had a full hour of prep time for this and I had to make up a lot of stuff on the fly. I realized I wasn’t going to make it the full four hours and had to invent a puzzle room on the spot. Seven orbs, each with a strange descriptive term, and one alcove in the wall that an orb could fit into. Each orb was cursed, though, and would do something horrible to a player that touched one. They wound up touching them all and getting cursed in fun ways. My group thought it was one of the best parts of the dungeon. An Orb Room is something I’m going to devote its own article to at some point so look forward to that.
• Playing with new players gives you perspective: I have a very tight knit group of nerds that I play Tabletop Gaming with. For my One-Shot Verse Campaign the same group of 4 people played weekly for a year and a half. I ran a random bunch of players through Hoard of the Dragon Queen at my local game store and had a blast. I had never met the players for my Iron Dungeon Master competition but I had a great time getting to know them and seeing what was important to them. It was a struggle to find ways to incorporate each and every person in the party when I barely knew them. One player had literally never played Dungeons and Dragons before and was just there with her boyfriend. She wound up having the most fun and was the person that sacrificed herself to become a dragon.
• Giving yourself random elements and making a story from them is really, really fun: Creativity is a game, sometimes. My brain loves to come up with cool ideas but it needs catalysts. I need a kick to get my brain turning a puzzle piece over to figure out the rest of the puzzle based on it. My co-writer and I play a series of writing games while working in order to keep ourselves from being bored out of our skulls and to create resources for our various Tabletop Endeavors (yes, this will be an article soon). Taking a random element, like a picture, and making an entire D&D game based on it sounds like a daunting task but it was great inspiration. I encourage any and all creative peoples to give themselves little writing games to help spur their mind into creating.

Iron Dungeon Master was awesome. I wish there were weekly versions of it. Weekend time!

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