What a fantastic NTX 2021 was! This was the first year for my son being a part of the experience and greatness which is NTX. He was supposed to attend last year, but we all know that didn't work out as planned. Anyway, it's great just seeing people again, and the hotel is not enforcing their own mask policy at all. So, it almost feels like everything's back. The main difference is that the numbers of people so far already feel lower. My son and I posted all available game sheets, and there are half the choices we usually present.
My son and I were scheduled to be in Doug's game on Wednesday night, but as he was in the hospital recovering from surgery, he asked his son David to fill in, and he did a fine job. It was an AD&D 1st edition game where an old, dying man asked us to help him die properly as his flesh was rotting away from a magically cursed sword. We had to go on several quests to get various spell components to fulfill his request. Overall, we rolled really well and the
DM did not, so we only lost one party member along the way..sort of. In the final battle, the halfling decided to yank away this cursed sword and it attached itself to the halfling leading the halfling to run away. We shot at him and chased him to no avail, and that's where the adventure ended.
The people playing had a fair amount of whisky and other heavy liquors and were having a very good time. We chased proverbial rabbits from time to time, but no one was unruly. I played a magic user with a magic telekinesis item, and used it to good effect, lifting enemies high in the air and dashing them on the ground. Blood and guts splattered everywhere! So fun! This photo was of my Wednesday night game with David Rhea, who filled in for his dad.
On Thurday afternoon, my son and I were in Steve Robertson's, Isle of Dreadmoor game . He does a great job of
DM'ing. It was a 5th through 9th level BX campaign, and since I had been in two of his previous games, I had an 8th level MU. My son ran an elf(fighter/MU). We battled a T-Rex, a tentacled monster, and some powerful Zargon, a tentacled, unicorn-horned creature. The big battle was with a flying Necromancer who had a Quato-like MU attached to his side. The MU's emissary was a flying, magical ape, who nearly wiped us out by himself, as Fear caused half the party to run. Anyway, two fireballs from the MU's killed the Necromancer and side-kick. The zombie-giant which had been summoned was then quickly dispatched. There wasn't a ton of memorable treasure we found that I can remember, but we had a great time! This photo was of the Isle of Dreadmoor game with Steve Robertson.
My son and played in the Knights & Knaves Alehouse Social game Thursday night. The Social was lots of fun! We had a good-sized crew but maybe only half the people there were regular contributors on their forums. Less than half were consuming alcohol, but that didn't keep the action and comments from being interesting and funny. The room was a little warm at the beginning, but once we closed the door to the hallway, it was quite comfortable. Most everyone started out 1st or 2nd level. My character died almost immediately, which turned out to be the best thing ever. My pre-gen MU had a dex of 3 and an intelligence of 13, his highest stat by far. The re-rolled character had an intelligence of 14, and a dex of 13, I think. Much better. We defeated a solitary troll, a group of three trolls, a horde of zombies(mostly turned), and avoided a pit trap, found several secret doors, and explored quite a bit of territory. The real fun was "negotiating" with a vampire, a lich, and a red dragon as well as carrying messages and memos between them. Someone found himself a powerful, intelligent evil sword and ended up acquiring an army of 16 orcs. The orcs weren't super faithful, ...surprise! We ended up having to put them all to sleep, check their rectums for treasure and tie them up. One was also flushed down a zombie drain.
The big battle happened when we escorted the red dragon to confront the Lord of the Manor (a character played by grodog), his efreet, and hirelings. The party mostly bet that the dragon would win and sided along with him, however, the battle ended in just about the best possible way for the party as the dragon defeated the Lord of the Manor, the efreet killed the dragon, the hirelings ran, and the efreet grabbed his bottle and took off for the City of Brass! High on our victory, we re-entered the dungeon and some characters were promptly killed by some Voodoo demi-god with a strange name. One died gloriously by Finger of Death. We had apparently damaged the demi-god's altar trying to find a secret door. The character with the powerful sword helped save most of the rest of the party by sacrificing a Lawful cleric, encouraged along by his intelligent, and quite powerful, sword. That character was further egged on as a magic-user attempted to use a Potion of Human Control on him, but he saved! The character with the powerful sword then quaffed his own potion of Human Control controlling the Lawful Cleric, who didn't save. Thus, the cleric was sacrificed on the Voodoo demi-god's altar we had damaged. The character with the powerful sword then swore fealty to the Voodoo demi-god, and he/it was satisfied. As we wrapped up, it was determined that the highest level character, a 4th level guy, was the new Lord of the Manor. However, the new Lord of the Manor position was not secure as sword guy's character was itiching to challenge him! And on that tense note, we ended! Fun!! And this is the Thursday night Social photo! As you can see, we were all in high spirits!
My Friday afternoon game was Ghost Tower of Inverness
DM'ed by Allan Hammack himself!!!
I was wondering how it would go as I hadn't really heard anything bad about Allan's
DM'ing, but I hadn't heard anything good either. Anyway, we only had about four and half hours to game, which is roughly the tournament parameters, so the pressure was on! Without giving away too many spoilers, we did really well. I chose the magic user and apparently picked about the perfect spell mix, which turned out huge. One room featured a lot of 2+1 HD monsters, and we fortunately hasted AND cast prayer over the party turning our group into a blender bloodbath. Allan later reflected that most groups fail to negotiate this room quickly or well. We also got by the fire giant room quickly and with little damage, using a Fly spell and Feather Fall spell to good effect. We also had several Dispel Magics in a key room of the dungeon. We only lost one member of the party (technically he didn't die!) somewhat due to unlucky dice rolls, but we could have played the room better too. Allan appraised our overall effort as excellent, which is high praise
IMHO, and he pointed out the rooms where most adventurers fail to survive. When the original tournament ran, only ONE party out of almost 100 actually completed the adventure without losing any party members in the allotted time! Allan proved to be a solid
DM but not flashy or loud, just like his personality. I'm guessing it helped that he knew the dungeon like the back of his hand. It helped that we also had a great party who knew how to game and work together. The best part was that my son was able to experience this legendary dungeon and early pioneer of D&D. Wow!! This photo was the Ghost Tower of Inverness game with Allan Hammack himself
DMing!
Our Friday evening game was with tacojohn
DM'ing! It was a high-level AD&D 1st edition game in the City of Brass. Woo! I had a 12th level wizard and my son ran a 13th level paladin, and we both did really well and had a lot of fun. We didn't complete the adventure, but we killed monsters with 100's of hit points. We didn't lose any party members either. Unfortunately, there were too many party members who were essentially a walking, talking Slow spell. I don't like telling grown adults how to be smarter, so I largely kept my mouth shut, but I did all I could to move things along. Even tacojohn had to get on to one guy for cross talk commentary. I will point out two specific suggestions for those who are interested. First, it helps to know what you need to roll on a dice in order to hit. Why people would roll again and again against the same monster and consult the to hit tables over and over again is beyond me. Another simple trick is to roll your to hit and damage dice at the same time. It's not a huge time saver, unless you put all your mound of dice in one pile like several people in our group were doing. And that's all I'm going to say about that! Still, great day to be at NTX!!!
My son and I played in Jeff Talanian's HYPERBOREA game Saturday afternoon, and it was one of my son's favorite games. Jeff is a great
DM, and the setting and action were super creative. We got some cool swag too, a custom dice, and a critical hit table chart for example. At the end of the game, Jeff asked who wanted the map, and my son got that. We traveled to these islands trying to figure out what happened to a group of druids who apparently had turned to the dark side. I played a witch!
We fought some weird monsters, but just about got wiped out by a stone golem which totally obliterated two characters. Fortunately, we were able to complete the adventure and solve the mystery of just what happened and how bad it was. We collected our award and left some very rich characters. This photo was the Saturday afternoon HYPERBOREA game with Jeff.
Our Saturday night game was a mid-level, 1st edition AD&D tournament adventure led by Paul Stormberg. Apparently he's run this adventure dozens of times, so I was interested to see how we'd do. We had to find this tomb and steal it's treasure. Easy, right? Not so fast! Fortunately, we had a pretty good crew of adventures who made some good observations. This dungeon was heavy on puzzles, semi-intelligence tests. My son made one of the better discoveries, finding the main entrance to the tomb complex instead of having to sludge through the back tunnels. We deftly handled the green dragon guarding the entrance, but took a little long on figuring out how to use the key to the tomb. There were some color-coded puzzles that took a while to figure out, but once we figured out one, the next one was easy. Most puzzles were figured out by trial and error. The final battle was cool, as my fireball was used for good effect. Looking back, I believe we set ourselves up for success well. We didn't lose a single character, but came close once. We were told by Paul that we did well, as most parties do not escape the dungeon with the treasure. Fun!!!
On Sunday morning, my son and I had a Gamma World game with Steve Winter! This always ends up being one of the con highlights. We had to find out who was stealing lots of technology stuff under the cover of fog. Everyone in our party was a humanoid mutant or a mutated animal, and there were some interesting combinations! We ended up chasing down some thieving weasels and figured out they were small-time thieves and not who we were looking for. Then, we ended up getting swallowed by and HUGE flying whale, and had to talk our way out to other denizens who had been swallowed, eventually being pooped out the whale's rectum! It's a miracle we didn't lose somebody as our two flying characters had to quickly get to our pilot less flying hovercraft which was also pooped out. The hovercraft was then used to get everyone falling. Whew! We were then captured by the main bad guy in a fog/rain storm. We negotiated our way up to the bridge and the main bad guy's HQ. We ended up blowing him up and destroying his weather generating flying machine used to steal stuff. It was a satisfying end to a weird adventure!
The best part of this year's con was having my son experience everything with me. He had a great time! He enjoyed meeting lots of new gamers, and learning about
1e AD&D and other gaming systems. He made some other great connections at the con too as he is interested in writing and publishing (anybody want to hire him?
). We are already planning to both participate next year! Woo woo! Here's a photo of the NTX staff. It's an honor working alongside these men and women.
Truth is worth finding and life is too short to work for money.
