The 'Seek What You Need On The Wurm Road ' Incident & More Temporal Adventuring

So last night I dropped in the Clash of the Titans film from 1981in the Bluray  & it brought back a a load of bitter sweat memories. Our group of twelve  players or so had an ever changing roster of players back in the Nineties. The table top hobby scene in Connecticut was a explosive as the OSR seems to now.

The big engine fueling this heady mix back then was White Wolf & it was a monster as Larping exploded in Hartford much to the disgust of the D&D crowd. Sort of because they paid lip service to the hobby shoppers  all the while doing some of the events on the weekends. There were lots of girls in that end of the scene & I did my fair share of White Wolf games back then. Looking over Clash of the of The Titans brought back my experiences with Arduin Grimoire especially with the Dave Hargrave title Shadowlands.



We had back to back games going with a mix of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons first edition, original Dungeons & Dragons plus bits of B/X where necessary plus a back bone of the Arduin Grimoire. I was traveling down to New Town Ct for the weekends & staying with friends for a marathon of twelve players plus four DM sharing duties it was glorious. We ran it like a Con game with PC's coming in & out, the campaign was a monster evolving from the West Hartford War & Pieces game. 

We were doing delves into past temporal shadows, warring with Deodanths in the corridors & shadows of world monuments right before temporal demons devoured them, taking on necromancers in the gloomier aspects of the Negative material planes while moon dogs nipped at our heels, and then finally coming up against a series of medusa agents of something really nasty.



Dave Trampier's perfectly nasty medusa  from the AD&D Monster Manual, TSR, 1977 was exactly the sort of mid level monster that we kept dealing with.

We needed answers & we needed them fast!? The blind seer witches sent us down into the 'Wurm Road' of Arduin for our answers. I was fresh back from a trip to England during this time & the 'Wurm Road' reminded me of some of the archeological digs that I had seen while there. An underworld road built on the back of other past urban  civilizations. It was a tough haul through miles & miles of trackless underground alien wilderness. And the monsters we ran into down there was the stuff of nightmares. Everyone lost at least one PC during those sessions. Our techno bought it right outside the ruins of the  temple of Hades when his throat was ripped out by Cushous Lightbreaker. Cushous Lightbreaker was one of seven major Vampusa in the service of the 21 Hells.
We did what any good group of adventurers would do. We ran our asses off & covered our tracks like the little bitches that we were!



Forget this BS you'll often hear about high level games where they kill gods. We played hide & seek with the temporal shadows only a few games ago we thought of as nothing more then just another 'jaded adventure location'. We hid ourselves in the temporal ruined shadows where time demons feed on the remains of yesterdays. The leeched out & time bleached  remains of an airport in Bangor Maine was our first stop but we knew that that thing's Deodanth hunters & its moondogs would be on our trail. The really big problem was that Cushous Lightbreaker had gotten the magical artifact first!?!
We saw the first of the time demons show up to drag their maws of entropy across the tired reality of the place meaning that we had to get moving to the next shadow. One of our clerics of Thoth needed a moment to contact her divine master but we couldn't risk it. And we ran as fast as our mana points allowed us! We burned each & every teleport scroll, & time back door that we could. Any snake or snake like monster we ran across we burnt its remains & fled.
We were a long way from these folks on the Arduin Grimoire & we had hardcore Rifts players & game masters shaking in their boots. As I said it was glorious!


I'll tie this back into the OSR next time & no more cats!