The Dwarven View Point & Maximum Mayhem Dungeons#4 Vault of Dwarven King In Castles & Crusades Sword & Sorcery

 Pulling down the idea of the Dwarves as a Fey power within our Swords & Sorcery campaign isn't as far fetched as one might think. Let's picked up right from here on the blog. And if we're using Dieties & Demigods by Kuntz & Ward's Celtic mythological section then there's very little in the way of tie ins with the Dwarves. 

However once we skip back into the the Codex Celtarum with it's section on 'Fairy Metals' now we've got our motives for the Dwarven kingdoms deep in the Fairylands. How does this fit in with the role of the Dwarves within  within Maximum Mayhem Dungeons#4 Vault of Dwarven King. written by Alan Chamberlain & Mark Taormino. The Dwarven kingdoms of the 'Ancient World' have held the line when it comes to protecting mankind long enough within thier view. 

"“The little poets sing of little things:

Hope, cheer, and faith, small queens and puppet kings;
Lovers who kissed and then were made as one,
And modest flowers waving in the sun.

The mighty poets write in blood and tears
And agony that, flame-like, bites and sears.
They reach their mad blind hands into the night,
To plumb abysses dead to human sight;
To drag from gulfs where lunacy lies curled,
Mad, monstrous nightmare shapes to blast the world." 
Robert E. Howard.. 

The events seen within Maximum Mayhem Dungeons#4 Vault of Dwarven King are highly dangerous and very violetile in the Dwarven view. 

The Dwarven nations here are the more modern dwarves who have been trading with mankind for eons after the Norse and Germanic gods have put them into thier roles as the guardians and caretakers of mankind. This is something that the politics deep in   Autarch's By This Axe: The Cyclopedia of Dwarven Civilization gets into. The Dwarven nations as abitors of the technologies of civilization and Law. 

Does this fit the ideals of a world of Sword & Sorcery?! Upon examination it does in so many ways. The magick of the world isn't dying but it is giving way to the newer orders of mankind. The world of the Ancients isn't giving up without a fight needless to say that Elemental Evil rulers are another form of Chaos just waiting to unleash themselves on the world. And where do the policies of mankind play into this?! Mankind in the Dwarven  view are fleeting at best and a nucience at worst. And this plays into the Fey approach seen in 

Castles & Crusades Codex Celtarum 2nd Printing.

You have divisions between the Fey Courts, the Dwarven nations, the European worshipers, and more. Not all of these interactions are going are going to be peaceful and at worst tinged by warfare. And this goes all the way back into a couple of cities that were mentioned in the 1980's Role Aids Dwarven book as far kingdoms and not well liked among the more 'modern' Dwarves of Fairyland.

'" Here Be Dragons" A Sword & Sorcery Campaign Using The Castles & Crusades Mythos Series & Dark Wizard Games Maximum Mayhem Dungeons#4 Vault of Dwarven King Session Report#2

“Time and times are but cogwheels, unmatched, grinding on oblivious to one another. Occasionally - oh, very rarely! - the cogs fit; the pieces of the plot snap together momentarily and give men faint glimpses beyond the veil of this everyday blindness we call reality.― Robert E. Howard, Bran Mak Morn: The Last King: A Novel


We're making full use of the the entire whole of  the Bundle: Castles & Crusades Mythos Series -- Print here for our Sword & Sorcery campaign. So last night I got reminded by the players that in the past there have been Dwarven kingdoms deep in the Fairylands and these weren't readily detailed. And then a player mentioned a ancient Dwarven kingdom deep within the past of our older campaigns. So I grabbed my copy of Role Aids Dwarves and began knitting this in with our current Dwarven campaign from last session here. 

I pulled a couple of cities that were mentioned in the 1980's Role Aids Dwarven book as far kingdoms and not well liked among the more 'modern' Dwarves of Fairyland. 

These cities are traditionalists and far closer to the Norse Dwarven mythologies and beliefs. They feel that they are 'superior' to other Dwarven communities because they remain true to the 'Old Dwarven Ways'

And this theme plays into the ideals presented within Maximum Mayhem Dungeons#4 Vault of Dwarven King. Written by Alan Chamberlain & Mark Taormino. The Dwarven kingdoms of the 'Ancient World' have held the line when it comes to protecting mankind long enough within thier view. The attitudes of the goblins are one of 'let the gods' sort the humans & Dwarven kingdoms out. There's a lot more bubbling below the surface of this adventure and we've been dealing with the politics deep in   Autarch's By This Axe: The Cyclopedia of Dwarven Civilization.

This fits within the events depicted within Maximum Mayhem Dungeons#4 Vault of Dwarven King.Without giving too much away many of the events depicted within MMD#4 are going to hit the high marks for certain key points within the Celtic Codex Second edition. Why?! Because the Fey courts are conspiring to bring down the empires of the Dwarves. 

Are the goblins  innocent or are they act in concert within other Fey?! The party in last night's game got deeply involved in the investigative side of things looking at loot, remains, and other evidence left behind by the slaying of the goblin mercenaries in last week's game. 
There's also evidence that the Dwarven nations have had deep trading relations with the local human empires for ores, metals, and other materials. 

While this doesn't seem major it's become a point of contention with the Elven & Dwarven players which is kinda dumb because thier actually a part of the same court. And it was settled by our party leader in very quick sucession reminding the players of thier PC's mission. And then our adventurers ran across the goblin mercenaries camp and things got very interesting! They were captured! 

'" Here Be Dragons" A Sword & Sorcery Campaign Using The Castles & Crusades Mythos Series - Germany Destabilized!

 So I've been back hard at work on the 'Ancient World' Castles & Crusades campaign & it's easy to really discount certain Mythos books. One of these is the Castles & Crusades Codex Germania but this is a mistake on my part. Codex Germania has two very distinct classes that can easily be applied to our campaign world. These are the dragon slayer and the witch which comes straight out of German mythology. 

This is important for two reasons, one the NPC villain is actually a dragon slayer and a bit of fantical one at that. He's Hell bent on slaying a gold dragon whose wife is a major NPC patron of the player's PC's. 
And things are going to go downhill from there. The party has it's hands full with the recent Dwarven fracus we just had unleashed. 
Codex Germania fills in some of the major gaps in the Indo European mythologies of the region within our campaign. This ties into several of the major Dwarven elements of our 'Here Be Dragon' canmpaign events. 

The secondary player's class that we'll be using for an NPC villain is the witch class. And this version of the witch is the one straight from mythology and this is something that we'll be plugging into. This the Germany of both an alternative late Roman empire and one that hits the high notes of mythology. Meaning that this is a period of high instability within our version of Europe. 
And it's this period of conflict that has awakened forces of creation from deep within the Earth detailed within  Maximum Mayhem Dungeons#4 Vault of Dwarven King.
Tieing all of this together is easily done with the dark version of Europe that we find within  the Bundle: Castles & Crusades Mythos Series -- Print here. All of this goes back to the start points that find within Autarch's By This Axe: The Cyclopedia of Dwarven Civilization. A German barbarian empire deep within the throws of conflict awakening the dark forces within the Earth. 

The Dwarves are really the guardians of the future fate of mankind and the custodins of the Gods. How long can we see them continue this role that they've held so long within myth and legend?! 

'" Here Be Dragons" A Sword & Sorcery Campaign Using The Castles & Crusades Mythos Series & Dark Wizard Games Maximum Mayhem Dungeons#4 Vault of Dwarven King Session Report

 

The PC's journeyed deep into the Fairylands after being recruited tonight by the party's wizard. Things got very complicated as the players found out that they'd be working for the Dwarven royals. 

“Time and times are but cogwheels, unmatched, grinding on oblivious to one another. Occasionally - oh, very rarely! - the cogs fit; the pieces of the plot snap together momentarily and give men faint glimpses beyond the veil of this everyday blindness we call reality.― Robert E. Howard, Bran Mak Morn: The Last King: A Novel

So tonight I did a bit of juggling to get our 'Ancient World' Sword & Sorcery campaign setting off the ground using Castles & Crusades with Maximum Mayhem Dungeons#4 Vault of Dwarven King. Written by Alan Chamberlain & Mark Taormino Vault of the Dwarven King works out quite nicely to be fitted into the campaign with PC's at the center of  events; "The Dwarven King of Brundurum has summoned you to his throne room within the Smokey Mountain. Brave souls are needed for a noble quest into the depths of the earth to retrieve the legendary hammer known as Fireheart. But beware – the Goblin King and his evil hordes believe the hammer woke a Lava Titan and they will seek to possess it at all costs. Who is telling the truth? Who is really kin to this ultimate weapon? What secret powers are at play in this tale of suspicion, intrigue and betrayal? Only your stalwart group of adventurers will find out and walk away with more fortune and glory than ever… if you can escape the Vault of the Dwarven King!" We were using the entire whole of  the Bundle: Castles & Crusades Mythos Series -- Print here. 

The Celtic Codex 2nd edition was front & center tonight as the party was called into the courts of the Fey. They were brought before Sir Erick a gold dragon & his wife Bridgette a paladin. These two were acting as envoys to the court of Brundurum. Originally these two NPC's were left by the Romans after leaving England for the empire. The reason the party has been called in is that the Goblin King has broken the peace with the humans, the Dwarves, and the rest of the Fey.
These are going from bad to worse as the goblins have disturbed one of the ancient elemental evil deep below thier kingdoms. For tonight's game too really help fill in the details on our Dwarven nations I used Autarch's By This Axe: The Cyclopedia of Dwarven Civilization.
This fits within the events depicted within Maximum Mayhem Dungeons#4 Vault of Dwarven King. The PC's are all from families which are all survivors from the lands of myth & legend. So while not human royals they are members of ancient royal families. 

The party of adventurers have begun to make the journey to the Dwarven lands and already encountered goblin raiders in tonight's game session. And things got interesting from there as the PC's engaged them but after they were killed off it turns out that a brief examination revealed that the goblins were mercenaries and bandits. Are they related?!  Found out next week. 

Sword & Sorcery Hex Crawling, Campaign Comprise, & Vault of the Dwarven King From Maximum Mayhem Dungeons Actual Play

Sometimes you've got to go back to basics & in this case its working out the internal adventure elements of our 'Old Solar System' campaign. So last night I popped a couple of beers with a friend & watched Ralph Bakshi's Fire & Ice.

When your getting into Fire & Ice your getting into some of the top talent in the fields of animation, fantasy artwork, film production, artwork, etc. including comic book writing and more. Yes this film is an underappreciated gem of the sword & sorcery genre. Just take a look at the film & street cred that this film has according to Wiki;" The film, a collaboration between Bakshi and Frank Frazetta, was distributed by 20th Century Fox, which also distributed Bakshi's 1977 release, Wizards. The animated feature, based on characters Bakshi and Frazetta co-created, was made using the process of rotoscoping, in which scenes were shot in live action and then traced onto animation cels.
The screenplay was written by Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas, both of whom had written Conan stories for Marvel Comics. Background painter was James Gurney, the author and artist of the Dinotopia illustrated novels. Thomas Kinkade also worked on the backgrounds to various scenes. Peter Chung, of Aeon Flux fame, was a layout artist." And that's just some of the talent that worked on this film back in '77. I saw this at the tender age of seven years old & yeah it made a huge impact on me.


Something my friend Steve & I noticed is that there is an internal flow to the story that one finds in animated films but there's also that same sort of flow in old school hex crawls. This was particularly true of B/X Dungeons & Dragons modules in campaign mode. A look at the basic plot overview of Fire & Ice will show you exactly what I'm talking about;"
From their stronghold in Icepeak, the evil Queen Juliana (Eileen O'Neill) and her son, Nekron (Stephen Mendel), send forth a wave of glaciers, forcing humanity to retreat south towards the equator. Nekron sends a delegation to King Jarol (Leo Gordon) in Firekeep to request his surrender, but this is a ruse orchestrated by Queen Juliana for Nekron’s sub-humans to kidnap Jarol’s barefoot, bikini-clad daughter, Princess Teegra (Cynthia Leake); Queen Juliana feels that Nekron should take a bride to produce an heir.
But Teegra makes an escape and comes upon Larn (Randy Norton), a young warrior and the only survivor of a village razed by glaciers, who offers to escort her back to Firekeep. As Teegra is recaptured, Larn teams with the mysterious Darkwolf (Steve Sandor) to save Teegra and then travel to Icepeak to stop Juliana. Darkwolf faces Nekron and kills him as Icepeak succumbs to lava released by King Jarol and is destroyed.
The film finishes with Larn about to kill a beaten sub-human until Teegra stops him saying that "it's over" and embraces him. Darkwolf is seen atop a cliff; he watches the pair, smiles and then disappears. Teegra and Larn kiss as the credits roll."
You've got all of the basic factions aligned where they need to be for the adventurers find them along the adventure path. This is something we'd later see during the evolution of adventure video games especially the text based ones like Zork. Yes I'm that old. There's another way of looking at this in the point crawl system of the Hill Cantons & there's an excellent series by Chris Kutalik. This sort of adventuring uses an absaract map to great effect but does put a bit of the pressure on the DM.

Basic placement of the factions of a campaign is going to determine the balance or lack there of when it comes to the adventure flow in an old school campaign. Sword & Sorcery campaigns don't often have a lot of balance they are punctuated by the violence & pulpy weirdness of the medium.
"Sword and sorcery (S&S) is a subgenre of fantasy characterized by sword-wielding heroes engaged in exciting and violent adventures. An element of romance is often present, as is an element of magic and the supernatural. Unlike works of high fantasy, the tales, though dramatic, focus mainly on personal battles rather than world-endangering matters.^[1] Sword and sorcery commonly overlaps with heroic fantasy."When it comes to hex crawling one or more factional powers are often the fixed points of 'law of the land' on the map. A good example of this is the minor witch queen or wizard that has carved out their own section of the map. These sorts of factions are the bread & butter for Adventurer,Conqueror, King & the game handles this sort of dark & dangerous figures quite nice as they make very portions of a campaign and even sub adventures unto themselves. Again this is where ACK's handles and excels at this sort of a campaign. What we're talking about today is where the Hexcrawl is actually driving the campaign itself. How to Hexcrawl From  Taskboy Games is a really good primer on just this sort of a game campaign. It gives a good solid overview & step by step guide for establishing and making your own hexcrawl for Labyrinth Lord.

So let's bring this round does this preclude a dungeon master from using a high fantasy adventure in a sword & sorcery campaign setting? Not at all, there are several ways that this can be done but for me one of the most successful is to have the high fantasy adventure become its own internal setting beast. A good example of this is my use of the recent Vault of the Dwarven King  From   Maximum Mayhem Dungeons  in my own 'Old Earth' setting. I've done this by having the entire adventure take place in an isolated hex area of the campaign.

Now this isn't the first time I've done this sort of adventure campaign set up & compromise but there are reasons for this including my buddy Steve whose nuts for Dwarves & the fact he brought beer, pizza, & his brothers as players as bribery material. Besides which I've already been ready for this sort of a player issue. Now the answer to this comes from Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea  whose dwarves are the maggot people who fell from Ymir the ice giant. The goblin races in my campaign came from his feces & fungus!


Both were collected & refined by the Ancient Ones a mysterious Lovecraftian race who spliced them with a bit of humanity we'll get into another day. Most of these two races have gone extinct but the Dwarves are making a huge push to comeback from the brink of extinction in the ruins of Europe. The country that +Mark Taormino 's Vault of The Dwarven King takes place in is going to be an isolated country. The Dwarves were/are a modified race that is occasionally used for outer world work where their expertise in metallurgy is often needed.  Vault of The Dwarven King has more then enough campaign module stuff to create a whole hex country/kingdom unto itself. The events of the module are weird/gonzo enough to take place without actually damaging a campaign in progress. Alright let me address the obvious, yes I think this module is worth getting and after watching Steve & his brothers have an awesome time dying it was worth the writing I did. I'll be more then ready for the traditional D&D players who come down the pike. The module is very deadly and there was a TPK last night in which the PC's were fried badly. 

There are several elements that Mark's choice of artwork has worked very well for last night's actual game. The dwarves were very distinctive & so stood out from the usual run of the mill fantasy artwork seen in many products. This gave last night's game a distinctive feel.

The fact that several of Vault artwork pieces convey exactly what the players wanted worked in my favor & might connect up with an idea that I had. Its easily possible to place an adventure or gonzo setting  within a hex and still keep things moving along within a sword & sorcery game without completely and utterly destroying the entire mood of the campaign. This is something I'm going to have to keep in mind and I'm at the moment considering resurrecting the operatic campaign that my uncle did back in the Summer of '87.
Vault of the
Dwarven King Is Available
Right Here

Mail call,Madmen,Mayhem, More Swords & Strangeness - Actual Play Adventure Event

Excuse me if I seem like I'm a bit late with this blog entry, my Saturday evening game went fine last night. The PC's have rescued the villagers of one of the PC's & former slaves from the clutches of the White Skull Formorians which gave them lots of trouble two weeks ago. The PC's hustled them out of the Roman style manor to get them healed up and sorted back in Tegel village. On the way back to the village the PC's found frost bite on some of the villagers in the shape of giant hands.


Outside of the manor the PC's found a wagon & some horses left by a knight, his party of retainers, etc. who left the area for another nearby dungeon. They took it & along with the supplies they found in the back of it. The PC's got the villagers to a healer at a local temple of Ymir & then went to get some of their treasure evaluated by a local pawn broker. Sal'iar Mar'reus is a local Esquimaux pawn broker & head of the thieves guild for the area. Within the pawn shop were the treasures from not only Tegel manor but from across the solar system wherever adventurers had stopped. There were several items from the Manor that were liberated by Sir Tristan & his group last time the party was there. There were also five or six purple crystals from the The Islands of Purple-Haunted Putrescence.

Esquimaux
A confrontation between Sal'iar Mar'reus & the PC's also revealed several items from Liberation  of the Demon Slayer adventure but that was more of an Easter egg nod to my other players in the past. Meanwhile several exchanges with the PC's brought in Sir Rump and the local Amazon peace officer and her goon squad. We got a sort of Quark/Odo dynamic going last night with the pawn broker backing down and giving the shaman the items after he revealed the deed.


Our shaman also noticed several rare treasures from the land of Lomar, which was besieged by an enemy known as the Inutos. This might indicate the pawnbroker's connections with the Inutos & raiders from some nearby islands. The village of Tegel is a mix of Roman & Viking styles with a sprinkling of Hyperborean influences along with Amazon/Kimmeri-Kelt.

The pawn broker gave up the artifacts but this leaves the question of where Sir Tristan's party went and why. One artifact that the PC's saw but were unable to get was a rare hammer belonging to the maggot dwarfs of Underboreas recovered from their abode
Myrkheim. There is a cult of murderous madmen on a nearby island that serve the horrid creatures & their icy dark masters.


All of this ties in quite nicely with the fact that yesterday Mark Taormino of Maximum Mayhem Dungeons sent me a copy of Vault of the Dwarven King. Which I'm going to modifying, twisting, and adjusting so that I can run this adventure in my sword & strangeness Old Solar System setting. The plot is very much in the Maximum Mayhem style;
"The Dwarven King of Brundurum has summoned you to his throne room within the Smokey Mountain. Brave souls are needed for a noble quest into the depths of the earth to retrieve the legendary hammer known as Fireheart. But beware - the Goblin King and his evil hordes believe the hammer woke a Lava Titan and they will seek to possess it at all costs. Who is telling the truth? Who is really kin to this ultimate weapon? What secret powers are at play in this tale of suspicion, intrigue and betrayal? "

If you haven't picked this one up I strongly suggest that you do the writing, artwork,&  quality are top notch. Its a very well done module with a strong AD&D 1st edition vibe with
Mark Taormino & co. twists and turns to it. You can see the quality and artwork in this photo which is on its side so my players can't figure out some of the tricks and traps in the adventure.