Gary Con would like to announce its continued commitment to the time-honored tradition: an AD&D tournament. The Gary Con Open is back for its second year! Teams of six intrepid adventurers will seek to solve the dangers and mystery of Mission Critical, a brand-new adventure written exclusively for Gary Con by Chris Clark and Tim Kask. All PC's will be selected from an extensive Rogue's Gallery, also written by Chris Clark. The Rogue's Gallery has a multitude of race and class options available, enough to make a balanced and effective party selection the first challenge in the tournament. The Gary Con Open will be scored as a team event and teams can be formed in several ways. First is entry as a complete team--if six attendees wish to play together, they can, if they all pre-register for the same tournament slot. Once your team is complete, please email us with the player names and badge numbers. The second way is to be part of a pick-up team; as Gary Con recieves entries for the Open they will be placed in a pool of prospective players and teams of six will be randomly assembled. If you are playing with friends who have already registered, you will need to email your group names and badge numbers, if you wish us to attempt to keep you together. The third method, which may not be feasible, or even available, this year is to form a team on site during event marshaling. This latter method should be considered a fall-back option only; there are a limited number of slots that may well be filled by the weekend of the event. All tournament related inquiries should be directed to [email protected]. Once your team is fully assembled, you will be directed to download a PDF file containing the entire Rogue's Gallery from which you may assemble your party. As this will be a scored competition (The DM's will have a scoring rubric to follow), the more time spent playing, and less time getting ready to play, will increase your opportunity to score well; knowing who you're playing and getting a prompt start could be crucial. For 2012, this will be a single-round tournament, so you will not need to worry about blocking off a semi-final or final round slot. If the tournament continues to grow in attendance and interest, it is likely in subsequent years that it will transition to a multi-round event. In addition to the regularly scheduled tournament slots, for those interested in playing this module in a more relaxed, non-tournament setting, three of our special guests have agreed to host VIP runs of Mission Critical! In addition to the authors, Chris Clark and Tim Kask, Frank Mentzer has also volunteered. Players registering for this special event will receive a signed copy of the module as well as a full printed version of the Rogue's Gallery. Registration for this event will take place outside of regular event registration, through the souvenirs section of the Gary Con website, and will begin Sunday, January 22.
Just inquiring about Team and Character selection. For those of us that are registered, are we going to get an email with PDF of characters :?:
A couple of questions - First, who won? I didn't notice anything posted or announced, though I didn't exactly go digging for it. Second, any chance one of the organizers could share the scoring criteria with me? I'm interested in organizing something similar for C&C in the future, and would love to pick your brains about the nuts and bolts. Thanks, John aka CKDad
Yeah, I'd like to hear what team scores were, how scoring was done, what happened to each time, and what could have happened but didn't.
I'd like to see the scores as well. Any info on this? We had a great time playing. I'd also like to hear how other people's games went. I'd be happy to post a write up of ours if people wanted to here it.
Of the two sessions I ran, both finished the adventure, which was a little surprising to me. The first group lost a dwarf thief to the giant octopus because they captured and interrogated a female orc. She told them there was a treasure chest hidden under the water there, the thief got greedy and was literally ripped apart by the giant octopus in two rounds. The second group I ran lost two members. A dwarf thief to orc archers and mage to the spear traps around the orb. Both groups managed to kill the orc shaman at the end, but it was a pretty close fight. One of the groups didn't act fast enough to save the head priest at the end. The other group saved all the priests.
The group I was with basically did the whole module backward. Too bad there were no style points. We selected the following group: - Dwarf Fighter - Elf Fighter - Half Elf Ranger - Dwarf Cleric - Halfling Thief - Elf Wizard Most of us took the typical magic armor and weapon. The MU interesting took his magic items as all scrolls in order to have more spells which turned out to help immensely. When we heard the stories from the clerics of Apollo (...<softly>creed - as our DM kept saying) we quickly decided that there was some further connection with the Orcs to the orb. We stuck around searching for clues around the outside of the shrine (and listening for clues inside that the cleric didn't tell us). About a half an hour in we heard a ruckus from inside the shrine, we snuck in quietly and witnessed a ton or orcs beating up on the clerics and a gaping hole in the ground. We quietly closed the door (not wanting to get pulled into it and figuring we'd have a better chance following). We waited a bit and went back in. We found the shrine exactly as it had been before (no hole in the ground) but the orb was missing. A couple of us disbelieve the illusion (as it turned out to be). We saw a group of orcs trying to fill in a passageway. The MU slept the group of them and we climbed down (while this was going on, the thief went into the clerics quarters and finding nobody around helped himself to a couple of potions - that had to be explained later, lol). We followed the passageway and eventually can to a door. I can't remember if it was open, we picked it, or what but we got through. We found the Orb in an oval room. We hugged the wall and snuck around to a door on the other side. I can't remember how we picked the door we did, but somehow we knew something nasty was behind it. We put silence on a fighter, used knock to open the door, and rushed (surprised) the poor orc behind (may have been a half-orc - was described as not being quite as vial as the others). I don't think he even hit one of us and he went down. We took his sword (turned out to be a sword of speed or something like it, the ranger used it the rest of the adventure). We did a detect traps spell on that room and the oval room. We found that there were lots of traps around the orb (the spell only show the triggers or maybe just the presence of a trap I guess though and not the actual trap itself as you'll see in a minute). We snuck around avoiding the traps. I think the silence was still going and we went to another door, rushed in, the cleric did a hold person on the orc (I guess a shamom) and we dispatched him and saved the other clerics of Apollo (...creed). On the way out, we decided to grab the orb and made one of our only miscues of the night. We pulled a rope around back of the orb and walked it around holding it tight. We apparently set off the traps but since we weren't actually in the area avoided any damage. We then pulled the orb towards us and right into...a 10' pit....DOH. So then we had a 9' orb in a a10' pit. We talked about how to get it out for awhile and then just gave up. We took the clerics back to the shrine. So there we where. We killed the leaders of the tribe, saved the clerics, we did have the issue of the orb in the pit, but generally, we killed the main bad guys, took what turned out to be basically all of the loot in the module, and did it without taking a hit. We thought we were done, lol. The clerics basically informed us that we still had to kill all of the orcs (earlier they seemed to indicate that chasing them away was preferred, but I think for the tournament we had to kill them). So....we rested an relearned spells, and went backward through the module killing everything in our way. The interesting thing was that it turned out we were really working against the stream. Every door we came to was locked and every key was on the other side (the module was written so if you killed the guy - coming from the front - you could unlock the door). It took at least one knock spell, a good lock pick roll by the thief and at one door the screaming of their women and children to get the doors open. In the end, we pretty much killed everything in the module (we did let the women and children flee out the front - they were the only ones that would, and it helped us get that door open). Our thief had an epic backstab on the leader of the largest group (toward the front of the caves). He rolled max damage and one-shot him. The ranger was using the sword of speed to absolutely wreck that large group (+5 damage 2x a round). Overall it was very fun. I give a lot of that credit to our DM Bryan Skowera. Here is a picture of our game on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?f....2167440.1315595608.1292880881&type=1&theater
Unfortunately, my scoring sheets got packed in with quite a bit of Con stuff. I'm still searching for them. Once I locate them, I'll announce the winners (and email them separately).
I played an elven wizard in one of the groups that ran at 6 PM Friday evening. We didn't quite finish, probably because we seemed bogged down a bit in choosing and equipping our characters - we didn't actually start the adventure until sometime after 6:30, closer to 6:45 I think. We were at the threshold of the final room at the time limit, and did play through the conclusion although we didn't get points for it. I should also mention that this was my first game of 1st edition AD&D since 1986 or so! So a bit of re-learning was in order. Like the MU in dekelia's group, I took the two scrolls (one with three 1st level spells and the other with two 2nd level) as my magic items, and like his MU found they helped immensely. I had Sleep, Charm Person and Web as my memorized spells, with Detect Magic, Comprehend Languages and Magic Missile on one scroll, and Knock and Invisibility on the other. I used both my memorized 1st level spells along the way, as well as the Magic Missile from the scroll in the final battle. I also used the two 2nd level scroll spells in the course of the adventure. I know we had a dwarven thief and a halfling fighter in the group, along with a ranger and cleric. After the meeting in the temple, we proceeded to the cave's front entrance. In the battle with the orc guards, I wound up charming one of the spear-wielding orcs ("My name Morg!") who became my magic user's best buddy. Morg proved to be a great help to us, fighting on occasion and providing a few useful clues after some good charisma rolls. He didn't provide much detail, but he did indicate that the "Chosen One" was in the back of the cave complex, which led us to bypass some of the side chambers and the monsters therein - for example, we spiked the door to the nursery and moved on, and never bothered doing more than peeking down the other side corridors to ensure we weren't going to be flanked. We didn't actually lose any party members, though it was a close thing as our thief missed some key rolls on traps in the room with the orb. There was also a bad moment in one of the storerooms where orc archers really turned us into pincushions, but no one actually dropped before they were either healed by the cleric or were able to quaff a potion. In the final battle, it was my magic missile spell, overpowered by the orb, that did the final blow on Big Bad. We had a great time, and the people in my group (whom I'd never met before) were a fun bunch. I also really, really liked the way the equipment options for the pregenerated characters was handled; I'm stealing that methodology now for some Castles & Crusades pregens that I'm working up. Thanks to the organizers & DMs for running this! EDIT: fixed a spelling error.
