The Black Gem

For the past two weeks, I've been head down scrambling to put together some kind of game for our family's annual Fall Festival. Last year, I ran a brick/Lego-based zombie scenario, which was a huge hit. The only specific request for this year's game was some kind of visual element (helps keep my son involved).

I had an itch to run some b/x (Moldvay Basic/Expert) Dungeons & Dragons again and decided to combine that with bricks.

After far too much time spent pouring over one-shot modules, I decided that The Black Gem  from Catthulhu over on DriveThruRPG had the makings of something fun. However, as written, it would not work for my players, so I reorganized it into a 5-Room dungeon format (I highly recommend subscribing at RoleplayingTips for the free guide). 

Spoilers ahead! If you are a player in a campaign and your DM plans to run this, STOP NOW!

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The party arrives in the area of the Crying Angel fountain.

While the PCs explore and investigate, some zombies and skeletons arrive.

Drawn by the smell of apples, the party finds themselves in the Spider's Grove. (This is something I added as a connecting point between the major encounters)

Ambushed by ghouls!

A tough fight but the party prevailed! The pumpkin headed figure resulted from that cleric trying to throw a pumpkin at the ghouls and rolling a 1.

The party happens upon two zombie grave robbers. They make quick work of them.

The final boss - the eerie glow of the black gem.

The Danse Macabre!

We had to turn the lights on so we could actually play.

Overhead shot of the battle field.

The thief fired an arrow at a skeleon, missed and the gem was alerted to the party's presence. It sent forth its guardian!

Ed the Head cast invisibility on itself, and rolled past the raging melee in front of the mausoleum. There it found the black gem. Which it debated eating or knocking off the pedestal. Given Ed's lack of a stomach, knocking it off was decided upon.

With the gem destroyed, the undead dropped in their places. The party was victorious.

I set up a map similar to a node-based wargames map based on the "rooms" and added some events to occur in between the main story nodes.

Here is my map for reference:

Grey boxes are from the module, blue circles are things i added. Solid lines are actual paths in the cemetery, whereas dotted lines are "overland" amongst tombstones and copses and take 2 -3 turns to traverse.

I purposely created multiple paths through the adventure - I don't like to rail-road my players and I've seen too many 5-Room dungeons setup or run just that way, with the rooms in order. The progression across the map, left to right, is basically the 5-Room structure, but they don't have to follow that.

In the event, my players went from the In Media Res start, to the Fountain, to the Spider Grove, to the Grave Diggers, to the Ghouls, to the Danse Macabre, skipping everything else.

To give players something to hook their directional choices on, I added simple sounds (or scents in one case), will-o-wisp "torches" were from a Halloween random encounter list i found on DriveThru, and the "gate signs" are part of the adventure as written. This made for quite lively discussion each time a decision was needed and that was the entire point, to allow the players to role-play and to feel their choices mattered.

I was pretty much able to run the whole game looking just at this. Including the time it took for players to decide on a minifigure and choice of armor, it took about 3 hours start to finish.

Cliche as it is, fun was had by all. It's hard not to have fun with Legos/bricks.

One player, a role-playing veteran, commented that he was impressed my ability to consistently run successful one-shots. Unfortunately, that's kind of where my ability ends! I find campaigns with through-lines difficult to run - perhaps because I cut my teeth in episodic module play? I don't know but thankfully our family gatherings are perfect opportunities to run one-shots.