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.

Zombies! And Blocks!

After my son was born, his mother decided we needed a unique family holiday tradition outside of the usual and so she invented "Fall Festival". We play something as a family, make something,  and watch something - usually "Over the Garden Wall". 

Typically, the "play something" is a video game, but this year, after spying some zombie Lego-knock-off brick figures and sets in the Dollar Tree, I decided to put together a game that would use them. To be honest, my original plan wasn't for Fall Festival (which is always the first Saturday in October) but I was asked if I could have it ready and, upon rediscovering the zombies supplement for GASLIGHT on WargameVault, I figured it was feasible.

Almost everything for the game, including the wooden cubes for markers, was from Dollar Tree except for the flora, the lamp posts, and gate with fence. That was provided by Amazon - they are knock-off Legos as well, and inexpensive.

Dice and playing cards were things I had on hand but even then, some of them were from the Dollar Tree.

Overview. of the table. Players had to make their way from the park to the cemetery to destroy the bubbling glop that produced zombies.

The aforementioned glop. As luck would have it, DollarTree sells a zombie figure in black slime. It's like they knew I'd need this!

My zombie horde. Well, as much as 16 zombies is a horde.

In order to make the game more like a video game to appeal to my son, I added ammo tracking (via (wooden cubes) and loot crates (more wooden cubes) with med kits (still more wooden cubes), additional ammo and weapons, and possible "specials".

There were four players each controlling a single figure and an NPC dog that was controlled by the team (but it would run away if it failed a save and potentially leave the table). 

Their objective was to find and destroy the zombie spawn point in the cemetery.

Early turns, the player character figures are entering from the lower left behind the pine trees.

Bob (you know, The Builder) and Brewster (the dog) clearing out zombies in the road. On their right, Potter has fired his AR-15 (The plain cube is a noise marker). Officer Krupke and Hermione in the middle, back (also with a noise marker).

Same turn different angle.

Krupke found this book of esoteric lore in one of the crates.

It contained the secret to defeating the zombies. (And removed the "you must score less than half - quarter at long range - of your shoot score to kill a  zombie" restriction)

The heroes fought across the road into the cemetery. Just before they entered, Potter found a radio in another crate. He managed to reach the outside world. What would it mean?

A helicopter en route!

The chopper lands and a crew of an anti-zombie paramilitary deploy. Will they be able to help our heroes?

Like true heroes, they don't wait to find out.

Bob, Brewster, and Krupke made it to the goop! After fighting off the spawning undead, Krupke planted the bomb. Although caught in the explosion, they made their saves!

The game turned out to be more of a success than I could have hoped for. Everyone seemed to have a great time and my son, who doesn't like to play much of anything table top related save PanzerKids loved it

I have plenty of critiques of course. 

For one, I don't feel it was as intense a game as it could have been - their survival was rarely in question. To do that, I would lower the shoot, scuffle, and save numbers for the player characters if I were to run it again (I let them players assign the values as they chose from 17,15 and 9 depending on how they imagined the character. I would probably go with 15, 12, 9 next time). 

I'd also buy way more zombie figures! There were times when I couldn't spawn any in because there were not enough figures. Actually, I'll probably buy more whether I run this particular game again or not. Zombie games are fun solo too because the zombies don't require any tactical planning.

Finally, a good option would be a second spawn point coming in behind the players so they'd have to watch their backs. As it was, per my original conception, each board section was like a video game level and once complete you don't need to go back. It worked well that way, but I think a second spawn point would be even better.

There was talk about starting a spring celebration tradition as well - mostly because of the game. I don't think another brick game is necessarily in order, but perhaps? The WWII themed brick stuff is very tempting.

As in most zombie movies, the authorities arrived too late to do anything except congratulate the heroes for a job well done.