Becoming a Basilisk: Minimalistic Freedoms, FMC Basic, and Gaming After a Massacre
This week I ran a party of players through their second session exploring the Tomb of the Serpent Kings. I used Fantastic Medieval Campaigns Basic by Marcia B. of Traverse Fantasy to run it - and have already run it in the past for a different group of players using White Box: Fantasy Medieval Adventure Game. The session went in a very unexpected direction, and sent my thoughts spinning in several different directions - so I thought I'd go over some of them here. "He Who Fights Monsters..." Tomb of the Serpent Kings is a great adventure, that manages to make even a supposedly trad (and "introductory") dungeon crawl interesting by building upon the complexity and strangeness of the dungeon the deeper you go, and by offering a bunch of divergent paths and different experiences to be had - from mummified hands bursting out of a pool, through fungus goblins that might declare you their king and then sacrifice you, to a basilisk in a dungeon intended for firs...