Celebrity Game Table
The Sumberton Campaign: House Rules and Quirks
By Daneen McDermott

Read more about the Sumberton campaign, and find new characters to use in your own game sessions. Main Page The Faces The Places The Foes Our Favorite New Rules and DM Tricks House Rules and Quirks Character Statistics

House Rules

(Already? The game hadn't even gone to press yet!)

Knowledge (monster): In order to help reconcile player knowledge with character knowledge, David included a Knowledge (monster) skill for the campaign. Sam took this class skill for rangers and it did clue is in a few times.

Level on the Fly: This wasn’t really a house rule, because the 3rd edition core rulebooks allow for gaining levels on the fly, but we really took that optional rule to heart. In several situations when we ran from one battle right into the next, it was amusing to watch characters use skills, feats and even spells that they had never had before.

Vampire Unicorn: The Vampire template in the Monster Manual is set up for humanoids, but that didn’t stop David from using it to create the biggest, blackest unicorn he could dream up. We ran into it once. Luckily, it was full from all the goblins we had driven out. We didn’t even fight Blacky, just talked to it a bit, shuddered a lot, and skittered away (watching our backs the whole time).

Quirks

(Marketing would call them "features")

Lego Figurine: Ed didn’t have a good female miniature with two swords. So a week or two into the game, I decided to bring my own. The Lego figure I brought not only allowed me to show my character wielding with her long sword and short sword, but when necessary I could substitute her bow or whip. Not sharing the same scale, she stood literally head and shoulders above the other figurines (which I believe drove David crazy to no end), but I liked the versatility and used her every week from then on. As a bonus, when she dropped her bow (a free action) instead of sheathing it (a move-equivalent action) to draw her swords, we all knew right where the bow was -- I just left it lying on the battlemat.

Pretzel Goblins: Alternate miniatures didn't stop with the Lego lady, however. One night, we had too few miniatures to represent the goblins attacking us in the tower. (Some might instead make the case that we had too many goblins.) So David grabbed the pretzel nuggets we had been snacking on and placed a dozen or so on the grid to represent the goblins. When the first goblin was killed, instead of just setting aside the figure, the victor claimed the right to "eat the goblin." And so it continued all night. I believe James went home quite full.