X2 - Castle Amber 2026 - Session 6.0 Count Your Curses and Blessings

Tangent! You can now get these books POD!
Basic here and Expert here.

Gamers often perceive Old School D&D as lethal. That is true and false. Combat tends to be lethal because the players make poor choices in combat OR the DM goofs and throws a scenario at the party that they misconstrue as winnable. This is poor playing by either the character, the DM, or both.

Completely random things tend to be mitigated by the party being aware of a threat that they avoid, plus they have a saving throw or skill throw as a backup option. That tends to make magic, tricks, and traps far less deadly than combat. 

In all fairness, PC in anything higher than 2nd edition have way too many ways to avoid death. It's the way people play. Instead of the campaign, it's the individual players that count. I dislike this because players can be heroes, but never the stuff of legends. 

When playing OSE or any AD&D or B/X game, I have a general guideline: If no one rolls for it, whatever is expected happens, for good or bad. This isn't cheating. It's simply not leaving fate to dice.  

Back to the scenario at hand. Castle Amber, the Chapel. This is my typical ad link so you can buy it. 

I know... I know. If you are one of the dozens of people who are reading this, you own it. But still, there is the ad link.

It's been over a month, so let's recap. The heroes met the Dragon and the Unicorn, and with their help, defeated the Wild Hunt. There are 13 or 14 characters, depending on how you count:

1. Alexei (turned to a ghost) 

2. Belaphon

3. Dorian

4. Gabby

5. Jude

6. Khouri

7. Lance

8. Merry

9. Nononn

10. Rety

11. Sybil

Maybe one of the statues looks like
this.

We can add Warren, Parker, and Gronk the rabbit. Gronk will never have stats, being a familiar and a rabbit, but the two Magen are there to absorb party losses by slowly becoming a classed character. 

The party has advanced to the door to the chapel of Castle Amber. I need to put on my DM hat to navigate this part of the module. In the chapel, there are 24 statues with a 1-in-6 chance of coming to life (per character) and bestowing a curse or boon on that person. The problem is obvious: with only the 10 classed characters, every single statue should trigger every single time. That is neither mysterious nor fun, because the characters have a 50-50 chance of receiving a bad or a good effect. This turns the whole scenario into a Monty Hall conga line. The surviving characters would receive only the benefits of taking the fallen's treasure. 

The way I read this is that part of the module is that this is an event that should be mysterious. I also don't want the possibility of forking out 24 magic items, boosting everyone's stats, or giving every character a permanent plus one. I want events that further the story. 

Good-bad-good-bad!

First things first, upon entering the chapel, the party hears strains of music. Alexei's ghost plays a sad song on his lute. Surprised, but not too surprised, the party greets him. He warns them that what is about to happen is tragic. Madeline Amber was buried by her brother prematurely, and it will be unlikely that the party will be able to save them both. He also warns them about the dangers of the statues. 

Being non-corporeal, he does the only thing he can to assist them: he casts sleep on Madeline Amber to give the party time to think. He also mentions the Rakasta entered the Chapel, discovered the trap door, and have moved on to their certain doom. Having done his good deeds, he fades away to his now eternal work of playing for the revelers in the Dining Hall. 

I dislike the trap door in this area because it is a dead end for the party to make it to the dungeon without finding the keys and secret to escape Castle Amber. This is one of the challenges when writing a module: something may make sense on paper, like the presence of a trap door, but could also vex the players and DM by causing unfixable problems. Alexei's warning to the party made more sense to me than ignoring the trap door as the module advised. 

Next problem. The statues trigger too often to be mysterious. One in six is a lot. I devised a new mechanic to trigger the statues. Looking at the saving throw charts, most of the characters have around 5 in 20 to save vs the effects of the statue. Well, that is close to 3 out of 4, so I rolled a bunch of four-siders. If the result was 1-3, then I rolled a 1d6 to see if the statue came to life. Yeah, the math doesn't work, and I am doing it backwards. 

After a bit, even this felt like too much die rolling. I could have resorted to my favorite OSR Solo oracle book, but that is also more die-rolling. I am not a fan of AI, but I do have a Gemini and ChatGPT account, so I asked AI to do it. 

And it was not as good as what I would have gotten from OSR Solo, but it was easier.  

I was reminded of why I don't like AI. I got a result, but a very curious one. The numbers look random, but for some reason the bot fixated on specific characters. I repeated this 4 times per chatbot. For some reason, it fixated on just 4 characters: Lance, Gabby, Khouri, and Dorian. At least 2 of those characters were hit in every run, sometimes more than once. When I removed several from the mix, the AI locked on two other characters. 

I don't like these results, but I am running with them with one modification. When Gabby saw the first statue touch Dorian, she immediately stopped participating. Jude stopped with them. In rerunning the scenario without these three characters, Lance, Khouri, and Merry became victims of AI fixation. 

Here were the results: Dorian was cursed. Lance received a magic item, as did Merry. Khouri was cursed to grow a tail (the slowing result), which her Post-Human physiology negated. Again, she suffered some harm as she overheated from negating the attack. Merry was touched a second time and was diseased. He is immune to that. Sybil received a +1 to one ability, and it was not a helpful one.  

I might make a follow-up post because I think I know why I got these results. We are going to leave off here. The next post will be 6.1, where I detail these results and possibly talk about AI.