Category Archives: Play

The projector setup is a success!

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It’s late.  I have to go to work in the morning.  I don’t care, though – I’m excited, and I need to write about it!

This evening I put my projector setup into action for the first time.  I ran a Living Forgotten Realms session at the local store, Enchanted Grounds.  I had seven players turn up for a session of CORM 1-1 The Black Knight of Arabel.  I had played this module in the first LFR game I had ever experienced as a player, so I was pretty comfortable running it as a DM.

I arrived at the store about 40 minutes before the game’s scheduled start time so that I would have plenty of time to find a good table, set up the rig, adjust the projector’s focus and so on.  All of that went totally smoothly.  By the time 6:00 rolled around, I was ready to go.

This would be the first time that I was using MapTool for the monsters and the map but not for the player tokens – the players brought their own minis for that.  I had realized when putting the adventure together that, if I wanted to keep track of initiative within MapTool, I would need to have something to at least represent each player for that purpose.  So, I created a set of seven generic PC tokens with their own set of properties.  The image for each token was a number (1 through 7) which I assigned based on the players’ seating arrangement around the table.  The name of each token is the character name.  Their properties include the player’s name, their race and class, their defenses, their initiative modifier (for tiebreaking) and their passive Insight and Perception scores.  It was great for helping me remember everyone’s name, character name, and character type.  The defenses didn’t come up much, nor did the passive insight or perception, but it was nice to have in case I needed it.

The adventure began with a little back story of how the party came to be traveling to the town of Arabel – charged by the king in the capital city to investigate rumored Netherese activity involving shadow creatures and reports of a black knight.  They began by helping a man repair his wagon, when they were set upon by shadow creatures.

The first battle was quite easy for the party, even though I made the minions into two-hit minions.  They dispatched the shadow creatures with little fanfare, helped the wagon driver repair his vehicle, and set off after the dark rider they had spotten on a distant ridge.

At this point I turned off the projector as the party entered a skill challenge to track down the rider.  This was a well-written skill challenge, and the players role-played it well, too.  They ultimately came upon the rider in his camp and started disagreeing about whether to attack or talk.  I allowed a little talk from those who wanted to do so, but the “attack” camp grew restless, so I called for initiative.

The not-so-bright fighter in the party (good role-playing, not a dumb player) decided to charge Dark Skull, narrowly avoiding some traps.  Other players tried to convince Dark Skull to drop his weapon, and he said that he didn’t want to hurt anyone, but he wasn’t willing to drop his guard with the fighter standing next to him.  So, the parlaying character decided to bull rush the fighter out of the way.  Great plan – except that in her quest to get to the fighter, she ran over a pit trap!  Oops.

Dark Skull teleported into the shadows, and the cooler heads in the party were eventually able to start a dialogue that led to an alliance with the falsely-accused knight (the skull was just a mask). They decided to go back to Arabel to find out who was really behind the dark goings-on. Since we were going into role-playing, I turned the projector back off.

Since we were doing fine on time, I decided to  run a little bit of the Arabel skill challenge.  The party repaired a broken obelisk in the town square, then went to the tavern where the innocent “black knight’s” father worked.  The father had cursed his son, leading to his shadow powers, and so the party questioned the father.  They asked about his family, and the father didn’t mention any adult son but told them that his wife and infant son were at his house some distance away (I made this up on the spot).  The PCs decided to go to that house to question the wife.  They found the house to be dark and broke in – no one was home, but the door to the basement was locked.  They picked the lock – and found an empty basement.  Clearly the father had lied.

The group returned to the tavern to confront the father about the lie, and found that he had left, heading toward the town square.  Some streetwise checks confirmed that people had seen him go that way, with some young lovers (also made up on the spot) in the square pointing toward the theater as being the father’s destination.

Upon entering the theater, the party saw a bunch of cultists of Shar looking at the stage, where the father was making a speech and getting ready to sacrifice a baby.  Again, some of the party wanted to talk, but others charged into action – the battle was on!

This is an interestingly-designed encounter, with the players having the option of either convincing the crowd to disperse, in which case they fight the leader and some shadow creatures, or not convincing the crowd to disperse, in which case they fight the leader and the crowd.  Since the party had mowed down everything in their path, I decided to have them fight BOTH the crowd and the shadow creatures!  Happily, the shadow creatures rolled low for initiative, so their entrance from behind the party made for a nice little surprise.

Even with the two-front battle, the players were able to win the day.  They mowed down cultists with no trouble, and the shadow creatures simply didn’t deal enough damage to be a threat.  The most interesting part of the battle was in round four, where I had the leader give up on fighting off the party and start trying to sacrifice the baby.  He picked up the baby and got ready to slaughter it, so the players tried hard to stop him.  One of the physically weaker characters in the party leapt down from the balcony and bull rushed the leader to make him drop the baby.  Unfortunately, this left the baby next to the party wizard’s flaming sphere!

One of the fighters, who was prone at the base of the stage, made a DC 20 athletics check to pull herself up onto the stage from prone and charge over to bull rush the baby out of harm’s way, diving to the ground again to do so.  The cult leader naturally picked the baby back up again, getting ready for the slaughter, so the party wizard hit him with an attack that caused him to lose the ability to take opportunity actions.  There’s a little-known rule that says if you can’t take opportunity actions, you lose any grabs you were making.  The baby gets dropped again (fortunately, I ruled that it was wearing a tiny little Amulet of Feather Fall as part of the ritual), and ultimately the cult leader was wiped out.

The session was loads of fun, and the technology ran without a hitch.  The only minor issue is that even the 2,500 lumens aren’t quite bright enough in some cases – the altar on the stage was tough to see (black on brown).  The solution there is probably for me to think a little more about contrast when I put the maps together.

I’ll tweak a couple of things for the convention on Saturday, but for the most part I am ecstatic about this rig.  It’s loads of fun to run, and it makes the game go very smoothly.  Thank you to my players for coming out to give this a whirl – especially to Andy, who told me that he reads my blog.  That’s the first time I’ve ever met one of my readers without having known them in person first.  It was a pleasure gaming with you, Andy, and with everyone else, too!

P.S. If anyone wants the MapTool campaign file that I used for this game (with my updated tweaks added), it can be downloaded here.

Online campaign session 6: Meet Gary Sidequest

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My online party gathered Friday evening for out sixth session as a group.  One of the players was unable to attend, and since the party was about to finish the first adventure of the War of the Burning Sky campaign and move into the second, I thought it was important to have everyone there.  I called an audible and ran a side quest.

The party had finished the previous session by battling a gnoll and some hyenas in a tough battle outside some ruins.  They began this session by looking for an extended rest (it was night time at this point) and decided to delve into the ruins to get out of the snow.  I had decided that the published adventure missed an opportunity here by not fleshing out the ruins at all, so I created a two-room dungeon down there.

The first small room was the gnoll’s hideout with a pallet and some rotting meat.  The door between this room and the rest of the ruins was barricaded with broken wood and stones, and a warning was scratched into the door: “Grave robbers beware: It’s not worth it!”  The party bedded down there for the night, then woke up and robbed a grave.

On the far side of the door, they found lots of dead bodies and a suspicious looking pit.  All was well until one of the party members got too close to the edge of the pit and it attacked.  Yes, this was a trap, and when it went off the dead bodies got up (zombies, naturally) and started fighting.

I’ve attached the PDF of this homebrew encounter here, but the general idea is that we have three big zombies and six two-hit minion zombies, all of which had some push and/or slide abilities to try to get the players back to the stairs or into the pit.  The pit attacks anyone who lands in it or ends their turn adjacent to it, damaging them, grabbing them and pulling them deeper into the pit.  The zombies and pit are animated by a dark tome that is in the coffin in the northern chamber – reading it is dangerous, destroying it is safer.  The encounter was fun (for me at least) and led to some cool role playing upon discovering the tome.

After this encounter, I had the party be greeted by Gary Sidequest, a dragonborn who invited them to solve the mystery of the organized kobolds.  This is one of the Living Forgotten Realms adventures that I’ll be running at TactiCon – specifically TYMA2-1 Old Enemies Unite.  I skipped the skill challenge and went straight for combat.  The first combat with organized kobolds was pretty threatening – who knew that kobolds could be scary when they fight smart?  The second combat, in a chamber of traps, was just boring in my opinion.  I’m not sure how I’m going to jazz it up for the convention, but I’ll come up with something.

There’s still one more encounter in the LFR module, and I figure that we might as well run through it when we regroup, but after that we’ll be heading into the Fire Forest of Innenotdar – the second adventure in the War of the Burning Sky.  We’re taking this weekend off, since I’ll be at TactiCon using my new projector setup.  I’ve also signed up to run an LFR game tomorrow evening at my local store, just so I can try out the projector before I go to the convention.  Wish me luck!

D&D Encounters – I finally get to try it!

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The timing of my introduction to Dungeons and Dragons was almost perfect.  I started playing the game early in 2010, just a couple of weeks before Wizards of the Coast began the D&D Encounters program.  And what do you know, the friendly local game store, Enchanted Grounds, is not only running Encounters, but they’re located within walking distance of my house!  How perfect is that?

Well, it’s ALMOST perfect.  Unfortunately, Encounters is run on Wednesday evenings, which is when my wife and I have our bowling league.  We love our teammates there, so I couldn’t abandon them to go play D&D.  Tonight, however, we’re between leagues – the summer bowling league just ended and the fall league doesn’t start until next week.  Time to check out Encounters!

It was good that I showed up this evening, because there were only three other players when we started the game (one more showed up a little later, before the action got too heavy).  I thought that I would be playing a pre-generated character, but I was told that players are allowed to create their own characters now.  I had brought along my character folder that held both my half-elf paladin from my Living Forgotten Realms games as well as my githzerai avenger, Kern, from my home game with my friends.  Kern the Avenger seemed like the right choice.  He is only Level 2 and the characters at the table were Level 3, so I added the appropriate amount of hit points, adjusted the healing surge value and picked a Level 3 encounter power to bring him up a level.  Off we go!

Kern, the Githzerai Avenger

The summary of the encounter from Kern’s perspective is that Kern completely ruled.  I don’t know if this battle just particularly played to his strengths or if my dice were just hot or what, but Kern made it through the whole battle without taking a single point of damage while unloading massive pain on the snakes and lizard creatures that we battled (the rest of the party took care of the fey panther that showed up in the third round).  It helped, of course, that Kern would not be playing in Encounters again, so he used his daily and his action point without any thought for the future.  Still, his Oath of Enmity was always working, and rolling two d20s on every attack made it so that he never missed.

The encounter itself was fun enough, though not what I expected from Dark Sun.  It was in a mystically lush environment, which I’m sure will be explained in future weeks (Dark Sun is usually a harsh desert environment).  The enemies had some cool abilities, and I frankly wish the DM had been a little more vicious with them.  One lizard grabbed our Seeker and started dragging him away and chomping on him, but he stopped dragging before he got too far from the rest of the party.  The Seeker was never even that badly threatened, though we were scared for him at the beginning of the battle.

The people at the table were great folks to game with – very friendly and welcoming.  I felt a little bad that Kern seemed to have an oversized impact on the battle, but this was partly about luck and the other players didn’t mind.  The DM had built some cool 3D environments for the encounter – some bushes with bad guys underneath them and a tall tree with the panther in it.  Nifty stuff!

Overall, I don’t feel like I’m missing much from not being able to play Encounters.  I prefer more continuity in my games, and one encounter just feels too disjointed.  I applaud the idea, though – it’s great that WotC has this program that will allow players to just drop in every now and then for no more than two hours (my session took an hour and 20 minutes) – no ongoing commitment, no need to even roll up a character if you don’t want to.  It’s a cool program, but I’m not the target audience. I can continue bowling without feeling like I’m missing too much.

Improvised cave trolls and double skill challenges

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Yesterday evening my online group got together for our fifth session of our game in the War of the Burning Sky campaign.  It was another fun session, though it began with some doubt – only one of the five players dialed in at the scheduled start time.  That was not so bad, actually – she runs an online game using other software, and she’s interested in learning more about MapTool (which reminds me – I need to send her the campaign file!).  A second player soon joined, and a third player came online about 15 minutes after the scheduled start.  Since everyone wanted to game, we decided to make do with what we had.

DM Lesson: Playing with less than a full party

When in doubt, fight!  In this case, only three of the five party members were online, so we decided to say that the two absent party members would stay in the ruined village where the party had rested while the other three kept exploring the caves in order to find their way out.  I threw them into an encounter with some deathjump spiders that I had prepared in case of a wrong turn in the cave navigation skill challenge (or in case they decided to unwisely rest in the caves).  For the no-healer mini-party, this turned into a tough encounter.  Our shaman player showed up partway through the battle, and when things started looking dire I allowed him to rush in as reinforcements.

As the party finished the battle and was deciding what to do next, the fifth and final player logged on – good timing!  (We’ll cut him some slack – he’s in London and had set his alarm to wake up him for the 1:00 AM local start time, but the alarm failed to go off.) I had him roleplay the stuff he was doing in the ruined village, and he soon rejoined the rest of the party in the caves.

I decided that the extended skill challenge to make it through the caves had gone on just about long enough, so when the party made a lousy dungeoneering check to finish finding the way through, I decided to throw them into one more monster lair.  The problem: I didn’t have any more cave encounters prepared.

DM Lesson: Whipping up a battle on the fly

One of my players suggested trying the random encounter generator at Asmor.com, but I didn’t have the time to tweak these as needed for the setting.  Instead, I tried to think about what make sense for another cave encounter.  I had already used cave fishers, crauds (in a pit of water) and spiders.  If the final battle would be near the cave exit, why not a troll?  I looked in the DDI Adventure Tools Monster Builder for a troll and decided that the level 7 Cave Troll would be just fine for a party of five second-level characters.  And he was!  I love the ability he has to grab one character and then use that character as a weapon to swing into another.  Too cool!  It was a fairly easy encounter, but still exciting – just what the doctor ordered.

DM Lesson: Running simultaneous skill challenges

Next up, the party crossed into the territory of a small-time dwarven king who insisted that they split into two groups to simultaneously solve two problems.  I had the characters sort themselves as they saw fit, and then I picked one group to begin.  I let each player in that group try something, and then as they started making progress I moved to the other group for a bit.  I tried to keep everything very snappy, and I liked the couple of times that I had a character tell me what they were about to do – perhaps something risky – and I then cut away to the other group before resolving the skill check.  This went far better than I expected, even though one of the challenges ended in failure.

DM Lesson: Reality checking monster attacks

The final encounter of the evening was a roadside ambush by hyenas under the direction of a gnoll controller.  It was quite vicious – the hyenas had a Pack Attack ability that had them deal extra damage to characters that had at least two other bad guys next to them.  This meant that they would try to gang up on one character at a time.  Our Wizard/Swordmage hybrid found herself on the wrong end of three of these attacks, all of which hit her high armor class – dropping her below her negative bloodied value.  Yes, that’s “dead-dead.”

As we began to mourn (and panic a little), the swordmage’s player realized that the attack bonus from these hyenas seemed really high (+12).  And that was true – it was a mistake on my part.  The gnoll was attacking at +12, but the hyenas were only level 2 enemies attacking at +7.  I had screwed up in MapTool when I copied a macro from the gnoll to the hyenas.  We rolled back time just a little and saw that two of the hyena attacks would have missed. (It’s worth noting here that I reveal the math behind the monster attacks to the players – I like them to see that I’m not fudging anything.)

There were some hyena attacks from earlier in the battle that probably would have been misses as well had the numbers been right, but I decided that trying to go back farther than the previous turn made no sense.  I just added some extra XP to the battle to account for the extra difficulty and called it a day.  Happily, this extra experience was enough to push the party to level 3 at the end of the session!

Final thoughts

Even though some players were running late for this most recent session, it’s remarkable that a band of six strangers on the Internet have managed to get together for five of the past six weeks, with one substitute one week and one week that we took off due to multiple scheduling conflicts.  No one has flaked.  No one has dropped out.  We’re still going strong.  I love my group!

Online campaign session 4: Through the caverns

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Ah, I love being a dungeon master!  My online group, consisting of five players whom I’ve never met in person, got together this evening for the fourth session of our ongoing campaign.  The first session was a standalone Living Forgotten Realms game, and the next three have been from the War of the Burning Sky.

Tonight’s session was the first I’ve ever run that was entirely homebrewed.  Yes, we’re still in the War of the Burning Sky campaign saga, but I decided to completely change the story of the party’s escape from Gate Pass.  Rather than dealing with politics and masquerading as city guards, I gave the party the option of going through the city sewers and into some natural caverns.  Happily, they took that option.

In our last session (two weeks ago – we took last week off), we finished with the party fighting through a crypt filled with undead dwarves.  It was a tough battle, but they made it through.  They also found a whole bunch of treasure in the crypt, evidently things that the ancient dwarves were buried with.  This included a mysterious blue cube that the party spent quite a bit of time experimenting with.  It seems mostly harmless so far…

From there, they delved into the caves.  This is a skill challenge, although I’m not running it by simply asking for a skill check, marking success or failure, etc.  Some parts of it have involved navigation – figuring the right path among many, or navigating through a maze of twisty little passages, all alike (the minotaur in the party is, appropriately, great at that).  There have also been some physical challenges – getting down a steep slope, or crossing a narrow bridge.

I built the challenge so that failure could lead to battles.  In the case of the bridge, five out of the six characters in the party (including an NPC, Torrent) made it across safely.  The sixth, our swordmage, decided to just walk on across while holding onto a rope, but not tying it around herself.  Naturally, she failed badly on her acrobatics check and wound up down in the pit, where she was promptly attacked by some crauds in a surprise round.  Some of the crauds rolled first in the initiative order, so they got a second wave of attacks which left the poor swordmage unconscious at the bottom of a pit full of water and lobster-creatures.

It was then up to the rest of the party to rescue the swordmage.  The fighter jumped on down (falling and hurting himself, but landing on a bad guy and hurting it, too) and started swinging his craghammer.  The druid decided to climb rather than jump down.  The others mostly stayed at the rim of the pit and attacked from range.  This ended up being a surprisingly nasty battle, despite the fact that it was technically below the party’s level and despite the fact that I held back a little bit in not using one craud’s encounter power before it was killed.  Go figure.

With the swordmage now at full hit points but no surges and the fighter down to his last surge, the group pressed on and took a wrong turn, ending up in a den of cave fishers.  I’ve been looking forward to running this encounter ever since I saw the cave fishers in Monster Manual 3, and I have to say that it was a lot of fun.  I love the way the anglers grab onto a character and pull them into the air while their young climb down to start eating the PC.  And of course once the angler is dead or the PC manages to extract themselves, they have to deal with the fall from the ceiling.  Good times!

I also tried to bring more of the characters’ back stories into the game this time.  The minotaur druid, who has no memory of his past, is starting to get hints above some savagery within himself.  He role-played the situation well, and I’ve ended up deciding to introduce an artifact into the game.  I’m open to ideas: What should a totem of Melora that’s tied to a minotaur druid be like?

I had the party finish tonight’s session in the village where our fighter had grown up – technically, in the ruins of the village, which had been pillaged by orcs.  It felt like a good place to wrap up the session, with the party next having to either figure out a way through the rockfall that has blocked the ruined village in, or heading back into the caves to finish navigating their way out.

I have some pretty good ideas about where the adventure is going from here – likely back onto the adventure path – but I really enjoyed writing my own skill challenge and encounters, and I think they played well.  The flexibility to do what I want is fantastic, and I’m not totally comfortable at winging things when I’m working from published material.  I just need to get over that!

War of the Burning Sky Session 2

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All right, now this is more like it!  I got together with my online group last night for our second session in the War of the Burning Sky campaign (our third overall session as a group).  The first WotBS session didn’t go all that well in part because we had to wrap up early when one player got called into work but mainly because I was underprepared and didn’t feel ready to wing it when needed.

This time, I was ready.  With this session, I started intentionally deviating from the campaign as laid out in the published module, and I’m glad I did.  There are some spoilers for the campaign ahead, just so you’re warned.

I started the party off in session 1 as scripted, meeting their contact, Torrest, in a closed-down inn at New Year’s Eve in the town of Gate Pass as the world was on the brink of war.  I ran the bounty hunter ambush battle more or less as scripted, though I ran it badly.  The players did well to think quickly and try to lure the lead bounty hunter to the Resistance – a cool idea.

I then ran some of the mini-quests as written as the party made its way from the inn to the bank tower to meet their next contact.  The party helped heal a burned family, caught a panicked woman who was jumping from a burning building, and shared in the panic in the crowd as a huge winged figure swooped overhead in the night.  That’s where we ended things last time.

Next, I ran the much-maligned “Animal Crossing” encounter, in which a rich man begs the party to help him find his Kiki, who, it turns out, is his pet dire weasel (see photo to the left).  I had Torrent clearly be uninterested in helping, and I would have awarded XP for simply the group deciding that this was a waste of time, but the soft-hearted warlock in the party helped persuade the others that this poor man was in need of their help.  So, the weasel hunt was on, and for me at least it was a ton of fun.  They tracked the weasel through the streets, into a closed temple, out a side door, down an alley and into a locked sewer grate.  The druid in the party used a fabulous Nature check to calm Kiki down, at which point she climbed out and snuggled into his arms for safety (I essentially role-played Kiki as one of my cats).  I showed the party the picture I had made for Kiki, and the druid was sorely tempted to keep her (she IS pretty adorable, if a bit dire), but the group ultimately returned the cute little dire weasel to her rightful owner.  They then spent a surprising amount of time trying to get out the box of treasure that they spotted alongside Kiki in the sewer grate, ultimately blasting the crap out of the lock on the sewer grate with a bunch of magic.

Fun aside: At one point the gnome in the party tried to squeeze through the sewer grate, which was an untrained Acrobatics check.  The dwarf fighter assisted by shoving him through with a great Athletics check.  Unfortunately, the gnome’s Acrobatics roll was a natural 1, so I ruled that he got his knee caught on the grate, the fighter’s shove cause him to bang up that leg, dealing him 1d6 damage. Ah, the dangers of assisting!

At this point I made my first major deviation from the published story.  As published, the party encounters a character in the bank who appears to be their contact, Rivereye, but who is really a good-aligned spy from a nearby eladrin country.  The spy has secretly subdued the real Rivereye and taken a potion to disguise himself as Rivereye.  He has taken the case of secret information that Rivereye was supposed to be giving to Torrent (that is, the MacGuffin) and sent it with some of his eladrin allies to another part of town because the real Rivereye has convinced the spy that the case is rigged to blow up if it’s opened without the proper pass phrase.  The encounter is scheduled to go like this:

  • The party arrives and meets the fake Rivereye
  • The fake Rivereye doesn’t realize who Torrent is and slips up in his charade
  • When Torrent catches him in the slip-up, the spy flees with his wisp solon partner
  • The party then has a long series of encounters helping the Resistance and tracking down the case, possibly becoming allies with the eladrin along the way

This struck me as overly complicated and, more importantly, no fun.  I don’t like the “meet a bad guy and keep him from fleeing” encounter, especially since it seemed like it would be easy for him to get away.  So I completely revamped it.

In MY version (available here as a PDF), the fake Rivereye is a doppelganger counter-spy from the evil empire that Rivereye has been spying on.  The doppelganger and his gang of half-orc goons have been tailing Rivereye in the hopes that he’ll lead them to his contacts in the Resistance.  As in the published version, the fake Rivereye tries to pass himself off as the real one and ultimately slips up.  However, in this version he doesn’t HAVE the MacGuffin – it’s locked in a bank vault and he needs Torrent to get it out.  When he fails in that, he and his goons attack.  He ultimately tried to flee at the end of the battle, but I had him use a potion of teleportation to try to get away – which, when combined with the Burning Sky teleportation issues, fried him to a crisp.  Add in the lightning trap that I had jumping around the battlefield, and it was a more fun encounter (at least for me).

I considered running the Flaganus Mortis encounter after this one, but I ultimately decided not to bother as it felt too random.  I had the party go to a safe house (which I made into the Dagger’s Rest Inn from their first session, transplanted from Waterdeep) and rest for the evening.  In the morning, they started their plans to escape the city.  I gave them the option of trying to work with a city council member as written in the published module, but that seemed boring to me, so I presented them with another option: Escape via the sewers.  Happily for me, they went with the sewers

I skipped most of the rest of Act Two, Act Three and Act Four as written, but I took the Dead Rising encounter from Act Two and said that in order to get from the sewers into the natural cave system that would take them out of the city, the party would have to fight through an ancient crypt of undead.  I ran this one exactly as written (except with an exit out the back of the crypt, and the fact that the entrance came from the sewer), and it was pretty darn brutal – but the players made it in the end.  I did soften the death explosion of the Dwarven Boneshard Skeletons to be 1d6+4 damage rather than 3d6+4 – they were crazy-powerful enough without dealing insane damage on death.

We called it a night as this point, as the party got ready to delve into the natural cavern system (which is not part of the published adventure at all).  I’m very happy with the changes I made to the adventure, and I personally am having much more fun than I did in the first WotBS session (mainly because I feel like I know what’s going on now and am free to make changes as I see fit).  I’ve already put together what I think is an interesting trek through the natural caverns, after which I will likely pick up some of the published threads of the adventure (probably using Act Five more or less as written and then moving on to the second published adventure).

What do you think of the changes I’ve made so far?  Was running the weasel hunt worthwhile?  Do you have any suggestions for a trek through some caverns in an effort to escape the city?  I have some ideas of my own, but I’m always looking for more input!

War of the Burning Sky – First session

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This past Friday evening I ran my online group through our first session of EN World’s War of the Burning Sky campaign.  It did not go as well as our session from the previous week, where I had run them through a Living Forgotten Realms adventure, and it’s my fault: I just wasn’t as prepared as I should have been, and it showed.

The session started off well, with the players talking about some back story for their characters and possible connections with one another and with the campaign setting.  I really enjoyed this part of the session, and it’s given me some good ideas for the future.

Then we got into the actual adventure itself (WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD).  Some of this was okay and some… less so.  The party begins by meeting a woman named Torrent in a tavern that has been closed by the city guards because the owner is a magic user and there’s a coming crackdown on magic (“The Scourge”).  Torrent is there to bring the party into “The Resistance.”  Great, no problem.

V. Shane's awesome depiction of Torrent from the War of the Burning Sky

As they finish chatting, they’re ambushed by bounty hunters.  Now, this is laid out as a pretty exciting encounter in the published adventure, and I totally biffed it.  There’s a warning of something coming, with the sound of creaking floorboards overhead in what is supposed to be an empty building.  Then some bounty hunters come barging in the front door, with the goal of forcing the party out the side door. (I was totally unable to accomplish this.)

Then a bomb hits the building and flames burst out all over the place.  Then the ceiling starts collapsing in places.  This would have been a good way to force the players out of the building and into the alley, but I failed to play it that way.  They basically ignored the chaos and beat the crap out of the bounty hunters.  I decided to have the leader of the bounty hunters (who wisely stayed outside) tell his men to retreat, but the party kept beating them on the way out (and really, who can blame them?).

We then had an interaction with the lead bounty hunter, Kathor, which, as I played it, didn’t make any sense.  Kathor is supposed to be ambivalent about being a bounty hunter, and that came across okay, but it was tough for me to reasonably play it so that the players would accept his withdrawal without attacking him further.  We worked it out so that the players are trying to recruit him into the resistance (a cool idea on the party’s part), but I admit that I didn’t handle this encounter very well.

We next played a few vignettes as the party made their way through the now-burning city toward their rendezvous with a gnome who is supposed to have information that they’re to take out of the city.  These little scenes were a bit out of place, but the party role-played them well.

Then we had to abruptly cut off the game, as one of the players got called into work unexpectedly.  I was okay with this, frankly, as it will give me more time to prepare for the next session.

After much reflection, I’ve decided that I have no interest in running a pre-packaged campaign through to completion.  A pre-packaged adventure, sure, but not a whole campaign.  I need to be able to wing it on the fly and change NPC motivations, all sorts of crazy things, and that’s tough with a published campaign.  So, I’ll be using the published campaign for inspiration and nothing more.  For one thing, I’m interested in getting the party into an underground area of some sort for some cool battles, and I don’t see anything like that in the near future for this campaign.  Easy solution: Change it!

My lessons from this time around are:

  • BE PREPARED!  If you’re not prepared as the DM, things aren’t going to go well.
  • Maintain flexibility.  Unless you’re the kind of DM who can run a party closely to a script, don’t hew too closely to a published adventure path.  You need to be able to adapt on the fly.
  • When you’re given cool material (like the burning, collapsing building that the party is fighting inside) make the most of it!  Describe it vividly, and let it affect the characters in whatever way seems most appropriate to you.

Next session is going to be better, I can already tell.  I’ve already made some big changes to the next combat encounter, which will take the adventure mildly off the published path.  I’m anxious to start working with my player characters’ backgrounds, too, and I have some interesting ideas on how to do that.

Running my first in-person Living Forgotten Realms game

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Today I officially became not only an online dungeon master but also an in-person dungeon master.  I finally ran a Living Forgotten Realms game at my friendly local game store, Enchanted Grounds (spoiler alert: I ended up killing one of the PCs).  I started preparing for this game (and talking about it on the blog) almost a month ago, and I already ran this same adventure for my online group last week, so it’s fair to say that I was well-prepared!

The module was WATE1-1: Heirloom, a Living Forgotten Realms adventure for a party of four to six players of levels one to four.  There will be some spoilers for this particular adventure ahead, just so you know.

The game was scheduled to start at 9:00 AM.  I got to the store around 8:45 to get ready – and then realized at 8:50 that I had forgotten the handouts for the players (they explain the laws of Waterdeep, show a map of Waterdeep, and show a list of stolen items that was provided to the City Watch in the story).  Fortunately, I live within walking distance of home, so it took me only two minutes to drive back, two minutes two print the handouts and two minutes to get back to the store.

We were fortunate to be allowed to play on Enchanted Grounds’ fancy new gaming table, which has an inset in the middle for the battle map and a special pull-out tray with a built-in screen for the game master.  There were four players at game time, and two more were on their way but running late.  We waited about 25 minutes before starting – and naturally the two latecomers showed up just as we got going.  No harm done!

Since this blog is meant to be educational, I think it’s worth talking about what I did to prepare for running this adventure:

  • Read the adventure at least twice, paying special attention to the point of the story and, on later read-throughs, the details of combat tactics from the enemies
  • Create the maps in MapTool, convert them to posters with PosteRazor, print them out in color and tape them together
  • Get monster minis together – I used self-made tokens.  I wish I had also brought some generic non-combatant NPC tokens, but that was a minor oversight.Tokens
  • Get some way of keeping track of conditions such as bloodied, slowed, marked, etc.  I went with little rubber bands from Target that are intended to be hair bands for girls.  I believe my wife Barbara found a big container of them for $3.  I sorted them by color and stored them on twist-ties.
  • Get dice.  Lots of dice.  No, a few more than that.  Yeah, that’s the ticket! (Note the awesome d12s that have Roman numerals for 1 to 4 printed three times – actually rollable d4s!  I got them from Dicepool.) 
  • Write the name of each type of monster on a half index card and roll initiative for it.  Write that number on the half index card.
  • Get blank half index cards for each player character.  Write the character’s name (along with race and class, maybe the player’s name and a description of the mini so you know who it is – all optional, but nice) at the top of the card.  As the players roll initiative for a battle, write the character’s initiative on the card, crossing out any old initiative number that’s on it.  You can then order the cards (PCs and bad guys) by initiative and use this to keep track of who’s up and who’s next – plus it’s easy if someone delays or readies an action to put them in a new position.
  • Get a blank piece of paper for each battle.  Write the name of each monster on a line, treating multiple monsters of the same type separately (so Guard Drake 1 has a line, as does Guard Drake 2).  Write in parentheses next to the monster its bloodied value, followed by a colon and the starting hit points.  As the monster takes damage, cross off the rightmost number and replace it with the new HP total.  Check it against the bloodied value to see if the monster is bloodied yet.
  • When you’re at the table, write down each player’s name, their character’s name, their race and class, their passive Insight and Perception scores and their initiative modifier

With that, we were off and running.  The adventure begins with a long skill challenge to find the thief who stole the title heirloom.  As with my online game, I never said that we were in a skill challenge.  Instead I said, “Okay, what do you want to do now?”  Someone decided to ask around the pub for information on where they might be able to find stolen goods – “Give me a Streetwise roll.”  That pointed them to another tavern, where they looked around to see if they could find anyone matching the description of the information broker they had been given – “All right, Perception.”  And so on.

In the middle of the long skill challenge, we had a quick-hit combat encounter with some drunken sailors.  There was some fun role playing, as one of the PCs tried to hit on the damsel in distress (she wasn’t interested, and I played her as such).  There was some great bluffing of the City Watch, too – “Honest, officers, these men just fell down drunk.  We didn’t attack them…”

Once the thief was located in his lair, the battle became more interesting.  I had ramped up the difficulty level of the battle a little bit, based on past experience, and I’m glad I did.  Lots of players ended up severely bloodied, but nobody dropped.  Our assassin got a little cocky after teleporting in behind a bandit and basically destroying him in one shot, so he ended up trying to take on a couple of halfling thieves by himself.  Bad idea – those guys love to get combat advantage and deal extra damage!

The players did defeat the thief and successfully interrogated him about the stolen heirloom.  He told them where to find the person who hired him to steal it.  I then asked the players what they wanted to do with the thief and his gang.  After a short discussion, they decided to execute them.  I had a bloodthirsty table!  But so it goes.  Had this been a home game, I would have made sure that there would be consequences from this in the future, but for a one-shot I decided to just move on.

The final battle against the gnome factor and his allies in an inn room was pretty cool.  Our assassin and our monk were stealthy about getting into position, seeing some gnomes in their room at the end of a hall and successfully hiding from the gnomes.  Our fighter tried to be stealthy but failed, making too much noise while coming up the steps.  The gnomes looked up, and our bard, thinking quickly, walked up the stairs and past the hallway, whistling merrily – so I had him make a Bluff check, which he totally rocked.  Thus, with surprise preserved, the party was able to charge down the hall in a surprise round before the battle began.

Our strikers jumped right into the thick of things, dealing tons of damage but leaving themselves exposed – especially the monk.  The gnomes spread the hurt around a little bit, but the two dumb guard drakes attacked the closest thing that was threatening their master, which was our monk.  The monk did get an opportunity attack on one drake as the drake moved into position between the monk and the gnomes, but then both drakes took big bites out of the monk.  Guard drakes, as it turns out, do tons of damage when they’re near allies, and the two big chomps put the monk at exactly his negative bloodied value.  He was dead – that is, dead dead, not just “I’m lying on the ground but I’ll be fine later” dead.  I felt a little bad, but that’s what happens when a relatively squishy striker charges into battle without waiting for defender support (a lesson I learned myself the first time I played an avenger).

Pretty soon the gnomes were all bloodied, facing our wizard’s Flaming Sphere, and several of them were invisible due to their fade away power.  When the gnome leader’s turn came up, with his invisibility in place, I had him open the window of the room, fey step down to the street below and start running.  Of course, all the player characters could see was a window opening.  They were left with a tough choice – attack the empty space where they had last seen the gnome leader, or try to go after him in case he ran.

The bard attacked the empty square and rolled well enough that I told him that he didn’t feel like there was anything there to hit.  So the wizard decided to run back down the stairs and into the alley leading to the front of the inn – where he spotted the gnome!  Meanwhile, back in the room, the fighter and psion took care of the guard drakes, the other gnomes jumped out the window (one killing himself) and the bard decided to take a flying leap after everyone.  He made his Acrobatics check, landed on his feet, saw the gnome leader and pegged him with two arrows (smart use of an action point).  Mission accomplished!

This was a fun way to spend a Saturday morning, and I know the players had fun, too.  Interestingly, the person whose player I killed, Jason, had played this adventure once before (in the same party as me when I had played it), and during the course of the adventure he said, “Wow, this is way cooler than the last time!”  That’s what I love to hear.  Even though his character died, he still role-played the things that his spirit was doing, cheering on the rest of the party.  The two players at the table who were new to fourth edition had a good time and learned a lot about how the game works.  Fun was had by all.

I’m learning that I really like being a dungeon master, whether in person or online.  I’ve also learned that I need to feel prepared in order to do well. (In my next post I’ll talk about my experience running my online group through the beginning of the War of the Burning Sky while not being as prepared as I’d like.) I think I’d like to do some more DMing for Living Forgotten Realms in the future.

Chaos Scar third session – swallowed by frogs

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We gathered at our place today for what is becoming a Monday holiday tradition – grilling and gaming!  Since we all had the day off for the Fourth of July holiday, just as we did a month ago for Memorial day, we decided to grill some burgers, ribs and veggies and play some D&D.  This was our third session in the Chaos Scar.  (Sessions number one and number two are at those links).

BullywugsOur party had just finished fighting bullywugs (frog people) on the first level of a ruined keep last time, and we began the day today by heading down a trap door into the next level.  Amazingly enough, our minotaur on a horse had no problem squeezing through the trap door.  🙂

We played through three battles today – some random bullywugs in a muddy chamber, some bullywugs and giant frogs in a big laboratory and some mud men in a vault.  The first battle was pretty good – nice and balanced – though my character ended up spending the entire battle stuck in the mud.   Fortunately, my Avenger, Kern, does have an at-will ranged attack, so I wasn’t TOTALLY useless!  Still, the mud that attacked at the beginning of my turn to immobilize me (save ends) was pretty annoying, but at least it only hit me and not the rest of the gang.

The third battle against the mud men was also easy, and we squeaked through the skill challenge that followed with success.  The real story of the day was the second encounter.  We fought three Giant Frogs (the link only works if you’re a DDI subscriber).  There were some other bad guys in the room, but this battle was all about the Giant Frogs.  These guys have an at-will power that lets them swallow a PC on a hit.  A swallowed PC is stunned (save ends).  That means that the character doesn’t get to do anything on their turn except take five damage (from the frog’s digestive acids, presumably) and make a saving throw.  If they fail the save, they don’t get to do anything next turn, either.

This was a miserable encounter for Nate, whose minotaur fighter was swallowed for pretty much the whole battle.  He didn’t get to take a single action until the battle was almost over (something like five rounds).  It was touch and go for the party (Nate and I both had our characters swallowed at least once), but Barbara used the healing abilities of her runepriest very wisely, which let us pull through.

This was a fun adventure on the whole, and we ended with enough experience points to move up to second level, which we’re all looking forward to.  Bree, our DM, did something I thought was really cool at the end of the session – she asked for our feedback on what was fun, what was not fun, and how to make the game more fun for us.  This leads naturally to some DM lessons.

  • The stun ability needs to be used very, very sparingly, if at all.  Certainly I wouldn’t recommend using a creature with an at-will ability that can stun (save ends).  If it’s once per encounter, okay.  If it can only stun for one turn and it is a recharge power, that’s probably all right.  But stun (save ends) at will is just too unfun for the players.
  • Similarly, monsters that daze or dominate should be used very sparingly as well.  Anything that keeps the players from doing stuff on their turns is not a lot of fun.
  • Adjusting the challenge level of encounters for a strong party is tricky.  Adding an extra monster with a stun (save ends) ability was not the way to do it in this case.  Consider increasing the damage dealt by the monsters and increasing their hit points.  MAYBE consider increasing their defenses, but don’t overdo it (having the PCs missing with all of their attacks is not fun either).
  • Flexibility is good, especially when the pre-packaged material just doesn’t work.  We faced a skill challenge that required Arcana and Nature as primary skills.  None of us are trained in either of those (except our Shaman, who was absent today).  Our DM rewarded creative uses of Athletics and Acrobatics on the fly, which made the challenge way more fun.
  • Think carefully before allowing a character a mount.  This hasn’t been a problem in our campaign so far, but we have one character with a mount, which seems really, really useful.  More speed, saving throws from being knocked prone, etc.  It’s all upside, and it seems to be pretty significant upside.  As a DM, I would make mounts an all or none proposition – either the players are all on foot, or they’re all on mounts.

Bree is doing a good job as a DM, and it’s clear that she really cares about getting better and making the game fun.  I think that’s the most important thing – a DM who is focused on fun for the whole party.  If you’ve got that, you’ve got a very important ingredient for a good game.

A nice little addendum – Bree ended up using some of my monster tokens for minions today.  They worked great!  I’m looking forward to using them in my LFR game (which Nate has said he wants to play in – cool!).

Chaos scar campaign – Fighting mushrooms, lunatics and frogs

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Our in-person D&D group gathered yesterday for our second session in the Chaos Scar (first session at this link).  I did indeed tweak Kern the Avenger a little bit so that he gave up some Dexterity for Constitution (a few more HP and surges seemed like a good idea), though I made it so the change wouldn’t go into effect until after the next extended rest.  Otherwise, it would have been too hard to figure out where my hit points should have been (okay, so I have one more surge now, and each of the eight surges I already used should have give me one more HP, but wait, I have AC that’s one lower now, so I probably would have taken some more hits…).

We also added a new player, Blaine, to the group with this session.  This brings us to five party members:

  • Kern, the githzerai Avenger played by me (Michael) – a striker
  • Zaaria, the dragonborn Runepriest played by my wife Barbara – a leader
  • Keira, the human Monk played by Kyle – another striker
  • Bullwark, the minotaur Fighter played by Nate – a defender
  • Iskander, the wilden Shaman played by Blaine – another leader

We’re doubled up on leaders and strikers and we’re without a controller.  That should be fine.  It’s worth noting that Barbara’s Runepriest is definitely a bit of a defender, not just a pure leader.  Also, Blaine’s shaman is at least trained in Arcana, which means we finally have someone who can identify magic items!  We’re not a smart party – Iskander’s intelligence of 13 leads the party, with Kern’s intelligence of 8 bringing up the rear.  Wise, yes; intelligent, no.

Yesterday’s session started off with a battle against some mushroom people who kept denying our PCs standard actions on their next turns – a real pain in the butt.  Since Kern was so low on HP, I had him stand in the back and shoot Radiant Vengeance for the whole battle until the very last round, where I used my encounter power to shift into melee and finish off the last bad buy with my fullblade.

We then got to do some nice roleplaying.  We had rescued a halfling slave from the temple of Torog in the previous session, so we decided to take care of him.  Bree (our DM) had to make up a name on the spot and decided to call him George.  With a few minutes to prepare later, she determined that George had been captured along with his sister and two brothers, who didn’t survive.  He was from a nearby town, so we returned him to his father.  Maybe that will be useful in the future!

Our next adventure hook was to help a goliath sorceror recover a staff of earthen might that one of his ancestors had created in a keep.  The keep had been ruined and the staff broken when the meteor came to the Chaos Scar.  The sorceror seemed to be on the up-and-up, so we took the job for the promise of the other treasure in the ruins of the keep.

On the way to the keep, we heard a horse whinny and some people shouting.  We found a horse and cart, with the cart sinking into a hole.  There was a lunatic on top of the cart who seemed to think this was our fault, and he ordered his minions to kill us.  The battle was interesting, as some giant ants came out from under the cart (apparently the hole was the ants’ home) and attacked the minions as much as they attacked us.

Finally, we made it to the keep, where we faced off against some bullywugs – frog people.  The setting was interesting (difficult terrain and the like), but the battle again was pretty easy.  We found the trap door that leads down to the next level but haven’t gone there yet.

We had a fun session, and I’ll admit that I was pretty focused on playing and thus didn’t pay attention to a lot of DM lessons.  Here’s what I picked up:

  • I’ve heard it said before, but having a list of names on hand is a good idea – you never know when your players are going to want to get to know a throw-away NPC a little better.
  • Monsters who take away the ability of PCs to do fun stuff (stunning, dazing, taking away standard actions) should be used sparingly, and it should be a big deal when they show up.
  • Asking players for wish lists of magic items they’d like to have is a good way to make sure the items they find are useful.  From the player side, though, I’m not sure how I feel about it yet.
  • Thinking of fun in-story tie-ins on the fly is not easy, but it’s rewarding for the players (such as the story of George the halfling).  Be flexible and creative as a DM, and you’ll be rewarded for it.

My online game is on hiatus at the moment as Lane, who is a newly-minted accountant, has to spend most of her free time studying for the CPA exams.  Good thing I have in-person D&D to keep myself occupied!