Tag Archives: LivingForgottenRealms

Becoming “in-demand” as a DM

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Three independent incidents in the past few weeks have made me realize that, at least in my local D&D community, I’m becoming somewhat “in-demand” as a Dungeon Master.

First, the person who coordinates Living Forgotten Realms games at my local store asked me if I would be willing to DM a paragon-tier game for a charity event on July 30. Not the biggest deal in the world, I suppose, but I was flattered to be requested. After figuring out that I should have enough time to prep everything I need to prep, I agreed to run the game.

Second, the person who is coordinating D&D games for the Tacticon convention over Labor Day weekend asked if I would be willing to run an epic tier game (an all-day event) at the con. He did a good job of flattery on this one, making it clear that he was specifically approaching a small number of DMs who he thought could run a challenging adventure and make it fun for the players at a convention. Since I’m planning to iron man the convention anyway (running games for every slot), I agreed.

Third, the owner of the local store approached me yesterday about D&D Encounters. I’ve been running a table every other week at 5:00 PM (alternating with the excellent Andy), and the store owner wanted to know if I’d be willing to run a second table at 7:00 for the next few weeks, as there’s been a DM shortage. Sure, I can handle that.

In addition, the owner also asked if I’d be interested in running the next season of Encounters, seeking my input on how he should try to arrange things with dungeon masters. I really like running Encounters since I love introducing new players to the game and Encounters is an ideal way to do this. Unfortunately, Wednesday night is bowling night in the fall. My wife and I don’t have a lot of organized activities we do together, but bowling is one of them, and we have some good friends who bowl on Wednesdays, so I’ll probably have to decline.

However, I did offer my opinion that the best way to schedule DMs for Encounters is to have one DM assigned to each slot (5:00 PM table 1, 5:00 PM table 2, 7:00 PM table 1, 7:00 PM table 2) and then an alternate for each DM that the primary person can call on if they’re going to be out of town or too busy or whatever. While I couldn’t serve as a primary DM, I could probably be a 5:00 PM alternate (missing a week of bowling every now and then, or just showing up a little late). I appreciated being asked for my input.

I feel like I’m at a pretty good place right now with my dungeon mastering. My Friday night online game is going strong. Running D&D Encounters has been a lot of fun. I ran my Tallinn’s Tower adventure for LFR on Thursday (more to come on that later – I’m making some revisions based on feedback from the recent game) and will  be running the final adventure in my trilogy after GenCon.  And I’m really looking forward to three and a half days of non-stop dungeon mastering at TactiCon in a couple of months.

Going from being a total newbie as a dungeon master a year ago to the point where people are actually asking me to run events is a pretty good feeling!

Free adventure (with maps): Tallinn’s Tower

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Edit 9/8/2011: I’ve since updated this adventure; the details of the update are at this link.

 

I’ve just finished writing a new adventure for D&D 4th Edition called Tallinn’s Tower. This is the sequel to my first “published” adventure, the Stolen Staff (aka The Staff of Suha). I’m planning on running this adventure at my local store as a Living Forgotten Realms adventure and then again at TactiCon in September, but this version is not LFR-specific.

Download the adventure here.

And if you’d like the MapTool file to let you run the game online, click here.

Structure

I’ve written Tallinn’s Tower using guidelines for the newest season of LFR for MyRealms adventures, in which an adventure can be run for a variety of levels in the heroic tier. The party chooses the Adventure Level (2, 4, 6, 8 or 10) and the DM runs the appropriate version. There are a few cases in which I’ve picked different monsters for the lower part of the tier and the upper part, and other cases where I’ve just re-leveled the same monster throughout the tier.

I haven’t provided monster stat blocks since I’m using published monsters rather than my own creations (and because I didn’t want to have to create five different sets of stat blocks for each encounter), but if you have any trouble with the level adjustments, just let me know and I’ll be happy to help. [Edit: Monster stat blocks are now included]

Synopsis

The plot of the adventure involves the PCs being hired to investigate the nature of a magic staff that apparently has more to it than meets the eye. They are asked to take the staff to a reclusive wizardess who lives in a tower, but in order to get an audience with her they must prove themselves worthy by navigating the hazards of the tower.

If you like adventures with illusions, traps, in-combat skill challenges and even poetry, check out Tallinn’s Tower! And please provide me with feedback (positive or negative); I fully intend to improve the adventure based on reader input.

Maps

What adventure would be complete without maps? Below are the gridded and gridless versions of each map in the adventure, scaled so that each grid square is 50 pixels (for ease of use in MapTool and similar programs).

Level 1 - Gridded

Level 1 - No Grid

Level 2 - Gridded

Level 2 - No Grid

Level 3 - Gridded

Level 3 - No Grid

Level 4 - Gridded

Level 4 - No Grid

Running an online game for new players

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I love it when a plan comes together. A couple of weeks ago I received a comment on my blog from a player who had never played a tabletop role-playing game before but who was interested in trying it out. Since I love to introduce new players to the hobby, I wanted to at least run one game for this prospective new player. So, I advertised here on the blog as well as over on EN World that I would be running a one-shot game for new players.

Getting this game set up went the way I originally expected setting up an online game to go when I first did it last July. For that game, I wanted five players so I recruited seven, figuring that a couple wouldn’t be able to make it. I ended up with eight. Oops.

This time I ended up recruiting six and only four were able to make it work (scheduling was problematic). That’s okay, though – four was plenty!

We gathered Friday evening on MapTool and Skype in the time slot that I normally run my long-running War of the Burning Sky campaign (my regular players were very understanding – thanks, guys!). I gave the new players some choice about what adventure we ran, and I ended up running a Living Forgotten Realms game – CORM 1-1 The Black Knight of Arabel (available here as part of a big archive file if you’re interested). This was, coincidentally, the first LFR game I had ever gone through as a player and one of the first I had run as a DM.

I specifically wanted to run an adventure I had run before in order to keep my prep time to a minimum (time was tight last week). Most of the prep time for this game went into getting the four PCs set up in MapTool. I did change the monsters in the adventure, too. First, I updated the damage expressions and defenses and everything to the post-Monster Manual 3 numbers. Second, since this particular adventure has the possibility of three fights with the same shadow creatures over and over, I mixed things up by bringing in some monsters from the Dark Legacy of Evard season of D&D Encounters that I’m running.

The group that gathered on Friday consisted of two new players (one of them in England – I somehow manage to attract players who are willing to play in the middle of the night!), one player who was rusty, and one player who at least hadn’t played online before (but he was looking for a game and I needed the fourth player to fill out the party). We had some minor technical difficulties at first, but soon enough we were all on MapTool.

I had created characters for the two new players based on descriptions they gave me – a tiefling cleric and a half-orc barbarian. The more experienced players created their own characters – an elf mage and a goliath warden. I started with some basics about how the MapTool program works and how the rules of the game work for the new players, and then we dove in.

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE BLACK KNIGHT OF ARABEL

The adventure began with the party on their way to Arabel to investigate reports of a black rider and shadow creatures. Near nightfall the party was approaching the city and came upon a wagon driver frantically trying to repair a wagon wheel before darkness came. The party offered to help, but just then the sun dipped below the horizon and some shadow creatures emerged. A battle ensued, using the Shadow Hulk and Shadow Seeker from the adventure, but using the Leeching Shadows from Dark Legacy of Evard instead of the Shadow Motes that were written. The fight was a little intense and the cleric ended up unconscious at the end, but the party stabilized her. They had seen the dark rider on a ridge in the distance during the fight and decided to go after him.

At this point, the party started tracking the rider through the woods and came to a steep downhill slope that was tricky for their horses. The barbarian ended up basically carrying his horse and then the cleric’s horse down the slope. It was awesome.

When the group came upon the rider’s horse, dead from shadow attacks, they started suspecting that the dark figure wasn’t commanding the shadow creatures after all. Eventually they found the dark creature and talked to him rather than fought. They learned that he was an exiled knight and that he was trying to fight the shadows, but that the townspeople thought he was commanding them. He also mentioned that his father had cursed him to an evil god. The PCs teamed up with him and tried to clear his name.

Next came a trip into town to confront his father, who wasn’t at his pub – but this didn’t stop the barbarian and the warden from starting a bar fight! I decided to roll with it and threw some brawlers at them. They fought for a couple of rounds and prevailed easily. Of course, they had to skedaddle because the barmaid went to fetch the guards (they DID start the fight, after all).

Ultimately, the group ended up at the theater where the cult of the evil god was meeting. They convinced the cultists (confused townspeople) that the cult leader was leading them astray as he wanted to sacrifice a baby to the evil god. The cultists left, leaving the party to fight the leader and more shadow creatures. This time I did use the original Shadow Motes but I paired them with the Dusk Beasts from Dark Legacy of Evard.

This ended up being an awesome battle, ranging all over the place. The mage used Mage Hand to pluck the baby off the altar, but the Dusk Beasts knocked him unconscious. The barbarian started raging and charging all over the place, twice getting knocked down to just one hit point. The cleric eventually grabbed the baby and took it up into a balcony for safekeeping, whereupon the warden smashed the ladder to the balcony to keep the cult leader from getting to it. Lots of damage, lots of heroism… it was a great fight, and the good guys just barely pulled it out in the end.

Everyone had a fun time, and I’m happy to say that one of the players has volunteered to DM the group through an ongoing campaign. Success!

This “game for new players” is something I would love to do on a regular basis, maybe once every few months. So, if you’re reading this post and are interested in learning to play D&D via an online game, drop me a line!

Factotum will try anything

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Given that I’m still pretty new to D&D (having started in early 2010), I’m still having “firsts” that are old hat for most gamers. I’ve just created my first character with a real concept, who I can really role play.

Factotum the Human Bard probably uses the same concept as a lot of 4e bards out there: Multiclassing. His motto is, “Oh, I’m great at that!” He’ll try anything. Note that he’s not especially GOOD at any of those things, but he thinks he’s ultra-capable.

His starting pre-racial stat array was 13 in every ability, with the one extra point in  Charisma (I wonder how many 4e players ever discover that trying to balance your stats gives you five 13s and a 14). As a slight nod to character effectiveness, I put his +2 human racial bonus in Charisma. So, he has 16 Charisma and 13 everything else. Optimized, he is not!

Factotum’s feats are, of course, his bread and butter. I made him a human so that he could have an extra feat at first level. Naturally, both feats are multiclass feats, so he’s a Warlord and a Rogue. Yeah, sneak attacking bards – woo hoo! I’m only picking feats that give him skill training; right now he’s trained in eight skills.

I’ve had a chance to play two Living Forgotten Realms sessions with Factotum. The first was not so great for him; it was the only LFR game I’ve seen so far that was four straight fights, with no time carved out for skill use. He muddled through all right, but he didn’t really shine.

The second session was this past week, and it was a blast. I hadn’t realized that the always-awesome Andy had set up a long series of LFR adventures at the local store with the intention of having a semi-consistent group of characters start at level 1 and go all the way through the heroic tier over the course of many months. I just happened to have signed up for the first game in this series. Two other players had brought fourth-level characters, so they obviously didn’t know about the series either. No matter – off we went!

SPOILERS AHEAD for CORE 2-1 The Radiant Vessel of Thesk

Our quest was to go to Thesk and find a mysterious “radiant vessel” on behalf of an insane halfling. We had a great opportunity for role playing in a small community in an effort to figure out what the heck this radiant vessel was. Factotum tried to turn on the charm, but managed to stick his foot in his mouth more often than not. With the help of the rest of the group, though, we ultimately got a lead: the radiant vessel was a woman with a mystical aura around her that destroyed undead creatures. She had been taken by orcs to some distant mountains, but her cousin had a map to get there (the cousin had been having a fling with one of the orcs – the hussy).

Into the mountains, then; Factotum was happy to stealthily lead the way. When we came to a room with ladders leading down to a chamber with enemies, most of the party climbed down to fight. Factotum, naturally, jumped down the 20 feet (and almost reduced enough damage with his Acrobatics check to land on his feet). He charged into a flank in order to sneak attack a minion. When confronted with a pit to cross (which could be done with ladders), Factotum jumped it.

Eventually the party found the kidnapped woman, surrounded by orcs and an imp. Factotum Bluffed his way in, saying that he was a trained physician. It would have gone well, too – if only he had been trained in Heal. A few failed skill checks later (the party’s Goliath Barbarian/Warlord didn’t have much luck, either), and we had killed the poor woman and her baby.

It was a sad moment around the table, but we wiped our tears and brought the body back to the cousin. Factotum was a blast to play, even though he usually missed in combat (his attacks were at +6 versus Armor Class or +3 versus other defenses). The best moment was when one of the other players said, “Factotum HAS to come back next week!”

Well all right then! It’s a lot of fun to have a character with actual personality. I need to learn to bring some of this to NPCs when I’m running games, too.

And since I think Factotum is so much fun, I decided it was worth taking 15 minutes to hack the five-page PDF that the Character Builder spits out into a one-page version. You know, I should probably just use the original offline Character Builder for this guy…

One more PC bites the dust

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I wonder if I’m starting to get a reputation as a killer DM. Tonight I ran a Living Forgotten Realms game at my friendly local game store, Enchanted Grounds, and I killed off a PC – only the fourth time I’ve done so in the approximately one year I’ve been running D&D games. Still, one PC every three months… that’s a pretty aggressive kill rate!

This time, though, I don’t really feel bad about it. I was running an adventure called AKAN 1-3 Property for Sale.

SPOILERS AHEAD

This adventure is, in a lot of ways, a pretty standard dungeon delve. The party is hired by a halfling to clear monsters out of a long-forgotten temple. They fight some drow atop a waterfall, then head down into a cave and fight some stirges and a Cavern Choker (plus one of the drow who escaped the first encounter). The adventure then has something I’ve never seen in another LFR adventure – an actual puzzle (basically a sudoku puzzle with colored gems). The puzzle ended up being a fun few minutes for the table, so I’m glad I didn’t skip it.

After the puzzle comes a trapped room – stepping on a pressure plate would cause the doors at either end to close and water to fill the chamber. The party figured out it was a trap, and when they set it off they all dashed for the far door – all but the party’s shaman, who decided to wait in the hallway they had come from. The trapped room takes 20 minutes to reset once it goes off, so the four PCs who had moved through the room decided to forge ahead and leave the shaman behind.

Given that decision, I didn’t feel bad if they blundered into a total party kill. After all, they were heading into a climactic battle designed for five PCs but with only three, none of whom could heal.

The battle itself was a nasty encounter with a drow priestess, two giant spiders… and a beholder (the first time I’ve gotten the opportunity to use one – cool!). The party focused fire on the beholder, bringing it down to the ground and dazing it right off the bat. It stayed dazed for two rounds and ended up bloodied in a hurry. The spiders started dealing serious damage, and the beholder invoked fear in both defenders, making them flee the chamber, leaving just a pair of PC archers (a ranger and a seeker) in the room with the bad guys.

Spiders attacked the ranger and seeker, bloodying both of them, and then the drow priestess unleashed her nasty surprise – she blew the beholder to smithereens, dealing a whole bunch of damage to both archers, dropping them unconscious. Healing potions started being poured by the defenders, but one of the archers was stranded on the far side of the room, out of reach of their aid.

I eventually let the shaman try to pick the lock on the trapped room door, which he did – and then held on for dear life as water came rushing out. He had some special shoes that let him surf to the far door, and spent a couple of rounds trying unsuccessfully to pick that lock.

Meanwhile, things were grim for the four PCs against the spiders and the drow. The seeker kept rolling death saves, slowly inching closer to oblivion. The others were up and down a lot, using healing potions and continuing to beat on the spiders.

At long last, the shaman burst into the room, just in time for the seeker to fail his final death save. The poor seeker was dead.

Now, it did take seven rounds of unconsciousness for death to claim him, so I don’t feel that he really caught any bad breaks. And the party did rush in to a room with one PC out of the action, so they knew what they were getting themselves into. Bringing the fresh shaman into the battle finally turned the tide, and the survivors prevailed, but it was too late for Oona the seeker – sorry, Steve.

Fortunately, LFR is pretty forgiving about death, so I didn’t feel too bad. Still, I let the dice fall where they may, and if death happens, it happens. If you’re a player in one of my games… consider yourself warned! Mwoo ha ha ha!

Recruiting RPG players via Magic: The Gathering

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Last night I went back to my old game for the first time in a year and a half: Magic: The Gathering. Yes, I know it’s widely derided in the RPG community, and ever since I started playing D&D I hadn’t been playing Magic.

But last night I wasn’t running my usual Friday night online game (sorry again for not being ready, gang!) and my wife was busy, so I decided to stop by my friendly local game store for Friday Night Magic.

Back when I played Magic regularly, my format of choice was called booster draft. This is where you open up a pack of cards, pick one, and pass the rest on. You take the next pack from the person sitting to your right, pick one, and pass the rest on. You keep doing this through three packs of cards and ultimately build a deck out of the cards you pick. It rewards good evaluation of the cards rather than a good budget to build a prepared deck of rare cards – much more my style.

I used to be quite good at booster drafting – my rating for that format put me among the top 20 players in Colorado. Last night, though, I was playing with cards that I had never seen at all, and was rusty in my play skills. I fully expected to do poorly, and I was okay with that (I was proud of having a good rating in the past, but it was never that a big deal to me).

The first good thing about last night was that somehow, despite not knowing ANY of the cards, I managed to win the draft! My first opponent was a first-time drafter, so I guess I would be expected to win that match. My second and third opponents were regular drafters, though, and I won a couple of close, hard-fought matches. That was a good feeling.

The second good thing was that I used the opportunity to try to recruit new D&D players! A couple of people at the draft were a pair of brothers, both of whom were familiar with D&D 3.5 but who were looking for a regular game and who had some interest in 4th Edition. I told them about D&D Encounters and Living Forgotten Realms, and I think they might come to check out Encounters. They’re really looking for an ongoing home campaign and actually asked if they could join my Friday night game, but that game is already VERY full.

So, despite the fact that I wasn’t playing RPGs last night, they were still on my mind. As for Magic, I like this quantity of play. I can see myself popping into a draft once or twice a year in the future, just to see how my skills hold up. It’s fun to see all new cards, too. And hey, if I can go into a draft completely cold and still do well, that’s a good feeling.

It’s the people that matter, not the system

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I’ve just come home from day 2 of Genghis Con 2011. Day 1 (Thursday evening) I played a game of Savage Worlds – my first non D&D role-playing game. Today I played a game of D&D 4e Living Forgotten Realms, a GURPS game and a Call of Cthulhu game. I intentionally decided that, with this con, I wanted to broaden my RPG horizons.

So far, the only game that hasn’t been much fun was the LFR game, but I know it’s not because of the system – I’ve enjoyed lots and lots of D&D 4e games before. It’s just that the DM wasn’t that great – not too prepared, running skill challenges in a very dice-rolling way rather than a role-playing way, not being especially creative with monster behavior, etc.

The Savage Worlds game was set in a sort of magical steampunk Victorian era. Our characters were basically trying out to be in something like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. We got to rescue Ada Lovelace and some other people from horrible alien egg implantation. The system was pretty easy to follow once I got the hang of it (a variety of dice come into play, with exploding die rolls). My character had the ability to turn into a huge wolf, and his main “disadvantage” was heroism – he would throw himself in harm’s way, with no attention to his own safety. That was fun to role-play.

GURPS was fun in a different way. Again, the mechanic was simple – roll 3d6 and try to get below your skill number. The GM was running us through a crazy kung-fu movie adventure, and the characteristics that we all had were plenty to give us a ton of role-playing opportunities. We had a sexy lady, a dirty cop, a drunk, a naive butt-kicker, and my character – an African with crazy luck, a stutter and a crippling fear of blood. Once we started discovering boxes of machine guns and explosives (thanks in part to my character’s Serendipity), things went nutty. I wouldn’t want to play like this all the time, but the GM had done a great job of creating interesting characters that were easy to get into.

Call of Cthulhu, much to my surprise, was way cool. I’m not really a horror / Lovecraft fan in general, but I was completely open to trying a game where it’s quite likely that everyone in the party will either go insane or die. I’m proud to say that, right at the end of the session, my character did both! This game mostly uses percentile dice, where you try to roll below a target number. I consistently rolled high on sanity checks, which meant that I kept losing sanity. When I got to the point that my character had to spend three hours nearly crippled by bacteriophobia, I think I really stepped up as a role-player. The whole group was well-developed, and even though we ended up “losing” in the end, I think we were very true to what our characters would do (even if it wasn’t heroic).

What’s the common thread? All of the fun games had great game masters and players, all of whom were enthusiastic about the game. I think maybe a game like D&D4e will be less consistently good with public games because there are so many people who play it, not all of whom are big RPG enthusiasts and not all of whom are really skilled at running and playing great games. With niche RPGs, only the people who are really into the game are playing it, which means that it’s more likely that you’ll have a great group of players and an awesome game master. It’s not that the system is better – it’s just that the random distribution of people is better.

As long as you have great people to play with, it doesn’t really matter what game you’re playing – you’ll have a good time.

Quick-hit recap

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I took a little time off from blogging over the holidays, but my D&D life continued.  Here are some quick-hit thoughts from the past couple of weeks.

  • My brother-in-law and his wife became huge D&D fans during their visit.  He played Sunday through Friday, every day, and she played Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  Now we have to figure out a schedule for an online game since they’re in Texas and we’re in Colorado.
  • We rolled up Gamma World characters with the family and had a good time doing so, but didn’t get a chance to actually play the game yet.  Too bad – it seems like goofy fun.
  • I ran two Living Forgotten Realms games at my local game store, one of which was my first try at a MyRealms adventure (one I wrote myself).  It went well and had some exciting combat, and I asked for player feedback afterward.  Since we finished with an hour to spare, they suggested that I include more role playing time at the beginning.  Done!
  • My regular Friday night online game took two weeks off and got back together for gaming last night.  It was good to get the band back together.  They’re deep in a swamp and spent last night fighting witches and skeletons.  I’m a little worried because we had a four-hour session and spent almost all of it on two combats – I need to speed those up.  I’m happy, though, that they reacted quickly and strongly to the new NPC I introduced – I think I’ve done well at role-playing her, and some of them love her and some of them hate her.  Perfect!
  • I’m participating in a forum-based “story playtest” of the next campaign saga from EN World, called ZEITGEIST.  Basically, the writer spells out a given situation, we tell him how our characters would react, and he narrates what happens and what comes next.  This is my first play-by-post experience, and I think it’s totally cool.  I love being able to really get into character with the rest of the group, and I could see myself doing some more play-by-post in the future. Also, the ZEITGEIST story is really cool so far.
  • I’m all signed up for Genghis Con, the February convention here in the Denver area.  I’m running three LFR games (two sessions of my MyRealms and one of another module I’ve run before) and I’ve signed up to play in three RPG sessions, none of which are D&D 4e.  That’s intentional.  My only RPG experience is with this one game, and the Con seems like a perfect time to see what other games are like.  I’ll be trying Savage World, Call of Cthulhu and GURPS.
  • My regular in-person game gets back together this afternoon after the holiday break.  I guess that means I’d better stop blogging and start prepping!

Writing my first Living Forgotten Realms adventure

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I’m excited to say that I’ve written my first adventure for Living Forgotten Realms (LFR), which I’ll be running at a local convention here in Denver called Genghis Con in February.

This is a “MyRealms” adventure.  MyRealms is an interesting little program for LFR in which dungeon masters like me can write their own LFR-formatted adventures and run them in public (or in private, I suppose).  The adventure should follow the overall format of a regular LFR module – 2-3 combat encounters and 1-2 skill challenges with certain experience point budgets and treasure amounts, designed to run in a four-hour time slot with a party of 4-6 characters within a certain level band.  With MyRealms adventures you’re free to create pretty much whatever you like, and the connection to the Forgotten Realms doesn’t have to be all that strong.

The one restriction is that you’re not allowed to run anyone else’s MyRealms adventure.  Technically speaking, I won’t be allowed to publish my adventure here on the blog… but I honestly don’t know how much that rule really matters.  I’ll find out, but since I’ve gone through the effort of actually writing this adventure in the LFR format I’d like to share it with the world.

The adventure is called The Staff of Suha.  It’s a distilled version of the adventure that I’m currently running for my friends here in Colorado, which is itself an adaptation of the adventure that I wrote many years ago under D&D 3.0 rules and rediscovered a few months ago.  It’s a pretty straightforward little dungeon delve with a plot that’s basically “Retrieve the MacGuffin.”  For a convention game, that’s enough plot.

Since I had already written the whole thing up in a Word document for my players here in person, it wasn’t too hard to adapt that version of the adventure into an LFR-friendly version.  The biggest change was that my original version was too long.  When all is said and done, we will have probably done 10-12 hours of adventuring to get through my original version, which is far too much for LFR.

I started by getting rid of the backstory.  My in-person players started the adventure in a town where they were contacted by a messenger who works for a wealthy uncle of one of the PCs.  The party had to travel to the uncle’s manor, talk to him about the theft of the titular family heirloom (the Staff of Suha), investigate the theft, and track the bad guys to their lair (with a fight in the forest on the way).  Once they arrived at the stronghold, they had get past the front gate guards, fight some minions, infiltrate an orc barracks, fight through an orc shrine, deal with some orcs training for battle and then fight the big boss (with a few other wrinkles along the way which I won’t write about here because my players haven’t encountered them yet).

For the LFR version, the party starts off as they come in view of the orc stronghold.  I’ll hand-wave the back story: “You’re here to get the MacGuffin, and here’s why.  Go to it!”  Not super-compelling, I’ll admit, but this is just a little delve.

There will be four encounters:

  • Getting into the stronghold
  • A skill challenge to avoid attracting too much attention
  • A battle in a shrine
  • The showdown with the boss

I stripped out two combat encounters and a skill challenge that happened before the stronghold (plus some general role playing), and I stripped out five and a half more combat encounters within the stronghold.  Thus, a 10-12 hour adventure gets down into the 3-4 hour range.

The current version of the file is the “high challenge” version (for level 6-7 characters) and I plan to adapt it for the “low challenge” version (for level 4-5 characters) shortly.  I may also re-write it as a MYRE1-1 adventure for level 1-4 characters, replacing the orcs with goblins.

I’m pretty excited about the idea of running my own game in public.  I like the published LFR adventure well enough, and I always customize them to my taste, but running an adventure that’s completely mine is very appealing to me.  Now I just have to wait until February!

United Kobolds of the Living Forgotten Realms

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This evening I ran a Living Forgotten Realms game at my friendly local game store, Enchanted Grounds.  The amazing thing is that it wasn’t a big deal.

You might remember my post from July where I ran my first LFR game at the store.  That was a big deal to me.  I spent a month preparing for that game.  I talked on the blog and on EN World, asking for advice about running a game in public.  I had to work to create paper maps and tokens for the bad guys.  I read and re-read the adventure to make sure I understood the ins and outs (even though I had been through it already as a player).  I over-prepared.  And to be fair, I had a blast running the game.

This time I realized at some point over the weekend – oh yeah, I’m running a game on Tuesday!  No problem.  It helps that I had already run this particular adventure at TactiCon and I therefore had all of the files I needed on the laptop in MapTool, ready to run with the projector.  (This is TYMA 2-1 Old Enemies Arise.) Still, I really didn’t stress about it.

Fortunately, I didn’t need to stress.  Aside from my accidental unplugging of the projector during the game (twice – but fortunately never in combat), it all went very smoothly.  The party battled some kobolds by the side of the road.

They met with some farmers to investigate the kobold menace.

They fought in a cave full of spike traps.

And they battled the big bad guy in another part of the cave.

The first battle was fair – the defender took some serious damage, but never dropped.  The spike cave battle was lots of fun – I got to push and pull players into spikes all encounter long, when they weren’t stumbling into them on their own.  The final battle was kind of boring – I really need to find a way to spice up that encounter if I ever run this adventure again.

Part of what I enjoyed about this particular adventure was that two of my players are DMs whom I respect – Rich and Aarun.  You might remember Aarun’s name from my very first experience with Living Forgotten Realms – he was the dungeon master for my first game, and I absolutely LOVED the experience of playing under him.  He mentioned this evening that the blog post where I mentioned his name (with its unique spelling) shows up when you Google that name.  Well, Aarun – here’s another Google hit for you!

Anyway, it’s great to run a game for people you respect and for them to clearly have a good time.  I also hung around the store afterward to chat with Wes, another DM I greatly respect.  I’ve already signed up to play in some LFR games in December, and I specifically sought out games that Aarun and Wes are running.  If I can run a game for that type of person and they have a good time, I feel good about my dungeon mastering!