Getting back to running my online game

I took last Friday off from running my online game in the War of the Burning Sky campaign so that I could attend TactiCon here in Denver.  The convention was great both for running and playing games, but I’m ready to get back to my ongoing campaign with my online players in the War of the Burning Sky world.

The last session was a weird one. We only had four of the five players, so I mostly ran them through a Living Forgotten Realms module that I had prepared for TactiCon. I didn’t want to advance the story from Adventure 1 to Adventure 2 without the full party being present.  Also, they needed a little more experience for leveling up to move into Adventure 2.  We’ll likely begin tomorrow by running the final encounter from the one-shot game and then resume the main quest.

I’ve had time to prepare for the next section, and I’m glad for it.  The second adventure in the War of the Burning Sky is complicated.  There are a lot of NPCs, and the adventure is written with great flexibility – the party could meet various characters in lots of different orders and take lots of different actions, which could lead to lots of different encounters.  The railroading is diminished.  This is great for the players, but tough for the dungeon master.

The problem isn’t so much that I have to be prepared for lots of different eventualities. It’s more that I need to UNDERSTAND what the various possibilities are well in advance so that I can make them available to the party whenever it’s appropriate.  I’ve read through the entire second adventure once now (all 93 pages of it) and I’d like to read it a second time before we play it if possible.  The campaign is starting to grow on me, and I think my enthusiasm will translate well for the players.  Here’s hoping!

P.S. I’m also excited to say that Bree, the DM for the ongoing in-person campaign I play in, is ready to start running adventures again, and we’re going to meet on Sunday for some gaming.  Huzzah!

Online campaign session 6: Meet Gary Sidequest

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!

Improvised cave trolls and double skill challenges

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

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

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

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.

War of the Burning Sky – the online campaign

After last Friday’s successful inaugural session with my new online D&D group, we did split the eight-player group in two.  Five of the players are remaining in the game with me as DM, continuing at level 1.  We started last week by running a one-shot Living Forgotten Realms adventure, which was fun and all, but I don’t really want to stay in the Realms for the rest of the campaign (mainly because I don’t know Forgotten Realms very well).

I was planning to go with a homebrew adventure that I had written eight years ago under 3.0 rules, but I abandoned that idea when I discovered that the plot hook for my adventure is exactly the same as the plot hook for last week’s adventure – the party is hired by a noble to recover a family heirloom that was stolen.  Seriously, the SAME THING!  I also realized that the setup was the best part of my own adventure, and yet that was the one part that would really need to be changed.

War of the Burning Sky logoIn searching for another campaign idea, I came across the War of the Burning Sky.  This is a campaign published by the people at EN World and free to any “community supporter” on the site (that is, a subscriber).  I had read good things about the campaign, and glancing at the materials myself, it looked pretty interesting. I proposed it to the party, and they were fine with the idea.

And so our story begins: OnlineDM’s online game delves into…

WAR OF THE BURNING SKY!

Stay tuned for recaps of how it all goes.  And if anyone has run this campaign before and has advice for me, I’d love to hear it!