Category Archives: Adventures

Running my third homemade D&D4e adventure at the FLGS

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Woo hoo – I finally got to run the third adventure in my Staff of Suha trilogy tonight! (Adventure one and adventure two have been previously published.) I ran it as a MyRealms game at my friendly local game store. This was the inaugural run of the adventure, so it’s still a work in progress, but it was so much fun.

First, I should mention that my players were awesome. I had a father and son at the table whom I’ve played with before (I love multi-generational gaming families). I had a new player who was playing his third game of D&D ever – super nice guy.

And I had a husband and wife pair; I had met the husband a few weeks ago at D&D Encounters when he was a brand new player, and I managed to kill off his character in that first session. We’ve kept in touch, and his wife was excited about playing, too. The wife made homemade gluten-free cookies for me and my wife (who’s allergic to gluten) to thank me for helping with their characters and getting them into the game tonight. How sweet is that? I really, really like this couple, and I’m hoping that I’m making some new friends here.

Anyway, the adventure itself started off with a little exposition, then moved into the first action scene. I won’t go into too much detail here; I’ll put up a full post about the adventure itself once it’s polished (after I run it at Tacticon over Labor Day weekend). Suffice it to say that the first battle began with the PCs in total darkness. I forgot some of the abilities I had given to the leader of that fight, but it was still a good battle. Lots of PCs were bloodied, but none fell unconscious. The party interrogated the leader, who gave them some information but then died in anguish (he evidently said too much). And the party discovered one of the three artifacts they were seeking.

We had some exploration after that. This was technically a skill challenge, though I’m running it as several scenes that each have their own success and failure consequences. I really, really liked this approach, and the way that the PCs worked together. I’m getting farther away from the formal skill challenge structure and closer to just scenes that use skills. This particular challenge consists of three scenes, followed by a combat encounter, followed by the final scene.

The second combat encounter began with some sneaking and spying and conversation, but erupted into battle when the assassin in the party had to be true to his nature and took a swing at a bad guy.

I skipped the final skill challenge scene because we were running way short on time, and just threw the PCs into the final battle with fewer minions than I originally planned. I was pleased that the party took advantage of two different terrain effects in this battle, and even though I forgot about a mini skill challenge that was supposed to be running during the boss battle, it was a cool fight. The boss wasn’t quite as interesting as I had hoped, but he wasn’t bad.

Enemy lair with ziggurat and magma river - no grid

I ultimately had to end the battle early because the store was closing, so I declared victory for the PCs and called it a night.

Lessons learned:

  • I need to shrink some of the encounter maps. One map has some terrain effects that work in blast areas; an overly-large map encourages the monsters to spread out too much, making the terrain effects less attractive.
  • Minions that explode upon death are fun, but only in moderation. I think my second battle is overdoing it. Maybe I’ll make them non-minions and have fewer of them.
  • If I’m going to give the PCs cool magic items to use during the adventure, I don’t want it to be too hard for them to figure out what the items do. I think I’ll have this auto-succeed during a rest (I was previously requiring an Arcana check).
  • Players are easily tempted by treasure. If you dangle something valuable-looking just out of reach (literally, in this case), they will move heaven and earth to get it.
  • Having an in-game time limit does a nice job of ramping up the tension (and provides an incentive not to take back-to-back short rests to maximize healing powers).

I hope to run this adventure once for my home game players before Tacticon. Once I feel that it’s polished, I plan to release it on the blog, and then I plan to release the whole trilogy (edited and updated) as a single big adventure. I’d like to make it look a little bit pretty, too, and I’d be willing to pay for some help with layout and maybe even commission some artwork. Does anyone have suggestions on this sort of thing? How do I find and hire a freelance layout person?

SPEC 3-2 Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds – MapTool file

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I felt like I had to share this MapTool file simply because of the sheer insane amount of work I had to put into it.

I agreed to run a “special” Living Forgotten Realms game at my local store today for a charity benefit event. The adventure is SPEC 3-2 Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds. A normal LFR game runs in four hours; this one was scheduled for six, plus an hour break for dinner (4:00 PM to 11:00 PM).

When I first saw the adventure I almost backed out due to the huge amount of prep work I would have to do in MapTool before I could run it with my projector setup. The adventure is cool in that it lets the players have a meaningful choice. Early in the adventure they can choose between two totally different paths. The encounters for each path are completely unrelated to one another, and you could get a legitimately different play experience if you were to repeat the adventure and go in the other direction.

Unfortunately, this means that, as the DM, I needed to prepare a whopping TEN different encounters that the PCs could go through. And half of that effort is going to be wasted on any given play-through, since the party can only take one path.

I decided to use the map images provided in the adventure PDF this time. I had to do the work to erase the markings for monster starting positions and PC starting positions, but I’m getting fairly adept at that. Then I had to create tokens for each monster.

Making matters more complicated is the fact that this is a season 3 adventure for LFR, which means it can be run at any of five different adventure levels – 12, 14, 16, 18, 20. In most cases the adventure uses the same monsters throughout (just leveling them up or down), but there are a few battles where the monsters for level 12-14 are different from the monsters for levels 16-20, for instance. And there’s almost no instances where a monster is used in more than one fight, so I had to create a crapload of unique tokens.

The work is done and the adventure is now over. If anyone out there ever runs this adventure in MapTool, you’re welcome. I’ve done the work for you.

Note that this campaign file was created in version 1.3.b66 of MapTool.

Download the PDF of the adventure here.

Download the MapTool file here.

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 12

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A bittersweet night, as this was the last session of Dark Legacy of Evard that I’ll be running. Of course, that’s because I’ll be in Indianapolis next week for Gen Con, so I guess I’ll survive!

At our 5:00 table we had a bit of a problem; only three players showed up. We’ve had as many as 14 in the past, and the last two weeks had 8 and 7. I waited until 5:10, and when no more players showed up I decided to run with just the three players. We had a defender and two strikers.

Scaling is a little tricky when you have so few characters and their levels are a bit uneven (one at level 1, one at 2 and one at 3). The encounter originally called for an evil wizard, a shadow bolter and four dusk beasts. I decided to take it down to 2 dusk beasts and go from there.

The encounter began with the party trying to figure out how to get into the spooky library where the wizard Nathaire (possessed by the spirit of the evil wizard Vontarin) was apparently holed up. They decided to try to sneak close to the front door and then quietly pick the lock. They failed. They made noise. And eventually they got the door open, whereupon I granted a surprise round to the two-headed shadowy dusk beast that had been sent to the door to investigate. Chomp.

Evard Session 12 Library Map - Gridded

Evard Session 12 Library Map - No Grid

The knight charged bravely into the library and started handling the dusk beast. The vampire and the assassin tiptoed in as well. Nathaire taunted them from upstairs, telling them that he had no desire to destroy them, but when they kept fighting his minions the evil wizard started blasting them with shadowy tendrils.

Eventually the shadow bolter made his presence known. The vampire and assassin stayed downstairs to deal with him while the knight climbed the stairs to go after the wizard… only to find that the wizard had another dusk beast standing guard upstairs.

The vampire was knocked unconscious by the bolter, but luckily got a 20 on his second death save. The knight, meanwhile, was in deep trouble with the wizard after taking out the second dusk beast. He started dying, taking ongoing enervation damage.

At this point it seemed quite likely that I would kill off the party, so I took the knight’s player up on his earlier suggestion of letting him run a second PC – a healer. The reinforcements arrived, and the party got back on its feet and finished off the dark mage, trapping his soul in a purple orb.

At 7:00 I had a table of four. Two were regulars from the 7:00 group from the past couple of weeks (including a fellow player in my Pathfinder group). One was my lovely wife (yay!). And the fourth was a brand-new D&D player who I’d met via EN World when he reached out to ask some general questions about the game and mentioned in his post that he lived near a store called Enchanted Grounds. I exchanged some messages with him, and he showed up to play!

This group had two defenders and two controllers – once again, no healer. They were a pair of 3rd level characters and a pair of 1st level characters. I decided to use the same scaling as I had for the earlier game (two dusk beasts instead of four).

The encounter began when the vryloka paladin walked up to the library and knocked on the door. When the voice on the other side (a shadow bolter) asked who was there, the paladin lied and said he was one of the people Vontarin had commanded to create undead in the crypts and he needed to talk to the wizard. With a great Bluff check, the shadow bolter opened the door and I allowed the paladin a free surprise round attack.

My wife’s binder opened the combat by dropping a zone of difficult terrain right inside the door – a mixed blessing that worked out okay. The paladins led the way into the library, and the new player’s paladin was knocked to the ground by a readied bite from a dusk beast. Nathaire/Vontarin exchanged taunts with the binder and the mage, which was a ton of fun; I loved role-playing the evil wizard.

The party took care of the dusk beast and shadow bolter downstairs without getting beat up too badly, and the binder and mage started zapping Vontarin from afar. The paladins started fighting through the upstairs dusk beast on the way to the dark mage. When the party’s eladrin mage teleported into the balcony behind Vontarin, the evil wizard closed to melee with the paladins.

The new player’s paladin was low on hit points when the bloodied dark wizard reached out to touch him with despair. He hit. The attack brought the paladin to dangerously negative hit points… and the slide effect took him off the balcony, whereupon the falling damage finished him off. In the very next round, the surviving PCs killed off the evil mage.

The new player’s character died heroically and rather cinematically (tossed off a balcony by a big bad guy), and he had an absolute blast with the experience. I stayed afterward to talk to him about D&D4e and how to get into the game. He ended up buying a copy of Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms (he loved the idea of the dual-weapon wielding Scout ranger) and I suggested D&D Insider if he decides he’s going to stick with the game. He’s a really great guy, and I hope to see him again at future games.

Thus ends my experience with Dark Legacy of Evard. I’m bummed that I won’t get to run the final session, but that’s okay. I’ll be jumping into the next season of Encounters for a few weeks before my Wednesday night bowling league begins at the end of August, and I’m looking forward to it. I love the way Encounters lets me bring new players into the game. It’s been a lot of fun.

MapTool campaign file: Cairn of the Winter King

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Since I’m running my family campaign through the Cairn of the Winter King adventure from the Monster Vault, I prepared everything in MapTool (my wife and I are in Colorado; her brother and his wife are in Texas, so we play online). I figured I might as well put the adventure out there to share.

This campaign file was created in version 1.3.b66 of MapTool. If you’re looking for the maps independently of the campaign file, you can find them here. Enjoy!

Download the campaign file here.

Maps: Cairn of the Winter King

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I’m excited that my brother-in-law is done with a multi-month training course he had to finish for work and we can now get back to our online D&D game starting this afternoon. The players in the game are my wife, her brother, and his wife. We play via MapTool and Skype. This is the group that I originally ran through Reavers of Harkenwold.

So, next up is Cairn of the Winter King, the adventure from the Monster Vault. I had prepared part of the adventure a few months ago before my brother-in-law had to leave for training, and I spent time yesterday putting the rest of the maps together. I’m still finishing up the monsters, but I thought I’d go ahead and share the maps since they’re ready to go.

As always, I’ve provided versions both with and without the grid, all sized to a 50-pixel per square scale. For the Cairn itself I’ve provided an overview map (not appropriately scaled – just for reference) and then one map for the southern half of the Cairn and a second map for the northern half (they can be stuck together in MapTool).

Frozen Riverside map - Gridded

Frozen Riverside map - No Grid

Cairn of the Winter King - Overview Map

Cairn of the Winter King - Southern half map - Gridded

Cairn of the Winter King - Southern half map - No Grid

Cairn of the Winter King - Northern half map - Gridded

Cairn of the Winter King - Northern half map - No Grid

 

My players are awesome

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I don’t spend enough time writing about my Friday night game. I’m OnlineDM after all, and this is my long-running online game. We’ve just passed our one-year anniversary of playing together. How cool is that?

Anyway, we weren’t able to play for the past two weeks (it felt like forever) because I had other plans on a Friday night and then I had to work late the next week. So this week we got the band back together – six of the seven players were able to make it (though one had to drop out about 40 minutes before the end of the session).

I had done a fair amount of prep work for this session over the past couple of weeks, and then realized in the 30 minutes before we started that there was a whole aspect of tonight’s session that I hadn’t prepared for. I threw that stuff together partly in the few minutes before game time and partly on the fly during the game, and it worked out just fine.

We’re running the War of the Burning Sky campaign saga from EN World. We’re currently in the fourth adventure (spoilers follow). The party had recently helped a noble win a war against his own king who was trying to destroy him. Tonight, the party traveled with the noble to the king’s capitol to talk about peace. They were wary but went along to protect the noble against any funny business.

The peace accords were celebrated with festivities – jousting, food, games, spelldueling, fireworks, etc. These would ultimately be followed by some treachery and combat. I had prepared the treachery and combat. I hadn’t prepared the jousting and spelldueling, so I threw those together quickly.

For the jousting, I drew a quick jousting ring (wood for the border, dirt for the center of an ellipse) and used an existing knight monster with a lance as the opponent. For the spelldueling, I took advantage of my new quick monster creation tool (what a lifesaver!) and whipped up an opponent. While the party talked amongst themselves later, I whipped up a second opponent, based on the first. It worked out great.

The party began with the fighter entering the joust. I ran the first round as an event that started on horseback and finished on foot. That was a mistake – the on-foot part was boring and dragged way too long. When I ran a second round later, I changed the rules so that becoming unhorsed would end the joust (which I ruled would happen when someone took a total of 25 or more damage). That worked much better (even though the fighter lost that round). I think the adventure is supposed to include detailed rules for jousting, but I couldn’t find them.

After the first round of the joust, the party explored the festival. They ran into a halfling cook arguing with a man who clearly didn’t appreciate how special the halfling’s food was. They calmed the halfling down, and he revealed that he was Randas, head cook in the king’s castle, and he was royally pissed at being told to clear out of the castle and cook outside at the festival. Rylos the cleric calmed him down and enjoyed an absolutely amazing bowl of soup. Randas became a favorite, at least of Rylos.

A shell game in an alley followed, in which our sharp-eyed elf seeker was able to follow the coin quite easily. Then we moved on to spelldueling in which the wizard/swordmage and the warlock in the party both vanquished their first-round foes. The other PCs cheered them on.

The good-natured thief in the party joined a game of horseshoes and taught the old man running the game how it was done, earning a round of beers for his skill.

Coming back by the halfling cook’s stall, the party found it empty with some guards clearing it out. The guards didn’t know where the cook was, so the party went on a mission to find him. They tried to talk their way into the castle to talk to the guard captain about the missing halfling, but utterly failed, insulting the head gate guard (Merrick) in the process. They tried again later, with the plan being that the thief would sneak in if necessary, and a better bribe got them the access they wanted. The guard captain told them that the cook had been disturbing the peace and had been locked up for the night to make sure he didn’t cause trouble. The PCs were satisfied with this and left.

Back at the spelldueling area, the warlock and wizard/swordmage had faced off against one another with the hybrid coming out on top. She then faced another spellduelist for the championship and lost in awesome fashion. The hybrid opened up an Arcane Gate leading out of the arena and tried to push the spellduelist through it with Thunderwave. She missed, spent an action point, cast another Thunderwave… and missed again. Whereupon the spellduelist walked around her (opportunity attack missed) and cast a spell that pushed the hybrid through her own Arcane Gate and out of the arena, thus costing her the duel. I felt a little bad that she lost in that way, but it was actually a really cool finish to a cool battle.

Some fireworks soon distracted the PCs; the alchemist who was setting them off asked for help in getting more supplies, as his normal alchemy supply houses had been shut down for a special project for the king for the past three days.

A “test your strength” hammer game proved irresistable for the dwarf fighter, who completely missed the target with his first swing (a natural 1) but shoved the cleric out of the way to take another turn, winning a stuffed polar bear toy that he soon gave to a small child (too sweet!).

While the party watched the action at the hammer event, a dwarf emerged from the crowd to surreptitiously pass on information about some fishy goings-on at the castle. They shared the information with their noble patron, who asked them to investigate. He was on his way to a royal banquet.

Here’s where things went off the rails. Rather than investigating by following the suspicious trail into the castle via the sewers, the party decided to go investigate the closed-up alchemist shops. Improvising completely, I had them go to the alchemy district where the shops were all closed up. They broke into a shop and ultimately found some ledgers that documented big deliveries to the king… for ingredients that could be combined to make a poison that would cause insane, murderous rage.

Uh oh. Time to run back to the castle, where the banquet was in progress. They debated whether to fight through the front gate guards or sneak in through the sewers before finally realizing that they were invited guests and just needed to talk their way in. Easy enough.

The dwarf fighter had grabbed some powder back at the alchemy shop that he believed was flash-bang powder, but knowing nothing about Arcana he wasn’t really sure. He was so excited to burst into the banquet hall and throw down the powder that I just ignored any possible resistance from the guards in the hallway and had him toss down the powder…

Which turned out to be stink powder, enveloping the group in a nasty stink bomb. Feeling that there was no way I could top this with a mere combat, I decided to call it a night at this point.

So, in the end, we had no real fights (just some jousts and spellduels) but all kinds of fun adventures and some advancement of the plot. My players were awesome and creative, getting into the role playing and character interaction and… well, I just can’t say enough good things about them. They clearly had a good time, and I had a blast. I’m really excited about next week’s game!

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 11

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As with last week, I ran both a 5:00 and a 7:00 table for D&D Encounters this week.

The 5:00 table had seven players. Two of them were third level, one was second level, and four were first level. The first level players included the father and son pair who first showed up two weeks ago and who’ve been coming ever since (yay!) and the other two were brand new players (one of whom had played 1st Edition long ago and nothing since). Ah, I love teaching new players about the game!

The 7:00 table had five players – my quartet of third-level folks from last week, and a first-level binder played by my lovely wife!

Setup

The party had emptied the crypts beneath Saint Avarthil Abbey last week, destroying some skeletons and some shadowy hoofed humanoids. Now they came out into the late afternoon sun and headed up the hill to the monastery grounds.

A skill challenge ensued, with the adventurers trying to find traces of Nathaire and his foul denizens. The 5:00 table didn’t have much luck and stumbled into an ambush; the 7:00 table aced the challenge with no difficulty and got the jump on the bad guys.

Evard Session 11 Map - Gridded

Evard Session 11 Map - No Grid

The battle

I’ll admit that I wasn’t crazy about the presentation of this encounter. The monsters were fine – a pair of nasty tar devils, a pair of shadow bolters (dark ones) and a pair of leeching shadow minions. For both groups (seven lower-level PCs at 5:00 and five upper-level PCs at 7:00) I used a total of four minions but otherwise left the monsters as written.

The problem was the terrain. There’s a 20-foot wall that can be walked on, and there are windows in the wall, but it was unclear how that was supposed to work. The wall is 10 feet thick; can characters on the inside see all the way through? It sounded like characters were supposed to be IN the wall, but that didn’t make sense. Ultimately I think they meant for the windows to be arrow slits in the battlements along the top of the wall, but none of the bad guys were stationed up there. It was all quite confusing.

The 5:00 table got in trouble quickly as the tar devils started burning people up in the surprise round and the bolters added to the pain. The lone healer in the group kept folks patched up, though, and they ultimately prevailed.

The 7:00 group had no trouble. They got the surprise round instead of the bad guys, and three of the five PCs had necrotic resistance, which made the bolters’ combat advantage power almost irrelevant.

Only one PC had any trouble at 7:00, and I felt really bad about it… because it was my wife! She had played once all the way back in week 1 and hadn’t been back since. I was so happy that she came to play, and then felt like a jerk when a tar devil immobilized her with flaming pitch in the first full round and she never got to move again. She was still effective, intentionally provoking some opportunity attacks from monsters in the paladin’s aura (and getting them zapped by divine vengeance), but it was a little frustrating for her. Her saving throw dice just hated her.

Aftermath

My favorite part of the encounter was the aftermath. As the party is resting after the battle, the land shifts into the Shadowfell. A nearby building, in ruins during the daytime, is now fully intact in the Shadowfell… and a light is burning in an upper window.

Ooh! Can’t wait for next week. I think I’ll just be running the 7:00 table, but it’s going to be a fun one.

Previous weeks

No week 6 – I was out of town

 

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 10

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The third and final chapter of this season of Encounters began tonight. I was running my usual 5:00 table, but I’d also been asked to run a second table at 7:00 (I guess there’s been some kind of DM shortage).

For the 5:00 table I had lots of my regulars – the first timer from week 1 along with the friend he’s been bringing, the father and son new players from last week, another father and son pair, and two other guys who’ve been coming pretty regularly.

Yes, if you’re counting, that’s eight players. We’d normally split up into two groups of four each, but we didn’t have another dungeon master, so I bit the bullet and ran with eight.

No one was at third level yet – I believe there were three people at level 2 and five at level 1. The encounter as written assumes a party of five characters of level 2-3, so scaling was interesting.

The party had the chance to take an extended rest back at the Old Owl Inn after dawn. In the afternoon, Grimbold (the captain of the Duponde town guard) came to the players to ask them to investigate a monastery a few hours’ walk to the west of town. The skeletons that had menaced the town the previous night were dressed in cassocks consistent with the long-abandoned Saint Avarthil Monastery. It seemed that someone had been reanimating the dead monks’ bones and turning them into monsters. Sure sounds like the evil wizard who’s on the loose!

Off they went to Saint Avarthil’s. The door to the crypt was open, and the adventurers trooped on in. The inside was well-lit by magical braziers, and lots of niches in the walls that once held buried monks had been broken open and stood empty. Soon enough, a couple of cassocked skeletons were found, and the battle began.

Saint Avarthil Crypt Map - Gridded

Saint Avarthil Crypt Map - No Grid

The 5:00 table of eight players ended up facing off against about 12 skeleton minions, a blazing skeleton (hello old friend from last week!) and a trio of dark ones – little shadowy guys with hooves and nasty short swords. We had a bit of a bottleneck at the top of the stairs until the minions were finished off, and then the dark ones started wrecking PCs with their double sword attacks. One of them kept getting knocked into the crevasse, though, which made for fun times. The player characters took a pretty good beating (a first-level thief foolishly rushed into the middle of melee and paid for it) but prevailed.

The 7:00 table had four players (one of whom was a fellow player from my Monday night Pathfinder game), and they were all third level (now that’s dedication!). Since they were a little higher level than expected for the encounter and there were only four of them instead of five, I decided to run it as written with eight skeletal minions, one blazing skeleton and two dark ones. This table rocked the encounter with little difficulty, despite a long series of failed saving throws against ongoing fire damage from the party’s vampire.

I had fun running this encounter, especially getting to do it a second time when I was a little better at making it interesting. I had one of the dark ones sneak around behind the party as they went into the main crypt, which was fun for me at least. I also really like the map. It was fun to re-create in MapTool, and I think it turned out quite nicely.

I’m also happy to report that I’m done putting the adventure together in MapTool. I’ve been trying to work a week or two ahead throughout the season, and I’m finally finished with all thirteen encounters. The map for week 12 is also awesome and I’m looking forward to showing off my version of it here on the blog.

I’ll be running next week twice, and possibly week 12 (Andy will be back to run a table that week, but it seems clear that we might need a second DM). Week 13 I won’t be here – I’ll be at GenCon! I’m a little sad that I won’t be able to finish the adventure with my awesome players, but let’s face it – I’m not going to be too broken up about the fact that I’ll be stuck at the greatest four days in gaming for the first time ever. I’m excited!

Previous weeks:

No week 6 – I was out of town

Free adventure: Tallinn’s Tower (updated)

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Edit 9/8/2011: This adventure has been further updated; more about the updates can be found here.

I ran my Tallinn’s Tower adventure at my friendly local game store this past Thursday, and I thought it went pretty well. As I ran it, I made a few notes about things to improve. So, I made those improvements and have published an updated version.

Download the updated adventure here.

The updates I made include:

  • New layout; each encounter now has the description of the encounter followed by the map and the monsters (instead of having all of the maps and monsters at the end).
  • Inclusion of monster stat blocks (built using Power2ool)
  • Tweaked the rune trap to no longer knock PCs prone
  • Changed the rune puzzle no longer require a variable number of runes depending on the party size
  • Allowed the use of Arcana or Thievery to help locate the control panel in the metal maze
  • Clarified that the medusa’s statues are carvings she made from petrified adventurers before later releasing them
  • Clarified that the wizardess can be persuaded to restore PCs who’ve been petrified

As always, I appreciate feedback. I’m quite happy with this adventure so far and will certainly continue to refine it based on my experience and your suggestions.

Original post about the adventure, including downloadable maps.

MapTool file for the adventure.

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 9

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For the second week in a row we had very few players at start time, but plenty showed up a few minutes later. And so we delved deeper into the Dark Legacy of Evard in D&D Encounters.

This week we had two of our long-time players, playing a half-orc knight and a dwarf weaponmaster. We had a player who’s very new to D&D bring his half-elf sentinel. And we had a father and son who were brand-new to the game and who decided to play the pre-generated eladrin warpriest and drow hunter. Huzzah for new players!

I took a little time to explain the basic workings of the game to the new players, as well as a few minutes to bring everyone up to speed on the plot so far, so we got started a bit late. I wasn’t worried, since we only had five players and my use of MapTool for running the game tends to make things go quickly in general.

Well, we got into some trouble and ran late! The evening began with a skill challenge. The party was patrolling Duponde at night and realized that the despair effect of the Shadowfell was getting to them and to the rest of the townsfolk, especially the guards. Everyone tried their best to cheer people up, but without much luck. The warpriest’s rousing speech fell flat (though the sentinel followed up with a stronger rendition). The weaponmaster’s acrobatic tricks ended up with the man on his face (though the drow showed him how it was done). Insight wasn’t helpful in figuring out how to reach the people, either.

This meant that the party failed the skill challenge, which meant that despair overcame the guards and they fled rather than fought when combat broke out. Each player also drew a card from the despair deck, some of which were quite problematic (the knight ended up vulnerable 2 to all damage for the battle).

Town with canal and bridges - no grid

Town with canal and bridges - gridded

Combat began with the party spotting some decrepit skeletons and one blazing skeleton on the far bridge (I scaled the battle down to include only one blazing skeleton, since we had mostly first-level characters and several new players). The PCs rolled initiative and started taking care of the minions. The vulnerable knight went after the blazing skeleton on his own and paid dearly, burning himself badly and ending up unconscious and without healing surges, far from his allies. The sentinel made his way over (after losing his bear companion once) and gave the knight a Healing Word, but it only restored 2 hit points (the value of the d6 roll) since the poor knight was surgeless. This meant that his ongoing fire damage knocked him unconscious at the beginning of his next turn, and he failed death save number 2.

The drow and warpriest stayed on the west side of the armory to fight a couple of skeletons and a shadow that appeared (thankfully for them, the shadow kept missing). The warpriest had the bright idea (pun intended) of using Sun’s Glow on the shadow, lighting him up. I liked the creative use of the spell and ruled that it turned off the shadow’s normal insubstantiality.

The weaponmaster, for some reason, decided to start the battle by chucking his grappling hook up to the roof of the library and spent the first two rounds climbing the side of the building, walking across the roof, and then jumping off near the canal – hurting himself in the process since he wasn’t trained in acrobatics. This didn’t help the party’s chances. He eventually made his way over to the fallen weaponmaster, with the sentinel also closing in to help.

All three of those PCs were unconscious by the time the warpriest and hunter had finished off the shadow and their minions.  The warpriest was out of Healing Words, but he could made heal checks – one to stabilize the dying knight and one to let the sentinel use his second wind (whereupon the sentinel used his last Healing World to bring the weaponmaster back into the fight).

The weaponmaster pushed the blazing skeleton into the canal, which I ruled was quite bad for the skeleton (fire in water, you know) and treated it as falling damage. The skeleton survived and came after the hunter, but the weaponmaster circled around and shoved him back into the canal, finishing him off at last.

This was a brutal battle, though I know this was in part because we had some new players and in part because the weaponmaster basically sat out two rounds. I ended up being pretty generous as the battle wore on. The weaponmaster claimed he had a power that would push the target on a hit or a miss; I was dubious, but the PCs needed all the help they could get.

Still, we had a lot of fun and a lot of tension. The father/son pair definitely had a blast, and I stayed afterward to talk to them about the game. The son bought a mini for his drow hunter, and the father picked up a copy of the Rules Compendium. The store was sold out of Heroes of the Fallen Lands and Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms, but I wrote down the titles for him and suggested he also check out D&D Insider if he decides they’re going to keep playing. The father said they would probably be back next week – the son said they DEFINITELY would.

I love bringing new players into the game!

Previous sessions:

No week 6 – I was out of town