Category Archives: Adventures

Free encounters: The Battle of Otharil Vale

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I’ve been running my Friday night online campaign through EN World’s War of the Burning Sky campaign, and we’ve been having a lot of fun. We’re currently in the fourth adventure of the campaign.

For our most recent session, the party was involved in a war – defending a nobleman from his out-of-control king. The published adventure presents the battles as skill challenges but provides some very rough sketches for parties who want to run their part of the battle as tactical combat.

I decided that actually running the combat would be more fun, so I took those vague suggestions and ran with them. The result is the Battle of Otharil Vale PDF. This is a series of three encounters in a war, with two waves of enemies trying to break through the heroes’ line and then the heroes’ being asked to retake a tower that has fallen to the invading army.

Maps and monster stat blocks (created using the awesome Power2ool) are presented inside the PDF. The gridded and gridless maps are below. As with all of my maps lately, these are pre-formatted to a 50-pixel grid size for use in programs like MapTool or Fantasy Grounds.

Download the encounters here.

Snowy battlefield map with grid

Snowy battlefield map - no grid

Snowy tower map - gridded

Snowy tower map - no grid

MapTool file for free adventure: Tallinn’s Tower

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Since I’m such a fan of running adventures in MapTool, I thought I’d share the MapTool file for the free adventure I posted recently, Tallinn’s Tower. For the adventure itself, check out my earlier post (it’s a cool adventure, I promise) or download it directly right here. For the MapTool file to let you run it quickly and easily, click here.

Note that this campaign file was created in version 1.3.b66 of MapTool, so I’m not certain of its compatibility with other versions.

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

ZEITGEIST adventure path for 4e and Pathfinder is here!

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I spend a lot of my D&D time over on EN World, surfing the various forums. It was a great resource for me when I was first learning D&D 4e in early 2010, and it’s where I found the players for my long-running Friday night online campaign. EN World also published the adventure path that I’m using for that campaign, War of the Burning Sky (which I’m very much enjoying running).

Thus, I was excited late last year when word started coming out about their next campaign saga, called ZEITGEIST. I was lucky enough to get into a play-by-forum playtest of the first two adventures run by the author, Ryan Nock. Ryan’s a fantastic writer, and his descriptions of our combats were amazing. Since we were really just running through the adventure to help Ryan fine-tune the plot rather than the combat encounters, he just narrated the fights, and yet this was probably even more fun than rolling the dice would have been.

I’ve been pretty geeked about this campaign path for a while, so I’m excited to say that the two-page introductions to the campaign as well as the 41-page player’s guide are now available, both for D&D4e and for Pathfinder. I have no idea what if I anything I’ll ever do with this campaign, since I’m pretty much full-up as a DM right now, but I could see maybe running it for my in-person group in the future if I decide to take another turn in the DM chair for that group.

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 7

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I was out of town last week, so I wasn’t running or playing in D&D Encounters. But hey, since I had already put the maps together for Week 6, I figured I might as well share them here.

For Week 7 tonight, I had a table of seven players. Six of them had apparently played together last week (including David, the die-hard who was brand new to Encounters but who’s been there every week so far – rock on!). The party last week had fought a bunch of tieflings who had apparently taken up residence in the home of the long-dead wizard Vontarin, and this week they were delving into the house’s basement via a trap door.

Below the trap door was a long, skinny staircase with an imp statue at the end of it. Our warpriest had a high enough passive perception to realize that there was a trap at hand, triggered by a very faint glyph on the floor at the foot of the stairs. The party’s thief tried to disarm the trap, failed horribly, and set off flames all over himself and the warpriest (oops). The hunter in the party then remembered the password they had discovered upstairs and said it… and then stood there, rather than walking past the statue. Nothing happened.

The thief took another crack at disabling the trap and succeeded this time, so the party moved into a room with three pits – dry cisterns. This is something new that I loved about this evening’s session – for the first time, the party had a chance to do some exploring of a location where each opened door didn’t lead immediately to a fight.

Beyond the cistern room lay a hallway with a big cloud of purple smoke. It turned out to be remnants from an already-triggered trap. At the far end of the hall were two sets of iron doors – one to the east, and another to the north. The northern doors showed signs of having previously been chained and sealed with a bronze plaque to Pelor. The eastern doors were unchained. The adventurers decided to go east.

To the east was a room filled with empty cages, but very lively tieflings, two of whom soon turned into clouds of smoke. The party started beating on this room of enemies…

Only to be surprised when the northern doors burst open and a tiefling warlock started wrecking them with flames. Bwah ha ha!

The hunter did some quick thinking and dropped a zone of mist in the hallway intersection that provided the party with a lot of protection. He then took a shot at the warlock and hit – but the warlock’s infernal wrath dropped the hunter to unconsciousness. The party’s knight fell soon after, but they were taking turns with unconsciousness, letting the warpriest bring them both back.

I had a ton of fun running this fight. I loved the “round one – bad guys to the east; round two – bad guys to the north” which gave the battle a good flow. Lots of moving around, lots of careful thinking. Minions that deal damage on a miss were also intriguing – I’ve never seen that before. The battle ended with the hunter completely out of surges; some of the party expected that this was the last encounter before an extended rest. Oh no no no…

I was also happy that the adventure designers are finally handing out some loot to the PCs. This battle gave out a magic staff, magic armor, and a bunch of cash. Now back to town to spend it, trying to figure out where the possessed wizard has gone.

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!

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 5

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This week marked the beginning of the second adventuring day for the intrepid travelers in the town of Duponde. A total of eight players showed up this week, so we split into two tables of four each. My table had:

  • Garro the hunter (the new player from week 1, now with a leveled-up PC!)
  • Sever the paladin (the new player’s friend, brand-new to D&D)
  • Markus the cleric (the replacement PC for the one I killed in week 1)
  • Jarren the mage

Having survived a night in the Shadowfell, the players napped through the morning back at the beloved Old Owl Inn, feeling a little shaky when they awoke (I’m using the Despair Deck, so they all drew a card). Some of the PCs spent some time studying the mysterious journal they had discovered at Evard’s tomb; it belonged to the wizard Nathaire who had disappeared from the Old Owl, and it was written in code. They haven’t fully deciphered it yet, but they’re making progress.

A young Vistani boy (basically a gypsy) came to the heroes to tell them that his grandmother Grivelda had a vision and needed to tell the heroes about it. She saw them as being the key to stopping whatever had happened to Duponde. We had a nice bit of role playing with Grivelda, with the PCs very interested in asking her about her visions. Three of them volunteered to have their palms read (two with poor results). They got the impression that she might know a thing or two about potion making, and I allowed them to make diplomacy checks to see if they could persuade her to whip up a healing potion, but none of them were very diplomatic (the best roll was an 8; I set the DC at 10). Oh well.

Before long, Grivelda’s grandson came running into the house, crying out that wolves were coming, along with a werewolf. As written, the battle starts with the PCs inside the house, but I thought the battle would be more interesting outside (the house was tiny), so I let them move outside as a free action when we rolled initiative.

Since there were only 4 PCs and most of them were level 1, I scaled the battle down. I threw two wolves at them instead of three, and I leveled the werewolf down by one level on the fly (reduced HP by 8, reduced defenses by 1 each). I left his attacks and damage alone.

The werewolf won initiative and rushed into battle, coming after the nearest target – the cleric (whose predecessor character from the same player, remember, I had killed in week 1). He went into his lycanthropic fury, in which he makes both a claw and a bite attack and deals himself 5 damage in the process. The claw was a critical hit, dealing a bunch of damage and knocking the cleric to the ground; fortunately, the bite missed.

The hunter in the party climbed onto the roof of the house and took at shot at a wolf  – and missed. The cleric used his turn to stand up, smack the werewolf, and then a minor action to increase the party’s AC for the encounter (rather than heal himself). One wolf came after the wizard while the other climbed up onto the roof after the hunter – who was quite surprised to have company up there!

The paladin and wizard went to work on the ground-bound wolf, and then Grivelda gave the werewolf a dirty look to turn off his regeneration (which ended up being hugely important) and his disease-bearing nature. The werewolf got back to savaging the cleric, who decided to heal the hunter on the roof instead of himself. This ended up being a mistake, as the werewolf dropped the cleric unconscious in the third round.

Eventually the mage started wrecking the ground foes with arc lightning and the paladin started drawing their attention. The hunter climbed off the roof and was pounced on from the roof by the wolf, who dropped him unconscious. Meanwhile, the cleric was busy failing death saves.

The mage’s dice were hot, and she started dropping the enemies one after the other. The last wolf tried to run but was met with a magic missile in the back.

Unfortunately, this was too late for the cleric, who failed three straight death saves. Pow. And once again, I killed one of Chris’s characters. Man, did I feel bad! But really, the dice just betrayed him. If he had just made one of those saves, he would have pulled through.

The other table breezed right through the encounter; maybe I should have scaled it down even farther. Well, so it goes. At least Grivelda was able to bring the cleric back with a four-healing-surge penalty, so Markus lives to fight another day!

No map this time, since I used the official Wizards of the Coast map for this one (it’s a map from Reavers of Harkenwold, which they put on their web site). If you’re a DDI subscriber, you can get the map here.

Previous sessions:

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 4

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I wasn’t expecting to be running D&D Encounters this week. Our local store has tried to set up a rotation so that no DM is running two weeks in a row (to prevent burnout). Thus, I ran the first 5:00 PM table on week 1, Andy ran it week 2, I ran it week 3, and Andy was scheduled to run it week 4 (this week). Wes has been the second table DM for all three weeks, but we haven’t had a second 5:00 PM table yet (we had only six players for each of the first three weeks).

However, I got an email from the store owner today asking me if I could be available to run a second table in case it was needed; Wes was unavailable. We haven’t had a second table yet, but hey, school’s out now – you never know.

So, I showed up at the store at 4:30 (I’m so glad to have a job with some flexible hours!) and set up my projector rig, just in case. It was a good thing that I did: We had 14 players! That meant two overly-full tables of seven players each. Woo hoo!

My table consisted of one player who had been attending most of this season of Encounters, one player who’s attended past seasons of Encounters, and five first-time Encounters players (two of whom were very new to D&D altogether – awesome!). The party was:

  • Hiver the Dwarf Fighter
  • Steven the Half-Elf Sentinel (our regular)
  • Chilliax the Drow Executioner (thanks again to Wielding a Bohemian Ear Spoon!)
  • Keira the Elf Thief
  • Balin the Elf Mage (a red box character!)
  • Fargrim the OTHER Dwarf Fighter
  • Thetari the Dwarf Cleric of Death

The session began with some recapping of the prior three sessions (since only one of the players had been present for any of them). This meant that it was tough to do much role playing; we pretty much just got the mission from the local cleric to head to the graveyard, since he believed all of the shadow troubles began there.

The players all made Perception checks as they entered the graveyard, none of which were especially great. This meant that the party saw some zombies shambling toward them, but they DIDN’T see the ghouls or shadows lying in wait. The ghouls actually acted very early in the initiative order, successfully attacking from hiding and throwing two characters to the ground and grabbing them. The rest of the party rushed to the rescue, with one ghoul getting pushed away by Smite Undead from the cleric and the other being Hypnotized by the Mage and forced to walk away, breaking both grabs (nice teamwork!).

Graveyard map for session 4 of Dark Legacy of Evard - with grid

Graveyard map for session 4 of Dark Legacy of Evard - no grid

When the shadows oozed out of the trees near the end of the first round, the brief panic around the table was awesome – “There are MORE monsters?!” The shadows did what they do, melding with PCs and draining their life for several turns. Zombies grabbed characters and started smashing them.

In the end, though, this party of largely fresh characters will full healing surges, action points and daily powers made short work of a graveyard full of undead monsters. Since I had more than the five PCs that the encounter was written for, I followed the guidelines and added one more zombie. Normally I would have added two, or perhaps even a zombie and a ghoul, but since so many players were new to the game I didn’t want to overdo it. I needn’t have worried – they rocked the encounter.

After the monsters were dead, we had a little more time for role playing. The adventurers examined the mausoleum of Evard’s tomb and saw that the main sarcophagus had been forced open and that some kind of magical curse had blasted whoever opened it. It was clear that the zombies were recently-killed workers who had helped to break into the tomb, but the wizard Nathaire and his halfling assistant were nowhere to be found. The group did, however, find a journal written in code that belonged to the halfling. The plot thickens!

After the party left the mausoleum, the sun came up and Duponde shifted back out of the Shadowfell. Ah, but for how long?

Previous sessions:

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Anyone interested in a one-shot online game for new players?

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The comments on my previous post about my experiences reading the Pathfinder Core Rulebook were interesting. Kayti chimed in to express interest in learning to play Pathfinder and asked if I would be running a game. I’m still just learning that game, but I know D&D 4th Edition, and I always want to encourage new players whenever possible.

So, I’m putting out a call: Are there any people out there who would be interested in joining Kayti in a one-shot D&D 4th Edition game aimed at new players? I’d run the game online using MapTool and Skype (of course), and I’d ideally love to have a table of all-new players. I wish I could agree to run an ongoing campaign, but I’m already a bit overcommited. A one-shot, though, I can handle.

If you have any friends who might be interested in playing, send them my way! Once I have enough players (I’m aiming for 4-5) I’ll get in touch with all of them about scheduling the game, figuring out what they want to do about characters, etc. I’ll be sure to blog about the experience, too!

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!