Tag Archives: D&D4e

Free adventure: Tallinn’s Tower (updated)

Posted on by

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.

Becoming “in-demand” as a DM

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 9

Posted on by

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

Free encounters: The Battle of Otharil Vale

Posted on by

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

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 8

Posted on by

This week I had the pleasure of enjoying D&D Encounters as a player at Andy’s table. As the start time of 5:00 rolled around there were only three players present, but we ended up with seven (so we ran one extra-large table).

The party had just finished exploring the basement of the Vontarin estate last week, taking on a gang of tieflings and discovering the the wizard Nathaire, possessed by Vontarin’s ghost, had apparently come to the estate, looked for something, not found it, and left in frustration. So, we returned to Duponde.

As night fell, Grimbold (captain of the town watch) asked the party to either defend some townsfolk who had taken refuge in the armory, or investigate reports of a small humanoid in the black hood near the south gate. The humanoid sounded like it might be Nathaire’s halfling assistant, so we took that route.

We spotted the humanoid through the window of a house, but before we could approach we were set upon by plant creatures. I was playing a Mage and had a good time blasting a bunch of twig minions. The party seemed to work pretty well together, and we really didn’t have too much trouble taking down the plants and then the humanoid, who turned out to be a shadow creature.

  

We took the shadow man alive and questioned him about what he was doing. He confessed that Nathaire hired him, and the wizard was working on building an army of skeletons at a nearby monastery. Ooh – creepy!

No maps this week, as just like week 5 we used a map that’s available on the Wizards of the Coast web site for DDI subscribers. But hey, at least I included the tokens I created for the plant monsters!

Previous sessions:

No week 6 – I was out of town

I wish opportunity attacks would continue to matter

Posted on by

Opportunity attacks can be hard for new players to understand. If you drop your guard by either walking away from a monster (rather than cautiously shifting a small distance) or doing certain things that take your attention elsewhere (making a ranged or area attack), the monster will get a free shot at you (a melee basic attack).

I like this rule. I can’t quite put my finger on why I like it, but I do. Maybe just force of habit, I suppose, but it feels “sensible” within the D&D world.

Thus, I’m a little bit annoyed by easy-to-access features of the game that shut off opportunity attacks. The biggest transgressors I’ve seen are Shadowdance and Shimmering Armor and the relatively new Staff Expertise feat.

Shadowdance Armor

Shadowdance Armor is available in cloth or leather, and it’s available as low as a 5th-level item. Now, it’s an uncommon, which means that the players only have access to it if the DM says so (thus, the DM can say, “Sorry, there’s no Shadowdance Armor in my game.”). It has a troublesome property in my mind:

“Your area and ranged attacks don’t provoke opportunity attacks.”

This is obviously a fantastic item for anyone who likes to make area or ranged attacks and doesn’t mind wearing cloth or leather armor. I think that would apply to lots of rangers, wizards, warlocks, sorcerers, etc.

The item annoys the heck out of me. If a PC uses a ranged or area power while standing next to a bad guy, unless they have something really cool about the power that makes it extra-defensive, the bad guy is going to get a free shot at them. Thus, they’ll need to figure out a way to get away from the baddie first, or maybe a way to make the free shot hurt (such as if the monster is marked by a defender) – or else just suffer the consequences. It’s part of the game, and I think it makes things more interesting.

Compare it in power level to the Razordark Bracers from Adventurer’s Vault 2 – a level 11 arms slot item for warlocks that says, “Your warlock at-will ranged attack powers don’t provoke opportunity attacks from adjacent enemies.” It only applies to warlock powers, it only applies to ranged powers (not area), it only applies to at-will powers (not encounter or daily) and it only applies to adjacent enemies (not farther-away foes with threatening reach). And that’s a level-11 item! I didn’t even mention that Shadowdance Armor also comes with a daily power (which, granted, I’ve not yet seen anyone use).

Shadowdance Armor is apparently from Seekers of the Ashen Crown, which is an Eberron adventure published in July 2009. I’ve never seen or played the adventure, and I don’t know how “integrated” it’s intended to be with the rest of the D&D world, but I’m comfortable saying that its armor just doesn’t exist in my universe in the future.

And for the character of Alayne in my Friday night campaign, don’t worry – she can keep her armor. Although I think it’s illustrative to note that when I theoretically bribed the warlock in my Friday night game with different leather armor that’s +4 instead of her current +2, she preferred to keep the Shadowdance. Yeah, it’s pretty optimal.

Shimmering Armor

Shimmering Armor is pretty much the same as Shadowdance, except that it’s only available in cloth and it doesn’t have the extra daily power. It’s available at 3rd level, and it’s from Adventurer’s Vault. I don’t like this one, either, though I’ll admit it’s a bit harder to justify it not existing in my world since it’s from a more core book like Adventurer’s Vault rather than a single adventure. Still, I can live with myself if I rule that it doesn’t exist.

Staff Expertise

Staff Expertise is the one that really bugs me now. This is one of the new expertise feats from Heroes of the Fallen Lands / Forgotten Kingdoms, and I generally love those feats. They add some flavor to a simple math bonus of a +1 to hit, and I’m a fan of that. Staff Expertise seems absurd to me, though. First of all, it gives +1 to the reach of your melee attacks. This isn’t going to come up all that often, but it will be nice every now and then.

Second, it gives you much the same benefit as Shadowdance or Shimmering Armor: your implement attacks made with a staff don’t provoke opportunity attacks.

Now, when I played a wizard as my first D&D 4th edition character (before the existence of Staff Expertise), he used a staff as an implement. I liked the idea that he could smack something if need be, and I liked the extra defense. But I know that lots of other wizards would use orbs or tomes or whatever.

Today, is there a reason for a spellcaster who CAN use the staff as an implement to use anything else? I think that making sure you never provoke an opportunity attack from casting a spell is a pretty huge incentive to be a staff wizard (unless you already have Shimmering Armor, I guess!).

Given that this one is a feat, it’s much more of a dick move for a DM to say, “Sorry, you can’t use this feat.” I’ll do it if I think it’s the right thing to do, but I feel guiltier about it. It’s right in the core Essentials books, after all.

Your thoughts

What do you think? Am I out of line for being annoyed with easy ways to prevent opportunity attacks? Am I wrong in thinking that these are no-brainer default choices for the appropriate character classes (if the DM allows them)? Are they TOO good?

MapTool file for free adventure: Tallinn’s Tower

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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!

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.