Author Archives: Rick Neal

Overdue DMG 2 Review, AKA Unwelcome Rant

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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I’m a little behind on getting this review up. I’m usually quicker off the mark; this time, I’ve waited several weeks before posting my review.

The truth is that I’m very conflicted about the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2.

See, I knew that it was going to be much harder to produce this book than the PHB 2 or the MM 2.* The PHB 2 can get away with just adding some classes and races. The MM 2 can get away with piling on the monsters. But the DMG 2 is tougher, because it has two jobs: first, it is supposed to provide advice as to how to run games, how to manage your group, how to build adventures, all that good stuff. Second, it’s supposed to have lots of lootable bits, like traps and templates and other little surprises that the DM can just plunk right into his or her own game with minimal retooling.

And the book does that. But I’m not sure I like the way it does it.

Because roughly 15% of the book (by page count) is stuff I’ve already paid for once.

I’m not talking about the preview stuff hosted on the WotC site, either. I’m talking about entire Save My Game, Dungeoncraft, and Ruling Skill Challenges columns plopped into the book. I’m talking about the bulk of the new section on traps being lifted from a Dragon article. I’m talking about a significant portion of the example skill challenges being pulled from published adventures and other sourcebooks.

Now, the stuff that’s been repeated is not bad – in fact, it’s quite good, most of it – but as I said, I’ve already paid for it once. It bothers me to find that I’ve paid for it again in buying this book.

Now, an argument can be made that repeating the material is a good thing, because it gives people who haven’t bought the other books or subscribed to DDI a chance to get their hands on the material.

Utter crap.

Firstly, it’s not my job to subsidize those who haven’t bought the other books by paying for some things twice.

Second, you can’t tell me that WotC wouldn’t rather get all those other folks buying the other books and subscribing to DDI. You know they would.

So, I am forced to conclude that WotC is double-dipping with this material either to cut corners or as a misguided attempt to lure those who have not already done so to give them more money by advertising the cool stuff available in other products. I say misguided because it strikes me as a bit of a slap in the face to the alpha-geeks like me who already buy all the 4E stuff that comes out.

I dunno. It just doesn’t seem like a good plan. Of course, the WotC .pdf sales policy proved to me that they don’t think things through very well at the best of times, but that rant is done, and no one wants to hear it.

So. Rant is done. You know my negative feelings about the book. How about the quality of the material?

It’s good. I like it. There is more of an emphasis, which I think is sorely lacking in 4E, on how to infuse your game with more story and roleplaying elements. The story branching section is very well done, and offers good advice to DMs both new and old. The section on Skill Challenges, though lifted almost completely from Mike Mearls’s column in Dungeon, is great, showing nice ways to use Skill Challenges and make them unobtrusive in the game. The section on Sigil has got me jonesing for a Planescape game. The new monster creation and customization rules look solid and easy. The traps and fantastic terrain examples are useful. And the advice on dealing with player motivations is very good.

One of the nicest things, though, are the little sidebar tips. These can add a little bit more information, or an example of what’s discussed in the main text, or just a little bit of advice from someone who’s been there. These are the things that stand out most in my mind after reading the book.

Well, there it is. I like the book, but am upset by the recycling of material I’ve already paid for. It hasn’t put me off WotC or D&D, but it does mean that I’m going to be checking the other supplements they publish to see if there’s enough original stuff in the book to warrant a purchase.

Because it’s good to know before I pay for it instead of after.

*Which I didn’t bother to review because it, like Adventurer’s Vault 2, is just a laundry list of things to add to the game. You’ll like some of the contents, and hates some of the others, and the ones you like or hate will probably differ from mine. Back

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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This past Sunday was the latest session of the Storm Point campaign, featuring the siege of Storm Point by an army of mixed humanoids led by shadar-kai heretics worshiping Vecna. We didn’t finish up the siege in one session, so we’ll have to get back to it next game.

I patterned the siege after the skill challenge I used for the defense of the mines last session. I varied it a little, because I wanted to accomplish a few very specific kinds of things:

  • Time pressure. I wanted the characters to feel that there just wasn’t enough time to do everything.
  • Resource pressure. I wanted the feeling of scant resources.
  • Random siege length. I wanted to have the actions of the characters determine just how long the siege goes on.

I also didn’t want to have the option each turn for the characters to kill attackers – in a siege this size, I felt that the impact of killing a few dozen besiegers just doesn’t tip the scales that much.

So, I decided to run the siege as a series of skill challenges, with eight-hour rounds. If a character worked more than a single round in a row, he had to start making Endurance checks – failure cost one healing surge and imposed a -1 (cumulative) penalty on all rolls. This, I felt, would make for some interesting choices, as the players try and decide whether they should take a nap or spend another eight hours manning the walls or whatever.

It worked, too, in that the players were all trying to push their characters as far as possible without sleeping, but saw their effectiveness diminish as they stretched too far. It also allowed for the Endurane skill to really shine for those who had good scores: Thrun the Anvil, for example, went three whole days before even starting to slow down.

The siege itself I broke into two phases: preparation and the siege itself. I set up a range of skill challenges in the preparation phase, each of which granted an advantage during the siege phase; things like training a command squad, laying in stores, reinforcing the walls, seeding the surrounding area with traps, and scrying on the approaching army. I gave them three days to get as much accomplished as they could, and they managed all of the preparatory challenges.

There was a longer challenge available, as well, one that I expected to run through the bulk of the siege. The Wizard was researching a mystical weapon created by the Bael Turathi tieflings in their war against Arkhosia. It was a set of runestones that could be used to unleash violent destructive energy in a wide area, and was called The Lightbringer. The DC on this challenge was tougher, and the Complexity higher than the other challenges. The swordmage and the cleric jumped all over this challenge.

And botched it. The experiment blew up, badly wounding the characters and killing the Wizard. The party paid to have him resurrected, but all the research notes and volumes were destroyed in the explosion.

Once the siege was established, I gave the party a list of nine different tasks that they could spend their time on, each one a skill challenge. This was stuff like planning, wall defense, blockade duty in the harbour, magical defense, leading a sally party, maintaining civil discipline, etc. The catch was that, every task they didn’t work on in a given round, automatically failed. When they succeeded in a task, they could either take the success or erase a failure. Failures also imposed some minor penalty, like costing a healing surge or giving a penalty to another roll.

To help alleviate the inevitable mathematical downslide this set-up produces, one of the tasks (Command) allowed the characters to remove a failure previously acquired in another area, and didn’t suffer from the possiblity of failure. Their success in the preparatory phase also gave them a command squad that they could assign to one of the tasks.

Now, the accrual of three failures on any given task results in something bad happening, but not in the failure of the siege. A certain number of challenges (which I’m not going to spell out here) need to fail for the siege to break the city. But, for example, if the party acquires three failures on the Magical Defense task (which they did just as we wrapped up for the evening), a band of demons is conjured into the city and begins wreaking havoc. They’re going out to fight them, now, and a few of the characters are very tired.

Breaking the siege will happen if they manage to succeed in a few key tasks, which will trigger the final battle, or after a certain amount of time, when off-stage developments will catch up with things.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the way the set-up has been forcing the party to make some hard choices during the siege, and dealing with the consequences. The players seem to be having a good time with it, too. We went all evening without a single combat, and everyone was engaged and involved in the game.

Of course, next time starts off with a nasty demon fight just to make up for things.

One Shot, Part Three: Brother Puddler Saves Humanity

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Okay, maybe I’m revealing a little bias in the title.

Saturday, we had the third and final installment of the Robot Wasteland one-shot that I’ve talked about here and here.

We managed to save Junkyard, flying in on our scavenged hovertransport at about the same time as the Devourer army reached the walls. My character, Brother Puddler, was flying, because the others were better at shooting things with the transport’s weapons or with some recovered beam rifles tied into the transport’s targeting assist.

We went after a few of the bigger Devourers first, because we had limited ammo and wanted to do as much damage as possible  before we ran out. Unfortunately, the shooting rolls did not favour us, and then one of the big grinders chewed the cockpit off the transport. There was just enough of it left for Brother Puddler’s divine powers to cobble the control systems back together again, and then we blew one of the control Devourers apart as we headed back to the no-man’s land.

Why were we heading back there? Because our psychic had spotted a small band of humans on a small hill surrounded by ravager Devourers. We flew in for a quick pick-up and dust-off, saving the wounded and driving off the attacking Devourers long enough for the survivors to get inside a bunker. I also managed to bash the crap out of the transport with a bad piloting check, but it still presented a great cinematic image: a hovertransport, with the cockpit shredded and open to the sky, a heavily-armoured warrior holding the controls intact through sheer willpower, swooping in to a rough landing on top of a pillbox, the passengers blasting away at six-legged catlike robots the size of bears, snatching up the the wounded, and blasting off back to Junkyard.

Then the folks in the bunker activated the bombs hidden in a long line through the battlefield, blasting a fifty-foot wide, twenty-foot deep ditch about a third of a mile long through the advancing robots.

After dropping off the wounded, we asked the defenders where they needed us, and they suggested helping to reclaim one of the cannon emplacements on the wall. We shot up there, but were running short on energy for the weapons. The two folks with beam rifles tried to clear the cannon tower of little raider Devourers, while the gunner on the ship’s guns kept firing downrange at the advancing larger Devourers currently trying to cross the ditch. When she ran out of power, she took the ship’s controls and Brother Puddler leapt down onto the tower with his chainsword to show the upstart metal a thing or two about the will of man.

And he was promptly pulled down and had his arm mangled. Again. Critical hit by a raider coupled with a critical failure on my Dodge roll. The rest of the raiders dogpiled him.

But a lucky Strength roll let him burst to his feet, tossing one of the raiders over the battlements, and grab a plasma cutter tossed to him by one of the other characters. He drove off the bulk of the raiders, supported by beam rifle fire from the transport, and then used the cannon to take out one of the huge Devourers that happened to be crossing the ditch by the simple expedient of walking across on the back of another huge one that was stuck in the ditch.

At this point, the Devourers were starting to flee, and had less cohesion than they had previously displayed. That’s when we figured that the first one we had killed was probably some sort of Devourer brainbot leading this unprecedented army.

So, we wrapped up the game, and we each got to say what our characters were doing five years later: we had wandering scouts and troubleshooters, a research team set up in the old weapons cache we had found, and Brother Puddler leading a chapterhouse of the Cult of Iron, working with the tech cult to understand and use the transport and other tech devices we had uncovered.

All-in-all, a most enjoyable one-shot, for all that it expanded to three nights.

Thank you, Clint, for the enjoyable game.

And thank you, Penny, Fera, and Tom, for saving Brother Puddler so many times.

Post Tenebras Lux Report

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Friday was the penultimate session of Post Tenebras Lux.

After what I felt was a fairly disappointing performance by me in the previous session, I decided to spend the session trying to say yes to the players, and generally trying to facilitate the game and story a little more, rather than focusing on the inner life and desires of the NPCs.

So, to that end, when the single combat of the evening came up*, I threw some thorn bushes on the map, and, when my players asked, I told them that any creature in a thorn bush space was restrained until they saved. They liked that, and wound up using it to take out one of the krenshars in nice little concerted tactical action.

I also decided that the final tribe they were seeking – the Blood Hawk tribe, halflings who raise a variety of predatory birds – were very willing to join the struggle, but were distrusted  by the other tribes. No one had to convince them of anything, but the party had to prove that they had a hope of pulling off the kind of military action they were advocating. The characters managed to prove that fairly easily, and then they had the halflings, along with their considerable wealth of intelligence gathered by spying, on their side.

We flashed forward a few days to the meeting, and the party had to persuade the tribes that they should unite to drive the gnolls and the Ghostlord (or whoever’s pretending to be the Ghostlord) out of the Thornwaste. Their success with fighting the gnolls, as displayed by the large collection of ears they had claimed, brought the Grass Dragons on board fairly easily, but the Stone Swimmer shaman continued to lobby for leaving the area.

In fact, he essentially usurped the chieftain’s position, telling the council that the Stone Swimmers were going to leave. The party managed to persuade most of his backers that doing so was cowardly, and kept the Stone Swimmer chieftain in power. When the shaman walked, he took only three of the warriors with him.

The next bit of wrangling involved trying to cobble together a plan of attack that had a chance of working, and played to the strengths and prejudices of the three tribes. I didn’t handle this as well, unthinkingly calling for a skill check to come up with the plan, which failed. They tried again with a different plan, and that succeeded. What I should have done is had the characters come up with the plan, and then use skill checks to get the tribes to adopt it.

Oh, well.

It ended up with the Blood Hawks planning to infiltrate the enemy camp before the attack, and then rise up behind the lines as the Stone Swimmers and Grass Dragons came in with a pincer attack at the main mass of gnolls.

Now, I wasn’t sure what kind of final session my players wanted – taking part in a big, climactic battle, or smaller-scale action with the Ghostlord, so I left it up to them. In-game, I had the Blood Hawks trot out their big secret: they had a scroll of linked portal and the sigils for the Ghostlord’s teleportation circle. They suggested that a small group of warriors be sent through the teleport circle right into the Lion Tower to deal with the Ghostlord and his power source.

I told the players out of game that the decision was up to them: either they went through the circle to the Lion Tower, or they led the armies and sent a commando squad through the circle. They opted to go themselves.

So, next session will see the barbarians of the Thornwaste going up against an army of gnolls, krenshar, witherlings, and a few oni, while the valiant New Heroes of Brindol strike right to the heart of the evil threatening the Elsir Vale.

And then the campaign is done.

*Four gnoll minions and four krenshars, 900 xp, a level 3 encounter for 6 characters. Back

I Don’t Trust the New Guy.

By | | What's he playing?, What's he reading?, What's he watching?
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Or, The Problem of Betrayal in Small Character Sets

Before I get going, I’m gonna put up a big spoiler warning:

Spoilers!

I’m going to be revealing plot twists in the following:

  • NCIS: Los Angeles series premiere
  • Turn Coat by Jim Butcher
  • The Inspector Morse mysteries
  • Hyperion by Dan Simmons
  • Bones season 3
  • American Gods by Neil Gaiman

So, we good? Good.

I was watching the series premiere of NCIS: Los Angeles the other night*. In it, the team are trying to track down a kidnapped girl connected to a South American drug cartel. Her mother gets a phone call from the absent father, and calls him Luis. And instantly I decide that he’s in on the kidnapping, because of the hispanic name. And sure enough, he’s the bad guy.

This brought into focus something I’ve faced before in creating adventures, writing stories, reading, watching movies and TV… basically, any time I interact with a story. Stories contain, of necessity, a limited subset of real-world things. Specifically, the only characters in a well-constructed story are those that contribute in some meaningful way to the story. This means that, especially in mysteries, we pay extra attention to the introduction of each character, looking for how they fit into the story*. And it becomes hard to hide things in the background, the way things get overlooked in the real world. There just isn’t enough background noise to conceal things.

This can make it hard to sneak in a betrayal, especially if the audience (or the players) are expecting one. This generalizes to any mysterious identity, including the identity of a murderer, or the missing heir, or the superhero’s secret identity, or what-have-you. I’m going to focus on idea of betrayal in this little screed, because that’s what brought it to mind.

Case in point is Turn Coat, by Jim Butcher. Going in, we know that there’s a traitor on the White Council. So when there’s a new character introduced – a fussy little bureaucrat that happens to hate Harry Dresden – he really stands out as the potential traitor. And you know what? He is the traitor*.

What made him obvious? He was a new character who didn’t seem to have a purpose that wasn’t served by one of the established characters. It made him stand out as a sacrificial lamb, so to speak. He hated Harry – but so did Morgan. He was a staunch traditionalist – but so is the Merlin and Ancient Mai and several others. He showed up, they made a big deal out of how much of the White Council’s information got processed through him, he made himself annoying, and basically made the reader want him to be the bad guy.

Yeah, this is all meta-thinking, based on what we know about how stories work, but it’s thinking that happens, whether in a reader, an audience, or a gamer. We know how stories function, and we can’t turn that knowledge off. You can come down on players for meta-game thinking, but it won’t stop them from doing it – just from acting on it.

And when you’re building a story – whether it’s a novel, a script, or an adventure – you’ve got to be aware that your audience is very sophisticated and knowledgeable in the area of story. Everyone is.

Some authors play with this. In Dan Simmons’s Hyperion, for example, he tells you up front that one of the group is a traitor, and then has each group member tell his or her story in a Chaucerian style. As you go through the book, you examine each story minutely for the clues that might reveal the teller as the traitor. The traitor turns out to be the last person to speak, but in the meantime, you come to the conclusion that each of the previous characters could be the traitor. Until the blatant reveal at the end, there is good cause to suspect each of them.

So, this actually creates two sorts of things that happen when traitors are introduced. One is fixing the identity of the traitor, and the other is seeding clues as to that identity.

By fixing the identity, I mean deciding who’s going to be the traitor. In an ongoing series (TV, novels, games, etc.), it can be tough to surprise with a betrayal. Either you have to introduce a new character (as in Turn Coat), or you have to make an established character the traitor. Introducing a new character draws attention to the addition, and makes the character an immediate suspect. Had the traitor in Turn Coat been introduced a couple of novels previously, he would have been much less obvious. On the other hand, making an established character a traitor can be jarring and unbelievable, such as the third-season finale of the Bones TV series, when they revealed that Zack Addy was the Gormogon serial killer – well, his apprentice, anyway.

The problems with fixing the identity of a traitor can be alleviated or aggravated by the seeding of clues as to who the traitor is. If you don’t give enough clues, then the reveal can strain credulity, as in Bones. If you give too many, then the reveal is not a surprise, such as in Turn Coat. Finding the right balance of clues to make the reveal both believable and surprising is tough, especially from the omniscient seat of the author. What’s the right amount of clues? Tough to say.

My assumption through this posthas been that you want the audience to have a chance of figuring out who the traitor is, but you don’t want to make it too easy. Like a good crossword puzzle clue, you want the solution to be obvious once understood but still surprising when you first discover it. You’ve got to know your audience, and you’ve got to know what they are (and aren’t) going to pick up on. You take a look at the clues you could seed, and try to use the bare minimum. In a game, you have the advantage of watching player reactions, so you can adjust things as you go to provide more or less information. In other forms of story, you take your best guess, and adjust when revising.

The most beautiful example of this that I’ve ever encountered personally is in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. You know all along that Wednesday’s up to something, and that Shadow is in over his head, but I didn’t twig to the actual shape of the con until about a paragraph before the reveal, simply because I never said the name Low-Key Lyesmith out loud. As soon as I realized that Loki was in the mix, I realized that Wednesday was playing both sides for his own ends. And then about a sentence and a half later, Gaiman spells it out. For that sentence and a half, though, I felt very clever. Then I knew that I’d been very successfully played. It was brilliant.

There is an alternative, though. If you’ve ever seen a Columbo episode, you’ve seen it. Technically, it’s called dramatic irony, when the audience knows more about what’s going on than the characters, but really its a sort of reverse reveal. Each Columbo episode started by showing you the (usually incredibly arcane) “perfect murder” perpetrated by the killer. The rest of the episode is a cat-and-mouse mental duel between the killer and the detective to find the flaw that will unravel the crime.

This approach shifts emphasis away from the surprise reveal to the interplay of character and investigation, and can be tough to pull off without becoming very formulaic. Still, it’s worthwhile considering as a device.

So, to sum up: adding betrayal (or another secret and reveal) to a story can be tough, because of the limited range of choices for identity, the difficulty of choosing the correct person for the villain, and the balancing act of seeding appropriate clues. Understanding the difficulties and keeping them in mind can help avoid the common pitfalls.

*Yeah, I like NCIS. You wanna make something out of it? Back

*Back in before-time, my friends and I used to watch the Inspector Morse mysteries. It got so that, whenever a new character was introduced, we’d race to see who could be the first to shout, “He/She did it!”* Back

*Unless, of course, the woman was a love interest for Morse. Then she was either a victim or the murderer. Back

*Well, he’s a traitor. I don’t know about the traitor. The world of the Dresdenverse is a twisty, deceiving place, and Jim Butcher is not above pulling a bait-and-switch on us. In fact, I hope he does. Back

Rough Magi(c)k(s)

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Gonna talk about two different things, now. They’ve got similar titles, and both deal with Lovecraft; one’s a DVD and the other is a game supplement.

Rough Magik

This is a television pilot from the BBC that never got made. It’s available on DVD from Lurker Films, on Volume 2 of the H.P. Lovecraft Collection – Dreams of Cthulhu: The Rough Magik Initiative.

The set-up is simple: twenty years ago, a group of covert operatives in the UK ran into a cult that worshiped a strange, ancient god that slept and dreamed beneath the seas. I don’t recall them using the name Cthulhu in the episode, but the sculptures and themes make it very clear that that’s who they’re talking about. They called themselves the Night Scholars, and the cult was called the Dreamers. Through great sacrifice and skill, the Night Scholars pretty much wiped out the Dreamers, though most of the Night Scholars wound up dead, insane, or exiled.

Now, the cult is stirring again, and the powers-that-be in the British government find they need to reactivate the Night Scholars they had previously disavowed and driven away.

If that sounds like a great framework for a Delta Green campaign, you’re not alone in thinking so.

Now, as I said, the series never got made, but the DVD has a pretty detailed description of the episodes that would have been made. In fact, according to the list, the episode on the disk is, in fact, episode 2: An Age of Wonders. The plan was for 14 episodes, and the brief descriptions of each of them make me very, very sad that they were never produced.

I can understand why, though. This is powerful, disturbing stuff, both on a horror-story level and on a human level. The episode on the disk opens with a middle-class mother sacrificing her young children to Cthulhu. There are scenes of atrocities in the Falklands as part of the story. Some unfriendly things are said about what people are capable of.

They manage all of this on what seems a shoestring budget. They use the cheap option for night-time scenes that we all know and love from low-budget kung-fu and horror movies – film during daytime, and use a dark filter. The scenes of gore and dismemberment are done in quick cuts (so to speak) and uncertain lighting. Most of the true horror creeps in as you start to think about the implications of what you’ve just seen or heard, rather than from buckets of blood or rubber monsters jumping out at you.

There are four other shorts on the DVD:

  • Experiment 17, which does a great job of looking like a WWII German Army archive film of a paranormal experiment gone horribly, horribly wrong.
  • Experiment 18, which is a sort of sequel, and loses a lot by abandoning the stark, simplistic style of 17 in favour of trying to tell a longer, more complex story.
  • The Terrible Old Man, which is pretty good, but longer than the pay-off is worth, in my opinion.
  • From Beyond, which shows the futility of getting actors to speak the dialogue Lovecraft wrote for his characters.

There’s also a bunch of extra stuff that’s of interest to Lovecraft and/or horror movie aficionados.

As I said, I’m very sad that the series never made it past the pilot, but I’m very glad to have the pilot. You should get it and watch it, if you like Lovecraft.

Rough Magicks

This is a sourcebook for Trail of Cthulhu, from Pelgrane Press. First thing you need to do is check out this cover art. That, to me, is the essence of magic in the Cthulhu mythos. “Yay! My spell worked! My dark god has arrived and OH MY GOD IT’S EATING ME!!!”

The book is written by the illustrious and inventive Ken Hite, and offers an expansion on the magic system from the core Trail of Cthulhu rulebook. It’s short – 38 pages, including a new character sheet – and inexpensive – $9.95 for the hard copy. And it’s quite good.

The new system is pretty light, consisting of just adding a new ability (Magic), and saying basically “Use this instead of Stability when you do magic stuff.” It’s a little more complex than that, and the book does a decent job of spelling out just exactly how it all works, but there’s not that much more to it.

There is also the obligatory collection of new spells, some examples of how to use the Idiosyncratic Magic from the Bookhounds of London campaign framework, and an analysis of what magics Lovecraftian magic Lovecraftian.

The two parts of the book that I really love, though, are very short. One is a page-long sidebar called “Names to Conjure With,” which gives the Keeper a list of names of historical or fictitious magi to seed into histories or spells or scrolls or whatever. I love stuff like this, that lets me name drop and create a sense of a vast mystical world lying below the surface of the mundane one.

The other part runs two whole pages, and gives a variety of options (reminiscent of the section on Gods and Titans in the core book) for what magic actually is. My favourite has to be the idea of it being the corrupted bio-technological operating system written into the DNA and crystalline structure of the world by the Elder Things. Using magic means hacking the degenerate code fragments still in place.

Anyway, as I said, it’s a short book, so this is a short review. I like it. If you play Trail of Cthulhu, or even Call of Cthulhu, there’s a lot in this little package to take your game up a very weird notch or two.

The Future of My Gaming

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The weekend before last, I ran three 4E D&D games on three nights in a row. I had fun at all three games, but it really wore me out, and got me thinking about what I want out of gaming currently and in the future.

I’ve been running nothng but D&D 4E for at least a year.

Now, I like the game, I enjoy running it, and I like all the games I’ve run. But I’m not running any of the other games I’m interested in, and I want to change that.

So, after mulling things over, and talking with a couple of my players, I sent out this announcement to all my players:

So, this weekend, I GMed three nights in a row – all D&D 4E – and I came to a realization.

I’m tired.

I like gaming, and I like GMing, and I like 4E, but I’ve been pretty immersed in them for some time, and I think I need to start scaling back. There are other things I’ve been neglecting for the D&D games, and I’d like to make some time for them again. I’m approaching a burn-out point, and I don’t want to reach it.

So. Here’s what’s gonna happen.

  • Post Tenebras Lux is going to wrap up after this adventure – I’m thinking 2-3 more sessions.
  • Development of The Phoenix Covenant is going on hold for a while.
  • The Hunter game is going to the top of the development queue, at least until we get a few sessions played and decide if we like it.
  • I’m going to start looking at other games for short mini-campaigns: runs aimed at 3-6 sessions, possibly using pregens, probably small groups of no more than four players. Things that are different from D&D. First up on this list is something from the Gumshoe line – Trail of Cthulhu, Mutant City Blues, or Esoterrorists. Maybe resurrect the Century Club. Dogs in the Vineyard? Maybe…
  • Storm Point will continue as per usual, unless someone in that game has other ideas.

And there you have it. I want to thank everyone for playing in my games, and I hope you’ll be interested in some of the new things I’m planning on trying. I enjoy gaming with you all.

Responses were very supportive, which just goes to show that I’ve got a great bunch of players.

But now I want to talk in a little more detail about what I’m planning for the next several months:

  1. Post Tenebras Lux. I want to wrap this up before the end of October. The adventure I’m currently running will make a decent stopping point. I’ve learned a lot about running 4E from this game, and have enjoyed it, but it’s served its purpose, and can be honourably retired.
  2. Storm Point. This going to continue; it’s my low-maintenance game, very beer-and-pretzels, and one of the only opportunities I have for seeing some of the people in this game. It’s going to be my only D&D game for the forseeable future.
  3. Hunter: The Vigil. This is first up on the slate for development. I’ve got to finish up a couple of things for some of the characters, and put the last touches on the initial adventure, then it’s ready to run. I want to get one or two sessions done before Christmas. The problem is that I designed and grafted on what I thought at the time was a simple system for supernatural player abilities – it’s turned out to be a lot more complex and difficult implementing from the GM end than I had anticipated.
  4. GUMSHOE. I’ve been wanting to try this system for some time, but just haven’t had a lot of luck scheduling it. Now, I’m going to run an adventure or two, either Trail of Cthulhu or Mutant City Blues. If nothing else, I owe the good folks at Pelgrane Press a play report for the generous act of sending me a preview of Mutant City Blues some time ago. I’d like to get this started before the new year, but after the first Hunter session.
  5. Spirit of the Century. I just love this game to death and want to run more of it. I also want a chance to play, so I’m going to look at resurrecting our pick-up league and getting it running again. Hopefully early in the new year.
  6. Dogs in the Vineyard. I want to give this game a try sometime, but don’t know when I’ll be able to fit it in. Probably not before January or February.
  7. Other Games. There are a lot of other games out there I want to try out – Mouseguard, Starblazer Adventures, Thousand Suns, Don’t Rest Your Head, Cold City… we’ll have to wait and see if and how those can fit in.

Those are my plans. I will, of course, keep people up to date on the various games I run, and occasionally spout off on some idea or concept that gets stuck in my brain.

I hope you stick with it. It should be fun.

Game Day Report

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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I just got home from running the Worldwide D&D Game Day session at Imagine Games.

It wasn’t a huge turnout; I had three players to start, and two more joined half-way through. Because of the numbers, and also the War Machine tournament that was running in the back of the store, we had neither the bodies nor the space to split into groups and do the build-the-adventure portion of the event, so I just ran the adventure I had prepared from their materials.

The basics I decided on were that first of all, livestock was going missing from a nearby village, then some livestock carcasses were found horrifically mutilated. This continued for a time, until people started disappearing, and lights had been seen in a nearby cave at the top of a waterfall. Then a pair of children disappeared on the night of the new moon, and the village elders sent some heroes over to the cave to straighten things out.

Yeah, it’s a kind of hokey set-up. It’s a one-shot.

Anyway, the idea was that the Doomdreamer was blending the worship of the Elder Elemental Eye with arcane experiments tapping into the Far Realm. He had set up a small shrine to tempt locals, using the Scarecrow Stalker, and seeded the offering pile with Scarabs. As he grew in power, he enlisted some Minotaurs and summoned a couple of Foulspawn, who liked hunting further afield and snatched the kids.

I made the encounters fairly tough:

  • Encounter 1: Scarecrow Stalker, Hoard Scarab Larva Swarm, 3 Minotaur Thugs (1,750 xp, a level 8 encounter for 5 characters)
  • Encounter 2: Doomdreamer, Foulspawn Mangler, Foulspawn Hulk, 2 Minotaur Thugs (2,200 xp, a level 9 encounter for 5 characters)

For the first encounter, though, I only had three players, so I dropped two of the Minotaur Thugs, reducing it to a 950 xp encounter, or a level 7 encounter for 5 characters. The group had some trouble with this encounter, mainly because they were lacking a striker (they played the fighter, the invoker, and the artificer), wound up in a bottleneck with the Minotaur hitting and retreating repeatedly. Not being able to dish out a huge amount of damage (and suffering from some truly disheartening dice rolls) made this a tougher fight than it looked like on paper.

Two other folks joined for the next encounter, so I didn’t have to trim down the encounter at all. It was an interesting fight, with the problem of getting down to the second level without getting spotted by the monsters down there.

There plan only sort-of worked.

The opening round had the heroes swinging down on ropes to attack (and some flopping painfully onto the rock), and then they all started shoving enemies down into the pit after afflicting them with ongoing damage of various flavours.

Despite this fight being significantly tougher than the previous one, having the party roles filled out, as well as the extra bodies to distribute the beatings being received, served to make it go more smoothly and successfully for the party. And, to be fair, the players all knew this was the last encounter, and most had saved their dailies for it.

So, they managed to slay the cultists, and looted enough cash to raise the kids from the dead. There was a party with ice cream and puppies. Yay!

Thanks once again to Pedro, Wendy, and Kieran, not to mention Leo and Maya, at Imagine Games for being such excellent hosts for these events. And thanks to the people who came out to play. I hope you had fun.

Worldwide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day – Dungeon Master’s Guide 2

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Don’t forget that this Saturday is the latest Worldwide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day, to celebrate the release of the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2. As usual, I will be at Imagine Games to run the festivities.

This game day is a little different – it’s not just an adventure to play. It’s an adventure to build. Here’s how it works:

The support package has a rough outline, monster selection, and battle map for the scenario. The participants break into two groups, each putting together a two-encounter adventure over the course of an hour. After that, the leader of each group runs the adventure for the other group. And fun, presumably, is had by all.

How many participants do I need to do the whole schtick? I’d say at least seven, with at least one of those being willing to DM. That would give each group one DM and three players (with me participating), which should be good enough. There’s enough material to run with up to 12 participants – each group having five players and one DM.

And there are freebies. Each participant is going to get the mini of the character he or she played, as well as the character sheet (and these are some nice-looking character sheets). The DM is going to get a set of the monster minis used in the game and the battle map.

What happens if we don’t get enough participants to run it this way? We’ll figure something out. If one of the participants wants to try DMing, I’ll be more than happy to walk them through the adventure creation part and let them run the adventure. Otherwise, I’ll have an adventure that I’ve put together from the material Wizards have sent out, and I’ll run that for up to five players. Depending on time and demand, I may even run it twice. Or two different ones.

Either way, it looks like it should be a fun day of gaming. I look forward to seeing some of you folks there.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Sunday was the most recent installment of the Storm Point game. We had a full house, less one, and I’d warned everyone that this sessions was going to be the defense of a fortified mine against a band of hobgoblins, part of the army marching on the town of Storm Point.

I decided that I was going to use the rough skeleton of the skill challenge created by Mike Mearls in his Ruling Skill Challenges column. I liked that it allowed a wide range of characters to contribute meaningfully to the defense of the mine, doing different things in different ways, so I filed off the serial numbers, put in my own required plot elements and big bad guys, and ran it.

It worked quite well.

Part of the challenge involves preparing for the battle, and it provides a nice set-up where the group just can’t get everything done that it needs to – there are too many options, and not enough time or resources. The players definitely felt that pressure, knowing that for everything they did to prepare the defenses, there was something not being done. And the things they chose to do had a real impact on the actual defense of the keep.

Now, the Warlord in the party came up with his own option, not using one of the ones provided in the skill challenge, deciding that he would, instead, train one of the defending units to be a command cadre, allowing him to pass orders and implement tactics more readily. I liked the idea, so I let him do that, giving him a +2 bonus to his rolls in the Tactical Command skill challenge during the defense.

The Cleric managed to get another unit on its feet with his Heal skill, so the boys were able to fully man both the battlements and the gates, while still keeping the trained command cadre intact. And the Fighter managed to fortify the gates a little better, the Swordmage sorted out some good healing potions, and the Ranger and Rogue made a scouting flight on their hippogriffs to assess the enemy forces.

Yeah. Those hippogriffs.

So, after that, I ran the challenge mostly by-the-book from the article, except that the archers weren’t mounted on hippogriffs, and I changed the leader to a shadar-kai rather than an oni. The undead attack was detected early on by the Cleric, and he and the Ranger and the Rogue on the parapets managed to drive them off fairly easily, and they used their healing potions to keep from losing the squad of defenders up there. The defense of both the walls and the gate were much easier without having to worry about air cavalry, and I wrapped things up with a big battle against the hobgoblin command (beefed up a bit to make it a good fight for the party) and the shadar-kai leader*.

The battle was tough, with a couple of the guys coming dangerously close to dropping, but the group has got very good at trading off healing and being targets, so they managed it without actually losing anyone, though I decided that they were going to lose one squad of defenders for every three rounds that the battle went on. It lasted five rounds, so they lost one squad.

Not bad.

The basic structure of the skill challenge was good, and it gave me a nice starting point to describe the battle and improvise when the characters wanted to try something not covered by it. Everyone felt that they were contributing to the success of the battle, and they had fun.

I’m planning on doing something similar for the next couple of sessions, which is the siege of Storm Point, and the end of this portion of the campaign arc.

I’m looking forward to it.

*4 hobgoblin soldiers, 1 hobgoblin archer, 1 hobgoblin warcaster, 1 hobgoblin commander, and 1 shadar-kai battle lord warrior*, 1,800 xp, a level 7 encounter for 6 characters. Back

*Found him in the Monster Builder, which I am starting to love. Back