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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.

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

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

One-Shot Dungeon Delve

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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This past Saturday night, I ran a one-shot for a fairly large group. The organizer, a friend from work, wanted to introduce his wife to the game, and to try out the new system, so I agreed to GM, supply pregenerated characters, and the adventures. His job was assembling a group. I told him that the basic assumption in 4E was that the party would consist of 5 characters, but that it was possible to run with more or fewer. I also said that less than four characters could make things more difficult, because then all the roles wouldn’t be filled, and there would be very little in the way of back-up.

He put together a group of seven players, most of whom had very little (or no) experience with 4E, which was fine. I used the D&D Character Builder (which I love to death) to generate quick characters – one for each class, and spread among the races. Everyone picked a character, and I ran them through  Coppernight Hold, the level 1 delve from Dungeon Delve. Everyone seemed to have a good time, and I think the game went fairly well. Some observations:

  • In retrospect, I think it would have been better to stick to the PHB1 races and classes, rather than going for the variety I did. While there was a benefit to having the broader choices – one of my friends finally got a chance to try out a Warden, for instance – I think that the range of choices was a little overwhelming to those who were less familiar with the whole thing.
  • As new supplements are released for 4E, I have noticed an increase in mechanical complexity with newly-introduced material. This is reasonable and to be expected, as the supplements can be viewed more as expert source material for those who have achieved some mastery of the game’s basics. However, for starting players, it makes the characters that use the new systems (beast mastery for Rangers, the Shaman’s spirit companion, and the Monk’s full discipline mechanic, for instance) more complex to play. We had both the Monk and the Shaman in play on Saturday, and they took a little time to start fitting together their abilities. I’m immensely glad no one chose the Psion.
  • Monks are very, very cool. I want to play a Monk.
  • Monks might be broken, currently. I’ll have to take a closer look, but the Monk in the game unleashed an absolutely devastating combo of powers with the wise use of an action point that made my eyebrows rise quite dramatically. Further investigation is warranted.
  • Seven players is a big group. Larger than I ideally like, but not completely overwhelming. The simplicity of the adventure and the frame of the one-shot made it easier to handle than a regular campaign, but combat rounds took a long time, especially as everyone was trying to get familiar with what their pregens could do.
  • The Character Builder Quick Character feature is great, but it produces some odd results sometimes. There was a real preponderance of multi-classing among the characters it generated, and some strange combos of class and race, and some less-than-intuitive selections of powers and feats. Now, the idea of the optimal build for each class will change from player to player, but I feel comfortable in saying that none of the characters was really optimized.
  • We started late (around 10:00 pm), and had a large group of novice players, so I cut out the middle encounter of the delve, and didn’t beef up the encounters we did play to match the number of players. That let us get through the delve in about three hours, which is not too bad.
  • It was very foggy as I drove home, and I thought I might die.

As I said, the game went well, and I think everyone had fun. We’re talking about doing it again, and I’m up for that.

Post Tenebras Lux Report

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

It’s been a long week, and I was kind of tired and unfocused that evening, and I didn’t have a very good game.

One of the things that I notice is that, when I’m tired and not completely into the game, I wind up making bad calls. Nothing huge, really, but missed opportunities for making the game more fun for everyone. You say you’d like an example? Well, sure. Here are a couple.

First of all, we had another combat with a patrol of gnolls*, which is fine. The party is trying to scout out the Ghostlord’s tower in the Thornwaste, which I’ve decided is sort of a savanna-like plain with hedgerows of brambles, and some deep gullies and mesas in places. As part of the scouting and avoiding detection, I let everyone make either a Perception or Stealth check, and used a sort of conglomerate of the scores to decide what happened. Now, the heavily armoured paladin really blew a Perception check, so I decided that the group and a gnoll patrol just sort of stumbled on each other at point blank range, and each party was equally surprised. I drew a few hedgerows on the map after the group had placed themselves, so that I could have the paladin basically coming around the end of a hedgerow face-to-face with the gnoll patrol*. I was using the thorns and brambles essentially as walls, obstacles in the combat. I described them as between eight and twelve feet tall, dense and impenetrable. And then one of the players asked if he could push an enemy into the brambles to hurt or trap it.

And I said no, because I was thinking of the hedges as walls.

That was the wrong answer – the fight could have become very cool, with people pushing each other into the clinging, piercing thorns, setting them on fire, and stuff like that. I realized it during the fight, though by the time I did, we had got deep enough into things that changing my mind would have made things worse, by invalidating the tactics the group had come up with to deal with the environment. I consciously tried to say yes to stuff after that, letting them climb up on top of the tangles and such, but I think I really missed an opportunity for some interesting stuff with that single no. I need to remember to say yes more often.

Second example came later, as they first encountered outriders of the Stone Swimmer Tribe – a tribe of goliaths who raise bulettes. The group wanted to talk the tribe into meeting with the Grass Dragon Tribe (enemies of theirs) in order to forge an alliance against the gnolls and the oni who may be behind the army. Now, the way I’ve been running these, as I mentioned last time, is that I’ve been listening to what the characters are saying to the NPCs, and giving them a roll against an appropriate skill when they say something that has a chance of swaying the listeners to the party’s point of view. With this particular tribe, the chieftain has had her position undermined by the tribal shaman, who thinks she’s being a coward for not making a direct attack against the gnolls, despite the overwhelming odds, so there was an extra layer of complexity, as the chieftain couldn’t come out in support of the meeting and alliance until she felt she had enough support among the warriors to stand up to the shaman.

So, what happened? One of the characters, playing the cleric, upon first meeting the Stone Swimmer scouts, launches into a very eloquent appeal to them to ally with the Grass Dragons. He manages in his speech to lay out the prospect in terms that gets the Stone Swimmers’ backs up – uniting with the Grass Dragons, the tribe not being strong enough to protect their own children, the way they need outsiders to come show them the errors of their ways, all that kind of thing. And all of this coming out of the mouth of an outlander worshipper of a foreign god, and a city boy, at that.

Now, what I should have done is used this opportunity to show the reactions of the goliaths in such a way as to provide guidance to the party as to what arguments would and would not be useful. After all, except for one of the warriors being the husband of the chieftain, they were all just extras in the scene, not decision-makers, so I could have offered instruction by having some of them react badly, citing the specific insults, and having a couple of the calmer heads settling the hot-heads down and saying that these questions need to be settled by the chieftain and shaman. Maybe even have a friendly one offer some sotto voce advice to avoid certain approaches.

What I did was have the entire Stone Swimmer party take umbrage and start to dismiss the group, until the paladin piped in with one sentence – after the cleric’s lengthy argument – calling the tribe’s courage and love of their children into question, which got them in to see the chieftain.

See, I made the mistake I railed against back here. I responded as if the goliaths were actually proud tribal warriors being insulted by an outlander. I did “what the goliaths would do,” not what I needed to do to move the story forward. In doing so, I devalued the cleric’s contribution to the process, and I almost threw a very large obstacle into my own plot.

Things worked out in the end, but not as cleanly or as interestingly as they might have. The cleric’s Insight skill became integral in figuring out the divisions within the tribe, and the trophies that the party had collected from the gnolls managed to set the tribe’s shaman back on his heels when they were dropped in front of him in response to one of his challenges.

So, the game was not a bust, but it wasn’t one of the best sessions I’ve run. If I had been a little more attentive and focused on the things I mention above, I think it could have been great, but it turned out pretty mediocre.

Have to try harder. But that’s always the lesson, isn’t it?

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*2 deathpledged gnolls, 6 gnoll minions, and 3 krenshars – 1,225 xp, a level 5 encounter for 6 characters. Back

*I can rhyme! Back

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Not a whole lot of plot progress in this session of the Storm Point game.

I gave my players the option at the start of the session of continuing with the attempts to delay the advancing army or jumping ahead to the next phase of the adventure – the defense of the dwarf mines near Storm Point. They decided to stick with the army, but wanted to devote their efforts toward clearing the path of the humanoid force of civilians and livestock, both to keep the civilians safe and to deny the enemy the resources. There was even some discussion of burning the fields in order to do the whole Russian-falling-back-to-Moscow thing that messed up both Napoleon and Hitler.

They decided not to go quite that far, though.

So, the flew around on their hippogriffs, warning people, and generally clearing the line of advance. I threw one encounter with a raiding party at them, and then recalled them to the mines.

Couple of interesting observations from the game. First, the addition of the hippogriff mounts did a fair bit to enhance the group’s combat effectiveness. Even the characters that didn’t use the mounts a whole bunch were able to drop out of the sky on the first round and attack, which they liked. And having a couple of extra targets on the table helps to dilute the damage that the enemy dishes out.

And hippogriffs bite really hard.

The raiding party was a 7th-level encounter for my players*, which is a party of six 5th-level characters. I expected it to be a tough, desperate fight, but it was pretty much a cakewalk. I’m going to have to take a closer read of the DMG and PHB rules for mounts, and check out the info on companion creatures in the forthcoming DMG2 to make sure I’m handling things right. I imagine that I will need to add some extra monsters to the fights where the hippogriffs play a role.

The other observation is a little more unsettling. It seems my players are one thin excuse away from vicarious Vietnam flashbacks. After killing the raiding party, they decided to drag the bodies back into the path of the advancing army. Fine. Then they started talking about arranging the bodies as a warning. Okay… Then they started talking about mutilating the corpses in graphic and obscene ways to instill fear in the enemy.

I drew the line at this point, stating unequivocally that doing so was an evil act*, thereby crushing their desire to recreate Apocalypse Now in my heroic fantasy game.

I swear, I gotta get those guys to watch less TV and fewer movies.

And that was it for another session.

*2 dire boars, 1 ogre savage, 6 orc warriors, and 1 orc eye of Gruumsh, 1,900 xp. Back

*”It’s not evil. The American forces did things like this in Vietnam.” Pause. “Okay. I see your point.” Back

Post Tenebras Lux Report

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
2 Comments

Latest session of Post Tenebras Lux last night. I was scrambling during the afternoon to prep, because I discovered that my updated adventure notes were on a computer that I did not have access to at that time – I had forgotten to e-mail them to myself. That meant I had to try and rebuild the information from memory in a couple of hours.

Now, the encounters weren’t too difficult to pull together, but I had notes on things that could happen in each little village the party passed through on their journey down to the Thornwaste to check out the rumours of the returned Ghostlord. I also had extensive notes on the nomad tribes of the Thornwaste, with political factions and character notes for important nomads and, I dunno, names and stuff, most of which I just couldn’t recall off the top of my head.

I was able to pull together a few things, though. The characters decided not to go directly to the Thornwaste, but to detour up to Vraath Keep to speak to the original Heroes of Brindol who destroyed the Ghostlord a dozen years previously. This gave one of the new players a chance to bring some of her background into play, as she had written up that she was the daughter of one of the Heroes of Brindol and had been trained by another. We had a bit of nice roleplaying there, with some insight into Jaks’s character and history, as well as getting details of the destruction of the Ghostlord.

When they headed down to the Thornwaste after that, they made some History and Insight rolls to see if they knew anything about the tribes in the area. As is becoming usual with this group, they aced the knowledge rolls, and learned about the three main nomad tribes:

  • The Grass Dragons, a tribe of human nomads who breed and raise drakes.
  • The Blood Hawks, a tribe of halflings who train birds to aid them in hunting, scouting, and combat.
  • The Stone Swimmers, a tribe of goliaths who have domesticated a number of land sharks.

The also got an idea of the territories each tribe claimed, and some insight into the nomad culture – somewhat isolationist and xenophobic, with a strong warrior culture, given to raiding each other and nearby farms, but also willing to trade from time to time. With this information, the group decided to speak with the Grass Dragons, the nearest tribe, to try and get more information.

Now, I had been going back and forth on how to do this – the skill challenge rules certainly work well for this sort of thing, but when I use them explicitly in my games, it always seems kind of jarring, like a move away from roleplaying to a very gamist system. I wanted the discussions with the tribes to be more fluid and natural for the players, so I decided not to use my normal method for skill challenges.

What I did was play the chieftain of the Grass Dragons as an older man, a traditionalist, a strong leader, but very resistant to change. Also, given that the situation involved a newly-arrived tribe of gnolls camping around the Ghostlord’s tower and stealing the children of the tribes for conversion into undead slaves, I decided that he felt helpless and angry, ready to lash out at anyone who stepped wrong.

And then I just ran it as a roleplaying encounter. Well, mostly. Secretly, it was a skill challenge, but I never told anyone that. For the most part, I just let the party talk, and replied as the chieftain would. When one of the party members said or did something that had the potential of winning some support from the tribe, I asked them to make a roll on whatever persuasive skill seemed most appropriate at the time and kept track of successes, describing the reaction of the tribe.

They got off to a bit of a rough start, what with the chieftain being especially prickly, and not very receptive to these outsiders coming into his lands and telling him that he needed to abandon the traditional ways of his people to unite with the other nomad tribes if they wanted to be able to drive out the Dog Ghost tribe – what they called the gnolls. A couple of missteps got interpreted as being threatening or insulting, and only backpedaling and apologizing, along with the intervention of the tribes shaman, got things settled down enough for the chieftain to agree to meet with the other tribal chiefs if they could be persuaded.

The information the party gained was that hundreds of gnolls were camped around the Ghostlord’s tower, and that they were sending out raiding and culling parties against all the tribes. No one tribe was strong enough to stand up to them, and the nomads were faced with the choice of leaving the area again or being killed off.

The party decided to go have a look at the Dog Ghost territory on their way down to the Stone Swimmer tribe, both to see what sort of force they were up against, and to try and get some trophies to lend weight to their words when they spoke to the other tribes. To oblige them and start showing some of the complications that await their investigation, I gave them a combat encounter with a Dog Ghost culling party.

In addition to the two gnoll huntmasters and four gnoll minions, I threw in two witherlings from the MM2, describing them as mummified children with dog skulls where their heads should be, in order to show the type of nastiness the gnolls were getting up to. Leading them all was an oni devourer disguised as a gnoll, which came as a bit of a shock to the players, and I think has a couple of them asking questions about what’s actually going on here. The whole encounter came to 1,250 xp, which is a level 5 encounter for 6 players.

So, now the party has the following information:

  1. Lights have been seen in the Ghostlord’s tower.
  2. The nomad tribes have been raiding farther afield. Some of this might be the action of the gnolls.
  3. A large army of gnolls has encamped around the Ghostlord’s tower.
  4. When the Heroes of Brindol destroyed the Ghostlord and his power sources, they split the Pool of Rebirth before breaking it’s connection to the Heart of the Lion, causing the enchanted waters to spill into the ground of the Thornwaste before rendering it powerless.
  5. The gnolls are creating undead servants.
  6. There was at least one oni involved, leading a party of gnolls.

This has got them thinking and making guesses about what’s actually going on. It’s also getting them a little worried.

Which I like.

All in all, despite the fact that I didn’t have my complete notes for the session, the game went pretty well, and everyone seemed to have fun. I’m looking forward to the next session.