Principia Discordia

Yesterday, I ran my first D&D game in probably six or eight months. It was really nice to get back to rolling 20s and breaking hearts.

I'm putting together this campaign called Ave Sestina. It takes place in a fictional version of medieval Venice.

I'm experimenting with Obsidian Portal, a website you can use to plan and document your D&D campaign. So far, I've found it incredibly useful to help organize and index the campaign setting -- you can have a wiki, a page for each character, and a map of your game set up like google maps (with location markers and wiki links!). Here's what I've built so far: http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/ave-sestina/

I'm jazzed because the players really ate up the idea of an intrigue based campaign. Lots of spying, politics, and not knowing if you're actually working for the good guys. Venice is a great setting for it too, because of the carnivale masks. I love the idea of a city where everybody owns these elaborate masks, and there are actually state-designated times when you're required to wear them (carnivale, voting, stuff like that).

So far, everybody's just built characters they wanted to play, rather than designing for what the party needs. So we haven't worried too hard about not having a leader-class (read: healer). We'll see how it goes though!

I am most eager for a particular friend of mine to come play. He's formed an opinion of D&D 4th edition as being like an MMO, and being bereft of roleplay. (BTW: this is coming from a guy who plays a D&D 3.5 campaign set in the world of warcraft) But I find this silly, the amount of RP is determined by your group, not by the rules. So I'm excited to show him that yes, this is still D&D, and in fact, there are certain things about 4th edition which are big improvements on previous editions.

Sounds like a ton of fun!  I hope I get to be in a 4th ed game that reverses my feelings about it from the first time (the guy ran a tedious little module and wasn't very fun about it, so I'm hoping to try it again with a better dm). 

Also I am totally going to steal that concept for a story now.

Character creation day went MUCH smoother than any other time I've run one. I owe this to the online character generator. Normally, I'd have the player sit down with a pile of books and walk him through character gen step by step. But if you make your character on a laptop, it goes wayyyyy faster. It shows you all the relevant choices from multiple books. It automatically calculates your to-hit and damage numbers. And then it generates a PDF of your character sheet and power cards.

One of my friends loves the game but hates the math. Every time it's her turn, she's always recalculating her numbers.. "Intelligence modifier plus orb bonus... is 5..." but with the character generator, it'll give you a PDF which has a playing card for each of your powers, including all the numbers you need. No need to even crack a book open. She now has a card which reminds her that when she throws a thunder wave, she's rolling 1d20 + 5 to hit and rolling 1d8+3 (lightning) damage. So much more efficient than looking up the fucking Confusion table every time a spell references it!

I also got a reminder of my favorite addition to 4th edition: minions!

Minions are creatures designed to be encountered in crowds. They're really easy to run because they take 0 effort to track. When you're building an encounter, four minions are worth the XP of one normal creature. All minions have one hit point, so you don't have to keep a hit point list for each monster. And they do static amounts of damage, so the minion's turn goes really quickly even though you might be moving like 12 different pieces.

We had a great zombie fight yesterday. There were 12 zombie rotters (minions), two zombies, and a ghoul. The rotters would grab you and hold you in place, thereby setting up the ghoul to skitter out the shadows and tag you with a paralyzing bite. Things looked really dark for the party, but then the dragonborn wizard dropped a daily spell which cleared 6 minions off the board in one attack. Suddenly everybody was breathing a bit easier.

This is another keystone of 4th edition fights - the monsters often have strong complimentary abilities that make them work really well as a team. The PCs, if they don't do their jobs, can get overwhelmed really quickly. But things like Daily Powers and Action Points can swing a fight back in the other direction. The PCs experience an "oh shit!" moment, and then somebody drops a daily, changes the tide, and feels like a hero.

I love the idea of minions.  Sometimes you just want to leave a ridiculous heap of dead in your wake.

The way you describe it the game sounds a lot more...game-ish than other systems I've used.  You know? 

Most combat systems I've seen don't really worry about dramatic tension-creating dynamics. 

Venice is a great location for an intrigue-based D&D game. Here's why:

• Nobody's really in charge. There are numerous factions which control different aspects of the city. It's partially democratic - people vote by neighborhood (in masks!) to elect 41 council members. The 41 council members select the members of the secretive "council of 10". Then the council of 10 selects the Doge, the leader of Venice. For my game I've paired it down to a council of 6 (much easier to keep track of, and the number 6 is a recurring theme in this campaign) But what it comes down to is that the government isn't all on the same team.
• This creates a lot of potential drama in the city. Some of the city's problems should get resolved by politician and bureaucrats... but they have more invested in making their rivals look bad. So the players may think they're on an altruistic hero mission, but it turns out they're screwing some noble who worked very hard to make things this fucked up
• Masks - I mentioned this upthread, but I think there's something very romantic and mysterious about a place called the City of Masks. In my version of Venice, Carnivale is called Festival, and last a month. And it turns out that some of the people walking around the city in those elegant masks aren't even people - some are fae, or shadows. All masks are made by a secretive guilt called the masquerati. It was a group you had to be born into. In my game, masks will be special magic items you can improve over time. Each character will develop a unique mask which compliments his or her personality.
• Lots of excuses for combat in the city. The waterways are an avenue for monsters and pirates. There will be a lovecraftian element which involves creatures from the Far Planes which have been crawling into the city via the canals.
• Venice has a lot of history, much of it has been forgotten. In particular, I want to focus on the bridges of Ave Sestina.. There will be six major bridges which each have their own history. When each bridge was built, somebody made a pact with a powerful being who agreed to protect the city in some particular way. These pacts have to be renewed every few hundred years or some biblical plague shit happens. But there was a major fire over a century ago, which destroyed many of the records at the Lyceum Ars. The players will have to learn about each pact, then visit the lord of each bridge. Some of the lords live in the shadowfell or feywild versions of Ave Sestina, and may require the PCs to go find something obscure to sacrifice for them.

Sounds like lots of fun Cram!

I'm really enjoying the Dark Sun chronicle my friend Mark is running atm on 4th ed. But seeing as i never played D&D before 4th ed, it doesnt make much difference to me.

Athas is a brilliant world to play on.

Its more fun than my Vampire larp game atm, of which I am taking some time off due to some of the other players gettting on my tits.

Quote from: Sigmatic on December 06, 2010, 08:39:01 PM
I love the idea of minions.  Sometimes you just want to leave a ridiculous heap of dead in your wake.

The way you describe it the game sounds a lot more...game-ish than other systems I've used.  You know? 

Most combat systems I've seen don't really worry about dramatic tension-creating dynamics. 

Yeah, the 4th ed rules have very gamey combat... They've done a good job of giving each player a lot of good tactical options. Gone are the days that the fighter's only move is to attack - now every character has at least

-two different "at will" moves they can do any time they want
-a few slightly more powerful moves that they can use "once per encounter"
-a few really nasty powers they can use "once per day"

And a lot of those powers reinforce your "party role".. For example, the Warlord class (probably my favorite 4th ed class) is a martial leader. His job is to fight, but also to keep the team up and positioned in the right place. When a warlord heals you, it's not a surge of divine magic which knits your wounds, it's a guy that you trust telling you "You can do it" - and that gives you the confidence you need to keep fighting.

One of the warlord's "at will" abilities is called Wolf Pack Tactics. The warlord makes an attack, and if he hits, one ally standing next to him or his target gets to take a free 5-foot step (called a shift in 4th ed). This means that when you're playing a warlord, your ally's position becomes a factor in which target to pick. A warlord working with a rogue can be devastating, because the warlord is able to help the rogue be in the perfect position. Furthermore, a warlord can give up his standard action to give another ally a standard attack. So if the rogue is teamed up with the warlord, the rogue is going to be landing sick backstabs twice per round.

Some of my favorite 4th ed fights are ones that we use teamwork in a way to achieve results you'd never get as an individual character. Like there's a wizard spell called Acid Mire which creates a 20 x 20 puddle of acid on the ground. Anybody who falls prone in that zone takes acid damage. So when the wizard casts this spell, everybody has a job: keep the monsters inside the mire, and trip them as much as possible. I had a barbarian character who learned a rage that would knock monsters prone specifically to compliment this spell. So before the fight, I'd talk to the wizard and see what spells he had prepared to get an idea of what kind of rage I should use. If we were able to capitalize on the "trip on acid" gambit, we could make short work of the monster party.

Quote from: Rainy Day Pixie on December 06, 2010, 09:00:11 PM
Sounds like lots of fun Cram!

I'm really enjoying the Dark Sun chronicle my friend Mark is running atm on 4th ed. But seeing as i never played D&D before 4th ed, it doesnt make much difference to me.

Athas is a brilliant world to play on.

Its more fun than my Vampire larp game atm, of which I am taking some time off due to some of the other players gettting on my tits.

I love Athas too! It's such a grim, gritty setting, it really makes you feel like you're in some Frank Frazetta artwork.


Sorry to hear about the players at your vampire game.

Quote from: Cramulus on December 06, 2010, 03:20:52 PM
So I'm excited to show him that yes, this is still D&D, and in fact, there are certain things about 4th edition which are big improvements on previous editions.

Gotta disagree with that.  4th Ed is dumbed down to a ridiculous degree, IMO...The skills alone make me wince.

Oh, and everyone already had loads of options in combat, including fighters.

I like the Venice setting, though.  Not my style, but it's different, and should allow for some hilarity.

You should consider allowing non-evil assassins (non-Good, obviously), if 4th Ed still has such a thing.

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on December 06, 2010, 09:22:48 PM

Quote from: Cramulus on December 06, 2010, 03:20:52 PM
So I'm excited to show him that yes, this is still D&D, and in fact, there are certain things about 4th edition which are big improvements on previous editions.

Gotta disagree with that.  4th Ed is dumbed down to a ridiculous degree, IMO...The skills alone make me wince.

Oh, and everyone already had loads of options in combat, including fighters.

see - I see it as streamlining, not dumbing down. If it were just a dumbed down version of 3.5, the game would be pretty simple and you wouldn't have very interesting tactical choices. But in my experience, 4th ed manages to have depth without complexity - that is, the rules are much easier to learn and keep track of, but that's not because of a lack of things to do or niches to build towards. I compare it to the old Chinese board game Go - there aren't a lot of rules (the D&D quick start rules fit into a 7 page booklet), but the game's still very tactically challenging.

I loved D&D 3x.. now I love 4th edition. I think they're apples and oranges - both games shine in different ways. My favorite thing about 3rd edition was that you had a lot more character build options, and the ability to come up with totally broken overpowered characters by making good feat and class / prestige class choices. 4th edition also has broken choices, but to find them you generally need to build complimentary teams, not just broken individual characters.

I haven't played 4th edition at higher levels, but I've DM'd 3.5 campaigns from level 1-21. And I do have to say that 3rd edition gets very wonky past level 14ish. The CR system breaks down and requires a skilled DM to construct challenging but sane encounters. As a DM, I'd often find myself in situations where I'd written a long challenging dungeon, and the players figured out that they can just scry the location of the treasure, teleport there, grab the thing, and then teleport out, solving the entire dungeon in a mere 3 rounds. I liked that the game allowed this kind of ingenuity, but it often resulted in this weird narrative arms race where the winner was the one who had the larger portion of the rulebook memorized.  :lol:

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on December 06, 2010, 09:26:01 PM
I like the Venice setting, though.  Not my style, but it's different, and should allow for some hilarity.

You should consider allowing non-evil assassins (non-Good, obviously), if 4th Ed still has such a thing.

most def! Medieval italy is the perfect place for assassins.

Historically, Venice itself conducted much of its foreign diplomacy through assassination.  One particular year, I believe, its ruling council paid for 200 successful assassinations, including one carried out by a priest.

I hate to ask, but...How many unsuccessful assassinations?

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on December 06, 2010, 09:26:01 PM
I like the Venice setting, though.  Not my style, but it's different, and should allow for some hilarity.

You should consider allowing non-evil assassins (non-Good, obviously), if 4th Ed still has such a thing.

Assassins do exist as a class, though currently you need a subscription to DDI to access it.

At least prior to the Essentials line of products there were no alignment restrictions on any class.

From a DM's perspective 4th is awesome.  I've never had an easier time running encounters straight out of the MM when my players take an unexpected turn.

Take into account the Monster Builder utility and building (combat) encounters is also a brilliant cake walk.

Quote from: Sigmatic on December 07, 2010, 02:22:10 AM
I hate to ask, but...How many unsuccessful assassinations?

Wasn't recorded, as far as I could see.  The Council preferred to work on a bounty system, rather than set targets, so the records only indicate the successes.

random: http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Katanas_are_Underpowered_in_d20

Quote from: Cramulus on December 07, 2010, 03:21:23 AM
random: http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Katanas_are_Underpowered_in_d20

:lulz:

OMFG


MASTERWORK HONEY BEER!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Incidentally, I decided that a katana should be 1d8 18-20/x2 and the 'falchion' should be 1d10 18-20/x2 back when 3rd ed came out.

Quote from: Cramulus on December 07, 2010, 03:21:23 AM
random: http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Katanas_are_Underpowered_in_d20

That hit full on awesome by the time it got to duct tape.

I'm convinced I'm just not nerdy enough for DnD. I'm struggling enough with the 3rd ed game I'm in. :(

I found that link because I was looking for homebrew katana rules

this one guy really wanted to be a rouge with a katana. I told him he should just take Exotic Weapon Prof: Bastard Sword, and we'll treat bastard swords as if they've always been katanas, and he looked somewhat disappointed. So I said I'd look around and maybe houserule something.

And I found literally page upon page of the same kind of fanwank you see at that link. No joke, the top 5 hits I found were all variations on some kid saying that if you plant your feet right, a katana should be able to cut through an armored horse and knight who are charging at you.

After reading the 1d4chan post I decided that he's getting a katanaesque bastard sword.

I think we should scientifically test this hypothesis, just to be sure.

The kid who thinks the katana is a Magic Super Slicer gets to be the one holding it as the knight charges.  But to be fair, the knight is allowed a lance and longsword as well.

Quote from: Cramulus on December 06, 2010, 09:53:33 PM
I haven't played 4th edition at higher levels, but I've DM'd 3.5 campaigns from level 1-21. And I do have to say that 3rd edition gets very wonky past level 14ish. The CR system breaks down and requires a skilled DM to construct challenging but sane encounters.

Yeah, that's a good point.  It requires time and effort to make an EL16 encounter that isn't autodeath or a cakewalk.  But it can be done, and it lets me vent the nastier parts of my brain.  IF you have the time to do it, I think it's actually quite rewarding.

On the other hand, it can be silly.  Not long ago, I created a CR4 chicken just for cheap kicks.  If I actually kill a player with it, I shall webcam my TPK Victory Dance and post it on Youtube.

Quote from: Cramulus on December 06, 2010, 09:53:33 PM
As a DM, I'd often find myself in situations where I'd written a long challenging dungeon, and the players figured out that they can just scry the location of the treasure, teleport there, grab the thing, and then teleport out, solving the entire dungeon in a mere 3 rounds. I liked that the game allowed this kind of ingenuity, but it often resulted in this weird narrative arms race where the winner was the one who had the larger portion of the rulebook memorized.  :lol:

Oh, there's ways of dealing with that.  Forbiddance, dimensional anchor, environment, etc.  Or simply nondetection (A favorite of mine...If you're the big scary lich, are you REALLY going to let people scry your favorite toys?  Would you as a player?).

Quote from: Cramulus on December 07, 2010, 02:51:03 PM
I found that link because I was looking for homebrew katana rules

this one guy really wanted to be a rouge with a katana. I told him he should just take Exotic Weapon Prof: Bastard Sword, and we'll treat bastard swords as if they've always been katanas, and he looked somewhat disappointed. So I said I'd look around and maybe houserule something.

And I found literally page upon page of the same kind of fanwank you see at that link. No joke, the top 5 hits I found were all variations on some kid saying that if you plant your feet right, a katana should be able to cut through an armored horse and knight who are charging at you.

After reading the 1d4chan post I decided that he's getting a katanaesque bastard sword.

Treat it as bastard scimitar, if scimitars have different stats from longswords in 4th.

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on December 07, 2010, 03:30:00 PM

Quote from: Cramulus on December 06, 2010, 09:53:33 PM
As a DM, I'd often find myself in situations where I'd written a long challenging dungeon, and the players figured out that they can just scry the location of the treasure, teleport there, grab the thing, and then teleport out, solving the entire dungeon in a mere 3 rounds. I liked that the game allowed this kind of ingenuity, but it often resulted in this weird narrative arms race where the winner was the one who had the larger portion of the rulebook memorized.  :lol:

Oh, there's ways of dealing with that.  Forbiddance, dimensional anchor, environment, etc.  Or simply nondetection (A favorite of mine...If you're the big scary lich, are you REALLY going to let people scry your favorite toys?  Would you as a player?).

This.  I know from playing some of the more tactical mod installations of Baldurs Gate II, allowing enemies to think like players makes even the simplest encounters much more deadly.  I think there is less obvious ways of cheesing in 3rd and 4th edition than 2nd edition (Immunity to Magic Weapons, Stoneskin, Immunity: Divination or Abjuration, Improved Invisibility, Mirror Image, Fireshield Red and Blue, Minor Globe of Invulnerability, Minor Spell Sequencer, Chain Contingency, Improved Alaracity etc), but I'm sure half an hour with a spell list and some imagination could make it much more difficult for the players without it being impossible.

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on December 07, 2010, 03:30:00 PM

Quote from: Cramulus on December 06, 2010, 09:53:33 PM
As a DM, I'd often find myself in situations where I'd written a long challenging dungeon, and the players figured out that they can just scry the location of the treasure, teleport there, grab the thing, and then teleport out, solving the entire dungeon in a mere 3 rounds. I liked that the game allowed this kind of ingenuity, but it often resulted in this weird narrative arms race where the winner was the one who had the larger portion of the rulebook memorized.  :lol:

Oh, there's ways of dealing with that.  Forbiddance, dimensional anchor, environment, etc.  Or simply nondetection (A favorite of mine...If you're the big scary lich, are you REALLY going to let people scry your favorite toys?  Would you as a player?).

I've been trying to feel out this balance with stuff I'm working up right now.  As much as I want they players to go through what I've layed out, fight interesting stuff and find cool shit, I don't want to railroad them into it.  

Accepting that PC's may spend 30 minutes poking at a funny looking chair, then COMPLETELY miss somethign else in another room I put a lot of thought into is one things I'll have to deal with here.

Quote from: Richter on December 07, 2010, 04:03:18 PM

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on December 07, 2010, 03:30:00 PM

Quote from: Cramulus on December 06, 2010, 09:53:33 PM
As a DM, I'd often find myself in situations where I'd written a long challenging dungeon, and the players figured out that they can just scry the location of the treasure, teleport there, grab the thing, and then teleport out, solving the entire dungeon in a mere 3 rounds. I liked that the game allowed this kind of ingenuity, but it often resulted in this weird narrative arms race where the winner was the one who had the larger portion of the rulebook memorized.  :lol:

Oh, there's ways of dealing with that.  Forbiddance, dimensional anchor, environment, etc.  Or simply nondetection (A favorite of mine...If you're the big scary lich, are you REALLY going to let people scry your favorite toys?  Would you as a player?).

I've been trying to feel out this balance with stuff I'm working up right now.  As much as I want they players to go through what I've layed out, fight interesting stuff and find cool shit, I don't want to railroad them into it.  

Accepting that PC's may spend 30 minutes poking at a funny looking chair, then COMPLETELY miss somethign else in another room I put a lot of thought into is one things I'll have to deal with here.

Well, there's two approaches:  Plot wagon and plot hammer.  I can elaborate, if you like.

Quote from: Cramulus on December 06, 2010, 03:20:52 PM
He's formed an opinion of D&D 4th edition as being like an MMO, and being bereft of roleplay.

Isn't that statement kind of redundant?

Sounds awesome, Cram. I'll DEFINITELY be trying Obsidian Portal for the shit I'm trying to organize.

Quote from: Cain on December 07, 2010, 03:53:17 PM

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on December 07, 2010, 03:30:00 PM

Quote from: Cramulus on December 06, 2010, 09:53:33 PM
As a DM, I'd often find myself in situations where I'd written a long challenging dungeon, and the players figured out that they can just scry the location of the treasure, teleport there, grab the thing, and then teleport out, solving the entire dungeon in a mere 3 rounds. I liked that the game allowed this kind of ingenuity, but it often resulted in this weird narrative arms race where the winner was the one who had the larger portion of the rulebook memorized.  :lol:

Oh, there's ways of dealing with that.  Forbiddance, dimensional anchor, environment, etc.  Or simply nondetection (A favorite of mine...If you're the big scary lich, are you REALLY going to let people scry your favorite toys?  Would you as a player?).

This.  I know from playing some of the more tactical mod installations of Baldurs Gate II, allowing enemies to think like players makes even the simplest encounters much more deadly.  I think there is less obvious ways of cheesing in 3rd and 4th edition than 2nd edition (Immunity to Magic Weapons, Stoneskin, Immunity: Divination or Abjuration, Improved Invisibility, Mirror Image, Fireshield Red and Blue, Minor Globe of Invulnerability, Minor Spell Sequencer, Chain Contingency, Improved Alaracity etc), but I'm sure half an hour with a spell list and some imagination could make it much more difficult for the players without it being impossible.

in the last long-running campaign I ran, this was a major problem for the players - their enemy was a sorcerer who used to be on their side, so he knew all about their plans, and he still had spies in their city. They thought he was a conjurer, but it turns out he was an illusionist. A number of their encounters with him were baffling to them until they figured out that he was summoning illusionary monsters and altering the terrain with illusions, not evocation. That NPC had a lot of tricks, I tried to play him very intelligently, and it kept them on their toes.

In one encounter, they were fighting him in the middle of this lava pit. And the players had to spend all this prep getting ready to fight while waist deep in lava, making sure he didn't gust of wind them off their flying carpet, that kind of stuff. And it turns out that the enemy was actually just invisible, flying about 20 feet above the lava in the corner, and he was making them fight illusionary versions of himself. They'd capture him and it'd turn out he was a simulacrum.

The party had an imp which had been following them around since a level 1 dungeon. And there was a period of time that they didn't see the imp, during that time, he was actually becoming the illusionist's familiar. So fast forward to level 14, the part was getting ready to go kick the illusionist's ass, but they knew they were getting scried on - so they'd only discuss THE PLAN while they were cloaked in nondetection dust, but of course the imp would just come ask if he could sit in on the conversation too. They'd oblige, and he'd report everything to his boss. At the end of the campaign when they found out Malzizipox had been betraying them all along, they flipped out! It was one of those twists which made perfect sense in hindsight; I had been dropping clues left and right that they just hadn't recognized.

Once they had figured out that Mogadore was an illusionist, they were able to prepare themselves using better divinations and detection spells. It was a good boss fight because they totally would have lost if not for that clue.

The campaign climax involved a fight against a great wyrm red dragon on the astral plane. (The dragon's name was Tia Poxa Kor, or TPK for short) (TPK is nerd slang for "total party kill", an intimidating thing to name your end boss) It's nuts, because in 3rd ed, on the astral plane, anybody can fly, and anybody can cast one spell per round as a free action. Dragons are essentially 20th level sorcerers in addition to firebreathing beasts, and on the astral plane the dragon doesn't have to choose between breathing fire or casting a limited wish. So it was a super weird fight, everybody was casting 2 high level spells per round. Half of the PCs had the leadership feat, so they had mid level cohorts and dozens of low level followers in the fight with them, all of which ate fire in round two, turning up the fight's emotional intensity by several notches. Eventually they capped the dragon, not through damage, but by hitting it with 15 negative levels, imposing a rough -15 to all the dragon's rolls and reducing him to a level 6 or 7 spellcaster.

Quote from: TGB on December 07, 2010, 03:35:08 AM
Incidentally, I decided that a katana should be 1d8 18-20/x2 and the 'falchion' should be 1d10 18-20/x2 back when 3rd ed came out.

As an exotic weapon?  Interesting, I think there actually isn't a weapon filling that slot.

An illusionist pretending to be an envoker/conjurer is a good one.  A similar good twist might have been having a psionicist or Shadow Mage in the same position - especially the latter, since their magic works rather differently, but gives bonuses to (IIRC) illusion and enchantment spells, allowing for similar methods in misleading them.

Quote from: Requia ☣ on December 26, 2010, 09:27:35 PM

Quote from: TGB on December 07, 2010, 03:35:08 AM
Incidentally, I decided that a katana should be 1d8 18-20/x2 and the 'falchion' should be 1d10 18-20/x2 back when 3rd ed came out.

As an exotic weapon?  Interesting, I think there actually isn't a weapon filling that slot.

The katana would be a martial twohand or exotic one hand and the 'falchion' would stay a martial twohand. This all from memory, mind you.

Quote from: CramOnce they had figured out that Mogadore was an illusionist, they were able to prepare themselves using better divinations and detection spells. It was a good boss fight because they totally would have lost if not for that clue.

:lulz: :lulz: Oh, you.

I ran session two yesterday. It was a great event!

Props: I think visual aids really stimulate the imagination and help people visualize the world we're in. I really enjoy making 3D terrain and other thing to spice up the battle board. We just got a new TV so there are all these styrofoam packing blocks lying around the apartment. I printed out a bunch of high res images of Venetian Facades (http://www.google.com/images?client=opera&rls=en&q=venetian%20facade&oe=utf-8&channel=suggest&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi) and taped them to the blocks so I could have accurate looking building blocks.

When the players have an encounter in the streets of Ave Sestina, I use 1 inch grid paper (which represents water), and laying dungeon tiles (representing streets) and my homemade building blocks. This way there are three levels of altitude in every combat - players can climb up onto roofs to snipe at opponents, they can get pushed into the canals, or they can just go toe to toe with melee on the street. I'll post some pix later, because the set up is really cool!


Skill Challenge: At this game I had the opportunity to use an unusual skill challenge called a Branching Challenge. For those of you who haven't played 4th ed, Skill Challenges are a way of resolving complex problems through roleplaying and the D&D skill system. In a Branching challenge, there are several distinct ways to solve the problem, and the outcome is determined by which skills the PCs use.

In this challenge, the players had to get access to the Lower Stacks, the guarded library sealed away underneath the Lyceum Ars guild tower. They were looking for a certain book down there, but the guildmistress wouldn't just give them access, even though they had a writ from a Councilman.

There are two basic ways of solving this challenge:

Legal Entry - convince the guildmistress to give you access. This used skills like Diplomacy, History, and Arcana. Insight checks can give you bonuses on these roles and can unlock Religion as a way of gaining legal entry. (an insightful player would sense that the guildmistress is a servant of Ioun, and is thereby sworn to share knowledge, not ferret it away, and could negotiate with her based on that)

Illegal entry - sneak into the tower! This used skills like Thievery, Dungeoneering, and Acrobatics. Perception checks can give you bonuses on these roles and can unlock Stealth as a skill that can be used in this challenge. (the character spots a route they can sneak through)

A few skills could be used for either goal, like Intimidate.

In order to access the tower, you have to get 12 successes at any of these skills. We played with 10 minute rounds, and every player was allowed to do one "thing" per round. Whether they made a legal or illegal entry into the tower was determined by the number of successes in the "legal entry" or "illegal entry" category.

Had they failed the challenge, they still would have gotten into the Lower Stacks, but there would have been some guardians waiting out side for them when they came back out.

In practice, it worked out really well. The mage and the warlord hung out in the guild hall chatting up the guildmistress while the rest of the party scouted for a back way into the tower and a route down to the lower stacks. Rather than mapping out the tower, we narrated it through the skill challenge system. In the end the party was ALMOST granted legal entry, but they decided that it would be more fun to break in, so the chatty characters eventually joined the stealth team. When they got in, the score was 7 to 5 (illegal to legal).


In previous D&D editions, you'd tend to have the high Charisma character make all the diplomacy checks while the other characters at the table hang around until it is their turn to do their thing. I like the skill challenge system because it gets even the hack-and-slash members of the party thinking about how they can help. (the tiefling paladin in the party tends to keep his mouth shut in social encounters, but we managed to coax some dialogue out of him when he realized his Intimidate skill was actually really useful here)

Cool!

I kind of really want to try out a 4th ed campaign now, maybe even just a one-shot game. At this point my nerd resistance to 4th ed has devolved from "3.5 is teh BETTAR!" to "I don't wanna spend money on new books." Which is, of course, circumvented by swiping them from the internets.

Nice AP account Cram. I haven't had a chance to play in a 4ed game, but the skill challenges are definitely an interesting concept. They seemed a bit simple at first, and I didn't know how the X successes before Y failures thing worked out in actual play (BTW, did this Branching Challenge have a Failure threshold, or where they just working one set of successes over the other?)

Seems to have a lot in common to the 'indie' Set-Stakes-Then-Roll advice from some of the weird games I've ran, but with multiple rolls.

yeah, you fail the challenge if you rack up three failures. Which sounds like it would be pretty easy to fumble, but the difficulty classes are pretty low though. And I give bonuses based on your RP. So in the end it ended up being 12 successes and 1 failure, when the rogue rolled a 1 trying to sneak through the tower. But since it was the group's first failure, he didn't make enough of a mess to jeopardize the mission.



I ran another skill challenge where they had to solve a logic puzzle. The puzzle had five clues, and involved finding out the names of four guildmasters, and the order that they joined the Lyceum Ars. The puzzle took place in a big room with book shelves along the corners (and lots of obstacles in the room to mix it up). Each book shelf had one clue, and you had to make a DC 11 history or arcana roll to find the right book. Meanwhile, spiders were attacking, creating webs all over the room, et cetera. When a spider died it had two baby spiderling minions in its belly which hatched and attacked.

So essentially in this challenge, you need five successes, and if you fail a challenge you can re-test for that shelf, but there's no failure threshold. In the original plan for the encounter, spiders would be respawning constantly until they solved the puzzle, but by the end of the fight people were getting restless so the spider eggs stopped hatching. Great puzzle though, it was one of those encounters that had something for everybody.

Research, a Logic Puzzle, and Combat in the SAME SCENE!


:evil::1fap:


And I've been wanting to use "Gauntlet" style monster generators for a while now. Nice touch.

you can do some very gauntlet stuff with minions. For the XP value of one monster, you get 4 minions. Minions die in one hit. They can be nasty too, because they help the tougher monsters by flanking, grabbing you, giving you a round worth of fire vulnerability, stuff like that. People who can do area effects (like wizards) can clear a lot of minions in one attack.


here's some of the city blocks for Ave Sestina


(http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a95/discordman/avesestinahouses.jpg)

--this is supposed to resemble Venice.

some dungeon setup

(http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a95/discordman/avesestinadungeon.jpg)

Bad Ass.

Quote from: Cramulus on January 26, 2011, 06:24:32 PM
you can do some very gauntlet stuff with minions. For the XP value of one monster, you get 4 minions. Minions die in one hit. They can be nasty too, because they help the tougher monsters by flanking, grabbing you, giving you a round worth of fire vulnerability, stuff like that. People who can do area effects (like wizards) can clear a lot of minions in one attack.


here's some of the city blocks for Ave Sestina


(http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a95/discordman/avesestinahouses.jpg)

--this is supposed to resemble Venice.

your city looks AWESOMES Cram.

Quote from: Cramulus on January 26, 2011, 06:48:08 PM
some dungeon setup

(http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a95/discordman/avesestinadungeon.jpg)

thsi also

Awesome props.

I'm toying with the idea of dragging out the old boxed sets of Ruins of Undermountain and either running 'em as is, or updating 'em for 4th Edition.  (I have my 4th Edition books, the 2nd Edition books are still in the custody of my husband pending the big RPG "whose is whose" argument.  We may need referees, the DVD split was downright civil, but we've both got RPGs going back 25 years or more, and they've had over a decade to become hopelessly intermingled.)

been keeping a log of our adventures here: http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/ave-sestina/adventure-log

At the last event the party got an Artifact. Though they don't know I'm treating it like an artifact, they think it's an NPC.

This leg of the campaign has been very very lovecraftian. I've had a lot of weird four dimensional beings who the PCs can only see part of as they dip into three dimensional space. It turns out that all these aberrations from the Far Plane are chasing around this little delicacy, a creature that calls himself Gehentir (http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/ave-sestina/items/gehentir). They saved Gehentir from being eaten, and he seems to be tagging along with them now. Gehentir is a little pyramid made of flesh, with an eye on each side. He communicates psychically, and talks like a condescending yoda. He's always yammering on about how the players are "like motes of dust floating on the skin of a vast sea," seemingly ignorant of the fact that he's basically an helpless pile of flesh.

I'm writing Gehentir to be sort of like the main character in Flatland. He's a 4D being who's been reduced to a 3D being, and now he is very very confused. But with heavy Lovecraftian tones of "Be thankful that you are ignorant of the true 4D nature of the universe." There's a little bit oc comedic irony in that he's actually a totally helpless pile of flesh. He sort of reminds me of the mooninites:

(http://www.innoshare.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/20070202-mooninites.png)

So the way that Artifacts work in 4th Edition is kind of interesting.

An Artifact has a base set of powers that it grants. In Gehentir's case it's mostly movement related things. Once per encounter he lets you teleport. (Or as he puts it, "Gehentir will show you a glimpse of the True Shape of the universe, he will pull you in a direction your mewling mortal mind cannot comprehend." And he makes it harder for you to be pushed or forcibly moved - he'll just teleport you out of the way.

Artifacts start off with a Concordance of 5. Their concordance changes based on how you act. For Gehentir:

-Every time you kill an aberration, it goes up
-If you feed him a magic item, it goes up (proportional to strength of the item. Potions are the cheapest way to feed him.)
-If you don't seem interested in bringing him home to the Astral Sea, it goes down
-If you go more than a few days without feeding him a magic item, it goes down.

At the initial level of concordance, he grants one additional power: he can detect any ritual components within 30 feet, and will inform whoever is holding him that he can smell some cooking ingredients nearby.

As the concordance goes up, he gives you access to cooler powers, and a ritual which can draw aberrations into the area.

If concordance goes down, he can harm you in combat, perhaps teleporting you into bad spots or making you vulnerable to psychic damage. If it goes down too far, he'll attempt to leave the party and set out on his own.



This week: We'll have some good intrigue... The players may be getting their first masks, and will have an opportunity to masquerade as an adventuring party that works for one of the city's shady factions. They'll hear some info that they're not supposed to hear, and this will catapult them into the drama and politics of the Serene City.

FUCKING AWESOME

Quote from: Canis latrans eques on February 04, 2011, 11:38:59 PM
FUCKING AWESOME

Great event last night, probably the most fun event of the campaign so far.

My out-of-game goals for the event were to (a) let the players perform some "intrigue"... ie, let them acquire some secrets of their own (b) clue the players in to what's really going on in the city of Ave Sestina.

Encounter 1:

The party is hiking north out of the city. They eventually get attacked by Nashrou (http://non-aliencreatures.wikia.com/wiki/Nashrou) -- these are demons from 3rd edition which I've rewritten to be aberrations.

(http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20101207075728/non-aliencreatures/images/thumb/c/c7/Nashrou.jpg/300px-Nashrou.jpg)

QuoteNashrou are swift, tenacious predators that have been known to pursue days or weeks, and even across planes. Often attacking in packs, they will launch themselves at the center of a group, disrupting formations and dealing as much damage as possible with their claws. Smaller and weaker members of the pack are sent ahead to scout for prey, while larger members (called "stalkers") pursue and harry chosen prey, exhausting it. once prey has been worked into a frenzy of fear, "slayers" (the highest rank) moves in and kills the prey. Lone nashrou are more catious, usually stalking solitary prey from the shadows. They exist only for the pleasure of violently killing anything they come across. They do not derive nutrition from their food, but do take joy in devouring their prey.

The encounter began when the party accepted a traveler at their camp fire. It was a frazzled halfling adventurer whose party had just been devoured by these creatures. They let him stay, even though they were going in the opposite direction.

On the first shift of night watch, the party heard these whispers, "Nashrou... Nashrou..." this animal noise coming from the woods. They woke up, got their gear on, investigated the area... and nothing was there.

Second shift - same thing happened.

Third shift - same thing happened. The halfling said, "They're not going to let us rest." So the party decided to just strike camp and start moving towards their goal even though it was like 3 in the morning. The adventurer called them crazy, waved goodbye, and took off in the other direction.

So eventually, after trying to panic the party, the Nashrou attack.

I have like 20 Nashrou tiles of various sizes from a previous campaign. I decided that due to their huge numbers, this would be a minion fight.. each nashrou only takes one hit to kill, but there are 15 of them on the board at any time, and four to eight more enter every turn.

By the end of the fight, the party had killed like 20 to 25 nashrou. It was kind of like one of those scenes in a movie where Blade kills like 3 vampires in one swing. The Nashrou are super easy to kill, but they keep coming, and coming, and coming... How many of them are there in this horde?


At the end of the fight, Gehentir (their aberrant artifact sidekick) was very pleased. He approves of the slaughter of aberrations (he calls creatures from the far realm Quo'na'ri). His concordance rating went up, giving the Tiefling paladin who carries him access to another teleport power. He also granted the party access to a ritual they can use to reach into the fourth dimension. This ritual could be used to store things in a very private space outside of 3D reality, or if they use it to lift Gehentir into the fourth dimension, it could be used to draw more aberrations into the area.


After dealing with the Nashrou, the party found the spot where the other party died and scavenged the corpses. They found a few magic items, some cash, a bag full of Venetian carnival masks (http://www.google.com/images?client=opera&rls=en&q=venetian%20masks&oe=utf-8&channel=suggest&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi), and a note. The note was a warning to stay out of the city, and an invitation to come to this chateau in the mountains for more work. It also said to come en masque, as usual.


So the adventurers decided to disguise themselves as this dead party, and go get their missions.


Encounter 2

This was a social encounter. The party showed up en masque at this decadent chateau in the mountains. They said the right password and were taken to a drawing room where their "employers" were waiting. The employers were all en masque too, and were in the midst of an argument about whether or not it was a good idea to work with the devils. Apparently the aberration attacks which have plauged the city for the last few weeks were the devil's idea. These masked figures are capitalizing on the chaos, but they kind of hope that it'll end soon.

The party had to make bluff, diplomacy, and intimidate checks to pass themselves off as these employees. Each time they succeeded, they got a little more info about what's going on.

A man a gold mask mentioned that Councilman Kelson [the player's employer] has been making trouble in the council house. He has Council Record LV and is seeking council funds to pay adventurers he's hired.

A man in a silver mask said that Kelson won't be a problem – but they should really neutralize the adventurers and get a hold of council record 55. (flashback: the adventurers recovered this book from the Lyceum two events ago, it details the situation with the bridges of ave sestina)

Second piece of info....

"We caught a fae spy. He was following around Chemellon. Probably trying to figure out who that bastard meets with. My men bound him in irons and locked him in the moat cell at Sovrano castle. We're still deciding how do do away with him. We think the fae are being employed by the Cloth faction. Which would mean they're being summoned by the Lyceum. Do you know anything about this? Or what fae are in the city?"

Third piece of info....

"We know your guild has been hurting for work since the shadow people came at last year's Festival. We have a lead for you. We know that the shadows are employed as assassins by the Lemitri bank. They use the shadows to act against their enemies. For example they were the ones who kidnapped Councilman Roland Clay. People are just figuring out that he's missing. The Halflings have probably buried him by now. Anyway, I have not heard much about the shadows. Tell me about them, or your run-ins with them."

after the skill check -

"oh," adds the man in the silver mask, "one of your guild contacts was here yesterday. She asked us to relay a message. She has more work for you – she said you can meet her under the rose at the Cloak and Swagger. Meet her en masque, and wear a rose too."

Fourth bit....

"We have some work for you. You need to renew the pacts at Wailing bridge and Lindgate bridge. We think that this will remove the Fae and Shadows from the city, respectively. We expect you will be able to research what needs to be done and then do it. Return here when this is completed and you will be rewarded. Will you be capable of doing this?"

Fifth bit....

"Another task is to keep an eye on Wolfbridge and Bainsgate. If you see anybody snooping around there, investigate. Throw them off the trail or take them out. But be aware – we have other parties keeping an eye on those bridges too. Will you be capable of doing this?"

Sixth bit....

"Very good.. You've served us well. We will not forget this in the coming months as we put down our enemies. For now, you may want to stay out of the city. The devils in the basement have just made something terrible. They captured some primal city spirit and showed it its reflection in the far realms. It went mad – they have it in the basement right now, and hopefully they're releasing it tonight. They call it a Thought Scourge."


The party left the drawing room and discussed what to do next.
They agreed that they wanted to keep masquerading as this party, keep these employers (whoever they are) thinking that they've got more control of the city than they actually do. The party will try to spread misinformation about themselves, and possibly make some cash through these guys too.

They decided that the next step was to find a route underneath the Chateau and put down the creature the devils have made.


Encounter 3

The party found their way underneath the chateau, and were immediately attacked by undead.

This was a really rough encounter! here were some of the monsters they fought:

Deathgaunt Madcaster - has an aura 2 squares around him. If you start your turn in the aura, you're confused by his mad chattering - you take 5 psychic damage and -2 to all die rolls for the turn. He has some gross ranged attacks too.

Wraths - these are like undead rogues. They move around really easily, they get bonus damage while flanking, and they regenerate quickly unless you hit them with radiant damage. When they hit you, you're weakened, so all your attacks deal half damage until you make a saving throw. This affects you tactically because you don't want to drop your nasty attacks when they're only going to do half damage, and then half again if you're hitting an insubstantial target.

Silver Seeker Wrath - a wrath variant with the same insane flavor as the madcaster. It deals psychic damage, it has an aura that decreases you will defense if you end your turn near it (which is nasty because all of the madcaster's attacks target your will defense). It's also nasty because if it hits you, it is able to keep you prone and keep you down.

Cauldron Corpse - an elite brute (elite = 2x as tough as a regular monster. brute = high HP and a nasty melee attack). The Cauldron Corpse started far away from the party. It moves very slowly (only 4 squares per turn), so the group saw him making his way towards the fight. They had 3 rounds before it was able to attack. The real challenge here was to get control of the battle before the cauldron corpse arrived, because he is nasty as hell.

The Cauldron Corpse has a cool ability.. every time you damage him, it sprays the squares adjacent to him with necrotic sludge, and he spawns a Cauldron Mote minion in a square adjacent to him. This means that you really have to hit him with strong attacks or area effects, otherwise you'll get overwhelmed by minions pretty quickly. It also means that if you're smart, you can force him to hit his allies by pushing them into adjacent squares before you hit the corpse. Cool tactics!

Luckily the party kept the corpse clamped down by creating difficult terrain and acid pools. The minions would start their turn in the acid pool and die instantly. After the PCs dealt with the madcaster, they were able to focus on the corpse. They dealt 160 damage to the corpse in like 3 rounds. It died and everybody cheered.




All in all, a very fun event!

We had some rough combat, some great roleplay, the party got a million ideas for what to do next, and now they have some cool secrets and insider info about current events in the city.

Sounds great, Cram!! And those Venetian masks ... where have I seen them before? ;-)

update for this week: http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/ave-sestina/adventure-log/a-little-bit-of-the-city-died-today


Great event! The PCs are really starting to sink their teeth into the plot. They're slowly morphing from a group of cutthroat sell-swords into a group that has a stake in the future of the city.

(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_c72kc4JbsgY/TOTLRfXdsvI/AAAAAAAAEV0/ciM5_ST43Zc/s1600/free-carnival-mask-wallpaper_1280x1024_84492.jpg)


The Thought Scourge was a really interesting solo creature. Solos are cool - they're designed to be about five times as tough as a regular monster, a challenge for an entire party. They have the ability to hurt you and screw you up even out of turn.

This one was a primal spirit of the city, a being formed from the emotions of thousands of people engaging in culture at once. The creature had been corrupted by seeing its reflection in the far realms, and went mad like a rabid creature. It looks like a well dressed party goer at carnivale, except that the mask is really its face.


Here's its stat block:

(http://i.imgur.com/QPpzB.jpg)

Translation for people who don't play 4e:

Insubstantial - it takes half damage from all attacks unless it's busy feeding on something

Seeds of Despiar - an area of effect centered on the attacker. It affects everybody within 3 squares of him. This "Spreading Despiar" attack keeps the party from standing in close formations. Some of the healing abilities they have require you to be adjacent to your target too, so if you were still hurtiing the people around you with this contagious despair, it might prevent you from healing them. This attack is a minor action (so you can do it even if you've already moved and attacked), and Recharge 5 & 6 means that it's got a 2 out of 6 chance to recharge that power at the beginning of each turn.

Seeds of Discord - this is an immediate reaction which takes place every time somebody misses the thought scourge. If you don't hit him, you often end up hitting a party member. The flavor is that you get lost in this hallucination of Carnivale -for a few seconds, you think you're in a brawl, but it turns out the guy you're fighting is a party member.

Notes from this Sunday's game: http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/ave-sestina/adventure-log/enter-the-gate-crashers

The party's been trapped in the Shadowfell, here's an update about their adventures.

http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/ave-sestina/adventure-log/fel-sestina

We finally wrapped up the Heroic tier (level 1-10) of our campaign.

The climax was pretty cool - the PCs had to find their way through three dungeons stacked vertically underneath the city. The Primal Garden they needed to defend was at the absolute bottom.

The three dungeons were:

The Fathoms - a series of caves. I designed this part based on maps of actual caves, rather than how caves work in D&D. So the Fathoms is kind of like a vertical dungeon - getting in/out of a room involves a lot of dungeoneering and problem solving. The party used about 2000 feet of rope to get through this section. The boss of the Fathoms was a hydra.

I've always liked the Hydra mechanics in D&D. In 4th edition, the Hydra's max HP is broken up into five sections. It loses a head for each 20%. If you don't deal fire or acid damage before the Hydra's next turn, it'll grow TWO heads from the stump (but not regain HP). During its turn, it can make an attack with each of its head. And once you get it down to 1 or 2 heads, those heads get a giant bonus to hit and damage because the hydra can focus on one target at a time. It means the fight is dangerous up to the last round.


Past the Fathoms, the PCs had to pass the Proving Grounds. This is a section of a dungeon from the published adventure Thunderspire Labyrinth. And honestly, it's the coolest boss fight I've seen in a D&D product. Here's a description from a review of the adventure (http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/13/13899.phtml):

QuoteThe Proving Grounds encounter is so utterly whacked yet awesome I'm going to try to describe it without giving away too many hints. In one encounter, the players basically have to trigger four traps simultaneously in four different parts of the dungeon to move on. Each trap then triggers another trap, plus another trap that makes the connecting tunnels between the four trigger points very dangerous. But that triggers a timer which shows how long the players have to survive this mess before they can even think of escaping. So they're split up facing a host of traps -- did I mention there's two rival adventuring parties trying to get the treasure from the Well of Demons at the same time as the party? And only one of them is made of living beings? And while they may or may not be friendly, helpful, or even interested in the party based on your group's roleplaying, the gnolls who have taken over the site definitely are not friendly, and the minotaur ghosts who still haunt it aren't fond of *anyone* being there? And that depending on the player actions earlier there may or may not be an enraged dire boar roaming the dungeon, looking for its dwarven master (who lives back in the Seven-Pillared Hall, and has a nice reward posted for it, and thus the players may have to keep half a ton of gnoll-tortured pork alive through the chaos)? That the guide recommended to the party to lead them there is, unknown even to himself, a vicious werewolf who tends to Hulk out under stressful moments and chew on anything nearby? And to top it off the hallways of the Proving Grounds are high enough for the master of the Grounds, a young green dragon, to fly overhead and try to mess up *everyone's* plans? And this all goes down at the same time with the party split up to trigger the four original traps? And if the party gets through this then it leads *immediately* to the boss fight with the main gnoll cultist?

That's one of the craziest encounters I've ever come across, and I'm just boggled at the possibilities for a creative DM and players to mess with it. If Irontooth cut the wheat from the chaff in H1, I predict that their hairbrained schemes at ad-libbing the chaos of the Proving Grounds will provide the same stories for H2.

and finally, under the proving grounds, they got to the Primal Caves, a webwork of vine covered rooms which stretch for miles.

The PCs were racing against five other factions to get to the primal garden. During these three dungeons, they had the opportunity to get the jump on the other teams. Maybe they'd knock em off early, maybe they'd just try to beat them there, maybe they'd try to negotiate... my party ended up getting lost in the caves for a while, and lost like six hours of race time due to bad dungeoneering.


The boss fight involved trying to prevent four out of five of the factions from casting a ritual in this primal garden area. If they got three successes on the ritual, a dragon would enter the fight too. The PCs narrowly prevented this (damn it), saved the garden, and prevented the city's factions from acquiring a dangerous and unbalanced amount of power.

It was a cool fight if only because it involved 9 named NPCs, all of whom had been established previously in the campaign. It was like the season finale of a sitcom where they revisit all the cool moments from the previous season.

It was a LONG fight, too. Each faction's arrival at the garden was staggered - the PCs had two rounds before a new faction showed up. The fight was worth as much XP as two fights... so instead of letting the PCs rest between fights, they had these nodes of power they could use to heal themselves and recharge their powers. The enemies could use the nodes too, and tried to fire off their nasty attacks then recharge them. This put the PCs on the offensive - they had to use THEIR nasty attacks and recharge them FIRST!

And lo, twas epic.

Sounds like a great time Cram!!

Though that Proving Grounds description sounds LETHAL .. how do you even beat that?

here's the map of the zone...

(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_63D8SW1zZOs/SoC6p0BB-uI/AAAAAAAABhI/isMl6dz7YUo/s320/proving+grounds.bmp)

(the published adventure includes a giant poster-sized map of this area)

two party members tried to follow the dragon and pin it down - this proved hard with the traps in every room.

In the top left room, the rogue and the warden worked together to disarm the two crossbow turrets.
Meanwhile, the mage was stuck in the bottom right room. She used her religion training to quell the restless skeletons who came alive as soon as the ritual started.

The dragon starts in the center and flies around the dungeon, avoiding the traps and using its breath weapon where it can. It tries to lure the PCs into rooms with active traps.

That track around the center hole --- there's a giant boulder rolling in circles around it. It makes fighting in the hall very dangerous because the boulder moves like 20 squares (half the distance around the loop) on its turn. Anybody that gets hit takes a ton of damage and is knocked prone.

After a few rounds of confusion and panic, the PCs managed to overcome the obstacles and keep the dragon pincered in the center chamber. From here, the task became to avoid getting dragged into the pit.  :p

The dragon itself isn't the difficult part. Getting your party to hit the dragon at the same time is the challenge. The dragon can really fuck up a character if they face him one-on-one, so it takes a bit of tactical planning to survive. Without a little coordination, the dragon will outmaneuver them and slide them into the path of the active traps. If they plan (which they did), they can block the exits from the center room and keep the dragon locked there.

awesome. goddamn I need to start playing again.

the DM of my old group got interested in PathFinder, I hope that might go somewhere. Maybe I should knock off a quick one-night game of Kobolds just to get the group together again. (it's about the only game I'm good at GM-ing because it takes very little preparation)

Quote from: Triple Zero on October 03, 2011, 06:45:43 PM
awesome. goddamn I need to start playing again.

the DM of my old group got interested in PathFinder, I hope that might go somewhere. Maybe I should knock off a quick one-night game of Kobolds just to get the group together again. (it's about the only game I'm good at GM-ing because it takes very little preparation)

I approve of Pathfinder. Paizo always produced better stuff than WoTC anyway.

Sounds EPIC!!!!!

I found this open source mapping software called AutoRealm. And I am in LOVE with it.

The best feature is called "Fractal Lines". For each drawing tool (freehand drawing, point-to-point lines, curves, polygons, etc), there is a regular version and a fractal version. The fractal version draws nuanced, complex edges. There is a slider bar for how chaotic they are. And if you zoom in, it remains complex, rather than reducing to polygons. It's the perfect tool for drawing roads, rivers, coasts, and political borders.

here's a regional map I was working on.

(http://i.imgur.com/GfiDc.jpg)


easy to overlay grids and hexes so you can play on them too.

here, 1 hex = 1 day's travel

(http://i.imgur.com/Zq0XW.jpg)

Wow that looks awesome! I'm gonna give this to my GM when he wants to start off that Pathfinder campaign.

So these maps are zoomable, right?

(because otherwise I could just as easy make those screenshots with a pen and paper)

idea: you can take those maps and photoshop in more detail and textures and such?

yep, fully zoomable.

and I'm not sure exactly how, but there is a way to create/import your own scalable map icons. I haven't needed that yet, it comes with a library of about 100 different icons.

I'm used to Campaign Cartographer; I found this to be much much easier to learn/use. And is free!

Ran a really epic encounter last night.

tl;dr summary:

-the players crossed six feet of map and faced like 35 monsters in one encounter
-they had to deal with a lot of obstacles, and a killer demon slowly moving closer to them.
-they had to find the treasure as they ran through the map, balancing defense and speed and loot
-it fucking rocked



Scenario: the players have been on the road for 48 days. They are trying to deliver the Flame of Erathis (an artifactual torch) to the city of Aedremere. A demon is on their trail. The only thing standing between them and their goal is Mt. Tunder --- which happens to be absolutely crawling with zombies.

I set up map #1 on the living room table. The players had to fight their way past a shitload of zombies and one undead mage. While we were getting set up in the living room, I secretly went into the kitchen and unfurled the Big Map I've been working on. It's about 4 feet long, and includes cliffs, pits, treasure chests, a rickety rope bridge, and a sealed gate house which blocks the way forward.

(https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-QCUZBlhGrss/Tq3gG-21kgI/AAAAAAAABhc/ZjjC92YG00s/s640/IMAG0139.jpg)

As the players finish the first map, they agree that they can make it one more encounter without resting. They have this secondary quest, you see, which raises the power level of the artifact they're carrying. If they make it through six encounters without taking a full night's rest, they gain concordance with the torch. So this was encounter 5 and 6... most characters are very tired, fatigued to the point of collapse.

So they finish the first map, and they ask what's next... I point to the kitchen, where they see another 4 feet of hell unfurled in front of them.

(https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-CsvA0deqlQQ/Tq3cafrv_qI/AAAAAAAABhE/gRsflTC1Pcs/s640/IMAG0141.jpg)

Their plan was "Let's take it really slow and careful. Use ranged attacks where we can. Conserve healing, because we don't have a lot."




So after they had two rounds to dick around and "be careful", I introduced the next element:

(http://www.baxaart.com/BuriedTreasure_Store/Original_Art_for_Sale-2011/D&D_for-sale_2011/AD&D/2010/MonsterManual3_AD&Dv4/Ultrodemon.jpg)

The demon Qadaar appeared on the map in the living room, about 20 squares away from them. Every round, I advanced him 4 squares. They have faced Qadaar before, and they know they can't take him. Everybody started shitting themselves. If Qadaar sees them, he will certainly nuke their asses.

So now the fun part begins: the frenzied race across the mountain. Is there time to pick the locks on the treasure chests? Maybe! They managed to loot 2 out of 3 of them.

(https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-d7Qd5mjU0lo/Tq35dKqov7I/AAAAAAAABh4/uxHYrBBYayI/s800/IMAG0148.jpg)

(https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-mGBIKWHfEgg/Tq3b_-zjHQI/AAAAAAAABg8/6wpMqonuGIQ/s640/IMAG0142.jpg)

(https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-NBOOAtYNYro/Tq35OSJaC-I/AAAAAAAABho/o5UBJT0CcZI/s640/IMAG0147.jpg)

here comes Qadaar, slowly moving over the bridge



As they move through the board, they see a door. There's a puzzle on the door, which they solved mid-combat. It opens. They know it leads to a boss fight (been foreshadowed earlier). The fighter wanted to charge in and do it. The other two party members, who are flirting with single digit hit points and no healing left, make the case that they should come back later.

The gate house at the end was very exciting too. The party didn't have the strength / time left to lift the gates, so they made a desperate push to climb over it. Timing was critical here, because at the end they had to run past a bunch of monsters they didn't have time to fight. As they scrambled up the wall, the zombie horde surged around them. The resolution of the fight came down to the last die rolls - had the warlord rolled any lower on his athletics check, he would have gotten dragged down off the wall by the zombies and definitely would have died.

When the warlord made it over the wall, everybody sighed a big sigh of relief. It was one of those white-knuckled D&D sessions that everybody'll be talking about for years.

In total they killed about 35 monsters - 25 of them were 1 HP zombies, the others were either zombie hulks infested with rot grubs or undead ice mages.

Jesus Fuckballs Cram. Sounds epic.

That really does sound epic! Great work, Cram!

What was with the demon though, couldn't it move faster, or did it not see or sense the party?

The Demon knew that they were somewhere in the general area, but it didn't know exactly where. That's why he was only moving half speed every round (as opposed to taking a double move). When they peered at Qadaar from a distance, it looked like he was examining foot prints, inspecting dead bodies, that sort of thing. Clearly tracking them. Had he gotten within line of sight of them, all hell would have broken loose -- but the heroes managed to stay one step ahead. Their next challenge will involve losing him in the mountains as they make their way towards the city.

Holy shit, Cram, that sounds amazing!

Quote from: Cramulus on December 07, 2010, 03:21:23 AM
random: http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Katanas_are_Underpowered_in_d20

To be fair, the katana and wakizashi were not meant to pierce armor. The katana was not used so much for killing on the battlefield as it was for cutting the strings of armor. The wakizashi, with it's shorter blade, was then used to deliver the killing blow. This is of course the traditional way; when Musashi Miyamoto made dual wielding became popular, all of this went out the window.

I've had quite a bit of experience with both weapons, since my father collects pre-WWII Japanese swords. The blades are nothing like European blades, they cut with a downward pulling motion rather than a swinging motion. In that sense, they do much less damage against an armored opponent than a European blade; their weight and the way they are used just isn't heavy enough to damage metal armor. Once the armor is off, however, the Japanese blades are far superior. Any damage rulings have to take that into effect. Or something. Or maybe I'm full of it.

Also, your campaign sounds awesome, Cram.

I think the reason I got out of playing tabletop rpgs is because I got tired of the incessant commentary on /everything/. The old tired jokes, the munchin players that know every single thing about the game, the distracting side talk. But it looks like you run your campaigns really well and keep all that to a minimum. I loved it when it was serious.

Quote from: 'Kai' ZLB, M.S. on November 04, 2011, 04:18:48 AM

Quote from: Cramulus on December 07, 2010, 03:21:23 AM
random: http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Katanas_are_Underpowered_in_d20

To be fair, the katana and wakizashi were not meant to pierce armor. The katana was not used so much for killing on the battlefield as it was for cutting the strings of armor. The wakizashi, with it's shorter blade, was then used to deliver the killing blow. This is of course the traditional way; when Musashi Miyamoto made dual wielding became popular, all of this went out the window.

I've had quite a bit of experience with both weapons, since my father collects pre-WWII Japanese swords. The blades are nothing like European blades, they cut with a downward pulling motion rather than a swinging motion. In that sense, they do much less damage against an armored opponent than a European blade; their weight and the way they are used just isn't heavy enough to damage metal armor. Once the armor is off, however, the Japanese blades are far superior. Any damage rulings have to take that into effect. Or something. Or maybe I'm full of it.

Just no.

As the entirety of RPG combat is an abstraction to add "more realism" would bog the system down in minutia.

Nevermind that when armed with a sword, and only a sword, a man-at-arms, or knight, or dude in armor, when fighting the against the same, would not be attacking his foe with the edge, unless it were in friendly sport, or he was untutored in the art. He would instead grasp his sword with one hand upon the hilt and the other midway on the blade and seek to the thrust into the gaps in the plate harness, the face/eye slits, the armpits, or the palms of the hands. This of course assumes a one on one scenario in the 15th to 16th centuries. A man-at-arms would not be using a sword as his sole weapon when in an open battlefield but either a spear or some manner of polearm, such as the pollaxe.

A nihonto of similar length to a European sword would weigh more as they are thicker in cross-section.
Sharp is sharp when encountering unarmored flesh. Japanese or European.

Furthermore to state that a wakizashi was used only to deliver killing blows after a bushi had cut the strings of the armor with his katana disregards the wide variety of ryu that dealt with fighting in armor during the feudal age in Japan.

Quote from: 'Kai' ZLB, M.S. on November 04, 2011, 04:45:12 AM
Also, your campaign sounds awesome, Cram.

I think the reason I got out of playing tabletop rpgs is because I got tired of the incessant commentary on /everything/. The old tired jokes, the munchin players that know every single thing about the game, the distracting side talk. But it looks like you run your campaigns really well and keep all that to a minimum. I loved it when it was serious.

I used to enjoy running really detail-oriented extremely long epic campaign arcs.

I was into a really serious D&D experience.

Then I chilled out.

These days I'm running a very casual game. We drink a case of beer while we play. There's a lot of story, puzzles, combat, character development (for characters that want it)... but I'm aiming for a game first and foremost FUN and easy to get involved in. I don't punish people for not remembering setting details, I'm cool with "cameo spots" where a friend checks out the game with us for 1 session, and a number of my NPCs are goofy or are based on running jokes.

I'm finding that I like the casual/hilarious style of play a lot better than the totally straightfaced We Are In A Tragic Drama style I used to run. We still have really intense white-knuckled story moments--it's just that the focus of the game is on exciting encounters and hanging out with your friends.



I have a friend who I'd really love to game with us, but she's hung up on 2nd edition. She is really only interested in the D&D experience she had when she was like 13-18... she was so excited to hear we were playing D&D --until she found out it was 4th edition.

I tried to reason it out with her -- "You know, regardless of the rulebook we're using, we have a lot of fun. D&D's mainly about doing something creative while hanging out with your friends. And we rock at that. Everything else is minutiae" but she wouldn't have it--- she admitted that she was just really stubborn about it and wasn't interested in finding out if 4th ed it was fun or not. Really a shame!

If she actually SAW us play -- if she saw the fighter sitting at the campfire frying up Hill Giant Dick and sharing it with an imp -- if she saw the fight against the Net-Wielding Trolls' Interns (yes, the Intern Net Trolls) -- if she saw the intense cold-sweat inducing encounter I posted above, she'd probably love to game with us.

But meh! Grognards! C'est la vie.

godDAMN, this thread makes me want to start playing again so much. my friend has a bunch of 4th ed books and I have the 3.5 stuff, but I've never really properly played a full campaign -- we've done bits of encounters and false starts, but never properly got into it, and I really want to :(


EDIT: in case I wasn't clear, holy shit Cram, your campaign looks fucking awesome

me too!
my kiddos were digging through the closet last week and found a bunch of painted minis and thought they were the tits, so we made up a little game with them.  then i read this thread.  then they found a monster manual and were eating it up.

now i'm jonesing for some dnd, but have no dnd buddies...  :sad:
i must find/convert some, stat.

There's definitely a sweet spot to be found between focused roleplaying and just hanging out with a weird centerpiece, and it's different for each group. All of my best sessions have involved some silliness, but we also actually played the game. Lousy sessions tended to degenerate into multiple simultaneous conversations about unrelated crap, with the game all but forgotten. Those usually leave one or two quiet players waiting ten minutes for the DM to pay attention long enough for them to hit the goblin with their axe.

I went through a hell of a cycle.

In 1999, I started staffing at a LARP chapter, Avendale, and eventually became the lead storywriter. For seven years, we ran six events per year in Milford, Connecticut. Our chapter had highs and lows -- but I managed to grow the game from 30 players (average) to almost 100. In 2005 I started working for the parent company (NERO) full time, doing national cross-chapter coordination and running demos at conventions. It was my dream job .. for a few months. Then the money dried up, my boss kept giving me the carrot & stick routine, and I suffered a lot for what I thought was my dream job.

In 2007, I quit Avendale. It was just too much work. Everybody wanted to play the cool game, nobody wanted to run it. We had 2 writers and we needed at least 6. My buddy Wes and I ran some of the best LARP events in New England (IMHO), but we burned ourselves out.

By the end of that run, I had become really jaded and cynical. The heartbreaking thing about running games like this is that you can write awesome plot, you can design the most exciting encounters, you can build props and atmosphere that makes people's eyes bulge out of their skulls --- and at the end of the weekend, when you ask your customers how they liked the event, they focus on the shitty weather, the lack of things to do at 4 in the morning, and the moron players that ruined the event for them. It's like - the quality of game you run is only vaguely correlated with people's enjoyment of the event. They tend to focus on details which are largely out of your control.

I mean, sometimes people run shitty games, but if the weather is good, and there are cute girls there, it'll be a great weekend!

I took a big step back. During this period I became "plot agnostic" -- I realized that the story is just a vehicle for the encounter. Encounters: that's the real meat of the game. It's all that people remember, anyway. They won't remember the dialog they had with an NPC in the tavern, or the history of the item they carry, they won't remember the name of the prince they rescued... they will remember that great teamwork moment when the rogue was in the right place at the right time and killed the mummy from behind.

So fuck story. I paid too much attention to the really slow-building long-term rewards of the game. The kind of things you can only appreciate on a long timeline. The momentary experience of fun, that's the real meat.

This is why I piss off other LARP plot writers... they pitch an encounter at me, and they explain it like, "Okay -- so if the players entertain the undead king with at least 30 minutes of stories, he will share HIS story. And in that story, he'll mention the True Name of the Lich, which they need." and my reply is, "So this encounter involves going to a potentially dramatic place and running the clock with war stories everybody's heard before. And the victory condition is that they pick up on a minute detail in an otherwise irrelevant story. Sounds BORING."

Anyway, I'm rambling --- the point is - build your games around immediate fun. Use the story to justify those awesome encounters, but generally speaking -- the story is completely secondary.

After I quit Avendale, I took a long break from running LARPs. I'm back in the saddle again - I'm actually running three encounters at a LARP this weekend - but my focus has changed considerably from what I was interested in five years ago.

Hill giant dick?   :lulz:

Yeah, I've tried to convince some people that the system is just a system.  Some are better than others, but the main thing is that everyone's having fun.

Quote from: Donald Coyote on November 04, 2011, 04:53:28 AM

Quote from: 'Kai' ZLB, M.S. on November 04, 2011, 04:18:48 AM

Quote from: Cramulus on December 07, 2010, 03:21:23 AM
random: http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Katanas_are_Underpowered_in_d20

To be fair, the katana and wakizashi were not meant to pierce armor. The katana was not used so much for killing on the battlefield as it was for cutting the strings of armor. The wakizashi, with it's shorter blade, was then used to deliver the killing blow. This is of course the traditional way; when Musashi Miyamoto made dual wielding became popular, all of this went out the window.

I've had quite a bit of experience with both weapons, since my father collects pre-WWII Japanese swords. The blades are nothing like European blades, they cut with a downward pulling motion rather than a swinging motion. In that sense, they do much less damage against an armored opponent than a European blade; their weight and the way they are used just isn't heavy enough to damage metal armor. Once the armor is off, however, the Japanese blades are far superior. Any damage rulings have to take that into effect. Or something. Or maybe I'm full of it.

Just no.

As the entirety of RPG combat is an abstraction to add "more realism" would bog the system down in minutia.

Nevermind that when armed with a sword, and only a sword, a man-at-arms, or knight, or dude in armor, when fighting the against the same, would not be attacking his foe with the edge, unless it were in friendly sport, or he was untutored in the art. He would instead grasp his sword with one hand upon the hilt and the other midway on the blade and seek to the thrust into the gaps in the plate harness, the face/eye slits, the armpits, or the palms of the hands. This of course assumes a one on one scenario in the 15th to 16th centuries. A man-at-arms would not be using a sword as his sole weapon when in an open battlefield but either a spear or some manner of polearm, such as the pollaxe.

A nihonto of similar length to a European sword would weigh more as they are thicker in cross-section.
Sharp is sharp when encountering unarmored flesh. Japanese or European.

Furthermore to state that a wakizashi was used only to deliver killing blows after a bushi had cut the strings of the armor with his katana disregards the wide variety of ryu that dealt with fighting in armor during the feudal age in Japan.

1. Agreed.

2. Agreed.

3. I'm not familiar with that weapon.

4. It wasn't ONLY used for killing blows. I was emphasizing the exaggerated importance of the katana when fighting armored foes. The wakizashi was pretty much the ideal close quarters sword; IIRC, the katana was surrendered at the gate of a lord's mansion, but the wakizashi was kept at hand at all times. Again, usage changed when Musashi popularized nitoichi. Or, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.

Quote from: Cramulus on November 04, 2011, 01:46:50 PM

Quote from: 'Kai' ZLB, M.S. on November 04, 2011, 04:45:12 AM
Also, your campaign sounds awesome, Cram.

I think the reason I got out of playing tabletop rpgs is because I got tired of the incessant commentary on /everything/. The old tired jokes, the munchin players that know every single thing about the game, the distracting side talk. But it looks like you run your campaigns really well and keep all that to a minimum. I loved it when it was serious.

I used to enjoy running really detail-oriented extremely long epic campaign arcs.

I was into a really serious D&D experience.

Then I chilled out.

These days I'm running a very casual game. We drink a case of beer while we play. There's a lot of story, puzzles, combat, character development (for characters that want it)... but I'm aiming for a game first and foremost FUN and easy to get involved in. I don't punish people for not remembering setting details, I'm cool with "cameo spots" where a friend checks out the game with us for 1 session, and a number of my NPCs are goofy or are based on running jokes.

I'm finding that I like the casual/hilarious style of play a lot better than the totally straightfaced We Are In A Tragic Drama style I used to run. We still have really intense white-knuckled story moments--it's just that the focus of the game is on exciting encounters and hanging out with your friends.



I have a friend who I'd really love to game with us, but she's hung up on 2nd edition. She is really only interested in the D&D experience she had when she was like 13-18... she was so excited to hear we were playing D&D --until she found out it was 4th edition.

I tried to reason it out with her -- "You know, regardless of the rulebook we're using, we have a lot of fun. D&D's mainly about doing something creative while hanging out with your friends. And we rock at that. Everything else is minutiae" but she wouldn't have it--- she admitted that she was just really stubborn about it and wasn't interested in finding out if 4th ed it was fun or not. Really a shame!

If she actually SAW us play -- if she saw the fighter sitting at the campfire frying up Hill Giant Dick and sharing it with an imp -- if she saw the fight against the Net-Wielding Trolls' Interns (yes, the Intern Net Trolls) -- if she saw the intense cold-sweat inducing encounter I posted above, she'd probably love to game with us.

But meh! Grognards! C'est la vie.

Oh, I agree. I don't care what edition it is (as long as it's playable). I don't mind the relevant in game humor, either. The Hill Giant Dick and Net Trolls incidents sound hilarious.

What I got sick of was the constant incessant jabbering about completely unrelated things, stupid jokes from monty python, people who aren't paying attention, people who are talking out of turn, and the players that know absolutely everything about the game book and won't shut the fuck up and let the other players have fun figuring it out. I'd leave a session exhausted, unhappy, and searching for a quiet place to hole up for several hours.

Or maybe it was just people who didn't know when to SHUT THE FUCK UP FOR FUCKING CHRISTSAKE. That could be it too, that it's entirely possible the people I was playing with were annoying twits.

Quote from: 'Kai' ZLB, M.S. on November 04, 2011, 11:19:31 PM

Quote from: Donald Coyote on November 04, 2011, 04:53:28 AM

Quote from: 'Kai' ZLB, M.S. on November 04, 2011, 04:18:48 AM

Quote from: Cramulus on December 07, 2010, 03:21:23 AM
random: http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Katanas_are_Underpowered_in_d20

To be fair, the katana and wakizashi were not meant to pierce armor. The katana was not used so much for killing on the battlefield as it was for cutting the strings of armor. The wakizashi, with it's shorter blade, was then used to deliver the killing blow. This is of course the traditional way; when Musashi Miyamoto made dual wielding became popular, all of this went out the window.

I've had quite a bit of experience with both weapons, since my father collects pre-WWII Japanese swords. The blades are nothing like European blades, they cut with a downward pulling motion rather than a swinging motion. In that sense, they do much less damage against an armored opponent than a European blade; their weight and the way they are used just isn't heavy enough to damage metal armor. Once the armor is off, however, the Japanese blades are far superior. Any damage rulings have to take that into effect. Or something. Or maybe I'm full of it.

Just no.

As the entirety of RPG combat is an abstraction to add "more realism" would bog the system down in minutia.

Nevermind that when armed with a sword, and only a sword, a man-at-arms, or knight, or dude in armor, when fighting the against the same, would not be attacking his foe with the edge, unless it were in friendly sport, or he was untutored in the art. He would instead grasp his sword with one hand upon the hilt and the other midway on the blade and seek to the thrust into the gaps in the plate harness, the face/eye slits, the armpits, or the palms of the hands. This of course assumes a one on one scenario in the 15th to 16th centuries. A man-at-arms would not be using a sword as his sole weapon when in an open battlefield but either a spear or some manner of polearm, such as the pollaxe.

A nihonto of similar length to a European sword would weigh more as they are thicker in cross-section.
Sharp is sharp when encountering unarmored flesh. Japanese or European.

Furthermore to state that a wakizashi was used only to deliver killing blows after a bushi had cut the strings of the armor with his katana disregards the wide variety of ryu that dealt with fighting in armor during the feudal age in Japan.

1. Agreed.

2. Agreed.

3. I'm not familiar with that weapon.

4. It wasn't ONLY used for killing blows. I was emphasizing the exaggerated importance of the katana when fighting armored foes. The wakizashi was pretty much the ideal close quarters sword; IIRC, the katana was surrendered at the gate of a lord's mansion, but the wakizashi was kept at hand at all times. Again, usage changed when Musashi popularized nitoichi. Or, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.

Nihonto?
The Japanese word for Japanese swords.

Quote from: Donald Coyote on November 04, 2011, 11:41:30 PM

Quote from: 'Kai' ZLB, M.S. on November 04, 2011, 11:19:31 PM

Quote from: Donald Coyote on November 04, 2011, 04:53:28 AM

Quote from: 'Kai' ZLB, M.S. on November 04, 2011, 04:18:48 AM

Quote from: Cramulus on December 07, 2010, 03:21:23 AM
random: http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Katanas_are_Underpowered_in_d20

To be fair, the katana and wakizashi were not meant to pierce armor. The katana was not used so much for killing on the battlefield as it was for cutting the strings of armor. The wakizashi, with it's shorter blade, was then used to deliver the killing blow. This is of course the traditional way; when Musashi Miyamoto made dual wielding became popular, all of this went out the window.

I've had quite a bit of experience with both weapons, since my father collects pre-WWII Japanese swords. The blades are nothing like European blades, they cut with a downward pulling motion rather than a swinging motion. In that sense, they do much less damage against an armored opponent than a European blade; their weight and the way they are used just isn't heavy enough to damage metal armor. Once the armor is off, however, the Japanese blades are far superior. Any damage rulings have to take that into effect. Or something. Or maybe I'm full of it.

Just no.

As the entirety of RPG combat is an abstraction to add "more realism" would bog the system down in minutia.

Nevermind that when armed with a sword, and only a sword, a man-at-arms, or knight, or dude in armor, when fighting the against the same, would not be attacking his foe with the edge, unless it were in friendly sport, or he was untutored in the art. He would instead grasp his sword with one hand upon the hilt and the other midway on the blade and seek to the thrust into the gaps in the plate harness, the face/eye slits, the armpits, or the palms of the hands. This of course assumes a one on one scenario in the 15th to 16th centuries. A man-at-arms would not be using a sword as his sole weapon when in an open battlefield but either a spear or some manner of polearm, such as the pollaxe.

A nihonto of similar length to a European sword would weigh more as they are thicker in cross-section.
Sharp is sharp when encountering unarmored flesh. Japanese or European.

Furthermore to state that a wakizashi was used only to deliver killing blows after a bushi had cut the strings of the armor with his katana disregards the wide variety of ryu that dealt with fighting in armor during the feudal age in Japan.

1. Agreed.

2. Agreed.

3. I'm not familiar with that weapon.

4. It wasn't ONLY used for killing blows. I was emphasizing the exaggerated importance of the katana when fighting armored foes. The wakizashi was pretty much the ideal close quarters sword; IIRC, the katana was surrendered at the gate of a lord's mansion, but the wakizashi was kept at hand at all times. Again, usage changed when Musashi popularized nitoichi. Or, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.

Nihonto?
The Japanese word for Japanese swords.

Quote
Or, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.

I should just stick to science.

 :lulz: It's ok Kai, you're not alone.

Last game was a very weird one. It was a "story" event, mostly investigation & plot development and very few encounters. And at this event I decided to break a number of my own rules.

I was nervous about this game. I'm throwing a big twist in the story and I wasn't sure how well it'd be received. The characters were captured by bad guys and banished to Fantasy Australia. They were bound by a Geas (a ritually enforced contract) to serve these nefarious nobles from another kingdom. For their characters, it was a bad day. For the players, I hope it was fun.


This was challenging a DM because this part of the story involves the players taking a loss. They walked directly into an ambush by higher level characters and had no chance of making it out. And in the story they SOMEHOW, have to end up in this region. I hate railroads, but at this point I've built up enough trust with the players that I could take them down this little story railroad without pissing them off too much. I assured them - they will have ample opportunity to handle this situation once their feet are on the ground.

So when they walked into the capture scene, I asked that they permit me to narrate it, rather than rolling it out using the table and dice. I told them that the fight would probably be very frustrating if we actually rolled it out --  and if we had rolled it out, it would have seemed like they might have been able to escape. But this is the scene where Lando sells out Han Solo to Vader... I don't want to set up an impossible challenge and then make them think they can actually do it, that's even more frustrating than the DM telling you, "in the next chapter of this story, you're a slave to some assholes".

I explained it like this ---- this is the scene in the movie where the chips are down. The good guys get their asses kicked, they lose their gear, and they are in danger of losing hope entirely. My goal is that this sucks for your character while still being a fun experience for you as a player. This is where character motivations are brewed. Now they're all fired up on escape and revenge - which, as a DM, I love.

And I do think they dug it, though it took a little while for it to sink in that this is plot development, not me "screwing" them for bad choices or something.

The last few weeks have been a really fantastic series of games. It's the situation every DM wants - the players are hooked, they're chattering about the game all the time, everybody's really excited to play. I come downstairs into the living room and everybody's theorizing about what's going on and what to do next.

So here's what's going on.........

Aedremere

The party was in the city of Aedremere, which is mostly dragonborn. They successfully defeated the witch queen Silona (a mummy/medusa) and her thrall Captain Daven (a dragonborn Death Knight). City is safe, right? Well, not quite. As the adventurers returned to the city, they saw the Flame of Sehanine (the city's artifact, a twin to the artifactual Flame of Erathis that the party carries) disappear from Aedremere's palatial tower. Somebody stole it!

The players spent a lot of time in the council hall, where they were asked a lot of rude questions by hopeless and cynical old men. The magistrate apologized profusely to the adventurers - seems the council's been shaken up by the recent undead attacks. They're humans with short lifespans, they don't see that we always triumph in the end.

Walking around the city, the adventurers can tell something's up. After spending a few days in the city recovering from mummy rot (the rogue rotted so bad, he came one die roll away from death!) the party had picked up on a song that people in the city are humming or whistling. They heard a lot of people humming it, but upon questioning them, the people didn't know what it was or where they'd heard it. Something weird was happening, but nobody could figure out exactly what.


The Geas

After that, long story short - the players got captured by two Kaladari (read: conquestadors) of the Dromen Commonwealth, this expansionist empire across the sea. They were forced into a geas -- a ritual contract -- in which they agreed to serve the two Kaladari as vassals. The contract ends when they've completed three tasks: they have to cleanse areas called Tanaret, Sataviseen, and Torobrask. Until that time, they can only rest in this one city. Sleeping outside of that city will not help them recover hit points or powers.

[according to the logic of my world] Geases must have a "back door", a way for the contract to be voided early, usually something very abstract in nature. The creator of the Geas usually phrases this as some impossible task. So this geas can also end "When a serpent swallows the sun". This got the players scratching their heads. What does it mean?

And they're strangers in a strange land. The game's been moved to the continent of Suldain, which is basically "Fantasy Australia". This equates to Australia during an early phase of English colonization. The only cities are basically Sydney and Perth, on the east and west coasts. Between that, there's a big open outback with lots of different terrain types (desert, mountains, tundra, jungle) and horrible australian monsters. (BTW, the monsters of Australian mythology are weird!)

The Dromen Kaladari inform the players that this is the Dreamlands, it may be the place where you go when you sleep. So things might not work like you expect, this is a supernatural place. It's also at the edge of the world -- this is the southernmost island that anybody's ever discovered. Go much further south than this, the currents take you, and you'll fall off the edge of the world. (surprise! My game setting is FLAT. "Round earth" is a foolish theory that wizards have repeatedly proven false.)

First Adventure in Suldain

The aboriginal locals call themselves Kalashtar. The players had a few run-ins with them, and found them to be suspicious and reserved, but not opposed to diplomacy.

In the salt flats to the south of Maedar (the Dromen city on the west coast), the players encountered the Tuddo tribe, a group of Kalashtar that have been displaced from their homeland by a Dromen outpost. Underneath the outpost, there is a sleeping Aeon called Bequmuni.

A Sleeping Aeon?

"People from your realm have the world upside down," said the Kalashtar shaman, Father Tuddo, "You are not in the dreamlands. You are in the real world. The world you live in is a dream."

Underneath the surface of Suldain, there are huge silver sleeping buddha statues, sometimes a hundred feet tall. They are dreaming, and their dream is the world.

The players investigated the garrison at Bequmuni, and were allowed to see the aeon. There was a small Dromen base, about 10 soldiers and 8 bards inside. In the central chamber, where the Aeon sleeps, a string quartet was camped. They were perched next to the Aeon's ear, and were playing a song, the Dromen national anthem.

"That's it," somebody said, "that's the song we heard in Aedremere..."

That's when it clicked. The Dromen aren't trying to end the world or anything like that. They're trying to take over as many city-states as possible by manipulating the beings which dream the world. It seems like playing this song next to an Aeon's ear puts the people of that city into a kind of trance. It makes them much more open to Dromen rule. The Dromen destabilize an area, then offer aid. The aid gives them seats on local councils and cabinets. Slowly, they gain control of those cities without exercising military force.

This puts the adventurers in quite a dilemma. They're ritually tasked to clear these three Aeons, and set up linked portals so that the Dromen can access them. If they fail to do this, the geas can actually kill them.

What Dreams May Come

Sleeping in Suldain, you don't have dreams. You have out of body experiences. Each player got a dream, a series of images which indicate that something from their past is here in Suldain. For example, the rogue wants revenge on this guy, and he now sees that the man has an estate here in Suldain somewhere. How is it that some noble from the mainland has a mansion in the fantasy outback -- the middle of bumfuck Australia?

As the shaman explained -- there is something here in Suldain which caused that nightmare to happen to you in your world. It's like you are having a dream of somebody breaking through your front door, and when you awake, you hear a woodpecker banging on it. The troubles you have faced in your life are the result of something happening here, a point of corruption which has bled into the dream.

Underneath the Surface

A bit later, the players met up with the Tarrinah tribe, a horse people who live in the south western peninsula of Suldain. In order to speak to the shaman, they had to go through an initiation process. They had to hunt down a beast called a Quillian and put a handprint on it. If they are real warriors, they will slay it.

So the players tracked down this beast's layer. As they go down beneath the surface, they start encountering this bewildering freudian imagery. There are statues of the players fathers, their faces scowling and judgmental. There are statues of beautiful women - when you take the cloth veil off the statue's face, you see your character's mother. We are beneath the surface now. Any time you go underground in Suldain, you encounter, in effect, your id. Players that can pass through the feywild see that this is the location of a violent and chaotic party. Satyrs and Nymphs are fighting and fucking and drinking self-destructive amounts of liquor.

They kill the Quillian (barely!) and head back to the horse tribe.

Tanaret

Finally, they make their way towards Tanaret, the Silver Aeon who sleeps beneath the plateau. The adventurers clear the monsters and pass the three wards. (but not without making some shady deals with an immortal creature called a Berbelang.) They get access to Tanaret, and see a vision of a city they recognize - the quiet town of Arnetta.

The adventurers passed through Arnetta right after they left Ave Sestina. It was a really pleasant place that was being threatened by hill giants. The giants worshiped these primordial elemental beings, and the adventurers slayed all 18 of them. This was a few months ago.

They see that the Berbelang spends his time whispering in the aeon's ear, telling the story of how no matter what people do, the giants always return to Arnetta. The adventurers had promised to allow the Berbelang to do his task in secret in trade for passage through the third ward. So they were kind of stuck allowing this thing to happen. The fighter, thinking on his feet, found a moment to go over to the aeon and whisper a quick story into its ear.

In the story, the lord of the city, who is descended from giant slayers, conceives a son. And this son will grow up to be the greatest giant slayer that Arnetta has ever known. The Aeon smiled in his sleep.

At this point, the players lost their shit. They realized that they too could influence the world by manipulating the dreams of the Aeons.



The eladrin warlord started paging through notes. Something clicked. He recognized that the names of the Aeons they'd been sent to cleanse were anagrams of the cities they've visited. The Aeon Tanaret dreams of Arnetta. That must mean that the Aeon named Sataviseen dreams of Ave Sestina, and the Aeon named Torobrask dreams of Starbrook!


So what should we do?

Suddenly, the party was a torrent of ideas.

Maybe we can kick the Dromen out of the region by using the aeons?

Wait, what if we find the Aeon that's dreaming of the Dromen capital, Glasdazk?

We could wake up that Aeon, and them Glasdazk would cease to exist!

Ooh, or maybe we could tell it a better story, and make Glasdazk into the center of a better empire, a place that would make Erathis proud!

But first we have to find it.

And we also have to get out of this Geas.

As the Geas compelled them, the characters created a Linked Portal back to the city of Maedar, where the Dromen greeted them. This was the end of the first of their three geas-tasks.  This leveled them up to 13.

They have found out that there's a shaman in the desert who knows all about geases -- maybe they can track her down and get some answers from her?

Also, they have to find out where the rest of the Aeons are sleeping, and what their names are.

Also, they have to find out where the Flame of Erathis has been taken, and get it back.

Also, one of the party members, a Githzerai Fighter, knows that his son is here in Suldain, and he's considering joining the enemy Githyanki. The symbol of these Githyanki is a black snake biting its tail. (the character wonders, in private, if this is "the serpent swallowing the son"... is he willing to trade his son's life for escape from the Geas?)

Also, one of the party members, a rogue, knows his old nemesis is here.

Also, the eladrin warlord senses that the aeon that dreams of his home city, Starbrook, is restless in his sleep, and that's why the city phases between the middle world and the feywild every morning and evening.

Also, an aborigine has joined the party. He came of age on the same day that the party killed the Quillian, so his fate is linked to the Gatecrashers and has chosen to join the party. (new player, first time playing D&D, now he's hooked!)

Also, the Raven Queen has sent one of her ravens to assist the party. (a friend of ours is playing a new character, a kenku sorcerer/bard)



And I'll cut it off here because this post is already way too tl;dr  :wink:

But seriously, this has been a BLAST. The players are really hooked right now, they have so many choices about what to do, how to shape the world, and I'm super curious about how they're going to handle it.

Whoa really awesome Cram!

And still very cool that you named those people the "Dromen", really cool name in English :)

Game has been AWESOME.

My current thing is that I try to mix up every event with at least one fight where the objective is something other than "kill all the monsters". Here's a few of the encounters/scenes that I've run:

---

This encounter took place at Uluru, also known as Ayer's Rock. It's a real-world location that also exists in my fantasy-australia campaign.

(http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/066/cache/uluru-national-park_6632_600x450.jpg)

I ran a fight the other week where there were cactii all over the board. If you got pushed, pulled, or slided through a square adjacent to a cactus, you'd take damage. The cactii also had these little flowers growing on them, and each PC had to get 4 of them.

The challenge is that this area is the site for a gender-based ritual that the local kalashtar perform. There are certain holy places that only women are allowed to walk. And there are certain places that only men are allowed to walk. For this encounter, I put down two big zones, one for MEN ONLY, another for WOMEN ONLY. If you stepped in the wrong zone, you'd get hit with a short curse (that would weaken you).

Trick is, the party only has one female! And the NPCs defending the cactii also only had one female, and she was the boss of the group. It was an interesting fight because the party couldn't move freely, they had to figure out how to manage NPCs standing in an area they couldn't enter without making themselves less effective. It was also really exciting for the (female) wizard, who had to square off with the boss one-on-one.

---

The players are trying to get through this section of dungeon. The demon Qadaar is after them, he's a powerful monster that they know they CAN NOT TAKE.

I used a pre-printed map, a large poster-sized dungeon with lots of rooms, corridors, irregularly shaped hallways, lots of stuff. I added a lot of doors, furniture, and a few hidden treasure chests. Every room on the map had 2-3 exits. There were two exits from the level. There were 5 monsters that started off on the exits, in addition to Qadaar.

Now here's the fun part: I gave the party 5 scrolls of Arcane Lock. These are special ones that can be cast by anybody, using a move action. So basically, you can shut a door REALLY HARD.

For the players, the goal was to get through the dungeon and not get blasted by Qadaar. One way to do this was to lock him (or his allies) into a room. If the party runs through a room and locks the door behind them, it forces the demons to take the long way around, giving the party a precious round or two to race for the stairs.

---

(http://www.toptenz.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Muldjewangk.gif)

The Muldjewangk is a creature from real Australian mythology. In my game, it's a basically purple worm. The players were crossing through a jungle when they encountered it.

Now here's the thing about the purple worm's stats in 4th edition. It's a solo creature, meaning it's statted to be a tough match for FOUR people. Most solo creatures have lots of attacks, ways to resolve stun and daze effects, a few nasty tricks up their sleeve, and a few actions they can take when it's not their turn (like if you flank an adult dragon, they get an immediate tail swipe to knock you back).

The 4e purple worm has very few of those things. It is tough because it has a shitload of hit points. Compared with other solo creatures, its attack isn't that bad (unless you're below 50% health, in which case it can swallow you whole), but it can take a ridiculous amount of abuse.

But I didn't think that would be a fun straight fight. When a creature has like 700 hit points and only one type of attack, the round is going to be pretty boring. I'm going to end up doing the same thing every turn, and so are the players. If I've got a player in the worm's mouth, the worm can't even move. So it's just a slug fest.

FUCK THAT, I said to myself. The worm is going to be an ongoing threat. So they first encountered the worm during a fight against evil natives. When the worm was down to about 2/3rds of its health, it burrowed underground.

It trailed them for days. The players knew it would attack if they rested, so they didn't sleep, they only took short rests to recharge their healing and encounter powers, and kept moving.

In the second fight of the event, the party battled against Girillons. These are some of my favorite D&D monsters because they're so absurd. I wish I could have been at the meeting when they came up with Girillons. They're just four-armed apes. They're so territorial that they can't even breed, they just beat up their mates.

In this fight, they party took on four girillons, who started to flee when they noticed the markings of the Alpha on nearby trees. The purple worm showed up mid fight and thrashed everybody. Then they teamed up on the worm, started to kick its ass, so it burrowed away.

At this point, the party is torn -- we're kind of beat up, can we take this worm or not? Should we teleport back to the city, take an extended rest, let the worm rest back up to full, and try it again tomorrow? NO! We should keep going like bad asses! (shit, somebody said, its' going to attack at the worst possible time, isn't it?)

So they started making noise. Banging on trees, bashing their shields against each other, making a giant racket, trying to get the worm to burrow up to the surface.

This backfired though. They attracted MORE GIRILLONS!

Three rounds into this third fight of the day, the alpha DID show up. This is a pretty tough fight already. THEN, JUST AS THEY STARTED TO OVERCOME THE GORILLAS, THE MULDJEWANGK BURROWED OUT OF THE GROUND.

They did eventually kill the thing, but it was a really tough fight.

I lost my first PC to a purple worm, so I always want them to be scary. :P

How many hobos do I need to murder to have you as a GM?

 :lulz: thanks


The current thing I've had in my head regarding encounter design is advice from Chris Perkins. He says the DM should think of every fight like a 3-act play. Something happens, then something happens to mix it up, then there's a twist.

It might be "the monsters get a surprise round, then when half of them are dead, the boss shows up"

It might be "In round 2, the monsters drag in a chained bear that's frothing at the mouth. The players can use nature checks to befriend down the bear. If they score 3 successes, the bear switches sides and aids them."

It might be that the terrain or environment changes and everybody has to rethink their movement.

It might be that the PCs complete a ritual and trigger something.

It might be that the PCs finally pop the lock on a chest and get the trump item that allows them to kick the elite creature's ass.

I ran a fight two weeks ago where the PCs were caught in a sand storm. At the top of every round, I'd roll a d4. If I rolled a 4, the winds blow. Wind would push and injure anybody who wasn't lying prone or standing on the east side of blocking terrain. It meant that "the best spot to stand" changed every round. If you didn't take cover from the storm, you'd end up spending your move actions trying to get back to the party.


The important thing is that during the encounter, the fight switches directions , objectives, or somehow nullifies people's initial assumptions. That's how I design exciting fights that everybody's talking about for weeks afterwards.

current campaign map: http://www.scribd.com/doc/79012955

edit: wow, that looks awful on scribd. here's a png. Problem is, when I exported to png, the patterns came out wrong. That should be a texture in the desert and salt flats, not just a dumb looking grid.


(http://i.imgur.com/XoJ5z.jpg)

Ran a really cool puzzle yesterday---

The players are in the Feywild, the faerie land hidden behind our world. They have to get to a certain spot in the Feywild. They know that the geography of the feywild changes and shifts all the time, so a map may not be that useful. You just have to travel and try to find the path.

I gave them four maps. Each map was drawn with magic marker on transparency paper, so you can see through it. If you put all the maps on top of each other, they all roughly line up. Each map has a few mountains, rivers, a forest, and a handful of black Xs.

Throughout the land, there are these X's on the map. Each X is a crossing point. At a crossing point, there's a little pedestal with a device into which you can insert TWO maps. When you activate the device (which requires a different kind of skill check at each pedestal, three failures would result in a fight), the world shifts to match the two maps you just inserted.

So the party says, This is easy! We just put in the map of where we are now, and the map that has the place we're trying to go!

But if we do that, there's mountains in the way... So we have to try to navigate to another crossing point...

It was a pretty involved puzzle. Took about an hour to figure out, and involved maybe six steps from start to finish.

If people want, I can scan the transparency pages so you guys can run it at your games.

Badass encounter design cram. Oooh, nice map too. I'd be down for seeing the Feywild ones too.

(https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-BMDjc2ngPqk/TyvyoqtoMDI/AAAAAAAACjI/PJgopMH8vJU/s0-d/IMAG0275.jpg)

The back story to THIS encounter is that the players are in this place --- essentially Ayers Rock in Australia, also known as Uluru. Worth a google image search, it's a cool place.

The aeon that's sleeping there, Torobrask, is dreaming of the city of Starbrook. (remember, in my world, the world is just a dream that these buddhas are having. the players are on the island of sleeping buddhas).

One of the party members is from Starbrook, and he knew he had a task to perform here. Starbrook is half in the real world, half in the feywild. Every night, it appears in the real world. And at sunrise, it fades away and returns to Faerie.

The REASON this happens (as the players discovered) is because the aeon who dreams up Starbrook is sleeping in the sun. There's a stained glass window at the top of this cave, and light streams in, hitting his face, disturbing his meditation. That's why when the sun goes down, he is able to focus, and Starbrook is fully part of the world again.

The stained glass window depicts this sea scene from Starbrook mythology. It's a famous story about a captain facing two krakens at sea. The players magically entered this stained glass, and found themselves in these boats, beset by Krakens.

Movement is tricky here! I gave the players two boats - a 4 x 2 tile, and a 2 x 1 tile (a little dinghy). They can spend a move action to move the boats 6 squares. If they fall out of the boat, the water is rough and choppy.

When they arrived in the naval scene, they could see the aeon sleeping 100 feet beneath them, the boat cast a shadow on the sea floor. They figured that if they steer the boat in a way that the shadow lands over the aeon's face, it will change the glass, and the aeon will sleep better. So the challenge was to move the boat over the aeon's face, then get back through the portal on the far side of the board.

But you know what? Killing krakens is too much fun to let them live. So the players decided to take on these two solo beasts. It was a really epic fight. My friend John has been reading Moby Dick, and he just learned his character's destiny is to become King of Starbrook one day, so he was really charged up about killing these things. He asked me if he could bend the rules and leap onto the Kraken's back like Ahab instead of attacking it from an adjacent square. Fuck yeah man!

It was MADNESS! Every time the Kraken threw him, he swam back towards it and climbed on top.

It was such a fun fight that a week later, I'm still getting RELEASE THE KRAKEN text messages from my players.

RELEASE THE FUCKING KRAKEN! :lulz:

It's the gift that keeps on giving. Badass adventure, dude.

Hells yes.

a few shots from yesterday's game:

(https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-kQPQbbo2oqo/T0FkTpng_kI/AAAAAAAAClw/LeJ7uEDFnfQ/s903/IMAG0290.jpg)

(https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-wzdKimmhqdo/T0FkdpR0ZhI/AAAAAAAACl4/atjMTbSfgfU/s903/IMAG0291.jpg)

(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-NAekR29jpz4/T0Fk7d3knpI/AAAAAAAACmQ/xBIrAubfvSI/s903/IMAG0294.jpg)

(https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-dC1AXNsaEeo/T0FlDyM2akI/AAAAAAAACmY/HUw93sbGhX0/s802/IMAG0293.jpg)


yesterday was one long fight. Didn't expect it to take nearly that long. It was like four or five hours! Combat length is basically my biggest gripe with D&D 4e.

Amazing encounter though. The mission was to kill a lich that lived in a tower. We started the encounter about 200 feet away from the tower, where the players first encounter the lich's minions. (shitty undead spirits with 1 HP) But this signaled them that they were in for the long haul.

The lich was an eladrin, he has a lot of movement and teleport powers. So as they fought him, he moved back through the tower, and back outside. This fight was all over the place! The lich's phylactery and some treasure chests were hidden somewhere on the board. They managed to find/crush the phylactery before they killed the lich, ensuring that he wouldn't be back to haunt them.

Epic!

Quote from: Cramulus on December 12, 2011, 03:25:31 PM
The last few weeks have been a really fantastic series of games. It's the situation every DM wants - the players are hooked, they're chattering about the game all the time, everybody's really excited to play. I come downstairs into the living room and everybody's theorizing about what's going on and what to do next.

So here's what's going on.........

Aedremere

The party was in the city of Aedremere, which is mostly dragonborn. They successfully defeated the witch queen Silona (a mummy/medusa) and her thrall Captain Daven (a dragonborn Death Knight). City is safe, right? Well, not quite. As the adventurers returned to the city, they saw the Flame of Sehanine (the city's artifact, a twin to the artifactual Flame of Erathis that the party carries) disappear from Aedremere's palatial tower. Somebody stole it!

The players spent a lot of time in the council hall, where they were asked a lot of rude questions by hopeless and cynical old men. The magistrate apologized profusely to the adventurers - seems the council's been shaken up by the recent undead attacks. They're humans with short lifespans, they don't see that we always triumph in the end.

Walking around the city, the adventurers can tell something's up. After spending a few days in the city recovering from mummy rot (the rogue rotted so bad, he came one die roll away from death!) the party had picked up on a song that people in the city are humming or whistling. They heard a lot of people humming it, but upon questioning them, the people didn't know what it was or where they'd heard it. Something weird was happening, but nobody could figure out exactly what.


The Geas

After that, long story short - the players got captured by two Kaladari (read: conquestadors) of the Dromen Commonwealth, this expansionist empire across the sea. They were forced into a geas -- a ritual contract -- in which they agreed to serve the two Kaladari as vassals. The contract ends when they've completed three tasks: they have to cleanse areas called Tanaret, Sataviseen, and Torobrask. Until that time, they can only rest in this one city. Sleeping outside of that city will not help them recover hit points or powers.

[according to the logic of my world] Geases must have a "back door", a way for the contract to be voided early, usually something very abstract in nature. The creator of the Geas usually phrases this as some impossible task. So this geas can also end "When a serpent swallows the sun". This got the players scratching their heads. What does it mean?

And they're strangers in a strange land. The game's been moved to the continent of Suldain, which is basically "Fantasy Australia". This equates to Australia during an early phase of English colonization. The only cities are basically Sydney and Perth, on the east and west coasts. Between that, there's a big open outback with lots of different terrain types (desert, mountains, tundra, jungle) and horrible australian monsters. (BTW, the monsters of Australian mythology are weird!)

The Dromen Kaladari inform the players that this is the Dreamlands, it may be the place where you go when you sleep. So things might not work like you expect, this is a supernatural place. It's also at the edge of the world -- this is the southernmost island that anybody's ever discovered. Go much further south than this, the currents take you, and you'll fall off the edge of the world. (surprise! My game setting is FLAT. "Round earth" is a foolish theory that wizards have repeatedly proven false.)

First Adventure in Suldain

The aboriginal locals call themselves Kalashtar. The players had a few run-ins with them, and found them to be suspicious and reserved, but not opposed to diplomacy.

In the salt flats to the south of Maedar (the Dromen city on the west coast), the players encountered the Tuddo tribe, a group of Kalashtar that have been displaced from their homeland by a Dromen outpost. Underneath the outpost, there is a sleeping Aeon called Bequmuni.

A Sleeping Aeon?

"People from your realm have the world upside down," said the Kalashtar shaman, Father Tuddo, "You are not in the dreamlands. You are in the real world. The world you live in is a dream."

Underneath the surface of Suldain, there are huge silver sleeping buddha statues, sometimes a hundred feet tall. They are dreaming, and their dream is the world.

The players investigated the garrison at Bequmuni, and were allowed to see the aeon. There was a small Dromen base, about 10 soldiers and 8 bards inside. In the central chamber, where the Aeon sleeps, a string quartet was camped. They were perched next to the Aeon's ear, and were playing a song, the Dromen national anthem.

"That's it," somebody said, "that's the song we heard in Aedremere..."

That's when it clicked. The Dromen aren't trying to end the world or anything like that. They're trying to take over as many city-states as possible by manipulating the beings which dream the world. It seems like playing this song next to an Aeon's ear puts the people of that city into a kind of trance. It makes them much more open to Dromen rule. The Dromen destabilize an area, then offer aid. The aid gives them seats on local councils and cabinets. Slowly, they gain control of those cities without exercising military force.

This puts the adventurers in quite a dilemma. They're ritually tasked to clear these three Aeons, and set up linked portals so that the Dromen can access them. If they fail to do this, the geas can actually kill them.

What Dreams May Come

Sleeping in Suldain, you don't have dreams. You have out of body experiences. Each player got a dream, a series of images which indicate that something from their past is here in Suldain. For example, the rogue wants revenge on this guy, and he now sees that the man has an estate here in Suldain somewhere. How is it that some noble from the mainland has a mansion in the fantasy outback -- the middle of bumfuck Australia?

As the shaman explained -- there is something here in Suldain which caused that nightmare to happen to you in your world. It's like you are having a dream of somebody breaking through your front door, and when you awake, you hear a woodpecker banging on it. The troubles you have faced in your life are the result of something happening here, a point of corruption which has bled into the dream.

Underneath the Surface

A bit later, the players met up with the Tarrinah tribe, a horse people who live in the south western peninsula of Suldain. In order to speak to the shaman, they had to go through an initiation process. They had to hunt down a beast called a Quillian and put a handprint on it. If they are real warriors, they will slay it.

So the players tracked down this beast's layer. As they go down beneath the surface, they start encountering this bewildering freudian imagery. There are statues of the players fathers, their faces scowling and judgmental. There are statues of beautiful women - when you take the cloth veil off the statue's face, you see your character's mother. We are beneath the surface now. Any time you go underground in Suldain, you encounter, in effect, your id. Players that can pass through the feywild see that this is the location of a violent and chaotic party. Satyrs and Nymphs are fighting and fucking and drinking self-destructive amounts of liquor.

They kill the Quillian (barely!) and head back to the horse tribe.

Tanaret

Finally, they make their way towards Tanaret, the Silver Aeon who sleeps beneath the plateau. The adventurers clear the monsters and pass the three wards. (but not without making some shady deals with an immortal creature called a Berbelang.) They get access to Tanaret, and see a vision of a city they recognize - the quiet town of Arnetta.

The adventurers passed through Arnetta right after they left Ave Sestina. It was a really pleasant place that was being threatened by hill giants. The giants worshiped these primordial elemental beings, and the adventurers slayed all 18 of them. This was a few months ago.

They see that the Berbelang spends his time whispering in the aeon's ear, telling the story of how no matter what people do, the giants always return to Arnetta. The adventurers had promised to allow the Berbelang to do his task in secret in trade for passage through the third ward. So they were kind of stuck allowing this thing to happen. The fighter, thinking on his feet, found a moment to go over to the aeon and whisper a quick story into its ear.

In the story, the lord of the city, who is descended from giant slayers, conceives a son. And this son will grow up to be the greatest giant slayer that Arnetta has ever known. The Aeon smiled in his sleep.

At this point, the players lost their shit. They realized that they too could influence the world by manipulating the dreams of the Aeons.



The eladrin warlord started paging through notes. Something clicked. He recognized that the names of the Aeons they'd been sent to cleanse were anagrams of the cities they've visited. The Aeon Tanaret dreams of Arnetta. That must mean that the Aeon named Sataviseen dreams of Ave Sestina, and the Aeon named Torobrask dreams of Starbrook!


So what should we do?

Suddenly, the party was a torrent of ideas.

Maybe we can kick the Dromen out of the region by using the aeons?

Wait, what if we find the Aeon that's dreaming of the Dromen capital, Glasdazk?

We could wake up that Aeon, and them Glasdazk would cease to exist!

Ooh, or maybe we could tell it a better story, and make Glasdazk into the center of a better empire, a place that would make Erathis proud!

But first we have to find it.

And we also have to get out of this Geas.

As the Geas compelled them, the characters created a Linked Portal back to the city of Maedar, where the Dromen greeted them. This was the end of the first of their three geas-tasks.  This leveled them up to 13.

They have found out that there's a shaman in the desert who knows all about geases -- maybe they can track her down and get some answers from her?

Also, they have to find out where the rest of the Aeons are sleeping, and what their names are.

Also, they have to find out where the Flame of Erathis has been taken, and get it back.

Also, one of the party members, a Githzerai Fighter, knows that his son is here in Suldain, and he's considering joining the enemy Githyanki. The symbol of these Githyanki is a black snake biting its tail. (the character wonders, in private, if this is "the serpent swallowing the son"... is he willing to trade his son's life for escape from the Geas?)

Also, one of the party members, a rogue, knows his old nemesis is here.

Also, the eladrin warlord senses that the aeon that dreams of his home city, Starbrook, is restless in his sleep, and that's why the city phases between the middle world and the feywild every morning and evening.

Also, an aborigine has joined the party. He came of age on the same day that the party killed the Quillian, so his fate is linked to the Gatecrashers and has chosen to join the party. (new player, first time playing D&D, now he's hooked!)

Also, the Raven Queen has sent one of her ravens to assist the party. (a friend of ours is playing a new character, a kenku sorcerer/bard)



And I'll cut it off here because this post is already way too tl;dr  :wink:

But seriously, this has been a BLAST. The players are really hooked right now, they have so many choices about what to do, how to shape the world, and I'm super curious about how they're going to handle it.

I don't mean to necro the thread.  But wow!  This may be the coolest thing I've ever read in my life, Cram.  This had me on the edge of my seat.  I couldn't wait to find out what happens next. . . And I'm not even part of the game, lol.  I wish I had a fraction of your story-telling skills/imagination.