Ten years ago today ...

 

... my kids were mangling the Moathouse garrison on a spring break run.

I could probably do a lot of posts like this at this point. I suppose that's a good thing as I'm still at it but I'm also feeling the passage of time a bit these days as the last of them wrap up school and prepare to head out on their own - mixed emotions for sure. 

The same week we also had one of our early Marvel Heroic runs with Breakout from the main book. An awesome game cut down prematurely but we have good memories and I still break it out (Yeah I went there) from time to time. Plus now we have the latest general Cortex book in print and we're also waiting to see what the newest Marvel RPG turns out to be. Amazon is showing "April 19th" for the playtest release - hopefully it will be interesting at least.  

Greatest Hits #26 - Sandboxing 4th Edition

One of my favorite posts about 4th Edition D&D - so many people were convinced that it could not do certain things that they never tried ...

Early on I wasn't sure how this would work - thought there was certainly no lack of insistence online that it could not work - but after spending a couple of years with the system I don't see it as being any more difficult than earlier versions. Let's look at some of the published material:

The best out-of-one-book option is Neverwinter. I've come around some on this setting from my original take on it. No, there isn't a traditional set of encounters or an adventure in it, but what is there is a pretty solid sandbox. There is a ruined city and the surrounding wilderness, mapped out in some detail though not exhaustively so. There is mechanical support through the themes that tie a character to the local situation. There are factions within and without to give the PC's hooks to look for, sides to take, allies and enemies to deal with. Each one has goals, a history, a list of creatures associated with the faction, a leader with a name and a personality, and typically some monster stats or stats for the leader as well. The whole thing is built for levels 1-10 and there's more going on there then one party could finish before leveling out of that range. Given that and it's small geographic area I think it's perfect for running multiple groups and multiple characters per player in an old-school style campaign.

The most complete published sandbox is the Nentir Vale. First presented in the 4E DMG, that material covered an overview of the vale and its history along with the fairly well detailed town of Fallcrest and a small starter dungeon. Over the next couple of years we saw more detail on specific locations like Shadowfell Keep, Thunderspire mountain, the active dwarven city of Hammerfast, and the ruined Tiefling city of Vor Rukoth which were all published as module-type products. Then we finally got the Nentir Vale Monster Vault which is full of things like a unique red dragon that lives in one of the mountain ranges, a spirit that haunts a certain area in the vale, and monster stats for specific tribes of orcs and barbarians along with notes on where they live and what they are up to. Put it all together and it's a very solid set of resources for a region roughly 200 miles long and 100 miles wide. Players can wander through the vale looking for rumors, contacts, patrons or just plain trouble. Have your players roll up a party, drop them in Fallcrest at level 1 and let them decide what to do next.

If these are too conventional then there is always the Gloomwrought boxed set which pretty much presents a city in the plane of shadow as a sandbox with factions and creatures similar to he Neverwinter presentation but with the weird meter cranked up several notches. I don't own this one so I can't go into as much detail (and it doesn't really push my buttons as a DM) but I think it might serve a somewhat higher level range than the first two - certainly at least 10-15 should work. The shades of gray to just flat-out evil party will probably be more at home here or at least will see less interference from do-gooders. There is also plenty of material on the plane of Shadow in the Heroes of Shadow book and the Manual of the Planes, plus there was a Free RPG Day thing covering another nearby domain. So if you want to go dark, there is a sandbox option for you.

A less-developed option (though there are plenty of resources from other editions out there) would be Sigil from the DMG2. It takes up 26 pages of content in that book including a map, stats for some typical street encounters, and a short starter adventure. It's not a block-by-block description but it's a good overview and certainly enough to start up a DM's imagination. Plus making the City of Doors the hub of your campaign lets the players go just about anywhere they want - demanding on the DM to be sure but it also means the players should never be able to say they're bored with the campaign or tired of the same old scenery.

Another slightly less developed option is the Gray Vale in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide. There's the town of Loudwater, notes on the history and geography of the surrounding area, a starter dungeon and some smaller encounter areas, and some of these other areas are developed in Dungeon magazine. It's mainly lower Heroic Tier but given the are of the Realms that it's in that can certainly be amped up without much trouble.

The main thing all of these published areas share is no metaplot. There is no overarching story driving things forward. There is a base area, various factions going about their agendas, old legends about people or places or things, and lairs and dungeons and wilderness to be explored. That's exactly the kind of thing you need to run a sandbox regardless of edition. Keep something like Dungeon Delve handy in case the players head off in a direction you were not expecting, or a PDF collection of dungeon and access to a searchable index and you should be good to go. DDI and a printer or the ability to rapidly cut and paste monster statblocks into one document could really help with on the fly encounter generation as well.

How would I run it given 4E's heavy emphasis on balance and XP budgets and set piece encounters? Originally I was thinking that zoning a region for different levels, like an MMORPG, would be a good approach but I don't think you need to do that. Rather than geographic level distribution I would look at faction-based level distribution. For example, we know the Bloodspear Orcs have member creatures that cover certain levels, maybe from 4th to 8th. Say we also know they live in the Cairngorn Peaks. I would work up three patrol-type encounters that include what I think their typical patrols would consist of and start with those. Maybe one is a light recon patrol of speedy skirmisher types, another might be warg-riders, and another might be a heavier one with a shaman and a couple of ogres and orc berserkers. The main idea here is that I don't let a set "regional level" drive my choices - instead, my choices determine what level it ends up at. If I end up with a heavy orc patrol that turns out to be level 9 when I add up the XP's well that's the way it is - hope the party is up for it or that the players are smart enough to run if not. If I'm doing random chance for wandering encounters then in the Cairngorns I would pick one of these when the time came. If I do a full-blown random encounter chart then  I would make sure the known home territory of the Bloodspears had a pretty good chance or orcs for random encounters.

Now some might say "but what if they level past the region?" - let them! You don't have a metaplot, remember? You could decide up front and say I will run this area at Heroic for one calendar year as-is. Maybe players will try multiple characters. After a year you can change things up - maybe the drow burrow up from below, maybe someone opens a gate to the Abyss, maybe the Gityanki start showing up en masse for some reason. Conversely you could have the entire area annexed by some kingdom and become too peaceful for adventuring and it's time to move on to a new area - maybe Sigil. Whatever it is you can have something drastic happen to your sandbox either upping the threat level into Paragon or wrapping it up and changing to a different campaign - or, enforce character retirement. When a PC hits 11th level they get one last adventure and then have to retire to something respectable like high priest or local baron or they take a trip to Gloomwrought or something. You could also move things downward and have more powerful heroes recruited to stop an underground threat like the drow and work up a whole Underdark sandbox in the same region and have a war going on deep beneath the surface with duergar and deep gnomes and drow and all of that lore. Not every group is going to want to go there, but it could be a cool option if you intend to have both tiers in play at the same time.

Anyway I mainly wrote this up to show that not only is sandbox play possible, but based on the amount of material published for it I would say it's even been encouraged by WOTC. The ease of up and down leveling monsters in 4E makes adjustment quite a bit simpler than in previous editions and if you're willing to run wit ha computer at the table tools like DDI and the numerous PDF products out there make seat-of-the-pants Dm-ing even easier. I do not typically run with a computer at the table because my players tend to stay focused on a particular goal or rumor or mission rather than meandering about like so many of us did in the old days, but it doesn't mean that I couldn't  - it's mainly because I haven't needed to do that. Maybe next campaign.

Greatest Hits #11 - PHB's I Have Known

Of course there's another one to put in the picture now ...

Yep, that's all of them. Bottom right comes in about 1980-81 for me (and yes that's the same book I bought with my allowance back then) and that upper left showed up on my doorstep yesterday.

I've had a lot of fun with these over the years and I can tell stories that came from games played with all of the previous versions. Even though I am still running Pathfinder and 4th edition games I am sure we will get around to giving the new one a try and then I'll have some stories to go with it too.

There are memories around the time each of these came out too. The joy of discovery, when all of this was so new with the first; the college days playing in dorms and at night at the IHoP of second; the fun of putting a new group together with old and new faces and new versions of classic adventures with third; the annoyance and disappointment of fourth gradually turning into a rediscovery of the fun and putting together another mix of old and new - including a new wife and some new kids; with 5th, well, right now it's all kid milestones for the last month - a 12th birthday, a lot of summer band practice, driving to and from the first job, and moving into a college dorm. If 5th has a good enough run, they may ALL be in college by the time 6th comes out.

PDF's may be the future of a lot of smaller RPG's, but I hope the biggest games, or the kickstarters for smaller games, give us a chance to acquire them as books. I'm pretty comfortable using an iPad at the table but there's something about being able to pick up the same book I held way back when that helps refresh those memories too - it's more than visual, it's texture, smell, weight, and all of the little nicks and dings they pick up in use. I'd say the largest ingredient in some of my AD&D materials after paper, ink, and glue is probably Domino's Pizza and Dr. Pepper. I took pretty good care of my stuff but hey, accidents happen, and Domino's was new here back then. We spent a lot of summer time scraping up our dollars so we could order pizza and keep on playing, especially before we could drive.

Anyway, I suppose I've "completed the set" for the time being - now to read the thing, and start the next chapter of a 30+ year story.

Greatest Hits #9 - 5E and Pathfinder Back to Back

An account of my first experience playing 5th and comparing it to Pathfinder and 4th which were also in play at that time. 

I played D&D 5E for the first time on Saturday, then had another session of an ongoing Pathfinder game (Kingmaker) on Sunday, and I thought I'd share some notes from the combined experience.

Like any first run with a new set of rules, there was some clunkiness at first. We had a DM and three of us playing so we had time to focus in on each character. I ran a wizard (necromancer), and there was also a monk (elemental) and a fighter (eldritch knight). We started at 3rd level. This was a homebrew adventure, not a published one, so we spent time getting acquainted and figuring out how we wanted to proceed as we picked up new information about the area we were in. We ended up sneaking in to a ruined city that was mostly populated by goblins and undead. There was plenty left to explore so hopefully we get to go back to it at some point and play some more. Afterwards we talked about the game and the high points were:

• Making a character is pretty easy and does not really feel like it needs a generator tool like HeroLab. 
• Backgrounds added more in the flavor department than I expected, given their limited mechanical impact
• Characters feel a lot less detailed/special mechanically than in Pathfinder and 4E. Sure, an Eldritch Knight feels at least a little different than a Champion, but I suspect two Eldritch Knights in the same party would play very much the same. Pathfinder and 4E have enough mechanical options that this is far less of a problem. Of course they also have so many classes that it's less likely to happen in the first place. I suspect time and expansion books will mitigate this for 5th as well but right now it feels smaller.
• There is a lot less to keep track of as there are not a bunch of conditions and modifiers flying around. The universe is pretty much the proficiency bonus, a stat bonus, and advantage/disadvantage and that's the biggest part of nearly any roll.
• It certainly felt like D&D, probably 2E D&D the most. 

Biggest insight: I suspect the battle-cry for 5th edition games will be "don't I get advantage on that?"

Character-wise Pathfinder also still feels like D&D : ) Sure, the modifiers are composed of more elements but once they're on your sheet it's not that different from 5E - d20 + your normal mods (found on your sheet) and possible situational mods like cover and concealment. Interestingly enough we just hit 3rd level in the PF game too so this was a pretty direct comparison. The PF characters just felt like they could do more when it came to game mechanics. Not in power level, but in being able to do something that would affect a situation in some mechanical way, not just handwaving or adding color. It's tricky to pin down but that's how it felt.

The other big note on 5E was from the DM who has run/played a lot of 3E/4E, mainly 4E for the last 5 years or so, and he said "The monsters are boring" - and I can't help but agree. I've been running Pathfinder and 4E the last few years and the 5E monster statblocks seem so ... mundane. Compare the stats for the manticore from all 3 games:

So the 5E manticore can fly but other than that it really just has melee and ranged attacks.

Pathfinder's manticore has flyby attack which is a normal part of the rules in 5E but not in PF. It also has the ability to track fairly well which could be interesting.

The 4E manticore has similar ranged and melee options but has a built-in shift on each of its attacks increasing its mobility beyond normal movement and it also has a reactive attack where it can throw spikes when hit. That action-reaction option does make fighting one a little more dangerous.

All of them fulfill a similar role in their editions of flying spike-flinger, no radical differences there.

• The 4E version does "more" as written and there are options to add templates and similar changes within those rules. 
• The Pathfinder version has a universe of options from advancement to templates to class levels to gear. 
• The 5E version is pretty plain but I'm hoping that changes with the release of the Monster Manual and the DMG and possibly down the road even more options will come to light.  

It holds true with goblins, too:

5E is pretty simple, but they do get the nifty extra move which was pretty frustrating to our fighter over the weekend.

4E actually had six different types of goblins in the first Monster Manual so there are a lot of options when populating a goblin lair. I do see some carryover of theme with the better-than-average mobility of these things. The minion is probably the closest to the new version. The other 4E versions though add some sneak-attack type options and even more interesting movement abilities. I'd really like to see some options to liven up the monsters of 5th edition in a similar way.

In the end I'd call our first run "successful" but I don't know that it's going to bump our ongoing fantasy games. In the long run it has potential but right now it's just not quite there.

Greatest Hits #2 - 4th Edition Campaign Idea #3 -Return to Phlan

Another from April 2010  - This was the starting point of a multi-year campaign 

This is a somewhat smaller scale campaign idea than the other two, and really only applies to Heroic levels. At this point I almost see that as a benefit and this is probably the one most likely to get played in the next few months.

I LOVED Pool of Radiance when it came out in 1989. I spent a huge amount of time playing it on my Commodore 64 as did my friends. It centered around a ruined city in the Forgotten Realms that was being slowly reclaimed by the inhabitants. Players made up a party and worked through the different sections of the city clearing out the monsters which were all conveniently level appropriate with the weaker ones nearer to the civillized section and the stronger ones deeper in the ruins. There were also side trips outside the city to a huge graveyard, a lizardman lair, and a mad wizard's pyramid. The computer game was awesome for the time and it came with a great little background book that really captured the favor of the area. TSR also published a 1st ed module version of this campaign titled Ruins of Adventure. It should have been the Realms version of Keep on the Borderlands but it failed badly and has largely been forgotten. Except by me.

So to start a new campaign of D&D I like to have a safe base area, some dungeons close at hand, some options for local countryside wandering, and some political or religious things going on to give the more roleplay oriented types something to do between dungeon crawls. This adventure fits that perfectly. Plus many of the adventures in the ruins involve more than just a frontal assault - many are centered around sneaking into something or talking your way past guards and many areas have some kind of guardians that can be reasoned with so there is more here than just carnage. There is plenty of violence though, and every kind of monster from kobolds to hill giants and dragons, lots of the D&D staples. Re reading the module made me realize it has a lot of good ideas just some poor presentation and limited monster stats - perfect for a conversion to another edition.,particularly this edition if its proponents are to be believed.

Classes: Anything goes. I'll pick up the Realms guides for 4th and however they've worked them into the Realms works for me.

Races: Same thing here - there's a book that explains all this so no extra effort for me.

The Gods - again, there's a whole book for this so that's what I will use.

Environment - it's a single large ruined city on the coast of the Moonsea and some of the surrounding features. Perfect - I don't have to build or convert a continent, just a one-page map.

Adventures - This is a fixed mission in some ways - reclaim the city! - but it's not a railroad, it's more of a sandbox. There's a big map and the players can approach it however they want. If your 2nd level band wanders into the hill giant lair then a lot of bad stuff is going to happen. Add in some factional differences on the town council and everyone should be able to find some interesting things to do.

Phlan and the Moonsea was the first area of the Reams I was exposed to and I really liked it. I have run almost no D&D in the Realms, spending most of my time there as a player as my friend ran the Realms like I run Greyhawk. But things change, so maybe it's time I tried it.

Note on the 100 year jump: I know the 4th edition realms is set 100 years after the old realms stuff but I don't think it matters. Phlan was ruined once and now it's ruined again sometime during that 100 year gap. My players didn't play through this module then (other than the computer game) so they have no investment in the original situation. Heck, maybe Tyranthraxus survived last time and has returned to finish what he started 100 years ago - either way it doesn't matter and doesn't cause any continuity problems with my game.

Expanding and improving this adventure should occupy my campaign through the Heroic levels and set them up as well known heroes around the Moonsea and major players in Phlan itself. At that point we could decide to continue, switch to something else, or start a new 4th edition game using the lessons learned here to improve the next one, maybe one of my other campaign ideas. Whichever way I think this is the best for a DM & players new to 4th edition and it's probably the way I will go.

Greatest Hits #1 - 4th Edition and Me

From April 2010 - and as it turned out ...

I played a lot of AD&D during the 80's, probably more than any other game. So when they announced they were making a 2nd edition about 1988, it was a HUGE deal. However, we had not really seen the edition changes with RPG's at that time that we have now, so the idea of a new edition was still kind of a new thing - they're going to make the game better, right? Plus there was some discussion in Dragon magazine and eventually a full insert that described what the new edition was going to do and it looked really good. There were no internet message boards - just friends, the people you met in stores, local game groups, and BBS's. Everyone I knew was pretty excited about it - we liked non-weapon proficiencies, we liked "spheres" for clerics, we liked the initiative changes - it was all good! Well, we did lose half-orcs and assassins but in my experience at the time most of the people who played assassins were jerks anyway and tended to assassinate party members just as often as they did monsters. Anyway, the game came out in 1989, it was huge, and everyone I knew switched over right away and we didn't touch 1st edition ever again.

I played a lot of AD&D 2nd edition in the 90's, probably more than any other game. So when they announced that they were making a 3rd edition about 1999 it was a big deal. We had seen multiple games go through multiple editions by now (Shadowrun, I'm looking at you - 1st ed 1989, 2nd ed 1992, 3rd ed 1998) and had to repurchase books and emotions were a little less positive. Plus they ran a year-long preview series in Dragon and a lot of the changes I saw looked suspicious and pretty radical. I was skeptical right up until the books came out then once I read the "whole" instead of selected parts, I fell in love with it instantly - the unified mechanic was huge and the single experience chart was a massive change for the better, freeing up multiclassing in amazing ways. level limits were gone, finally! And monsters finally had full stats, which eliminated a ton of problems. It was awesome and I totally dropped my misgivings and started up a new campaign within a month. We never played 2nd edition again once we had 3rd.

I played a lot of 3rd ed D&D in the 2000's, probably more than any other game. The 3.5 revision in 2003 was way too early in my opinion and my group largely ignored it as no one wanted to buy the books all over again. So elements of 3.5 gradually filtered into my existing campaign until we started my last 3rd edition campaign in 2008. that one I declared to be officially 3.5 and picked up the last few class books I didn't already have. The games were close enough that at the lower levels (where we spent most of our time) the differences didn't matter a great deal.

Then rumors of a 4th edition started seriously flowing about 2007. WOTC denied them flat-out in January of 2008 so i felt pretty comfortable that we weren't going to be seeing a new edition for another year or two - I assumed they would announce it at GenCon a year in advance like they did the last time. So when they did announce about February or March that it was coming in June of 2008 I was shocked - no dragon previews, no big online previews even. They did put out some books that you could buy (!) that were previews but considering I had not had to pay anything extra for the previous ones there was no way in hell they were getting my money for those. But I did get a good deal on a preorder through the local store so I did it. After all, I had liked each previous revision so why not? Plus, as the bits and pieces leaked out I really liked what I saw - a lot of things were very much like what I had houseruled during my 3rd ed camapigns: skill consolidation, more HP's, simplified languages, stc. Then I picked up Star Wars Saga Edition, described by some as a test bed for 4th edition, and it was awesome - it was everything I would have changed plus a little more and it worked and I was very excited for 4th edition - it was going to be great!

Then 4th ed was released, I picked up my books, started reading the PHB and felt awful - this was not anything I recognized, with the changes going far beyond anything that was in Saga. Radically different, it didn't look or read or feel like D&D anymore. At the time I did not play and had not played any MMORPG's but even I recognized the elements taken from them and didn't like most of them. In short, I thought that I was going to get D&D Saga Edition and I didn't and I hated it.

So we continued with our 3.5 campaign and the 4th ed books gathered dust for the next year and a half or so.

The 3.5 campaign ended and I thought about introducing my "apprentices" to D&D as they were now 13 & 10. I decided I should give 4th edition another chance and start them off with "their" version of the game, the "modern" one, letting them skip all the legacy material in my head from the past 4 versions that I had played. So I started reading the books and I actually got through all 3 of them this time and there was actually some good stuff in there. I can see a lot of what the designers were trying to do and a lot of it actually makes sense and could be a lot of fun. I tried running the boys through the adventure in the back of the DMG and it took FOREVER. Plus, they pretty much focused on their powers to the exclusion of all else - I didn't like that so I dropped it and started them off using Moldvay Red book basic. We've been playing for a couple of months now and it's going very well - see my session reports in my other posts for details, but I like the way they are approaching things. I am running that and Savage Worlds Neccessary Evil and I am quite happy.

But I still can't help but think there's some value in 4th edition. I have these nifty books, and I like parts of the system, and I hate not "keeping up" with what is going on with D&D. So at some point in the near future I am going to try and run a campaign of this thing, with friends, to try and get a handle on it. I have several campaign ideas I want to try, I will post those later.

Experiments in RPG: Wrath of the Righteous 4E?

It's been a few months since We called the Wrath of the Righteous campaign. Some of it was the system as Maximum Pathfinder is something I find myself a little less interested in these days. A lot of it was the campaign itself as it really gets tangled up in itself in the latter half of the campaign. I think it's a downside to having multiple authors writing each of the six adventures as they get locked in on something they think is cool even when it doesn't really fit with the rest of the campaign. The single biggest example of this problem is that at a certain point the party pretty much has to work out a deal with one demon lord to help them against another demon lord and I mean it is assumed for the rest of the path that this is how things are. To me this is a ridiculous assumption for a few reasons:

• Chaotic Evil - They're demons! You can't trust them to keep their word by their very nature as the embodiment of chaotic evil in D&D (and Pathfinder)! Devils, sure, that's one of their signature things, that you can make a deal with them because they are Lawful Evil. This assumes/requires that the players are stupid or it assumes demons have a different nature than I see them having based on every prior portrayal of them in D&D.
• The Prior Campaign - It's all about killing demons! Not negotiating, not making accommodations, not mutual neutrality, but raising an army and destroying their major foothold on the world! Now suddenly we're going to the Abyss and making deals with them?
• Lawful Good - This whole adventure path was touted as the one for the paladins and clerics and anyone else that wanted to be on the side of Right. It was an AP that would let your LG's unleash their full potential. Paladins don't make deals with demons in my eyes. Neither does a cleric of the lawful good fighting god. Making that a key point in the AP means that either someone didn't get the memo and the editors didn't catch the lapse or that everyone thought it was a good idea - it was not. 

That said I hate leaving a campaign unfinished. I have done some work re-figuring how the campaign ought to go to be more to my liking. Then I had an idea - if I am going to have to rework the whole thing anyway before I would even consider finishing it, why not fix the mechanical issues to? This kind of epic level play is exactly what 4th Edition D&D was made for! I looked at some potential encounters and how it might work and it looked completely do-able.

So I asked my players how they felt about it and they were not instantly opposed to it. We talked through some points and I'd say there is a chance this will actually happen some day. I'm not stopping my Deadlands game or my M&M game for it, but it may find a home on the schedule down the road. The characters translate fairly well and would be about 11 - 13th level. The one glaring issue is the Cavalier as there is not really a class in 4E that is all about mounted combat. That's the one part that does not yet have an easy answer but I suspect we could find something he would be happy playing that's still a big tough guy in heavy armor. 

So that's how that's going. More when it actually becomes a game. 

Picking a New Campaign

So with the old campaign shelved we needed a new game. I told my crew I was fine with fantasy but I probably did not want to start another Pathfinder campaign right away. We have a lot of options for swords and spells besides that game so let's use them. Discussion points:

• I had gone back and looked through my notes for the nine 4E campaigns I had written up and realized there were a ton of ideas there. It's been almost three years now since the end of my last 4E game (fizzle ...) and it has come up in discussions several times. I ran at least 70 sessions of 4E spread across three different campaigns and I still have ideas I'd like to explore. So 4th was on the table.
• I also looked over 5E and saw some possibilities. Not with the published stuff which seems to keep disappointing people but with some homebrew + conversions of some old adventures I think I could make a pretty memorable game. I've only played it once. I feel like we do need to try it out for an extended period at some point. Why not now?
• Runequest came up too but I'm not sure we want to run that as the "main" game. I've been thinking of it as a drop-in candidate for when the stars are right and 3-4 of us can get together without planning it 3 months in advance. I want to date it, not marry it.
• Savage Worlds also jumped in. I brought up 50 Fathoms as I think it would be a perfect mix of long term plot with plenty of sandbox room and still fantasy with swords and wizards and giant apes and stuff. This sparked a turn in the conversation that "maybe we don't need to a fantasy game at all." Rifts came up but I'd like to play a more "normal" game of Savage Worlds for a while before we go that nuts. I dropped in Flash Gordon, I mean Slipstream, and there was some interest and then somebody mentioned Deadlands. Well ... I do have a lot of material for it, going back to first edition and continuing up through the latest (fourth!) plot point campaign book they Kickstarted last year. Theoretically I could run 5 different campaigns simultaneously and never have the party members cross over each other! We talked about Hell on Earth briefly but Blaster already likes the Weird West, Versatile Dave was up for it, Paladin Steve says he never gets to play a cowboy, and ... that kind of settled things.  

I was in a bit of shock. I still am. I've owned Deadlands for about 20 years and never run more than one-shots and occasional episodic campaigns. We haven't had Savage Worlds as our main game for a few years and it's never lasted more than about ten sessions at a time. I'm still in shock but very happy to be in this place. 

So we made characters, started weaving them together, and ran through a short adventure. There was a lot of rust to shake off, particularly for my players, but it started to come back fairly easily to me and I felt fairly "at home" with it by the end. 

As far as setting details I'm leaning towards using The Flood as our home base, mainly because I like the Maze as a region - lots of ghost rock, Santa Anna eyeballing things, ironclads ... those are all good things. Plus it brings the whole Kung Fu thing in too and that's only going to make it better, right? Each of the campaign books focuses on a particular area of the west and this region has called to me since I first read the original Deadlands book. 

The plan is to make this the main game for 2017 and see how we like it at the end. That has me debating how much I want to use the plot elements in this book versus how much I just want to sandbox it and let the PC's get into trouble without a plot at all. Figuring that we have 11-12 sessions a plot could make things a little more coherent but having a plot also means that the players are not always going to be doing what they want to do. I need to read through it again and figure out how much I want to do with it, if anything. 

I have to admit it's very strange to not have a D&D type game to run on the schedule. Regardless, with this and a superhero game as the regularly scheduled campaigns, it's going to be a very different year this year! All aboard!

Into the Unknown for D&D 4E

Just to change things up a bit ...

Why this book now? Because it's one of the two books I never picked up for 4E and I figured I might as well finish the set.

This is subtitled the "Dungeon Survival Handbook" but it's a mix of material for players and for DMs. It is very much optional and I never missed it while I was running my 4E games.

• Up front is a selection of Themes for a dungeon-heavy campaign. These were a late addition to 4E that added a lot of flavor and a little bit of crunch, first appearing in Neverwinter I believe. I liked the concept and I still do. There are 7 new ones here and they seem broad enough to be useful in a lot of campaigns if a little less flavorful than the Neverwinter themes. "Treasure Hunter" and "Trapsmith" are samples of what we're talking about here.
• We also get new races: Goblin, Kobold, and Svirfneblin. Very underdark-themed, but I could see them being fine in some games. 
• There is a section of dungeon-themed alternate powers for a bunch of classes. Nothing essential, and nothing I saw seemed to be a game-breaker, but some cool moves nonetheless.
• That's about it for the mechanics other than a few pages of magic items near the end. Most of the rest of it is good ideas for exploring dungeons, types of dungeons, things that live in dungeons (no stats, just flavor, habits, descriptions), famous dungeons (White Plume Mountain, etc) , DMing dungeon adventures, and methods for creating dungeons including a random dungeon generator. 

 In general it's a fine book if you're going to feature a dungeon-heavy or megadungeon campaign, and there's nothing bad here, but you could run a dungeon-heavy game without it too. It didn't impress me as much as Neverwinter or Mordenkainens Magical Emporium but I do like it overall. If anyone out there is still running a 4E game and doesn't have it, it's certainly worth a look

4E, 5E, and Pathfinder

So in the last few weeks I've been diving into several different games - skimming through 4E to shake the rust off in anticipation of finishing up Red Hand of Doom (finally!), keeping up with Pathfinder for my other ongoing campaign, and then reading all the new 5th Edition D&D material. There have been others too, but those three are basically different flavors of the same game and spurred some thoughts I wanted to get down. Sometime soon we will be deciding on our "main" campaign for next year and this kind of thing influences what I'm thinking.

 For cinematic fantasy combat, and I mean mechanically well-defined cinematic combat, not roll-high-and-we'll-describe-something-epic combat, 4E is the king to me. No other system comes close as far as having this kind of stuff built in to the mechanics of the game. Forced movement, reactions,  and interrupts force the whole party to pay attention even when it's not their turn. This does come at a price, as it does take some time to play out a battle but it pushes for a different kind of D&D experience - less emphasis on hacking through six rooms of grunts to get to the orc chieftain, and an idea that maybe there should be fewer, but more meaningful/interesting fights. It works with older style adventures - I've converted a few, pretty faithfully - but it did have me wondering about starting from a different set of assumptions.

More importantly, it rewards teamwork in some amazing ways, with powers and abilities that build on each other. Synergies can build between all 4-5 members of a party and let them do some very cool things. The downside here is that if one or two people can't make it on game night those benefits are lost and while it can be fun to look for some more focused ways to work together, it can be difficult to adjust expectations when those force multipliers disappear. In my experience, it was the least-forgiving edition when it came to working around missing party members. All of that niche protection and ability to grow your characters with complimentary abilities creates a sort of web between them that is damaged when you lose a member. In he end this became a bigger problem for our campaign than the length of combat. If we take it into Paragon Tier for 2015 then we're going to have to make some different assumptions about party size and composition to try and keep the game on a more regular schedule.

In contrast to 4th Edition, 5th Edition dials back the detail in a big way. Now I have not run it or played it yet, but I've made a character for a game coming up this weekend and there is just ... less there. I had no problem coming up with a concept and working the mechanics to fit it but the lessened game detail around races and skills, the change in how feats are used within the system, and the general de-emphasis on "numbers" and detail make it feel smaller. There's more detail than with, say, an old school Basic D&D character, but not as much as you might think.  I do expect it to play much faster than 4E when it comes to combat, and its looseness when it comes to non-combat activities should keep things moving too.  It's interesting, and we're going to explore it.

I've seen a  lot of interest in Backgrounds as one of 5E's new features. They are interesting, but 4E had a similar concept called ... Backgrounds! The Forgotten Realms alone had over 20 of them. Just like 5th they were a way to connect your character to the setting, whether by occupation, race, affiliation, or something else, and they included some kind of mechanical benefit like extra  skill choices. I was glad to see them carried over and given a more prominent place in 5th but the current options are pretty limited. I'm betting we see more before long.

I expect 5th will do just fine. Those tired of the mechanical complexities of other systems will see it as a breath of fresh air. I do think converting older adventures, especially 1st & 2nd edition adventures, will be pretty easy. I intend to find out myself at some point, but for now it's just speculation. I don't think it will be the ultimate answer for everyone as some people like a fair degree of crunch in their fantasy game.

Speaking of crunch, I've also spent a fair amount of time with Pathfinder over the past year and it has moved from being the "extra" game to feeling like home in a way. It's popular, so it's easy to bounce ideas off of other people. It's incredibly well supported so there are a tremendous number of adventures available and a lot of mechanical options as well.

As a player I find that between stats, race, class, archetype, skills, feats, and traits I can create a character for darn near any concept I can come up with. Traits are a little like Backgrounds, sharing the same purpose at least. Archetypes are an underrated element added to the prior framework by the Pathfinder team that allow for a tremendous degree of tweaking a class to fit a particular concept. Looking at Hero Lab, for Barbarian alone there are 21 archetypes, and I don't have all of them in my HL setup. Mix that in with all of the class options in the current game and I'm comfortable saying it's going to take an extraordinarily picky player who can't find something to match their concept.

As a DM it's become easy enough to run that I enjoy it, being able to focus mainly on the game and less on the overhead of executing the system. It's less involved in many ways than 4E combat, but more detailed than 5E, which leaves me in a place that I am pretty happy to inhabit. A few years ago I would not have believed that a close relative of 3E would be such a comfortable middle ground but that's how it feels right now. Just detailed enough, and yet still fast-moving enough, that it just fits.

So they each have their strengths. If we pick up Stonehell again I'd consider flipping it to 5th Edition just to give it some more flavor without getting too complex. For published adventures, I'm a fan of the Pathfinder Adventure Paths and plan to run those for the next few years, maybe as the consistent "backbone" of my RPG time. I'd love to focus on a more cinematic approach with 4E and if we decide to go that route as a group I will, with a mix of published material, homebrew stuff, and conversions of other adventures. Why limit yourself to just the one game?

PHB's I Have Known

Yep, that's all of them. Bottom right comes in about 1980-81 for me (and yes that's the same book I bought with my allowance back then) and that upper left showed up on my doorstep yesterday.

I've had a lot of fun with these over the years and I can tell stories that came from games played with all of the previous versions. Even though I am still running Pathfinder and 4th edition games I am sure we will get around to giving the new one a try and then I'll have some stories to go with it too.

There are memories around the time each of these came out too. The joy of discovery, when all of this was so new with the first; the college days playing in dorms and at night at the IHoP of second; the fun of putting a new group together with old and new faces and new versions of classic adventures with third; the annoyance and disappointment of fourth gradually turning into a rediscovery of the fun and putting together another mix of old and new - including a new wife and some new kids; with 5th, well, right now it's all kid milestones for the last month - a 12th birthday, a lot of summer band practice, driving to and from the first job, and moving into a college dorm. If 5th has a good enough run, they may ALL be in college by the time 6th comes out.

PDF's may be the future of a lot of smaller RPG's, but I hope the biggest games, or the kickstarters for smaller games, give us a chance to acquire them as books. I'm pretty comfortable using an iPad at the table but there's something about being able to pick up the same book I held way back when that helps refresh those memories too - it's more than visual, it's texture, smell, weight, and all of the little nicks and dings they pick up in use. I'd say the largest ingredient in some of my AD&D materials after paper, ink, and glue is probably Domino's Pizza and Dr. Pepper. I took pretty good care of my stuff but hey, accidents happen, and Domino's was new here back then. We spent a lot of summer time scraping up our dollars so we could order pizza and keep on playing, especially before we could drive.

Anyway, I suppose I've "completed the set" for the time being - now to read the thing, and start the next chapter of a 30+ year story.

Boundary Tokens

It really started in 3rd edition D&D - is there an easy way to mark the area of effect on a spell? Our answer was to draw it on the battlemat, but that can involve some erasing and redrawing as spells come and go and when I took the time to draw up a map in advance, on paper (as in the picture above) you can't really erase something once it's down, and if you're playing on a poster map then no one's drawing anything anywhere. Then 4th Edition made it even more complicated with zones and other effects that move with the caster becoming much more common, and heaven forbid they overlap - now it's really tricky to track these things. We've used pipe cleaners bent into a rough square but it's a very loose solution.

Armorcast briefly had a set of tokens for marking corners that had some style to them - the white ones looked like clouds, the red was like fire, the blue was like water, etc. but they went out of business so fast I never had a chance to acquire them. Litko though has a set of colored boundary markers that are inexpensive and should work just fine.

They come 4 sets to a ... set. Now these are in the end brightly colored bits of plastic, but since I play 40K I am used to paying ridiculous amounts of money for brightly colored bits of plastic and these are relatively inexpensive. This set of 4 runs about $6. It's ideal for 4th Edition because every effect in that game is square, but it works for Pathfinder too:

Yeah, I picked up two sets. We play enough Pathfinder here (and we're not done with 4E) that it's worth it.

Now if you don't play with miniatures or tokens on a grid then you don't really need this but if you do play a game like this then here's an option for handling this particular issue.

SSoI - Session 28: Airstrike!

Our Heroes (10th level):

• Lt. Alex Gravis, Water Genasi Warlord (and Ivan, owlbear paratrooper) 
• Gartok, Dwarf Earth Warden
• No-Name, Elf Bow Ranger 
• Torin Tsai, Half-Orc Slayer
• Xyla, Drow Vampire

Note: Full Attendance! Just to restate, standard 4E encounter balance is built around a 5-man party. I stayed with this as we had six players when we started. So I build for five - if six show up they have an advantage, five is even, and if only four show then they are at a disadvantage. If only three or less can make it we just don't play that week.

This worked really well for much of the campaign but we're down to five players now and two of them are involved in an organization that has out of town weekend events fairly often. That means that quite a bit of the time I either have all five or I have only three. With six players it just meant a weaker party sometimes, but now it means no game. Add this unusual wrinkle in to the usual job/kid/family/holiday schedule complications in trying to get six adults together regularly and we had a very spotty latter half of 2013. I haven't fully solved it at this point so it was good to have a full team this time.

As the last of the fire's from Abrithiax's rampage are stamped out the bucket-brigading townsfolk raise a cheer for our heroes. Appreciating the appreciation is short-lived though as a telepathic contact comes in form Lord Cartwrtight that the western gate is under heavy bombardment. Some hellish green flame is being catapulted in and it's clinging to everything it hits and even the gatehouse is beginning to melt under the assault. He asks the heroes to risk an airborne trip outside the walls to destroy the infernal siege engines that are behind the attack. naturally, our heroes agree. Whistling for the owls, they leap into the saddle and are airborne in minutes.

They easily spot the launching point of the blazing green hellfire, but as they angle towards it other winged shapes are rising to meet them. As the gap closes they become familiar leonine beasts - manticores!

While a few combatants hang back and shoot, an aerial joust shapes up between the three biggest manticores and the four close-combatant party members, slashing and striking as they flash past each other hundreds of feet above the ground. Thinking outside of her usual melee box Xyla focuses her glowing eyes on one manticore and dominates it, sending the beast to attack one of its own. Aiming for the wings, the slayer and ranger both manage to send manticores spiraling down out of the fight, sometimes temporarily, sometimes for good as two of them plummet straight into the ground to their deaths! One beast gets tangled up with the slayer who goes after the wings (hey it worked the first time) and then realizes his mistake as the manticore, the slayer, and the owl all begin falling from the sky. He manages to break free before impact, but it's a near thing. 

Stay in formation!

Blasting through the manticores, the party reorients themselves, climbs back up out of bow range as they cross over a group of hobgoblins, then dives down over the artillery site. Leaping free they take stock of the opposition - dwarves! Strange dwarves with infernal symbols operating large mechanical siege engines - Charduni? No, Duergar!

There are 3 of them, one working each machine, plus a clear leader type shouting orders and one tough-looking customer with a big warhammer who is already eyeballing the party in general and Gartok in particular.

Starting things off right No-Name plants an arrow in the leader with his usual style as he gracefully leaps from his mount. The evil dwarf staggers back but is then charged by the slayer who is winding up for a ferocious fullblade strike. Desperate, the dwarf summons a legion devil between him and the onrushing half orc. One swipe of the blade cuts the devil in half, the follow through bloodies the duergar, and a final slice puts the dwarf down for good - and the fight has only just begun!

Gartok moves to engage what is clearly the duergar champion and the two go at it like angry blacksmiths, hammers ringing. He is aided by Xyla who is happy to meet a victim that doesn't drop at the first hit - finally a challenge! 

Gravis and Ivan, quickly joined by Torin and No-Name, begin attacking the artillerists to put a stop to the bombardment. They prove to be no weaklings themselves as they back off and team up, wielding frost-weapon morning stars and tossing explosive devices whenever the heroes group up. It's an unpleasant new tactic, as the dwarves are willing to grit their teeth and drop bombs in close, counting on their innate resistance to fire to protect them form the worst of it. The battle is mobile, shifting in and around the massive siege engines. The explosions take their toll but the defenders of Brindol are not deterred and one by one the duergar fall, leaving only the champion upright.

Battered but not beaten, the champion suddenly grows to the size of an ogre, slashing out with his spiked beard and laying about with rapid strikes from his hammer. If he can't save the others he can at least destroy these upstarts. Xyla and Gartok take some hits but the rest of the party rushes in after felling the last engineer and under the weight of those  attacks the dwarf staggers. Torin goes for the killing stroke, misses, but an incredible shot from the ranger deflects his blade into the massive champion finishing him after all. 

Realizing that the Red Hand army is all around them the group sets about destroying the hell-forged artillery and then escapes on their owl companions before the hostile forces can react, winging back over the walls of Brindol to safety.

DM Notes: This was a pair of battles in unusual conditions to change things up. First, the aerial battle with the manticores to try out the 4E flying combat rules. They worked pretty well but are very risky as "proned" = "falling" if the target is flying. This made for a very three-dimensional fight as the party does have some proning attacks. Some of the manticores had grab attacks which  led to some tricky situations as the grabbed character prones the grabbing manticore, sending both of them downwards. The mants have lots of ranged attacks too which meant they didn't have to close and our melee monsters had to work a little harder to jump on things. Even given that the fight only lasted 4 rounds, and these were not minions.

Exchange of the game:

DM: "...and these manticores attack the ranger" 

Gartok's player: "Yeeeeeeah yes yes yes!"

Gravis' player: "You're a terrible defender."

The duergar fight involved a new opponent for them and had a time limit, though they didn't know this had an actual mechanical element. It is night, but they are dropping in on a unit in the middle of the enemy army. Now that army has given the dwarves plenty of room to work, but if the engines stop firing and sounds of fighting break out, they will come to investigate. So, after the firing stops and combat starts, the party has ten rounds unmolested. After that, soldiers from the nearest units start coming to investigate. As it turned out it didn't matter as that fight only lasted 6 rounds, plus a few more to destroy the artillery. All the rest of the Red Hand got to do was shake their fists as the PC's flew off. 

Duergar are fun in 4E. This was my first run with them and I'm looking forward to more. The poor hellcaller died on round 1 but he did get to pop his fun power:

It didn't matter as the slayer still killed the devil AND the hellcaller but doing the facial expressions and (very short) conversation (BAMF! Yes o mighty mast-ACK!) as this all happened was quite a bit of fun.

The artillery crew had some fun stuff too.

Now these particular duergar had resist fire 5, and the champion had resist fire 10 - note the damage can exceed that pretty easily, but desperate times you know. The champion at one point was shouting at them to target him so the attackers would be getting hit as they ganged up on him and was just gritting his teeth as the 5-6 points punched through his tough hide and the push let him get some movement in that didn't provoke OA's - it seemed like a perfectly evil dwarfish thing to do. 

Also note: This pair of battles does not appear in the original adventure. I am freelancing quite a bit for the siege to make it appropriately climactic, to use some of the things 4E does well, and in some cases just because I want to. 

Everyone seemed to have fun, the good guys won pretty handily and the western gate was saved.

SSoI - Session 27 - Red Dragon Fight

Our Heroes (still 10th level):

• Lt. Alex Gravis, Water Genasi Warlord (and starting second base-bear Ivan!) 
• Gartok, Dwarf Earth Warden
• No-Name, Elf Bow Ranger 
• Torin Tsai, Half-Orc Slayer
• Zarra, Drow Vampire (in a torpor for this session after gorging herself on hill giant "juice")

Returning to Brindol after their emergency expedition the heroes realize that much of the city has been evacuated, presumably during their expedition to the Fane of Tiamat. They are invited to a council of war to share their advice and help plan a strategy for the defense of the city. As the most powerful adventurers in the city they are an important resource, and the city leaders know it.

Mechanically this is a 3-part skill challenge that will help frame the rest of the climax of the adventure.

Part 1: Formal Introductions

In this opening discussion the party meets the city leaders and makes their first impression on each. 

Success or failure here will affect how difficult the targets for the subsequent skill challenges are, initial attitudes of some of the NPC's,  and some of the offers that might be made by some of the individual NPC's.

This goes extremely well. The major players are:

• Lord Cartwright, ruler of the city 
• Lady Kaal, leader of a powerful trading house
• Marshal Ulverth, head of the city watch
• Lady Goldenbrow, high priestess of Lathander
• Immerstal the Red, leading wizard of Brindol

Also Appearing:

• Sorana and Speaker Wiston from Drellin's Ferry
• Sellyria Starsinger representing the Tiri-Kotor elves
• Captain Helmbreaker, leader of a dwarf mercenary company 

This was a Level 10 Complexity 2 skill challenge to make a good impression on the town leaders. Previous successful efforts in the adventure drop this to a level 8. Primaries are Diplomacy, Religion, and Insight. Secondaries are History, Arcana, Streetwise, and Perception.

The party blew right through this one. They are very good at some of those skills, had good references from Drellin's Ferry and the elves, and handled themselves perfectly.

Part 2: Strategy Session

With the introductions out of the way the talk turns to a debate on how to use the forces available to best defend the city.

This counts as one of the "battles" in the defense of the city. There are definite wise and unwise options on the table and choosing the bad ones will count as a defeat and remove some of the assets available to defend the city. This, combined with the results of our played encounters will determine the "finale" scenarios and the fate of Brindol - a successful, heroic defense and breaking of the Red Hand's siege, or a desperate rear guard action as the horde overwhelms the city's defenses and the remaining defenders flee for their lives.

This goes well too. It's a Level 10 Complexity 5 challenge. Primaries are Diplomacy, History, and Religion, Secondaries are Arcana, Bluff, Insight, Nature, and Streetwise. The basic debate is whether to meet the enemy in the field with the Lion Knights leading the way, or to hold the walls, giving up the initiative but maintaining a stronger defensive posture. Lord Cartwright and the knights are in favor of the field battle while the marshal favors holding the walls. The others hold varying positions or are undecided.

Gravis the warlord quickly realizes the army is not large enough to take the Red Hand on straight up ad argues forcefully and persuasively for holding the walls. Aided by his companions, they convince the lords of the city to play defense instead of a glorious but foolhardy charge into a stronger foe.

Part 3: Defending the City

Having decided on defense, the question arises as to what happens if they get inside the walls.

This affects some of the possible scenarios later in the campaign and there are advantages and disadvantages to both sides. This isn't a win/lose so much as it is a way for the players to decide how they want to handle things later.

One option is to run a resistance cell type of defense - small groups of snipers with makeshift barricades spread throughout the city making the entire area dangerous for invaders. The danger is that healing and power may be spread too thin. The alternative is a centralized defense stationed around the High Cathedral of Lathander. Clerics and elite defenders would be staged there to provide centralized healing and a rally point for any retreating defenders and to act a dispatch-able fire brigade if things are going wrong at any point on the walls. The danger here is that if this group/location falls, the whole city may fall. Lord Cartwright, Immerstal, and the high priestess favor the centralized defense while the rest favor a distributed defense as they are unwilling to abandon their individual holdings.

This is a level 10 complexity 2 challenge and the party once again blows it away with Torin setting Gravis up for an intense but diplomatic illustration of the perils of the distributed defense. Success here = the players get to choose how this goes, failure = a distributed defense regardless as the disunited leaders refuse to pool their resources and only defend their own holdings

After this the party is made the leading edge of the city's defense. To ensure communications the wizard uses a scroll of telepathic Bond to link Lord Cartwright to Gravis so they can communicate from anywhere in the city. Then word comes that giants are making another push for one gate, siege engines are bombarding the north wall ... and a red dragon has just landed inside the city and is setting that quarter ablaze. Our heroes mount up on giant owls and head out to deal with the dragon.

Abrithiax, the red dragon, has driven off the gate guards, smashed some smaller buildings, and set others on fire. He shows no fear as the party rushes in. In fact, though they have faced several dragons, none were as large and powerful as this one and his magnificence has an effect on them - briefly. All of them charge in (except for the ranger, though he does open fire). They wound the dragon but he repsonds with fiery breath and furious claws leaving Gartok bloodied. The warden stays in the fight, and the slayer keeps swinging, but a tail slap knocks the warlord across the street!

Continuing hits from the others are beginning to hurt the great beast and it unloads more flame on Torin and Ivan but Gravis gets back in the fight and shots encouragement to everyone. As the dwarf holds the red's attention, the slayer unloads a series of punishing slashes with his fullblade, and the ranger plants a final arrow in the thing's head as it staggers and falls.

After the dragon is slain it's a Level 10 Complexity 3 skill challenge to put out the fires. This was a little more freeform as to skill relevance so I let the players justify their skill choices. It was a lot of fun and a nice way to wrap up this session.

Marked, Quarried, and Bloodied - that's a tough situation

DM Notes: Most of my notes are above but I wanted to give the players some say in the defense of the city and the skill challenges worked very well. Their characters are the highest level beings in the valley other than the enemy leaders, and given their track record so far it makes sense that the town leaders would listen to their counsel. Note they are not just turning it all over to the PC's, but they are treating them as valuable partners, maybe even equals. I had notes on each leader's position on each of these questions and let the player's direction drive whose opinions were swayed. Skill challenges play much faster than a typical combat, so it's easy to include a few, make them feel fairly important to what's going on, and then wrap it all up with a fight against a big dragon I was very happy with the way this one went and I think the players were too. The decisions made here will shape a lot of the remainder of the adventure when it comes to encounters and the opposition.