D&D Minis

Hello!

When I was getting the minis out for photos of the wife's Tyranids and our Daemons, I decided I might as well take some photos of our mini collection we use for D&D. We've got a mix of miniatures from GW, Reaper, Hasslefree and others, painted by the wife and I, and some others donated from friends. Should be easy, we don't have that many I thought. Turns out we had enough that I had to split them into two to fit the space I'd cleared...

Firstly, lets look at the 'characters' - all the human and human-like minis we'd generally use as player characters, NPCs, guards, bandits etc.

Some notable characters up front, including Basil Goodbread, my LARP halfling alchemist. Some of the other minis represent characters played by me, the wife and some close friends and family.

This is the 'spellcaster corner', where a lot of people in robes are standing with their familiars. Also seen here are the Mighty Nein from Critical Role painted in slightly generic style so they don't stand out too much. We've also got Vox Machina to paint, which might be another post on here someday. 

Here is 'NPC corner' with a bunch of fairly generic looking bandits, guards and soldiers, along with some non-combatant types. Although being D&D it's a fair bet if they have a mini they are a doppelganger, a vampire or some kind of secret badass.

So the second batch is all the 'monsters' - minis generally used as the bad guys to be killed in battle. (Though of course, there is nothing wrong with good guy Orcs or goblins!)

A decent amount of the monsters, such as the Beholder and the Lemures (the blobfish-like things at the front) were donated by John, the semi-regular opponent who sacrificed his soul to the dark powers for greenstuff sculpting ability.

So, there we have it, quite a lot of minis it turns out! As it happens we have been playing quite a lot of D&D during lockdown, but over discord and without these minis. Hope you enjoyed this little look at our collection beyond the 40k battlefield, and I hope you're all staying safe out there.

Lessons from the Unbroken Islands - my D&D campaign.

Hello!

For two and a half years, I have been running a D&D campaign over discord - the Adventures in the Unbroken Islands. In the past week we had the final session, a climactic showdown with the big baddie that had been causing problems behind the scenes for well over a year. The campaign was run using slightly modified 5th edition D&D rules in a custom setting - the titular Unbroken Islands, a largely unexplored archipelago with many mysteries lost to time. It was also run in the style of a West Marches game, which meant a larger cast of players who would play as and when they could attend sessions, and a sandbox setting that player groups could explore as they liked in discrete single session adventures.

I was heavily inspired by the Rollplay West Marches series run by Steven Lumpkin, but I did tone down the difficulty and input required for navigating the world and passing on information by updating the world map myself and writing up a ‘story so far’ document with short notes on each session. This was primarily because I wanted the game to appeal to new players and players who could only make a few sessions every now and then, rather than just heavily committed players who would be there almost every week.

Anyway, the campaign as a whole went well, the players seemed to enjoy it, and the final session was suitably epic but the heroes got to save the day. I had a blast running it, but I did get a little burned out towards the end, and I definitely think along the way there were things I could have done better. To that end I have written up a list of lessons from the campaign, things that didn’t quite go according to plan, how I dealt with it, and what I’d do differently next time. Some of these lessons might only apply to this style of game, but some are applicable to pretty much any game.

Lesson: The game is not balanced around large, high level parties getting to have one or two encounters between long rests. 

This was probably the most noticeable issue in the late stage of the campaign, when the players all had many more powerful abilities than they could reasonably use in a single session. Having lots of abilities also slowed down combat as many players struggled to decide which to use in the moment. D&D 5E is designed for 6-8 regular encounters per ‘adventuring day’, between long rests where all their abilities reset, but this was next to impossible to achieve in a single 3-4 hour session once the players got to higher levels. 

The solution of course was just to make the encounters harder - but this resulted in even longer combats that turned most sessions into one of two basic formulas: either a roleplaying bit, then a big fight, or just two big fights. It also had the problem of really punishing players that had lagged behind in experience points (see below.)

In future I think I would have to find a better way to force players to conserve their resources. One idea is to limit long rests in some way, so perhaps players only get half their resources back between sessions, or they can only take a long rest at specific times. I have an idea for a campaign where the ‘hub’ that the players return to after each session moves around a map, and they can only get the full benefits of a long rest if it is in a ‘safe’ location. I think that could work well, because the time between long rests could be scaled according to the level of the party.

Lesson: Players gaining XP individually and getting ahead of the rest by attending more sessions isn’t a massive problem, providing the gap isn’t too far. 

I found that, as expected, some players played a lot, and some didn’t. As I gave out XP for those who played at the end of each session, this meant some players got very far ahead of others. A few levels either way didn’t cause too many problems, but having a new player turn up in a party with level 10+ characters did make it very tricky to give them challenging encounters that didn’t just instakill the lower level members.

I put a few things into the campaign to combat this. I slowly increased the starting level for new characters, so they wouldn’t be too far behind, I gave an XP bonus to the lowest level player in a party and I allowed players to have multiple characters if they had played long enough so they might have lower level options. This all helped but I still feel there were times when players were put off by how far behind they were. 

Next time, I think I would either put a level cap in place that would slowly increase, (e.g. Players start at level 1 and can go up to 3, until a certain point where both the cap and starting level increase) or I would just do away with experience points and use milestone leveling for the whole group. I think the experienced players would still gravitate towards taking charge in adventures and being the ‘main’ characters, but the other players would be able to contribute just as well when it came to combat and skill tests.

Lesson: Unlimited downtime is a problem.

At the start of the campaign I essentially let everyone do whatever they wanted between sessions, allowing them to build up their influence, craft magic items and even scout out upcoming adventures. This was ‘realistic’, but it quickly caused a few issues. Most notably it gave regular players even more of an advantage over the others, because they were always involved in plots and could craft themselves all sorts of cool gear. It also caused the big issue for me of becoming very time consuming as players pushed it to the point of practically completing the adventures in downtime.

This was largely solved by implementing a somewhat ‘gamey’ system of downtime actions. Essentially players were given a list of options, and could choose one to do, or two if they had not played the previous week. I was a bit disappointed that I had to limit the players this way, but I think it worked out very well in the long run. It also allowed me to modify the rules for crafting so it would be harder to spam out loads of cheap items, but also easier to create those rare magic items that, by the DM’s guide, should take over a year’s work. I left some of the options a little vague, and allowed plenty of leeway to let players do some unusual narrative stuff, but having a simple system in place really helped to focus the players on the game itself, rather than the time between the games.

Lesson: Some players do not like being ‘left behind’ in the story. 

I’m not entirely sure how much this is linked to the experience point gap discussed above, but some players who played infrequently did not want to come back after some time away, as they felt the ‘plot’ had moved on without them, and they wouldn’t know what was going on. The ‘Story So Far’ document was meant to address this issue, but I think the nature of the setting was that it was quite hard to keep up. I think in future it would be helpful to have a single overarching goal that all players are working towards, so there would always be an anchor point for anyone returning. “How are we getting on with defeating the evil wizard?” “We’ve found out where he lives, but his tower is too well defended for now, we need to find allies.” Something like that.

Lesson: Some players don’t like leaving ‘unfinished’ areas. 

Players would often see a dungeon or similar area and thing they should be able to explore it in a single session. While sometimes they could, some areas were designed to be returned to multiple times, but players often felt a bit unhappy to leave at the end of a session, especially if they still had many resources available. I think it was immersion breaking as much as anything, to suddenly have to go home for no in-world reason. Sometimes they would come up against a powerful enemy and be forced to flee, if only because the fight would take far too long to resolve.

In future I intend to split dungeons into discrete sections, be it levels or locked doors or whatever, to signal to the players that ‘this is a session’s worth of content’ without explicitly saying so. I’d also be sure to telegraph the size of a dungeon where possible. A single tower might reasonably be a session’s work, but an underground labyrinth could take much longer.

Lesson: Most players don’t want to write a report or update a map between sessions.

As mentioned, I tried to remove some of the player homework required for this kind of game to lower the bar of entry, but I was still keen for players to convey information to each other about what they had discovered. While early on players often wrote in character write ups of adventures, for which I rewarded XP, this tailed off towards the end of the first year.

I could think of a number of ways to further try and incentivise write ups, but I don’t think it really solves the issue. What I’d like to do in future is have some kind of wrap up at the end of each session where players each get to place a note on a map, or leave one piece of information to put into a report. That way the information given is player generated, but I can ensure it is shared with the group as a whole.

Lesson: Players like random loot, but generally they do not use the stuff they get. 

Towards the end of the campaign we had an ever growing pile of unused magic items because random rolls frequently gave out things no one wanted or could use. In addition, they all got so much money that after a while they could pretty much buy or craft whatever they wanted anyway. Partially this is an issue with me giving out too many magic items but it’s also the result of random magic item tables that are not geared towards a specific party (because the party would change between sessions).

A simplified loot system would help - perhaps random elements but with player choice for specifics. E.g. roll up a magic weapon, player gets to choose the type of weapon. I also think there could be some situations where magic items are time sensitive or specific to certain locations, so players would want to use them and then be forced to discard them, rather than hoarding them all.

Lesson: Players often like to role play character disagreements, but sometimes too much!

This is of course an age old problem with roleplaying games - when players decide their characters don’t get on, and as a result the session comes grinding to a halt while they play out a lengthy scene and the other players just have to wait. The thing is, we all love a bit of drama, it’s what makes these games special, and characters in conflict is great drama. But it can get too much. I thankfully had very few issues with ‘that’s what my character would do’ causing people to be upset, but it can happen even with people who aren’t wangrods.

My preferred solution, which I would try to implement in future, is to have some defining characteristic unite all the player characters. Perhaps they are all members of the same mercenary company following the same orders, or they have all had their town destroyed by the same evil wizard. Whatever it is, they should have a shared cause that would force them to, at very least, work together while they bicker.

So that’s what I learned, and some of what I’d do differently next time. I hope that was helpful to some people, if only to show that if you play a long running D&D campaign there will be issues to resolve, but that doesn’t mean it will be a failure or that people won’t have fun. It is always a learning experience and the more you learn, the better your game will be.

Wrath and Glory: Blessings Unheralded - 'Review'

Hello!

As you may have read here, I was planning on writing a bit of a report of my session running Blessings Unheralded, the Wrath and Glory introduction adventure. This was both my first go at Wrath and Glory (obviously, at the time of writing the full game isn't even out yet) and also my first go at running a pregenerated adventure module, rather than making up my own content. I'm going to split this into three parts. The first is what I and my players thought of the game itself. Secondly I will 'review' the module itself. Finally there will be a little write up of what happened in the session itself. Obviously this last section will contain spoilers, so if you are going to be playing in the module, don't read that bit!

The Game

The response to the Wrath and Glory system was largely positive. At the start two of the players had declared that they didn't like dice pool systems, and one had never played a pen and paper RPG, so I think we gave the game a fairly tough task to win the group over. I'm pretty sure I got a fair few things wrong, but the players still picked up the core mechanic pretty quickly and felt confident enough to make use of the titular Wrath and Glory resources during play without too much prompting from myself. Most of the group is used to D&D 5E so it felt complicated to begin with but I think we all thought by the end that it was actually quite straight forward.

The group consisted of 4 LARPers, which definitely helped given the narrative focus of the game. Everyone loved the character objectives, and by the end all of them had been achieved. The group also made good use of the ability to spend a Wrath point to make a narrative declaration, which to my mind made running the game more fun and cooperative. We also had an interesting use of the Inquisitorial Acolyte's ability to call in a favour from their Inquisitor and had the Guardsman use their ability to take a bullet for someone. It was nice to see this stuff coming into play rather than just being an optional, often sidelined bonus like the Inspiration mechanic in D&D.

In terms of balance, it did seem like the four characters the players chose were roughly even in terms of their abilities. The mob mechanic made mowing down chaff enemies simple enough for all the characters while the ability of named enemies to use Ruin to soak or perform special abilities makes them feel like a threat. The battles took a while to resolve but I'm pretty sure this would speed up with experience, and was still considerably quicker than the old Dark Heresy calculators at dawn style.

Of course, it's not perfect. If I have to pick the nits, there are some mechanics that are confusingly or just unimaginatively named. The Wrath dice, for instance, does not generate Wrath, while 'Soak' to turn wounds into shock feels a bit phoned in. There are a few things that are not entirely clear, and several rules are suspiciously missing from this version. Some of the mechanics do feel a bit too gamey - to go back to 'Soak', the option to turn wounds into shock is usually the correct one to take, but not always. It's hard to imagine what this represents in the game world - is the Guardsman taking a split second to decide if they should block the blast from the grenade or just take it on the chin? We also noticed that the players racked up a massive pile of Glory, ending the session with 5 or so still in the bank. I'm not sure if there is supposed to be a limit to how much they can accumulate, but I couldn't find it if there is. Having that much doesn't make the resource feel very special.

All things considered, we liked the system and all of the players said they'd play it again. Most of them agreed it was stronger than the Dark Heresy system and personally I'm pretty set on purchasing the book when it becomes available.

The Module

Though we all had fun with the system, I found the module a little difficult to follow. In my preparation I drew out a flow chart of probably events, but that largely went out of the window. The adventure starts with a nice little combat to show the players the ropes, with enemies hopelessly outclassed. Though it is a bit convenient that things kick off as soon as the players arrive, it does set the scene and immediately got the players' heresy senses tingling.

After the opening there is an investigation section. The players meet a number of NPCs, each with some information to help or hinder them. The named NPCs are quite interesting characters, and in spite of my fears the players picked up on several clues and were able to work out more or less what was going on without me just feeding them hints. This section ran quite well for us but I still feel it was the weakest section as written. We went off script a fair bit and missed some of the content, which is all fine, that's player agency at work. However I did find it quite hard to find relevant information sometimes, because either it wasn't there or it was given as information from specific NPCs that the players might never meet or think to talk to.

The final part features a race against time to stop the bad guy doing an evil thing. The module calls for a cool GM trick to be used here, which immediately put the players under pressure. The final battle is relatively forgiving for the players as written, but it is quite easy for the players to 'win' but get the 'bad ending'. The boss has some interesting abilities, but I did have a problem with his stat block - his Weapon Skill and Ballistic skill did not seem to be listed. As I understand it there is a 'default' stat to use for everything unlisted, but it feels like the ability to shoot and slice the players shouldn't be merely 'default'. I'm not entirely sure I understand how it's supposed to work, but I'm pretty sure I 'cheated' and made the boss a fair bit more skilled than as written, though in the end it provided some dramatic moments so I absolutely do not regret it.

As a little aside - it was noticed that the majority of the pregenerated characters are women. Neither I, nor my players, saw any problem with this. I'm sure there are some for whom this might be an issue, but aside from the Space Marine and the Sister of Battle, the gender identity of the characters is entirely irrelevant to the adventure so if a player really wanted to, they could easily just play the female characters as male or vice-versa. I've also heard a bit of criticism on the internet about the artwork for the game and how it looks a little more cartoony and less grim-dark than normal, and a slight fear that this would be continued in the actual content of the game being more 'sanitised' than the 40K universe is generally portrayed. This adventure definitely features a good chunk of grim darkness, so I think it's pretty safe to say those fears have not been realised.

Overall the adventure was ok. Some good bits, some not so good. As a way to learn the system it worked, but personally I think I will stick to homebrew content in the future.

The Session (SPOILERS!)

Our heroes, Sergeant Gael Harden, Battle Sister Henna Orten, Lady Yyrmalla Aleretta and Commissar Victoria Linn travelled to St Deploratus' Sanitarium on the world of Enoch to retrieve their injured colleague Adept Genevieve Parker. Upon arrival at the medical facility they were immediately set upon by a group of Poxwalkers!

Sister Henna Orten fired her bolter into the mob, praising the Emperor while destroying his enemies. The group made short work of the foe, Gael finishing the last one with a bayonet to the head just as the hospital security forces arrived. Lady Aleretta immediately flashed the badge of the Inquisition and took control, calling upon her Inquisitor to lock down the facility with a cordon of enforcers. (GM note: this already caused things to go 'off script'.) She also checked the security cogitators to find the Adept Parker had been moved to the Exotic Diseases ward.

Upon arriving at the ward, the group found the patients suffering from a mysterious disease, Abacys Syndrome, causing them to lay unresponsive while constantly chanting random numbers. Adept Parker had also contracted the disease. The group spoke with the medicae workers, as well as Tech Priest Philanon, to find out information about the disease; the first patient was an Astropath, around 20 patients have already died, and there is no obvious pattern to those infected. They quickly became suspicious of the head of department, Willem Konig, who was not yet at the hospital. (Given that the place was in lockdown it would be difficult for him to come back to work and get interrogated.) Aleretta suspected there was a pattern to the random numbers, and convinced the tech priest to help compile and crunch the numbers.


The group took a visit to the morgue where they would allegedly find the quarantined bodies of the deceased. While investigating bodies outside the quarantine zone Sergeant Harden managed to suffer a complication and lose a finger to the bonesaw of a mindless servitor. They found the quarantined bodies mysteriously missing. Aleretta noticed a security camera (using a Wrath point to make a narrative declaration) and hacked into the system, finding footage of the Poxwalkers walking out of the morgue, unnoticed by the servitors. Pushing further into the system (by shifting 6s) she found that the security forces did not have access to the footage, it was locked to heads of department, such as Konig.

After returning to the ward, the group consulted with the tech priest. Together they worked out that the numbers could be translated into Lingua-Technis. It corresponded to a high level security code - the kind that might be used by the nearby food processing and distribution plant. Suddenly all the chanting patients fell silent. The group rushed to the corridor, to find a number of patients getting up and walking to the entrance, including Adept Parker. The now mindless patients are gunned down, the group saving Parker with Gael Harden's field medical experience. (A couple of shifted sixes kept her alive and sedated, for now.)

Outside, unknown to the group, Konig had arrived and, finding an Inquisitorial cordon, he decided to move on his plan, heading to the food distribution facility. The clock was ticking. (Literally - at this point I put a 30 minute timer on the table as suggested in the module for the start of act 3.) The group quickly left the hospital on Konig's trail. Entering the facility, Harden used the auspex to quickly locate the foe, and battle was joined.

The sight of heavily corrupted Poxwalkers gripped the group with fear, but they fought on regardless, Commissar Linn barking threats of execution to any who faltered. Sister Henna blasted an explosive barrel to kill a number of the chaos creatures (narrative declaration at work.) Konig fired on Aleretta, but Harden took the bullet. Aleretta leaped over a fallen beam (another declaration) to reach Konig, but took a brutal blow from his filthy chainsword. Sister Henna moved in and distracted Konig, allowing Aleretta and Gael to rain blows down upon him and finally kill Konig with a bayonet in the gut, before he could infect the water supply.

With the day won, the group returned to the hospital, finding all the Abacys patients dead, including Adept Parker, who died clutching her silver Aquila.

Preparing Blessings Unheralded - Wrath and Glory Intro Adventure

Hello!

I don't think it's a surprise to anyone that I like a bit of 40K. I also play a lot of D&D. So when I heard about a new 40K based RPG with a focus on narrative and streamlined mechanics, I got all excited. I have played several previous 40K RPGs from Fantasy Flight Games, mostly Dark Heresy, and to be fair, had a lot of fun with them, but I always found the mechanics somewhat obtuse. When D&D 5E came into my life I pretty much abandoned the FFG games.

Wrath and Glory (by Ulisses), is something that looks much more to my liking. Having followed bits and pieces over the internet, including the rather spiffing comic features on the Warhammer Community, I find myself liking almost all of the design decisions made for this. I'm pretty much ready to love this game already, however RPG books are expensive and I've not gone full irrational fanboy just yet. What I really need is to try the game for a session or two first...

Enter Blessings Unheralded. An intro adventure that was until recently available to download for free. (It's now available for around 4 dollars from DriveThruRPG - other RPG PDF sites are available). I've managed to arrange to GM the adventure on Monday for a group including my wife and her LARPer buddies (NERDS!). So I've been spending a fair amount of time reading through the rules and the module and making notes, printing character sheets etc.

Most of the basics of the game rules seem to be in here, which seem quite nicely designed. Nice, simple, flexible core mechanics and enough complexity in options that I'm sure it'll cover most of the ideas the players have for creative ways to kill stuff. I personally am very interested in the character creation/tier system that seems exceptionally wide in scope, but none of that is in here yet so I'll have to trust that it will be good. The characters that are in here are rather well fleshed out though, with multiple special abilities and gear and a nice lump of background, including a really cool mechanic for objectives. Essentially the players roll a D6 at the start of the session, and consult the objective table for their specific character. The objectives are all narrative, for example Commissar Victoria Linn (who will be played by the wife - read into that what you will) has an objective that calls for her to threaten to execute someone for cowardice. Achieving the objective will grant an in game resource called Wrath that can be used for rerolls and other bonuses. It's a similar but more defined system to the Inspiration in D&D 5E.

(Image stolen from here)

The biggest issue for me will be running the adventure itself. I've never actually run a pregenerated adventure before, I've always made up my own stuff (with various degrees of success) so this is a little intimidating. I've read through it a couple of time and drawn myself a handy flow chart to get through it, so I'm doing my homework. I even found and listened to a recorded play through on Youtube - run by someone called ELH Mk 1 (who mostly seems to play Star Trek Adventures). Obviously if you are planning on playing the module, spoilers are found here!

My initial thoughts on the adventure is that it is quite well put together, with a nice investigative segment and some appropriately scaled fights, but does require a certain amount of 'bad stuff kicks off just as the PCs happen to turn up' which to me breaks the immersion a little - though perhaps it will be less noticeable to the players. As a pregen for a one shot it is naturally a bit railroady and most of the investigation just 'happens' when the players go to the right places, but I figure this will not be an issue if the players are proactive with their decisions, and if they are not then it's nice that they won't just be sitting around twiddling thumbs until things happen. I'm also happy to go off the rails if the players come up with some crazy ideas - which, let's face it, they probably will.

So I'm looking forward to Monday night. At this stage I'm nearly sold on the game, so I guess marketing works? I'll be back to post my 'review' of how the session goes sometime next week. Stay tuned!