Sat - April 12, 2008

My son the game designer


I've been playing a lot of World of Warcraft with my son the last few months. He's getting really into it—so into it that it's beginning to frustrate him. See, he's my son, and therefore he's got some natural inclination, it seems, to be a game designer. He's always designing new classes, talking about new races, and lately getting frustrated that he can't build the exact character he wants to play. He wanted his rogue to be able to dual-wield engineering wrenches, and gave up playing the character when that turned out to be impractical. Then he decided that what he really wanted to play was a combination of rogue and paladin. "We should play D&D," became my refrain.

Finally he took me up on that, and we sat down on Thursday night to make characters and play some encounters. He had moved on past the rogue-paladin idea and wanted to play something like a shaman in WoW—a totemic, he said. So we designed the class from the ground up, as sort of a cleric-wizard hybrid. I think he might be a bit broken-good, but not too much. Over and over as we played—that night, Friday night, and much of the day today—he kept saying, "I love this game! It's so much better than WoW!" With the key selling point, of course, being the flexibility.

Did I mention the fire archon character I made for him, just by re-flavoring rogue powers into fiery things?

Speaking of selling points, I went to San Francisco last week to talk to some press, including cnet and Maximum PC. Tomorrow, I fly to Chicago to do more of the same. Do I know anyone in Chicago?

Posted at 03:49 PM    

Thu - February 21, 2008

Fearlessly dead


My paladin, Baredd, died tonight, at the poisonous fangs of a green dragon two levels higher than him. It seemed, somehow, as though someone were trying to prove a point. And what a point—at the end of the fight, of the six characters, two were dead and three were unconscious. Jarrett the halfling warlock saved the day!

I think the number of times my d20 came up above 9 might have been lower than 5, starting with my initiative roll and proceeding on to a whole bunch of saves against ongoing poison damage.

However, because we successfully rooted out the followers of Tiamat masquerading as a fanatical sect of the church of Bahamut, my companions managed to get Baredd raised. I need to give some thought to how death might change Baredd, though. Is he still confident of his ability to help build a better world, restoring the glory of the lost empire? Or is his undying optimism perhaps tempered somewhat after this experience? "Not even death can stop me!" might be his attitude now...

Good times. Still loving this game. It's even gotten better while I've been on vacation.

Posted at 10:30 PM    

Mon - September 3, 2007

Yes, I do have active games!


I posted a bit about Andy's game yesterday over on my Wizards blog.

Posted at 08:47 AM    

Sat - August 11, 2007

Fun with Dungeon Tiles


I've been playing in a monthly game run by Andy Collins, which he calls Greyhawk Dungeons. It's kind of a old-school dungeon crawl-type campaign, which includes parts drawn from some of the classic adventures of D&D, and in some cases whole adventures. For example, we delved into White Plume Mountain to retrieve the three weapons of legacy, Wave, Whelm, and . . . Eventide. (That was for my swordsage—it's a legacy weapon from Book of Nine Swords.)

And the point of my telling you all this is . . . to share my pictures! If you're familiar with the adventure, you might remember this room, number 26:

I was impressed by the effective combination of Dungeon Tiles with good old-fashioned Battlemat.

In the original adventure, the monsters on the terraces were giant crayfish, giant scorpions, sea lions, and manticores. In the revision we did a couple of years ago, the giant crayfish were replaced by hammerclaws. I can't remember what's represented by those chuuls...

Posted at 09:41 AM    

Sun - July 9, 2006

d20 Future


On the topic of playing D&D with my son...

This weekend I brought home d20 Future, at his request. He likes fantasy, but he also has a taste for the high-tech. So on Saturday he made up a character: a 4th-level Tough hero/Dreadnought with a dozen mutations and a mecha. Together with my bioreplica robot Strong hero/Soldier, he fought off a klick invasion of our colony and rescued a "power core" (whatever that is) from a magma-covered planet. Besides the klick stats in d20 Future, I applied the extraterrestrial template from d20 Future to an ankheg and, when even that proved too easy for the mecha, a chuul (which nearly killed us both), to replicate larger species related to the klicks. Then on magmaworld we fought a magma hurler and an elemental wall, sans mecha. Finally, we defended our colony against more klicks—this time with an AT-ST to provide a challenge for the mecha.

It's been fun, but scifi is really not my thing. I don't have a clear vision of what this "campaign" is, and I find it much harder to throw encounters together. (Not being able to just pick minis and use stats off their cards is a significant factor.) It's also quite clear to me that these 4th-level characters shouldn't be toting a Large mecha around—mechas are pretty clearly designed for mecha-on-mecha action, not for blasting monsters of a challenge rating equal to your level.

But what matters is that he's having fun, right? He gets to use a micro series Transformer for his mecha, combined with both Star Wars and D&D minis. It's all good.

Posted at 04:31 PM    

Mon - July 4, 2005

Wild and Wacky D&D Day


OK, now it's really done—the first draft of my novel, that is. I just finished my first pass of revisions and emailed it off to the editor. I'm a little bit stunned. And quite happy.

I saw a copy of Adrian Cole's novel, The Crimson Talisman, the other day, and was pretty tickled to see my novel listed inside the front. I guess some of you probably saw that months ago. Color me oblivious. It kind of made the reality sink in—I have actually written a novel, and it should actually get published. That's a pretty cool feeling—even for someone who's already worked on a dozen game books. This one's different, somehow.

But I have chosen to file this entry under "Active Games," so let me tell you about the game I played yesterday!

It's a holiday weekend, and my wife and son are out of town, visiting family. This leaves me feeling somewhat lonely and unusually free. So I decided to pull some folks together for an unscheduled D&D session yesterday, and Andy Collins, Gwen Kestrel, Steve Schubert, and Mike Mearls descended upon my house. Mike had kindly volunteered to run an adventure for us, and Andy came up with the wacky idea that we should all make characters who use races and classes from sources other than the Player's Handbook. So that's what we did.

Andy and Gwen played a pair of goliath brothers. Andy was a barbarian 1/favored soul 4. Cheating? Sort of—but he took the goliath barbarian substitution level to get mountain rage, so it wasn't really like he was playing a class from the PH. Gwen was a barbarian 5, but she also had substitution levels and/or variant class features from Unearthed Arcana—the dragon totem and whirling frenzy variants. So again, not very PH-like.

Steve played a kalashtar character with a class I can't tell you anything about. It appears in a book currently in development, and received some development in mid-game session. I kind of think that's cheating, but it's hard to argue when the two people at the table who are actually working on developing the book agree on the change. And it wasn't exactly game-breaking.

I played a shifter totemist, a class that appears in Magic of Incarnum.

Mike is a seriously twisted guy, meaning he fits right in to the development team. He ran us through a very disturbing adventure laced with seriously gruesome imagery, but involving plenty of nail-biting combat. A splendid time was had by all.

Posted at 06:08 PM    

Mon - October 18, 2004

Worldwide D&D Game Day


This past Saturday, as I hope you know, was Worldwide D&D Game Day, the great big celebration of the 30th anniversary of this game. It's received lots of national news coverage:
An AP story (on cnn.com)
Chicago Sun-Times story
Nashua Telegraph story
Of all places, the National Review

So what did I do to celebrate Worldwide D&D Game Day? I played D&D!

It was the second Saturday of the month, so that made it D&D day anyway. But we got to talking, and decided to head down to Tacoma to visit a couple of the game stores that were participating in the festivities. We stopped in first at Table Top Games, where they had regularly-scheduled D&D Minis and RPGA (Living Greyhawk) events planned in addition to the special activities. We hung out there for about an hour, talking with folks, signing books, and browsing the merchandise. Then we went up the road to The Game Matrix, which had just one table of the introductory D&D adventure going on. Many thanks to these two stores for welcoming us (on pretty short notice) and showing us a good time!

Then we came back to my house for the gaming.

It's October. As I was cleaning the house on Friday, putting away some of the Halloween stuff my son has been accumulating these last few weeks, I realized that Halloween was coming up and I should make the most of it. So I put together a dungeon crawl with some pretty creepy elements. I didn't go overboard with it, and I didn't even tell the players that I had a creepy game in mind. Not like sitting down with the lights dimmed to play through the original Ravenloft module or anything.

So back in Stormreach, the PCs met back up with Tala Karrna after their weird little expedition to the village of the catfolk (in Mellorn Hospitality, from DUNGEON, which we played at our last session—in July!). The kindly Professor informed them that agents of the Emerald Claw had made one more attempt to steal the mysterious rod from her while they were gone, but that she was rescued by an Exorcist of the Silver Flame. This Exorcist then went on to tell her that he was seeking a powerful artifact of good in a lost temple, and that it was imperative that it be found before the Emerald Claw could grasp it. He hired Tala, and the PCs through her, to find this artifact and keep it from the clutches of the Claw.

So off into the jungle the PCs traipsed once more. I fast-forwarded through weeks of jungle travels, ending when the party arrived at the Marsh of Desolation. This swamp was dismal and desolate indeed: Gwen's character (Phenn) caught mindfire and lost some Intelligence. None of the PCs could get a restful night's sleep because of nightmares arising from the great evil of the place. They fought off a will-o-wisp (no easy task in such a dense fog), and then arrived at the temple fatigued and worn.

Inside the temple, they launched into a fight against two yuan-ti purebloods. Even as another pureblood and a half-blood appeared to aid the first pair, some ghostly apparitions started manifesting in the area. They were basically phantasms, manifesting first as the sound of distant chanting, then as ghostly glowing green lights floating toward the great ebon doors, then as ghostly figures wearing robes remarkably like the tattered vestments worn by the yuan-ti. In front of the doors, a fifth yuan-ti blocked their path—this one an undead monstrosity (basically an akutsukai from Oriental Adventures), that slammed Andy's character (Kalar) with a point of Taint. Turning that bad boy enabled the PCs to fight off the rest of the yuan-ti, including one last abomination, before dealing with him—and finally the PCs stood alone in front of the night-black doors.

Phenn decided to try to channel positive energy into these black doors. Her first attempt (pretty lame) turned the black stone momentarily granite-gray. Her second attempt (even more lame) I described as like a breath of warm air on a cold glass, sending a merest blush of gray through the black. Cameron's warforged character (Stratos) at that point decided to just beat the thing down. He took some damage from the negative energy-charged door, and failed despite a pretty good Strength check. Then Steve's artificer (Jeb) produced a knock scroll and opened the door.

Inside, the ghostly apparitions were gathered in front of a terrible statue of some unknown charnel god. The glowing green lights danced like serpents of flame over their heads for a moment, then plunged into them, sending them writhing to the floor (the apparitions, not the PCs). At the same time, a wraith (with the evolved template from Libris Mortis) was manifesting near the statue. Stratos (or maybe it was Jeb with his undead bane crossbow) did it a lot of damage right off the bat, and it was reluctant to hide in the walls too long because it had already used its 1/day haste spell-like ability on itself. It hit Kalar hard, took his Con way down—and smacked him with another point of Taint. But then it died.

As it died, the statue crumbled, leaving a gaping hole in the floor through which a wholesome golden light shone. The PCs found a room below, very much like the one where they had found the evil scepter some time ago (the same Shrine of Justice tile). The statue wore the mithral crown they sought. Fearful that the statue might turn into an erinyes the way the last one had, they camped for the night before touching the crown, tallying up the other treasure in the room in the meantime. Morning came, and they snagged the crown without incident. Jeb put it in his pack and the party emerged from the lower room.

To find agents of the Emerald Claw camped out at the entrance to the temple, apparently awaiting their emergence. As battle erupted, Tala Karrna urged Jeb to give her the crown, saying that she knew how to use it to fight these guys off. Steve didn't quite trust her, but rolled a 1 on his Sense Motive and dutifully handed the crown over. As the gravehounds, Emerald Claw agents, clerics of Vol, and ogre zombie advanced, Tala bravely rushed forward—and got up on the back of the fiendish warhorse behind the nasty blackguard leader of this band... who had the evil scepter in his hand.

Brave Phenn chased them into the swamp, even after the blackguard socked her with a fireball from the scepter. Her little weasel familiar latched on to the horse and dealt a point of damage each round. Finally, fearing another fireball, Phenn gave up. At about that time, the ogre zombie got a crit on Stratos and smashed him to pieces.

It was simultaneously glorious and really depressing. Never have I handed a group of PCs such a defeat. Utterly betrayed by an NPC they had come to trust, at the cost of Stratos's life, they were pretty disheartened. But they were also really angry at the Professor, and I think that's really good. Next time, they're going to start making plans to track her down, which should drive the campaign for a while. Oh, I have great plans for Tala Karrna, yes indeed.

Here's the really funny thing. Tala Karrna appears in the Sharn: City of Towers sourcebook that Keith Baker and I wrote, coming out in November. She's a professor at Morgrave University who's an agent of the Emerald Claw. I knew that almost all of my players would have that book dropped on their desks at work in a couple of weeks, and somebody was sure to run across her and uncover her treachery that way. So I figured that I had to do the betrayal thing in this session, before everyone got their copies of the book. But I discovered just this past week that her name got changed in development or editing of the book, so the players might not have caught it. Well, they still might have, so it's just as well. Besides, it was a great session.

I have been really, really busy lately. That's mostly due to a trip to Australia for Spring Revel Downunder, which I still intend to write about soon. I am starting to get caught up on things after that trip, and life should get a little more back to normal. We'll see. :)

Posted at 12:36 AM    

Sat - July 31, 2004

Back in the SPQR


I've been on vacation all this week, enjoying a visit with my family and friends in Ithaca, New York. I find it amusing that my friends in Ithaca all talk about how rainy Seattle must be. I'm pretty sure Ithaca gets more inches of annual rainfall than Seattle does. OK, no, according to my quick Google search, Ithaca gets 35.4 inches of rain per year, compared to Seattle's diluvial 36 inches. But compare Seattle's annual snowfall (8.6 inches) to Ithaca's 67.3 inches!

When we were packing for the trip, I waffled about how much D&D stuff to bring. Coming home to Ithaca is often an opportunity to play D&D (see the SPQR Adventure Journal ), but it used to be that it was the only chance I got to play and that's not so much true any more. I planned to bring my Eberron book since I had hoped to get some work done on my novella, and I've got my laptop which has PDFs of the three core books on it. So I threw the two tubes of dice I bought at Origins into the suitcase and figured I had my bases covered—if a D&D game arose, there's an adventure in the back of the Eberron book I could run.

I was pretty surprised, frankly, that David Lieb was the one who seemed most eager to get a game together, when I had lunch with him on Wednesday. David has always been a casual player—he learned how to play in college when we had some summer campaigns going, he's never bought a D&D book that I know of, and he's always seemed more interested in playing as a social activity than in the game itself. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I think a lot of D&D players fit that model to a T.

There were two flaws in my perfect plan about what D&D stuff to bring. First, I figured folks would make up new Eberron characters in order to play "The Forgotten Forge," but these guys don't want to make up new characters and we don't want to spend the time doing that. Second, I no longer remember how to play D&D without miniatures. So I came up with a perfect plan. I went to my Friendly Local Game Store here in Ithaca, had a nice conversation with one of the owners, and bought two Giants of Legend Huge Packs. I brought the minis home, put together 5 encounters appropriate for 5th-level PCs, and ended up using 14 of the 18 minis in those boxes. Yet another example of "How D&D Minis Changed My Life... Or At Least My D&D Game," which is a seminar I'll be participating in at GenCon this year. I pretty much randomly placed those encounters in the dungeon map from the back of the DMG. I loosely set them in a framework vaguely tied to the last adventure they were on (as well as I could remember it), telling them they had to stop some crazy cultists from releasing a dragon imprisoned beneath the Egyptian city of Tanis.

The PCs were Denis (played by Mark Lawrence and represented by a Deepshadow elf mini), Hal (played by Paul Gries and represented by Lidda, Adventurer), and Rakh (played by David Lieb and represented by the orc brute). The encounters started off with a pair of fighter bandits (Regdar, Adventurer and Dwarf Sergeant), and a drow fighter and its displacer serpent pet. The next encounter was a minotaur skeleton, a zombie, and a ghast, which scared the wounded PCs enough (especially after the minotaur's axe hit Rakh once) that they closed the door and retreated back to the drow's room. They later encountered just the minotaur skeleton in the hallway, then fought a lizardfolk rogue and a grick. Rakh really shone as the group's fighter, despite being a single-classed rogue. The climactic encounter included the ghast and the zombie from the earlier room, along with a tanarukk and a warforged fighter, the leader of this group of psychos trying to free the imprisoned dragon. Denis finally came into his own in this last fight, getting off a successful hypnotism on the warforged fighter and turning the zombie, allowing the others to focus on the ghast and the tanarukk until they were out of the way.

The minis I didn't use: Medium astral construct, Mordenkainen the Mage (the one from these two boxes that I didn't already have, so I don't at all mind not having used it), a Huge gold dragon (my second; I'm hoping to trade it for a red dragon, which is the one Huge I don't have yet), and a bulette (which I planned to use, but decided that it would tear this group apart).

Admittedly, 40 bucks is a fair bit of money to spend for a night of pretty random adventuring. On the other hand, I'm convinced that we had more fun than we would have had if I had spent money on, say, an issue of DUNGEON to find an adventure we wouldn't have finished by 2:30 am and we would have played without any minis at all. And if we had decided to share that expense, 10 bucks each is less than we would have spent going to the movies, and we played D&D for a good four and a half hours—longer than even Return of the King. And I don't much mind not sharing the expense, since I get to keep the minis and use them over and over again.

Last, random comment more directly related to the Imperium Romanum campaign: I got an email today informing me that a link to the SPQR pages on my site has been added to an online encyclopedia entry about Hispania Terraconensis . These people need to research their sources more carefully!

It might be fun, if we start visiting Ithaca more often again (it's been two and a half years since our last visit), to try to build this campaign up again. Things have been pretty random when we've played the last several times, and it would be nice to re-establish some themes of plot and continuity and the calendar, and that sort of thing. But that might mean getting the rest of these guys to think about D&D between gaming sessions again!

Posted at 02:39 PM    

Tue - July 20, 2004

Mellorn Hospitality


We played my Eberron campaign again last weekend, and once again had a fabulous session. I was very short on preparation time, and with a great deal of guilt I ended up running an adventure from DUNGEON, called "Mellorn Hospitality." I won't spoil the plot, since it's from a fairly recent issue and there may be people out there reading this who are playing in it... or about to. I made some adjustments to the adventure, most of them necessitated by setting it in Eberron and on the continent of Xen'drik—so read "catfolk" for "elves" and "Shavarath" for "Hades" (which was a little weird; if you've read or played the adventure and know Eberron you can probably figure out why). But it was a fun adventure. The pace built steadily to a really dramatic climax, with the main villain of the adventure fleeing to Shavarath, the PCs in hot pursuit. Considering that was an EL 10 encounter, these five 5th-level characters (actually, Gwen's character was still 4th!) handled themselves remarkably well. The artificer proved to be the hero of that climactic encounter, using personal weapon augmentation (making his crossbow a bane weapon) in combination with true strike to dish out lots of damage where the other characters were only doing 3 to 7 points per hit with damage reduction and a couple of well-placed rays of enfeeblement slowing them down.

Jesse is on a temporary hiatus (is that redundant?) from the game, with a new job as development manager and a wedding coming up, so the group was feeling a little short on clerics. Jesse's druid and Gwen's aspiring mystic theurge combined to make about one cleric (plus another fighter, in the form of Fergus, Crael's dog), but without Crael there was only a half a cleric in place. So Dave sent Madivh off with Professor Karrna and brought in Crucius, a cleric of Dol Arrah and a testament to the power of prison ministry. (Yes, this is a remake of the character he played in Rich Baker's playtest of Prison of the Firebringer . 25 points if you remembered that.)

Great fun. All the characters went up a level, except Crucius, who had started at the very bottom of 5th level and didn't quite get enough XP to hit 6th. Next month most of us will be at GenCon, and I'm planning to do another short one-shot sort of thing. We'll see.

Posted at 11:02 PM    

Sat - June 19, 2004

Eberron Campaign Session #6


Today was the sixth session of my (still relatively new) Eberron campaign. We started in January and have been playing monthly, the third Saturday of every month. The players are David Noonan, Andy Collins, Gwendolyn Kestrel, Jesse Decker, Stephen Schubert, and Cameron Curtis. It's been a change for me, from playing every week and with a different group, but it's been quite fun so far. Playing monthly means longer sessions when we do play, and it means that in most weeks I have more time to be with my family. (It's just the week leading up to our monthly session, when I'm doing too much last-minute prep work, that maybe I have less time with my family...)

So the campaign began in January with the adventure that will see print in DUNGEON next month, "The Queen with Burning Eyes." It's a classic sort of dungeon delve, with the weird twist that all the rooms are constructed from miniatures terrain tiles. For that matter, in the published version of the adventure, I suggested miniatures to use for every encounter.

After playing through that adventure, the characters traveled to the city of Sharn, where they hooked up with a professor at Morgrave University for an expedition to Xen'drik. (One of the items they recovered in the first adventure turned out to be a key to a vault somewhere in Xen'drik, and in a later confrontation with the Emerald Claw necromancer Demise they recovered a second key to the same vault.) They fought some sahuagin in the strait of Shargon's Teeth, encountered some incompetent Emerald Claw agents in Stormreach, and sailed near the location of the Lost Vault they sought.

Journeying into the jungle of Xen'drik, they encountered a harpy who informed them that Tzaryan Rrac of Darguun sought the same treasure as they did, and claimed it for his own. They dispatched both the harpy and a batch of gnolls working for the Darguun warlord with ease, and made their way to the enormous steps of the Lost Vault. The drow guards there proved ill-equipped to withstand the PCs' assault, and the remaining denizens of the Vault—an owlbear, a pair of ogres, a drow wizard with some Abyssal eviscerator allies, a water elemental, and even an erinyes—all fell before their might. They emerged from the Vault with a horde of lost treasure, including a glowing iron rod that Professor Karrna seemed particularly interested in bringing back to Sharn.

Upon emerging from the Vault, a black dragon intercepted the characters, spouting off cryptic remarks like, "The world is not ready for that which you bear," and, "If I perish, so do many, but you will be stopped." They defeated the dragon, then faced still more minions of Tzaryan Rrac: orcs, another ogre, and a displacer beast. It seems they have found the treasure that both the Emerald Claw and Tzaryan Rrac are desperate to claim. But what do the mysterious dragons of Eberron have to do with it?

So today they made their return trip as far as Stormreach. We started the day off with a bang, since I got my first Giants of Legend miniatures this week: a bulette. The fight went pretty well, considering that the characters were only 4th level—they would all have survived had it not been for the critical hit it got on Gwen's wizard, killing him outright. Gwen went off to make another character, while the others proceeded, fighting a trio of werewolves (who seemed to really hate Andy's shifter, even going so far as to call him a "mudblood," though I can't believe I used that word in a D&D game, and one of them taking two attacks of opportunity from other characters in order to go attack Andy). Then they returned to where they had left the launch from the ship they came in on.

Near the launch, they were attacked by a group of lizardfolk—5 ordinary lizardfolk and one rogue (the GoL mini). That was a pretty easy fight, but the pair of sea cats out on the water was tougher—especially since one of them was just attacking the boat. It turned out to be pretty exciting to see Andy's shifter hanging on to the edge of the larger ship while Professor Karrna tried to climb up him from the launch before the sea cats pulled it down under the water. All while the pirates up on the deck, who had captured their ship, were shooting scorching rays and crossbows all over the place. The pirate warmage died pretty quickly, his quasit ally fled the scene (after his cause fear made Cam's warforged run like heck), and the pirates fell in short order... especially once the fear wore off. Gwen's new character had been working (rather unwillingly) with the pirates, but aided the PCs from the start of that encounter.

Back in Stormreach, lots of shopping took place, and the artificer made a lot of stuff, and we closed off the day with one more fight against the Emerald Claw. This time it was a party of four enemy agents: a cleric of the Blood of Vol, a barbarian/fighter (Axe Sister mini), a Daring Rogue, and a kalashtar wizard (with a striking resemblance to an elf of Evermeet). They went down pretty quickly, too, to my chagrin.

So that was the session. Here's a rundown of the players and characters:
Dave: Madivh, an Aerenal elf monk
Andy: Kalar, a shifter ranger/psychic warrior
Gwen: (originally) Te, a changeling wizard
(now) Phenn, a changeling cleric/transmuter (heading toward mystic theurge)
Jesse: Crael, a halfling (House Jorasco) druid, and Fergus, his dog
Steve: Jeb, a human artificer
Cam: Stratos, a warforged barbarian/fighter

Posted at 11:32 PM     Read More  

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