I'm still off the WoW habit, but...

I let my World of Warcraft subscription lapse in May. This might be the longest I've gone without playing it since I started, come to think of it, which could explain the cravings.

In addition to the cravings for the actual computer game, which I keep denying because it turns out there's a lot about that experience I just don't enjoy, the cravings have been manifesting recently as desires to play D&D in the world of WoW. I think it's a cool world, and there's a part of me—a rather large part, it turns out—that would love to play a night elf warrior in a tabletop experience where I'm not button-mashing, where my actions make a difference in the world, where there's a DM to adjudicate my doing whatever I want to, and all those other things that make tabletop gaming superior, in my estimation, to computer gaming. In fact, there's a lot of it that feels like the best of both worlds: I can have the tabletop experience I enjoy while also playing the soundtracks to the game and making abundant use of visual aids and quest design from the computer game.

So I've spent some time with the D&D Monster Builder, statting up monsters from the game in D&D terms. I've spent a lot of time on WoW fan sites like thottbot and wowhead and wowwiki, culling information about the world and its inhabitants and "translating" it into D&D content, from quests to monsters to storylines.

When I was at GenCon, I bought a couple of WoW mini singles: a couple of nagas, a voidwalker, and a timberling who made an appearance in my Greenbrier campaign a couple of weeks ago, as a myconid sovereign. They were $1 each, so I felt that was a pretty good investment for monsters that would be Large in the game anyway. Doesn't help much for gnomes and night elves and other Medium critters, but they're pretty cool additions to my minis collection.

So then today I got an idea. Using the 3D models of WoW mobs available on wowhead, I took snapshots of a bunch of monsters, front and back, printed them on cardstock, and turned them into stand-up figures, much like the Cardboard Heroes of old. Look:

That's a bunch of murlocs on the left, some nagas on the right (I decided to make them Large after trying them both Large and Medium), and satyrs in the front.

More:

On the right, a demon and its cultists. Center, an abomination and three forsaken. Left, a worgen. And in the back are two orcs and two tauren.

Still more!

These are the woodsy folk: a couple of furbolgs (I decided to make them Medium after trying them Large) on the left, a bunch of night elves toward the right (with a son of Cenarius and a dryad at far right), Gnarl the ancient in the back, and two draenei and a human (Delgren the Purifier) behind the furbolgs.

I focused on creatures and characters to be found in Ashenvale, since that's where I've been putting most of my attention. It's aesthetically one of the most appealing zones to me, which almost makes up for its almost utter lack of good storylines. And Blackfathom Deeps is one of the only instances I've done, pathetically enough.

So then it occurred to me that the work I did might be useful to other people. Want to print the WoW minis I made? Visit this page and download the PDFs, and print them onto card stock. Want to make your own, visit the same page and download the photoshop files, delete (or hide) the layers showing the WoW monsters, and add your own images.

Caveats: I'm more or less happy with the Larges, but they don't stand up if you make the base too narrow. What I ended up doing was not cutting through the page margin at the top of the page, so I got a wider base on them.

I'm really not happy with the Huges. They take up a row of three squares, rather than a box of nine squares. And it's just possible that all the Huges I did ought to be Large anyway. Thoughts on making effective Huge monsters in this format would be welcome, but it's possible that a flat counter is just better. I suppose one could get all fancy and make an X-shaped figure with four views of the monster... oh, geez, now I'm going to have to try that.

Have fun!

A pair of random thoughts

First, in case you missed it on Twitter or Facebook, I did an interview last week with local public radio station KUOW (94.9). It's supposed to air at 12:26 tomorrow afternoon, and a couple of times over the next week, but you can listen to it now on the web.

I got thinking later about one of the things I said in the interview, and I realized that for a number of books that I've worked on, the funny little chapters are my favorites. To wit:

• The one I mentioned in the interview was the chapter in Deities & Demigods that presented Taiia (the god of a monotheistic religion from Aquela), Elishar and Toldoth (the dualistic religion practiced by my last 1st Edition AD&D character), and the dwarven mystery cult of Dennari (from the Roman campaign).
• The chapter of Oriental Adventures where I talked about using dwarves as the Crab clan of Rokugan (and elves as the Crane) and talked just a bit about using Asian cultures other than China and Japan as sources.
• In Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, the chapter with the three fanes you can use to weaken Strahd.

I don't know what it is about those three chapters that I like so much, but somehow they feel like some of my most distinctive contributions to the D&D game. They're quirky and unique. They're me.

The dog food test

I read this, talking about Google's Chrome OS, last night:

In short, will Chrome OS pass the dog food test: is it something Google’s own engineers will want to use?

I’m skeptical about the prospects of any new system or product that isn’t intended for use by the people creating it. Gmail, for example, is the best web mail system because it was designed to be used not just by “typical” users but by expert users, including the engineers at Google who made it. The iPhone is simple enough to appeal to almost anyone, but guess which phone the people who created it use?

Make something intended not for your own use, but for use by dummies, and you’ll usually wind up creating something dumb. The future of computing probably is in the direction of thin clients connecting to network services for storage and software, but my hunch is that Chrome OS is too thin.

It struck me because it dovetailed directly with a conversation I'd had the day before about D&D 4e. Some people think that we designed the game for World of Warcraft players, or for kids, or for stupid people. We didn't. We designed it for us—and by "us," I mean not just the people inside this department who are lucky enough to play more D&D than just about anybody in the world, but also people like us: People who love the game and want the best gaming experience possible. People who had a great time playing 3rd edition but grew increasingly frustrated with its mechanics. People who still enjoy the tabletop experience of sitting down, face to face, with your friends and spending a couple of hours lost in fantasy.

From my perspective, it was incredibly successful. I'm playing more D&D than I ever have in my life—five regular campaigns, plus frequent games with my son (and sometimes my wife). I'm having more fun while playing, too. And I still hunger for more—I want to get the old band back together and return to the glory days of the Imperium Romanum campaign (back in the SPQR!). From what I've seen, a whole lot of people feel the same way.

Some people don't. Well, that has to be OK. No edition of D&D has pleased everybody. Some people still consider 2nd Edition a blight on the purity of the original AD&D, and some think it's been all downhill since "Advanced" first got appended to the name of the game. Fourth Edition can't please everybody, either. So play the edition of the game that makes you happy.

But, for crying out loud, play the game. I have no patience for armchair generals who stir up the so-called edition wars without ever actually playing any edition of D&D. Play the game the way you want it, and lay off the people who don't like the game you're playing. But play. The D&D kitchen table is big enough for all of us.

Thuk

GenCon 2002: A bunch of friends sit down to play some D&D. We make up some hasty, 9th-level characters and then play. I don't remember who DMed—maybe Steve Schubert? I only remember some of the players. But I have the character, because for some reason I entered it into the character storage CGI script I wrote for my old website. Inspired by the T-shirt distributed with the announcement of 3rd Edition, I decided to make a half-orc barbarian/sorcerer. Because the shirt said I could.

Thuk II was a chaotic good half-orc barbarian 3/sorcerer 6. Str 16, Dex 12, Con 14, Int 6, Wis 10, Cha 16. He had 54 hp, AC 21, Fort +7, Ref +4, and Will +6. He wielded a +2 greataxe, wore a +2 mithral shirt, +2 ring of protection, +2 amulet of natural armor, and +2 cloak of Charisma. Raging (once per day) gave him Str 20, Con 18, Will +8, AC 19. His skills were Intimidate +9, Listen +6, and Concentration +8, and he had Weapon Focus (greataxe), Power Attack, Blind-Fight, and Combat Casting as feats. His personality I summed up in a quotation: "Thuk smash!"

His spells per day: 6 level 0, 7 level 1, 6 level 2, and 4 level 3. He knew (1st level) true strike, shocking grasp, burning hands, magic missile; (2nd level) blur, bull's strength; and (3rd level) haste.

Thuk I, who died early in the adventure, was a barbarian 2/sorcerer 7. I changed the distribution of levels so that I could get a second attack each round.

That's perhaps the weirdest irony—I wanted Thuk to be a melee guy who ran up and smashed monsters, enhancing his ability to do so with his sorcerer spells. That's why I chose the spells I did. But the system encouraged me to give him more sorcerer levels than barbarian levels, because I got more bang out of those bucks (more spells). Even in his revised form, Thuk was not a particularly strong character. I was fighting upstream to get a high Charisma (my save DCs started at 13), and my Strength was lower than it would have been as a straight barbarian. 

Now, I've been thinking for a long time, and particularly since we were intently working on Player's Handbook 2, that a half-orc barbarian/sorcerer in 4th Edition would be pretty awesome. So the other night, for kicks, I revisited Thuk.

The new Thuk is a good half-orc barbarian 9 with the Arcane Prodigy (sorcerer multiclass) feat. Str 18, Con 12, Dex 16, Int 8, Wis 11, Cha 18. He has 75 hp, AC 23, Fort 22, Ref 20, and Will 20. He wields a +2 berserker greataxe, wears +2 bloodcut hide armor, and a +2 amulet of health. His trained skills are Athletics +13, Intimidate +15, and Perception +9, and he has Weapon Focus (axes), Power Attack, Arcane Prodigy, Novice Power, and Acolyte Power as feats. His personality can still be summed up as "Thuk smash!"

Here's his powers: (at-will) howling strike, pressing strike, (encounter) furious assault, roar of triumph, vault the fallen, flame spiral, curtain of steel, (daily) rage strike, macetail's rage, vengeful storm rage, white tiger rage, (utility) combat sprint, swift escape. His weapon attacks are +12 and deal a base 1d12+6, while his sorcerer attack is +8, with a +4 damage bonus.

When he hits 10th level, he'll take Adept Power and swap out one of his barbarian rages for a sorcerer daily. 

He doesn't have as much overt magic going on, but there's a lot more happening in his barbarian powers than just his basic attacks. His one sorcerer attack (flame spiral) is a close burst, so I don't need to worry about opportunity attacks—I just burninate the guys next to me. No Charisma penalty means my ability scores are better (even without the cloak of Charisma), and the barbarian has some good uses for that high Charisma score as well. 

This is a character I might actually like to play...

What class are you?

D&D Home Page - What Class Are You? - Build A Character - D&D Compendium

Sasha Bilton on Swords & Sorcery D&D

In Pelgrane Press's See Page XX webzine this month, there's a fun little article by Sasha Bilton outlining some changes you could make to a 4e D&D campaign to get at a Swords & Sorcery feel, similar to what I've been talking about for a while now. Aside from the oversight of talking about how no healers are available if you prohibit clerics and paladins and then going on to talk about how the warlord fits great, it's a worthwhile read. I particularly like the idea of turning orcs and hobgoblins (and other humanoid monsters) into tribes or nationalities of humans.

Another turn behind the DM screen...

After two days pretty much wasted by the flu, my son decided tonight that he wanted to run another D&D adventure. I had brought home a bunch of new minis, a set of the new Dungeon Tiles (Caves of Carnage), and the Dungeon Delve book, and I guess that got him in the mood. So I sat him down with Dungeon Delve and the DMG while I started some laundry, made myself some dinner, and did a few other things around the house.

He decided that he wouldn't use anything from Dungeon Delve—he wanted to make his own adventure tonight. So he created a Delve of his own: three encounters, ramping up in difficulty, with the ultimate goal (inspired by reading the Quests section of the DMG) of rescuing the village magistrate, who'd been kidnapped and held for ransom. I helped him build the encounters (which involved scaling a number of monsters down to 1st level—he wanted to use a shadar-kai chainfighter and an iron cobra and . . .), but the adventure was really his design.

At last he, Amy, and I all sat down to play. We used the characters we created last week for Jeremy's game (about which more in a moment), including my son playing his character as well as running all the monsters. And it was fun! We all had a great time, playing for maybe an hour and a half.

He was so thrilled. He kept saying things like, "I'm DMing!" and "I want to run a regular campaign!" I was tickled pink. And kept drilling him on math as he tracked the shadar-kai chainfighter's 88 hit points (we turned it from a level 6 to a level 3 elite). Good times.

* * * * *

We are all playing in a new campaign started up by Jeremy Crawford. We played one session last Saturday, and we're missing another tomorrow. (Amy refuses to play D&D on Valentine's Day . . .) Our characters:

• Jaeric (me), male half-elf sorcerer. Actually half-eladrin. 

• Riva (Amy), female deva invoker.

• Chava (son), female deva swordmage.

Here's the background I wrote up for Jaeric:

Jaeric is the eldest son of the human thane of Llandaer and an eladrin princess (Meriele) who died when he was very young. From birth (a birth accompanied by mysterious omens), Jaeric was regarded as a strange child beyond what one would expect from his fey blood—he never cried, and it soon became apparent that he saw things that no one else (even his mother) could see. His father regarded this as a personal betrayal on the part of his mother, and when his mother died, some folk whispered that his father was responsible. Soon after his mother's death, the thane took a new human wife and promptly sired a respectable heir, Jaeric's half-brother.

When his father remarried, Jaeric was sent to live with the druids at the Grove of the Dhunail. They laid him on the Dhunail (a sacred stone) to heal him, but his condition did not improve. The druids took to saying that his madness was a divine gift, not an ailment, and they secured fey tutors to help him learn to control the magic that seemed to flow uncontrolled through his body (beginning when he reached puberty).

Recently, Jaeric's father died and his half-brother became thane of Llandaer. Before his father's death, his living in Tira had been basically a caretaking situation, but with his half-brother's ascension it's clear that Jaeric is an exile from Llandaer, not welcome home.

Chana and Riva don't have quite that much background worked out. And I think it's probably best if I avoid saying too much about them until PH2 is officially out there.

* * * * *

In other games:

Baredd, male human paladin (in Bill's Thursday night game), has reached 11th level and chosen the Champion of Order paragon path. We've basically been playing through the adventure series, but we skipped H3 (because I co-authored it). We're pursuing Skalmad into the Feywild (in P1) right now. I missed last night's game because of the aforementioned flu situation.

Baredd is a devotee of Erathis. His background notes that he grew up in a distant town built among the ruins of the ancient capital of the long-fallen empire. His head full of dreams of civilization's greatest glories, he came to the town of Haven hoping to help rebuild the Havenguard (the town watch) and eventually grow the town into the seat of a new kingdom. 

* * * * *

Adrin, male elf rogue (in Andy's monthly game), is 5th level. We're playing through the Scales of War adventure path. I missed the last session of that game, too, so I haven't played since about Christmas and it's a bit of a blur . . .

Near the start of the campaign, Andy asked four questions about each of our characters. Here are the questions and my answers:

1) Where are you from?

I'm from Tiri Kitor, in the Witch—in the forest to the west.

2) Why are you in Brindol?

I came to Brindol primarily out of curiosity and gregariousness—I like being around people, interacting with different people, and a small village of elves and eladrin isn't sufficient company.

3) How are you connected to at least one other character in the group?

Galidas (Brian Larabee) and I met in Tiri Kitor and decided to journey to Brindol together.

4) What interesting secret would your character prefer that others not know about him just yet?

While everything I've said about my reasons for coming to Brindol is true, it's not the whole story. The immediate impetus for my departure was an encounter I had in the Witchwood, an experience of some kind of fey being of enormous power, ancient wisdom, and primal hunger. It scared the sh** out of me, and resulted in my fey pact (via the Pact Initiate feat). I used to love to walk in the woods alone, but I won't do it ever again (which is part of the reason I was so glad to hook up with Galidas). I'm not quite sure what my pact consists of, and I'm terrified of what this fey being is going to ask in exchange for the power it gave me. Not that I particularly think it's going to be sinister or awful, just that I don't like the feeling it gives me of having a greater purpose or destiny. I have nightmares about the experience just about every night.

After a couple more sessions (after we finished a detour into the Treasure of Talon Pass adventure), Andy asked some more questions:

1) What rumors have you heard?

Travelers through the more remote parts of the Witchwood have told tales of an enormous beast wandering through the forest. Nobody has given a clear description of the thing, except to say that it's gigantic and dark. Common themes: Shaggy appearance, the forest seems darker just before it's spotted, response of people and animals alike is to run in terror at the sight of it.

2) Who is your character's best friend, closest confidante, or most trusted ally? What does he do, where does he live, and why do you have such a close relationship?

I have an uncle named Haran, a hunter who lives among the other elves in the Witchwood. I spent a lot of time with him while I was growing up, and he taught me a lot about the forest. He is the only person I have told about my experience with the creature in the forest, and his reaction—of utter terror and shunning—is what really drove me away from home. I don't feel that I can go back to him any more.

Adrin died in a nasty fight with some kruthiks before we reached Talon Pass. The nearest place for my one surviving comrade to bring the bodies for resurrection was Tiri Kitor, which was about the last place I would have wanted to go. Andy informed me that when I came back to life, something came with me, and he asked me to describe what it was. I said:

The spirit, or an echo, of a powerful eladrin of winter and decay. It's not committed to evil, but it is utterly uncaring, amoral, and borderline cruel. I don't know whether it's connected to the being I encountered in the forest, but I suspect that it hitched a ride back to the world on my spirit because of my connection to that being. It doesn't speak to me (at least not yet), but its influence is clearly showing on me.

* * * * *

Saman, male human fighter (in Mike's lunchtime game), is also 5th level now. The strange bastard sword (apparently carved from a single piece of metal) that he found after a disastrous military raid has just awakened into a powerful (+2) sword with elemental power. This happened when I slid it into a sword-sized hole in an altar of elemental evil beneath the moat house (yes, that moat house). I can use it as an arcane implement (which will help my otherwise pretty lame attacks with thunder wave and burning hands), and its daily power lets me use one of four elemental-themed effects each round at the start of my turn. I don't have all the details here at home with me, and I haven't had a chance to use it yet. But it's quite cool.

* * * * *

And my fifth current game is the one I'm running. I wrote a bit about the first session in my most recent Dungeoncraft column (link for D&D Insider subscribers only, sorry), and I won't muddy the waters by writing too much about it here.

So what explains this lengthy post about all my D&D games? Partly it's that I'm having such a great time gaming these days, and just loving the fact that I have five games going on—plus the occasional game with my son! In a month's time, I could play D&D as many as 17 times, just counting my regular games. Add in playtest sessions, games with the family, and other random events, and I call it a happy gaming life.

I guess the other reason is that some folks were talking at work today about the bizarre and random accusation that 4th Edition somehow prevents players and DMs from telling stories in the game any more. It's a charge I just can't understand, and I think this post explains why. I actually believe the opposite: compared to 3rd edition, at least, I spend more of my game preparation time (for the campaign I run) thinking about the story of my campaign, and much less hashing out stat blocks for the villains and monsters I plan to run. 

Taking a turn behind the DM screen...

...is a lot more appealing when the screen looks like this: 

We had a D&D-filled weekend after the Seattle Game Day, but my son wasn't eager to take a turn behind the DM screen—despite the fact that I think he'd be a natural at evocative description and exciting encounters. Well, then today I got one of those awesome resin castle "screens" from Alliance and Gale Force Nine, which he had been drooling over at the Game Day event. (The picture doesn't show the center section—one tower was broken off in shipping, and the Krazy Glue was drying when I took this shot.) That made DMing a lot more appealing. So we had an encounter in the inn—an evil wizard animated a sculptor's statue, which attacked and then turned into rocky minions when we destroyed it. It was great.

The kids, they love the toys.

Sobering realization

Some people actually read this.

I know what you're thinking: "Duh! I do!"

It just seems strange to me, is all. I keep having this experience where I'm trying to tell a story and the person I'm talking to says, "I know, I read that on your blog."

I can't decide whether that means I should stop blogging or blog more and forget about having actual conversations with people.

Which reminds me of another sobering realization I had recently. Stop me if you've heard this, 'cause I've told this story a couple of times recently. HA HA! You can't stop me! 

Anyway, my big revelation recently was that I'm actually an extrovert. I've been saying for 12 years that a big part of why I left ministry was that I was just too introverted for the job. False. Big lie. I'm really an extrovert. Which probably explains why I'm talking about this on the internet, even knowing that some people are actually reading this.

So I was talking at lunch a couple of weeks ago about the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory, because some folks in the group had just done a leadership training session discussing it and other ways of understanding the different personalities that interact on a team. And we're talking about the important distinction between being sociable, congenial, affable, friendly and all that, on the one hand, and being an extrovert on the other. The key thing being what recharges your batteries—extroverts get energy from being around other people, while introverts might do a great job of putting on a social face for a while but need to retreat and be alone to recharge. And we're talking about how we're all relatively good at the social face—we go to conventions and talk to fans and keep up the energy as long as we can, but then we go back to our hotel rooms and crash and need to be alone before getting up the next day to do it all over again.

It wasn't until a couple of days later that I realized that wasn't true for me. When I'm at conventions, I dread going back to my hotel room and being alone. I'd stay out all night if I didn't have to sleep. I write my novels in Starbucks, for crying out loud, because I feed on the energy of the people crowding the place (and the free-floating caffeine in the air). I need face time. Extrovert.

I left ministry, in large part, because I hate conflict. And when I do feel, even now, that I don't like people and I want to be alone, it's usually because there's some kind of conflict situation I want to avoid. 

I can be shy sometimes, and it's not always easy for me to keep conversations going. But the inescapable reality is that I'm a total extrovert. So that pretty well rules out going whole-hog on the blog and giving up on face-to-face interaction.

Speaking of faces, let's talk about Facebook. I joined Facebook because an old friend from Ithaca invited me, and then I had about four friends, all good friends from Ithaca. Then I did the address book thing and found lots more friends, and increasingly, people are finding me. I find it interesting that a lot of the people I'm connected to on Facebook are professional extroverts—people in brand and marketing, for example, for whom networking is a professional requirement as well as something they do naturally in their personal lives. I've never thought of myself as someone like that, but with this new-found realization that I'm actually an extrovert, it begins to make sense that I'm connected to these people. 

But now Facebook is a source of guilt for me. I have 26 requests of various kinds that I don't know how to respond to. Some of my friends are really close friends, some are old college friends, some are people that I worked with years ago and knew kind of in passing. (I love you all!) I don't know what to do with Facebook. It's out of control. I'm considering quitting it entirely, rather than feeling guilty about the people I feel I'm slighting in some way by not responding to their invitations.

Speaking of beholders, did you see the one that's in Seattle?

Hey, I call it Random Musings for a reason.

It turns out I do not, in fact, know anyone in Chicago. But I did talk with Joe from ENWorld and Shawn from The Analog Gamer. Lucky Bill Slavicsek, though—he's on G4 TV!

Speaking of Bill Slavicsek, another great session in his game last night. We're a hair away from 5th level (this is Baredd, my paladin who died a few weeks ago) and getting started on Thunderspire Labyrinth. I also had a great time in Mike Mearls's lunchtime game yesterday—a really fun encounter with a trap and some skeletons. (I put a thing on my Gleemax blog about the character I'm playing in Mike's game.) It reminded me of something I told folks when I sat them down to run one of the adventures at D&D Experience in February: "This is still D&D. You can still try anything you can imagine." It's that whole flexibility thing again. 

Speaking of flexibility, I need dinner.

Why I love D&D Miniatures, part 17 (with visual aids)

My parents are getting ready to sell their house. If you can believe it, I still have some stuff in their house, including some really old roleplaying stuff. Well, I got a package with some miscellaneous stuff in it, including some of my very old D&D miniatures. And so, without further ado, I present the c. 1980 version of a black dragon, Demogorgon, and hobgoblins, alongside their contemporary equivalents.

I never could get that black dragon to hold together.

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. :)

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 successfulhypnotism 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!

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.

The first party for D&D's 30th anniversary

Wizards of the Coast is celebrating the 30th anniversary of D&D all this year, but the party—sort of a launch for the celebrating season, I guess—is this afternoon. (I'm writing at almost 2 a.m.; I'll explain why in a sec.) I figure this will be the first party to celebrate this event, to be followed by a big party at GenCon and then Worldwide D&D Day on October 2nd, which will be celebrated in game stores around the world. Hey, 30 years is a lot to celebrate.

So we're having a company-wide party this afternoon, in the courtyard at the center of our office buildings. But when this was first announced, I posted to an internal message board for RPG R&D that we'd be doing something wrong if we didn't, as a department, actually play D&D that day. Then I made the mistake of mentioning it again in a department meeting this week. So on Tuesday, I got permission to coordinate just such a game, which I'll be running in the morning.

The adventure, such as it is, should be fun. We're playing from 9:30 to 12 (when the party starts)—not a very long time, so I tried to keep it simple. But I also wanted to suggest the momentousness of the occasion by hearkening back to the early history of the game, as well as use some of the cool Giants of Legend minis we're all collecting at this point. So I'm doing a pastiche of Against the Giants, in four encounters—Steading of the Hill Giant Chief (fight Nosnra and his hill giant and ogre buddies!), Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl (this one's just the Jarl with a couple of winter wolves), Hall of the Fire Giant King (Snurre and a couple of fire giants), and "Vault of the Drow" (Eclavdra and some drow lieutenants). I've got a couple of interstitial encounters in case these ones go more quickly than I anticipate—but that would surprise me a great deal, since I told people to bring 9th-level characters, and these encounters start at EL 11 and go up from there. But I'm pretty much figuring on running a whole big batch of PCs, which should help keep them alive. So that's why I'm up so darned late—finishing up the stats for the drow, primarily. And watch—they won't even get that far. You wait and see. There is no logical explanation for why I'm posting now, however. Now that I'm done statting out all the giant rulers and drow nasties, I should be flopped in bed getting some sleep.

Thirty years of D&D. Man, that means I've been playing for 25 years—yeah, my personal gaming anniversary has probably just passed quite recently, unobserved and unremembered. Yep, I started playing in 1979 with this boxed set, a few months before my 11th birthday. I must have bought the fourth printing, according to this page. That's pretty cool. They sure were reprinting them quickly.

But who knows how many copies were in each print run? It's hard to prove, but general opinion around the office is that, despite the nostalgia with which the media typically approach D&D these days, it's actually bigger now than it was in the '80s. As in, more people playing, more people buying our books, a larger community of gamers than in the years that were supposedly D&D's height. 

Yeah, OK, that sleep thing is sounding pretty good right now.

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 fearmade 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