Blogs

So if you are wondering if I fell off the face of the earth or something, worry not. I spent the last week traveling to and from Indianapolis and my first ever Gen Con. I thought PAX East was amazing and yet Gen Con exceeded even that. One of the big reasons I had such a great time at Gen Con is the Dark Sun game I played in on Friday, run by Chris Sims.

Chris is an amazing Dungeon Master. I hope one day I can be as good as him, particularly when it comes to confidence at the table. He's also an awesome story teller and I felt more connected to his game than any other game I've been in.

Beyond Chris, I had the chance to play with two people I knew from Twitter, Jared von Hindman and NewbieDM. In addition to them, Robert Schwalb played with us. Rob was on my list of people to meet at Gen Con so it was a great honor and privilege to play at a table with him, even when he insisted having his character, Taewyn, constantly defile us, which meant we kept taking damage whenever he used certain powers.

Of course, he wouldn't have been able to do that if I didn't keep healing him with my shaman, Malamac, a good shaman and one who was particularly close to 3 other party members. Yet, he was doing so much damage, I justified it in that a living party was better than a dead one.

However, at the end of the adventure, I got my revenge. We defeated the big bad guy before he could finish his evil ritual. At this point, Taewyn thought it best to take over the ritual in case it would make him powerful instead. Since he had just killed, as in negative bloodied hit points, Malamac's close friend, I had to avenge the death. As a result, I attacked Taewyn, rolled a crit, and killed him.

So that is the story of how I was defiled by Robert Schwalb and how I killed his character. It was an awesome game and one I'll remember for a long time. Now to design some t-shirts for my group.

All the cool kids are doing it so I figured I would post mine as well. Fred and I will be arriving in Indy early, probably Monday or Tuesday. He's a big open-wheel racing fan so we have lots to see and do outside of the con.

Wednesday:
7 pm - RPGA Judges Meeting
After that, hang out and meet some peeps.

Thursday:
8 am - 1 pm: RPGA Judge Learn to Play
2 pm - 4 pm: Monster Building Workshop
4 pm - 6 pm - Design & Development: Presented by D&D Insider
8 pm? - ?: DMing a D&D Hooters GenCon Interactive Adventure

Friday:
8 am - 1 pm: RPGA Judge Learn to Play
1 pm - 6 pm: Hanging out in the hall and maybe a seminar or two
6 pm - 10 pm: The ENnies

Saturday:
9 am - 10 am: What's Coming from Open Design
10 am - 12 pm: Dungeons & Dragons Preview and Q&A Show
2 pm - 7 pm: Chris Sims' Welcome to Dark Sun, B!#@&s! game
8 pm - 10 pm: Media Meet & Greet

Sunday:
Leaving early to drive back, but should have some time free in the morning.

I'm really looking forward to this grand adventure and I'm glad to be sharing it with Fred. This is our first Gen Con and second convention ever (PAX East was our first). Yeah, we're a bit spoiled.

In particular, I can't wait to run Learn to Play and hopefully convince some people to play 4e D&D at home. I'll get to see the new Red Box in action and hopefully make my saving throws against sleep. I may even give voices a try. :)

The monster builder workshop will be a great time too. My understanding is that Greg Bilsland will walk through the monster creation process. (At least, that's my hope.) Greg is a great guy and I can't wait to see him again.

While it may seem strange to have me DM a game in Hooters, I think it's a really funny plan and is going to be awesome. This cartoon (NSFW!) sums up how I'm viewing that game. Hopefully my story will be able to hold their attention long enough to get through a game.

And finally, I'm so honored to be able to play in Chris Sims' game. He even created a character just for me (at least that's what I'm telling myself), using a concept I sent him.

Beyond those planned events, I would love to run my lumbermill delve while I'm out there. I also need to meet a large number of people and thank them personally for all of their encouragement and advice over the last year or so. So if you're going to Gen Con, send me an email tracy [at] sarahdarkmagic.com or a message on twitter. I'll also be tweeting and posting the best I can with my crazy schedule. Hope to see you there!

I had a great time running our regular game last night. No one quite wanted to stay on task but we still got through a bunch of story and encounters in the time we had together, which was awesome. The game started easily enough. Last session the PCs had defeated Ragdin and his henchmen when they came to collect the latest group of "volunteers" for the Shadow Army. They allowed Ragdin to live with the promise that he would make it easier for them to enter the mine where they are holding Sirius Darkmagic.

Mimics, Mimics, Everywhere

This session was supposed to be them going to the mine but, like PCs like to do, they took a bit of a detour. The bard was convinced that a man in town, Garel, still had the papers about the Shadow that he stole from various libraries. So they decided to break into the guys house.

Now, I'll be honest, I had nothing planned for this event. I mean, I knew where the guy lived, in the end, he was just a dwarf who had more money than sense thanks to the papers he stole. But the players had no idea about this and they started making checks for...every...movement. Perception to see if the door was trapped. Arcana to make sure it didn't have an arcane trap. The list just goes on. Believe me, I'm not complaining, but it told me they wanted something to happen.

Trying to think quickly on my feet, I settled on the idea of mimics. I invented a study on the first floor of Garel's house since that would be a good place for papers. Ok, so a desk full of papers, some chairs and bookcases. What to make into mimics? The desk was a bit obvious, so I settled on the chairs. True to form, they asked all sorts of questions about the desk but the chairs sat there, unnoticed.

So what should be the trigger? Ok, how about one old looking sheet of paper, its corner sticking out from the pile? On it, one word, "Die!". When the bard found the paper, lifted it from the desk and read it, we rolled initiative and had fun with the mimics for a bit. I think the players felt rewarded for their carefulness and they had the fun of reminiscing about instant death traps without their characters actually being in one.

The Shadow Army's Home Base

After they settled out the mimics and terrorized poor Garel, they made their way to the mine. I created this encounter months ago and I'm glad I was finally able to run it. The entrance to the cave is beneath a waterfall cascading off the side of a cliff. One both sides are recently constructed platforms holding dwarf fire archers. While they are using dwarfs to guard, they didn't use them to build, a fact gleefully pointed out by Ragdin to the PCs when they interrogated them. It didn't take much to trigger their collapse, and when the tumbling rocks also wiped out a bunch of minions, things were even more fun.

As the last minion and archer died however, a large form sprang forth from the pool beneath the waterfall. A dragon! It flew high into the air. A few seconds later, the body of a dwarf, Ragdin, fell and landed at the feet of some of the players. The black dragon then landed in front of them and taunted them the best he could. "Did you really think I wouldn't notice that you had turned Ragdin against me?" he asked.

A recent addition to the encounter, I created the dragon that morning. I started with the earthquake dragon from Monster Manual 3 and just changed some things to make it fit a black dragon better. I can't say that it's the best conversion ever, but I'm pretty happy with it. And the exploding aura is pretty awesome. However, working on this dragon did bring a few more bugs in Monster Builder to the surface, but I'm sure they'll fix it soon. One of them involves the additional speeds. For some reason it keeps putting the difference from normal instead of the full distance.

Overall the fight between the PCs and the dragon went really well, with the players honestly afraid for a good portion of the battle. I think having the elite rather than the solo was a great change. It had just the right amount of hit points to worry the players without dragging out the fight past the fun limit.

It was with great pleasure that I sat down with Sarah Darkmagic (of the respectable New Hampshire Darkmagics) and spoke at great lengths about our plans for world domination. Fear not, we do intend to shape it into a nicer place, molded after our own glorious images. Plus free drinks. At any rate, we rambled on as future benevolent dictators do, and Ms Darkmagic touched upon some ideas she had developed with regards to gods and other deities for a cleric she once played. She jokingly referred to a lack of a “menu of gods” to choose from at the time and went on to describe the deity she ended up half-inventing as part of her cleric concept.

But I was stuck on the phrase “menu of gods.” When we gamers play “serious” DnD, a cleric's path is no light matter, and many find their calling under dire circumstances, forever after strengthened by the guiding hand of their god. However, sometimes it's delightful to say “To hell with serious!”, and for those campaigns, I might present your choice of deity like this:

Jennifer Snyder is an awesome all-around geek girl and a great proponent of tabletop RPGs. When she isn't busy playing games or wreaking havoc on Twitter as @Level30Yinzer, she works on the outstanding RPG-focused non-profit she and her husband founded in 2009. You can find more information at Level30Yinzer.com.

Last night the players presented me with an interesting dilemma. They wanted to look throughout town for a item they already possessed. The bad guys who are trying to free the shadow from its prison are searching town for the key. The players would like to find it first, only problem is, they already have it but don't know that.

I can't fault them for forgetting. Sometimes I hit them over the head with information and other times it's a bit more subtle. In this case, a group of dwarfs the PCs had saved from a watery grave presented them with the only item they had, an artifact that the ship captain had tried to smuggle out of Andernach and one of the dwarfs had snatched before walking the plank.

But they forgot about the gift last night and they determined that their next move would be to find the key in town. I know that I could have reminded them but I remembered they weren't overly interested in the key when they received it either. Besides, having them look could be fun as long as it didn't take too long.

So when they went to the one person in town they trusted and confided in him the state of affairs, I quickly formulated a plan in my head. One of my players already had taken out a book to start looking through the rituals. I decided that I didn't want to make them spend any money on this and thought something custom might be better. I remembered that the PCs in The Slaying Stone are given scrolls that will help them locate the stone in the town and decided to do something similar here.

Their contact is Sunspeaker Deldaran, a devotee of Pelor (I'm using Hammerfast for Andernach). After hearing their story, he finds one of his colleagues, a rather tall, scrawny man in long, brown robes with mussed red hair and rather large glasses. Called Boniface, he is the bookish sort.

The two of them clean off a table and place down a map of Andernach. Boniface pulled out a long string with a heavy metal object at the end and explained that he will need their assistance to perform the scrying ritual since they are searching such large an area for so small an object.

The first round goes pretty well. Working together, they try to both guide the pointer and remember information about the section of town the device pointed to. Mechanically, I made them all roll their skills checks at the beginning of the round, and then we pieced together a story of what was happening. At the end, they knew that it pointed to the lore ward of Andernach, that quite a few likely targets existed there and one of them was able to assist in the arcana check the next round (with a +4).

With the general area narrowed down a bit, Boniface moved the device so it was centered over the lore ward and they tried again. Again, I had them make the checks at the beginning of the round. I attempted to resolve the non-arcana checks first and then I had to ask the group an important question. I reminded them of the time they saved the petrified dwarfs from beneath the lake of lost memories and that the dwarfs had given them a gift. At this point, one of the players remembered the key but I asked him to hold off on telling everyone else for a moment. Eventually, it was decided who had the item and I finished describing the ritual. They did really well on their arcana check so the device pointed horizontally, right at the PC with the key.

Overall, it was a great moment and while it took a little time to play out, it didn't take so long that the players thought I was wasting their time. While not every seemingly insignificant item will turn out to be quite this significant, sometimes it's fun to have one or two items that are.