dnd

Here there be ThunderCats spoilers.

In the episode "Journey to the Tower of Omens," the ThunderCats found the outer entrance to the temple where the ancients hid the Book of Omens. The Book of Omens is a powerful artifact in Thundera's mythology. In fact, the other animals often attacked Thundera trying to obtain it for themselves. The ancients took the book and built a temple to house it. In addition to secrecy, they protected the tower by providing a series of trials to test those seeking it.

The trials are a great example of providing opportunities for each character to shine (and sometimes to cause trouble).

• Snarf accidentally uncovers the outer opening by following his stomach.
• They are presented with a large locked door. Thousands of keys hang from the ceiling. When Cheetara tries the first key she finds, she triggers the trap. The bridge over the spike pit retracts. WilyKat saves them by picking the lock.
• They come to a long hallway and Panthro triggers a pressure plate by stepping on it. This triggers a blade attack that almost cuts him. Cheetara saves the day by using her incredible speed to race through the trap and hit the kill switch on the opposite end.
• Next they come to a room with a pool in the middle. In the bottom of the pool is gold. WilyKat and WilyKit go for it, being thieves after all, which triggers the water trap. They see a grate at the top of the room and try to tread water until they can reach it. Unfortunately, Panthro can't swim. He goes under. While Lion-o tries to save him, he needs to turn back when he runs out of air. When Panthro hits the bottom, he sees another way out and ends up saving all of them.
• When they get through the outer temple, they get to a doorway that opens to a cliff. Lion-o is finally able to use the Sword of Omens to see and it reveals the bridge trigger to him. However, he can't reach it. Tygra saves the day by using his whip.

One of the problems I often run into at my table is providing a way for each character to shine (and get into trouble). After years of having DMs use personality traits and "weaknesses" to screw over their characters, I've seen and heard a lot of players who are resistant to providing these. My players tend to prefer the same subset of skills so allowing them to differentiate along those lines is also difficult. And, I tend to forget to collect them information from them and keep it in one place, so my adventures aren't as tailored as they could be to the differences they do have.

One could argue that other systems are better about this because they either provide more skills or restrict a number of skills to particular classes. There are a few downsides to both of these. First, with longer skill lists, I think it's important to tell the players which skills are likely to be useful in the campaign. I'm not comfortable with having a player put a ton of points or ranks into a skill that is utterly useless in the campaign, such as something for sailing in a landlocked game or nature in a dungeon crawl. Once we limit the list, we are back to the same issue again.

Limiting by class forces some players to play a class they have no interest in to satisfy the needs of the party. Personally, that really bugs me. I know it has a long history in D&D, but it's just not my style and it adds a whole host of problems of its own. What happens when the shining moment for a particular character happens after he is unconscious? What if the thief dies in room 2 but the locked door is in room 5? Everyone needs to leave the dungeon and then hire or find a new thief? That's not my style.

If the group is ok with it, I think this is when group party creation can really shine. For skills, we can either set up one primary in the group or provide some background to the character to differentiate how each character uses that skill. We should still have good skill coverage even if one character goes down or her player isn't present. If two people really need to be trained in arcana, perhaps one is more of a knowledge person (like the wizard) and the other has an innate sense of how magic works and is able to create counter-spells on the spot (like a sorcerer). The exact specifics would come down to what the group negotiated.

Then it would be the DM's responsibility to make sure there are challenges tailored for each. If you are going ask them to roll to do it, it's important to ensure that failure won't stop the forward progress of the story. It could add or remove something from the story or force them to seek another alternative. Also, sometimes it makes sense to limit the test to only one character. Sometimes, even if the untrained fighter rolls a 20 on an arcana check, he shouldn't be able to close the portal to the abyss.

And then if the players are willing to provide weaknesses, adding elements to the story that would pull on them to decide between indulging their weakness or turning against it could be fun. If they indulge a weakness, I would add a complication to the story, such as triggering a trap, but provide a benefit. I'm not sure what benefits I would give yet, because some of them should be useful outside of combat. That means just offering action points doesn't exactly help.

In addition, I would make sure the challenges helped particular characters shine or make sure they all can shine in some way. In my experience from running Learn to Plays, a number of players are afraid to do things like stealth around to get an advantage before a battle because some of the characters have no stealth. The result is that a number of skills lie unused because the group thinks they all have to succeed on it to make it work. If the players preemptively decide to not use skills because they are useless in a party situation and we only present party situations, then what's the point? Perhaps the ranger can sneak up to a window before the battle to get a nice perch for ranged attacks? Or the rogue can sneak to the other side of the room to make gaining combat advantage easier?

These are just some quick thoughts. How do you give the characters a chance to shine in your game?

Writing. I know I haven't done a ton of that on here for a bit. I had a super flurry of creativity freelancing and in my day job. It really cut into my desire and, in some ways, ability to write. Add on top of that my natural inclination to put ever more pressure on myself and this little text area became something to avoid. So I've spent some time thinking about that. Then I spent time thinking about anything but that. I saw some movies, lived a little, and just tried to be.

One of the things that has gotten to me lately has to do with issues of gender in gaming. Believe it or not, while the issue is very important to me, I don't define myself by it. I don't seek to be the gender in gaming person. But because I'm so passionate about the issue, it becomes hard to stay out of it. I will write about it here from time to time.

So why even write this? Because I just need to write. I need a space to be, well me. That's what I always tried to do with this site. And I hope you all are ok with that. If you've wondered why I've been quiet, it's a mixture of all these things. I'm putting those things behind me now and I'm just going to write. It won't all be wonderful. I guarantee it will suck at times. But it will be me.

So what has me excited? I'm so glad you asked:

Tiltfactor.org

I saw Tilt Factor at Gen Con. The person running it is a professor at my alma mater, Dartmouth College, which is freaking awesome. A few of the undergrads running the booth even knew people I know from the school which was an unexpected surprise. Tilt Factor's tagline is "game design for social change." Their game Pox is an excellent example of this. It's a board game where you attempt to isolate an infectious disease from the population while minimizing deaths. Most people die if they are surrounded by infected people, but there are some people on the board with compromised immune systems. If the infection spreads to them, they instantly die. Your tools are to cure 1 person or vaccinate 3. A deck of cards controls the other events in the game including which directions the disease spreads in and other events. I had a ton of fun playing the game and it definitely reinforced the lessons of cures versus vaccinations.

Neverwinter

I know, I've decried canon before. I still look at it pretty warily, but I love the move in recent D&D books to include a more detailed world. This is especially true with the Neverwinter Campaign Setting. The accompanying Facebook game is pretty fun too and serves as a good introduction to me for the setting. I often have a hard time reading setting books because they try to pack so much information into too few pages. But slowly exploring the word and circling outward helps tremendously.

The Gunslinger

We picked up a number of Pathfinder books at GenCon. My husband started playing about 6 years before 4e came out so he has a certain nostalgia for 3/3.5 and Pathfinder brings that back for him. One of the books we got was Ultimate Combat which contains guns! I love the mechanics for the gunslinger class and I can't wait to run a Western themed game with him. He's a big fan of Westerns. I grew up reading lots of books set in the American West. I often daydreamed of being a cowboy or a Native American in a tribe. So I think this wil be so much fun.

Adventure Burner

Another Gen Con purchase, I'm enjoying this book so far. One thing I particularly like is the presentation of demo or sample scenarios and the accompanying, why this is important. The why is so important. Sure, I won't be world-class GM just from reading the book, I need to practice and refine my skills, but seeing the wide array of ideas and then put them to the test myself is awesome. I'm still think there's a lot of Burning Wheel that will interfere with my enjoyment of it, but the ideas in the Adventure Burner and the BW system are well worth the cost.

Well that's what I have so far. Don't worry, I have even more stuff from Gen Con to write about along with other stuff here and there.

My first ever Kobold Quarterly article came out in the huge Summer/GenCon issue, #18. My article focuses on minotaurs, and while I might be a tad biased, I think it's awesome. While it ties into their place in the Midgard setting, many of the ideas in the article can easily be used in other settings. Also, while it has the 4e designation attached, very little of the article is crunch, just a table of minotaur knowledge using 4e DCs and a few boons tied to professions.

I wrote this article back in March which was a crazy month for me. For some reason, my writing assignments tend to come in batches and almost always due right around a con. So that month I had PAX East (with the DM challenge), part of a fortune cards article for the Wizards of the Coast website, and this article. While that might not seem like a lot, with a full time job and a bunch of podcasts, it was a bit daunting. What made me even more nervous was that this 1) was an ecology article for Kobold Quarterly, 2) was about minotaurs a race that many people love and which has a long history in D&D, 3) would set some of the canon of Midgard and 4) that Wolfgang likes minotaurs so I knew he would be giving it an especially close look.

My first step was to spend some time familiarizing myself with minotaurs and what was written about them already. Sometimes this is a bit harder for me because I don't have a huge library of D&D sourcebooks. But between the Internet and talking to a couple of people, I found a fair bit of material to use as my base. I also searched through the Midgard forums for anything I thought would be useful for this article. Overall, I spent about 10 days on a combination of research and letting ideas grow. My husband was kind enough to serve as my sounding board and listen to me get excited about things like horn carvings (based off of military or gang tattoos) and ritualized combat.

Next came the writing. I'm not sure how others write, but I tend to write in layers. The first part is filling in the outline. Whatever comes to me that might be interesting goes in. For this article, that meant a lot of uses for mazes since they are one of the key characteristics of the minotaur. This meant everything from coming up with the first blood ritual (done when children turn into adolescents, based on a combination first communion and ritual combat from the Paksenarrion series) to a description of minotaur sailors seeing the ocean's winds as a large labyrinth to navigate. Not everything stayed in the article, but it was good to get it all out on the screen. Once I had a bunch of ideas on the page, it was time to organize and refine them, the first round of editing. Then for each cycle after that, it was about making the whole thing more coherent and tied together along with finer details, such as the colors for the First Blood maze and the minotaur librarian profession.

I also tried to make sure there was something for a broad array of players. I listen to a lot of the chatter about D&D on twitter and elsewhere and I know while there are lots of players who would never go against type, a fair number of people want some broader options. That's why I included the librarian profession and tried to include some non-combat focused options as well. I also tried to maintain a balance between pushing the boundaries from the past and respecting the legend and lore of the game.

So that's the background of the minotaur article. I hope you find it useful in your games, even if it's just to inspire you to do something of your own. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Finally, in case you haven't heard, SarahDarkmagic.com is up for an ENnie award for Best Blog. I'm really honored to be on the list with other great blogs such as Critical Hits, Gnome Stew, At-Will and Thistle Games. If you haven't voted yet, please go and do so.

How could I forget to write about the chuul? I think out of everything I did for Lost City, they were the most fun. Whenever I worked on their section, I would turn to my husband and make claw motions with my hand. *Click-click*

When I was working on my chapter, one of the things I really wanted to do was to make sure everything had a purpose. This was important due to the limitations of designing for Lost City. There were only so many pages in the book and there wasn't enough room to detail every encounter, especially not in the tactical encounter format 4e is known for. Combined with the sandbox-style of the adventure, this meant the DM would have a fair bit of work to do to make things happen. I wanted to give the DMs as much as I could in hopes of making their job easier.

I added chuul to my pitch mainly because they were a vaguely level appropriate monster from the Monster Manual. This was important for a few reasons, but a big one was we weren't sure how much space we would have for monster stat blocks. I also liked the idea of these brutal fighters who could rise out of the water behind one of the PCs and maybe drag them under. I bet you didn't expect that in the middle of a desert.

So the first question I had to answer was why in the world there would be chuul wandering the depths of the Lost City. There aren't any major bodies of water around and the 4e Monster Manual entry didn't give me a whole lot to use. The earlier edition stuff that I could have really used was stripped from the 4e version so that was no good either. I started to get worried, telling myself, "Don't worry. They just are. People will be ok with that."

But that didn't really make me happy either. Then, while waiting for the bus home after one of my writing sessions, I had an idea. They are the Lost City's version of alligators in the sewers. The giants who lived in the Lost City were a brutal lot. It would make sense that they might raise chuul gladiators who would fight to the death. Over time, some of those chuul might find their way to the waterworks and set up their own home down there. As the waterworks became more and more neglected, they would be free to start their own colony and grow in numbers. The giants wouldn't really care, they would help keep any invaders out. To this day, the hatchlings from each batch of eggs fight themselves until only one of them survives.

As the Kadrana’s society grew, so did their hunger for brutal amusements. They created a large arena and held brutal death matches for the ravenous fans. Their favorite creatures were the chuul, a race they came across in their travels. The cannibalistic tendencies of the creatures appealed to the giants’ natural bloodlust, and many homes of the upper classes housed specially crafted aquariums for holding the egg sacs. When the eggs hatched, family and friends would gather around and watch as the siblings battled each other for supremacy. The winners would be raised and cared for by the families, trained to become gladiators in the ring. It was a high honor to raise a champion.

If you want to add some additional chuul encounters, I would suggest having at least one cage match with the creatures, maybe using the burrows idea from the hatchery encounter in Lost City.