Sarah Darkmagic's blog

This past week I really didn't have the time to create the well-thought out, challenging encounter that my players deserved. So I looked through adventures from Dungeon magazine and found a great side trek that I could easily fit into my campaign called Treed!. Without giving spoilers, I would like to mention a few things about the adventure. First, my players really enjoyed it and they had a lot fun with it. There is enough of an element of danger with the monster choices to keep the heart rate up and, if my dice didn't decide they were too tired to bring their A game, potentially to kill a PC or two.

However, it's a bit of a tricky encounter to run. There are four different monster types to run, terrain features and a leash. It probably wouldn't be so hard to run with more time to plan and prepare, but for a weeknight game during a busy two weeks, I had some problems keeping things straight. That is more a fault of me than the adventure itself, but it bears noting. Also, if I ran it again, I would use something physical to represent the leash. It was too difficult to remember that it was there and to use it effectively.

Overall, I'm really glad I ran it and it really can be an easy mini adventure to fit into just about any campaign. Time to plan for next week.

My new job is kicking my rear end. During my first week on the job, a huge, high priority job got added to the tech team's plate. While I'm really enjoying it, the work has me a little outside my wheelhouse. As a result, I don't have a ton of time to prep for this week's game and I found myself browsing through the RPG adventure database in search of some adventure ideas to steal. Figuring that there are a few other DM's out there in a similar position, I thought I would share some of my ideas on how to plan in a hurry.

If you have some time, don't limit yourself only to adventures in your system and setting.

Converting an adventure from one system to another can take a lot less time than developing one from scratch. With 4e's simplified encounter design, the combat portion of the game can be a lot easier to create and modify.

Feel free to steal bits and pieces instead of the entire adventure.

Maybe you really love to design your encounter groups, but hate drawing maps. Or maybe you want to populate your town with engaging NPCs but don't feel like figuring out what trades they should have or what to name them. Or maybe you came across a great encounter in an adventure but the rest of the adventure doesn't fit with your world. Regardless of the reason why using the whole adventure doesn't make sense, grab the bits that grab you and make them your own.

Build off of a Trope

We use tropes a fair bit because people know how to react to them. Emphasize a full moon, and your players are likely to look for a werewolf. They are not only useful in setting player expectations, but they can help you get through a session with a little less planning than normal since you are also likely to be comfortable with the story you're telling. You can find some tropes on TVTropes.org.

For a few weeks, at least, design your game in bits.

Dave Chalker had a great post about this on the Critical-Hits website. He was designing the second chapter of his campaign and wanted to give some overall structure to it without going into too much detail. His solution was to create 5 major quests and, for each quest, create a list of 5 things that must be done to complete the quest.

Hope these ideas help get your brain going. In the meantime, I found a side-track to use and need to add it to my combat manager.

There might not be a ton of entries in the Spend a Healing Stirge blog, but the entries are full of great tips, especially for DMs. The author is especially interested in bringing music to the table, with tips on how to incorporate it and, just as importantly, provides some recommendations on music to use. In addition, there are a number of sensible, buy-from-your-local-store DM tips, such as using non-stick kitchen rubber mats to keep dungeon tiles in place and using pipe cleaners to mark figures.

Recent Posts

• Assault on New Avalon - Describes how he would use the song "Assault of New Avalon", from the World of Warcraft - Wrath of the Lich King soundtrack, in a game.
• GameMastery NPC Decks - Tips on how to use GameMastery's NPC decks in a game.
• 3.5 Reskin: Magic Sniper Rifle - "[A] weapon that does d20 damage? That's ridiculous!"
• Achievements in D&D - A way of bringing renown to your world, or at least to your table.
• DM Pressure, more music! - More info on how to bring music to your table.

About 7 months after the release of D&D 4th edition, Goodman Games announced an open call for ritual submissions. After receiving over a thousand entries, they compiled over 300 of them into Azagar's Book of Rituals. The book is narrated by a hobgoblin general, the afore-mentioned Azagar. Each chapter begins with him trying to explain the type of rituals found in that chapter along with a funny story about how one of the rituals saved him at some point in his travels.

The book is organized into 9 chapters, each with a different type of ritual. Each chapter has a list of rituals across all ranges of play, from heroic to epic. The ritual information is organized just like the rituals in official Wizards of the Coast products, with level, time, duration, component cost, market price and key skill(s). The majority of the rituals are tied to Arcana with most of the rest being tied to Nature or Religion and a smattering of Heal.

Types of rituals

Binding Rituals (30)

Like warding rituals, these rituals offer some protection, but generally by keeping things from doing things or going places.

Creation Rituals (37)

These rituals allow the caster to create something, sometimes out of thin air.

Deception Rituals (29)

Generally, these rituals create illusions to help fool even the most perceptive and insightful friend or foe.

Divination Rituals (24)

Information is the name of the game. These rituals help the caster determine everything from what's happened to what's happening to what might happen.

Exploration Rituals (91)

More of a generic category, these rituals don't easily fit in any of the 8 other categories. However, that doesn't mean that they are any less useful.

Restoration Rituals (18)

Often utilizing divine magic, restoration rituals seek to help with everything from disease to bringing back the dead.

Scrying Rituals (17)

Like divination rituals, these rituals are all about information gathering, in particular, how to gather intelligence remotely.

Travel Rituals (28)

Sometimes, getting there is half the battle. These rituals aim at making transit time shorter, or at least more comfortable.

Warding Rituals (27)

Want to protect a place or an object? Or maybe you want to keep certain creatures from getting in or make certain types of magic less effective. Then warding rituals are what you need.

Sample Ritual

There are many rituals that are more useful, but this is a particularly amusing example.

Product Information

Rules Set: 4E (GSL).
Contributing Writers: Tavis Allison, Cedric Atizado, Jobe Bittman, Jeb Boyt, Aaron Brosman, David Caffee, Jarrod Camiré, Steven A. Cook, Patrice Crespy, Joseph D’Amico, Chris Dias, David Dolph, Douglas R. Edmundson, Alan Z. Eisinger, Raymond G. Falgui, W. Daniel Fichtel, John R. Flemming, Joshua Gervais, David Gibson, Rob Green, David M. Guyll, Lee Hammock, Matthew Hannum, Matthew J. Hanson, Morgan Hardy, A. G. Edward Haskell, Isaac Hicks, Dwight Hulse, Matthew Kaiser, Charles W. Kiley III, Chris Kümmel, Phillip Larwood, Matthew Lawrence, Hannah Lipsky, Lizard Lizard, Chris Longhurst, Lucas Mackay, Hal Maclean, Paul Matthews, Dan McAllister, Derek Meurer, Nick Miller, Scott Moore, Tim Rose, Aeryn “Blackdirge” Rudel, Mark Steinmann, Harley Stroh, Stefen Styrsky, Chris Tandlmayer, Greg Tito, Chris Torrence, Austin Watkins, James Whitman, Doug Wideburg, Robert Clayton Wyatt, Jr.
Cover Artist: James Ryman
Interior Artists: David Griffith, Doug Kovacs, Hunter McFalls, Jesse Mohn, Matt Morrow, Chad Sergesketter, Mike Wilson
Graphic Designer: Erik Nowak
Editors: Dwight Hulse, Aeryn “Blackdirge” Rudel, Harley Stroh
Publisher: Joseph Goodman

Other Reviews

• Haaldaar at LivingDice.com
• The Spirits of Eden
• Neuroglyph Games

More Information

Goodman Games released two pre-release pdfs: one with the introduction, table of contents and the binding chapter and another of indices organizing the rituals by name, level, category, and key skill. The book can be purchased from RPGNow (as PDF), Paizo (PDF and print), and Amazon (print). I purchased my copy from my local gaming store.

Being a GM can be hard. Games can take a lot of time to plan, especially if you are designing foes and encounters from scratch, drawing your own maps and creating all your own NPCs. At least, those are some of the problems I run into when planning my own game. Pre-written adventures are great, but not every group is keen on them and it seems like finding suitable ones is half the battle. With that in mind, I started an adventure database to help me in my planning and I wanted to share what I've created with the rest of you.

The database is still in its infancy, with about 175 modules spanning from early D&D to today. Since I run a 4e game, it's heavily populated by D&D modules in general and 4e in specific. Since my hope is to continue to grow this into a much larger resource, I thought I should outline my initial goals and how people might be able to help.

Initial Goals

• Add as many adventures as possible with title, level information, author, publisher, system and published setting.
• Figure out a system for keeping up with new adventures as they are released.
• Work with the community to determine what additional information is desired and how to collect and add that information in a way that helps both people using the content (e.g. GMs) and the people producing the content (e.g. authors, graphic artists, developers and publishers).

How You Can Help

• Game Masters and Players: Use the adventure database. Let me know what's wrong, what's missing and what can be better. Let your friends know about it. And, most importantly, if you find it useful, let me know. It takes a fair bit of work to add in this data and it would be nice to know if further development would be useful to others.
• Publishers: Let me know how much information you are comfortable with sharing. Ideally, I would love to tag each adventure with additional information such as location, maps included, monster types, level of magic, etc. This sort of information will be of great use to your audience without giving away the store.
• Authors: I'm creating a page for each author which will list their works, but which would also ideally include a bio, a pic, links and social media tools like a twitter handle. If you could send me information you would like to have included, that would be great.
• Retailers: Tell me you exist. I want to add links to a number of places where people can purchase these adventures. If you don't have an affiliate program, don't worry. This is about giving the customer choice.

To Infinity and Beyond

My goal is to help game masters pinpoint adventures that contain information they can use in their current campaign. This information could be a complete module, a map, an NPC or adventure hook, a skill challenge or the like. Thus, one of my near-term goals is to increase the types of information available about the adventures. However, I'll need help to do this. Over the next few weeks, I'm hoping to figure out the best way to make it possible for interested community members to enter data. Since I want this data to be easily searched along a number of facets, a wiki is probably not the best way to go. Also, until we have enough people who can help monitor for spam, completely open editing will probably pull too much of my time away from more important things such as feature development.

Finally, just a quick note about affiliate programs. Yes, some of my links have affiliate codes in them. The site takes money and time to put together and run. So far, all of the money I've made from this site has gone on to purchase more gaming supplies and pay for the cost of the server. I don't see that changing any time in the near future as there are lots of cool books and tools out there.