Author: Bryant

Back to non-virtual reality for For Crown and Kingdom, down at Legends. We had a new player today, Colin, which is awesome; he joined me, Susan, Hudson, evil Tony, and Tom. Mark DMed. 

For Crown and Kingdom is a decent little adventure, and probably the best 1-4 Cormyr module. It’d make a great introduction to the region, since it really gets the whole knighthood and nobility thing across. It’s also relatively non-linear. I liked it a fair bit. At this point Collin (my PC, not the new player) is fairly twinked out, so I wasn’t totally challenged or anything, but I don’t expect that out of the average 1-4.

I dragged Sirath out of the vault yesterday to play Silent Streets and Vanished Souls on short notice. They had no leader, and it’s probably a good thing they got one. I didn’t burn all my healing but I burned most of it; this is one of those two-fight modules. The second fight has yet another appearance of that annoying werewolf solo. I can’t believe he’s been used in two LFR modules. He’s dull!

Eltherian DMed; Matt, Darksydex3226, and Xalcairn joined me as players. Or rather, I joined them. Fun little module, which I’d never played before; good urban setting with neat cultural stuff. Unfortunately that’s one of the things that usually gets lost a bit in online play. Still, it was enjoyable. I’m reminded I like playing shaman; I think I’m getting better at it after watching Susan play Gurdis.

As it happened, there was an online session of What Storms May Come scheduled for Friday, so Susan and I jumped into that. Dareus DMed; Matt, Eltherian, Darklord, and MisterJester were our fellow players. We were pretty psyched to dip our toes in the paragon waters before RegulatorCon. 

It’s quite the mod. For me, it was satisfying finishing up the quest line, and the combats were epic all on their own. The second combat takes place on a sea of ice floes, which move and shake and so on. There are ice slides and slippery macguffins and all kinds of fun. Awesome stuff.

Also it was fun watching characters who are, shall we say, somewhat more optimized than Reed. Eltherian played his paladin, who is a healing machine despite not being a leader. Between him and Faral I think we saw over 200 points of surgeless healing in the last encounter.

Incident at the Gorge of Gauros is second in the Radiance Against Thay quest, so now I guess Reed has to play What Storms May Come, huh? And conveniently, he’s now paragon, so I’ll keep an eye out for that one… damn, we could have signed up for it at Regulator Con, but right now nobody else is signed up for it and we have a sure thing in that slot. Ah well.

Draden DMed this on Maptools; my fellow players were Matt J., Ceneakor, spayne, and Emperor799. This was the first time I’d seen a high level taclord in action. Spayne was pretty terrifying. It was also the first time I’d seen people using mounts heavily. I can’t say I was deeply impressed – mostly the benefit was Draden pounding on a mount instead of a PC, and that was a DM choice thing. Not worth the effort if you ask me, but they didn’t make the game painful either, so no objections from me.

The module was good but not awesome. I liked the story continuation quite a bit. The fights didn’t strike me as very difficult, but it was a fairly optimized party. Sort of a B+; I’d run or play it again, certainly.

Wow, two weeks between LFR games. I feel all at loose ends and stuff. Good thing RegulatorCon is coming up.

Blades of Daggerdale was the first level 4-7 LFR module I ever played, so I was kind of pleased when Mark requested it. It turned out to be quite a bit of fun to run. There’s a ton of roleplay and while the big skill challenge is normally the sort of thing I hate – an extended skill challenge requiring eight successes that’s 95% trying to convince people to believe you – something about this one worked well for me. I think possibly it was the presence of an adversary, which gave me a way to sort of tilt the situation against the PCs every time they made an argument. It made the skill challenge into a give and take rather than a slow slog up a hill.

The combats are no big deal. I did get the pleasure of watching the players assume a certain combat was full of minions just because I put down seven identical minis.

“OK, I go get started on clearing the minions. I roll… 23, I hit that one, my attack does damage.”

“How much damage?”

“… crap.”

Players: Tom, Mark B., Jonathan, evil Tony, and Susan. The usual rocking crowd.

12 games; I played in 8 of them and ran 4 of them, which is a pretty good ratio. None were at cons and half (6) were online. That will probably drop in the future; I was pushing to get a character to the 4-7 band.

7 different DMs. Dareus was the only repeat DM this time around. I DMed for 16 different people, and I played with 25 different people. In total, I gamed with 32 people. Having gone back and changed everyone’s name to forum handles, my original calculations are still correct. I still wind up playing with Susan more often than with anyone else.

The 12 games were all normal length except one, so let’s call that 52 hours of gaming. There, I cut back. March may go up again since I’m attending a con. Depends on whether or not I do much online play or not.

At this rate I’ll be at 162 games by the end of the year. That sort of seems like a lot. If we really settle into a rate of 5 games a month, plus 4 more cons with around 8 slots each, that’s a more likely 109 games or so. I am not upping my goal of 50 games, though.

A lot of the reviews give this one a high tactical challenge rating, for some reason. I’ve played it twice and it hasn’t been too tricky either time. The campaign file people use for this one online has modified maps, so maybe that’s the issue? Anyway, this was another highly efficient module for us and Collin is now level 4. Not that we ran it at speed or anything. I hear stories of people clearing this one out in an hour.

Neofax DMed; my fellow players were Zeitgeist (and his son), Logopolis, Ryven, and Elden from Germany. Good crowd, pretty much.

Hey, that’s February done with. Recap post to come.

This was sort of a last minute addition when Mark got Jason to come up and play, which meant we’d have five people for the full day, which meant we could have another game, but I didn’t want to ask anyone to run at the last minute, so I said I’d run. And Mark asked for Head Above Water. Which is awesome, because Head Above Water rocks.

I told everyone we were switching from the Hong Kong action movie genre over to gothic horror. I was so right. Head Over Water takes place in the Vast Swamp of Cormyr, and a lot of the plot occurs in this almost deserted mansion. I went full out and described the place as a Southern plantation, decrepit and decaying, and played the Lady Mersha as a steel-backboned elderly Southern woman. Fun for me and the players seemed to like it.

The adventure is pretty solid, with several paths, and a serious choice for the PCs. My players were very noble in the face of temptation and managed to roleplay well enough so that they could split the difference and avoid choosing between two rather divergent interests.

Key moment: Jason’s PC, who happens to be an eladrin, is dueling an eladrin knight. Said knight had earlier called him a traitor to the fey kind. Jason dodges the blow which will probably bring him to 0 hit points, and retaliates, hitting for enough damage to take out the knight. He then says “OK, can I reduce him to 1 hit point but knock him prone?” I say sure, since the knight would have been prone and unconscious otherwise, and I want to see where he’s going with this. Jason says “OK, I do this,” and reaches his hand across the table to me as if to help me up. I hope I was grinning like a madman when I accepted his hand, because that was a completely cool thing and Jason deserves huge props for it.

The knight called for his guys to surrender, and they did, and then the PCs kept on thinking hard and figured out a way to make everyone happy and took some chances and it all worked out in the end. So satisfying.