Author: Bryant

Back to Legends for another session on the player side of the table. Mark ran Depths of Airspur for me, Susan, Hudson, Tom, and evil Tony. I was playing Reed, buffest halfling in Faerun. We pretty much kicked ass and took names. I got to pull off my fun trick: move, AP, Spark Form to hurt a bunch of critters, Thunder Leap to get in two more licks. If I stretch it out I can get 27 squares of movement in a single round.

Alas, this time I wound up burning two dailies to kill seven minions and do zero damage to non-minions, plus I rendered Hudson’s warlock unable to get ridiculous damage out of his dark spiral, plus I removed any chance he’d get to use his Minion Killer card. Well. I’ll know next time.

Mark runs a fun module. The combats were solid and well-managed. Airspur is also a way cool setting.

Coaxing the Flame is the fourth in the Embers of Dawn series. Two more to go! I’m gonna be bummed when we’re done. Susan, Peter, Mark, Jon, and Noah were my players yesterday. I don’t think I mentioned last time; Noah is Peter’s son. He hasn’t yet reached teenagerhood, but he’s a joy to play with. I should have pushed D&D on my nephew harder a few years back, clearly.

Anyway, Coaxing the Flame is fun. It’s combat-heavy, with only one skill challenge, but there are some good NPCs and a nice variety of fights. I have to admit I didn’t like the skill challenge much – it’s a 12 success skill challenge with only two phases, and both phases are talking to the same person. Since the entire thing could be resolved with 11 Insight checks and 1 Diplomacy check, I short-circuited most of it.

In retrospect, I should have perhaps stretched the bounds of DME. There’s one bit where the PCs are looking for a kid. That would have made a perfectly good skill challenge, so I could have whittled down the big dull one and added that one. Disclaimer: DME doesn’t allow that any more. But still.

On the other hand, the rest of the adventure was solid. The denouement was a bit I’d been waiting to run for like months now. So that was awesome.

Also I papercrafted an entire graveyard, as per the previous picture. I’m now using bobby pins to hold the walls together. This is an awesome technique which I recommend highly.

For the third adventure of the day, I got back to playing. Jeff DMed, and Peter, Mark, Susan, Emily and I moved our little miniatures around a map. I swapped in Alesk for this one. He’s my dragonborn cleric. He’s not a priority for me to play – I’m content leaving him in the level 4-7 range as a leader mostly, just playing him when there’s a need – but I wanted to play The Lady In Flames to further the Byar’s Seven questline. He started it with Blades for Daggerdale back last year sometime.

I kind of lost/changed Alesk’s voice a bit in the intervening months. He’s young and enthused, maybe more so than I used to play him, but I like the eagerness so that’ll probably stick. Also it was a nice contrast to the morose PCs who’d just had a near-TPK in Impiltur. Alesk feels sorry for them!

Fun adventure. I like the Dalelands. Afterwards Alesk will follow Zootah back to wherever to give her poor resurrected Eddie a nice pep talk. “Hey! It’s a great big beautiful world out there! Let’s go!”

That’ll go over well.

Back in the DM chair for me! Peter, Susan, Mark, Emily, and Jeff played How To Hunt a Demon. Definitely the best of the Impiltur adventures I’ve seen; it’s grim as all get out but it’s got some nice moral questions in the middle of it and I quite like the final skill challenge.

I, um, killed two party members in the final fight. It’s possible that I could have edged it into a TPK; one enemy ran after the big demon went down. I’d had that in mind from the beginning, though. The adventure doesn’t go into detail about what happens if the demon dies, so I figured we had some really fanatical cultists and some who were in it for the money.

The fight came down to one hefty thug and two PCs, neither of whom could afford to take one more hit. Fortunately he missed on his last two shots. Very close to a TPK. The mix was a leader and four strikers, though, so you’ve got to expect some fragility.

Yay, I played this time! Also playing: Susan, Peter, Emily, Jeff, and Mark. Peter DMed the first chunk of his four part adventure set in Silverymoon. It was fun; I’m hoping I can get a chance to play the other parts.

This was the first of what’ll probably be a series of MYREs set in the Windrise Ports, which is of course my favorite chunk of the Forgotten Realms. It is perhaps significant that the bit I like the most is the bit that wasn’t there until this edition. Ahem.

Players: Susan, evil Tony, good Tony, Mark, Hudson, and Kirby. First LFR table with Kirby, who trucked up from DC to Legends for the game. This was also the first time one of my game days has been oversubscribed, so that was a minorly tragic moment. Tom sat out.

It went well and I’m happy with my format for my notes. I’m using minimal encounter notes, a page or two for outlining the adventure, an NPC list with some traits for each NPC, and a big list of names for ad libbing. I write out a few paragraphs for the skill challenges so I know where I want to go with them.

I wove in the Peerless Champions, although Myrelas was off on a secret mission, and I tossed in the Burning Incense as a throwaway line. The players appeared to approve. I feel awesome about my structure for skill challenges, which is basically “here’s the complexity and difficulty, ask players for rolls as appropriate.” I established a few villains and a patron for the next adventure. Feeling good.