Category: Writeups

I ran Hive of Corruption online Friday night as part of a three table effort, which was pretty cool. My players: mfrizzell, mwjones10, sovelis025, jredgiant, Thaldryn, and eladar. It was a good crowd, and a nice balanced party.

Hive is a tricky mod. It’s a total dungeon crawl, which is fine. It’s also very hard to complete in the time allotted, which can make for some unhappy players. I let everyone know they might not finish everything in the available time, and we did have to end before they’d wiped out every encounter, but nobody was too sad. It’s just as well; after using up so many resources in the first big fight they’d have had some serious trouble in the final encounter.

The highlight of this one for me, as a DM: “OK, on the start of your turn you take 30 points of damage.” I had given them some warning! Quite satisfying to hear the reactions.

Black Heart is the culmination of the Fisherman questline, which I have never played, although I played Black Heart itself once before. This time I was running it online for Jay Ibero, swornsoldier, ShinAkuma2, Oskar581, Zalarian, and shamballa.

It was pretty fun to run. The first fight was a doozy: the bad guys rolled very high on initiative and I dropped the one leader before he got a chance to act. “Ooops.” From there it was touch and go, much more so than I expect in an LFR module combat. Generally you’ve got a pretty good idea which way the fight will go in the first couple of rounds, but this time I was unsure up until the point at which I called it. Even then I think I might have been able to wear some characters down, but two hours into the combat seemed like plenty.

I later realized that I forgot to account for one monster’s insubstantialness. Had I gotten that right, I think I’d have TPK’d them. Just as well this way, though.

The second fight, um, yeah. The important monster was stunlocked through the entire thing; he got one and only one attack off. I rolled a 1, a 4, and a 1 on my saves, so even with his saving throw bonus he didn’t wake up. Sad but true. I should have known he was doomed when the ranger double-critted him with a total of 6[W] damage on his first action, huh?

Our first P2 adventure! Very exciting. The title made us all nervous, particularly given one of the story awards from Tyranny’s Bleak Depths. I will pause a moment here to say that I love that story award and I love the other similar ones and anyone who can’t handle a little mechanical consequence for undertaking certain missions should lighten up a bit. Sheesh. It only costs maybe 800 gold per adventure to compensate for it, anyhow.

Ahem. Where was I? So we mustered up Saturday afternoon and found a nice enough group who needed a leader and a striker and who wanted to play low tier. Thanks to Aaron, Justin, and Scott for letting us come along. We also added Kevin to fill out the table. Theron M. was our GM, and he was super-good. Smart, knew his stuff, fair but firm. We’d played The Morninglord’s Laughter with him way back at DDXP.

The adventure was way more challenging than Tyranny’s Bleak Depths, mostly because the party wasn’t quite as cohesive. Not a bad group by any means, but less tactically minded. We didn’t really focus fire all that much. I still had a great time; there’s nothing like gritting your teeth and crawling to victory.

Rubicon of the Feywild is one of Peter S.’s Nixie Queen adventures. Friday afternoon, he rounded up Susan and I, plus Annemarie, plus Rich and his friends Maggie, Bill, and Dave, and we all got on the Nixie Queen and set off for whoops, the Feywild.

This was a great adventure. Lots of fun, good quick pace, and awesome roleplay. Rich et al were all pretty new players; there was a weird bug with the character sheets but they just rolled with it and had a fun time and so on. I’m bummed that I screwed up our schedule and we missed the second Nixie Queen run on Saturday, but maybe next time!

Gencon begins! We played Tyranny’s Bleak Depths on Thursday evening, 8/5; I won’t be backdating entries any more, unless I get way far behind again. We’re always a bit nervous about playing specials at cons, because they’re intended to be super-tough and you never know what your group is going to be like. Much to my pleasure, the minotaur adventuring company we met at DDXP was searching around for a leader and another striker, and Reed and Faral fill those roles nicely.

They were a little edgy themselves about taking on unknowns, but we talked ‘em into it and I modestly think we met their expectations. Bards don’t heal like clerics, but they give out a lot of temps, plus a lot of helpful conditions. Meanwhile, Reed’s damage is solid. One of their guys, Michael, was playing a ranger, which is about the perfect combo: I softened things up and he did pinpoint damage and monsters dropped.

Lee, Michelle, and John were the other players at the table. Trent was the GM. I might politely suggest that he embrace the power of a well-played table of paragon characters; sometimes it’s just hard to provide a challenge, but that’s not the GM’s fault! In retrospect we could have gone for glory tier. No way to know that the group would play that well together at the start, though.

Yeah, I was over a month behind. Catching up now… and done. Posts are backdated to the day the game occurred. Hey, look, Gencon this week!

I am not going to bother doing detailed stats at this point, but I’m at 77 78 games played in 7 months, which is obviously well on track for the 100 game target. If I get over 100 games, I’ll maybe reevaluate, but more likely I’ll just declare myself a success. If I just play five games a month from here on out, I’ll still hit the target.

Oh, one thing worth noting: July appears to be the first month I didn’t run any games. 12 13 games and no DMing? I feel guilty.

Edit: whoops, missed one. There.

Jason B.’s running the Raven’s Bluff mini-campaign at Gencon, so he wanted to slot zero it for practice. Amanda, Jimmy, Hudson, Peter, Mark B. (who’ll also be running it) and I were happy to oblige. We all played our Nixie Queen adventuring company characters. Since it’s not Gencon yet I’m not going to say anything about the adventure other than that Kevin the poser barbarian is immensely fun to play.

There will be a photo from this adventure on Friday, but I’m embargoing it until then.

For the second module of the day, Jimmy ran Curse of the Queen of Thorns. I swear I very rarely choose modules for the bundles, but I admit I wanted to play this one for the Ring of the Dragonborn Emperor. Such a good item, even though the damage bonus doesn’t stack with Reed’s radiant weapon. The extra use of an encounter power is still good, and I’ll have more flexibility to use different damage types without giving up damage this way.

Powergame much? Well, sometimes.

Amanda joined me, Susan, Hudson, Jason B., and Mark B. on the player side of the screen. Her warlord, Kiera, is a serious Cormyr loyalist, so this module was awesome for her. We got very diligent about handling every single threat to the realm, which somehow wound up with four PCs sitting in a mausoleum an hour’s ride from the palace, while Kiera and Reed held down the fort at the palace itself. We expected and got simultaneous attacks on both locations. Jimmy scaled both fights for six players.

It worked out surprisingly well. The away team dealt with their problem pretty quickly, and Kiera and Reed played survival and gonzo damage dealer respectively. I think we actually might have been able to finish up the palace fight alone, although we’d have needed some luck, but the away team managed to teleport back in time to finish off the last monster. It helped that Reed and Faral were level 14 and we were playing on low, but it was still pretty tense.