Tag: 4e

Oooh, my first premier adventure! I played this in the second slot, so I guess that makes me pretty close to the head of the line for this one. It’s a continuation of the Byar’s Seven plotline. The Dalelands has some sweet story continuity going here, which I am very happy to see.

I will not spoil the plot other than to say that you’ve got some classic tropes going on here. I think it could have been a bit more perky, but Dean (our GM) was suffering from a sprained right hand, which meant he was GMing with his off-hand, which takes like a -2 penalty. Drumroll, please! I’m looking forward to running it.

Players: me as Reed, Susan, Hudson, Andy, Jack, and Ryan. Hopefully I got all that right. We sort of romped. There’s one extended encounter which is very interesting and I dig what they were attempting to do, but I’m not sure that it’s wise to present a sequence of single targets to a well-functioning party. Three strikers can be a bit of a buzzsaw.

We got into Fort Wayne last night and ran into Peter, Mark, Hudson, et al. After some sleepy comparison of trips, we did the obvious and set up for an impromptu game. Peter dragged out a My Realms adventure he’d written as a level 1-4 intro to his Vault of Xammux series. Mark, Hudson, James, Amanda, Jennifer, and I played. I was going to play Cine, but realized I didn’t really want to play him, so I dragged out Veil, my deva avenger of Vergadain.

She was fun and the adventure was fun. Afterwards I determined that while I want to push a controller up into the level 4-7 range (that’d be Cine), I didn’t feel like playing him because he didn’t have a strong personality. So I’ve given some thought to that. I’m seeing the only son of a lesser noble who’s been remarkably protected all his life; he recently developed psychic powers and used them to get out from under the thumb of his bodyguards. I am much more excited about playing that than about the generic eladrin psion he used to be.

And Veil is second level, so she can use her magic weapon +2 and swan around Faerun complaining about how she was supposed to serve some noble god before she got shanghaied during her reincarnation.

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.