Writeups

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. ...

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. ...

Vault of Xammux Writeup A previous run of the Vault.

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.

[gallery] Drow on a boat.

Legends (original)

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. ...

[gallery] The city of Sambral; adventurers on an elevator. Lots of bravos threatening from below.

I’m running a small local group through the Embers of Dawn mini-campaign; today we did Building the Pyre. Susan, Peter, Mark, Jon, and Noah played. It’s a remarkably fun group of people – there are a lot of fun possible groups in the Baltimore LFR circle and this is definitely one of them. I knew it’d be a good time given the players; I was not really anticipating a great module. Building the Pyre doesn’t read as well as the other Embers of Dawn modules. The combats are OK, if a little disjointed, but the skill challenges are fairly blah and over-long. I’m firmly of the opinion that interrogation skill challenges should not be more than 4/3 complexity. 8 successes? That’s a long, painful interrogation. ...

This was my second run-through of Arts, both times as a GM. Last time I ran it on high; this time was on low, as expected. I was kind of looking forward to finding out how deadly the final fight was on low, but this wasn’t the right group for that, which is perhaps for the best. I ran down at the Games and Stuff game day for long complex reasons – can’t make it down there usually, but for special occasions I can. It’s nice to meet new folks. The table was Susan, Tom, Trevor, Nina, Frank, and Zach – two newcomers, four fairly experienced players. I’d only run for Susan and Tom before. We had a nicely balanced group with two leaders, a controller, two strikers, and a defender. ...