We played a couple of games at the house on 12/18. The first one, which Susan ran, was Tyranny’s Bitter Frost: a bunch of the local peeps who’d played Tyranny’s Bleak Depth’s at Gencon wanted to play the sequel. I happened to have Collin sitting comfortably at the beginning of P2, so that worked out well. (This made his fourth SPEC module in a row, and he’ll be playing the BI later in January. No mundane mods for him.) ...
Year’s just about done! I will do a retrospective post at some point in January, although I will not bother with stats. I will also finish up the last four or so games I played and ran in December. I might do a post for DDXP if I feel moved. I will not be cataloging all my 2011 LFR games, because I don’t think I’ll be playing as much LFR in the new year. More on that in the retrospective, or possibly in its own post, depending on how I feel.
We finished up the day with Silver Lining. Mark B. ran; Colin, Pamela B., Matt B., Stacey, and Marc were the other players. I played Veil, my cranky deva avenger of Vergadain. You try getting hijacked by some dwarven god of merchants and thieves on your way to serve the elven pantheon and see how you feel. By this time we were pretty punch-drunk. Matt’s barbarian pummeled everything. I cannot for the life of me remember who healed… it must have been Marc, cause Stacey was playing a Magic Missile-happy wizard and Pamela was playing a psion. This was absolutely fun and reminded me what it is I like about H1 play. As did How To Hunt A Demon, for that matter.
Colin ran How To Hunt A Demon for our second game of the charity gameathon. I played Cine; the other players were Pamela and Matt B. (who run a Columbia game day that we wanna go to sometime), Stacey, Marc, and Mark B. This time we played low and Colin complained about it the whole time until he accidentally killed Mark’s warlord. I told you so, Colin! I think possibly part of my earlier crankiness about Cine was because Spellgard was getting a bit claustrophobic, because this time he was pretty fun. Moving people around the battlefield continues to rock.
Games & Stuff does a charity gameathon every year after Thanksgiving, so this year instead of waiting in line for Black Friday sales I went down to Glen Burnie to play a bunch of LFR. We set up three adventures for the day; I ran Shadows of the Knights to kick things off. My players were Colin, Mark B., Mike McK, Stacey, and Marc. Playing high was probably a mistake – any second year adventure, you should take the high/low distinction seriously. I wound up underplaying the final fight a bit to avoid demolishing the PCs, which normally I wouldn’t do but who needs a bad start to a charity event? I like the mod a lot, though. Plenty of room for roleplaying.
[gallery] Marc C. crits a party member and rolls max damage on his crit dice.
I ran Enemy of My Enemy online last night for Matt, Oskar, Dareus, DanMathMan, Genolen, and Joey. I was pretty interested in seeing how the module held up under the assault of Matt’s wizard. Answer: pretty well, given that I spent some time thinking about tactics beforehand. I dropped Matt once thanks to a lucky critical, and came very close to dropping him again towards the end of the second fight. If I’d thought a bit harder and pushed him into the Stinking Cloud rather than the Wall of Ice, I suspect he’d have gone down. I also had Genolen’s cleric nearly dead, and all in all things went quite well. The module is challenging but not overwhelming for optimized characters. ...
Susan, Mark B., Peter S., Noah S., Amanda, Jimmy, and I playtested The Sign of Four last night. Jimmy ran. I won’t talk about the adventure at all because, you know, playtest. I think, however, I can legitimately say that it rocks even in the non-final state. I picked a couple of nits and made some suggestions cause that’s how I am, but you could publish the sucker right now and you’d have a fine module. ...
We finished up with Agony on Sunday morning.. Bill W. ran for us, which is cool, since it was fun playing with him on Saturday. We only had four players – me, Susan, Jimmy, and Amanda. This is just about right for a Sunday morning game; keeps it from being over-lengthy, and it’s nice to play with familiar people. I loved the way this mod brought together almost every Dalelands plot to date, with a sprinkling of Dragon Coast material to boot. I really, really loved the use of Kira and Dayan Nenthyn. Reed happens to be one of my PCs who hasn’t played The Prospect, which is a shame, so he didn’t have the emotional hooks some of my other characters would have found, but it was still cool stuff. ...
J.D. McCoy ran First Strike for us on Sunday evening; the players were the now familiar cluster of me, Susan, Jimmy, and Amanda plus Brian S. as our fifth. Brian played a warforged fighter who did the meatbag schtick, which let’s just say I’ve seen warforged doing it before, but his build was interesting. Lots of focus on defenses. 30 Will at level 14 is quite good. He gave me some stuff to think about with Collin. ...