Nothing like a bit of East Rift dungeon crawling! And that’d be Unbidden (original). Jay Ibero ran for us on Saturday, 8/28; me, Dareus, Darklord, Elden, Bollivergray, and Trident played. This is the bit where I realized that hm, if we didn’t complete the whole module successfully in high, then Collin wouldn’t level. Added a bit of spice to the whole thing, but the module didn’t turn out to be too hard and we got through it without any trouble. ...
Part 2 of operation ParaCollin was Lost Souls (original), run by the always chipper Matt J. The other players were Eltherian, Kazordan, Eladar, Mike 38115, and gadunge. I’m a bit behind, but I played this on… Thursday, August 26th. This is definitely a tough module, made tougher because Matt’s a very good tactician. Also an excellent GM, and yeah, those two things are sometimes different. We had a striker-heavy group with only a hybrid leader, but given Collin’s self-healing and our general ability to crank out damage, it all went well. Despite Matt cheating horrendously in the middle fight (I kid because I love)! And now Collin has a little blue tear tattoo next to his eye, which doesn’t make him at all happy. Probably better get used to divine attention as he hits paragon.
Come play, it’s fun! I am very pleased at the respect that is being paid to gamers of all stripes; OSR questions exist next to 4e questions exist next to story game questions and so on. It is a great place to ask questions and get answers. Read the FAQ first. It explains everything.
I played Property for Sale (original) online Monday night, as part of project Get Collin to Paragon. Jay Ibero GMed; logopolis, Trident, Mike Lemmer, and dakhran also played. It was one of those exciting no-leader runs, so we played on low, but I’m not sure we couldn’t have beaten it up on high. There was one very timely crit at the start of the last fight which made a huge difference. ...
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. ...
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 wound up calling this guy. The number listed was his home number but his wife kindly gave me his work number. He sounded pretty confused when I talked to him, so I just recommended that he contact his local FBI office and complain that someone was using his name for fraudulent purposes. At the time, there was no telling if he was lying or not. I figured recommending the cops would work either way. ...
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. ...
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. ...