For the first game of MiniMoreCon 2 – MiniMoreCon being our house conventions, three games in a day – we played White Flower Falling (original). This is part 2 of the White Petal Demise quest, an absolutely awesome Dragon Coast quest themed after Hong Kong movies. Susan and I had played Falling Snow, White Petal at GASPCon and we wanted to finish the quest line before we hit paragon; fortunately we managed to con a bunch of friends into coming up and playing with us. ...

Flames of Initiation (original) is another oldie but goodie. I will admit, I played this so Collin could pick up +2 Dwarven Armor. I have no shame. (Why are there so few +2 armor rewards in the 1-4 range, but so many +2 weapons? Faerun is full of wonders.) But I do authentically enjoy it and getting Flaming Fist membership is a nice hook into Baldur’s Gate. DM: Dareus. Players: Maelwys, Zeitgeist, Goldfishmind, Marquis, Jesterrr21, and me. Marquis plays a very nice barbarian.

Well! As noted previously, Susan rolled 4 crits in the space of 5 rolls against my poor Collin. She dropped him three times as a result. When he climbed up to fight a hopefully less dangerous foe, she crit our other defender, and then dropped Collin again. Nothing quite so sweet as rolling a 20 on a death save when you’re two strikes towards the eternal choir. The other highlight of the fight, for me: “Well, unless she crits me again, I’m OK for one more hit, and how likely would a fourth crit be?” Now I know. ...

Four crits against Collin in five attacks.

… third crit on me in a row. Collin drops again.

What I am now is pooped. I ran Pyrophobia (original) for the usual crowd – Peter, Jon, Susan, Mark, and Noah. It takes, let me tell you, a lot of prep. I had about 20 effect cards on hand to give out to the players to reflect various temporary effects on the PCs, and a good number of those temporary effects had specific effects on individual combats. Here, have Vulnerable 3 for the rest of this section. Also, here’s an extra power you can use once in the next combat. Whoo. ...

I ran my second Sambral MYRE for Jonathan, Mark, Tom, Hudson, and Susan. I really need to tune down my MYREs – it is not the case that any random combination of experience point appropriate monsters will be as easy as one might expect from the average LFR module. The opening fight was a mere 938 experience points – even level for a high tier group – and I dropped three PCs. The second fight was also pretty iffy, although not as bloody. ...

More MapTool games! Collin is now only three sessions away from level 4. This experiment in leveling quickly has proven to be a success. Draden Tristen GMed; he did a great job of moving things along and running the combats well. My fellow players were Crow of Pyke, Logopolis, Neldar, Maelwys, and Dareus. Crow played his warlord again and I found it deeply satisfying to play a fighter with a warlord. We spent a good part of one fight keeping two monsters locked down as he granted me basic attacks. ...

More Arts? Don’t mind if I do… I played with Emperor799, Maelwys, Monouk, Matt, and Zeitgeist – yep, another MapTool game. Collin’s still working his way towards level 4. It looks like he might get there before our next MiniMoreCon, which would be keen. Dareus DMed. We boldly went for it on high despite a preponderance of level 1 or 2 characters. Since certain gnomes rolled dead last on initiative, and since our DM did not take advantage of certain knock prone powers, we managed to clear out of a certain doorway before certain bad things happened. ...

I decided to run this as a MapTool (original) game because it’s one of the 1-4s I’ve never run or played. It was in fact pretty fun, although I have some quibbles. My players were Matt, Ryven, Draden Tristen, Neldar, Crow of Pyke, and Xalcair. I really liked the group; this is one of the best MapTool LFR experiences I’ve had. We had zero technical issues. There was maybe a bit of conflict between roleplay oriented players and tactically oriented players but people gave each other space to do what they wanted, which was nice, and much appreciated by the DM. ...