Our paragon play for the weekend began with Killing the Messenger. Susan and I were joined by John M., who I’d just DMed for; Justin V.; and Paul. I spent the entire module assuming Paul’s name was Team, because that’s what it said on his name tag, but it turned out he was splitting his badge with his wife who was going to be playing on Saturday. Tom A. was our DM, and a very fine job of it he did. Lots of personality to this one. ...

The Regulator Con recap begins here, and will go on for quite some time. Me, Susan, and the Bradleys trucked on up to Gettysburg bright and early Friday morning so as to get there in time for the 9 AM morning slot, in which I ran Black Cloaks and Bitter Rivalries. My players were the Bradleys, Hudson, Matt M., and John M. Little did I suspect how much I’d see of John that Friday… but I risk getting ahead of myself. ...

After the Battle Interactive last night, Dave Guerrieri called up… I believe her name was Allison. There was apparently some special award for roleplaying, or so he claimed. The ruse held until Paul came up front to present the award, dropped to one knee, and asked her to marry him. (She said yes.) Awwwww! Very cute. More on the actual games of the con later; running a three slot schedule makes it hard to keep current. Also my throat hurts. A lot.

Back to non-virtual reality for For Crown and Kingdom, down at Legends. We had a new player today, Colin, which is awesome; he joined me, Susan, Hudson, evil Tony, and Tom. Mark DMed. For Crown and Kingdom is a decent little adventure, and probably the best 1-4 Cormyr module. It’d make a great introduction to the region, since it really gets the whole knighthood and nobility thing across. It’s also relatively non-linear. I liked it a fair bit. At this point Collin (my PC, not the new player) is fairly twinked out, so I wasn’t totally challenged or anything, but I don’t expect that out of the average 1-4.

I dragged Sirath out of the vault yesterday to play Silent Streets and Vanished Souls (original) on short notice. They had no leader, and it’s probably a good thing they got one. I didn’t burn all my healing but I burned most of it; this is one of those two-fight modules. The second fight has yet another appearance of that annoying werewolf solo. I can’t believe he’s been used in two LFR modules. He’s dull! ...

As it happened, there was an online session of What Storms May Come scheduled for Friday, so Susan and I jumped into that. Dareus DMed; Matt, Eltherian, Darklord, and MisterJester were our fellow players. We were pretty psyched to dip our toes in the paragon waters before RegulatorCon. It’s quite the mod. For me, it was satisfying finishing up the quest line, and the combats were epic all on their own. The second combat takes place on a sea of ice floes, which move and shake and so on. There are ice slides and slippery macguffins and all kinds of fun. Awesome stuff. ...

Incident at the Gorge of Gauros is second in the Radiance Against Thay quest, so now I guess Reed has to play What Storms May Come, huh? And conveniently, he’s now paragon, so I’ll keep an eye out for that one… damn, we could have signed up for it at Regulator Con, but right now nobody else is signed up for it and we have a sure thing in that slot. Ah well. ...

Wow, two weeks between LFR games. I feel all at loose ends and stuff. Good thing RegulatorCon is coming up. Blades of Daggerdale (original) was the first level 4-7 LFR module I ever played, so I was kind of pleased when Mark requested it. It turned out to be quite a bit of fun to run. There’s a ton of roleplay and while the big skill challenge is normally the sort of thing I hate – an extended skill challenge requiring eight successes that’s 95% trying to convince people to believe you – something about this one worked well for me. I think possibly it was the presence of an adversary, which gave me a way to sort of tilt the situation against the PCs every time they made an argument. It made the skill challenge into a give and take rather than a slow slog up a hill. ...

12 games; I played in 8 of them and ran 4 of them, which is a pretty good ratio. None were at cons and half (6) were online. That will probably drop in the future; I was pushing to get a character to the 4-7 band. 7 different DMs. Dareus was the only repeat DM this time around. I DMed for 16 different people, and I played with 25 different people. In total, I gamed with 32 people. Having gone back and changed everyone’s name to forum handles, my original calculations are still correct. I still wind up playing with Susan more often than with anyone else. ...

A lot of the reviews give this one a high tactical challenge rating, for some reason. I’ve played it twice and it hasn’t been too tricky either time. The campaign file people use for this one online has modified maps, so maybe that’s the issue? Anyway, this was another highly efficient module for us and Collin is now level 4. Not that we ran it at speed or anything. I hear stories of people clearing this one out in an hour. ...