Population: One

There are going to be some spoilers in this; be warned! Not a lot, but I’m going to spoil one of the fights.

We happily got Amanda from the Games and Stuff crowd as our GM, which was pleasing. The players were me, Susan, Dallas, Randy, Garry, and Robert. Good balanced party: two strikers, two leaders, a defender, and a controller. Double bards is very amusing.

I liked the adventure as a whole. The Moonshae Islands have a nice Celtic/Viking feel to them; they’re always very atmospheric and I really get the sense that it’s not just another mainland Faerun adventure. I should play more of them, or run more of them – this was Reed’s first time out there. So that was quite cool.

The spoiler: I’ve been curious to see if anyone would ever put a solo in an LFR adventure. There’s one in here, which is cool. But it’s the most boring solo printed to date, which is not so great. I get that it had to be a werecreature, and I get that LFR authors are limited in what they can do in terms of new monsters, but the werewolf solo from Pyramid of Shadows is a 450 HP punching bag with two melee attacks and nothing interesting about it at all. So that was a bit of a downer.

Still, the adventure as a whole was fun and Reed hit level 8! I have wimped out and taken a feat for more damage rather than flavor, since I want to be in prime shape for the battle interactive and the special. I may retrain it into something fun post-convention.

Oooh, my first premier adventure! I played this in the second slot, so I guess that makes me pretty close to the head of the line for this one. It’s a continuation of the Byar’s Seven plotline. The Dalelands has some sweet story continuity going here, which I am very happy to see.

I will not spoil the plot other than to say that you’ve got some classic tropes going on here. I think it could have been a bit more perky, but Dean (our GM) was suffering from a sprained right hand, which meant he was GMing with his off-hand, which takes like a -2 penalty. Drumroll, please! I’m looking forward to running it.

Players: me as Reed, Susan, Hudson, Andy, Jack, and Ryan. Hopefully I got all that right. We sort of romped. There’s one extended encounter which is very interesting and I dig what they were attempting to do, but I’m not sure that it’s wise to present a sequence of single targets to a well-functioning party. Three strikers can be a bit of a buzzsaw.

We got into Fort Wayne last night and ran into Peter, Mark, Hudson, et al. After some sleepy comparison of trips, we did the obvious and set up for an impromptu game. Peter dragged out a My Realms adventure he’d written as a level 1-4 intro to his Vault of Xammux series. Mark, Hudson, James, Amanda, Jennifer, and I played. I was going to play Cine, but realized I didn’t really want to play him, so I dragged out Veil, my deva avenger of Vergadain.

She was fun and the adventure was fun. Afterwards I determined that while I want to push a controller up into the level 4-7 range (that’d be Cine), I didn’t feel like playing him because he didn’t have a strong personality. So I’ve given some thought to that. I’m seeing the only son of a lesser noble who’s been remarkably protected all his life; he recently developed psychic powers and used them to get out from under the thumb of his bodyguards. I am much more excited about playing that than about the generic eladrin psion he used to be.

And Veil is second level, so she can use her magic weapon +2 and swan around Faerun complaining about how she was supposed to serve some noble god before she got shanghaied during her reincarnation.

Back to Legends for another session on the player side of the table. Mark ran Depths of Airspur for me, Susan, Hudson, Tom, and evil Tony. I was playing Reed, buffest halfling in Faerun. We pretty much kicked ass and took names. I got to pull off my fun trick: move, AP, Spark Form to hurt a bunch of critters, Thunder Leap to get in two more licks. If I stretch it out I can get 27 squares of movement in a single round.

Alas, this time I wound up burning two dailies to kill seven minions and do zero damage to non-minions, plus I rendered Hudson’s warlock unable to get ridiculous damage out of his dark spiral, plus I removed any chance he’d get to use his Minion Killer card. Well. I’ll know next time.

Mark runs a fun module. The combats were solid and well-managed. Airspur is also a way cool setting.

Coaxing the Flame is the fourth in the Embers of Dawn series. Two more to go! I’m gonna be bummed when we’re done. Susan, Peter, Mark, Jon, and Noah were my players yesterday. I don’t think I mentioned last time; Noah is Peter’s son. He hasn’t yet reached teenagerhood, but he’s a joy to play with. I should have pushed D&D on my nephew harder a few years back, clearly.

Anyway, Coaxing the Flame is fun. It’s combat-heavy, with only one skill challenge, but there are some good NPCs and a nice variety of fights. I have to admit I didn’t like the skill challenge much – it’s a 12 success skill challenge with only two phases, and both phases are talking to the same person. Since the entire thing could be resolved with 11 Insight checks and 1 Diplomacy check, I short-circuited most of it.

In retrospect, I should have perhaps stretched the bounds of DME. There’s one bit where the PCs are looking for a kid. That would have made a perfectly good skill challenge, so I could have whittled down the big dull one and added that one. Disclaimer: DME doesn’t allow that any more. But still.

On the other hand, the rest of the adventure was solid. The denouement was a bit I’d been waiting to run for like months now. So that was awesome.

Also I papercrafted an entire graveyard, as per the previous picture. I’m now using bobby pins to hold the walls together. This is an awesome technique which I recommend highly.