Population: One

For the third adventure of the day, I got back to playing. Jeff DMed, and Peter, Mark, Susan, Emily and I moved our little miniatures around a map. I swapped in Alesk for this one. He’s my dragonborn cleric. He’s not a priority for me to play – I’m content leaving him in the level 4-7 range as a leader mostly, just playing him when there’s a need – but I wanted to play The Lady In Flames to further the Byar’s Seven questline. He started it with Blades for Daggerdale back last year sometime.

I kind of lost/changed Alesk’s voice a bit in the intervening months. He’s young and enthused, maybe more so than I used to play him, but I like the eagerness so that’ll probably stick. Also it was a nice contrast to the morose PCs who’d just had a near-TPK in Impiltur. Alesk feels sorry for them!

Fun adventure. I like the Dalelands. Afterwards Alesk will follow Zootah back to wherever to give her poor resurrected Eddie a nice pep talk. “Hey! It’s a great big beautiful world out there! Let’s go!”

That’ll go over well.

Back in the DM chair for me! Peter, Susan, Mark, Emily, and Jeff played How To Hunt a Demon. Definitely the best of the Impiltur adventures I’ve seen; it’s grim as all get out but it’s got some nice moral questions in the middle of it and I quite like the final skill challenge.

I, um, killed two party members in the final fight. It’s possible that I could have edged it into a TPK; one enemy ran after the big demon went down. I’d had that in mind from the beginning, though. The adventure doesn’t go into detail about what happens if the demon dies, so I figured we had some really fanatical cultists and some who were in it for the money.

The fight came down to one hefty thug and two PCs, neither of whom could afford to take one more hit. Fortunately he missed on his last two shots. Very close to a TPK. The mix was a leader and four strikers, though, so you’ve got to expect some fragility.

Yay, I played this time! Also playing: Susan, Peter, Emily, Jeff, and Mark. Peter DMed the first chunk of his four part adventure set in Silverymoon. It was fun; I’m hoping I can get a chance to play the other parts.

This was the first of what’ll probably be a series of MYREs set in the Windrise Ports, which is of course my favorite chunk of the Forgotten Realms. It is perhaps significant that the bit I like the most is the bit that wasn’t there until this edition. Ahem.

Players: Susan, evil Tony, good Tony, Mark, Hudson, and Kirby. First LFR table with Kirby, who trucked up from DC to Legends for the game. This was also the first time one of my game days has been oversubscribed, so that was a minorly tragic moment. Tom sat out.

It went well and I’m happy with my format for my notes. I’m using minimal encounter notes, a page or two for outlining the adventure, an NPC list with some traits for each NPC, and a big list of names for ad libbing. I write out a few paragraphs for the skill challenges so I know where I want to go with them.

I wove in the Peerless Champions, although Myrelas was off on a secret mission, and I tossed in the Burning Incense as a throwaway line. The players appeared to approve. I feel awesome about my structure for skill challenges, which is basically “here’s the complexity and difficulty, ask players for rolls as appropriate.” I established a few villains and a patron for the next adventure. Feeling good.

I’m running a small local group through the Embers of Dawn mini-campaign; today we did Building the Pyre. Susan, Peter, Mark, Jon, and Noah played. It’s a remarkably fun group of people – there are a lot of fun possible groups in the Baltimore LFR circle and this is definitely one of them.

I knew it’d be a good time given the players; I was not really anticipating a great module. Building the Pyre doesn’t read as well as the other Embers of Dawn modules. The combats are OK, if a little disjointed, but the skill challenges are fairly blah and over-long. I’m firmly of the opinion that interrogation skill challenges should not be more than 4/3 complexity. 8 successes? That’s a long, painful interrogation.

The first skill challenge, however, was better than I thought it would be. I’m not just saying that because the PCs failed it. So that sort of made up for the other two; and the penultimate fight was awesome good times. Noah crit with his daily and I dragged Mark’s avenger into lava twice. Both times he probably would have died if they hadn’t gotten him out before his turn. That’s what I call entertainment for all.

Also this is the module where the plotline starts to weave back on itself, which IMHO is the real strength of the mini-campaign. So that was awesome too. We’re doing Coaxing the Flame in two weeks and I am tremendously stoked.