4e

Our GASPcon (original) fun began with a My Realms on Friday night. I don’t mind admitting I was a little nervous about playing some random guy’s My Realms adventure, particularly at P2, but it turned out to be really good. The set up was the kind of thing you’d find in a heroic tier adventure, but the GM – Michael Grancey – really played up the slew of adventurers who’d tried and failed to solve the problem before. Our characters were Baldur’s Gate’s last hope. I liked that. ...

[gallery] High quality signage at the GASPCon Best Western. (I kid because I love.)

Ghosts of the Past: Dark Portal – possibly the longest LFR module name to date. I have not done a comprehensive study. Mark B. ran it; Jason B., Susan, Evil Tony, Alan and I played. The adventure has a rep for being brutal. It really is. We happened to have the right people in place for the stairs fight: I had good necrotic resistance, so I could easily stay static while the warlock disabled the big defensive ability of the problem monster. So that was one of the mean encounters handled. ...

Games & Stuff stays open till midnight on the first Thursday of every month so that people can get the early WotC releases as soon as possible. This makes it an excellent time to run those long paragon modules. I volunteered to run Wetwork, and Susan agreed to run Alone – she’d been wanting to GM down at G&S for a while. My players were Evil Tony, the Bradleys, Amanda, James, and Hudson. You’ll note that’s five out of six of the players I ran for the previous Sunday. Did I wipe the party again? Oh, crap, yeah. ...

Matt ran Killing the Messenger for me so that I could get Collin to level 13 before the weekend. (Anvil of Doom, yay!) I was joined by Eltherian, Jay Ibero, jbever, Eladar, and Zharm. Lotta new faces, which is cool. I don’t have a ton to say about the module, although this was the first time I saw the “destroy the supplies” path from either side of the GM screen. Eladar played his Intimidate-based bard. Very effective, but maybe not quite as satisfying as doing the combats the expected way. Still, I don’t begrudge him his fun. ...

Pain was our Halloween run at Games & Stuff. I ran it for Jimmy, Amanda, Hudson, the Bradley brothers, and Mike. Hudson had played it before but had an awful experience, so I figured I could improve on it some. It’s a great investigative adventure when run properly. The investigation went well! So that’s cool. Unfortunately, the plot branch I used has a final fight which went very poorly for the PCs. My monsters caught them in overlapping auras, and they didn’t really have any good way to handle it, which resulted in a sort of cascading failure effect. Not to spoil overly, but there’s a monster out there which creates new versions of itself when it kills a PC, and it’s not like you can decide not to use an aura. ...

High Infidelity was the first P2 game Susan and I played since Gencon. We needed a little extra experience before GASPCon, plus we always like tuning up our characters a bit. The always-reliable Matt ran (I owe him a run or two), and Eltherian, jredgiant, and misterjester played with us. By some miracle, we had a pretty balanced group: defender, two leaders, and two strikers. The lack of control hurt a bit, but since Matt’s pretty reliable about focusing on the leaders, it’s always good to have two of ‘em. Reed performed quite well and got a +4 weapon out of the deal. I’m feeling good about the upcoming P2 play.

Aw yeah, Arts. Who doesn’t like Arts? I ran this for jffdougan. It looked like we weren’t gonna have enough players, but then another game fell through so we wound up with him, AussieScum, ceneakor, Tsriel, AequitasXXIII, and Mike Lemmer. Fun group. They really zoomed through the initial investigation. They found a clue I’ve never seen a group find before, probably because people tend to focus on the social stuff. Sadly, this means they missed out on the teaching. Then they hit the combats, which were appropriately brutal. They almost but not quite died on the final fight, which pleases me greatly, although in retrospect I should have taken it as a bad omen. For reasons which will become clear in the next few entries.

Wait, that was number 100? I should have had a cake. Darn. Anyway, I got all enthusiastic and played Where Dragons Die (original) right after running The Fardrop Incident. Tsriel ran; Xalcairn, Jay Ibero, Dareus, Elden, Genolen, and I played. There are, for the spoiler-ish record, a lot of dragons in this adventure. I like killing dragons when I’m playing Collin, so I have nothing bad to say at all. Although the module does need to be fixed because some of the dragons use the preview stats instead of the final Monster Manual 3 stats. They’re a bit weak as is. But that’s not something bad, that’s just a handy tip!

I ran The Fardrop Incident as a favor for Eltherian, so that he could get his barbarian to P2. I think the clever plan was to make sure he’d be available to play High Infidelity (original) with us later on, and that worked out.The other players were Jay Ibero, Darklord, Elden, Knight4612, and Blackmantle. Since this was a reasonably skilled party, and since they agreed to be experimental subjects, I adjusted all the monsters to the summer 2010 damage expressions. It worked really well; while I didn’t challenge them a ton, they found it much more fun. I wouldn’t recommend this unless you’re pretty sure your group can handle it, but it’s a great tool when used with care. And I did almost manage to get myself a perma-dominated barbarian, which would have been awesome. (“Fardiz. Go kill the cleric.”)