lfr

I ran Hive of Corruption online Friday night as part of a three table effort, which was pretty cool. My players: mfrizzell, mwjones10, sovelis025, jredgiant, Thaldryn, and eladar. It was a good crowd, and a nice balanced party. Hive is a tricky mod. It’s a total dungeon crawl, which is fine. It’s also very hard to complete in the time allotted, which can make for some unhappy players. I let everyone know they might not finish everything in the available time, and we did have to end before they’d wiped out every encounter, but nobody was too sad. It’s just as well; after using up so many resources in the first big fight they’d have had some serious trouble in the final encounter. ...

Black Heart is the culmination of the Fisherman questline, which I have never played, although I played Black Heart itself once before. This time I was running it online for Jay Ibero, swornsoldier, ShinAkuma2, Oskar581, Zalarian, and shamballa. It was pretty fun to run. The first fight was a doozy: the bad guys rolled very high on initiative and I dropped the one leader before he got a chance to act. “Ooops.” From there it was touch and go, much more so than I expect in an LFR module combat. Generally you’ve got a pretty good idea which way the fight will go in the first couple of rounds, but this time I was unsure up until the point at which I called it. Even then I think I might have been able to wear some characters down, but two hours into the combat seemed like plenty. ...

Our first P2 adventure! Very exciting. The title made us all nervous, particularly given one of the story awards from Tyranny’s Bleak Depths. I will pause a moment here to say that I love that story award and I love the other similar ones and anyone who can’t handle a little mechanical consequence for undertaking certain missions should lighten up a bit. Sheesh. It only costs maybe 800 gold per adventure to compensate for it, anyhow. ...

Rubicon of the Feywild is one of Peter S.’s Nixie Queen adventures. Friday afternoon, he rounded up Susan and I, plus Annemarie, plus Rich and his friends Maggie, Bill, and Dave, and we all got on the Nixie Queen and set off for whoops, the Feywild. This was a great adventure. Lots of fun, good quick pace, and awesome roleplay. Rich et al were all pretty new players; there was a weird bug with the character sheets but they just rolled with it and had a fun time and so on. I’m bummed that I screwed up our schedule and we missed the second Nixie Queen run on Saturday, but maybe next time!

Gencon begins! We played Tyranny’s Bleak Depths on Thursday evening, 8/5; I won’t be backdating entries any more, unless I get way far behind again. We’re always a bit nervous about playing specials at cons, because they’re intended to be super-tough and you never know what your group is going to be like. Much to my pleasure, the minotaur adventuring company we met at DDXP was searching around for a leader and another striker, and Reed and Faral fill those roles nicely. ...

[gallery] Kevin as sketched by Bill Spytma.

[gallery] Kevin’s on a boat! And bloodied. He’s the little halfling with a red marker underneath him towards the top right of the photo. There are few halfling barbarian minis out there, it seems.

Yeah, I was over a month behind. Catching up now… and done. Posts are backdated to the day the game occurred. Hey, look, Gencon this week! I am not going to bother doing detailed stats at this point, but I’m at 77 78 games played in 7 months, which is obviously well on track for the 100 game target. If I get over 100 games, I’ll maybe reevaluate, but more likely I’ll just declare myself a success. If I just play five games a month from here on out, I’ll still hit the target. ...

Jason B.’s running the Raven’s Bluff mini-campaign at Gencon, so he wanted to slot zero it for practice. Amanda, Jimmy, Hudson, Peter, Mark B. (who’ll also be running it) and I were happy to oblige. We all played our Nixie Queen adventuring company characters. Since it’s not Gencon yet I’m not going to say anything about the adventure other than that Kevin the poser barbarian is immensely fun to play. There will be a photo from this adventure on Friday, but I’m embargoing it until then.

For the second module of the day, Jimmy ran Curse of the Queen of Thorns. I swear I very rarely choose modules for the bundles, but I admit I wanted to play this one for the Ring of the Dragonborn Emperor. Such a good item, even though the damage bonus doesn’t stack with Reed’s radiant weapon. The extra use of an encounter power is still good, and I’ll have more flexibility to use different damage types without giving up damage this way. ...