You can still die, for the average person in multiple ways. You don’t have a healing potion. You’re out of surges. You fail your death save three times before you make two successes. [Going to disallow Quickdraw for this particular effect. It's hard to be quick and dying at the same time.]

Because it’s not a standard action you can’t Second Wind. Unless you’re a dwarf of course so this boosts the dwarf’s ability to Second Wind as a minor action. But then the only dwarf in the party is my wife and not killing one’s wife’s character off is probably a good idea if it can be helped. Although I’ve done it in the past.

If you have some other way to heal yourself with a minor action you’re also good.  So leaders or anyone multi-classing into a leader or hybridizing into a leader will be set up fairly well. The rest of them will need to keep a potion and a surge handy.

It makes use of a saving throw that’s already being made so there’s no extra rolls. It simulates a recovery into semi-consciousness. On the downside, any character that is feebly fumbling a potion out of their belt will be subject to discretionary attack by any adjacent hostile although ranged attackers unless they’re sentient and particularly vicious will probably ignore or not notice a prone dying opponent’s movements.

Anyway, thought I’d share.

Dying Condition-

Make a saving throw when you are dying.  If you fail you take one death strike.  Fail three times and you are dead.  If you succeed you can make a minor action.   If an desired result requires two minor actions then they must be made in succession typically.  Example:  Retrieving a potion and drinking it requires two minor actions typically.  If the character makes their save they retrieve the potion.  If they fail the subsequent save then they’re assumed to have dropped the potion and must now spend another minor action to retrieve it from the ground where it may have rolled.

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Elisssa has decided to retire for awhile from the adventuring life [Laura wanted to try something else]. The reason that I made up for this was a fairly obvious one, the group (characters) keeps getting on Elisssa’s case about killing the hill giant, not being able to pitch a tent or sail a boat.  For a dragonborn such insults and snide comments are hard to take.  Them not letting her kill the captured slavers was the final straw and furious with the group she stalks off to see her friends and family as soon as they enter Larkson.  She takes with her a couple thousand in gold and Krag’s Axe and Bracers and some assorted trinkets and souvenirs.

Later discourse over the course of the session might reveal that Elisssa may come back as the floating crew of available NPC’s for use by players (Torn, Dash, Sushanna, Kane)

The action starts immediately with the first of three encounters for the night.  Screams are heard echoing through the temple and grabbing their arms the group rushes to see what’s going on.  T’Balktu, Torel, Visra and Stak are joined along the way by a visiting Cleric of Kord from Anvil here to do research at the temple by the name of Spar.  [Played by Biminey's owner Temple]

THe five of them find the room that contains the temple’s main ritual circle filled with a vortex of energies.  People located in the room are being sucked into the vortex and being… reformed as something else.  As the energies die away the group catches a glimpse of Liloth and Phy’el Fleshwalker through a rent in space causing the effects.

An abomination of flesh, humanoid, composed of merged persons in the room roars out a challenge.  It’s back bursts and hunks of flesh drop free to create little humanoid creatures dripping flaming slime. The monkeys immediately start flinging their slime around the room and where the gobs hit, invisible before now runes flare and burn out, a few seconds later the bricks blow outwards in blasts of energies and shrapnel.

The group attacks of course, taking down the big creature and then mopping up the smaller ones but not before they cut a wide swatch through the walls, floor and celing of the room destroying  large sections of the bricks and subsequently the wardings inlaid upon them.

As they stop and catch their breath they hear more screams, deducing (correctly) that this was a diversion while another attack was going on.  They rush through the temple to find the forbidden archives under attack by rats.  A section of the floor has fallen away down into the sewers that run under the town and rats are streaming in, each grabbing a scroll or parchement or tome to flee down the hole with it.

They follow, smashing rats as they go.  In the dank large sewers they run into Krag’s animus which has formed a temporary body out of rats along with other rat swarms.  Due to their positioning Krag has to reveal early on that he can absorb the rat swarms to recover his mass (i.e. recover health) and the group destroys the swarms before working on Krag.  (this made the encounter easier on the group by a considerable amount thanks to their smart thinking).

As the mass of rats that is Krag collapses to stream away a red mist shoots off down the sewers. (Krag’s animus).

They follow the animus (and trail of parchment fragments) to Krag’s lair where he’s been feeding the blood of those he’s slain through one of Liloth’s warps.  A large chamber has been damned up at the doorway forming a pool of blood like liquid several inches deep.   The room is filled with rats each holding a parchment.  Right now the rats are being lifted through the portal bearing the parchments. They turn on the group as Torel and Spar both try to bless the portal to destroy it.  (A whole hella lot of very low rolls).

Eventually the group gets the warp closed and triggers a trap laid into the room turning the blood into a blood elemental.  It’s not designed to be able to stand up against a full group but is aimed to destroy single intruders and the group makes short work of it.

Spar had the idea during the fight to break the dam holding in the blood and if they’d of done that before the fight they could have destroyed the warp and prevented the elemental from spawning but hind sight and all that.

They recovered a bracer and axe that Krag’s been slowly enchanting to replace his lost axe and bracer.  He’s a very good enchanter, at odds with his brutal nature but has a knack for things that deal with blood.  It’s just hard to enchant things when you’re a ghost.   The bracers are similar to Iron Armbands of Power but require a healing surge to activate, after activated they boost edged weapons damage by 2 for the rest of the encounter.   The axe gives its wielder a Immediate Reaction ability that grants them a basic melee attack with the axe when an adjacent target is bloodied for the first time and it deals an extra +2 damage when the wielder is bloodied.

The group retreats from the chamber and heads back to the temple.  They rest and recover and then work on plans.  They talk to the captain of the watch and Garon of the council.  Garon is floundering.  He’s out of his league with the things that are going on and doesn’t know which way to stumble much less lead.  People have been leaving the city out of fear, this is obviously a bad thing for the city’s protection and the party points it out and want him to lock the city down.  He’s reluctant to do that, he doesn’t want to be the ‘bad guy’ or institute the martial law that this requires.  Larkson has always been a free city and preventing the poeple from leaving strikes him too much like slavery, an act that really runs against his core values especially after having lost his children to slavers.  He’s also loath to go against the agreement with the Watch in terms of disbursement of the mercenaries.

He asks Torel and Stak to hire on advisors, a task they reluctantly agree to consider.   The group considers their actions and decide to send a fetch out to Biminey asking him to meet them early.

They purchase a longboat and row out to sea, successfully navigating to their general meeting area.  They discuss things with Biminey and the others.

Biminey asks them to ask Sushanna to come visit him for multiple reasons, the primary one he wants to teach her the ways of the artificer so that she can at times take control of the airship allowing him freedom to leave the ship.

After discussion they’re going to try and lead a band of mercenaries out of the town to gather information on the hobgoblins who are taking small villages and farmsteads captive as a threat for the town to give them some book, a book they believe holds power over the creatures loosed from Darkmith.

We end our session there.

Image Credits

I can always download my web traffic logs and parse them (Episode 10 Part 1 has been pulled 355 times since it went up 3 days ago for instance) but that’s a chore and I only get 9 log files from my isp (www.1and1.com) which auto recycle when they hit around 40megs.  Right now that only let’s me go back about 3 months. And the time frame between them is shrinking the last one only lasted a week before it was archived and the oldest one deleted to start a new one.

In an effort to get some easier stats to view and some more long term stats I’ve invoked the stats option on my blubrry plugin which is what I use to show them in posts here and auto submit them to itunes.  For easy podcasting through wordpress blubrry does a great job by the way.

I’m not sure what using their redirect might change and what that might screw up so you 355 people that are listening to my podcast please let me know if you run into any problems.  I’ll be deleting it and resubscribing from time to time in the next few days to check but if it breaks let me know.

I’ve also noted that itunes was only showing the last 10 podcasts.  Not very new listener friendly.  I’ve made some changes that should make it possible to pull all the casts going back to the first one from either the podcast feed or through itunes or from you ipod/iphone (open itunes on the phone and search podcasts for key our cars) directly.  If you’re a new listener and started somewhere in the middle, again my apologies for the quality of the first couple of episodes.  Recording casts is a learning experience.

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The party will be dining in the Temple of Eris when they’ll hear the ubiquitous screams in the distance.  Assuming they don’t ignore it and let’s face it they’re heroes and screams are what they dream of, they’ll come down the passage way to the left to behold a swirling vortex of energies pulling priests of Eris into it where they’re swiftly ‘disassembled’ and reshaped into a hulking monstrosity of an abomination comprised of multiple priests and priestesses.  Uh, ew.

It’s body will ripple and bulge and moments after it shapes it’s hunchback will burst forth and small mounds of flesh will fall out to the floor shaping into small monkey like creatures with arms like an octopus although instead of suckers it has small teeth lined ovals that open and close constantly while a thick slime oozes from them dropping away to the floor where it flares up into flame.

All in all that should be enough to bring the drool to any adventurer and a scream of terror from any bystander.

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Subscribe to the feed – http://www.keyourcars.com/feed/podcast/

Also available through iTunes.

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Subscribe to the feed – http://www.keyourcars.com/feed/podcast/

Also available through iTunes.

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I use the Monster Builder to create the player’s foes and then use the Export as Rich Text in the app to get the data.  I paste that into a page in MS Word where it looks all nice and neat.  Unfortunately the monster colors are far from printer friendly (massive green, well cyan and magenta, ink usage) and they’re not all that legible when printed.   It’s impossible to apply a theme to them due their oddities in format so I came up with this macro to strip out all the coloring and set the text all to black.  Now they’re very printer (and eye) friendly.

Sub RemoveShading()
‘
‘ RemoveShading Macro
‘
‘
With Selection.ParagraphFormat.Shading
.Texture = wdTextureNone
.ForegroundPatternColor = wdColorAutomatic
.BackgroundPatternColor = -603914241
End With

Selection.Font.Color = -587137025
With Selection.Cells
With .Shading
.Texture = wdTextureNone
.ForegroundPatternColor = wdColorAutomatic
.BackgroundPatternColor = -603914241
End With
End With

End Sub

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Anyway, now I can hand out actual potions when the players pick up or make potions. And if the slaver they’ve got on the airship ends up joining the party then they might have access to quite a few potions as he’s a master alchemist.  Of course you have to get over the idea that he’s a slaver of course. Or ex-slaver.

They’re filled with nothing more than a little food coloring in some water.  In retrospect the first ones I filled have too much coloring.  The blue and the green are pretty hard to tell apart at a distance.  I briefly considered using some kind of silicone or epoxy to fill them since they are made of glass and could conceivably break if they hit the floor just right but they’re fairly thick and small enough and light enough that I think you’d practically have to fling them at the floor at top speed to get them to break on the average floor.

I think I’ll pick up some more and get some of that ’swirly’ shampoo.  WIth a little food coloring that make a pretty cool visual inside one of these. 

As it stands, only one person in the group is actually trained in stealth and the other four have pretty low Dexterity all things considered so it makes it simply impossible aside from unusual luck to sneak anywhere as a group.

This train of thought was kicked off by something Chris Perkin’s did in the third Penny Arcade podcast Sept 25 section (I think, could be wrong).  I’d been up 38′ish hours without sleep at that point so I wasn’t tracking 100% but at one point he had one person make a stealth check and the rest just made Assist rolls.  I’m not sure if he did it by accident or what since he makes a lot of mistakes about the game’s rules during the sessions and not 5 minutes later he had them all roll individually again instead of as a group.   [For someone who apparently helped write the game he's not very familiar with the basic mechanics of the game.  I think he does a wonderful job as a DM please don't get me wrong.  But he's failed to correct a lot of mistakes the players have done like Aoefel forgetting to use his weapon proficiency bonus on attack rolls over and over and over.  Oman not getting his Wis bonus on any cleric power with the keyword healing in it.  Just basic game mechanic kind of things.  But then maybe he's not used to having players that don't know what they're doing.]

This started me thinking.  Every time I’ve heard on someone’s podcast about a stealth check being needed, invariably one or more people fail it.  This also has happened every time I’ve done it in my own games.  It gets worse if the group is having to roll against more than one perception check.  This devalues stealth completely except in those instances where the one guy with stealth essentially plays by himself for awhile.

I don’t like that.  I don’t like that the characters don’t have a stealth option, a viable one anyway and I don’t like splitting a party up because it reduces the fun for everyone.

Do I have an option?  Well just now in asking on the forums if someone else had come up with anything my fingers typed out something to the below and as I’m typing this I just came up with another two options which I’ll type down there when I get done typing this.

And this only applies when the game is not in initiative, i.e. out of combat.

Out of Initiative Stealth –

Note: This assumes the group is moving as a group.  If they split up then each group would need to use the appropriate option.  Individuals would be back to making individual checks of course.

Option 1 – Stealth Master – One person is designated the Stealth Leader and they make a stealth roll based on their abilities.  They suffer a -2 penalty on their roll for every untrained person in the group that’s moving with them.  This simulates the master stealther telling the others where to move, what to avoid, fixing their gear so it makes the least amount of noise etc.  Optional – Each untrained member of the group that’s involved other than the Stealth Master makes an Aid Another check.  If they succeed they add +2 to the master’s roll, if they fail the -2 still applies. A member trained in stealth would roll Aid Another and if they succeed they add +2 to the master’s score but if they fail they don’t add -2.

Option 2 – Mini Skill Challenge - Everyone in the party rolls their own stealth check.  As long as they have more successes than failures they succeed as a group.

Option 3 – Cumulative Totals - The party members each roll their own check and their rolls are added together.  If this number is higher than the opposing number they win the check.  The opposing number is generated by multiplying the number in the party by either a flat DC or totaling up all the opposed check rolls.

Thoughts –

The base part of Option 1 is fast, the total number of untrained people is going to be known so it’s one roll for the party, quick and easy.   If you add in the Aid Another then everyone has to roll but it allows each party member to contribute to the success of the endeavor, never a bad thing to promote.

With Option 2 I don’t feel it adds what I’m looking for.  At least in my situation.  With 4 untrained people with low dex in the group they’re going to fail the check more often than they’ll succeed.  I want it to be possible for the group as a whole to sneak onto the castle grounds, over the walls, and into the keep before they’re discovered.  Without just saying “Okay you managed to sneak into the grounds, up and over the walls and are now in the storage areas on the second floor.  Now make stealth checks to avoid getting seen.  Ooops Biminey you must of stumbled into a pile of broken glass, metal and loud noises piled precariously next to you.”

The problem with Option 3 it’s not much better than option 2 and you also have to do math.    But seriously, on the plus side it lets a high ‘overkill’ roll help a lower roll but by the same token a low roll pulls a high one down.

Anyway, that’s how I spent a bit of my afternoon while staring at progress bars.  Comments and thoughts welcome as usual.

[Edit Afterthoughts: The DMG I've been told suggests for a group roll having the lowest skilled person make the roll. While that might make sense, it simply means that we're back to the group not being able to stealth and that's not my point to all this.  So this is what I'm going to start with and work from there -

The party divides the party into groups as they wish each group has to contain at least two people and can contain the entire party.  One person in each group at the players’ choice makes an initial stealth roll.  The remaining members of the group impact this roll as follows – each character Untrained in stealth makes an Aid Another check.  If they fail, they add -2 to the initial roll.  Each character Trained in stealth makes an Aid Another check.  If they succeed they add +2 to the initial roll.   The group has to move as a unit or reasonably so.

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Unless you’re planning on a encounter string, i.e. at least 3 encounters back to back, plan on building your encounter at the far side of Medium or short side of Hard.  You have to adjust this of course for the abilities of both your players and your player’s characters.  So start with medium hards before you go into hards.  I can realistically and demonstrably give my group, warden, avenger, ranger, artificer, warlock(barbarian) level+3/4 encounters.  And yes they’re hard but they’re doable for the most part. I’ve only had one character death from tossing the party into this mix as their sole fight for a day.  And that was due to bad death save rolls as well as heal checks.

When you’re building your monsters, remember that they’re going to be alive for all of maybe 5-7 rounds for the most part.  In the interests of making them interesting give them all 2 or 3 encounter only powers and give them a little bit of synergy among them. 

Example: A standard skirmisher might have his basic +7, 1d10+5 Warclub attack, then encounters of Smashing Blow +7, 1d8+5 and target is knocked prone.  Head Blow: +7 2d6+8 and target is dazed.  Target must be Prone.  And finally Aim Low: +7 1d8+5 damage and target is Slowed.

Then drop them in pairs or trio’s.  One of them does a Smashing Blow on a PC and another one follows up with a Head Blow now that he’s down and the last one Aim’s Low and slows the PC.   So now you have a PC that’s dazed, slowed and bleeding on the ground.

Typically that means he’s going to be able to stand on his turn or attack from the ground.  If you have a trio of these guys then they can simply alternate their three encounter powers over three rounds and beat the heck out of the PC.

The point of this is not, well mostly not, to kill a PC but to force others to interfere on his behalf.  A defender marks the attackers, a warlord pushes one, two people bull rush two of them, a wizard thunderwaves, an artificer thundering armours, whatever it takes to get them off the PC they’ve singled out.  In all things you as the DM should be striving to make them work together as a team, watching out for each other, buffing each other, taking hits for each other.

4th Edition is a balanced edition, significantly more so than any previous edition (please keep the 4e hate spam down about that).  As long as you follow the general guidelines or the Adenture Tools (well worth a one month subscription to get it and the Character Builder) it’s hard to build an unfair monster with just a tiny bit of common sense.   Some combination can be wicked hard, a creature with a minor action to knock prone and a bonus to damage on prone targets is harsh (Needlefang Swarm).  Creatures with auras that stack can be really harsh (Chillborn Zombies) or creatures that have resistances to damage and reduce damage at the same time (Wraith).  These are all examples of monsters that are significantly tougher than their level or exp value warrants as a result (and just bad monster design IMO).

Also as a general rule I really think monsters that Stun should used VERY sparingly.  I don’t use it all, forcing a player to skip their turn “Is Not Fun”.   Dazed is as much of a screw over as I will ever give a player in terms of costing them their turn.

But over time this balance design can lead to encounters that feel the same.  So don’t be afraid to take those guidelines and manipulate them a bit.  With just two or three tiny changes you can drastically alter the feel of an encounter.

By changing the hit points or attack bonus in conjunction with the damage dealt with a power you can rachet up the tension of an encounter in many ways.

As an example, let’s say I build an encounter that’s designed to depict a bandit party that’s venturing into hobgoblin lands to negotiate a deal and the players have been chasing them.  I put in one elite, 5 standards, and 5 minions and generate roughly a level+2 encounter as the culmination of a 3 encounter string, the first two encounters level/level+1 encounters with hobgoblins.

I take the elite and drop his health by 20% but I boost his damage output accordingly.  So he goes from 200 hit points to 160 hit points.  His average damage per round per attack goes from 15 damage to 19 damage.  He’s got a shorter lifespan but hits for more damage so it should equal out assuming no major ’swinginess’ in the attack rolls.

Two of the standards are his body guards.  They’re not ‘elite’ but I want to show them as being highly trained.  I boost their attack chance by +4 (20% more likely to hit) and drop their damage output by 20% (15 damage becomes 11 damage).

3 of the standards I want to be really annoying as a whole but individually they’re not much.  As a group of highly trained archers who go for the sure shot rather than the damaging shot,  I up their attack by +6 and drop their damage from 15 down to about 8.   So they’re a steady unswerving health bleed on the party.

You could also model the boss of this encounter as a little more brutish but not a true brute, a giant of a human who’s armed with a big slow greatsword, easy to get out of the way of but don’t let it hit you whatever you do.  Let’s decrease his attack chances by -6 and boost his damage by 30% instead.   So he doesn’t hit often but when he does, a player REALLY feels it.

As a DM if you take this to an extreme in terms of damage per hit and 30%+ is bordering extreme then you HAVE to keep an eye on your dice and your players.  You’ve changed the encounter from a fairly steady progression of damage sinking on both sides to something that with a little good/bad luck can be very swingy and really hammer your players and you’re not there to do that.  Or if you are you probably won’t have players for long.

With these simple few tweaks though you can have players leaning forward when the boss rolls, wincing as you roll high and breathing a sigh of relief when you roll low.   And cursing out loud as ‘those %$(!*% archers are chewing my ass off.  Would someone kill those little @$@*(*!s?!”

In terms of encounter make up, make sure to mix things up.  Sure throw in the encounter that’s six giant slug like abominations and make it a straight forward bug hunt.  Easy, simple, not complicated, something every group needs from time to time.

But your encounters that are comprised of intelligent creatures are very likely to run something like boss, bodyguards, guards with optional groups of support and minions.   Or that’s how I see it.  The boss is going to want at least one or two people dedicated to his survival in my opinion.  Warriors or casters that stick with him, intercept attackers that kind of thing.  Then there are the general purpose guards, standards that keep the attackers occupied while the boss does his boss thing, they’re the defensive/offensive line of your encounter.

Then you have support groups that consist of artillery, control and/or healing. Typically these should be the smallest presence on the field as they’re the ones that usually sit in the back and go with range powers, they die easily but sometimes getting to them is just flat out hard.

Minions are just that.  Masses of incompetents who die in a loud messy fashion to the enjoyment of the players.   And once the group gets past level 4 or so, plan on your minions having little to no impact on the battle other than to waste a round or two as the party AOE’s them down.   Any more I don’t even count them against the XP budget of the encounter unless they’re artillery that is going to be widely spread out.  It’s realistically impossible to spread out melee attackers, they have to bunch up to get at the players who typically hang out fairly close together. They’re there to make the heroes cool as they kill six guys with one blast, that kind of thing.

I’d also advise you not to get too crazy on your encounter makeup complexity.  The more creatures with different powers you throw out there, especially if you take my advice and give them all some ‘fun’ powers for you to play with, the more likely you are to forget to use them.  I regularly forget to use Immediate powers that I give to my creatures for instance.

Trying to keep track of multiple powers on multiple types of creatures in one encounter servers not much more than to slow things down. Any more I strive for (but frequently fail to accomplish) no more than 3 types of creatures per encounter although with humanoids it’s hard to do.  My bandit, slavers and hobgoblin tribes just like to cover their bases, they want front line, back line, support, artillery, control, pure power and leadership in every fight.  And it’s hard to say no to them as they make sense when they send in their manpower requests. 

Also keep your players’ characters’ abilities in mind.  A group with a lot of radiant output is going to rip your undead encounters to shreds.   A group without any way to control creatures should run into encounters with fewer but tougher creatures.  A group with massive amounts of AOE’s shouldn’t get encounters comprised of mostly minions as a steady diet.  A group without a lot of ways to spend surges during an encounter needs smaller easier encounters but more of them during their ‘work day’ or few but tougher encounters per day.  Things like this keep in the back of your mind as you’re planning their almost but not quite demise.

And the flip side of that, keep your players abilities in mind as well.  A group who’s sole tactic is “I got this one, you go get that guy.” needs a lighter hand on the encounter difficulty than a group that knows exactly how their powers mesh with the powers of the rest of the team and acts accordingly.

So to wrap this up -

• give all your creatures some nifty encounter powers because that’s fun for you
• don’t be afraid to deviate from the monster building guidelines but do it in a balanced fashion because that’s fun for the players
• don’t make your encounters too simple or too complex, not fun for you
• keep the abilities of your players and their characters in mind, not fun for the players
• and most importantly make sure you and your players are having a good time or you’ll be putting your books away to gather dust and that’s a very un-fun thing to have to do…

I hope this is of some benefit to someone, putting it down at the very least helped solidify it for myself and that’s never a bad thing. Next week (or month or whenever) I’ll try and come up with some thoughts on how to actually run the encounter and give you some excuses for why the archers are all focus firing on the cleric for the 800th time.

Image Credits

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“I strongly protest your decision Lord Kotar!” the slaver mage said, indignation and fury apparent in his voice.

“Do you really Bokka?  You think we should continue to lose resources to these people?  We have the ship, I’ve sent teams inland after suitable… resources to let us recover its functionality and hopefully build more of them.  I don’t see any purpose in paying any more attention to them.  Lady Sethra has warned against our involvement in their activities any longer as it could prove… costly.”

“So we let them get away with what they’ve done?  I’ve given you the report that they killed most of our people in Larkson and caused our contact with the bandits and the tribes to disappear.  We don’t know what’s become of him, only that he wasn’t in the warehouse.  And what about my brother?  You’ve read the report, these people killed him and destroyed his ship.”

“Your scheme to take over that city doesn’t sit well with most of the Nine Bokka.  We don’t belong inland, we belong on the seas. And I really don’t care about your brother, he ruined more cargo than any other captain I’ve known. If you have an razor to hone for them, you do it on your time but I am not spending more men or gold to go after them.”

Bokka, a thin ascetic man of average height, swore softly and his hand slid toward the blade sheathed at his side, the green glowing gem in the pommel pulsing in time with his heartbeat.  The stocky figure in robes on the ornate large chair arched an eyebrow at the motion. 

“Really Bokka?” Lord Kotar’s voice held traces of amusement.  The shadowy figures swirling around the room fluttered close in anticipation, hunger apparent in their motions.

The room was a frozen tabluea for a long moment then Bokka’s shoulders slumped “I obey your wishes in all things Lord.” he said through gritted teeth, hands disappearing into the sleeves of his robes, away from his soulblade.

“Then please return to Safe Harbor and guard the airship for me.  I would be very… perturbed were anything to happen to it.  Send a fetch when the teams arrive with the artificers and keep me updated on their research.”

“Aye m’lord.”

“And Bokka, if anything happens to that ship, you’ll be a long time dying.”

“Aye m’lord.”

Bokka fled the room, one of the shadows silently closing the door behind him.  From behind an ornate tapestry a beautiful woman stepped, hair the color of night and skin so pale veins formed a pale blue web under it.

“Love, you should deal with that one now.  I’ve read the strands of the weave and in very few of them does he not covet your position.”

Kotar reached out and gently grasped the woman’s hand and pulled her close.  “And in all those possible strands does he ever succeed dear?”

Sethra’s mouth twitched in a slight smile, “Only in a very very few of them does he manage to take your place love.  I believe the phrase, ‘pigs are flying’ is appropriate for him.”

“As I thought, he is weak, tied to petty feuds, born of a weak strain.  I think before long the line of Jothan should be erased.  Only which of the minor captains to replace him?  Such a quandary…”

“What of the ‘heroes’ love?  In many strands, they oppose you and their fates are entwined in your downfall in many more.” she asked, running her head over his face, using her fingers to ’see’ him as the dark sockets where her eyes had once been looked into the distance.

“We shall wait and see. They’ve lost one already to mischance.  I think we shall simply wait and see what else chance brings to them.  Send a fetch to Robear in Larkson, have him work on our contact there, I need a schism opened so we can operate more freely.”

“As you ask so shall it be love.”

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[DM: I want to point out that I rolled like utter [bleep] this session.  My miss ratio was pretty far on the wrong side of the standard deviation on a d20. I only had one natural 20, on T’Balktu of course, and a bunch of 1’s, 2’s, 3’s. ]

The tower taken from the forces defending it our band of heroes takes stock of the situation.  And the phat lewt.  They recover a magic staff, set of robes, some fire arrows and bolts, a couple of healing potions, a stack of what they’ll eventually discover are alchemical bombs and a set of signal flares.

Based on Keri’s notes they know the cave trolls are sent around the island around dawn to help with the construction efforts.  This gives them about 6 hours before then so leaving Biminey to begun work on repairing and re-tuning the airship.  A couple of hours into it he realizes he’s going to have to replace the broken boards of the ship before it’ll be flyable again.

He wakes the others and gives them the bad news.  They decide to go back to sleep and deal with it later.  Biminey joins them in sleeping leaving Torn, Kane and Dash on watch.  Hirelings work well for that.

As the sun peeks up Torel and Stak go look at the avenues of approach to the tower.  On the far side of the chasm separating the tower side from the rest of the island is a extending bridge.  They crank it over and investigate the far side. A couple of smaller buildings are under construction on that side.  Torel preps the area by liberally splashing gallons of oil in the places where attackers might take cover.   
A couple of hours after dawn, the compound forces start wondering where the cave trolls are and send a couple of sailors up to find out what’s going on.  They holler and hullabaloo for awhile but the good guys don’t respond.  One of the sailors twists a rod like the ones that are in the tower and a flare of light flies way up in the air, sparking and sputtering, visible for miles in all directions and then head back to the compound at a jog.

[DM's Comments: I'd planned out a number of scenarios, even had maps ready but the group's actions as happens quite frequently took a turn that I hadn't planned.  Their scheme for the lumber was sneaky and scheming and my possible scenario's didn't quite get that sneaky on their behalf.  I'd envisioned them possibly ambushing the first people up to see what was going on by either setting up in the partially built houses on the far side of the bridge or leaving the bridge down and luring them over to the tower.  But it just really proves yet again one person will never be able to accurately predict what other people will do, 100% of the time no matter how long they've known them.]

Now that the bad guys know something is up, although not what, the group decides to hunker down and prepare to repel an attack trying to come across the chasm and wait in vain for rest of the day with nothing happening although they do spot a sneaky person scouting them out.

[Torel rolled a natural 20 on a perception check or they'd of not spotted him.  After the slavers knew something was up they sent up an assassin who wisely decided not to try anything during the day.  The slavers are expecting another ship of reinforcements which would include at least an overmage if not another ubermage. They also have some high level captives that they've been lead to believe will be highly ransomable. The captives lied by the way to gain time, there's no one left to ransom them.  Hence they're not going to try to frontal attack a tower that they have to try to cross a 25' gap with a 50' fall into jagged rocks.  They're going to wait for nightfall and sneak across under the cover of darkness.]

As the day continues to wind down the group decides to send Stak and Dash, both fairly sneaky bastards over to scout the compound.  They know from Keri’s notes that there is a building under construction over there which should mean there’s lumber.  The two are supposed to try and steal the lumber.  And rather than going around the island they cut across the harbor, using a small cask to carry their gear and to rest with on the mile or so swim.  They’re given two signal flares to use if they need help.

Stak and Dash get over and find no way to get to the lumber, the slavers over there are scattered, hiding in nooks and crannies while several are guarding a building that Keri marked as holding slaves.  Discretion prevails and they return the way they came.  Stak unfortunately failed in his attempt to climb the cliff so they shout for help and then are pulled up the cliff.

They report their findings to the rest.

Our five leave Kane, Dash and Torn to watch the tower as they’ve come up with a plan to not go after the lumber at the compound but instead take the ship and de-construct part of it for the lumber they need.  They get ready and slither down the rope and into the warm salt water and start dog paddling.

[It's about this time that the assassin makes it across and starts scouting the tower section of the island.  He's not sure what to make of the three men that he can find, assuming they must be tougher than they are if they were able to take the tower and goes back retrieves most of the quality forces from the compound and they assualt the tower while our group is slowly swimming across the harbor.  The attack on the harbor kicks off about the time that the group gets to the ship.  The three hirelings immediately know they're heavily screwed and set off two flares.  They three are all level 6 though and they do cut a swath through the attackers but are eventually taken.]

The group reach the ship, Stak going further to steal the longboats from the shore.   Elisssa hits the deck of the ship first due to bad timing on their part but has no trouble killing both slavers on board.  One swing of her axe at the end of a charge cuts the slaver’s arm off which is holding a signal flare.  She spins and takes the head off the other one in the same motion.

The rest climb on board to find the ship is theirs and Stak comes up with the longboats.

The signal flares go up from the tower but there’s just not much they can do for them except continue with the plan.  They wait till down though which isn’t far off and use the ballistae on the ship to let the forces on the shore know they’re there.  Keeping the slavers on the shore occupied, they strip lumber off the non-visible side of the boat.

Lumber in head they set the ship afire and start rowing back to the tower.  The tower forces are waiting for them but aren’t too concerned as the cliffs are almost impossible to climb and it would be very easy to just drop rocks on anyone trying to climb them and knock them off.

Unfortunately for the slavers they don’t know about Biminey’s Ladder ritual. As the ladder springs up and Torel starts climbing his butt off the two at the top realize that things may not be going as planned and start yelling.  They drop rocks but they miss and Torel is able to reach the top of the cliff, Biminey right behind him.

A fight breaks out and both sides are reinforced as forces rush in from the tower and up the ladder but when Torel uses the Deamon Heart to walk the assassin off the cliff and Biminey drops the ladder as he’s trying to climb back up.  Battered, bruised, ribs cracked and leg broken the assassin limps off vowing to come back and kill them all in nasty ways.  Right as Biminey’s firebolt, charged with lightning enters his skull from above.

The fights just clean up this point between the guys the hirelings killed, the loss of the ‘boss’ of the island forces and the fact that the slavers can’t seem to hit a damn thing it’s quickly over.

They capture one of the slaver alchemists and get information from him.  They go back and strike a bargain, one sided, with the remaining neophytes in the tower (all minions) and make them leave.  They recover their battered and beaten hirelings.

Hauling up their construction supplies Biminey and a couple of others get to work repairing the airship while the rest traipse across the island and intimidate or kill the remaining slavers.

In the captive hut they rescue a dwarf noble woman and her retinue.  She has a tale of her city being overrun by hobgoblins and her father putting her and the rest on a boat with a few guards while they stayed to defend the city.  They were picked up by slavers not long after setting sail and brought to the island.  To buy time and preferential treatment they let on to the slavers that a huge ransom would be possible.  The other slaver ship on the island went off to collect said ransom.

Air ship repaired and drivable they take a minor detour to burn the slaver compound to the ground from the air and head back.  They try to investigate one of the small farming villages on their way back, one of the ones that has lost contact with the city and Biminey has a test of wills as something tries to take over control of him through the airship control amulet, forcing him to land the ship.  He breaks free and they flee back to the coast.

Leaving biminey and most of the noble woman’s following on the ship the rest are dropped off outside of town walk in.  They get inside and learn news of the hobgoblin threat and get information from Sushanna of good news.  The Eris researchers are constructing a battle standard that will duplicate the weakening effect of the Larkson wardings for a small area.  They also find out from Sushanna that the wardings of the city are powered  by the life force of people born in the city.  This was uncovered in the research into the standard which after use requires a ritual and life force to recharge to enable it to work again.

We leave our group getting cleaned up in the temple’s sauna’s and breaking the fast.  They have plans for to meet up with  Biminey in two days time, who’s currently flying the ship out of sight of land and above the clouds and making offers of employment to Visra’s, the noble dwarf’s retinue since she obviously won’t be able to pay them.  On the flip side, Visra is going to try and find them employment in the town.

Elisssa, getting a little tired of the group’s actions preventing her from killing who she wants to when she wants is going to depart the group for at least awhile, taking the gold and valuables she’s garnered from their adventures.  She has thoughts of packing up her relatives adn friends on a ship and sailing away from this danger zone now that she knows there are cities to the south, albeit under the threat of hobgoblin attack but at least she won’t have to worry about her mind being consumed and her body used to kill innocents.

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To offer an anecdote, I’m specifically working to avoid a recurrence of a scene in years past where a player, to get away from a particularly gruesome fight metagamed and said, “I can survive an 8 story fall, I jump out the window.”

So I’m making falling damage cumulative and discounting the first 10′.  So anyone can fall 10′ or less without an issue.  For every 10′ farther than that, that they fall, they take 1d10 damage cumulative.

So a 20′ fall deals 1d10 damage.  A 30′ fall deals 1d10+2d10 damage.  A 40′ fall deals 1d10+2d10+3d10 damage.  A 100′ fall deals 1d10+2d10+3d10+4d10+5d10+6d10+7d10+8d10+9d10.

Falling onto a hard surface adds 50% damage.  Falling into a soft surface reduces damage by 50%. An acrobatics roll versus DC 15 can reduce the distance fallen by 10′.

This will very quickly make long distance falling deadly even for high level characters.

[Edited]

Per the comment associated with this I offer up the following alternative which I’m consdering -

For every 10′ after the first 10′ falling damage costs a falling character a healing surge value in damage. So a fall of 50′ equals 40′ of ‘damaging’ fall and kills a healthy character.  This has the benefit (depending on your point of view) of removing level from the equation.   The downside is that this would greatly increase the lethality of even short falls.  Teleporting a creature 30′ up would cost it half it’s health with one power regardless of how much half it’s health is.   So this might end up being a player’s rule only.

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It’s not easy to upgrade to 2.9.2 on 1and1.com.  They’re using MySQL 4.0.x and 2.9.2 requires 4.1.2 and better.  But they do give you access to MySQL 5.0.x you just have to migrate your existing database over to it. Manually.

I was able to find some notes on workarounds but they didn’t work as well for me due to the size of my database.  I ended up having to create the new database in chunks, not difficult since I’m pretty familiar with SQL (certified by Microsoft even) but annoying.  But eventually I got it all working.  I think.

On the plus side I was able to do a lot of database cleanup, dropping old unused tables and optimizing existing ones so the new database is much cleaner and in theory should be a little faster.  Although it’s on different hardware so it’s a crapshoot.

I also took the downtime to update the ‘captcha’ mechanism which seems to generate less obscure, aka hard to get right, human verification checks.  But with 100’s to 1000’s of script based spam, primarily porn and grey market drugs, in comments a day I’m just not able to have an open comments (non admin approved before it posts) section or an easy to bypass mechanism.

“Kord’s balls, what the hell?” the guard exclaimed looking out at the east road. A naked figure was stumbling down the road, covered in blood.  As it dropped in the packed dirt in front of the gate she could see it was not only naked but most of the skin of it’s arms and upper chest had been removed.  In the distance at the top of the first rise of the road she spied what could only be a warband of hobgoblins.Â

A shout, the gruff voice of her sergeant barked up from below, “What is it trooper!?”

“There’s a man, I think it’s a man, he’s hurt, hurt bad in the road below and I shit you not sarge there’s a full hob warband no more than 200 yards up the road.”

“Awww shit.  Coleson, Donal, Tig spread the alarm, I want every square foot of this gods damn wall manned and I want it done NOW!”

Pounding feet sped off behind her and the brazen clanging of the alarm bell started to sound.  The halberd in her hand didn’t seem nearly as impressive as the dim light glinted off the naked steel arrayed among the hobgoblins.  The ladder behind her creaked under the massive form of the dragonborn sergeant.

“Well fuck me sideways…” Sergeant Drakotta said softly.

“What do you want to do about him Sarge?” she said pointing out the bleeding figure below.

“Shit, can’t leave him there.  And they’re held up far enough way for someone fast to get out and get him.  I remember you’re speedy Bawndi.  Get down that ladder, grab Hork and get out there and get him.”

“Crap Sarge, why…”

“Cut it trooper, get your ass down there now or you’ll be safer out there than here!”

Bawndi grimaced and nodded.  She slid down the ladder dropping lightly to the ground below. “Hork!  Get your skinny ass front and center, Sarge has a job for us.  Tally, you and Peete open the gate, we’re going to run out there and grab that guy.  If the hobgoblins charge you slam the gate you make gods damn sure that there’s no way I can make it back before they get to the gate or I swear to all hells I’ll have your ass no matter what it takes.”

As two of the guard turned the winches that pulled the massive bars back from the gate, Bawndi and Hork, a thin almost scrawny human but with surprising strength, stood poised as the thick iron bound wooden gates parted sideways.  As soon as the gap was big enough to squeeze through they did so, sprinting down the road toward the bloodied figure.Â

Bawndi slid to a halt next the man, eyes taking in the ruin, the skin was gone from his shoulders in long strips that ran halfway down his back.  She knelt, not sure where to grab the man as Hork retched next to her.  “Suck it up!  You toss on me and I’ll make you pay for a long time.” she hissed glancing up at the other watchman, tossing a glance toward the hobgoblins that remained motionless in the distance. “Grab the hands, I’ll get the feet.  Hurry up gods damnit!”

Together they picked the man up, carefully but quickly rolling him over and then moved back to the gate at an awkward shuffle, Hork moving backwards to keep an eye on the hobgoblins.   With release of held breath they passed through the gate again, multiple watch including the Anvil mercenaries were gathered around, weapons ready.  A stretcher appeared and they laid the man on it.  A watch healer stepped up and laid a hand on the man’s forehead and a glow appeared around her fingers and sank into the man’s flesh, the flesh knitting and healing. Â

The man screamed sitting bolt upright then trying to lunge away, troopers grabbing him and pressing him back down.  His struggles died as his terror filled eyes took in his surroundings.  Sargeant Drakotta pushed through the crowd, squatted by the man, “What’s going on?  Who are you?”

The man shook his head, stammered, “Stanal, my names Stanal.  They destroyed the village, killed everyone!  They kept me alive to deliver a message.”

“What’s the message?  What village?”

“My home, Greenoak village.”

One of the watch spoke up, “I know the place Sarge, maybe ten buildings, about thirty or forty people.”

Without looking back, Drakotta rasped out, “Next man that speaks is going to regret being birthed.  Now, you, Stanal, what do they want?”

“They want some book they say is here, some book with a name in it.  They’ll give you a week to come up with it.  Every week they don’t get it, another village dies. When they run out of villages then they’ll march on the city.”

“What the fuck? A book?”

“Yes, that’s what they said. Said someone would know what they’re talking about.”

A voice called down, “Sarge, they’re moving out, heading south.”

Drakotta rocked back on his heels, shook his head.  “Well someone sure as shit ain’t me.”  He rose, yanking the man up with him, hand locked like a bear trap on his wrist.  Bawndi, you’re with me.  We’re taking this one to the captain.  Frost, take over here.  Keep them on their toes and keep everyone’s eyes open.  This could be a feint of some kind.  Send runners, make sure the east gate is covered and send someone to Joncel and make sure he’s got the river side sewn up.”

“Aye sarge.” replied a hardbitten trooper, “I’ll get’em moving.”

“Come on you, let’s go.  And someone get these people moving, show’s over!”

Drakotta lead the way down the road at a swift pace, the farmer behind him and Bawndi trailing, naked steel in her hand and mistrust on her face.

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Our group starts off in the warehouse littered with dead bodies, the bodies they’ve slain.  Deciding that the’d be better off if they got the hell out they do so and retreat back to their tavern.  The next day Biminey vists the temple of Eris where he talks with Sushanna and the new high priest and finds out information on their possible foes.   King Hesh’tar, his queen Liloth, his adviser Phy’el Fleshwalker and their enforce Krag the Butcher.  Tales of their powers are legendary only surpassed by the tales of their evil.

After telling the high priest they’d already killed Krag, Biminey was a bit taken aback at the priests quesiton, “did you burn the body and scatter the ashes?”  Which they didn’t do.

Other information learned is that the town is a mystical anchor point that keeps Larkson’s curse alive and well on the city of Darkmith.  That the prince’s True Name is located in the city of Larkson and that the very stones of the city are warded against the powers of Darkmith and for one of the creatures of Darkmith to enter the town would render it significantly weaker than it wold be outside the town.

Torel meets with the Captain of the Watch and discusses events.

Shuk meets up with Stak in their tavern and gives him a device that she’d had created in Anvil by an high level artificer there to help with Soozin.  She seems distant to the Stak and doesn’t wish to talk much. It’s obvious that the loss of Dra’kin has hit her fairly hard.

They meet up and compare notes and Biminey leads them to the temple of Eris where they stashed Soozin while they went out to the temple of healing to cure Torn.

Biminey activates the device and it enters Soozin’s throat to go after the parasite.  It warps out and something goes wrong and the parasite splits up the way it’s created to do but lightning flares and the several small parasites swell to the size of large dogs.

The group defeats the giant slugs and Soozin is now healed. [Note: Wasn't planned to be a hard fight unless for some reason not everone in the group happened to be there but as it turned out they were.]

After everything that’s happened to them they pressure the high priest of Eris to allow them to stay on the grounds and he doesn’t take much persuading.  The group has proved formidable to hostile creatures and having them around he can’t see as a bad thing.

Elissa finds Keri waiting for her in her new room in the temple.  Keri has a tale of having been on a boat for three weeks scouting the charts that she lifted from the slaver ship while it was in the harbor.  She reports finding the stronghold listed on the charts and reports that there is an airship attached to a keep on the island.  She also tells Elisssa that the free ride is over now with Dra’kin dead and any future services will be cash in hand.

They discuss further the murders taking place and finally [after DM prodding] determine that the murders are taking place in houses/buildings that are newly constructed, not part of the original town’s construction, wooden.  With the new knowledge of the warded stones and construction it’s not a big leap of deduction to figure out that the wardings are keeping the murderer out.   Which they have determined is possibly Krag in spirit form trying to recover his lost corpse.

They take their findings to the Captain of the watch and lead him to make the deductions on his own.  He takes them to the Council who decrees that it would be prudent for citizen’s that are in new construction to find a place to stay that’s part of the original stone construction.  As the group determines that people aren’t yet for the most part taking the warnings seriously they decide to head out after their air ship after making plans for their assault.

They arrange for passage, their money is rapidly depleting.

Arriving at the island, to everyone’s astonishment their plan works, they get on the island and defeat the forces at the keep which is where we leave them.  They have several hours most likely before someone might question why no one has come down from the keep with the cave trolls but they still have the air ship to repair, the master override amulet to tune and unfortunately Biminey is only one man.

[Note: I had a timeline of the coming's and goings of the forces on the island and by chance or luck they hit the island when it had minimal forces.  Also their plan bypassed the forces on the keep and made what might have been a fight that could have seen the loss of some of the group into a fight that while knuckle biting wasn't white knuckle.  At least yet.  But rather than a fairly large fight they managed to defeat the forces in waves due to their actions and negated some of their firepower by a pretty plan and good reaction to the situation at hand.]

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So, since I had chicken and potatoes already cooked and waiting their turn in the leftover plate I came up with the following -

Dennis’ Chicken Potato Coconut Curry Soup

Melt 1 tablespoon of butter in a saucepan.

Add 2 tablespoons of flour and stir make a roux.   Let it cook a minute or two to cut the raw flour taste.

Pour in one can of chicken broth and whisk smooth.

Add one tablespoon of -

• Chopped Garlic
• Minced Ginger

Add in 1/4 to a 1/2 teaspoon of -

• Ground Cardomon
• Tumeric
• Curry Powder
• Red Pepper (ground or flakes)
• Onion Powder

Pour in 1 can of Coconut Milk, whisk smooth.

Add in 1.5 grilled chicken breast

Add in 1 cup roasted potatoes

Simmer till slow boil stirring to rotate the potatoes on top to the bottom and cut back the heat and simmer as long as you can stand the smell and not eating it.  About 30 minutes for me.

Salt to taste and spoon up in a bowl as a thick soup (my preference) or ladle over steamed white rice (Laura’s choice).   Top with a dash of red pepper flakes and spoon a dollop of coconut yogurt in the middle.

Try it, if you don’t like it then you’re just weird.

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In a year or so if they remove the DRM (and the price drops subsequently) I may consider it.

I have a ‘friend’ who bought Bioshock Uno and didn’t even unwrap it and instead downloaded a cracked version to avoid this bullshit.  My ‘friend’ refuses now to continue to support and pander to this kind of thinking.

<rant off>

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I don’t really have a reason to cut them up at all, my initial thought was release them over time to give people something to look forward to but really the post work necessary means I end up getting each of the sessions cleaned up and have my wife (Elisssa) record the intro that delaying publishing any of them would be pointless.

Honestly who wouldn’t prefer to download the entire Penny Arcade podcasts at one time rather than 30 minutes  a week?

Another reason to keep them chopped in blocks is to make it easier for people to skip ahead without missing a lot.  If they want to jump to the end of the current battle, it’s not a hard thing to do.  If the recrding was 5 hours long with 4 battles in it, then it might be a little more difficult to skip the parts you in particular didn’t want to listen to.

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At any rate the net result is T’Balktu has joined the group.  He’s a younger goliath barbarian.  Think of the goliath in my world more as a Hill People than some half elemental race.  Lots of muscles, outdoor types with a hunger for living as large as their view of the world from atop their mountain fortresses.

He was made in a hurry Saturday and I’ve since cleaned it up a little, swapping a couple of things out that didn’t work for a 2handed great axe wielder.

The end result is a veritable damage machine.  If he crits his Ragestrike power he’ll be doing 60 damage.  Not half bad at all.  And with multiple ways to get temporary hit points he should make up a little for his lower defenses.   With low reflex and willpower he’s going to get whacked a lot by critters that attack those defenses.  And unfortunately as I happen to know, more than one of the bosses of this campaign have powers against those.

Against masses of mobs his total damage output should go through the roof and he should be a minion killer from hell.  An at-will that has a blast 3 component if he hits with it?  I’ll have to seriously ramp up the minion count just to break even.

I’ve started him out with Bleeder, his father’s greataxe, that spurs him onward to greater displays of glory as well as an Ironskin belt made by his grandfather out of materials no one in the family likes to talk about.  And I think he may be a good candidate for the Cape of the Red Path they recently found as mobility for him would be a good thing so he can get to the best position on the field to unleash his burst/blast attacks against swarms of bad guys.

Too bad though about Dra’kin.  But failing 3 out of 4 death saves and the healer failing 2 out of 2 stabilization checks?  His death was meant to be.

But T’Balktu should be able to pick up the slack and then some.  And as a front line striker it should help keep the others alive and in better shape a little more.

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This was mainly a combat session with two boss battles and was marred by the fatality of one of the group.  I’m not ‘doing’ resurrection in this campaign, so a death is the final curtain, not a revolving door.

We pick up with our heroes after the end of the fight in the Temple with the demonic goddess.  They decided to go try and save Torn by taking a simulcrum to the temple of H’Estar, a goddess of healing, sun and all that.  The temple has been abandoned over time as the area controlled by the hobgoblin hordes to the south have encroached and overrun the area.

Acquiring horses the group heads to the temple where they perform the ritual of healing for Torn, channeling their own life force into the simulacrum they’ve had crafted, the ritual lead by Sushanna, acolyte of the temple of Eris and Biminey’s snuggle bunny.

As the ritual ends the release of magic breaks the illusion that’s been crafted on hobgoblins that are sneaking up on them from four directions. The fight was rough, Stak performing exceptional work thinning the hobgoblin grunts two at a time per round until there were no more, dropping them with a single arrow to a vital location each time.  The remainder dealt with the wardogs, soldiers and the hobgoblin fleshcarver.  The fleshcarver and two other hobgoblins escaped with their lives.

[It was a tough fight - 16 grunts, 5 soldiers, 3 archers, 4 war dogs, 1 fleshcarver, divided up in groups of 4 sets coming in from four different directions. I'm become not a fan of bad guys fighting to the point of stupidity and needlessly sacrificing their lives, at least the bosses of the fight and once the boss breaks and runs there's going to be one or two underlings who are going to see it as their duty to follow after him to keep him safe...]

Unfortunately their healing shortage cost them this time dearly.  Dra’kin, normally safe in the rear, but now up in front due to the four sided attack.  This provided to be ultimately costly to the warlock and left him with his life’s blood draining away on the battlefield at the end of the fight.

[In Dra'kin's defense (and mine), he failed 3 out of 4 death saves while Biminey the best healer in the group, failed two out of two healing checks to try to stabalize him. Apparently the gods of luck, whimsey and statistics wanted him dead.]

At the end of the fight they recovered and performed a second ritual for the simulacrum of Soozin, hoping that it would deal with the parasite lodged in her belly.

They fled home making the trip safely.  There they found Torn recovered, no longer a vegetable although still missing his hand.  Apparently regeneration wasn’t part of the package.  He’s a pit fighter though and while it sucks he can deal.

They find out that there were three days without murders but the last three days there have been a murder a might.

They also found [not sure if anyone actually heard it] that another farming village hasn’t had anyone come into town in awhile which while not unheard of is viewed with suspicion these days.  Maybe it’s nothing, or maybe it’s some evil influence spreading it’s power base.  Who knows?

They contacted Meri and informed her of Dra’kin’s death and told her they had something to give Shuk (the good luck amulet she gave Dra’kin on a braid of Tanner’s hair).  Meri passed on information that an eladrin was in town meeting with strangers in a warehouse in the dock area.

A mercenary showed up at the groups doorstep looking for work, T’Baktu the goliath barbarian.  T’Baktu came into town with the other mercenaries hired by the city but doesn’t really like the mercenary life.  He tried to join the City Watch but the Captain of the watch is suspicous of everything these days and turned him down.  The captain did though point him at our heroic group and offered to pay him gold if he’d spy on the group and inform the captain of their dealings and work.

The group showed up at the warehouse and found it guarded on the outside.  Stak with a bow shot from the gods killed the sentry on the south gate with a single shot through the head.

They crept up to the door and Biminey undid the barring and peeked inside spotting a large group of sailors, bearing tatoos like those they saw on the slaver sailors.

He stepped inside rolling one of his constructs of lightning into the center of the group, killing all six in one shot. [New record by the way].

The rest of the group rushed in and joined the fray.  A group of tougher thugs, two slaver and two bandits were spotted by a set of stairs.  As the screams started a slaver Overmage, and Warrick the leader of the bandits and his shaman stepped out of an office on the second floor.

T’Baktu took several hits in the opening round almost dropping him but he persevered and came back into the fight.  The thugs kept the group occupied while the  overmage, shaman and warrick’s bow decimated their health from above on the walkway connecting two upper level office structures.

Eventually the thugs were dropped as was the shaman.  The overmage descended to lower level to try and get a good usage out of his blast powers but was unable to without hitting his own troops.

Warrick seeing the way the wind was blowing tipped his hat in salute o the other bowman, Stak and fled through the office and up to the roof.  Torel was hot in pursuit but discretion proved the watchword of the day and didn’t follow the leader up to the roof where at least one other thug was on guard duty.

[As it was late and obvious the overmage was going to die I didn't play out the last round or two and just fast forwarded to his demise.]

The group recovered a Trishan Spine Bow from one of the hobgoblin archers and a Cape of the Red Path from the slaver overmage along with some gold  and healing potions.

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I ended up trying EVERY distro of 0sx86 out there before I found the right combination of things to get a 10.5.8 working edition.

To sum up – I started with iDeneb 10.5.5 as the base.  This was the ONLY build higher then 10.4 that would even install.  All the rest of them give me the gd “Still waiting for root device” error that’s so prevelent.  I tried using external DVD, external HD, etc. to get around this error but to no avail. The Dell BIOS prevents me from changing the drive compatibility settings and the hardware doesn’t have an IDE connector which prevented me from trying those options.

So I installed with 10.5.5 using the following patches – AMD Fix,  9.0.2 Speedstep, AppleAzalia sound, the ATA Test (the one that’s labled use this if your SATA drive doesn’t work), the AppleBMC440 network driver.  This gives me a working 10.5.5 system.

Next up was trying to get a 10.5.7 or 10.5.8 system.  This failed miserably with every distro, iDeneb, Kalyway, XxX, iATKOS, 10.5.6, 10.5.7, 10.5.8 they all failed to even start the install because of the Still waiting for root device.

So tried to upgrade in place.  Again, failure.

Finally I did manage to get it working and this is how -

Get a 10.5.5 install working (as described above).

Start osx86tools and backup the extensions, don’t close it!

Run the iDeneb 10.5.8 combo update.  don’t restart!

Restore the extensions you just updated.

Now restart.

This worked for me, fully working video, lan, DVD, sound.

I installed the iPhone SDK without any problem and was able to make a quick app and run it in the iphone emulator.

It restarts and shutsdown without hanging as well.

It won’t though recognize USB memory sticks without a reboot.  Not a huge deal for me so I’m not going to bother with it right now.

The only thing I haven’t as of yet gotten working at all is a Zyxel G-202 usb wireless that I have laying around.  But this is a problematical for everyone from what I hear.

Something wicked this way comes....

Excuse the hiatus, we take one week off out of every four and last week we also had a huge snowfall to contend with that made it dangerous to get together.  With any luck we’ll be playing this weekend.

In  the meantime –

“Councilman with all due respect I believe the idea has merit.  Council Lerik’s idea of locking the 5 of them up for a few days to see if the murders stop will harm no one and it might help uncover the truth.”

“See, even the guard are smart enough to know I’m right Garon.” came the oily voice of Councilor Lerik as he leaned forward, thrusting out a finger to point to the chainmail clad form of Captain Warik, commander of the guard.

The creases of Warik’s eyes bunched slightly and then smoothed out at Lerik’s tone, insulting without giving cause for insult. A skill the man possessed in spades, one that Warik couldn’t help but wish would get the man… hurt.  Not killed, he wasn’t that obnoxious but Warik wouldn’t be unhappy to hear that the councilor had met with some mishap, maybe a broken bone or two.  It would be too much to ask that Lerik became a victim to the person or creature that was killing townsfolk each night.

“Captain! Did you hear me?” Garon asked sharply.

“Sorry sir, something occurred to me about the murders that distracted me.”

Garon shook his head, “I said no we won’t be tossing them in jail.  They’ve done well enough by us.  They chased that creature out of the Eris temple, were captured and almost killed trying to solve our gold thefts, we know more about the murders because of them.  No, they stay free.”

“You realize they ‘found out’ information on the murders because they committed them!” Lerik spat out.

Garon leaned forward, planting his palms on the table, “That’s enough!  I know you have issues with them Lerik.  You have issues with anyone who doesn’t fit your god’s image of the ideal.  Oh I know who or what you worship.  So far your belief’s haven’t interfered with your ability to keep the merchants happy and in line but don’t push things too far.  Without my goods to sell and Teagan’s boats and wagons to ship them you’d be a little unpopular with everyone both merchant and commoner so I suggest you give up this little vendetta you have against these people.”

Lerik dropped back into his chair, mouth open and then a look of furious anger crossed his face.  Without a word he rose and stormed out of the council chamber, Jan, the pretty young woman who’d taken Tanner’s place following after an uncertain pause, tossing an apologetic look around the room.

“What a pleasant individual.” Warick growled.

“That’s enough from you too Captain.  We all need to get along.  I know we’ve had our differences, I know you don’t like the changes we’ve pushed down your throat as it were about hiring outside help, which again doesn’t indicate a lack of confidence in your or the Watch’s ability.  But with the slaver raid, the murders and I know you don’t care to believe in them but of late all the temple priests have spoken of auguries that bad times are coming, very bad times.  Better poorer but prepared.  Perhaps if we’d of had these extra troops then my own… Never mind. As I say we need to get along with him and each other for the protection and benefit of the town.”

Warick nodded curtly, “Aye, I can understand your position Councilor.”

“I hear a but in there but I won’t push it.  Please go on, we’ll go over your report and see if we can make anything out of it.  Do what you can to catch this killer and keep our people safe.”

“Aye, that I can agree with.” Warick saluted the two councilors and their aides and turning on a heel left the room.

Teagan, the eladrin in charge of shipping who up till now had been quiet spoke up, “Berylon would you and Spar be so good as to wait in the other room for a few moments?”

The two aides glanced at each other and Berylon shrugged, “Sure, just summon if you have need.  C’mon Spar.”

After the room was empty and the door closed Teagon leaned back in his chair.  Face calm and impassive, eyes wandering over the decorative carvings in the ceiling of the council chambers he spoke quietly, “You know that one is beginning to overstep his bounds.  His hatred of all non-humans is affecting his dealings with me. I know he’ll be dead in 20 or 30 years and be out of my hair but it’s going to be a long 30 years at this rate.  Out of curiosity as he’s without heir or acknowledged relation as far as I know who would inherit if something were to happen to our fellow councilman?”

Garon shot a sharp look at the eladrin, “You know the answer to that and I don’t like where that question is going Teagon.”

Teagon flicked his eyes over and gave a miniscule shrug, “I’m not proposing anything Garon.  I’m just noting that the man has a lot of people irritated at him.  And ever since that deal with the slaver, if it was a slaver, he’s gotten a lot worse.  Did you know he’s pushing all the merchants under his control to get rid of their non-human employees?  I also heard that he wants to erect an altar to that banal spiteful god of his.  Yes you humans make up the highest proportion of the cities population but humans versus non-humans you’re in a distinct minority.  It’s irrational hatreds brought upon people by the ideologies of the likes of that one and his ilk that could end up destroying this town much less the slavers or reavers or whatever it is that the priests are warning us is coming.”

Garon suddenly chuckled, “You know that’s the most I think you’ve ever said at one time.  Yes the man was never pleasant and lately he’s turned downright vile, even to his ‘own kind’.  I think though that you overestimate the draw of his beliefs and the power of Bain.  Did you know he already has an altar to his god in a cellar under his home?  Ahh, see, we both have sources of information.  And do you know how many people in his circle of ‘friends’ and acquaintances actually pay homage to his detestable little godling?  Only twelve that I know of.  Twelve followers out of how many people in this town?  Nay he poses no real threat to the security of the town.  And he’s brilliant at keeping the merchants in line, paying their taxes and not overcharging the commoners.”

Teagon’s lips curled up slightly, “I bow before your wisdom then Garon. Perhaps I shall learn somewhat of it during the time you have left on this plane of existence.”

“We live as the gods decree my friend.  Even your longevity might be cut shorter than you’d like as your gods wish. As for myself, I find it pointless to worry about it. Have you come up with anything we can do or have the Watch do to try and protect the people?”

Teagon shook his head, “Without knowing what we’re dealing with there’s little we can do.  Trying to ward every home, building and store against everything would be impossible.  But if we can find the creature’s nature we might be able to come up with something or so my people tell me.”

“The information that the group gave us was of no help?”

“Not really.  Necromatic arts are pretty far reaching.  We need to know the nature of the creature, if we could get something that belonged to it, an article of clothing or better yet flesh or blood then perhaps those skilled in the arts might come up with a way to track it.”

Garon snorted, “Blood? Hells we can’t even find the blood of the victims.”

“A chilling part of the deeds.  Where is the blood going and what is it being used for.  I fear the answer will not be one we wish to know.”

“Undoubtedly. Let’s get them back in here and start going over shipping needs.  The fish are pouring in from the boats and we’re going to have to get more barrels and crates to hold them.  I’d like another five hundred of the stasis crates as well, we should have planned ahead for this just in case.”

The two men, two of the most influential men in the city began studying the piles of documents that detailed the lifeblood of the city of Larkson, the fishing harvest and its dissemination.

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[Edit: Per a reader's comments this is a take on the Taint system from Heroes of Horror, a DnD 3.5 supplemental book.  Thanks for the info!]

The base premise is the characters are exposed to something or do something that ‘bends’ them mentally and or physically.  This can range from pyschosis to turning bestial and many other things.   Perhaps wandering the streets of Darkmith and the aura of evil and power that envelops that city might plant a seed of evil in someone.  Or maybe the touch of Liloth’s powers driving one to stab a companion in the throat might leave lingering inclinations to repeat the action unforced.

We will see.

A few snippets from the pdf although a quick perusal shows some missing entries and some small typo’s that could be fixed as well as generalized overhaul to fit my personal needs.

The Touch of Taint
Characters in the Vale that venture into the dark places of the world, or dabble in the waters of evil, run the risk of their minds and bodies becoming poisoned by taint. Mental taint, or depravity, can eventually send one mad, where physical taint, or corruption, can transform a living being into an undead horror.

Acquiring Taint
“Sometimes one’s soul can be filled with evil because of the evil of their actions. Sometimes all it takes is for one to pick up the wrong book…”

Committing acts of unspeakable evil
In cultures throughout the typical D&D setting certain acts earn universal condemnation amongst races and peoples with even the slightest moral code: murder, torture, genocide, and rape as well as fouler acts warp the mind of those committing them and result in the offending character gaining depravity.

This does not represent external evil creeping into the character’s mind, but rather represents the wearing away of one’s moral compass as characters begin to treat others as pawns and toys rather than as individual creatures worthy of respect. Even characters that describe themselves as “hardened” or “jaded” are not immune to gaining depravity in this fashion; indeed, one could argue that being extremely hardened to or jaded about the suffering of others is a sign of one gaining depravity.

Exposure to areas warped by evil
Whether due to the presence of demons, foul creatures from the Far Realms, or simply areas forever marred by evil of a less supernatural variety (such as the execution of an innocent man by a corrupt court, or the shack where a serial killer went to hide his “conquests”) can result in character’s gaining corruption through no fault of their own.

Typically, there are only certain areas in the blighted zone that bestow corruption (the area around the altar where innocents were sacrificed to dread gods), but in the cases of extreme blights, every square foot of the area might potentially bestow corruption. This corruption is typically applied to a character after a certain length of time and isaccompanied by a feeling of instinctive disgust that warn both the player and his or her character that it would be wise to spend as little time in the location as possible.

Certain sanity-rending locations that warp the minds of those who travel through them, like an area tainted by the energies of the Far Realm might very well bestow depravity instead as character’s minds break under the strain of sights alien to any sane man or woman.

Exposure to dread items
While tools and weapons both magical and mundane have no moral significance in and of themselves, the uses they are put to or the techniques used in their creation can sometimes result in them being a vessel of corruption or depravity.

A blade carved from the bones of a whimpering slave carries with it an imprint of the suffering of the one who “donated” the material for the blade and might whisper words of condemnation and hatred to a character who chooses to carry it, slowly increasing his or her depravity. A weapon wielded by a demonic general or an unknowable Far Realm entity might have acquired some of its master’s inhuman corruption, and might plague a wielder with disgusting growths. Then of course, there are weapons and other items specifically crafted by mad cultists or vindictive spell casters that slowly drive their wielders insane with lust for power, or that cause them to rot from the inside out.

Mental Condition –

Treacherous
Foul whispers cloud your mind with images of what you could receive if you struck your companions down. Once per encounter when an ally leaves a space that you threaten, the DM may choose to roll an attack with an attack bonus of your level +3 vs. the will defence of your character to represent the urge to take an opportunity to strike. If the attack is successful, you must make an opportunity attack against your ally. The upside is that your treacherous leanings make it easier to stab others in the back-you gain a +2 bonus to damage against creatures that you have combat advantage against.

Physical Condition

Internal Corruption (Ranked, maximum 3)

Your body is slowly consumed from the inside out by the corruption growing within you. While others cannot see it, it’s effects are all too obvious-for each level of this symptom taken you regain 2 fewer hit points from a second wind and take a -1 penalty to endurance checks. However, the festering growths within your body make you unappetizing to creatures that might otherwise want to make a meal out of you. If a living creature makes a bite attack against you that deals damage, it takes a -1 penalty to all attack rolls and skill checks for each time you have selected this symptom, until the end of its next turn.

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“The wardings of that accursed place hold true still.  They sap my powers more than imagined I.”  A second voice was definitely feminine, a caressing shiver of a voice that spoke of silk and whispers and promises of shadows and touch.

The first figure shrugged with a sinuous wave of its body, “I do not know stay shall I.  My freedom is enjoyable.” The figure gestured idly and nearby a man dressed in the uniform of the Larkson Watch drew a knife across his throat, the cut joining many many others on his body.  As the last of his life’s blood fountained as a scarlet ribbon in the air he slumped to the ground.  Only to rise moments later, dead eyes focused on its master.

The feminine voice changed in a flicker turning into a thing of razors and pain, “Mine husband you shall see free or your usefulness is at an end, know this Phy’el Fleshwalker.”

The corpse white skin of the first split open as the second’s words played over it, bloodless flesh gaping open. With no sign of pain upon its face it smiled slightly and nodded, “An it pleases you my queen.”

The voice, once again silken caresses, “Keep up the pressure on the wards.  Use the humans as you can to subvert them.  The Accursed One’s guardians seek to undo our release and attend to them I need.” Wings of green fire erupted from the second’s back and the body elongated.  The grass for yards around wisped into ash as it rose into the air with a lazy beat of her wings.  Hovering for a moment the solid black eyes looked down at him, “And use your command over the dead and flesh to recover Krag’s animus and restore him.  I do not wish my beloved to be deprived of his personal guard.”

Phy’el turned his head to follow the figure, using the heat of it to track it while the eyes of his head, boiled and burst in the first instants of the wings coming out and caressing his body, slowly regenerated. “Some day my queen.  Some day…”

Ranks of motionless figures jerked in unison minutes later as a single cry of raw anger and rage ripped through the air.  With a crook of his finger he summoned one of them to him.

“I hear you’re asking for Shuk.” Dra’kin started as a voice spoke behind him, the staff of wood he was carving slipping out of his hand and rolling across the worktable. He turned to see one of Shuk’s halflings, Keri he was almost sure.

“Yes, I wanted to check on her, it’s been a couple of days since I’ve seen her and I wanted to make sure she’s all right.”

“That’s why she has me.  Me and Meri. To make sure she’s alright. She went up stream with Meri to Forge.”

“Oh?  Why?”  Dra’kin gestured to a nearby chair and sat on the edge of his bed.

Keri shook her head, “Guild business.  I’m sure you understand.”

“When’s she coming back?”

“Guild business.” the halfling thief replied.

“Uh, okay.  When she gets back could you tell her I’d like to see her.”

“I’ll give her the message.”

“Great.  Are you hungry?  My treat. The council came through with a little gold to thank us for our ‘efforts’ in looking into the murders and for driving the creature out of the temple.”

She shook her head, “No thanks, I’ve got to look into some things.  You can’t give people a chance to get momentum or your place in the order of things becomes at risk.”

There was a tap on the door and moments later it opened revealing Torel standing there, “Hey we’re going to go over to… Well hey there.  Meri?  Keri?”

“Keri.  Meri’s with Shuk who’s…” Dra’kin paused as Keri shook her head slightly, “…busy right now.”

“Mi’lady Keri would you care to join us for the evening meal?” Torel asked with a slight bow.

“Thanks but no, I must be off.” she replied.

“Perhaps next time then.”

“Maybe.  Later Dra’kin.” Keri said, flashing him a look, a warning in it.  Torel stood aside to let her leave, coming further into the room.

“So what about you?  Hungry?”

“Sure, let me get my pouch.”

“So what’s up with Shuk?”

Dra’kin grimaced, “Guild business. Don’t think I’m supposed to talk about it.”

Torel shrugged “Okay, just being polite.  We’re going to try some place that Stak found down on the docks.  Swears they have a fish stew to die for.  Personally I think it’s not the stew but the person bringing it that he thinks is to die for.”

Dra’kin rolled his eyes, “Okay I guess.  But if there’s another gods damned drunken brawl this is the last time I’m letting any of you pick a place to eat.”

Torel protested, “Hey those were all Biminey’s fault!  Him and that damn hand of his trying to steal drinks from drunks.”

“I’m just saying, your fault, my fault, nobody’s fault. I have to jump through another window to avoid being thrown through it and I’m going to burn someone’s pubes off.”  Hellfire flickered to life on the finger he was pointing at Torel.  A sympathetic light pulsed in red crystal in a silver mount on his worktable casting a red glow onto the room.

Torel held his hands up with an innocent look, “Hey hey watch that thing!”

Dra’kin closed his fingers into a fist, the action causing the flames to go out, “Just remember what I said.  Now let’s go I’m hungry enough to eat even bad food now.”

Torel clapped him on the shoulder, then pulling his hand back as Dra’kin stopped to look at it. “Right right, the warlock that walks alone. Come one.”

Dra’kin’s eyes narrowed as the avenger of Kord walked ahead of him, a thoughtful look on his face for a moment before clearing.

In the shadows across the street two figures stirred, one stepping out to follow the warlock and avenger down the street, the other slipping away down an alley.

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[Sorry for the delay on the session report and podcasts.  Busy at home and work and Life intruding and all that.]

This session saw the inclusion of a bard, a gnome by the name of Dash, seeking to record the exploits of the “only known survivors of a slaver kidnapping!!!” who met up with them at their tavern but I get ahead of myself.

Present were Biminey, Dra’kin, Elisssa, Stak, Torel and temporary guest star – Dash.

We start our journey with the quints getting back to town from their voyage down to darkmith.  There’s a lot of questions, answers, no answers and the like going on for the first few hours of the session.  The group discovers that for the last few nights a gruesome murder has taken place.  They’re unable to uncover any pattern to the murders, they seem to be random serial killings.  Each body and most times there were multiples, was dismembered and an odd lack of blood was found at each scene.  No one noticed the murders even though in one case it was performed at a whorehouse with thin walls and crowded clientelle.

They interact with the priests of Eris and the Captain of the Watch as well as the council about their past, present and future activities.

The researchers at Eris have a possible solution for Torn.  An old healing temple, now in Hobgoblin lands might be able to channel healing energies still through a simulacrum back to Torn.  Getting there might be a problem though.

A bloodied woman and child arrive at the town and they witness this and join in on the investigation. They determine that both woman and child have been impacted by arcane/necrotic energies and only after the energies are cleansed at the Eris temple’s circle are they able to get anything more than the White Man from the hysterical woman and catatonic child.  A ritual is performed and the woman reveals that a white figure she remembers it as a skeletal unearthly figure while the child remembers it as a man in white robes entered their village a day earlier and brought the dead to life and had them descend upon the villagers doing horrible things to them.  The two of them were then sent to the town to summon aid.

Unfortunately this information was uncovered after the town watch sent out a squad of men.  Once it was known it was a trap, at least the PC’s beleive it to be one, two additional watch were sent after the first squad to warn them but they had several hours head start and it’s unlikely they’ll catch up in time.

A day passes, the group on watch on the city walls but no ‘army of undead’ shows up.  The captain of the watch sends out two squads of the watch’s elite units although the group tries to persuade him otherwise.

The group determines that the murdered bodies are oddly drained of life energies, even dead flesh has some life to it.

Oddly Dra’kin has a hard time finding his girlfriend Shuk during the initial two days they’re back in town.

Anotehr thing of note is it’s been cloudy for the last 10 days, roughly equal to the time that whatever happened in Darkmith happened.

Two of the group were headed to the Temple of Eris to talk to Sushanna when they met her in the street outside.  The vault doors to the forbidden archives were locked, from the inside and although there were three priests in there no one was answering.  The rest of the group was summoned to investigate adn found the vault door sealed by magic.  While Dash got the door open, a summons was sent to the town watch but with the door opened it revealed a odd arcane circle floating in midair at the bottom of the steps.

The group went down into the forbidden vaults and uncovered a powerful female who summoned deamonic pets through multiple portals floating in air.  She was apparently searching for something as there were scrolls scattered everywhere.

While she kept the group busy with the four deamons and a golem crafted up from scrolls and bits of broken tables and stones she continued her search but as her pets dropped she was forced into the combat.

She fled as the combat turned against her, unable to flee through her own portals as they had grown unstable from the arcanic energies released during the fight she was forced to flee through the streets but was easily able to make her escape.

All in all the 5-6 hour session was split fairly equally between roleplay and fighting. The fight did take longer than I was hoping for, with 6 players at the table and 4 standards, 1 elite and 1 solo it was unfortunately an issue.  But the fight wasn’t geared for minions IMO and frankly this group has multiple minion killer powers so to make it a challenge I’d have to pump up the count.   THere is another fight though where this might apply…

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Night Sky

Interlude – At Sea

The sound of sobbing drew him to the bow of the boat.  THe moon’s light was dim, hidden behind clouds.  Thank the gods that they were normal clouds, not the swirling banks of dark grey clouds lit from within by green flaring lights that they’d left behind at the ancient city of Darkmith.

Tucked into shadow behind two bales of fishing net, Torel found the girl sitting on the gunwhale, feet up on a bale and clutched to her chest.  She was rocking back and forth crying quietly. If the seas had been any rougher than the millpond it was currently he feared she’d have gone over the edge long ago.

Slowly he eased up to sit next to her, keeping just enough space between them to be able to grab her if she went too far back. “Hey,” he spoke softly, gently,”how’s it going?”

The girl’s muffled voice came softly from where it was buried between her knees. “I don’t want to die.  Things keep happening to me and I think I’m going to die and then other things happen and suddenly I’m not and I’m just so tired of it.  I’ve got this… thing inside me, I saw what it did, I don’t want to …” Her tear covered face looked up at him and she reached out to grab his arm in a grip that would leave a ring of bruises around his forearm. “Swear to me, swear on your life, on everything you hold dear in this world and the next that if this thing in me…if something happens…swear that you’ll end the pain.”

Torel didn’t, couldn’t look away from the fierceness of the girl’s gaze and found himself nodding, “Aye, Soozin.  This I swear on my life and my faith, if it comes to that, I will… stop the pain.”

For several long moments the girl was silent, eyes gazing into those of the holy warrior of Kord then she nodded and said simply, “Thank you.”

He moved closer, then hesitantly put an arm around her shoulders.  She leaned into him and he held her, offering what comfort he could.

They sat in silence that way, the salt taste of the water in the air, the gentle breezes from the south, warm and comforting blowing across the ship with the snap of the sails and the creak of rope and pulleys adding their own melody to the night.  Her tears like small raindrops rolling over his forearm.

Then the girl began to speak, voice calm as she watched the water flow past.  Telling him of her life, of growing up the daughter of a seamtress, her father lost at sea.  Of her hopes at the spring festival of finding someone, of her home and her brother, lost in Darkmith. Of Torn’s caring for her and their plans for the future.

“You said Torn was hurt but that the temple priests were going to fix him.  Was that the truth?”

Torel sighed heavily, “As far as I know little one. The temple has vast stores of knowledge and they seemed hopeful they would be able to find a way to heal him.  His brain was hurt during the attack and that’s the part they aren’t sure about.  I’ve seen those who’ve been damaged in such a fashion and I’ve seen them lay in a deep sleep for weeks and then come out of it.”

“And sometimes they don’t.”

“Aye, sometimes.”

“Thank you for the truth on that.”

“We’ll do everything we can for him, I hope you know the truth in that as well.  It’s only another two days and we should be home.  Gods willing he’ll be up and around and waiting for you.”

“The gods will as they will.  Damned be them all.” she said bitterly looking up at the skies.  “By all… what is that?” she whispered.

His eyes turned up as she gasped. A shadow was crossing through clouds overhead, outlined in green fire, the outline was that of a man but with abnormally long legs and arms and giant tattered shadow wings that beat the clouds into a frenzy at its passing.  Fragments of green fire dripped from those wings like water splattering into a rain puddle and each drop burned a section of the clouds away.  It soared without sound, significantly faster than the ship could sail, moving in a weaving graceful pattern, leaving wispy burned away clouds in its wake. 

Rooted to the spot they watched it, unable to look away as it sailed far ahead of the ship and then with a swirling loop it turned inland and vanished in the distance.

A deep terror filled the girl’s eyes as they shook off the spell.  “Do you…?”

Torel shook his head slowly, “No.  But I fear by all that I know that this does bodes dreadful ill for the future.  I fear those meddling fools may have doomed us all with what they’ve unleashed.”

He stood, helping the girl to her feet, “Come we must tell the others of this.”

Source Image

Biminey exits the temple of the Artificers with the knowledge that he can get the group into the grounds without being attacked by making amulets for them that are essentially visitor’s passes to coin an anachronistic term.  He’s also found reference to the rituals and methods needed to repair the elemental ship as well as reference to override controller amulets, a kind of master key, that can be attuned to an airship for the purposes of controlling it much like the original 6 amulets were created during it’s construction.

The group enters the temple grounds and are ignored by the constructs which are going about their programmed business of fighting delaying tactics against the wear and tear of time. Many constructs stand or lie broken and worn out. Bolter turrets mounted in certain areas spark and crackle, malfunctioning while others turn to follow the groups movements.

Down a long flight of stairs they find the outer vault chamber.  The outer door is standing ajar, the inner door is sealed tight.  The sinking of the city into the swamp though, has destroyed part of the wall and there is enough room for the group to squeeze through.

They drop down into a series of hallways, lit by light crystals, panels roughly 4′ x 4′ that are inset into the walls.  The flooring is covered in 6″ of water.  As Elissa steps into one of the three hallways leading out the wall crystals start a slow pulse.   When Torel tries to follow the lights start a rapid pulsing and there’s the sound of metal on metal as doors start to go up around the complex.

Constructs start to appear, some spider like with nozzles for mouths that fire sticky webbing, others childlike in size with razored claws and containers of some fluid that lead to large needles embedded into their palms.  The creatures show up scattered out over the course of several rounds though and with the use of corners to prevent being surrounded, focus fire and especially the use of Elisssa’s lighting based breath, Stak’s Azurian longsword which deals lightning damage and Biminey’s Lightning Sphere the constructs are taken down without any of the party going down.

[DM's Note: It hit me after the session that Dra'kin should really be up in front soaking damage.  He has hit points as high as any of the group, a huge number of surges and Hellish Rebuke requires him to get hit to be truly effective. ]

The group investigates the area after the fight, finding mostly decayed and destroyed by damp furnishings, equipment and miscellaneous items.  Dra’kin is blasted by bolter fire as he steps up to open a locked door but the two wall mounted bolters inside are swiftly destroyed.  The room appears to have once held racks of some objects, long gone at this point and was apparently important enough to have secondary defenses with the bolters mounted up on the walls inside.

Down one hallway they discover the end of it has broken apart and light is gleaming from under the water.  As they move closer to look it over, the vines and mosses that have invaded in from the swamp come to live and stand up.  It shoots a cloud of spores that catch the entire party and they all rush forward in fascination to end adjacent to the creature.  Thorny vines swarm up their bodies against the party, all hit with only Dra’kin avoiding the vines as he shakes off the fascination.  Hollow pointed thorns on the vines plunge into their bodies, restraining them and draining them of blood.  [Fairly nasty creature I came up with.  Burst 6 pull as a minor then burst 3 that restrains and inflicts 10 ongoing damage (save ends) which is why I only had the one creature in this fight.  I also had three 20's in a row during this fight.  Unfortunately for me the 20's didn't actually do anything extra as it was just to apply the ongoing 10 and restrain effects.  Damnit.]

They uncover a way through the broken earth and stone and emerge into a vast chamber piled high with crates, timbers and building materials.  Naturally suspicious they use Dra’kin’s familiar to scout the area spotting a large form lying in wait behind a pile of crates.  They move to attack and as they do so there’s a roar of another creature on the far side of the chamber.

Two dragonlike constructs although without wings are enjoined in the fight.  Over the course of the fight two more constructs, comprised of chains and spikes drop into view from above.  Again the party’s tactics have improved and they focus their anger and damage onto single targets for the most part although twice they bunch up nicely and are subject to burst attacks that catch more than one person at a time.  Their sound fire control and especially the lightning damage pull it out although once or twice someone in the party goes down but is brought back up again to re-enter the fray.

During the fight a large quake throws everyone to the ground and the roof high overhead splits open, it was designed to do that so the elemental ships could be lowered into it but the holding mechanism fractures and it opens up partially.

They search the area and uncover two small containers of residium worth 10,000 gold, a master override amulet and enough specialized artificer gear to proceed with the repair and control of the air ship. They also see on a magical map a green dot among many red ones that appears to be nearing the coast line before it gives up the ghost destroyed by the quake.

The exit the chamber by climbing up through the roof [They didn't check but if they had they would have found the water passage now blocked from the quake]

Outside they find the temple structures had suffered serious damage and the constructs are too busy repairing to pay them any attention even if they were so inclined.

Overhead the clouds are boiling, a vicious greenish black tinge to them that cast the city into dark shadow although miles away the skies are clear.  Their first though is that the priests of Eris have breached the tomb of Larkson.  Dra’kin and Biminey both note that a subtle arcanic pressure over the city is now gone.

Rather than resting to recover, their recent activities have left them tired and worn out, they proceed to head to the coastline at the fastest possible route which is through the city.   The city creatures seem to have their hands full and they’re unaccosted.

Hearing the sounds of hunting hounds they swing to the side to investigate and find Merik (Merkin) treed up on top of a pillar while savage dog like creatures snarl and bite from below.   The party is detected and the hounds vanish into the rubble.  The high priest falls, impaling himself on a fence that surrounds the pillar.  The party arrives just in time to read his lips as he dies, “I didn’t know… gods forgive…”

They search him claiming a crystalline fragment on an amulet around his neck and continue their mad dash to the coast.

Passing through what they thought was merely an overgrown plaza turns out to be instead a grave.  One of the tomb doors shatters exploding and a giant abomination of a creature climbs out.  Standing 12′ tall, its guts hang out, wrapping around his torso, writhing like snakes.  It is Krag the Butcher, storied creature of a dark past.  It spies the party and calls forth its minions which claw their way from not so warded anymore imprisonment and the attack is on.

Stak does a good job of keeping the minions cleared out as they arrive in waves as they make their way up through the earth covering them while the rest pound on Krag. It’s a tough fight but they eventually put him down, even as Torel lies dying on the ground and Biminey after being encased in Krag’s grasping intestines is only released shy of death at the creature’s being killed.

Or so they thought as Krag rises again.  With the most wounded scrambling away, the rest continue to batter the abomination into the ground, this time spending the time and effort it takes to dismember the corpse before they consider it dead.

Almost dead from exhaustion and the toll of being on the go, fighting, sneaking and moving quickly for 24 hours they climb into the vacant tomb of Krag and rest while Stak stands watch.

They recover Krag’s Blood Sink Bracers and his Flensing Axe from the body and tomb.

[They were almost completely out of surges across the party, most were down below half health and of course their dailies were long spent.  All in all I think I got this balance of fight series just about perfect.  See the end of the post for the Blood Sink bracers]

They continue their cautious rush through the city to reach the beach.  There they find three men, emissaries of the slavers, waiting with what turned out to be Soozin.  The elemental ship is in tow on two ships and is disapearing on the horizon.  A third smaller ship lies in the harbor while a ship’s boat is on the beach.

The slavers want knowledge of how to control the elemental ship and they offer Biminey a kings ransom in gold, slaves and power if he has the knowledge and gives it to them.  They believe they will be able to figure it out eventually but they’re not patient men.

During the discourse the emissary which turns out to be nothing more than a slave dressed in finery arranges a deal with the group, one of the options he was given to offer is if Biminey doesn’t know how to control the ship, if they uncover it and provide the deal will still stand.   Biminey though has already told them he knows how to do it.  The slave has heard their plans and realizes that most scenarios end with him dead so he counteroffers.  He’ll go back and tell the Overmage on the ship that Biminey doesn’t know yet and will work on it but, and he indicates the two guards which are actually just ship’s cooks, he can’t afford witnesses.  Without a second thought, Biminey and Elisssa fry the two where they stand using his Lightning Sphere and her breath weapon.

The slave hands over a bottle, instructing them that Soozin has to have one drop in water a day or she’ll die. In comes out that he as well has been ‘infected’.

[They assume the girl has been poisoned but it's nastier than that.  They've both been infested with a parasite that's kept dormant by the liquid.  If it wakens it spawns immediately and hundreds of it's spawn burrow their way out of the host over the course of a few of the most painful agonizing last minutes of your life.  This will come out as they talk to Soozin on the trip home.]

The slave rows back to the ship and the group sets off overland, following the coast where they come across the ship that brought The priests of Eris to the area.  They arrange a deal to go back to the city on the boat and learn some boating skills of their own along the way.

Podcast should go out this week sometime.

Modified Image created by me from this one

Subscribe to the feed – http://www.keyourcars.com/feed/podcast/

Also available through iTunes.

Subscribe to the feed – http://www.keyourcars.com/feed/podcast/

Also available through iTunes.

Subscribe to the feed – http://www.keyourcars.com/feed/podcast/

Also available through iTunes.

I’ve also run volume equalization on the sound files such that everyone should be the same volume regardless of where they are in relation to the mic.  This may have a detrimental effect of enhancing background chatter in some locations but we’ll see how it goes.

The podcast files are ready, I just need to schedule some time with my announcer to do the recap and lead in for me and then put some public domain back beat under her.

My molding efforts are steadily showing fruition.  I’ve run easily 20-30 moldings, with Laura’s help, of the ones I own and the bags of pieces are growing at a steady rate.  Since I really want all the pieces to be color matching I’m not going to even consider painting until I have way more than I need for what I want to do with them.

I may start considering my basing options though in the near future.  I am going to be going with low walls for viewing purposes which will also help with the obvious (to me) seaming issues with the fieldstone.  I may try to come up with a technique to help minimize that as well using some kind of filler materials here and there to break up the horizontal seams.  I’m also going with a more modular approach than the one posted on Hirst’s web site for flexibility’s sake at the cost of set up time.

In regards to the painting, I’ve been perusing various other people’s efforts in painting and IMO too many of them are following Hirst’s color schemes to the letter and as a result they all look identical.  And, again my opinion only, those colors are hard to get realistic especially if they’re the only coloring you apply.  The color values are too separated and garish and too bright.  Part of the problem is I believe that the molds overly emphasize the texture. I do though realize that roughness to scale would be invisible at standard viewing ranges much like it is now if you stand and look at a brick wall from 100 feet away but I think a more subtle color scheme would work better and then use washes to highlight the texture could look better.

I aspire to this kind of coloring/shading (images pulled from this thread where you should go look if you have any artistic appreciation.  Absolutely gorgeous game board in the making for HeroQuest):

Floor Tile Coloring

Wall Shading

Not this (Image from Hirst Arts) :

Speckled

In other news I see I’ve surpassed a quarter million unique visitors since this site initially went live with this inaugural post on April 21st, 2007.

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Familiar's Eye view of the temple

Interlude – Temple of Artificers

Biminey looked up, cocking his head.  The sound came again, the voice of one of Torel calling from outside the complex.  He put down the scroll he was reading and removed the glasses.  Rubbing his forehead he waited for the headache to go away making yet another mental note to work on the plan for the translation goggles, one that wouldn’t leave him feeling like a foot long spike was being shoved through his head each time he took them off after using them for more than a few minutes.

But without them the scrolls would be nothing more than scribbles and strange alphabets. He tossed the scroll into his pack where it joined a growing selection.  The ancient outbuildings of the temple of artificers had proven to be a wealth of information of curious natures of his craft.  Reluctantly he’d marked several an collected them but had no plans for taking them.  There was only so much space in his pack after all.

Head only pounding now rather than splitting he went outside, grabbing a silvered spear he’d found next to a jumble of parts that had once been one of the spear constructs.  Night had fallen while he was reading and the moon shone down giving the courtyard a silvery blue tint.   He headed to the gate, his feet making soft noises on the heavy stone tiles filling the inside of the temple walls.

“What?  I didn’t catch that?” he yelled over the wall.

Torel’s voice came back, “Just checking on you, we’ve found a good place to set up, it’s about 50 yards south, southwest of the gate.  Some walls are still standing and give us some concealment but we can still keep an eye on the gate.”

“Great, I’ll find a place in here to get some rest and keep at it!  There’s a lot of information here to go through but I’ve found a building that holds a lot of rituals and knowledge that seems to be specifically with the air ships!”

“Fantastic!  Okay scream if you run into a problem and we’ll stand here and mourn you appropriately.”

“What a friend you are!” Biminey called back laughing.

“Get to work!  It’s cold out here!  And there are dark priests!”

“Riiiiight!”

The artificer went back in, the building he was currently rummaging through looked very promising as many of the scrolls held illustrations of various ships and ship components. With a sigh at the upcoming pain, he slipped the glasses back on and continued his search.  The hours came and went as he scanned scroll after scroll, the building headache looming larger and larger.

Finally he found it, a set of scrolls outlining how to make field repairs to elemental ships and another set that outlined the control mechanisms.  He scooped them all up, hugging them to his chest before storing them carefully into his pack, pulling out several of the others that he’d collected to make room.

Even tensing in anticipation did nothing to prepare him for the shattering white pain that ripped through his head as he removed the glasses and he was literally driven to his knees by the pain.  As darkness took him, he though, “Perhaps I won’t wear them so long next time.”

Sun was shining through the windows as he woke up, groggy and disoriented and for a few moments unaware of where he was.  Panic set in momentarily before the memories came crashing back.   His head was pounding still and it was the work of several minutes before he was able to climb to his feet. And several minutes longer before he realized that the sun was slanting in from the wrong direction.  It was almost evening again with morning come and gone.

“Biminey!?  HEY!!!” called an urgent voice from outside.

He stumbled out, pausing to lean against the door frame.  It took a couple of tries before his voice worked and then he replied, “I’m okay!”

“Baphomat wept!  For the gods sake man, we’ve been calling all day!  Dra’kin lost his little eye familiar trying to see inside and we didn’t know if you were alive or dead!” It was Elisssa’s voice that came back.

“I’m alive!  Mostly! Over did it a little and… never mind!  I’m okay!”

“Don’t worry us like that! Did you find anything!?”

“Right, found something.”  He remembered now what he’d been reading right before he’d dropped and his eyes widened, “Found something?!  I found EXACTLY what we needed!  Let me collect my stuff and I’ll figure out a way to get out of here.”

Gear in hand he headed toward the gate, a panel on the wall inside that he’d seen earlier glowed with a soft pale light much like the light of the crystalline windows of the tower on the island, the gleaming controls of the air ship and the crystal plaque near the tomb of Larkson.  At his command his familiar emerged from from a pouch at his waist and he picked it up and placed it on the panel.  The massive gate slowly began to shift open and he walked through it.

His friends stood just out of range of the guardian bolters atop the walls and waited for him.  Biminey held up his pack, “Got what we need, well I know what we need to do and where we need to find it.”

“Great, where to?”

“First I need to make you some passes that will get you into the grounds.  I found the ritual on how to make a amulet that will get you into the grounds without triggering the defense systems.”

Dra’kin spoke slowly, “And why do we need to get into the temple?”

“Because we’re going to raid the vaults under it of course.”

“Raid the vaults… say that again?”

“I found scrolls that tell me how to repair the damage done to the ship at least enough to get it moving again.  For that I’m going to need residium.  An ass load of residium.  And I’m betting we can find it in the residium vaults under the temple.  We’re also going to need an override amulet of control.  These are also stored for safekeeping in the vaults under the temple.”

“What’s that do?” Stak asked.

“With that I’ll be able to direct the elementals powering the airship and we’ll be able to fly that bad boy anywhere we want.  We’ll be gods damned kings of the world with that thing under our control.”

“Riiiiight…” Torel said rolling his eyes. “Until someone steals it.”

“Or sets it on fire with arrows.” Elisssa chimed in.

“Or he crashes it into a tower.” Stak added.

“Or a….” Dra’kin started to say.

“Enough! I get the point.”  Biminey int erupted wryly.

Elisssa snorted, “Someone has to keep you down to earth. So we just waltz down to the vaults, grab what we need and we’re off to save our ship.  The ship we don’t know where it is?”

“Exactly.  Well maybe not quite that… easily.”

Torel sighed, “So what are we looking at?”

“The amulets I can make should get…”

“Should?!” Dra’kin sputtered.

Biminey continued on, “should get you all onto the grounds and into the main temple.  In there we’ll find an entrance that leads down to the vault.  I should…”

“There’s that word again…And by the way I need a new eye construct.”

“I should be able to get us through that door without a problem.”

Stak asked, “But?”

“The vaults probably have a few safe guards on them.  You know to keep people from doing what we’re wanting to do.  On the plus side, the place is falling apart. There are bits and pieces of constructs laying all over the place where they just gave out.  The nine spearmen that came out?  Those are probably the last working ones.  I got this spear from a pile of parts just inside the door.”

Torel held up a hand and started checking off fingers, “So, just to sum up, you get us into the temple maybe.  We find the entrance to these vaults. We fight our way past guardians, traps and whatever else they might throw on the pile.  That may or may not be working.  We break into the vaults. Damn ran out of fingers. Steal the temple’s loot.  Figure out where our ship is.  Go get it from whoever took it.  Fix it.  And then you pilot us out home again.  Where the city council is probably dying to try and take it away from us not to mention everyone else with a sword and a desire for the power such a ship would give them.”

Biminey grinned, “Yep, that about covers it.  So.  Are you in?”

Torel grinned back, “Of course.”

Image Credits

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Mold 85 has some hard pieces to get to come out correctly.   A lot of very narrow parts, especially the small bucket is giving me problems in getting the mold filled and a couple of other pieces are also inconsistent in their turn out.   But it gives them character and helps reduce the ‘clone’ effect.  I guess.

Mold 71 has a couple of problem pieces, some fiddly curved bits that are for window moldings I think that if I’m not extremely careful unmolding snap in half.  I could wait longer I suppose for the plaster to harden more but I’ll just have to be more careful I think.  I’ve probably only gotten 4 or 5 of these pieces intact out of last nights work and should have 10 at this point.

Molds 70, 75 and 201 don’t give me any problems, easy to fill, scrape and demold.

My piles of pieces are building slowly but surely.  I’ve run about 10 moldings of 3 to 4 molds at a time and the bits and pieces are starting to pile up.  There’s going to be an ass load of excess pieces though that I probably will never use.   The tiny triangles and such on the floor mold springs to mind as well as some of the more esoteric curvy bits.

Image Copyright Hirst Arts

So yesterday I finally got set up, on our dining room table of all places, it’s just been brutally cold here so the garage was out and I didn’t want to use our gaming table and didn’t want to set up another table as a considerable portion of the house is still carpeted and I imagine plaster spilled on carpet is probably a bad idea so the dining room was confiscated.

I’m using Merlin’s Magic as the plaster, it was the most recommended in terms of being user friendly while still being crazy strong.  I mixed it up per the recommended settings on the HA site to-wit 30 grams of water by weight to 186 grams of plaster.   It mixed up pretty well over all.  It’s damn pricey though, mostly due to shipping costs and I’m going to try to find Hydrostone locally or within a reasonable drive which usually goes for $40 per 100lbs.  MM is $40 for 50 lbs and shipping doubles the cost or more.

I’d cleaned my molds and spritzed them with ‘wet water’ and now poured them, actually Laura and I both poured.   I poured multiple times and ended up with the scraping method being preferable right now.  I also scraped within a couple of minutes of pouring for best results after trial and error.  Waiting the recommended six minutes resulted in the plaster being too set to scrape easily.

I also tried the ‘glass’ method where you take a piece of glass (I used plexiglass) and lay it down on the molds starting at one edge to squeeze the excess plaster out.  Unfortunately I had issues with air bubbles and weighting and all that.   I tried it twice (6 molds altogether) and one or two came out good, the others had bubbles or I ended up with ‘tall’ parts because the glass wasn’t in full contact with the top of the mold in all locations.  The first time I used water bottles which had the advantage of letting me see what was going on but weren’t evenly weighted.  The second time I used bricks so I couldn’t see just how tight the glass was to the mold top.

I may try again with thick glass that would be flexless rather than plexiglass.  But the scraping is working for me as well.

Realistically I could make probably 3 runs an hour if I wanted to really push it and with my current set up time perhaps 4 maybe 5 molds at one time.   Of course a lot of this is sit and wait time so if you had a lot of molds you could certainly be busy all the time with weighing plaster and water, scraping, demolding the finished pieces etc.

So now I have 4 or 5 runs of my 3 molds from last night and will probably do several more especially of the standard flagstone wall pieces and the floor tiles.  I’m not sure how much of the rest I’ll need right now.

The express purpose of all this is to build modular layouts in full 3D for playing purposes much like this but at much reduced cost long term. Dwarven Forge stuff is extremely nice looking but just too pricey for a many (myself included).  Although if you only need a smallish setup then it’s probably more cost effective to go that route than buy your molds and plaster.  But nowhere near as fun.   As an example you could buy this set up from Dwarven Forge for $109+Shipping or you could buy two molds from Hirst Arts, a wall and a floor mold and a box of plaster for the same money and make about 5 times as many pieces.  And after you go through one box of plaster the next set of 5x the bits and pieces is half the cost because you already have your molds.   And you can create your bits and pieces at the height you want, example I’m going to have short walls so it’s easier to see things especially since the map section on my gaming table is high.

All in all the process was pretty simple, a few bits of trial and error as temperture of ambient, molds, water and the  color of plaster and the humidity all have an effect on your plaster and dictate the times needed to wait to scrape off the excess plaster and how long it takes to demold and I’d bet bubble severity.

So if you have some time to spare and the cash to outlay (spread it out among your players as well) and of course the interest then these molds and techniques might be something to consider to raise the bar at your table.

I tracked down a full set of ’stuff’ that you can print out to play the game over here but it seems like this includes a lot of ‘non-original’ material as well as modified original material.  Of course not having any experience with the original I’m not sure if it’s better, worse or the same.

Anyway, at cursory glance it seems kind of like a cross between Dungeon Twister and Munchkin Quest in that there are board pieces like Dungeon Twister and it’s PVP with lots of cards like Munchkin Quest.  The basic premise each player owns a sector of the map where his two treasures are stored.  To win you have to go steal other wizard’s treasures while preventing them from doing the same thing to you.  To accomplish this goal you create/destroy part of the maps, summon creatures to do your evil bidding and directly attack your opponents.

Because it’s a random draw game, random chance probably has a huge impact on the games outcome but playing your cards at the opportune times probably helps offset this.

Qualifies as a ‘beer and pretzels’ game in that the rules are fairly simple and the games last from 15 to 60 minutes.  Supports 2 – 6 players although with more map sections you should be able to support more although play time would increase I’m sure.

I would imagine you could also play ‘teams’ by dividing the players up and then increasing the requirements to win as needed.

Anyway, I like board games and now own HA molds so I’m going to be giving this a try.

They can tell they’re traveling through town, their own obviously as there are none close enough for their travel time. Then the wagons stop moving and there are a couple of thuds, the wagons shake a bit and next thing they know they’re being released from their captivity by Meri (or is it Keri?) along with some of Shuk’s thugs.  One of the thugs drops a bundle of weapons, maces, longswords and hand bows and the group arms itself.  They’re weakened by their captivity and their first response is to go back to their inn where they raid the kitchen.

While they’re eating one of Shuk’s people comes looking for Shuk and passes on the information that “I seen four men go into the house where yer friend Torn is living with that girl of his.  Shuk asked us to keep an eye on him.  Three of them was sailors I think the other one had chain on…”

The group rushes off to help their friend.  They get to the boarding house to find an elderly woman dead on the bottom floor, apparently in the middle of cooking breads for the day’s meals.  They ease upstairs where they find several empty rooms, one body and then the room of their friend.

A warding of Silence has been chalked on the door as determined by Dra’kin.  He broke the warding and it released its energies in a psychic blast that encompassed most of the group.

Inside there’s been a big battle, three men, sailors by their look lie dead, cut up on the floor.  Torn is in a heap in one corner of the room, his left hand and part of his forearm missing.  Left for dead he apparently managed to loop a thong over the stump before he bled out completely and is unconcious but alive.  His head took a grevious blow though and it doesn’t look good for him.

Biminey healed him enough to stablize him and stop the bleeding.  They noticed the bed sheets were missing and bloody handprints leading out the window.

Leaving by the window they followed the trail around the balcony that ran around the upper story and into an alley way behind.  Signs indicate that someone dropped a body from the upper floor but that it was probably still alive at that time.  The fourth attack is presumed wounded as he or she is leaving bloody hand prints and a blood trail.

The trail heads downhill through the town and the group heads for the docks, they believe they know who it is, someone from the trade ship, slavers they think at the docks.

They’re stopped by a strange figure, a unusually non-descript looking person but as he smiles he reveals a mouth of teeth filed into points. He let’s them know he’s glad he’s found them and whistles for reinforcements. Elisssa believes that he may be concealed by illusion as to his real appearance and several people note a goblin like cadence to his bad Common.   Meri and Keri, show up at this time dropping from the roofs on either side, apparently they’d been tracking this gentleman.   Meri tells the gentleman that they don’t approve of ‘outside contractors’ and tells the group to go on, they’ll deal with this one.  The group is happy enough to bail, they’re trying to save Soozin.   They catch a glimpse of the figure shimmer then vanish from sight as they’re taking a side street.

As they get to the docks they’re spotted and multiple figures leap off the ship and combat is initated.  The overmage on the ship drops a capture net of magical energies over them as the ship’s forces charge to attack.

The battle is harsh and the group wins but the ship makes it escape.  Part way through the fight they hear a large force of armed men approaching from the city, assuming correctly that it’s watch.

The watch shows up and Tanner, Lerik’s flunky appears from the shadows and speaks to the captain of the watch telling him that the group had killed several people in a nearby warehouse and when they were heard the ship had sent people to investigate andt he party had killed them as well as he can plainly see.  It appeared to the group that Tanner was unusually convincing in his speech.

The party was arrested and tossed into the slam.  The next day Shuk shows up to hear their side of the story.  She arranges for better food and creature comforts with the jailor and leaves.  Another day passes and she shows up again to inform the group that their accuser has ‘apparently left town.’  *wink wink* and tosses Dra’kin an amulet on a braid of yellow hair.  Tanner had yellow hair of the same hue…

The group is informed they’re going to be put to the question, a ritual of Truth and will be asked questions to either prove their innocence or guilt.

They’re moved to the Temple of Eris where they’re subjected to the ritual.  Garon and Teagan ask their questions which prove their inocence more or less.  Lerik though asks if they’ve ever ridden in an airship which they of course have to answer yes.

There’s a bit of an uproar as Lerik is deviating from the program but eventually the group is free’d and allowed to collect their belongings.  They also claim right of victory over the trader ship crew for their gear which they do get.

Biminey agrees to the Ritual of Remembrance for the high priest of Eris and describes the tomb of Larkson and it’s immediate surroundings in vivid detail, every word and description taken down by scribes.

The high priest asks if the group would be ameniable to taking a group of scribes to the tomb.  Biminey puts him off saying he’ll need to talk to the others.

They work out a plan to do so since they’re going that way anyway but by the time they get back to the high priest he’s unavailable.  They wait a day, making preperations, then go back and he’s still unavailable.  Biminey thinks to ask Sushanna and finds out the high priest left with several other priests.

They’ve arranged travel on a small coastal ship and also find out that another ship left that morning with some scribey types on it.

Travel down the coast is mostly uneventful but as they near Darkmouth they’re beset upon by a ship similar in build to the one at the docks only bigger.  They turn to shore where they’re dropped off in boat and their ship beats a hasty retreat before the slave ship.

They work their way through the dangers of the fire swamps and make it to the city (failing my system for abstract combat horribly).  They move inland following the maps that Biminey had uncovered from the scrolls that the little thieves had stolen for him from the forbidden scroll room.  They’re heading for the Temple of Artifice as depicted on their map.

As they made their way they note that the airship is no longer near the top of the tower where they’d left it.  Acting on the assumption there’s no point in going after it if they can’t drive it they continue on to the temple.

They find the temple in an area that’s otherwise mostly destroyed but the temple though is still in good repair.  Dra’kin familiar is sent to investigate and is shot at by guardian constructs like the ones they fought back on the island where they got their airship to begin with. They attack it from extreme range and silver spearman come from the temple but as they stop attacking they don’t pursue the party.  Screwing up his courage Biminey moves closer his mechanical hand out in front.  As something seems to happen he  then approaches the temple.  As he’s looking for a way in the silver spearmen are recalled and he slips through the gate as it opens.

Inside he finds multiple buildings, some holding archives of knowledge, others workshops of artificing.  Constructs roam the grounds, fixing, repairing and guarding the temple.

Through the complicated method of yelling they communicate with each other as to what’s going on and the other four of the group find a semi-sheltered location where they can watch the gate and have some concealment and protection from the elements.

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I really don’t have much to say in regards to another year down and another year in the future.  I’ve had better years and worse years than the proceeding one and I’m sure this cycle will continue to repeat.  Without the downs there are no ups; you just have a flat line.  And flat-lined is generally not a great place to be.  A little cardiac failure humor there.

But I do wish for you a better year regardless of how good the past year was.  Or good it was not.  Just try to remember that People as a ‘whole’ generally suck although a Person can be the best thing about and in your life.  And Life really is out to get you.  And it’s going to get you in the end, the best you can do is fight a delaying action and hold onto it as long as you can.  Anything good that comes to you in spite of that should be that much more enjoyable as a result.

Anyway, best of luck to your and yours in the upcoming months -

“All good that a person does to another returns three fold in this life; harm is also returned three fold.”

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If you run into any problems let me know.

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I cut out 1″ square foam core pieces, well technically slightly less than 1″ square.  I also cut out 1″ pieces of the flexible magnetic strip.  I cut the sticks into 4″ long pieces.  Using an x-acto knife I cut a small hole in one corner of the foam core and glued a stick into it.  Once those were all dry I peeled and stuck the magnet bits to the bottom.  I have magnetic receptive game mats.

Using photoshop I made some number flags and some condition flags.  The numbered flags were glued directly to the sticks.  THe condition flags were glued to small pieces of drinking straws.

Now during play I can park a NPC on top of one of the flag bases and can easily see what number it is for the purposes of record tracking and announcing.   In addition as an NPC gets a condition I can drop a reminder on it.  By dropping them upside I can designate they go away at the end of the turn (turned over) or if they’re right side up they’re a Save Ends.  I made the status flags pretty generic without numbers because frankly having a marker for every freakin’ option is just too much.  +X ongoing, -X to AC (F/R/W), Save Ends, End of Next Turn, etc and so on. The status markers are just visual reminders when a creature has something odd about it.

If you’re mini’s also have magnets on the bottom of them then they all stick together quite well and you can use the status stand to move them around pretty easily.  Otherwise you just have to be careful when you pick them up to avoid the mini from falling off.

Anyway for $10 or so I made 25 of these with a ton of material left over.

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Dragonborn with Maul

“You smell that?  What’s that remind you of?  Smells like… snake.” a harsh voice cut through the evening air.

“Hells no Marti, it’s something with scales alright but I’d say it’s more like dead rottin’ fish.” a sardonic voice replied loudly.

Elisssa shook her head slightly. On the whole living in Larkson was enjoyable but of late the Bain followers seemed to be getting more overt about their humanistic beliefs.

“Oh yeah Jakia, fish might be right. Something smells fishier than an unwashed doxie’s crotch.”

Elisssa snapped over her shoulder without slowing, “Don’t badmouth your birthplace, you’ll make your mom cry.”

There was a startled silence and then, “What the fuck?!  What did you say?”

Elisssa sighed, turning as she heard footsteps hurrying toward her.  Two humans were moving toward her from the mouth of an alley.  The one in front of medium build, hair tied back with dirty blue rag, the other one stockier with broad muscled shoulders.  Thugs the both of them was her first impression.

“Snake bitch you want to be repeating that?  I don’t think I heard you right.”

The stockier one spoke, “Marti, I done think she called your mom a whore.”

The other thug snapped his hand sideways and a iron club grew out of it, fashioned of linked steel piping. “Whore she may have been but she was human and no fuckin’ snake bad mouths a human.”

Jakia’s hands disappeared into his tunic coming back into sight with small metal cylinders that snapped open with a jerk of his hands into twin clubs. “Snake gotta know it’s place Marti and that’s down in the dirt on it’s belly.  You want to get yourself down and apologize now snake bitch and we might let you walk away in one piece.”

Elisssa heaved a deep sigh, sending a mental plea to her goddess, the mother of her race for the strength to not kill the fools in front her.  She eyed the approaching men, slowly counting to five to calm the heat that roiled just below her surface.  ”We can do this hard or easy.  Easy is we both go our separate ways now, no harm no foul.”

“Oh I think you like it hard there snake bitch.  How’s about we give you the hard way.” Jakai leered, holding one of the clubs suggestively at his crotch.  ”This ain’t nothing to what I got for you.”

Elisssa felt her thoughts bubble toward rage and opened her mouth, lightnings playing off her teeth as her inner energies began to race.  With a new found trick she snapped her own hand out and there was a sound of ripping leather ties as Rock Crusher leapt into her hand, the red runes on the flawless black iron maul’s head glowing with a dim light.

“You sure you want hard fuck face?” she snapped, lighting arcing from her teeth onto the maul.  ”You really really don’t want to fucking push me….”

The two thugs faces tightened and they started to spread apart in the street when a voice, tone casual, almost bored spoke, “Hey girl, who are your friends?”

All three of them glanced sideways to see another human coming out of a doorway, dressed in the red trimmed chain and leather of the city watch, the hilts of two swords rising up behind his shoulders and a long bladed knife on each hip.  He leaned against the door frame, cold green eyes boring into those of the two men. His arms were scarred with the reminders of over thirty fights in the pits and a jagged slash rand down his face.  The savage scarring detracting little from his otherwise good looks.

“Hey Torn, I see that the watch took you in.” Elisssa said, after the first glance she’d returned her gaze back to the men.

“Yeah, wasn’t hard, Hells if you defeat all their trainers in one go, they even make you a officer and put you in charge of shit.”

“You sidin’ with the snake?” Marti spat out.

Torn stepped forward, with a blurred motion and rasp of metal on metal he held a short sword in each hand.  The one in the right of arctic blued steel, the razor-ed edge crackling with lightnings identical to those dancing over the great maul in Elisssa’s hands.

“No, I’m siding with my friend.  Now get the hells out here before I have to call a corpse cart.  I hate the paperwork and reports I have to give when I have to do that. Just the thought of it really pisses me off.”

The two men glanced at each other then glared at the dragonborn and the veteran pitfighter. “We’re going. The stink here is about to make me vomit anyway.” Marti growled out.  He jabbed a club at Elisssa, “Just a little advice snake, mind your manners next time a human talks to you. There’s bad things other than snakes sometimes in the dark, you might just run into them.”

The two men turned and stalked away, Elisssa and Torn watching them go.

“What was that about?” Torn asked, sheathing his swords in a smooth crisscrossing of his arms.

Elisssa shrugged, “Bain followers I think.”

“Bain?”

“Pissy little god that thinks humans should rule the world and everyone else should be dead, pets or unpaid help.”

“And here I thought you had such a nice little town.”

Elisssa snorted, the remnants of lightning flaring out to light the minuscule blue tinted scales of her face, “They’re nothing, just some lowlives that need someone to blame for their shit.”

“Seemed rather more than nothing.”

“Nothing to worry about, all talk, they’d of threatened, I’d of warned them off and life would have gone on.  How’s Soozin?”

“Don’t think I don’t know you’re changing the subject El.  She’s fine, I got her a little room over on the east side of town, as a watch leader I get a house allowance and the gold that Torel loaned me she’s not going to need to work for awhile and I’ll start getting a pay sack in a week or two.”

“And how are the two of you doing?”  Elisssa chuckled as a rose of color bloomed on the fighter’s cheeks.

“Wha…what do you mean?”

She reached out and clasped his shoulder, “I may have scales and breath lightning balls dear friend but once you get past that I’m still a woman.  I see the way she looks at you and you her.”

Torn grinned, “I guess we’re going okay.  I was going to wait till you guys get back from that job you’re doing for the Council but I might as well tell you now . We’re going to have a binding ceremony next month after I get a little more gold saved up and I want you all to stand Witness for us.”

“I’d be honored Torn.” she replied leaning forward to brush his cheek with a kiss and give him a hug. “And the others will too or they’ll answer to me.”

“Such a fierce one you are Elisssa!”

Elisssa’s belling peel of laughter rang out through the darkening street, “Come and we’ll tell them now, we’re meeting now at our inn to discuss our trip.”

“I cannot,duty calls El. But look me up when you get back and we’ll make arrangements.”

“The gods themselves couldn’t stop me.  I’ll see you in a few days friend.  Take care of the little one.”

“With my life, El, with my life and more.”

With a final clasp of forearms they split up, the dragonborn warden heading north to meet with her companions…

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• Biminey’s Static Shock – Range has been changed to 5/10 instead of 5.   This gives him a little more reach (out to 10) at the expense of a negative to hit (-2) at the longer range.  When using it at a range of 5 or less it’s the same spell. Power up.
• Biminey’s Healing Infusion – Modified it as such “You or ally in burst regains hit points equal to their surge plus Int Modifier(+5).” This switches it from surge + wisdom mod.  Since the artificer is an int based class, basing their healing on at best a tertiary stat seems off and as the only healer the party needs the boost. Especially with me at the encounter design side of things.
• Stak’s Ferret An Opening is modified to read as such – “Gain Combat advantage against one adjacent target until the end of your turn.”  The original required you to first have combat advantage which then carried over to your next turn even if your co-flanker moved away.  Since that rarely happens I did away with the requirement and it now gives you CA against one target for your current turn.  Same power output, easier to use.  Power up.
• Stak’s Leonine Surge – Removed the dick you clause “If you miss with both attacks you grant CA to all enemies until the start of your next turn.”  When you compare this power against Two-Fang Strike that clause makes the power come up short.  Leonine surge was “Two attacks.  If both hit, deal +2 damage and knock the target prone.”  Two Fang Strike is “Two attacks.  If both hit, deal +Wisdom damage.”   While knocking a target prone is fairly powerful (move action to stand, grants CA while down), it’s not worth the you grant CA to everyone on the battlefield for a full round by any stretch of my imagination.
• Torel’s Oath of Enmity power now reads “When you make a melee attack against your oath target, make two attack rolls and use either one.”  This is a changed from the original removing the requirement which said that your oath target also had to be the only target adjacent to you. Rationale: Less complex situation to use.  Power up.
• Torel’s Deflecting Thunder now reads “Until the end of your next turn the next melee or ranged attack against you instead targets an adjacent enemy to you.”  This removes the exclusion that you couldn’t deflect an attack back on the person attacking you.  Didn’t see any reason for the clause other than that makes it a Reflecting Thunder rather than Deflecting Thunder.  And frankly since Torel’s never gotten this power to work…  Power up.
• Dra’Kin’s Flames of Phlegothos – Added the following:  “Miss: Half Damage”.  It’s one of a limited number of daily powers that either doesn’t have the Reliable keyword or a half damage on miss or some other guaranteed effect.  These are typically because they deal higher than normal damage but with the second gen classes out this is showing its age hence the modification. Because it’s such a high damage spell, half damage is the smaller power boost over Reliable so I went that way with it. Frankly missing with a daily sucks ass  and suckage should be kept at a minimum.  Power Up
• Dra’Kin’s Eldritch Blast – Modified the range to a 10/20 from a 10.  Increased range at the expense of accuracy.  Although the ‘conlock’ has more hit points than anyone he has less defense than most and as a result I think a little more range helps the character.  And a caster based striker with no ranged attack over 10 seems silly. Power Up.

Elisssa didn’t have any powers that I felt were in need of tweaking, the Defender is a solid second generation class and the power’s she’s chosen so far are all right in line with what they should be.

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Keri, or is it Meri?

Dra’kin leaned back on the lavender scented down pillow, the better to enjoy the view as his lover, Shuk continued stretching her body into positions that looked impossible for her.  Born of human and orc she favored her human half more but still dense thick muscles covered her lithe frame, the skin a polished white jade rippling and flexing as the woman moved slowly and smoothly through a series of stretches and slow motion maneuvers.

Shuk paused, body frozen in place and she glanced through the strands of her brown hair, glinting with green highlights. “Love, best tell your familiar to stop staring at me or you’re going to need to get another one.”  The wicked looking dagger in left hand spun around her fingers sending sparkles of red light through the air in counterpoint to her threat.

Dra’kin, eyes rolling, exerted his will upon the hovering eye in the corner of the room sending it zooming down to disappear into his carefully folded clothing. “You know it’s just attracted by the motion Shukie.”

“Don’t care dear, I don’t like things staring at me when I work out.”

“So I should close my eyes?”

Body folded down her head turned to look at him from roughly around her knee, the position showing off her curves to excellent advantage. A slow smile spread, her elongated canines gradually showing, “Not if it has that reaction that I see it has.  Or is that your knee under the sheet.” she said with smirk.  She unfolded with a sinuous snap and somehow ended up on the bed standing over him.  “Now then… Let’s see if we can’t find another way to pass the time…”

Sometime later, the warlock was dozing and only partially registered the sound of someone clearing their throat.   The impact of the floor as he was violently shoved sideways out of the bed though woke him up quite effectively.   Naked he rolled sideways, hellfire blooming on his hands to end in a crouch in the corner of the room.  The flickering red glow highlighted the innocent face of Keri, one of Shuk’s lieutenants, one of a pair, twin halfings. On the far side of the bed, Shuk slowly rose from a crouch, a long jagged edge blade in one hand, the red flecked bade of Ravager in the other.

Keri whistled appreciatively as she glanced between them, “I see that what they say about the size of a warlock’s staff is true.”

Dra’kin stood, letting the flames flicker and die, “I don’t use a staff.”

“Exactly. You don’t have anything to compensate for obviously.”

“Keri, I thought we talked about this?”

The halfling pasted a contrite look on her face. “I know ‘mom’ but you had that new lock and warding put on your door and you know I can’t resist a challenge.”

Shuk sighed, “Obviously I was grossly overcharged, I should have been warned someone was trying to bypass the protections at the very least.”

Kery grinned, “Oh you got your money’s worth cutie.  I wouldn’t worry about it.  There aren’t many, alright, any as good as me at getting past wards don’t want me to.”

“What are you doing here Keri?  Anything wrong?”

“Your boytoy asked me to get some information for him, I have it.”

Dra’kin spoke, his voice muffled briefly by the tunic he was pulling over his head, “I said bring it by this evening at the tavern.”  He sat on the edge of the bed to pull on his boots.

“Hate to break it to you hottie but it’s evening now.  You must of really been working overtime. Did you do that thing I told you about, where you put your…” Keri dropped to the floor as a throwing spike whiffed through the air where her head had been moments before.

“That’s enough Keri.” Shuk said calmly replacing the spike in the strap on her forearm with another from a box on the dresser by the bed.

“You never complained when I did…” Keri’s voice trailed off as the golden green eyes of her boss caught her’s.  Shuk had her scary face on, eyes and face calm and showing no emotion what so ever.  The same face she wore as she persuaded someone slow to pay their loan that prompt payment left everyone happy.  The same face she wore as she took a lead weighted club to someone who thought they could refuse to pay their loans.  And the little rogue was sure it was the same face she’d worn as she gutted the man who’d held her job at one time and thought he and his seconds could take advantage of the young half orc female newly joined to the night guild.

Dra’kin stepped over and kissed the most deadly woman in town on the neck, “See you later Shuk, I need to catch up with friends.” He ran a hand down her jaw in a caress and with a thought his familiar settled down on his shoulder, the dangling wires from the mechanical construct that Biminey had constructed for him wrapping around his neck like some odd necklace or collar.

“Later cutie, I’ll see you later then.” Keri said with a suggestive waggle of her eyebrows.

As the door closed on Dra’kin, the corner’s of Shuk’s mouth twitched and she couldn’t help but smile, the cheerfulness of the haling infectious.  It was one of the reasons they’d shared a bed for awhile when Shuk was feeling the pressure of her step up from apprentice to leader of the guild.  She shook her head as Keri bounced up on the bed. “So what did you find out about the ship?”

Keri grimaced, “Not much.  Gonna need Meri on this one. I can take care of the wards but the watchers are good, you’ll need spookie to get in there see what’s going on.”

“Okay, make arrangements with Tork on the docks to give you a distraction if you need it to get her on board. I want to know if they’re hauling the gold that rumor has it.  And if she can find out their home port or a chart book, that might be useful for something.”

“I hear your man is heading upstream after the ones taking the gold shipments?

“He’s not my man love, just a distraction.”

Keri rolled her eyes, “Riiiight. So since you’re not stopping him I can guess you’re not behind those thefts.”

Shuk frowned, “Was that ever a question?”

“You never know with you hon. You keep them close to that bountiful chest of yours sometimes.”

“Not this time.  Personally I think it’s the buyers out east.  They get the cargo and the payment.  None of our concern at the very least.  Okay get with your sister and work out a time to visit the ship.  Yes I know she’s already working nights for that friend of Drak’s, work something out.”

Keri saluted her boss, a satire of the watch’s salute ending with her hand cupping her own breast and shaking it, “At your command!”

“Whatever. I also need you to have Pip pay a visit to the rug merchant and remind him he’s past due.  Nothing painful, just a threat of painful is fine.  I might want to take payment in goods later once he’s really worried.  I also need you to have…”

For the next hour talk was of business, the business of shadows and night before the two of them headed toward the tavern where their friends were talking…

]]> http://www.keyourcars.com/2009/12/25/drakins-interlude/feed/ 0 http://www.keyourcars.com/2009/12/23/interlude-stak/ http://www.keyourcars.com/2009/12/23/interlude-stak/#comments Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:51:44 +0000 Dennis http://www.keyourcars.com/?p=3383

Tavern

He’d been sitting in the dockside bar for an hour now, listening to the talk, occasionally trying to nudge the conversation around him with a discrete question or a raised eyebrow.  The ale was bad, green as hell but better than the water the gods knew. A loud clang drew his attention as the barmaid slammed her drink tray up against a drunk’s head and he used the distraction to swap his three quarter full mug with his neighbor’s empty one.

Stak signaled the serving girl, pointing at his mug.  She nodded, a world weary smile pasted to her face that didn’t come close to reaching her eyes.  Shorter than average, probably topping little over five foot tall, she was well proportioned although slight.  But apparently that didn’t keep her from packing a hell of a wallop as the tavern’s thug grabbed the unconscious drunk by the hair and started hauling him toward the door.

A scrap of conversation caught his attention, “…bugger all gold on that ship I hear tell.  And them sailors of theirs, never seen such a hard assed crew.  You don’t hire a crew like that you ain’t hauling a assload of gold and you know it Sammi.”

Stak dropped a silver on the girl’s tray as she set down another full tankard of bad ale.  For an instant a smile crinkled the corner’s of her eyes and she bowed in thanks before whisking away to fill another order.  She glanced back at the wolfkin born ranger with an appreciative eye, making note to make sure his mug was full in case there were any other silver offerings.

At the next table, two older peasants, probably fishermen judging by the leathery skin and sun bleached hair and the out-sized knuckles on their hands although he noted hard callus on one was missing a leg from the knee down, callus you only got from wielding a blade. The other’s right arm hung bound in a sling.  Casualties of a sea that life that didn’t treat kindly with those that dared it’s surface.

He picked up his mug and eased over to their table, “Afternoon gents, buy you a round?  It’s a holy day for me, I made some extra silver and my god requires me to tithe by spreading it around.”

The two men eyed the ranger standing by their table, then the legless one shrugged, “No skin of my nose stranger.  And if you’re buying why I reckon that gives you leave to sit as you like. Sammi, what do you think?”

The other one, showing a touch of shifter himself, nodded slowly, “Well Lonni, kinda hard to turn down free booze. Sit stranger.”

Stak took a seat, turning to see the serving girl watching him.  He gestured at the other’s mugs and pointed to himself.  A flash of a smile and she headed to the bar.

“So what tell god of this is yours that you have to waste your good money on the likes of us?  Ain’t never heard tell of such.” Sammi asked.

“Family god neighbors, not good for much to be honest but he does sometimes pull out a minor miracle and it’s a miracle I’m alive and sitting here so I figure, why risk it, pay homage to the little shit and maybe I’ll keep on keeping on.”

“Need to watch that kind of talk friend.  Gods is listening all the time.  Figure that’s how I lost me leg, too drunk to remember to make an offering last year before we went out and first day, rope snagged me leg, cinched down and clean ripped it off, taking it over the side.  Captain, he saw no point in coming back in, leg was lost so they just doused it in a healing salve to clean the cut up and we stayed out.  Docked my pay 25 gold for it, left the ship 4 gold and half a leg lighter than I left with.”

“Last time I heard this story that there leg of yours it was fighting off three reavers in the rigging and single-handedly saving the ship.” the serving girl said as she set down a pitcher of ale.    “You sure you wanna be buying these here lot ale?” She leaned one hand down on the table, ostensibly to give the table top a wipe with a rag while giving the ranger a magnificent view of her small, firm breasts in the low cut leather tunic.  “A person might find summat else to be spending their money on is all I’m saying.”

Stak rolled two silvers over the table where she adroitly swept them up without looking down. “Something else like…?”

She grinned, her otherwise plain face lighting up rendering it pretty, “I’m just sayin.  Come by toward high moon when we kick this lot out and send them home to disappoint their wives and mayhaps we might discuss it more private and proper like.”

A smile of appreciation curved Stak’s lips, “Perhaps I shall at that.”

Sammi chuckled as all three men watched the girl walk away, enjoying the view.  “See what I mean stranger?  You buy us ale to repay your god, your god repays you with that.  Karissa she don’t cotton to many.”

The elderly fisherman’s voice turned hard of a sudden and from somewhere a large bladed gutting knife had appeared in his right hand. Eying his fingernails he started trimming one with the razor honed edge, then looked up, hard eyes gone flat,  boring into Stak’s. “She’s a good girl.  Lost her mam in childbirth, her da to reavers when she was just hittin’ marrying age and left her an orphan with no dowry.  Fisherfolk look after each other but it’s hard times and she’s an independent cuss so she took to workin’ here.  Some of us, well, we’d get a little put out she was to come into trouble or harm.”

Stak’s left hand, held below the table since he’d sat down twitched as Sammi made the knife disappear.

“Just a friendly warning, stranger.” Lonni spoke up, pouring his glass full from the pitcher. “Man sees storm clouds in the distance, only fair he let people know they may be in for rough water.”

“I see…” Stak replied, taking a sip of the awful brew in his cup.  “Appreciate the warning then but you can rest easy.  I don’t take what’s not freely given and I return it in better shape than I got it.”

Sammi smiled a tight little smile, “Then we should have no problems, me and you.  Here, toss that whale piss out and fill it up with this.  Now why don’t you ask us what ever it is you wanted to ask, we’re drinking your beer, you got that coming to ya.”

Stak couldn’t help but chuckle and shake his head, “Right.  I’m interested in that ship in the harbor, heard you saying it was filled with gold.”

Lonni glanced at his friend, shrugged, “Just bar talk friend.  You know how it goes, someone says something, someone else repeats, soon it’s the truth as far as them is concerned.  You don’t appear to be stupid or suffered a recent blow to the head so hear me then, that’s not a ship you want to be getting ideas on.  Filled with gold or no, that’s a crew there that you don’t wanna be fuckin’ with.  That lot’ll gut ya and feed your entrails to the fish without a blink I’m thinkin’.”

“Hard looking bunch then?”

“That’s how I read’em and I’ve been around the block a few times.  That lot’ll have your guts out of ya and over the gun’sel as fish food before you could blink.”

Stak took a sip of his ale, paused at the fairly palatable flavor rolled over his tongue. “Now that’s not bad at all.” he said, saluting the two men with his mug. “So the ship, unusual for a ship to have that… experienced a crew?”

Sammi shrugged, “Depends on the ship and what she’s haulin’.  Dangerous waters out there friend once you leave the pale blue.  Tough buys you a lot of things.  This’un though, she shows up, no cargo at all, riding high the way she is.  Says she’s here to haul part of our catch away and I hear tell her quartermaster been talking to Garon and his flunkies about buying fish. I also hear she don’t wanna pay what we can get it for upstream but what with the gold being stolen on the way back them that has might best figure a fish in the net is worth two in the sea.”

“The crew ever come ashore?”

“Bits and pieces of them, never more’n a handful.  They come ashore, get drunk, tumble a doxy or two, go back on board.  Spreadin’ tales and askin’ questions they does. Most of which I done heard a hunnert times in me life, water folk tend to go on they do about things they may have seen, or mebbe dreamt up during a long night watch to use to cage a few drinks when they come ashore.”

Lonni spoke up, “That’s cause it’s filled with gold you old fool.”

Sammi snorted, “Hush up you, or I tell Lorri how you really broke that arm.”

“Bah, I ain’t scared a her.”

“Right… shut up and drink the man’s beer.”

“What kind of stories?” the ranger asked emptying the pitcher into his mug.  He looked around and caught Karissa’s eye and signaled for another.

“Usual claptrap, sea monsters bigger’n a hundred ships, islands that belch fire or move about on their own, sailing ships that float through the air like a bird.”

“Huh, flying ship you say.  I’d like to see that.”

“I hear tell there’s some what sez they escaped the slaver’s and come through Darkmith spreadin’ the same tales.”

Stak noted Lonni making the two finger warding gesture of Troe at the name of the ancient city. “I guess I don’t put much stock in what I haven’t seen with my own eyes.”  He dropped several silver on the table, “Here have a round or two on me elders and I thank you for your time.”

“Any time you wanna stop by and buy drinks friend, you feel free now.” Sammi said, reaching out to stack the coins in the center of the table. “Any time.”

Stak headed to the door, brushing past the petite barmaid who murmured, “So… later?”

“Aye, barring end days coming early.” Stak replied.

She nodded and continued, swirling nimbly out of the way of a stumbling peasant, heavy drink tray held effortlessly out of harm’s way.

Pushing to door open, Stak stepped on the cobblestone street and headed back to the inn he was staying at with the others to let them know what he’d found out.

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Barring dungeon crawls I don’t really do trivial encounters, that long progression of ‘gimmie’ fights that a DM puts a party through to do a slow drain on their resources to soften them up for the BBEG encounter at the end of the work day.  I certainly run multiple fights in one work day but typically they’re not quantified as ‘trivial’.  Each one has a chance to result in death for someone other than the NPC’s.

Let’s face it, the vast majority of us have limited play time and expending that playtime in fights that are ‘gimmies’ seems wasteful.  Many of these single type encounters can be done using Narrative rather than combat.  But there are times that you do need to show the wear and tear on the group as they go through a long series of encounters but breaking out the mini’s for each one just eats horribly into the time you have to play.

Lately I’ve been using skill challenges to drain surges from the group to simulate small but pointless fights as they flee pursuit through the swamps or try to hide from the hobgoblin tribes while making their way home.   But those seem rather flat.

So I’m considering something more combat encounter based and let the party use their combat values against some defensive value, kind of an abstract combat.

The key question is how, I like the 3 rounds and you’re out system I use for skill challenges (duh or I wouldn’t use it right?) rather than the three strikes and you’re out that is the official system. And right now three rounds of combat are close to typical for the group at the level it’s at and seems like a good place to start.

So primarily how to abstract something as tactical as 4th Edition combat is the big question.  I need to work in a way for the players to gain some benefit from the various level of powers, at-wills, encounters and dailies with the understanding that a daily used during an abstract combat encounter is a daily they will not have during that work day.  And we need a simplistic way to simulate buffage.

So my thinking is on any of the three rounds the players can elect to use an At-Will (base), Encounter (bonus), Daily (bigger bonus).  They will take their Attack value for that power, added the bonus for encounter/daily, and then roll against an abstract defense of their opponents.  This isn’t so much to abstract their ability to hit as it is to abstract their ability to do damage.  Encounters and Dailies = more damage output.

Enough failures and they will be forced to expend a surge for each round.   So the most they can cost themselves is 3(4) surges per A.C.E. which isn’t out of line with a trivial encounter.

But we also need a way to more equitably spread out the surges lost.  As we all know barring really hard fights it’s typical for some (defenders) to go through an asston of surges while classes that can remain out of harms way might spend none.

So as a first draft let’s see how this flies -

Abstract Combat Encounter System or ACES

Purpose:

To simulate resource drain for a fight the party is expected to win without much risk but without having to take the time to move to a tactical simulation.

Procedure:

The party will negotiate 3 rounds of abstract combat.  In each round each member of the party will pick one of the following, At-Will, Encounter, or Daily.  They will roll a d20, compute their attack roll and compare it to the appropriate DC for the encounter using the AC/F/R/W values as set by the DM.

On any round that there failed rolls are equal to or less than successes the members of the party will lose one surge.

On any encounter that the party does not garner at least one success they will be penalized an additional surge.

Details:

Characters /Attacks -

During each of the ACES rounds each member of the party will choose one of their powers to use.  If the power is an attack power that targets a defense, the character must roll against the appropriate DC/Defense as set by the DM.

If the power also enhances another member of the party then the player may grant/add a +2 bonus to another character’s roll using the Aid Other rules.  If the power does not make an attack against an AC/F/R/W attack but it grants a benefit to another character then the player rolls against a DC+encounter level.  If they succeed then it counts as a success and grants a +2 bonus to the other character’s roll.  [NOTE: Yes this grants higher 'value' to non-strikers in general but what the hell let's give them a time to shine.]

If the power is not an At-Will the character receives the following bonuses where appropriate:

• Encounter +5 to attack roll / Additional +2 bonus Aid Other.
• Daily +10 to attack roll / Additional +4 bonus Aid Other.

Monsters / Defenses / DCs –

The DM will determine the defenses / DC’s of the encounter using the average AC, Fortitude, Reflex, Willpower of the encounter creatures.  You can also use the following values as an overall average across all monster types

• AC = 14+Encounter Level
• F/R/W = 12+Encounter Level

All encounters are assumed to be at the Easy level.  If you wish to simulate a normal or harder fight then add +2 per increase in difficulty that you wish to portray.

Experience / Loot-

The party will earn loot for the encounter just like they would have if it had been played out tactically.

They will earn full experience of the encounter divided by 3 multiplied by the number of rounds they succeeded at with a minimum of 33%, even failure teaches us something.  i.e. if they only succeeded on two rounds then they get 2*33% or 66%.

If they win two out of three rounds they’ll also typically earn some mundane items of value.  By winnign three out of three rounds they’ll also earn some items of higher value or items of a magical nature.

Sacrifice –

One per encounter a character can elect to sacrifice a surge and take one for another member.   More than one character can sacrifice for a member but each character can only sacrifice once per encounter.

Major Failure / Death-

If the group fails all three rounds then one player determined randomly is assigned a Death Strike which counts toward their three death strikes for the day and as such can only be removed after an extended rest.

Long Term Usage / Wave Attacks -

Sometimes you might want to simulate a lot of minor attacks, wave situations for instance where the party might have to face 5-10-20… etc trivial fights.

In this case you could instead of each encounter being three rounds, you just decide how many rounds per wave you want simulate.   Each round rather than once per encounter a player may sacrifice a surge for another player.

If a character runs out of surges they’re considered out of the combat and the remaining characters incur a cumulative -2 penalty per out of commission character on their die rolls to simulate them being forced to ‘take up the slack’.  If all characters are reduced to 0 surges the encounter is considered lost.

High Level Example: Goblin Warrens for Level 1 Party

Setup: The party has been tasked with cleaning out a goblin warren on one of the caravan trails.  The creatures have been causing issues with the caravans, stealing things at night from the strong ones, attack and pillaging smaller ones after driving off or killing the guards.

Attacks against the goblins have proven of little use with only a few killed.  But now the location of the warren where they’re holed up has been found and the party has been sent to insure that one way or another the raids stop.

It’s assumed that trying to deal diplomatically has failed and there’s no point in talking to anyone but the leader of the goblins and the outside chaff won’t talk.

So the DM figures it’ll take 3 minor encounters to get to the inner sanctum of the goblins.  He chooses to do this with ACES to leave time for the big boss fight whether that turns tactical or roleplay.

The first two encounters are truly easy so the DC’s for those are going to be AC: 15, F/R/W 13 as they’re level 1 encounters.  The third one will see the goblin boss throwing in some of his personal bodyguards so he’s going to crank that difficulty up one notch and that fight will be at DC’s of AC: 17, F/R/W 15.

The final boss battle will be played out normally.

Encounter 1 – Party of 5:

• Round 1 – 4 successes – Result: No loss
• Round 2 – 4 successes – Result: No loss
• Round 3 – Only two success – Result: 1 lost surge

Total: 1 surge lost.  The paladin elects to sacrifice a surge for the cleric and loses two and the cleric loses none.  Experience gained equals 66% of the total.

Encounter 2:

1. Round 1 – 3 successes – Result: No loss
2. Round 2 – 4 successes – Result: No loss
3. Round 3 – 5 successes – Result: No loss

Total: No additonal surges lost. Full experience gained.

Encounter 3:

1. Round 1 – 2 successes – Result: 1 lost surge
2. Round 2 – 2 successes – Result: 1 lost surge
3. Round 3 – 3 successes – Result : No Loss

Total: 2 additional lost surges per party member.  The fighter sacrifices for the wizard and loses three surges while the wizard only loses 1.  The paladin does the same for the cleric losing three surges and the cleric loses 1.   Only 33% of the encounter experience gained.

ACES results –

• Wizard – Down 2 surges
• Paladin – Down 5 surges
• Fighter – Down 4 surges
• Cleric – Down 1 surge
• Ranger – Down 3 surges

Comments? Thoughts?

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Given I’ve got an artificer and they’re going to be searching for artificer type things something like this might actually find a way into their hands.  Given the secrets of the powder manufacture is currently lost it’s a automatically self limited resource.

Obviously the superior ones would require a feat for all to pick up and use well and the martial ones would require a feat for most.

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Original idea presented by DMEric on the official WOTC forums -

The goal of my firearms was to make ones that had a historical basis, but presented an interesting option to players as opposed to either an overpowered “must have” item or a slow loading piece of junk outclassed by bows. The martial level of items represent what, stat wise, amounts to a martial level crossbow. The superior level ones are essentially a superior version of the Repeating Crossbow.

Blackpowder is a rare and “expensive” item from the perspective of a peasant(or lord trying to outfit an entire army), but still trivial to any adventurer past the earliest levels, or very well funded mercenaries, pirates, etc.

My firearms come in two varieties, Martial and Superior. I haven’t designed feats yet, but I think in all likelihood they will just share feats with crossbows, since they are used in a similar manner.

Martial Firearms use breech loading mechanisms (they are loaded from the rear- either from the side sort of like a bolt action rifle or from behind like an old style shotgun), and they use paper cartridges with minnie balls. A minnie ball is a special type of bullet that when fired expands slightly to grip the rifling, allowing one to load the weapon at the speed of a musket, but fire with the accuracy of a rifle. (Historically, the difference was that rifles had “rifling”, tiny ridges that spin the bullet, inside the barrel, while muskets were smoothbore. However, rifles took a much longer time to load than muskets since the bullet had to be very carefully seated inside the barrel w/ a rifle, while muskets could use paper cartridges and just be quickly jammed in.)

• • Pistol  +2  d8 5/10   50gp   2lbs Firearm  Load Minor/High Crit
  • Musket  +2 d10 15/30  75gp 4lbs Firearms Load Minor/High Crit

Superior Firearms are special weapons based on the designs of the famed artificer,Vicento Leorezzi. These weapons, while using a smaller bullet, utilize magazines preloaded with primer, cartridge, and shot, allowing the user to reload the weapon from the magazine by way of the weapon’s finely tuned internal clockwork mechanism. In addition, the improved barrel design alows for accurate fire at longer ranges than conventional firearms. Each magazine holds ten shots, costs 3gp, and requires a standard action to remove the spent magazine and load the fresh one.

• • Clockwork Pistol +2 d6 10/20 80gp 2lbs Firearms Load Free*/High Crit
  • Clockwork Rifle +2 d8 20/40 105gp 4lbs Firearms Load Free*/High Crit

Ancient Scrolls

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As much as everyone gives lip service to a ’sandbox’ world, “OMG you’re railroading them!”, etc. as a DM you, IMO, HAVE to railroad to some extent in order to give them the best possible gaming experience you can.  Mature, complex, interesting campaigns have a hard time finding fertile ground in a sandbox.  Sand just isn’t conducive to growth.

A sandbox is “Hey peasant, where’s the nearest dungeon?  No we already cleared that one, where’s the next one.” typically.  Or out of character, “Okay guys I have three modules for your level, which one do you want to do?”.  These can certainly be entertaining at the player level, social dynamics, the mechanics of the fights etc. But they’re hard to engage the characters.

I can improv aka play in a sandbox as good as many, better than most I think but I can certainly tell a difference in the quality of experience I can give the players by just spending a few minutes each day thinking on how things are going in the world.

By devoting a few minutes going over current events (assuming you’re doing more than dungeon crawling, a fine past time in and of itself) and putting yourself in the shoes of your NPC’s and their interactions with the PC’s you can come up with some pretty cool stuff I believe.   As an example, Biminey has transcribed details of their trip through Darkmith and sold it to the Temple of Eris (god of knowledge). As I was documenting his payment (125gold for the curious) on the campaign sheet for Biminey’s character I thought about one of the high priests reading these descriptions and realized from my one line personality note I’d scribbled out on him weeks ago that this could have a profound effect on the man.   And that effect is now going to flavor and color multiple interactions  that deal with the PC’s in specific and the NPC’s in general that might be affected.  And flavor and color add a LOT to a session.  No one likes bland white toast all the time.

Your own content also really really has to be flexible. Case in point the group in our last session derailed my story arc by getting captured. [Through all fault of their own. ]

Luckily this happened at the end of our session or it might have either resulted in less interesting events than I think it will now or I’d of had two options. Either called a time out while I rapidly regrouped or improv out the remainder of the session, the first has the advantage of better results, the later of keeping the flow of the game going.

Drastic events like the party getting captured by the bad guys when you’re not expecting it can certainly throw a kink in things. Or perhaps you have one key character in the group that your story arc is founded upon and that character dies. Do you have a backup plan to keep the story on track? Or do you toss out what you have and work out another arc? Do you sink to the level of “A wandering healer comes across the scene and agrees to resurrect the poor man if only you’ll go fetch him 10 belts from the orc tribes in the next canyon.”?

You have to consider these things when you’re working on your storylines. And you cannot possibly consider everything that a group of players might do or things they might simply not figure out, or figure out wrong and be unable to see other clues as result of their wrong conclusion.  But by taking the time to build up this gestalt image of your world between sessions you have a much better stronger tapestry that you can reweave around snags in the thread that might occur.

That’s not to say though that as a DM you don’t have to be prepared to lose work, some things you’ve worked so hard for just can’t be salvaged after the party goes off on a tangent. And that’s okay. There’ll be other times, other places, other campaigns if needed for those events to happen.

Look at every side trek, every derail not as an issue, but as  an opportunity to weave a stronger storyline that integrates the characters’ actions into your world. And integration is something that will involve your players.  This issue with the players being captured in my personal campaign is going to I think really expand some NPC’s in an interesting way, create at least a couple of memorable encounters and has sparked an idea that will have a domino effect that might see wrack and ruin in the region from yet another possible source than those already planned and that might actually cause a redirection of a regional force into a force of while not good, at least not evil.

All this because the players split up like so many chickens with a weasel dropped in their midst during a fight and got taken out by a group they should have been able to beat.  Players definitely get a ‘we always win’ complex and as a result not really take tactics or even thought into consideration.  It’s nice to throw them a curve like this and drive home the fact that they’re not always going to win and there are going to be consequences to losing even if it was unintentional.   In this case they’ve lost 1000’s of golds worth of magical gear, not to mention their basic gear that will have to be replaced from very limited funds.

Improving though with 4th edition can be hard, especially if you lack experience with the system in specific or gamemastering in general. With older editions it was pretty easy to ‘fake it’ with monsters you had to add at a certain point. You just needed a to hit number, a defense and some damage. Monsters were boring, the vast majority of them simply swung, bit or clawed at the players for ex damage in a Flinstones Boxing methodology (aka stand there taking turns swinging till someone died) And those were very easily faked, especially if you had any experience with older editions as faking things is mandatory for a DM as the math was so broken overall.

But 4th edition improv is harder. Sure you can come up with a basic creature fairly easily, just use the basic monster value formulas and you’ll have balanced monsters quickly. They’ll just be a bit boring until you have enough experience under your belt to knock them out.  And remember battles that contain a single creature type can also contribute to boring battles so you have to knock out, print out, look up several creatures per battle.

As a result of the more interesting monsters in 4th, it helps if you have some basic creatures printed out of an appropriate level range for you group, pick a couple of of each type, then just ‘reskin’ them as needed. A level 3 orc can just as easily be a level 3 guard, a war dog, an undead abomination, whatever. Just print out a few in preparation just in case.

So to wrap this up, remember, think about your campaign when you’re not playing it, just a few minutes a day can work wonders.  Think about your NPC’s and what they might want and their reactions to the actions of the PC’s.  And be flexible, be prepared for the party to jump the tracks by having a good idea of the world in general and being prepared with materials as filler/stop gap to give you time to work the derailment into your campaign and make it stronger as a result.

A derailment doesn’t always have to mean a train wreck….

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Shük

[DM's Note: Overall this was a really good session, lots of character involvement, dialogue, sleuthing and clues and all that. We learn a little about the character's past lives, they learn about their city, there's intrigue and mystery, all that kind of thing.  You know, the stuff that 4th Edition makes impossible according to some people because it's just warcraft on paper.  This is one episode of the podcast that I'd recommend you download when it's available if you like that kind of thing.]

We open our movie with our vaunted cast, Torel, Dra’kin, Elissa, Stak, Biminey continuing their journey homeward.  Biminey glad to be alive on this fine day, feeling like he might have almost been dead just moments earlier.

The terrain grew rougher as they continued moving north toward home.  Small rolling hills turning into craggy ravines and cliffs.

It is one such ravine, almost a canyon that they run into their first major issue. A band of goblins trying to be sneaky and the group spot each other at the same time about 100′ between them.  The goblins scream and shout and attack.  Moments later a giant rounds the bend in the canyon, all 11′ of him and the 8′ tree trunk he’s using as a club.  A club that hurts a lot for those that try to stop it with their chests.

Boulders fly, clubs swing in might arcs and goblins die in rapid succession. Deep rough breathing from a nearby cave is heard as Stak passes near and when Dra’kin is knocked flying by a blow from the club landing in the mouth of the crack in the cave wall.

The hill giant retreats from battle leaning on his club, using the language of the goblins he asks if the group wants to join him, “Yu tough’ens, me yu jone up, we split 50/50.”  Torel and Biminey are the only ones that can understand the large creature and Biminey translates the conversation to the others.

But dragonborn fury is not to be denied apparently and Elisssa cuts the discourse short and attacks the giant who roars out in fury and slams Torel back in righteous anger.  The avenger goes flying through the air landing heavily on his ass.  Regardless of their own inclinations the rest of the group backs the dragonborn’s play the giant soon lies dead at their feet.

A giant wineskin filled with the finest dwarven ale is recovered from the giant, a wineskin that they discover much to their delight refills every day with ale.  In addition a magical belt is removed from the hill giants, a belt that Biminey re-sizes to fit Torel.

They continue their climb up through the mountains, avoiding or appearing too tough to take on and the rest of their journey, although tense and eventful yields no further obstacles and within days they arrive at the gates of their home town.

They’re welcomed as semi-heroes for having escaped the slavers and bought drinks and food and lodgings provided without cost to them.

The town Council summons them and there they meet Garon, Lerik and Teagon, the councilmen.  Also, and un-coincidentally, they’re also the three richest men in the city.  Lerik owns merchants and shops, Garon owns the majority of the fishing fleets, and Teagon runs the shipping, primarily by boat to the cities further inland but with some wagon trains.

During their interview it becomes obvious quickly that Lerik, a middle aged human male, doesn’t appear to like non-humans and in fact later on they discover that Lerik is a follower of Bain, a human-centric god who’s teachings propose that humans should be in charge of anything important.

Garon, another older human male, is intensely interested about the group, his daughter and son having also been stolen during the slaver raid during the Spring festival. Unfortunately the group does not recall his children, both in their early 20’s as having been part of their group although it’s possible they were among those first lost in the sealie attacks.   Those first couple of days after waking on board the ship were hectic and many people died, unknown and buried at sea.

Teagon, an eladrin also male, age unknown but mature seems indifferent to the group.

The group told their story, changing details and saying they sailed the slaver ship they’d woken on to the coast, landing it in Darkmith and then glossing over the details of their journey.  Specifically keeping all details of the elemental ship out of their story.

Part of an old argument among the council comes out during their interview, Garon wants to hire mercenaries from the the mostly dwarvish settlement inland.  He doesn’t want anyone else lost or to lose someone to slavers ever again, Lerik believes it would be a waste of money, the slavers have already hit the city and undoubtedly will have moved on.  Teagon seems to be worried only about the cost, how can they afford it now. Perhaps after the fishing fleet’s harvest starts up in earnest.

Garon gives each of them 100 gold of his own money, assuming they have no money of their own after their harrowing escape to purchase necessities.

Torn steps forth and tells the group he’ll take charge of Soozin’s protection, as it turns out she’s an orphan now, her father was one of the one’s taken by the slavers and her mother died in childbirth.  He intends to join the guards, his skills with a blade should be of use to them.  Torel steps up and gives him 50 gold to provide for the two of them while the group figures out it’s next moves.

They decide to stay together, their thoughts on that elemental ship they left back in Darkmith.  They spend a few days in town, getting reacquainted with old friends and lovers, Dra’kin renewing his relationship with Shük, a half-orc girl that favors her human side, while Biminey visits Sushanna, an acolyte of the Temple of Eris that he’s friendly with from his visits there going through the god of knowledge’s vast collections of scrolls and manuscripts.

Stak and Torel, both mostly alone in the city venture out together several times, gathering news of current events while Elisssa visits her clan, enjoying several celebrations of her safe return.

Stak and Torel among other things learns of a trader ship in the harbor which is rare in these times of unsafe travel, a typical year might see 4 or 5 trading ships from up or down the coast.

Dra’kin asks his sometimes girlfriend to look into Lerik, the man’s non-human bigotry bothers him, while Biminey uncovers in his trip to the Temple of Eris that all information on Darkmith is in the forbidden archives, Merkin, high priest of the temple blatantly refuses him access to those scrolls saying some knowledge should not be known.

A few days after their arrival they’re summoned before the council again, the council is obviously in disagreement but Garon informs the group of the losses they’ve taken on their trade ships returning from inland being taken by bandits and the gold taken.   He proposes that the group recover the gold if they can and he will keep 10%.  Larceny is in their hearts as they ponder this, “Who’s to say how much we recover exactly?”.  Lerik, the bigot, seems in favor of the idea only after his associate, a slightly oily human by the name of Tanner whispers to him about how “wouldn’t Bain approve if these beasts and snakes were killed trying to recover it? ” referring to Stak and Torel, both shifter born and Elisssa obviously.  A whisper overheard by a couple of the sharper eared members of the group.

Teagon seems almost against the idea, saying it’s a waste of time, and they’d be throwing the groups lives away in vain.

The group tells the council they’ll consider the idea and give them an answer in a couple of days.

The ship in the harbor is visited, found to be carrying a high number of skilled fighters, perhaps uncommon or perhaps necessary for any ship to be able to sail the seas and make it safely from port to port.  None of the group who see the ship can say for sure if it’s a slaver ship, a suspicion born of paranoia perhaps as Garon tells Dra’kin when the warlock visits him, pressing for Garon to get on board and search the ship.  Garon agrees to consider the information and says he’ll try and arrange for a visit.

While discussing his inability to get into the archives he needs to get information on Darkmith and the elemental ships, Shük shrugs, “is that all?” and has one of her twin halfing lieutenants show up.  Meri nods, “I can recover items from there for you, it’s a bit of a hassle, hard to get to even for me and I can’t remove much without it being noticed.”

They arrange for her to remove one scroll from several shelves a night and in that way they can zero in on the area that they need.

Torel and Stak interview known survivors of the bandit raids on the ships, finding out that no one before seems to have done much in the way of information gathering and by getting maps they’re able to narrow down the area where the ships are taken by quite a lot.  They also find out that the ships that are taken are always ones in the top percentile of gold coins carried.

This arouse a lot of discussion and suspicion on who might be slipping information, or be behind the stolen gold shipments being stolen.

The group decides to go after the gold thieves, arranging for Meri to continue bringing out scrolls and a forger of Shük’s acquaintance to copy them for Biminey’s return.

After some discussion the group heads upstream to the area where the ships are taken and there Stak finds a trail that leads them to a hidden camp.   He sneaks close but not quite close enough to overhear an interesting conversation that occurs between a man dressed in city clothing who enters camp and appears to be warning the bandits that there is someone after them.  The leader of the group turns and starts barking orders for the bandits to break camp.

Stak sneaks out to tell the group, noticing in passing a hidden archer he missed on the way in.

The group tries to stealth up to the clearing but are hopelessly incompetant and find the camp deserted although the bandits gear is still around.  They circle the camp, spotting a couple of archers moving around as they do.  Stak cuts through the camp and the trap is sprung.  Bandits rise up out of shallow pits covered by bedrolls.

The group is dispersed in all directions while the bandits tend to focus their attacks better and although the bandits take their losses in the end Elissa is down, a glaive at her throat while another rests over her heart and a razor tipped arrow is pointed at her left eye.

The eladrin, seemingly bored, speaks loudly enough to be heard across the clearing, “Surrender now or the dragonborn dies.”

With Elissa down and certain to die, Biminey down, bleeding from multiple wounds, Stak with a growing puddle of blood growing under his feet and Torel facing two more archers solo and bloodied, the group drops their weapons and is captured.

They’re expertly tied up, all their gear except clothing removed and bags put over their heads and that’s where we leave our party to await their fate at the hands of their captors.

[DM's Afterword: This outcome was unexpected although at one time I did have some thoughts on increasing the size of the force to make capture a higher percentage chance that I was thinking it would be.  As a result I can work with this outcome, just didn't expect it to happen.  It does show the necessity of focused play in 4th edition.  ALL of the bandits were hurt, most approaching bloodied status but the damage was simply too spread out.  Since even someone down to 1 hp still deals full damage, hurting them doesn't do much, removing someone from the battle is what makes a difference.

The aftermath of this is that, obviously, the group is going to lose their gear.  I'm so NOT a believer in captors conveniently storing all the capturee's gear in an unlocked chest in the next room and leaving a key hanging just out of but not quite reach to the cell door.  I think that's lame.  But because I'm granting bonuses to the characters inherently as a function of being heroes, it doesn't matter.  Gear only gives them gimmicks the way I do it, it doesn't impact their base attacks and defenses etc.  Sometimes gimmicks are useful but this way they're not necessary.

Because of the holidays the next session will likely be on January 2nd.  Stay tuned to see how our plucky but disorganized heroes get out of this mess. ]

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And I’m not saying that if you did run into one of these you wouldn’t find them in pairs or even trios…

Or for the worst offenders, say perhaps a group that killed a high ranking hobgoblin officer that was out gathering toys for the grand hobgoblin marshall’s birthday present, you might run into a whole herd of the things.

You can get a PDF and the monster builder filer here [Download not found]

It’s a USB mic so you’ll need a PC of some kind to use it and you won’t be able to feed the input through a mixer or anything like that.

Previously I was using the mic on a Logitech Pro 9000 webcam as my mic.  If you’ve listened to the podcast you can tell the quality isn’t all that and that’s after extensive cleanup and tweaking.

I think you’ll find the next podcast release to be significantly better in quality with everyone audible and without overload.  Probably doesn’t hurt that I parked the mic in front of me on the gaming table and put Temple at the far end of the table.

I’m not an audiophile, I don’t really know cardioid patterns or impedance or pickup sensitivity.  I do know that the recording with this mic is very acceptable to me and although I cringe at the price, its worth it IMO.

D

They headed out through the ruins the next day, north toward home.  Their trip through the city saw them harassed by small bands of ferals but none in forces large enough to do much more than minor wounding and abrasions.  Their pursuit trailed off as they entered a more damaged section of town.

In the center of a curiously free of rubble area they found a crypt of white stone bound in metal that was untarnished, no small feat in the humid air a city sinking into a swamp.  Biminey went to examine it while the others held back out of fear like little kids confronted with something with big teeth and red eyes.

He found a crypt that was constructed of the finest craftsmanship, engraved in runes in the dead language of the city (dead as far as Biminey was concerned) as well as runes of arcanic nature that protected the crypt he thought from outside influences. As he went back to join the party he noticed tall emaciated figures.  It was as if they’d been veiled from his sight until he left the crypt unmolested and then suddenly he became aware of them.  As did the others.

The figures were not much more than leathery skin and bone with arms abnormally long and fingers tipped in claws stained with ancient blood.  More stains covered their faces especially around the very large mouths and down their chests.  Their eyes were sewn shut but they seemed able to see in spite of it as they tracked his movements exactly.   The only motion of any of them were the slow turning of their heads and sporadic slow mouth openings revealing rows of needled pointed teeth.  Burned or carved into their foreheads was a sigil that matched the one carved above door to the crypt.  A sigil that Biminey associated with that of the prince who came back to Darkmith and destroyed the city to purge it of the darkness and chaos brought upon it by his soulridden royal family.

Backing away the party detoured around the strange crypt and the stranger guardians and continued on their trip through the ruins.  At least reaching the swamps they hadn’t gone very far when they were attacked by giant crocodiles with huge clamping jaws.  The fight was difficult, movement in the water and deep mud of the swamps making it hard to get around but the group prevailed without serious although most of the people involved in direct melee combat with the crocodiles ended up clamped in their mouths on at least one occasion.

Learning the dangers of the swamps as they continued they found it easier going after time but still very draining.  Then a huge explosion of water in front of them revealed a creature that seemed to be swamp given animate form.  A Swamp Walker surged up out of the water and it’s powers reached out and two trees nearby twisted their roots up out of the mud and dirt and started flailing branches at the group while the swamp walker beat on them with smashing limbs and generating wave surges that attempted to drown them.  The trees were beaten down without much trouble but the Walker took considerable damage before its essence was extinguished and it dissolved back into the swamp of its nature.

[Level 5 Solo Soldier with 2 level 3 Skirmishers.  I didn't find the fight taking 'omg fights take forever in 4th edition against solo's personally.]

The party recovered a strange insect riddled staff in the center of the mass of the destroyed walker that Dra’kin took as his own. [Feyswarm Staff].

Eventually the party survived the swamps and made it to dry land, the lands of the warlike hobgoblins.  Not too far from the swamp they encountered a strange black eyed wolf like creature leading a pack of normal wolves.  After one attack the pack fled leaving behind one corpse.

The next days of travel saw them moving carefully during the day and then digging into the thickets of brush at night to hide as they slept.  One night as Torel sat lonely vigil he spotted an orange glow growing north of their position and just barely caught the faint sound of screaming in the night air.   He woke Stak and then the rest of the party and they moved up to investigate.  The party staying well back as Stak stealthed up.

He saw a band of hobgoblins torturing two humans or half-elves, it was hard to say from the fire damage.  Other slaves roamed the camp serving the hobgoblins of which there were about 15 visible.  Then as he was turning away a patrol wandered in to camp, another 6 hobgoblins and 6 more left from the ones that had been resting and drinking.

Stak went back to the others and as a group they attempted to stealth into position.  Then Elisssa tripped and fell into a thicket of bushes.  The hobgoblin warcaster heard the noise and then turned and saw Biminey and Stak standing at the edge of a small drop off.  The warcaster moved up with a savage snarl and used his power to yank Biminey down from the rise.  Biminey smirked a bit and then used the power of his amulet to teleport back up.

The fight was on then and the swarms of hobgoblins rushed the cliff lead by their commander.   Deadly hobgoblin archers remained where they were peppering the group with jagged bladed shafts while the grunts shifted up the rise at their commanders orders after the group.

Slowly the hobgoblin forces were decimated even with arrival of the wandering patrol as reinforcements.

For some reason Biminey decided to rush the archers down below and was peppered with shafts and dropped at their feet.  Mostly dead he used his last healing infusion on himself and the two archers shook their heads and shot him twice again, one impaling him through the throat and into the ground.

[Due to a mistake in my math we assumed Biminey was dead at this point. He was at negative 19 health and his negative bloody is 18.  But I doubled the damage on the archer's critical to 20 rather than maximizing it 15.  As a result Biminey only appeared dead to the rest of the group and we'll roll back time and allow the group try to stabilize him.  Which given the plethora of action points left and Biminey's proximity to the group should be a given he'll not die.  On a side note, given the plethora of action points left the group could have certainly have killed one or more of the archers before they got a chance to kill the artificer.  Very much like the death of Aoefel it could have been prevented by the actions of the rest of the group... Perhaps they didn't think I'd kill him given the chance?  Perhaps now they know better....   But because it was an honest mistake on my part in dealing out the damage, I'm fine with rolling back.]

The party searched through the gear of the hobgoblins and came up with a Battle Standard of Might and a Staggering Broadsword along with valuables of monetary nature as some very welcome potions of healing.

[Although I had another overland encounter planned at this point it was getting late and we called it.]

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Darkmith by Day

[Warning this is a rambling post that doesn't stay on topic very well or at all really...]

I was explaining my style of DM’ing to someone and thought it might be something that someone else might get some usage out of.  Or might just rile them up if they think differently but I’ve been riled up by the ‘wrong’ way that other people play only to eventually make a change in the way I play. [Ramble Alert!] As a prime example, I had a long discourse with someone about when to grant experience in Neverwinter Nights modules.  I was still very much in the ‘per monster killed’ mindset.  You kill a monster, you get experience.  His was you awarded experience when the players reached a certain point in the game.  Eventually, not then because he was being an ass about it but eventually, I decided that made a lot more sense to me as a DM.  It takes away the [True Story Alert] meta-gaming aspect of XP “I only need 10 exp to level?  I lean out the window and throw a dagger at someone on the street.” and makes it easier to balance things out if you have any kind of branching encounters planned.  If there’s no way the players are going to be anything but 5th level by the time they make it to the Sacred Tombs you can build the Sacred Tombs way in advance and not risk them being 3rd level or 7th level.

I really don’t do trivial encounters; even back under older editions I stopped pretty early.  I lean heavily toward combats that mean someone might get really hurt. (And yet I’ve killed fewer characters in 3 decades of GM’ing than I have fingers).  My harshness is I make the players work for their victories and I enjoy the reputation I have as being harsh and deadly in spite of the fact that in reality I rarely kill anyone.  I just make them know they were in a fight.  You do have to kill someone every now and then though just to show them that they’re not immortal…

4th Edition really lets me go to town in this regard.  Since the players are back to full after each fight and with limited options for them to spend their ‘working resources’ aka Healing Surges this means a) their work day is long enough that sleeping periods fall naturally rather than being forced by lack of resources and b) they can keep going typically for a few encounters even at the level+3, 4, 5’s that I toss at them.

Granted I haven’t really used a ‘dungeon crawl’ yet with 4th edition.  Where there are encounter after encounter after encounter.  But I have problems with those anyway.  I’m as guilty as the next person early on in my career of having a series of rooms connected by passageways with essentially random monsters tossed into each one.  Each battle very sandboxed, you fought these creatures and the ones just down the hall ignored the fight and patiently waited their turn to be slaughtered.  Part of that was definitely a bit of “Oooh the party hasn’t fought one of these before, or this, or this, or this.” and I’d munge them all together.

Then I started doing themed dungeons, waaaaay back in the day when even the commercial modules were still very much a list of encounters built by rolling percentiles.  The Swamps of [Clare] Grogan (Scottish actress that I thought was hot and I thought the name was very dungeony) which was a swamp themed dungeon, lizardmen (and women), giant snakes, crocodiles that went down for like 5 levels.  The Lair of the Eternal Trickster, a dungeon comprised of probably 50% traps combined with creatures.  Party would find or trigger a trap that alerted mechanical guardians or undead, creatures that could be ‘realistically’ parked in an alcove to wait for their queue and didn’t have any intelligence or programming that would allow them to respond to anything other than their set queues.

It was about this time that I started making dungeons smaller in terms of overall population and larger in terms of encounter population.   Or I’d do the ‘obvious’ and stream the bad guys in as a seemingly never ending fight.  Attack the guards in the front room and the guards down the hall would take a round or two to wake up, grab their gear and charge up, yelling for help which would get the guys in the next room up etc and so on.

I find myself now with fourth edition expanding further on this.  Fewer encounters but more meaningful encounters.  Perhaps I’m merely playing to my thoughts or the inclinations of my group but a series of trivial, everyone is down a surge or the cleric used up a couple of CLW’s fights bore me and I presume/assume they bore the players if there’s no story arc reason for the fight.

With 4th Edition I can fairly safely assume that the party will have a full set of hit points after each fight, when they reach the point they don’t then they’ll rest and recover them.  Sure they might be down a Daily power or out of their Action Points but numerically Dailies just aren’t that big a deal, sure they can cut a round or two out of a fight or if everyone burns them on one boss cut that fight out of the day in short order.  But they’re not a valid excuse to have a 5 minute work day.  The only real valid reason to extended rest IMO is when you’re out of surges, not because everyone’s burned their daily powers.

But I digress. [Hence the disclaimer at the top of the article now]

To get back on point, I don’t personally see a need for trivial encounters.  They spend valuable limited game time on something that is a foregone conclusion that the players will win and win without threat.   The only time I plan on using trivial encounters, trivial meaning anything that’s not on the Moderate difficulty scale at least, is when they’re strung together as a series of encounters without a break or when they forward the storyline or add another element to the story.

Case in point, the [I've Got Crabs] encounter in session 2 of this encounter (yes I give my encounters goofy names in my notes), it was a fairly trivial encounter, the party was never in any real danger.  But their focus on dealing with the crabs charging them rather than the crabs menacing the other huddled survivors of the slave ship on the beach cost one of those NPC’s their life.  Perhaps a point lost on the group but still a point that I wanted to make an effort put out there and try to broaden their scope and awareness.  Did it work?  Doubtful.  But I feel better for making the effort.

In my upcoming session I’ve got a skill challenge among others where the characters will try to escape the city.  If they fail on any of the three rounds (I use my own skill challenge design) then it triggers an encounter or two with the ferals of the city.  But these will be narrated out and the party will simply start the next round of the challenge a couple of surges lower.  This will continue throughout the skill challenge.   The only times I have planned to break out the miniatures is when it’s a fight worth playing through tactically.   There will be days in their overland trek that will have them facing encounters but these are again just narrated out, “Over the last three days the lands have changed from tundra to low hills as you continue your homeward bound journey.  Through the use of your skills you’ve managed to avoid most of the dangers of the lands although dusk of one night found you battling for you lives against a wolf pack lead by a strange black eyed wolf with boney spikes protruding from its joints.  They were fought off through the use of your talents and the black wolf seemed to really fear the Torel’s abilities that were infused by the power of his god.” [Just made that part up but now I'll use it Saturday.]

In this particular instance the success or failure of the challenge will cost them surges that they won’t have for the next round.  And of course, obviously?, there will be a tactical encounter at the end of the skill challenge and their success or failure at the challenge will have a direct impact on that encounter.  (in more ways than one but I won’t spoil that right now in case they read this before Saturday).

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You can grab a copy of the monster builder files and a pdf here – [Download not found]

And here’s a basic screenshot of the creature you could print out but it doesn’t include the Animate Trees.  Just grab the download for the PDF.

The basic tactics would entail using the swamp spew on its enemies to weaken them by making them easier to hit, then typically it would summon two animate trees and use the surging wave ability to push creatures away that are trying to get flanking on it while just smashing the crap out of everything that approaches.  It does have a ranged attack as a minor action that it can use where plants near the target lash out at it.  If you use this then I’d recommend you add in some ‘high ground’ for one or two characters, a rock pile where a character can escape the minor attack, that kind of thing.  But its your encounter do with it as you will.

swampwalker

I’m glad there weren’t any Windows ME visitors or I’d have to really question whether hell actually did freeze over.

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Familiar

The sun’s fading light illuminated the two of them as they shook hands, little knowing they were taking their first step into destiny.
Dennis

Ohhh if I only had better hardware to do the recording….  If only….

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A pole

So anyway, if you have any input, make your voice heard and click one of the radio buttons.

Tossing it up raw like most of them is of course the fast easy way to go.

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This is just an example of tweaking an existing creature.  I took the Hill Giant which is a level 12 brute, dropped his level in the character builder, reset the damages a bit to nudge him closer to a soldier while keeping the defenses and hit points etc of the brute, and added in a couple of powers as the default Hill Giant would be boring as a boss encounter.  With the other things I’ve got planned for this encounter I think it’ll be a good BBEG level encounter for the group.

You can grab the monster builder file here [Download not found] and an image of the creature below you could print out.

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Hill Giant Runt

Biminey uses the free time to construct two Amulets of Blink – Neck Slot items that provide the following function – Blink (Daily, Teleportation) – Minor action – teleport up to 4 squares.  Elisssa and Biminey take them.

Day three of their voyage after dark they spot lights on the ocean and their course takes them near.  It’s a group of slaver rading ships off loading their ‘cargo’ into two large galleons, home port unknown although Biminey recalls seeing historical tales of travel from back when there was travel between cities of significant nature that cities along the southern end of the west coast used them for hauling goods around.  It’s been decades since their city has seen anything more than small fishing boats that take shelter in their bay blown off course by storms from the tiny ‘towns’ on either side of them along the coast.

Ballistae bolts fly toward them from slaver ships but they arc below their elemental ship’s height.  It will take time for the slavers to elevate their weapons and time isn’t something they have as the ship continues on it’s inexorable course south by south east.   Arcane energies flare out from one of the galleons but falls short of them.  With the strong northerly winds there’s no chance the slavers will be able to follow with enough speed that they won’t be lost before daybreak.

They soon pass the point where they believe their city is to the east but the coast isn’t visible to them and there’s nothing they can do.

Day eight of their voyage finally brings the low smudge of coastline to their left.  The ship continues on its journey and the coast grows closer.  The lands once they finally can make them out are flattening out, the rocky coasts of their town long gone.  The lands grow marshy and then turn into full blown swamps even as ruins start to sprout up.  From piles of jungle covered stone to partial upgright walls to almost intact buildings over time.

Dark forms, keeping to the shadows below pace the ship after awhile, its speed drastically decreased as it enters the cities airspace.

A tall step sided tower is seen in the way, canted at a sharp angle obviously as result of the slow devastation caused by the swamp engulfing the city.  This cant is putting it squarely in the way of the ship which continues on.  With a heavy crash the ship collides with the upper part of the tower and sends almost everyone crashing to the deck.

Figures cloaked in living shadow swarm up and around the tower leading into the deck, The attackers consist of literal shadow, small flitting forms of black swirls and coase featured humanoids draped in it.  Larger forms swarmed over the ship grabbing the unskilled citizens and fall over the sides down to the ground below while more engage the combatants of the ship’s passengers. Ranged attackers armed with shadow given substance line the tower’s ledges.

A long fight but our party perseveres and wipes out the attackers but they’ve lost 5 of their 6 companions, only little timithi going uncaptured due to his hiding in the wheelhouse with Bimini.

After recovering, tossing the bodies over the sides our heroes regroup in the dawns morning light to discuss their options.  It’s a toss up as to who is the most uncaring but eventually after listening to Timithi’s pleas to save his little sister the group starts on the trail toward another intact tower they can see rising up from the ruined city about 2 miles distance.

Stak recoverd a suit of Blacksnake Armour which makes him fairly shifty once a day.

On their journey they are attacked by a building.  Or rather someone drops a building on them.  All but Torel are captured by the debris, immobilized trying to get free as archers, feral humanoid creatures open up from a second story on a building facing the now large mound of debri.  Three giants, most likely part goliath drop into view wielding massive steel mauls although one is bearing the black steel, red runed warhammer known as Rockcrusher.  Additional creatures stream out narrow alleyways into the fray, wielding rusty corroded weapons.

The party makes good use of their teleportation powers to escape the stone and debris holding them motionless and engages the attackers.  The archers from above do a good number on the party, Torel, Elissa and Stak taking numbers of missiles in their backs and sides as they engage the maulers. Dra’kin and Biminey engage the feral foot soldiers then turn their attentions to the archers while the maulers are brought down by their friends.

Poor little Timithi is crushed into a pulp during the fight as the party watched with casual interest. His dying words even as ribs ripped his lungs apart and his brains leaked out are “Please sir, please won’t you save my sister.”

Elisssa latches onto the dweomered Rockcrusher.

The group continued on through the streets of the city toward the tower. There they found it sitting in the center of a plaza, the base covered in swirling shadows.  A body falls from the tower above, a gaping hole where her chest had been, a waitress from the Blue Duck in their home town by the name of Lolly.  Yes there were jokes about adverbs.

As they move closer the shadows start to detach and surround the group and then attack, sinking into the very bodies of the heroes with a bitter burning cold of the soul. Using his resounding armour ability Biminey blasts open the door into the tower during the fight.

The first floor proved to be empty but filled with the most noisome furnishings one could ever hope to find.

The second floor appeared at first glance to be the same then slender shadow draped forms erupt from hiding spots under the piles of foul bedding.  Trying to ease into positions where they could inflict devastating damage the heroes proved to be too careful [DM: And my dice proved to suck royal ass.  A problem that occurred with distressing frequency for most of the evening.  I don't' think I've ever had that many numbers below 10 before.]

After a short breather the heroes continued up the tower, finding the third floor as empty as the first.  [DM: As it was getting late and I wanted the boss battle to occur, I pulled the forces from this room which would have further drained the groups resources, it was planned for an addition encounter of 6 level 2 brutes, the same Darkmith Retrievers that had captured the hostages.  As a result there's a bit of a break in continuity but no one noticed that the creatures that had kidnapped the hostages vanished into thin air.  But this is party of what being a DM is about.  Dynamic changing of things to fit the available time, interest and party resources.]

Stak with a stealth ability the likes of which hasn’t been seen outside the training rooms of the local thieve’s guild sneaks up the stairs to look over the rooftop.  He sees pillars of energy slowly eating away the chest away of another of the captives.  The remaining three captives are laying motionless near one edge of the rooftop guarded by the darkmith lurkers they’d fought on level 2.   Two dark priests are directing the energies in a ghoulish sacrifice of the captives.

With Elisssa’s battlecry, “Let’s charge them!” the party moves up as a whole to the top of the stairs.  The dark priests react to this intrusion and the fight commences.  The dark priests have the abiltiy to cloak themselves in shadow and vanish from mortal sight but it proves to be of only moderate use to them as they continue to take damage, Stak continually sinking arrows into their invisible forms. With Elissa and Torel taking care of the skirmishers, Dra’kin amusing himself with incredible lack of skill at combat. [DM: Four 1's in a row, I kid you not.]

The battle is tough but our crew is up to the job and downs the bad guys, frees the hostages and looks askance at Dra’kin wondering just which side he’s working on given his complete ineffectiveness during this fight.

We leave our party atop the tower recovering with their rescued captives including little Suizin who’s asking about her brother.

[DM: This was planned to be a little tougher fight than it was but I forgot to use a wonderous item a Jar of Steam that I'd given to one of the dark priests and in general my overall lack of decent dice rolling and Stak's high rolls kept the fight from being as tough as I'd hoped.  With two shifts in the balance of randomness that way it does tend to deflate an encounters power base.  But I'm sure that at some point the tides will turn and the shoe will be on the other leg.]

From this fight the heroes garnered a amulet of protection (not that it did that much good for the priest wearing it since the group is primarily an AC attack base) that boosts NADS, a pair of Goblin Stompers (shift as a reaction to being missed), an Azurian short sword (lighting damage + close burst once a day of lighting damage) and the Jar of Steam.

The podcast of the events will be made available as I get it broken up and cleaned up.  If you’re subscribed to the feeds either from the site or from iTunes you’ll get it automatically when you sync whatever you’re using to pull the feed.  If you don’t have a feed toy then you can hit the site up and listen to them through the flash players on each post.

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For the curious I’m using an old craptop, a Dell Latittude P4 single core with 256megs of ram under XP and using the mic from a Logitech 9000 webcam, recording through Audacity, then transferring to my file server where I can run Adobe Soundbooth against it to do clean up.

Anyway sound levels, snap crackle and pop, breath pops etc. are a problem but it’s still listenable too in my opinion.  Yours may vary and you’re welcome to it.

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Honestly, the only reason it works for them is the fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent that wonder about the benefits of \/1@grA and would rather risk their money, credit card information, identity with someone who needs to send a billion spam emails touting their security and confidentiality than use their common sense.  It costs them $0 to send the emails.  If even a single person gives them money?  It’s a huge profit deal for them.

So think of the children trying to surf Nickelodean the next time you start to click a link to some chinese web site to get a little blue pill or some russian site that’s going to guarantee your high pagerank on google and just remove your hand from the mouse.

That is all.

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[Note: This has all be hashed out before but someone asked about it so here's my take]

While Solo creatures are designed so they cost the same XP as 4 standard creatures, they don’t really have 4 times the firepower or stamina.

Four standard creatures get 4 attack rolls at least on the opening round.  A solo gets two typically or at least most have a ‘double attack’ of some kind that lets them target two creatures or get two hits on one.

Four standard creatures have sets of hitpoints that typically have 2 or more of them being worn down each turn.  A single solo has one set of hitpoints that everyone is wearing down each turn.

Solo’s typically have AOE’s of some kind and a lot more powers but they’re still limited to one turn per round.   Four standards get four turns per round.

So the key thing to take away from this is that solo’s shouldn’t be fought solo as a result as a general rule.  There should be other game elements arrayed against the players to keep the fight interesting for them or the solo itself should be intrinsically interesting.

Another option that I’ve found that works well is not have your boss fight be a solo but instead toss in a two or more elites as your solo.  I recently used this to good effect, using level 5 elites as a boss fight against 5 level 1 characters (my HR make this more viable than the standard system).  As the party eliminates each elite from the fight they get a sense of accomplishment greather than the grinding away at the bag of HP that a solo grants IMO.

As a DM one thing you can do to help you have a more dynamic challenge is have additional elements introduced during the combat.

Examples of this using The Mummy -

A solo mummy is released from its tomb by foolish delvers.  As they array themselves to attack it, it screams out words of ancient magics and lesser mummies burst forth from their burial pits throughout the complex and head toward the main chamber.  You can tailor the waves of low standards or minion creatures as your party needs them.  Getting close to a TPK?  tone down the waves in quality and quantity.  Players are kicking your bosses ass?  Then toss in some extra waves or have more than one wave attack at the same time.

I had a ‘boss construct’ encounter planned for my last session but pulled it to save for another time as it would have likely resulted in a TPK as the party was out of healing abilities and low on surges.  My plan was a giant construct guardian.  In the area as well I had plans for turrets that fired tanglefoot material.  The boss was designed so that at bloodied it would break into three individual constructs, each with additional abilities that the main version didn’t have.   Between the constant harassment of the being immobilized from the turrets and the creature’s arms and shoulders breaking away to create skittering skirmishers while the main torso turned into a brute would have I believe made for a pretty good boss fight.  I’m going to rewrite this for another encounter later on though.

A dragon encounter with lots of kobold minions including lots of traps in the area laid by kobold trapmasters could be another exciting solo fight.

What you really want to avoid are constant slugfests or ‘flintstone boxing’ where the players surround the solo and each just pounds away at the other until the players win or you destroy them.  Sure a stand-up brutefest is fine occasionally but 4th Edition has so much potential for interesting fights.  But that’s potential that you as the DM have to fulfill, the system won’t do it for you.

So toss in ice flows or mud pits, cables to swing on, crumbling bridges and ledges, falling rocks, lurkers joining the fight halfway through, bosses that summon or morph into something else.  Add in turrets or fighting while falling down a volcano.  Add one really LONG fight where the it becomes a boss fight overall but the players are forced to fight group after group of weak creatures without the ability to take a rest.

Mix it up, have fewer fights but ones that are more interesting rather than more fights but boring ones.  Quality over quantity goes hand in hand with 4th Edition fights.

Image Credits

Our heroes were attending the Spring Festival in their home town.  During the celebration slavers swept down on the party and through the use of alchemical bombs captured an unknown number of the celebrants.  Our heroes, Biminey the human artificer, Torel the shifter avenger, Dra’kin the human warlock, Elisssa the dragonborne warden and Stak the shifter ranger were among the taken.  They awoke aboard a slave ship.  They were eventually freed by one of the other captured, a man they didn’t know.  The slavers were dead on board, poisoned.  There were indicators that some slaves were missing as was the ship’s boat.  During their internment the ship had drifted north into sealie territory, carnivorous humanoid underwater dwellers and was attacked twice.  During the attacks it was damaged.  Repairs were made that let them limp the ship to an island where it ran aground.  After arranging for the remaining other captured citizens to start repairing the ship our band of heroes decided to investigate the mysterious tower located in the center of the island.

This session –

Biminey, Torel and Elissa were in attendance and Stak was played by Elissa’s player.

We start our session with the band of four standing in the entrance to the keep.  The outer courtyard looked like a very pleasant place to spend the day.  Statuary of white marble dotted the area, the figures human or similiarly proportioned although time had erased most of the details.  They were typically in poses of repose or casually posed, none were in a warlike or martial air.   Planters still held the dead remains of bushes that the party thought were probably decorative types, flowering and or pleasantly scented.

After entering the courtyard and looking around there was a resounding crack from the front door as if something had broken and it slammed downwards shutting them in the courtyard.

As it was now after dark they decided to set up camp for the night, it seemed a secure location.  Biminey began the ritual that created a neat and clean campsite.  While intoning the words that powered the ritual they heard the other door into the courtyard open and close.

Then crackling bolts of blue energies fired down at them from the keep walls, flowing out of the mouths of several of the gargoyle like creatures lining the top of the wall 30′ above them.

Four humanoid constructs showed up, moving on metallic feet carrying silver spears.  The party was able to defeat the creatures with Stak assisted by Biminey taking care of the bolters atop the walls while Torel and Elisssa cut down the spear constructs.  Not without a modicum of damage taken but none were killed.

After the fight they attempted to rest again, this time successfully.  Biminey after examining the constructs was able to extract some amounts of residium from the remains which he tucked away to use later for his own arcanic constructions.

With assistance Torel was able to lift the broken gate far enough that they were able to jam it open using parts of the constructs.   With a way out secure they moved further into the keep.

The second set of doors opened without issue.  As they moved into the large vaulted chamber there were two crashing thuds that reverberated throughout the chamber as two large constructs slammed down to the ground splintering the tiled stone.  They let loose with deep thundering growls blasting Stak with the force of their blasts and intimidating the ranger.

Undaunted our four heroes maneuvered around the chamber catching the guardian constructs in advantageous positioning and they were able to defeat the creatures. 

[DMs Note:  These creatures were Level 5 Elite Skirmishers worth 400xp each.  Originally there were going to be 3 of them and making it very much a 'boss' level encounter.  But with the party down 1 player I had to pull one of the creatures and only put in two of them.  So the encounter was reduced by 1/3 but the party was only reduced by 1/5 so this wasn't the really tense fight I was hoping for but it was still a decent fight.]

After the fight the heroes recovered and Biminey went to work with his tools and knowledge and extracted 1800gp worth of residium and he believes he was able to extract the arcane devices that the guardians used to blink and will be able to turn those into two amulets that the party can use.

They explored the rest of the lower level of the keeping finding lots of small rooms with the dust piles of furniture decayed away. A large gilded door drew their attention and lead them to the stairs leading up into the tower.

At the top they found walls