Game Anouncement for June 2009

Well its June 2009 already, wow 1 year of 4e is already gone by and were already half way through 2009 time flies.

June 7th, 21st, 28th

I will be running my Shadows of Orcus game on these nights from 6pm to 10pm est. This is a private closed game from my house, but stay tuned and follow us for the aftermath blog and read the adventures of my 11th level party as they continue to battle cults of Orcus to stop him from returning to the world.

June 20th - Delve Night

We know Wizards is putting a end to the Delve Night however we still have two adventures left before i start something new. This month join us at Alternate Icons in Brantford, Ontario from Noon to 6pm EST for this level 25 game

Through your many adventures you have served many powerful and exotic patrons, but none have been quite like the being beseeching you now. A massive couatl one of the mysterious plumed serpents of the Astral Sea named Corithasat has asked you to brave the shifting landscape of the Elemental Chaos; worse yet, a section that hangs the lip of the Abyss to save an angel of Ioun from a fate worse than death.

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June 15th to June 18th - Los Angeles California
I'm traveling to LA for work reasons, and will have most nights free, if your in the area then please send me a mail if your interested in playing some d&d games. Also this week i am going to try to setup a online game with newbiedm using Maptools and talking about our experience using the software. Contact me on twitter for both at mleger.

That's it for this month, next month we can expect to see another great delve from Wizards of the Coast.

Until next time keep your dice on the table

Save Delve Night

Delve Night is a once a month delve released by Wizards of the Coast that is shipped out world wide to players and groups to play in their local stores.

Designed for 4th edition, this event needs to be saved. Even if you do not play 4th edition i urge you to help save this event because its the first of its kind to focus on us.

You can read the news here: http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?p=18737788#post18737788

What about Con's

Cons as far as i can tell are great, I've never been to one, but they are not always local

What about Living Games

Living games are great, I've been to a few myself and can be a lot of fun. LivingGames are community driven where the story has a life of its own (hence living games)

Why Delve Nights

Delve nights are great because you don't need to take a big test to be a DM of one, you can just run one. You play locally supporting your gaming store. You get to meet new players and get new ideas. Delve Nights are a great opportunity to introduce new players to the game.

It is also considered a reward system, you go out to these events and wizards gives you a point, you go to enough of them and they send you out some little cool thing every 6 months. Extremely similar to Magic if you ever played.

This in itself is great, a lot of players i know always wanted some thing more for going through and buying all the books, just something small that says thank you.

D&D is about getting together and just running through the dungeon, that's what it was at its core. The Delves brought this back, hey lets play d&d tonight, you didn't need a mass story you didn't need the best characters you just played.

How can I help?

Wolfstar76 recommends replying to the original post and submitting to customer services, so i say send in as much as possible, post your ideas here too. Share this page to help get others, get your gaming group to send in emails as well.

Thank you

Until Next time, keep your dice on the table

DM Tips: Encounter Information

As you learned from Monday's (actually Tuesday) crafts i use the D&D tiles in every encounter. They are pretty generic and don't provide much information.

So today's tip is about encounter information. When building your encounter its important to list details about the encounter, is it day or is it night, what is the illumination like, is there difficult terrain in the encounter and where is it. Are there areas of concern, that could deal damage.

Every encounter you build should include the following
Illumination: Consider time of day, weather, and put in any negatives you need to apply to perception checks
Traps/Damage: Identify any areas that are traps or create damage. Example what if one square has a campfire.
Treasure: List any treasure that can be found in the encounter

This is where you can make your encounter unique and give your players additional challenges. Its a great way to increase the challenge of an encounter without affecting the monsters or XP. Check out the Dungeon Delve for great ideas on tweaking up your encounter.

So you have your encounter built, and your using tiles, how do you convey this information to the player?

Answer: Overhead projector sheets, cost about $12 for a pack of 20. Seems a bit pricey but when you use whiteboard markers you never realy need more.

Its hard to see in the picture to the left beacuse the material is so clear but thats the beauty of it, it allows you to mix well with your tiles, and still draw directly on the encounter. I highly recomend drawing walls, and if something in the encounter causes something to change, you can show it live, its even great for drawing in the wizards wall of fire.

One of the things i do in my encounters is orange squares, every encounter has 1.5 times the amount of orange squares than players. (5 players 7-8 squares) my players know that when the sceen starts (i will explain the diffrence between a sceen and a encounter next week) that they can chose where they want to be as long as its in a orange square.

It gives them some flexibility in the encounter that makes sence, brings back the old marching order question, and gives you control when setting up your encounter.

Sticky Tack, i used it monday and i am using it again today. This is a amazing tool for any DM. I use it to stick the tiles to the mat, and when creating multiple levels it helps to hold the blocks in place (muilty level encounter is going to be the topic in two weeks time) i've also used it to create a beholder (a zombie behodler).

In this case were going to create small peices of sticky tack and stick the film on the tiles. Five peices should work just fine, one in each corner and one in the middle.

Remember you can draw anything you want on the tiles, in this example here you can see i used it to draw an underground river. Sure its placed on top of a stair set, but it works, the rest of the area is a cave set tile system.

So this DM tip is half crafts and half tip, in either case i hope you enjoy it and find new ways to use the overhead projector sheets. I don't recommend cutting them up because it makes them harder to reuse, but having a bunch that are 8"x 8" will work out in your favor.

Until next time, keep your dice on the table.

Review of our first Epic D&D Game

4th edition Dungeons and Dragons is still fairly new, in fact so much so my groups normal campaign is only at level 10 right now. This is with 120 hours of game play too, so all of us are really enjoying ourselves.

This weekend we decided to play 21st level characters in a one shot night using the 4th Edition D&D Supplement "Dungeon Delve". I ran the 21st level adventure in there.

The adventure itself was fun, however i highly recommend not adding more encounters if this is a one night game. I made this mistake and added the ghost encounter the book suggested. This encounter was roughly two hours log.

The party consisted of a Avenger, Ranger, Warlord, Sorcerer, and a Fighter. I felt the party was a bit squishy as they took massive amounts of damage. On the upside with this party build they dished out the damage.

The first encounter with the ghosts took a while because the ghosts were only taking half damage and constantly controlling the party members. This encounter lasted about 8 rounds, two ours long.

Dave -
The first encounter was not much fun. Mostly because there was way too many of them and the available area vs. monsters really limited movement. Also, I think since there where so many non-minions to kill it took a frighteningly long time to continue. I think I looked up and saw it was after 11:30 (closer to 12:00).

The second encounter was the entrance to the building with some demons and minotaurs. The tactics the book suggested seemed solid, however the sorcerer teleported the minotaurs in a tight group where the fighter was able to get to the center of and burst constantly. Minotaurs were dropping quickly and i forgot about most of their on death attacks, not that this seemed to matter. The warlord really shined in this encounter giving all players +8 to their initiative really let the party go first and control the fight. The encounter lasted maybe 45 minutes and totaling 3 rounds.

The player review at this point was mixed, the ghosts seemed to draw things out, and then the next encounter was extremely quick. Nothing at this point really seemed epic in nature it was still just a dungeon crawl, the only epic part was the background story.

On encounter three the players seemed a bit confused about the area created by the statues, however the party again thanks to the extremely high initiative even for epic was able to charge in and destroy the Rashaka-Khan noble. The two Rashaka-Khan destroyers entered melee and really didn't bring much to the fight. However the fighter and the astral stalker went toe to toe, the astral stalker only went on round 2 for the invisible attack, but was dead by round 3.

Jared
Not to hot, not to cold.

The skill challenge itself was confusing, no one fully understand what they needed to do, and from a DM point of view, i think they needed to explain things a bit more. IE the arcane roll would tell the party they need to use endurance to power the teleporter. It could have also been lack of sleep, at this point it was around 1:30 in the morning

Once the party finally made its way through the skill challenge and onto the final encounter. As a DM i enjoyed the core encounter; the Players felt a great challenge fighting these two creatures. The area allowed for some neat combat maneuvers. However once the reaper dropped other players began fighting for the amulet, the marut was still walking around while the infighting went on. The sorcerer escaped invisibility, and the avenger left with the eye.

Deryk -
the end fight i thought was pretty challenging, just speaking of the bosses.
But again, I think perhaps maybe if this was more than a one night deal the role playing/story behind the adventure would have been more in depth and better justified for how things ended.

Though the player left players upset, it actually opened up an idea for a great adventure since the sorcerer was.

Over all most people had a fun night, and are eager to see what higher levels have to offer.