Maps | Online Dungeon Master

November 3, 2011

D&D Encounters – Neverwinter week 13

Filed under: 4e D&D, Adventures, Maps — Tags: D&D Encounters, D&D4e, Maps, MapTool, Projector — OnlineDM @ 7:30 AM

I loved DMing D&D Encounters over the summer, but once the fall came and my Wednesday night bowling league started up again, I had to bow out. However, I still agreed to be the backup DM when needed. I ran a table in week 8 with several weeks’ notice, and tonight I ran another table with about 24 hours’ notice.

Being out of the loop and then jumping in to run a session of Encounters in a hurry is a little bit tricky. I had read the synopsis of the whole adventure when it first came out, but I certainly hadn’t read every session. I did my best to glance over what had happened in weeks 11 and 12, and then dug into prep for week 13.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Since I run my games using MapTool on my laptop and a projector to put the map on the table, my first order of business was to create the map for this session. It would be lovely if WotC would make the D&D Encounters maps available to DMs in high-resolution JPG format rather than just as physical posters in the Encounter packet, but I’m up for the challenge of creating the maps on my own as needed. Here is my version of the Week 13 map:

The session begins with the party having chased the Lost Heir of Neverwinter through the streets of town, following the blue flames the Heir has left behind. They discovered last session that the Heir is evidently female, and in this session came the big reveal:

The Lost Heir is actually Seldra.

And moreover, Seldra was causing trouble. She had put up a magical dome of blue fire in the middle of the town square, surrounding herself and the dragon-turned-statue. She seemed to be doing something to mess with that dragon, and the PCs couldn’t do anything about it until they got the dome of flames out of the way.

I had one brand-new D&D player at the table tonight, along with one person in his second-ever session, plus four regulars. The new guy was playing a Binder Warlock, and he jumped right in by using his arcane knowledge to start disrupting the dome of fire. The rest of the party joined the effort as well, some of them physically hacking at the dome, one warpriest praying to his god for assistance, and so on.

Ultimately, the dome was brought down, and the party attacked right away. Seldra summoned some fire elementals and the fight began.

The fire elementals were a little bit strange in that their attacks simply gave the PCs ongoing damage. Being hit by three elementals was no different than being hit by one (since multiple instances of the same ongoing damage don’t stack). The one exception I made was for a critical hit, which I ruled would deal 5 damage right away and ongoing 5 damage (save ends).

Pretty soon, most of the party was on fire. The new guy playing the Binder asked if jumping into the fountain in the square would put out the flames – you betcha! Great idea; I love it when players think creatively.

The Bladesinger in the party was surrounded by elementals and Seldra, and soon found himself in deep trouble. Fortunately, the party has two healers, who kept the Bladesinger up. Unfortunately, the Bladesinger ended the battle without any healing surges left.

Seldra made for a fun foe. I waited until round 3, when she was bloodied, for her to both use her action point and to start sucking the life force out of the elementals – a truly fun mechanic. The dwarf warpriest in the party prevented a ton of damage in one round by using a power that gave everyone Resist 5 All, nicely negating both the ongoing damage from the elementals and Seldra’s fiery aura.

After six rounds of fighting the Bladesinger dropped Seldra with a Magic Missile, and the PCs decided to spare her, since it was clear she wasn’t in her right mind.

Best of all, the session wrapped up in about an hour and a half, which let me get to my bowling league on time. I had no time to warm up, but I guess that’s good for me since I bowled a 227, a 218 and a 200. For a guy whose average was 182 coming into this week, that’s a heck of a series!

So, victory for the party and victory (at bowling) for the DM. Huzzah for everyone!

-Michael, the OnlineDM (OnlineDM1 on Twitter)

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November 1, 2011

Stormy Weather – 4e Encounter with map and monsters

Filed under: 4e D&D, Adventures, Maps — Tags: D&D4e, Maps, Monsters — OnlineDM @ 7:30 AM

While I’ve mainly been running published adventures lately, every now and then I throw in some encounters that I create myself.

I’m currently running my Friday night online MapTool group through the War of the Burning Sky adventure path. We’re in adventure number five right now, and one part of the adventure called for the party to venture into the Valley of Storms. Despite the name, this valley had no storm-themed creatures in it at all, which felt like a crying shame.

As I was thinking about this encounter, I happened to be joining Mark Meredith as co-host of an episode of Dice Monkey Radio, his new podcast. The episode hasn’t gone live yet, but (spoiler alert!) I used the segment at the end of the podcast where Mark offers campaign advice to get his suggestions for some storm-themed encounters I could throw at my party. His ideas were excellent, and the result is Stormy Weather.

Download the encounter PDF

This encounter is for a party of five PCs of 15th level. You could use it in any campaign where the party is likely to meet hostile storm-themed creatures. The basic setup is that the PCs have intruded on the territory of a thunder titan and his genasi friends, and they intend to destroy the interlopers. While you could certainly handle this type of interaction via diplomacy (assuming someone speaks primordial), I wrote it as a fight.

Taking advantage of the ever-awesome Power2ool, I created monster stat blocks. I drew a map in MapTool. And the result is right here for download!

Since I’m proud of the monsters I created, I’ve reproduced their stat blocks below (click the images to enlarge them). I particularly like the thunder titan who spews lightning motes.

I ran this encounter for my group last Friday night, and they absolutely loved it. Now, that may be in part because they went after the genasi with a tornado of carnivorous hell-frogs, but it was a cool battle. Fair warning, though – they ended up using a LOT of map! Getting out of range of those genasi is a tricky business.

Map – scaled to a 50 pixel grid for use in MapTool and similar programs

Valley of Storms map - gridded

Valley of Storms map - no grid

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October 21, 2011

Descent Into Darkness: Free heroic tier D&D4e adventure

Filed under: 4e D&D, Adventures, Macros, Maps — Tags: D&D4e, Maps, MapTool — OnlineDM @ 7:30 AM

At last, my adventure trilogy is complete. The first two adventures, The Stolen Staff and Tallinn’s Tower, were released here on the blog over the past few months. The third adventure, as I mentioned here, is now available.

Descent Into Darkness is an adventure for 4-6 heroic tier characters. The adventure is presented at level 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10. I personally recommend it at level 6, 8, or 10, but it can work at lower-level (though the PCs might be surprised and scared by the final boss).

Synopsis

The powerful wizardess Tallinn seeks adventurers to be teleported into the Underdark bearing a powerful magical artifact, the Staff of Suha. The mission: Find three other artifacts that have been stolen by unknown creatures, likely in an effort to recreate a teleportation device once used by a long-dead drow sorcerer to bring his foul armies to the overworld in conquest. The other three artifacts (Orb of Oradia, Chalice of Chale and Shield of Shalimar) must be recovered or destroyed, and the forces behind their theft must be stopped.

The adventurers discover that the powerful beholder Ergoptis has enslaved drow, diggers (new insectoid monsters), halfling thieves and mindless duergar as soldiers and hunters of artifacts. The party must fight their way through treacherous traps and puzzles to ultimately face Ergoptis and its underlings in a room dominated by a ziggurat, with a magma river crossed by bridges and floating platforms. Can they recover the final artifact and escape or destroy Ergoptis before the one-hour time limit on their teleportation ritual runs out? Or will the beholder simply add the adventurers to its army of enslaved warriors and continue its plans for domination?

Descent Into Darkness includes four new artifacts, an all-new monster (the digger), a find-the-path puzzle with custom runes and an exciting final encounter with an evil beholder.

Files

Download the full heroic tier adventure PDF (level 2/4/6/8/10)

Download the MapTool campaign file (compatible with version 1.3.b86 of MapTool)

Maps (scaled to 50 pixels per square)

Mine map - Gridded

Mine map - no grid

Thieves cavern map - gridded

Thieves cavern map - no grid

Mushroom cavern map - gridded

Mushroom cavern map - no grid

Magma cavern map - gridded

Magma cavern map - no grid

Afterword

If you decide to run this adventure or have the opportunity to play in it, I’d love to hear about it! And if you have any feedback based on your own read-throughs, I’m always trying to improve the adventures themselves. Feel free to chime in via the comments, email, or Twitter.

-Michael, the OnlineDM

[email protected]

OnlineDM1 on Twitter

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September 30, 2011

D&D Encounters – Lost Crown of Neverwinter – Week 8

Filed under: 4e D&D, DM Lessons, Maps, Reviews & Culture — Tags: D&D Encounters, D&D4e, Disease, Maps — OnlineDM @ 1:30 PM

Edit 10/1/2011: Apparently WotC is NOT changing their policy of requiring that D&D Encounters be run on Wednesday nights, as I had originally mentioned in this post. My mistake.

I ran D&D Encounters at my friendly local game store, Enchanted Grounds, all summer long, and I loved it. I love the mini-sessions for prep purposes, I enjoyed the story, and most of all I enjoyed helping new players learn the game. One of the people I met via encounters is now good friends with my wife and I, along with his wife.

Thus, I was sad to have to give up DMing Encounters this fall when my Wednesday night bowling league started up. I agreed to serve as a backup DM in case any of the regular folks were out of town, though, and this week I got the call. Put me in, coach – I’m running a game!

My party consisted of four PCs – two warpriests, a bladesinger and a thief. They began the session by taking a short rest in a boat house in a swamp, where they had come in search of the Dead Rats gang. The boat house held only a table and a rug, and a sharp-eyed PC noticed the rug sagging in the middle. Pulling it aside revealed a stone pipe with metal rungs forming a ladder down into darkness.

The adventurers successfully negotiated crumbling ceilings, narrow ledges, tough climbs and tricky tracking with no problem and eventually emerged into the sewers proper. They noticed some movement in the water – two pairs of eyes staring at them from just above the water’s surface. As the dwarf warpriest pushed forward, the eyes revealed themselves to be attached to a pair of crocodiles, and a swarm of hundreds of rats poured out of some pipes in the walls to join the fun. The PCs could also hear noises inside a larger pipe, as if something else was making its way toward them.

The party thief decided to try to jump across the sewer channel but failed, landing in the water next to the large pipe – which was revealed to contain a dire rat. The rat bit the thief (one exposure to Dire Rat Filth Fever) and was soon joined on the other side by a crocodile who clamped its jaws around the poor thief’s leg. Ouch!

The rest of the party was dealing with the swarm and the other crocodile, but the drow warpriest did wade into the muck and drop a cloud of darkness to help the thief get away. No luck, though – the crocodile’s next turn of grinding its jaws down on the delicious thief left the sneaky bugger unconscious (and getting more exposure to disease from the dirty water).

Eventually the thief was healed and got himself out of harm’s way and the rest of the party started taking care of the bad guys one by one – first the dire rat, then the swarm, then finally the crocodiles. And there was much rejoicing!

At the end of the encounter, since the thief had been exposed three times to Dire Rat Filth Fever (twice from rat bites and once from bleeding in the dirty water) I invoked my house rule: He only had to make one saving throw to avoid infection, but because of the two extra exposures, the saving throw was at a -2 penalty. It was a moot point, as he rolled a 7 on the die and found himself infected.

In prepping for the game, I realized that it would be a pain in the butt for a typical Encounters player to have to deal with a disease. “Wait, what do I have to roll to get better? And what happens if I get worse?” So, I used the awesome Power2ool to create disease cards to hand out to any players who get infected:

While it was only a one-week return to the Encounters DM table, I had a lot of fun. It was also nice to have more people compliment me on my projector setup + MapTool for my in-person games. The encounter itself wrapped up within an hour, so I was even able to make it to bowling on time.

Best of all, the coordinator at the store is thinking about moving Encounters to Tuesday nights in the future, since WotC has given store owners more flexibility about when they run the program. That would be awesome, since I’d be able to get involved again!

Edit: However, it looks like this is not a new WotC policy after all, and Encounters is still required to be run on Wednesday. Well, poop.

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August 11, 2011

Running my third homemade D&D4e adventure at the FLGS

Filed under: 4e D&D, Adventures, DM Lessons, Maps — Tags: D&D4e, Maps, TactiCon — OnlineDM @ 11:30 PM

Woo hoo – I finally got to run the third adventure in my Staff of Suha trilogy tonight! (Adventure one and adventure two have been previously published.) I ran it as a MyRealms game at my friendly local game store. This was the inaugural run of the adventure, so it’s still a work in progress, but it was so much fun.

First, I should mention that my players were awesome. I had a father and son at the table whom I’ve played with before (I love multi-generational gaming families). I had a new player who was playing his third game of D&D ever – super nice guy.

And I had a husband and wife pair; I had met the husband a few weeks ago at D&D Encounters when he was a brand new player, and I managed to kill off his character in that first session. We’ve kept in touch, and his wife was excited about playing, too. The wife made homemade gluten-free cookies for me and my wife (who’s allergic to gluten) to thank me for helping with their characters and getting them into the game tonight. How sweet is that? I really, really like this couple, and I’m hoping that I’m making some new friends here.

Anyway, the adventure itself started off with a little exposition, then moved into the first action scene. I won’t go into too much detail here; I’ll put up a full post about the adventure itself once it’s polished (after I run it at Tacticon over Labor Day weekend). Suffice it to say that the first battle began with the PCs in total darkness. I forgot some of the abilities I had given to the leader of that fight, but it was still a good battle. Lots of PCs were bloodied, but none fell unconscious. The party interrogated the leader, who gave them some information but then died in anguish (he evidently said too much). And the party discovered one of the three artifacts they were seeking.

We had some exploration after that. This was technically a skill challenge, though I’m running it as several scenes that each have their own success and failure consequences. I really, really liked this approach, and the way that the PCs worked together. I’m getting farther away from the formal skill challenge structure and closer to just scenes that use skills. This particular challenge consists of three scenes, followed by a combat encounter, followed by the final scene.

The second combat encounter began with some sneaking and spying and conversation, but erupted into battle when the assassin in the party had to be true to his nature and took a swing at a bad guy.

I skipped the final skill challenge scene because we were running way short on time, and just threw the PCs into the final battle with fewer minions than I originally planned. I was pleased that the party took advantage of two different terrain effects in this battle, and even though I forgot about a mini skill challenge that was supposed to be running during the boss battle, it was a cool fight. The boss wasn’t quite as interesting as I had hoped, but he wasn’t bad.

Enemy lair with ziggurat and magma river - no grid

I ultimately had to end the battle early because the store was closing, so I declared victory for the PCs and called it a night.

Lessons learned:

I need to shrink some of the encounter maps. One map has some terrain effects that work in blast areas; an overly-large map encourages the monsters to spread out too much, making the terrain effects less attractive.
Minions that explode upon death are fun, but only in moderation. I think my second battle is overdoing it. Maybe I’ll make them non-minions and have fewer of them.
If I’m going to give the PCs cool magic items to use during the adventure, I don’t want it to be too hard for them to figure out what the items do. I think I’ll have this auto-succeed during a rest (I was previously requiring an Arcana check).
Players are easily tempted by treasure. If you dangle something valuable-looking just out of reach (literally, in this case), they will move heaven and earth to get it.
Having an in-game time limit does a nice job of ramping up the tension (and provides an incentive not to take back-to-back short rests to maximize healing powers).

I hope to run this adventure once for my home game players before Tacticon. Once I feel that it’s polished, I plan to release it on the blog, and then I plan to release the whole trilogy (edited and updated) as a single big adventure. I’d like to make it look a little bit pretty, too, and I’d be willing to pay for some help with layout and maybe even commission some artwork. Does anyone have suggestions on this sort of thing? How do I find and hire a freelance layout person?

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July 31, 2011

SPEC 3-2 Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds – MapTool file

Filed under: 4e D&D, Adventures, Macros, Maps — Tags: D&D4e, LivingForgottenRealms, Maps, MapTool — OnlineDM @ 12:36 AM

I felt like I had to share this MapTool file simply because of the sheer insane amount of work I had to put into it.

I agreed to run a “special” Living Forgotten Realms game at my local store today for a charity benefit event. The adventure is SPEC 3-2 Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds. A normal LFR game runs in four hours; this one was scheduled for six, plus an hour break for dinner (4:00 PM to 11:00 PM).

When I first saw the adventure I almost backed out due to the huge amount of prep work I would have to do in MapTool before I could run it with my projector setup. The adventure is cool in that it lets the players have a meaningful choice. Early in the adventure they can choose between two totally different paths. The encounters for each path are completely unrelated to one another, and you could get a legitimately different play experience if you were to repeat the adventure and go in the other direction.

Unfortunately, this means that, as the DM, I needed to prepare a whopping TEN different encounters that the PCs could go through. And half of that effort is going to be wasted on any given play-through, since the party can only take one path.

I decided to use the map images provided in the adventure PDF this time. I had to do the work to erase the markings for monster starting positions and PC starting positions, but I’m getting fairly adept at that. Then I had to create tokens for each monster.

Making matters more complicated is the fact that this is a season 3 adventure for LFR, which means it can be run at any of five different adventure levels – 12, 14, 16, 18, 20. In most cases the adventure uses the same monsters throughout (just leveling them up or down), but there are a few battles where the monsters for level 12-14 are different from the monsters for levels 16-20, for instance. And there’s almost no instances where a monster is used in more than one fight, so I had to create a crapload of unique tokens.

The work is done and the adventure is now over. If anyone out there ever runs this adventure in MapTool, you’re welcome. I’ve done the work for you.

Note that this campaign file was created in version 1.3.b66 of MapTool.

Download the PDF of the adventure here.

Download the MapTool file here.

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July 28, 2011

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 12

Filed under: 4e D&D, Adventures, Maps — Tags: D&D Encounters, D&D4e, Maps — OnlineDM @ 3:00 AM

A bittersweet night, as this was the last session of Dark Legacy of Evard that I’ll be running. Of course, that’s because I’ll be in Indianapolis next week for Gen Con, so I guess I’ll survive!

At our 5:00 table we had a bit of a problem; only three players showed up. We’ve had as many as 14 in the past, and the last two weeks had 8 and 7. I waited until 5:10, and when no more players showed up I decided to run with just the three players. We had a defender and two strikers.

Scaling is a little tricky when you have so few characters and their levels are a bit uneven (one at level 1, one at 2 and one at 3). The encounter originally called for an evil wizard, a shadow bolter and four dusk beasts. I decided to take it down to 2 dusk beasts and go from there.

The encounter began with the party trying to figure out how to get into the spooky library where the wizard Nathaire (possessed by the spirit of the evil wizard Vontarin) was apparently holed up. They decided to try to sneak close to the front door and then quietly pick the lock. They failed. They made noise. And eventually they got the door open, whereupon I granted a surprise round to the two-headed shadowy dusk beast that had been sent to the door to investigate. Chomp.

Evard Session 12 Library Map - Gridded

Evard Session 12 Library Map - No Grid

The knight charged bravely into the library and started handling the dusk beast. The vampire and the assassin tiptoed in as well. Nathaire taunted them from upstairs, telling them that he had no desire to destroy them, but when they kept fighting his minions the evil wizard started blasting them with shadowy tendrils.

Eventually the shadow bolter made his presence known. The vampire and assassin stayed downstairs to deal with him while the knight climbed the stairs to go after the wizard… only to find that the wizard had another dusk beast standing guard upstairs.

The vampire was knocked unconscious by the bolter, but luckily got a 20 on his second death save. The knight, meanwhile, was in deep trouble with the wizard after taking out the second dusk beast. He started dying, taking ongoing enervation damage.

At this point it seemed quite likely that I would kill off the party, so I took the knight’s player up on his earlier suggestion of letting him run a second PC – a healer. The reinforcements arrived, and the party got back on its feet and finished off the dark mage, trapping his soul in a purple orb.

At 7:00 I had a table of four. Two were regulars from the 7:00 group from the past couple of weeks (including a fellow player in my Pathfinder group). One was my lovely wife (yay!). And the fourth was a brand-new D&D player who I’d met via EN World when he reached out to ask some general questions about the game and mentioned in his post that he lived near a store called Enchanted Grounds. I exchanged some messages with him, and he showed up to play!

This group had two defenders and two controllers – once again, no healer. They were a pair of 3rd level characters and a pair of 1st level characters. I decided to use the same scaling as I had for the earlier game (two dusk beasts instead of four).

The encounter began when the vryloka paladin walked up to the library and knocked on the door. When the voice on the other side (a shadow bolter) asked who was there, the paladin lied and said he was one of the people Vontarin had commanded to create undead in the crypts and he needed to talk to the wizard. With a great Bluff check, the shadow bolter opened the door and I allowed the paladin a free surprise round attack.

My wife’s binder opened the combat by dropping a zone of difficult terrain right inside the door – a mixed blessing that worked out okay. The paladins led the way into the library, and the new player’s paladin was knocked to the ground by a readied bite from a dusk beast. Nathaire/Vontarin exchanged taunts with the binder and the mage, which was a ton of fun; I loved role-playing the evil wizard.

The party took care of the dusk beast and shadow bolter downstairs without getting beat up too badly, and the binder and mage started zapping Vontarin from afar. The paladins started fighting through the upstairs dusk beast on the way to the dark mage. When the party’s eladrin mage teleported into the balcony behind Vontarin, the evil wizard closed to melee with the paladins.

The new player’s paladin was low on hit points when the bloodied dark wizard reached out to touch him with despair. He hit. The attack brought the paladin to dangerously negative hit points… and the slide effect took him off the balcony, whereupon the falling damage finished him off. In the very next round, the surviving PCs killed off the evil mage.

The new player’s character died heroically and rather cinematically (tossed off a balcony by a big bad guy), and he had an absolute blast with the experience. I stayed afterward to talk to him about D&D4e and how to get into the game. He ended up buying a copy of Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms (he loved the idea of the dual-weapon wielding Scout ranger) and I suggested D&D Insider if he decides he’s going to stick with the game. He’s a really great guy, and I hope to see him again at future games.

Thus ends my experience with Dark Legacy of Evard. I’m bummed that I won’t get to run the final session, but that’s okay. I’ll be jumping into the next season of Encounters for a few weeks before my Wednesday night bowling league begins at the end of August, and I’m looking forward to it. I love the way Encounters lets me bring new players into the game. It’s been a lot of fun.

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July 27, 2011

MapTool campaign file: Cairn of the Winter King

Filed under: 4e D&D, Adventures, Online games — Tags: Cairn of the Winter King, D&D4e, Maps, MapTool — OnlineDM @ 8:40 AM

Since I’m running my family campaign through the Cairn of the Winter King adventure from the Monster Vault, I prepared everything in MapTool (my wife and I are in Colorado; her brother and his wife are in Texas, so we play online). I figured I might as well put the adventure out there to share.

This campaign file was created in version 1.3.b66 of MapTool. If you’re looking for the maps independently of the campaign file, you can find them here. Enjoy!

Download the campaign file here.

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July 24, 2011

Maps: Cairn of the Winter King

Filed under: 4e D&D, Adventures, Maps — Tags: Cairn of the Winter King, D&D4e, Maps, MapTool — OnlineDM @ 9:14 AM

I’m excited that my brother-in-law is done with a multi-month training course he had to finish for work and we can now get back to our online D&D game starting this afternoon. The players in the game are my wife, her brother, and his wife. We play via MapTool and Skype. This is the group that I originally ran through Reavers of Harkenwold.

So, next up is Cairn of the Winter King, the adventure from the Monster Vault. I had prepared part of the adventure a few months ago before my brother-in-law had to leave for training, and I spent time yesterday putting the rest of the maps together. I’m still finishing up the monsters, but I thought I’d go ahead and share the maps since they’re ready to go.

As always, I’ve provided versions both with and without the grid, all sized to a 50-pixel per square scale. For the Cairn itself I’ve provided an overview map (not appropriately scaled – just for reference) and then one map for the southern half of the Cairn and a second map for the northern half (they can be stuck together in MapTool).

Frozen Riverside map - Gridded

Frozen Riverside map - No Grid

Cairn of the Winter King - Overview Map

Cairn of the Winter King - Southern half map - Gridded

Cairn of the Winter King - Southern half map - No Grid

Cairn of the Winter King - Northern half map - Gridded

Cairn of the Winter King - Northern half map - No Grid

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July 20, 2011

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 11

Filed under: 4e D&D, Adventures, Maps — Tags: D&D Encounters, D&D4e, Maps — OnlineDM @ 11:30 PM

As with last week, I ran both a 5:00 and a 7:00 table for D&D Encounters this week.

The 5:00 table had seven players. Two of them were third level, one was second level, and four were first level. The first level players included the father and son pair who first showed up two weeks ago and who’ve been coming ever since (yay!) and the other two were brand new players (one of whom had played 1st Edition long ago and nothing since). Ah, I love teaching new players about the game!

The 7:00 table had five players – my quartet of third-level folks from last week, and a first-level binder played by my lovely wife!

Setup

The party had emptied the crypts beneath Saint Avarthil Abbey last week, destroying some skeletons and some shadowy hoofed humanoids. Now they came out into the late afternoon sun and headed up the hill to the monastery grounds.

A skill challenge ensued, with the adventurers trying to find traces of Nathaire and his foul denizens. The 5:00 table didn’t have much luck and stumbled into an ambush; the 7:00 table aced the challenge with no difficulty and got the jump on the bad guys.

Evard Session 11 Map - Gridded

Evard Session 11 Map - No Grid

The battle

I’ll admit that I wasn’t crazy about the presentation of this encounter. The monsters were fine – a pair of nasty tar devils, a pair of shadow bolters (dark ones) and a pair of leeching shadow minions. For both groups (seven lower-level PCs at 5:00 and five upper-level PCs at 7:00) I used a total of four minions but otherwise left the monsters as written.

The problem was the terrain. There’s a 20-foot wall that can be walked on, and there are windows in the wall, but it was unclear how that was supposed to work. The wall is 10 feet thick; can characters on the inside see all the way through? It sounded like characters were supposed to be IN the wall, but that didn’t make sense. Ultimately I think they meant for the windows to be arrow slits in the battlements along the top of the wall, but none of the bad guys were stationed up there. It was all quite confusing.

The 5:00 table got in trouble quickly as the tar devils started burning people up in the surprise round and the bolters added to the pain. The lone healer in the group kept folks patched up, though, and they ultimately prevailed.

The 7:00 group had no trouble. They got the surprise round instead of the bad guys, and three of the five PCs had necrotic resistance, which made the bolters’ combat advantage power almost irrelevant.

Only one PC had any trouble at 7:00, and I felt really bad about it… because it was my wife! She had played once all the way back in week 1 and hadn’t been back since. I was so happy that she came to play, and then felt like a jerk when a tar devil immobilized her with flaming pitch in the first full round and she never got to move again. She was still effective, intentionally provoking some opportunity attacks from monsters in the paladin’s aura (and getting them zapped by divine vengeance), but it was a little frustrating for her. Her saving throw dice just hated her.

Aftermath

My favorite part of the encounter was the aftermath. As the party is resting after the battle, the land shifts into the Shadowfell. A nearby building, in ruins during the daytime, is now fully intact in the Shadowfell… and a light is burning in an upper window.

Ooh! Can’t wait for next week. I think I’ll just be running the 7:00 table, but it’s going to be a fun one.

Previous weeks

No week 6 – I was out of town