Review: The Elder Elemental Eye

My reformed tabletop group (see the last post for that story) just finished the D&D Encounters season called "The Elemental Eye".  In a lot of ways, this adventure is quite a bit different from "Beyond the Crystal Cave", the Encounters season I began running for my tabletop group and am currently running at RpgCrossing.  The Crystal Cave focused on roleplaying elements and a fairy tale feel.  The Elemental Eye is more of an old-fashioned dungeon crawl as a great deal of the adventure is the exploration of an ancient temple of Ghaunadaur and a hidden shrine to Tharizdun.

This review will not be spoiler-free, so if you are planning on playing this adventure and don't want to be surprised, you have been warned.

The Good:

The adventure uses the Abyssal Plague, which was a multi-campaign setting event that Wizards of the Coast did to try to tie all their products into one crisis, much like DC and Marvel do every couple of years.  Though I never read the novels, I did read the short story introducing the concept (which can be downloaded as a free ebook on the WotC site). 

I like threats that could possibly infect the players and change their bodies into something horrifying.  It is basically what makes the zombie genre so scary.  This one features a plague that turns its victims into horrifying plague demons.  Thanks to lucky saving throws, only one of my players ever got infected despite numerous bites.  The disease was cured before it got too scary.

This also presents good opportunities for tough moral decisions.  Do we kill the infected villagers or tend to them, even though even if only a few of them turn the village might be overrun?

There is also a really interesting nightmare sequence where the characters return to the town to find that they had failed and it had been destroyed by plague.  Creepy clues slowly let the players know that what they are seeing isn't real, but the entire sequence was suitably scary and had a great ambiance.   It is hard to do horror in a tabletop rpg, and this felt genuinely ominous.

The encounters were very tactical, emphasizing cover and using the maps to their fullness.  There was height, concealment, cover, environmental hazards, and elemental effects to really challenge the players.

The Bad:

I really don't get the nostalgia for dungeon crawling.   You explore rooms meticulously, step by step, looking for traps and listening at doors for monsters.  Bleh. So, there was a lot of that.  And a LOT of dwarves with crossbows.  My party of three didn't have any really ranged characters so that was pretty painful.  

The story also wasn't too surprising.  For the most part it was 'kill insane dwarven cultists and their elemental allies' with few deviations. 

Final Thoughts:

Overall it was a fun way to get a group of players from levels 1-4.  The player concepts were a lot of fun.  They played shifters built around the Pack Outcast theme from the Neverwinter book.  Essentially, Uthgardt werewolves who had been exiled from their pack when it got corrupted by Netherese agents.  An arena fighter and a scout, they traveled from city to city taking odd jobs and fighting in pits until they got the job that started them on this quest.  Of course, with only two player characters, I had to introduce a leader (the class, not an actual leader) as an NPC.  Luckily, the Silverstars are a group of Selunite priestesses who hunt evil werewolves so that fit perfectly.  After convincing her that they were here to help and not the cause of any diseases, the werewolf PCs were joined by Cerridwen, a half-elf warpriest of Selune.

Eventually, I managed to work another player into the party as an eladrin illusionist and we had all the roles properly filled.

Overall, I think everyone had a good time.  We're set for the Shards of Selune adventure next, designed to take characters who are levels 3-5 through an adventure in Neverwinter.  This works out well geographically and also puts more focus on Selune, who is a patron of good lycanthropes.  Cerridwen hopes to gain at least  two new converts for her goddess out of this! :D

Fortitude Saves at the Table, or, The Dangers of Alcohol

I recently had another session of my live Beyond the Crystal Cave game.  It went...not so well.

Two of the players had started drinking before the game began.  I'm certainly not looking to enforce Prohibition at my games, largely because I wouldn't want to help establish a Mafia presence at the table.  In fact, a little social lubricant can be great for the players to open up a little and not be too shy to roleplay around each other or in front of me.  But, please, please, PLEASE drink responsibly.  It is the height of boorishness to get so sloshed at a game (or any social event) that you fall asleep in the middle of the action.

The game I'm running has a backstory that the players learned about through rp interaction with leprechauns, pixies, nymphs and the like.  This requires a little bit of clear-thinking for them to be able to piece together a chain of events.  There's a heavy focus on story, role-playing, and even some politics.  All of these things are less than ideal circumstances for inebriation.

Combat was not safe either.  One of our intoxicated players is new to 4e, so even under the best of circumstances, her turns tend to be slow.  Add wine to the mix, and suddenly every turn is her looking at her character sheet and saying 'what can I do? I want to do a....'ranged basic attack'.'  She's playing a sentinel druid with an 11 dexterity and no ranged weapons at hand.  And this is when I can get her attention at all, normally after a series of "Alyiah...its your turn.  Alyiah...its your turn" chanted like a bizarre ritual.

Eventually, she passed out and then her husband left to use the bathroom and never came back (also passing out).  That left me with two players and a half-finished campaign session.  As this wasn't the first time a game ended this way with these particular players, we decided that three of us would simply stop inviting them to the game.

I'll make a new campaign and run that for the players that can hold their liquor, as well as the new players they bring to fill out the party.  Hopefully, we can all drink responsibly and have a game that looks like this:

Instead of this:

An Ambitious Experiment

Today, I join the ranks of blogs dedicated to a hobby that demands the rare combination of literary prowess,  improvisational acting, and number crunching: tabletop role-playing games.  The word 'table-top' is a bit of a misnomer, however, as the majority of the games I both play and DM are done by play-by-post.  Dungeons and Dragons has always been my game of choice, so the majority of this blog will be discussing the latest iteration of that long, and storied rpg.  Because I tend to DM far more often than play, a lot of this blog will be a behind the screen look at what is happening in my games and my thoughts on DMing.  It will be part advice column, part travelogue, and partly a way to note the things I learn as I run games.

In fact, I am currently in the middle of a bit of an experiment.  Wizards of the Coast has long had a program called D&D Encounters.  The idea is that every Wednesday night, your friendly local game store hosts a game where anyone can walk in off the sheet, pick up a character, and have an hour of adventure with random strangers.  It is a great way to evangelize the hobby (something that is surprisingly easy as geek becomes more chic) and a fun way to teach new players the game.  I was attracted to the hour-long format of the sessions.  Each encounter was a session built around a set piece combat, surrounded by role-playing and story.  You could get in, roll some dice, rp a little, and get out without a huge time commitment.  The encounters string together like episodes in a TV series, ending with a climactic season finale.  I've always wanted to play in one but WotC kept the adventures exclusive to the stores running the program.

Until now.  As of Dungeon issue 211, WotC has begun to release their encounter seasons to DDI subscribers, starting with Beyond the Crystal Cave.  This module is based on an old British tournament module from the OD&D days that focused on problem solving and role-playing.  I read through it and was instantly attracted to the whimsy and fairy-tale ambiance of the story.

One of the problems with my irl gaming group is scheduling.  Four of my group have young kids at home, which provide their own host of scheduling issues, and one of them is working on a PhD on top of that.  There simply isn't time to for the weekly, four hour gaming sessions of yesteryear.  (If only we'd known how good we had it in college!)

This is what makes the D&D Encounters format so appealing.  Instead of marathon sessions, we could get together on the weekends for small, 2 hour, episodic games.  I recruited my friends and soon we'd had our first session.  The second session went off fairly smoothly too, though one of our players was unable to make it at the last minute...

I have already done most of the prep work for running this game, so I decided that I would also offer to run it online at RPGCrossing.  This is a play-by-post site where I have been DMing and playing for quite some time.  I put up an advertisement for a date 3 weeks in the future, asking for adventurers.  9 answered the call within the deadline, and I decided, in the spirit of D&D evangelism, to accept them all.  I created two parallel games, with a party of 4 and a party of 5, and am running them concurrently.

So I find myself DMing 4 games at the same time.  Three of them are the same adventure, two by play-by-post and one in person.  I am interested to see how they diverge.  Though the story is fairly streamlined, any veteran DM knows that the you never run the same adventure twice, thanks to the diversity and creativity of the players.