DM Chronicles, Session 11: When the stars are right… Planar Awesomeness! Part 2.
See part 1 here.
Also, please note that while the adventure is technically Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, about 90% of what happened last session was homegrown. Do not think of being able to replay this without some serious work!
Seeing an overwhelming horde of arachnids attack the Elven compound of Iritidil’s House, all characters deemed that going through the portal to Yggdrasil was smarter than staying and fighting.
So they started climbing the tree really fast…
Of course, that where I described that 4 Driders and one of the Huge Harpoon spiders were breaking off the assault and moving toward the climbing heroes.
Cixi shot one arrow to cover their retreat and stopped a drider in its track with a well placed critical hit (you could probably set your watch to that!) leaving it too wounded to follow.
Then the PCs found themselves on a gigantic branch at least 10 foot wide with the driders and harpoon spider 1 round behind, welcome to Yggdrasil… the Planescaping finally starts!.
Battlemap aside: I used the King’s Road map, from the Field of Ruins Fantastic Location pack to represent the Tree. The branch was the map’s road and everything around was considered Dense Underbrush that one had to make climb checks (DC 15) to move within. It worked perfectly! [Read the rest of this article]
YouTube of the Week: Better than a Big Gameboy Edition
More human Tetris! Be sure to listen to the music and sounds.
DM Chronicles, Session 11: When the stars are right… Planar Awesomeness! Part 1.
Previously in Phil’s game…
Our heroes investigate a series of Drow raids on Elven interests in Ptolus. Re-visiting familiar (under)grounds again, they meet and vanquish numerous Dark Elves and recover interesting documents. Meeting with Rule of Three again leads our heroes to obtain a cryptic Prophecy that talks of Demon slaying weapons, gates, keys and a Goddess Queen…
This week, our pal Math couldn’t make it, I think we haven’t had a complete group in 3 sessions now… ah the joys of intruding Real Life®.
However, since Math has the craziest, most corporate job of us all (he’s a patent agent) and is almost always the last one to arrive, we were all ready to start at 5h00 pm! For a minute there I feared I might run out of material and… gulp… improvise…
We started the evening with a review of Lillee’s letter to Cruguer and the fact that there was a gift with the letter. An onyx sphere featuring Oak trees in bas-relief, found earlier in the campaign and kept by Lille.
While Cruguer pondered the meaning of this gift, we switched the camera toward Yan’s new PC. [Read the rest of this article]
Inq. of the Week: Save vs. Rod/Staff/Wand
Just like me, 38% of you will be starting a new campaign when D&D fourth edition comes out. 24% people are going to stay with 3.5, though not necessarily for reasons that are anti-4e. Those who don’t play D&D and those who will do whatever the DM decides (including several of the players in my current game) got some decent votes too.
I just happened to come across something today that we just couldn’t believe: one of our D&D in-joke classes ended up being published in a supplement. Yes, someone got paid money to design the Master of Immovable Rods (expert of the rod-in-the-throat maneuver).
I have no explanation for why I want to know:
Loading ...Chatty's Out of the Box #001 : Discriminating Taste!
I should have spent the evening writing my DM log, I know, but the Webcomic bug came back and bit me hard.
So I got myself a rightfully owned copy of Comic Book Creator 2 and I started experimenting a bit more. (Once more with Graham’s technical expertise and critical eye).
Since my blog was not designed to show a comic (it’s about 500 pixels wide) you can see it by clicking here! (Or the thumbnail, zooming in once helps to read it)
What is it about? Well it’s about my D&D mini collection and the adventures its members could live. The line between Characters, Game Props, Setting, Story and Reality are very blurred. There is no Fourth wall!
I owe my inspiration to Shamus Young’s DM of the Ring and the Irregular Webcomic crew.
I don’t know how often I’ll post these as it’s very hard to be funny in so few words. I’m really not sure if my talents lay there yet. (Woot, I even manage to sound like Pyro on issue #1!)
I wonder if it gets any easier with time?
I hope you enjoy it…
P.S.: For those wondering that’s the box up for the ‘Chatty’s new abode‘ raffle. While the figurines you see in panel #3 are all of that collection, the actual contents of the box are still in their bags… and I’m not saying what the rare is…
Review: "Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight" DVD
When the announcement was first made, I was excited about the prospect of a Dragonlance animated movie. As the voice cast was announced, I was even more excited. Some big names were there- Kiefer as Raistlin!- which made me think they were sparing no expense in making a cherished novel from my teenage years into a quality movie.
When the trailer debuted, my faith wavered a bit. I still decided to reserve judgment until I had seen the final product.
Well, I rented it from Netflix. And I have to say, I’m disappointed.
(For the purposes of the review, I’m assuming some familiarity with the original book. From that, there will be spoilers.) [Read the rest of this article]
Mini-Crunch: The Bebilith Revisited
I’m currently writing about Friday’s last game and chances are the post will be massive. So I’m taking this one “Aside” I had plan to write and making it into a separate crunchy mini-post.
While I was preping last week’s adventure, I had a strong arachnid theme going (I looooooove spider monsters!). At a certain point, I needed a demonic Guardian in the CR9-10 range and the Bebilith came up.
Thing is, the Bebilith is an armour destroyer creature that got somewhat nerfed in the 3.0 to the 3.5 ‘upgrade’. Witness the latest ability:
Rend Armor (Ex)
If a bebilith hits with both claw attacks, it pulls apart any armor worn by its foe. This attack deals 4d6+18 points of damage to the opponent’s armor. Creatures not wearing armor are unaffected by this special attack. Armor reduced to 0 hit points is destroyed. Damaged armor may be repaired with a successful Craft (armorsmithing) check.
I don’t know about you, but I never did find the Armour HP and Hardness table in D&D 3.5. Granted an enterprising DM can tackle this by extrapolating from the Breaking Items table, but quite frankly, just how thick is Chainmail vs Full Platemail? What material do you use for Studded leather armour? You see where I’m going with this? [Read the rest of this article]
Review: "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters" DVD
Who knew one giant gorilla could cause so many problems?
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is a documentary that primarily follows the story of Steve Wiebe, a laid-off family man who sees the world record in Donkey Kong and decides that he can beat it with the arcade machine sitting in his garage. The world record is owned by Billy Mitchell, a hot sauce magnate who has spent the past 20+ years enjoying the fame and fortune (in a relative sense) of being an arcade game playing-legend.
The film begins with an introduction to world of competitive arcade game playing, which had its seeds in a 1982 LIFE magazine article that gathered the top players the county over. Out of that meeting came a group of devoted game players and minor celebrities in the game world. Eventually, one of the alumni of the event establishes himself and his arcade (Twin Galaxies) as the foremost expert on arcade game world records. [Read the rest of this article]
Chatty's Newly Renovated Abode!
Welcome one and all to the newest incarnation of this here blog!
With the tireless help of Graham, (well, more than that really, he hacked the whole theme!) I present you the newest theme, complete with the awesome banner done by artist Veronica Pare.
Late last year when I was still writing over my Blogger-based site, I contacted Veronica to create a Banner that captured the essence of what the blog was about: a loudmouthed DM with wayyy to many cool things to say! I must say she captured the feeling perfectly!
Then PM, Graham and I started discussing how to redesign the blog to be both pleasing to the eyes and easy to read. I really like the results!
The new theme features Shamus Young’s Wavatars, giving each commenter a unique avatar. Alternately you can have one from Gravatars if you signed up with the free service over there.
The blog also features a comment preview where you can see what the comment will look like on the page as you type it.
Also, as usual users can edit their comments up to 15 minutes after posting.
So awesome!
Now I really need to scrounge some cash to buy Graham an XBox 360… 
Please drop by and say hi to generate your own Wavatar…. come on! Even the lurkers!
Heck, I’m going to make a contest, I’ll raffle something nice among all the commenters, one chance per commenter!
How about this box of War of the Dragon Queen booster box of D&D minis I bought to make my next Webcomic post?
It’s going to be opened for the comic (the box only) but I won’t open the bags nor touch the cards in it. Maybe there’s an Aspect of Tiamat in it…
Edit: Contest is up until Tuesday February 19th at noon EST.
Anyway, I hope you’ll like the result. If not, well complaints are handled by my pet Ogre that can be reached at chattydm@chattydm.net.
32.33—Repeating of Course—Percentage of Success
A World of Warcraft Collectible Miniatures Game is coming. Details are still vague on the website, but there’ll be starter packs and booster packs as you’ve come to expect from this sort of thing by now (and to go head to head for your random prepainted minis dollars with D&D Minis 2.0). Some examples of the figs are on the website. As with their CCG, it looks like they’ll mostly be characters they made up (and of course, LEEROY JENKINS) instead of, I dunno, drawing on characters that people have made themselves. Come on, who wouldn’t want to play a ROFLCOPTER the gnome?
Anyway, even as non-WoW fan, and someone who really disliked the WoW CCG, I see a lot of potential because of two tidbits (emphasis mine):
You can build parties from the Alliance, Horde, and Monster factions
and
the Miniatures Game will feature standalone raid and dungeon scenarios, letting players play cooperatively against other players or fully automated dungeons.
D&D Minis tried hard to come up with a random dungeon system in their Handbook, but it still required DM intervention and all this other stuff. If they can succeed in making a satisfying random multiplayer minis-driven dungeon crawl that doesn’t need a DM, then sign me up. Bonus points for making them the same scale as D&D so I can use them in my RPG sessions.
(ninja’d from OgreCave)
