Adventure Prep: Of Airships, Feys and Player Input
After a poisoned pillow fight, Slave apes and a librarian warrior chainmail bikini fetish, I promised my players that I’d write the last part of our 1st D&D 4e campaign and bring it to an apex of coolness.
Since our next session is next week and the adventure is actually going to be a homebrewed thing, I’m starting to plan it now.
As things stand, the PCs are to try to rescue their patron, the Halfling robber baron Brandobaris the Fat. He was kidnapped by the crew of the Pirate Airship of the Crimson Fleet and is being held for a ludicrous ransom. The PCs have located the Airship’s Mooring base, situated 6 days away from Hobble’s Point (the Campaign’s main city) by boat.
We were supposed to play last Friday, but Halloween got in the way. In order to keep the game fresh in the minds of my players since we could only play on November 14th, I sent them a little e-mail assignment:
I want you to create setting elements that can help you reach Brandobaris in time. I’ll weave your ideas into the story.
Math chimed in with a proposal that some sort of favors could be cashed in to have Metallic Dragons help out and fly the party to the Airship. (Yeah! Math flying a dragon, I can see the supercoolness from here!)
Yan chimed back that having metallic dragons around could take away a bit of the spotlight away from the PCs. (If we have Large/Huge dragons around, who needs us?). He instead proposed that maybe some sort of Eladrin/Fey Airship could pop out of the Feywild and help the party get to their destination.
(I’ll still try to work Math’s proposal in)
Stef, our budding storyteller, added that his father (an influential Halfling merchant) could cash in a favor with the Fey and summon the airship for the party.
Franky playing the Eladrin Fey-pact warlock said he very much wanted to explore some more aspects of the Fey in the campaign.
That was awesome. My players had provided me with all the elements I needed to plan the 1st part of the game… I just needed to learn more about airships.
I’m not an Eberon fan (yet) so my techno-dungeon-punk material was rather limited. Wizards’ Adventurer’s Vault has stats but little in the way of fluff to help me build an adventure around Airships.
What are they made of, why do they fly?
That’s when I started perusing issue #7 of Kobold Quarterly (you know, the gaming magazine that’s been heralded as being the spiritual successor to Paizo’s Dragon mag?). You see, I got a copy to participate into a little Blog Carnival built around promoting it (see links below).
I accepted because Wolfgang Baur is a good friend (yeah, from nemesis to buddy, who knew?) and because he’s been kind enough to advertise my Kobold Love project.This post is my contribution.
It just so happens that my good friend Ben McFarland wrote a piece in it about… Wait for it…
Airships!
The piece is about dwarven made airships. It covers thier history, the nature of Liftgas mineral, new airship-themed 3.5 spells (Greater Feather fall anyone?), feats, gear and full gaming stats for a Dragon ship!
Bingo! I found my bad guys’ ship!
I’ll tweak the fluff behind it, maybe have it filled with actual Helium that the Pirates ‘mined’ in the volcanic Islands of the South Sea, or better yet, through a Pulver Bi-Elemental WF-2000 engine (Bacon prize to those who get the reference).
As for the Fey airship, I needed something totally alien to make getting on it and traveling a pair of scenes in themselves. I’m a big fan of the playing up the difficulties people have dealing with the Fey. So I tried to dream up something weird and yet cool and accessible to my players.
So I ended up taking one of the Monster Manual’s most sedentary creatures, gave it mad wanderlust and merged it into a flying ship? I added some sort of dark secret and I was primed!
I’ve been running with that ever since, complete with surrealist introduction scene, Skill Challenge and an aerial combat I hope my players will remember for a long time!
If you thought pillows were cool, wait till you hear about the Wyldeship!
Up next, I’ll discuss about making the pirate hideout without getting bogged down with stating everything!
Have a great weekend!
Want to learn more about Kobold Quarterly Issue 7? Read on…
- KQ7 Editorial: Fair Games or Fun Ones?
- Dungeon Mastering.com: What everybody ought to know about rogues
- Jonathan Drain’s d20 Source: Powder Burn: Firearms in Dungeons & Dragons
- Gnome Stew: Troy’s Crock Pot: At Full Gallop at the KQ Carnival
- Ogre Cave: Interview: Stan!
- Atomic Array: Episode 009: Kobold Quarterly 007
Drop by Kobold Quarterly.com to pick up your copy today!
Credits: My Airship, by ShAwNKun
Kobold Love Update: Scene 2 is up
I posted a new Kobold Love article today (my D&D 4e Reverse Dungeon Adventure I’m working on) .
In it, I tackle Scene 2, where the Half-Kobold PCs, travelling to the City to seek out and kill the quest giver, meet a group of inexperienced adventurers traveling in the reverse direction to their dungeon home.
If you want to see how I used minions to simulate old school 1st level PCs, have a look!
How a Wiki can Excite Players
You can find all kinds of advice on how to use a wiki to help out your roleplaying campaign, but there is one aspect I discovered during the last game I played in which I don’t think I’ve seen mentioned by anyone. Sure wiki can be great for keeping track of loot, NPC’s, and plot threads but there is an even more powerful way in which you can use a wiki as a tool. I experienced this as a player in Dave’s last 3.5 game, spending some idle time looking through the game’s wiki on Obsidian Portal and now I am actively using this in my game for my few players that actually spend a little time every now and then reading up on the game.
What I’m talking about is secrets, hints, and Easter eggs. As DM’s and GM’s we naturally know quite a bit about what is going on in our games, but the players usually don’t follow even a fraction of this. If you’re using a wiki for your game, no doubt this helps give the players a little bit more insight into how you think about the game, but what if you actively put things in there that the players didn’t know yet or weren’t sure about? This can really make your players feel like they’ve stumbled upon some important, hidden fact and if done sparingly and correctly can help keep players excited and anticipating the next session even more! [Read the rest of this article]
Chatty's Question: Your duality as a DM/GM
As discussed last week, GMs are often really hard on themselves.
Yet we can’t all be doing a bad job now can’t we?
So I thought to myself, how about we talk some more about that.
I want to know that one thing you know you are good at as a GM. Tell us what comes easily to you and works well at the gaming table.
For instance, I’m very good at pacing. I make things move all evening long. When the group loses focus, I’m usually able to bring them back. When a fight drags on, I sometime let narrative imperative take over and opponents find better things to do than getting slowly killed by the PCs.
I’m also pretty good at description and mood setting. There’s nothing I like more than seeing a player’s stare go wide, when I evoke a scene or describe how a monster acts or a NPCs responds.
While, we’re at it, just so we can at least indulge in that GMing sport of self-torture, I also want to know in what area you would like to improve.
For instance, when I get tired, I tend to shed a lot of the flavor off the game and focus on the numbers rather than the story. During a fight I may end just counting squares of movement and declare points of damage. In that sense combat becomes a sub-game with only a fraction of the excitement that well-described fights can generate.
I also still get caught in the story’s logic and will prize what should happen in a story as I envisioned it over what would make the story more fun.
What about you? What are you good at when behind the screen and what would you like to improve?
For players only, what about your GM? Say one good thing about him/her and one thing you’d like to see get better.
If you notice that you could help one of us with one of our weaknesses, feel free to chime in with a tip!
On Fighting the Blues… and Winning!
No, honest to god, this is NOT yet another post about how miserable I feel! Quite the contrary.
I occasionally talk about my mental health here for 2 reasons. One, it is therapeutic to put it out there for others to see… it forces me to deal with it actively. Two, I know many other gamers have similar issues and I want them to know that there’s nothing wrong with it. Sadly, such symptoms of modern life syndrome are now more and more common…
As long time readers know, I’m prone to both Seasonal Depression and Stress Anxiety Disorder. I rationalize it by saying that I’m some sort of creative genius and that with it comes some form of insanity.
These last few weeks have been harder than most and I honestly feared a relapse into depression. My down periods are often triggered by discrete events like a stressful buisness trip (Switzerland), or the turning of a season (February and October are bad for me).
However, this time, instead of moping about it (well I did mope a bit), I decided to do something about it… and it freaking worked. So here’s my list of things to do to fight off a mental funk.
Don’t fall in love with your depressed state.
Being depressed/anxious becomes such a great excuse not to do anything and hibernate in our personal caves. Staying in bed all weekend long, ditching social events, quitting projects, stop exercising, playing online games instead of prepping your next D&D session are all things that I have done.
You must not become complacent of you mental state. You need to realize that you are depressed. While its okay to accept it (its far preferable than feeling guilty about it), you must not embrace it.
When the blues crashed on me a few weeks ago, I started planning to beat it. It took me a few days to get something done about it.
The first thing I did was realize that it was a temporary state and that I needed to rest a bit and plan my crawling out of that hole.
Let there be Light
The next thing my wife did to help me out (Thank you!!!) was to buy me a Luminotherapy lamp (10 000 lux within 16 inches). I set it up by my desktop computer at home and use it for 30-60 minutes every morning before the rest of the household wakes up.
Its only been a few days, but so far it seems to lighten my mood.
(Get it?)
Get out there and socialize
One thing I realized when I get the blues is that I don’t want to see people anymore. I tend to eat my lunch in my office (or go to the restaurant alone), I go to bed really early and I want to spend my weekends staying at home doing nothing.
In order to fight this, I’ve started forcing myself to socialize more. I run with office colleagues during my lunch break. I have lunch with them every weekday. I also call up friends to see them and I even organized a Halloween party (when the mere thought of one disgusted me. BTW We ended up having a ton of fun!)
During these forced socialization sessions, I refrain from complaining and being a bummer for others. I sat there and listened to others stories and pushed myself to participate through active listening and making a few jokes.
It worked, my mood improved tremendously.
Fish Oil!
Yup, I started eating more fatty fish and taking some Omega 3 gel capsules. While the mental health benefits of doing such might not be all that clearly established, its also a great supplement to prevent heart disease, a condition I’m genetically predisposed to suffer from (made worse by my periodic anxiety spikes).
But damn I hate burping fish oil! Gah!
The Best anti-depressant ever
Depression in me is a vicious cycle. When it does strikes, the first thing I stop doing is exercising. I usually exercise to keep my weight in check (I have high cholesterol) and to better deal with stress.
Thing is, a psychiatrist once told me that exercising 30 minutes a day actually is more effective than most pharmacological antidepressants. And he’s right as I attribute much of my recovery from my Acute Depression 3 years ago to daily exercises.
That’s why I started running at least 2 times a week during lunch and I started going back to the gym.
I often feel like ditching it.. When that happens, I grit my teeth and suit up. It’s always worth it as the runner’s high makes the rest of the day so much easier to bear!
Relax, it will pass
A drop in energy is also an occasion to slow down and look at your life and what’s filling it up. While you should act to fight it off, do take that time to rest a bit and review the things that stress you and those that make you happy.
Periods of blues, if tackled actively, will surely pass momentarily. Its not useful nor constructive to lose more energy being angry about your emotional state, or worse, feel guilty about it. Its not your fault you feel like that…
…it becomes your fault if you wallow in the feeling and don’t act on it.
Push through and accomplish things
Even if your energy levels are low, try to push through and indulge in work that usually motivates you, regardless if you don’t perform well in said work. For instance, I wrote my Feedback to GMs, my Supers Trope post and my Kobold Love Playtest report while not feeling like writing at all.
It was not my best work. So what? It sure helped me get my mind off my darker thoughts and I could see it get better as the week progressed and it culminated in my Inter-review post which I’m really proud of!
So did it work?
I wrote this on Monday morning, it was the first one in weeks that I didn’t feel like crawling under a bed and wait for Fall to end.
So yes, it sure worked. Now I just have to stay the course.
You are not alone, many of us are like that. If you want to share your ways of dealing with it, feel free to do it in the comments.
Review: The Witcher – Enhanced Edition
I’d heard about The Witcher over the last couple of years, but never really paid much attention to it until I got my hands on a review copy of the Enhanced Edition. What happened is that the polish company game company CD Projekt spent a lot of money developing the game, and when it was finally released in October of 2007 it was received quite well but plagued by various technical issues. What the company decided to do, which is rare these days, is to fully re-release the game in an “Enhanced” form in a hope to fix many of the issues with the original. By and large they succeeded quite well, and The Witcher: Enhanced Edition is one of the better medieval-gothic mature rated roleplaying games to come out for the computer in the last couple of years.
The Witcher takes place in a world filled with ruined castles, werewolves, vampires, evil wizards, and all of the sorts of creepy supernatural stuff you love to find lurking about at night in a moonlit European setting. The game starts with a very well done, but a little lengthy, cinematic that depicts the main character of the game Geralt entering a village and solving a mystery involving a noble’s daughter and a vicious monster. You eventually play as Geralt after some unknown events leave him in the wilderness with partial amnesia. He is still a specialized occult monster hunter (known as Witchers), but he’s lost a lot of the cool skills and items he had in the introduction. The entire game consists of an appropriately short but eventful prologue, followed by five chapters.
One of the first things that surprised me is that the game is much more of a roleplaying game then I’d ever expected: there are a lot of dialogue choices and decisions to be made along the way. At least in the prologue, it makes great use of a choose-your-own-adventure style gameplay by presenting the player with the choice of where you go, while the NPC’s take care of the other path and the outcome is different based on who you decide to help.
The writing and dialogue itself is good, but sometimes cheesey and I wouldn’t call it one of the highlights of the game. There are quite a few scene transitions that are abrupt and surprising, sometimes taking you right to a loading screen before you even know what’s happening. The environments are really well thought out, and add to the atmosphere of the game in excellent ways, while the character models are also good but they are often re-used for NPC’s as well as the same voice actors pop up for many of the NPC’s. The game’s combat system feels very repetitive at first, but as the game progresses the combat takes more of a back seat, so this becomes less of a problem. The Witcher utilizes three combat systems, one for fighting against large/tough opponents, one for fighting against small/agile opponents, and one for fighting against large numbers of weaker opponents. This spices up the combat to a little more than just pointing a clicking, and if you attack in timed progressions you create combos that are more effective.
Once you get to the point of leveling up your character, the wealth of options available become apparent. You can specialize in normal combat techniques, silvered weapon techniques that are used against supernatural creatures, magic, and each of your stats/abilities can be leveled up to gain special benefits as well. The multitude of character options, combined with the overall storyline, side quests, and dialogue options all contribute to make The Witcher feel like a very full and fleshed out RPG. 
If you enjoyed games like the Vampire branded games, Undying, or the more occult quests in fantasy games like Oblivion, then The Witcher is the game for you. It presents a fairly unique mix of medival occult lore with a dash of high fantasy and quite a bit of mature elements that I think give it a unique feel from many of the other games that have come out in the last two years.
The Enhanced Edition comes with a lot of extra content including two bonus adventures, a complete game guide, a bonus behind-the-scenes DVD, the soundtrack to the game, and a CD of music inspired by the game. With the amount of actual content that the game comes with, in addition to the amount of gameplay available compared to most other games, makes The Witcher a really good value for the lower pricetag.
YouTube Tuesday: Vote for Lando Edition
Currently only available at Funny or Die, some campaign ads you need to see before voting. And remember, if the Emperor doesn’t win, he might have to get another job.
Are you ready to ROCK?
Last year, in December, Bill Slavicsek decided to give a holiday present in the form of the entire 4e Elf class in his Ampersand column, one of our first big glimpses directly into 4e. This year, the holidays have come slightly early, but he gives us an unexpected present (one not listed in the editorial calendar): the entire Bard class. To see it, however, you need to be a D&D Insider subscriber.
It turns out that I am (as of last Friday), so here’s some tidbits about the new Bard:
- They are Arcane Leaders (no big surprise there), and they’re better at short rest healing (which all leaders SHOULD be.)
- They’re a jack-of-all trades in several ways, including having a benefit like the feat of the same name, having a huge class skill list, and best of all, can take as many multiclass feats as they want.
- They get their own rituals (which we don’t have yet) which they can cast a limited number of times per day without spending resources.
- They have a number of utility effects for skill-boosting, in the areas traditionally mastered by Bards.
- The two at-wills featured are unusual but very much fitting with leaders.
- Their powers are mainly ranged, focusing on the more arcane end with some musical flavor. Some familiar spell names make their way back in to the Bard’s list, which I’m always fond of.
- They use wands as their implement (conductor-mage, anyone?) but can also use “Songblades” and magic musical instruments. Clearly they missed the mark by not offering axes.
Overall summation is that I like their class abilities quite a lot. The Bard finally comes into its own, buoyed by the leader role. I’m not super-excited about the selection of powers they showcased (with a few exceptions), but that will probably change when I see the final list. I’m looking forward to playing a Bard again for the first time really since 2e: I played them in 3.0 and 3.5 but always ended up dissappointed. (That’s where “Bards Suck!” comes from, after all.) I actually think the 4e Bard has the potential to outstrip the Cleric in healing ability, and is far more appealing to me in play than a Cleric.
A brief comparison to the Advanced Player’s Guide version and the Forgotten Heroes version: Play the APG version (Troubador) if you want more of the swashbuckling type (especially since the WotC one doesn’t use Dex), play the FH version if you want the total Music Mage concept featuring songs as class abilities (and a fairly complex set of abilities), and the WotC version best portrays the “Versitile Inspirer” type.
There you have it, your Bardic options for 4e. Speaking of which, I was amused to find an article Bartoneus wrote last year talking about the missing Bard, which speculated on the four roles and the eight classes in the core book (all correctly.) Always interesting to look back on our speculation and information gathering to see how close we were to the final product!
Supers Carnival Roundup!
Hello, I’m Chatty DM, your host for last month’s RPG Blog Carnival. It was quite a month for Super Heroic RPG blog goodness let me tell you.
So here’s my digest!
Things started out with my good friend Greywulf where he picked some Supers Tropes (Alternate Origins, Costumes, Group names, Base of Operations, etc) and saw how to apply them to D&D.:
Greywulf then made a few Super Renders:
- The most common Super Powers (Boobies!)
- The Grey Gauntlet (Fantasy Superhero)
He later returned to visiting Super Fantasy with a post on Secret IDs
Stargazer also explored Super Fantasy tropes (a recurring theme this month BTW) in
I did something in the same vein:
And so did A Butterfly Dreaming:
Chris of 6d6 fireball discussed animal-based superheroes as covered by Palladium’s Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtle RPG:
Donny the DM chimed in by discussing how some of House of Blooded’s game mechanics could be used in D&D to simulate Superpowers:
The Fistful of Comics Podcast proposed a series called ‘Superhero Summit’ about Supers in RPGs:
The Geek Emporium gave us 3 super servings:
- Supers of the Apocalypse: The Templars (What if the Templars survived the Apocalypse and were Heroes?)
- Supervillains of the Apocalypse (Introducing 2-Rock, Leader of the Viper Street Gang)
- Pulp Hero of the Apocalypse (With Jason Cole, Survivalist Hunter!)
Critical Hits Posted about the paradox of having Tank PCs in a group with Squishy Psions.
They also posted musing about applying the Watchmen/Dark Knight Returns/The Incredibles tropes (i.e. Superheroes are forcefully retired) to D&D (All adventurers have been retired by society):
The Book of Rev chimed with 6 (yes 6!) posts :
- Superheroes? Bah, The Villains Are Where it’s At! (the Top 7 reasons why Villains rule)
- Everybody Loves Deadpool(A demotivational Poster)
- The World Must Be Destroyed…But How? (A Supervillain post about bringing the Apocalypse)
- He’s the Goddammed Batman! (Another demotivational poster about Ice Cream)
- For the Carnival! For America! (Demotivational Poster about Captain Avandra, the Paladin!)
- Because its Awesome (Yet another poster about Supervillains)
The Call of the Dungeon posted 3 articles on the subject:
- Marvel Phile: Go Team Venture: Venture Bros. done with the Marvel Super Hero Game
- Nothing Fancy, just Kill’em: How not to run a superhero campaign
- Tweaking a Classic: Discussing a Net-based Marvel RPG tweak
Zach Houghton reposted his review of the Truth & Justice RPG:
Stargazer posted a second article about playing a Superhero campaign without using some of the most common tropes:
Gomez over at Paper & Plastic posted about his Supers campaign he GMed:
NiTessine posted about Godlike, his favorite Supers game ever:
Ravyn over at Exchange of Realities tackled the subject with her take on the Secret Identity trope:
A Butterfly Dreaming posts another article that muses about the elements that come in the making of a hero:
Followed by a funny post on some Strange Superpowers by the same author:
The Dice Bag reminisces about a game where some players wanted Sci-Fi and the GM wanted Supers… the group settled on Cyberpunk:
The innimitable Berin Kinsman invited his readers to submit Superhero Haikus:
He followed this post with A campaign idea about retired Heroes being asked by a former Nemesis to check on his kid’s bad frequentation:
He finishes his trio of article with an article about Prcedural Crime investigation in Gotham City. The PCs are not Superheroes, but thier investigation are affected by the existance of suprahumans:
And finally, Joshua from Tales of the Rambling Bumblers closes off this voluminous Carnival with an article where he reminisces about past Supers campaigns:
Edit: I forgot to add one, Szilard’s article on using Super Hero tropes in other genres:
This has been quite a month! (And this is a lot more work than I expected!)
November’s Blog Carnival is about Religion, find out more here.
Inq. of the Week: Presidential Election
Last week, we wanted to find out which of the wonderful pile of games that have just come out you’re planning on buying. The big winner, and I have to agree that it’s a must-buy, is Fallout 3 with 65% of the voters. Second place is Fable 2, recently reviewed here. In third, since our WoW crowd seems to be diminishing, is Wrath of the Lich King. I personally haven’t bought any of the new games on the list because my Xbox 360 started refusing to read disks, and I prefer to play the games I buy instead of just smelling them. So hopefully I’ll replace that soon, and get to enjoy some of these great titles around Xmas-time.
It’s everywhere this week: the Presidential election. While not all of our readers are US citizens, I’m sure the election coverage spills out over the world. So in that spirit, we thought we’d conduct our own informal presidential poll:
Loading ...In case you’re somehow unfamiliar with the candidates, full descriptions after the break:
