Gears of Ruin: The Ruiner’s Gambit’, Session 1, Part 1
A Melorian Siege Burrower (AKA Terror Worm)
(I just landed an unexpected, but very welcome Seminar to prep for and teach in less than 2 weeks, posting schedule will be borked. Expect shorter, less frequent articles, thanks).
Last Friday’s adventure was great. It was mostly a 3 hour+ set-piece fight but I wanted to duke it out with the players in a no-holds barred slugfest. I cranked damage dealing to the absolute maximum I could without breaking the rules (a design goal of mine). I also did my best to screw with their game plan and use plenty of dirty tricks to give them their greatest challenge in months.
In fact, I did exactly what I wrote about last week.
It was gruesome, tensions rose and player nerves became frayed at times, but they pulled it off without making a single death save (and I tried real hard).
Someone Else is Crashing our Party
We finally started our Gears of Ruin campaign with the most awesome bunch of PCs. We started right where we left off, with the PCs resting for a few hours after their first contact with possessed military grade clanks (mechanical constructs). They rescued one of 2 agents of Baron Falkenstein’s Intelligence Ministry who urged them to the Factory-mine, some 12 miles further, to save his colleague (he tagged along).
As they moved toward the Baron’s rebellious compound, I described the absence of further opposition. Ad-libing 100%, I described various acid-eaten gigantic Mortars and broken Boulder-clanks. The PCs deduced that they had been destroyed by Melorians, the savage, self-replicating, bio-contructs created in the last decade by the previous incarnation of Eric’s Deva Avenger.
As they approached the site, the signs that Melorians were also going there became evident.
Franky: Well, that’s going to be anti-climactic, we’ll get there and the whole place will be a melted puddle of acid.
Chatty: Didn’t you like sleep only 3 hours in the last 48 hours? I’m trying to work with you man.
Unidentified Plot Twist at 6 O’clock!
Shortly before they arrived at the Foundry-Mine where the psychic signal, supposedly at the origin of the Clank uprising, was located, the Baron’s Spy NPC dropped a rock in the puddle.
Agent: My colleague just died! We absolutely must recover his Watch within 24 hours or his “Transience” (i.e. personality backup) will be sucked in the Elemental Chas with all he knows.
Rod Stone: How do you know that?
Agent (points at watch and grins): I’m not supposed to tell you that.
Rod Stone: Can that ‘not supposed to tell us’ tell you where your ‘not alive’ friend is now?
Agent: Wha?
Nar-Beth: Just lead the way to his body.
Agent: Huh? Yeah… That way.
The Falkenstein Works Foundry-Mines
The PCs crested a hill and came upon a the smoke-belching, clockwork-running monstrosity that was The Falkenstein Works Factory-Mines. A series of buildings and mine tunnels sticking out of a mountain. Surrounded by an electrified, barbed wire palisade guarded by tower-turrets. The courtyard was filled with refined ore, cranes, piles of crates and drums, huge mounds of dead bodies and clanks walking here and there, some very large.
The compound’s front gate had been crashed open but was apparently unguarded.
Holy Clank: Well, I guess we just need to see what those towers do before we charge…
A flash of light was seen to the party’s right, then a loud thuderclap was heard. A vague odor of ozone and burnt poultry reached them.
Holy Clank: Right, that’s what I thought.
Up next: Mecha in 4e!!!
Credit: Terror Worm image by artist Emerson Tung from The Wandering Men’s upcoming Untold: The Game.
Friday Chat: Are You Trying Too Hard?
Friday Chats are end-of-week posts intended to foster discussion on various RPG topics that bounce around in my noggin’.
This week, with my post on prepping for my game,cramming it with all the awesome Magitek I can think of and applying lessons from last week’s posts, I caught myself asking, yet again, “Dude, aren’t you just trying too hard here?” Chances are I’ll spend 4-6 hours of preparation for a 3-4 hour game. While I’ll likely be setting a solid foundation for the next 2-3 session… one is left to wonder: is it worth it?
If you were to ask that question to my players, most would roll their eyes so far up they would likely pop right out. My friend Yan, Myers-Briggs Mastermind that he is, rarely misses a chance to remind me how much less time he invests in his games that are, overall, pretty similar to mine in scope and play experience, although I suspect he daydreams about it a lot. Our other group GM, Franky, seems daunted by my dedication to put so much effort in the art of DMing. I sometime worried if he isn’t half-scared that I’ll call the GMing S.W.A.T on him during our monthly Star Wars game.
Nevertheless, when I say ‘trying too hard’, I means prepping so much game material that an unhealthy chunk of your free time is sucked out of your life. It also means cramming so many ideas in so few scenes that they become too tangled to play out as cool as they appear individually on paper.
Therefore, I think the question is not if I try too hard as a DM, I totally do, but why I keep doing it after having realized it? While I almost always overprep games, I often fail to pull off all the potential awesomeness I hope for once at the gaming table. The ideas end up being too complex, I’m more tired than expected or find myself reacting poorly to an unexpected turn of event.
Let’s not deny that prepping is fun. If it wasn’t, there would a lot less homebrewed or adapted published adventures. Heck, even running published ones straight need prep. I would however say that should prepping become more fun than actually gaming, chances are there’s a fundamental flaw in your gaming experience that should be explored and addressed before your campaign collapses. I would, however, be curious to see if some GMs would rather prep a game for a friend than run it).
The thing is, I realize as I write these lines that I mainly keep doing it because I’m wired like that and have not reached a point where the disadvantages of doing this outweigh the gains… but I must say that at times, It does. And when I reach that point, I need to look at my way of preparing adventures and give it a good healthy kick to see what falls off and I don’t really need.
For D&D 4e I realize that weren’t for the fact that I always keep the door open for publication and appreciate having everything (stats, outcomes, descriptions, etc) in one document, I could afford to drop things like templating and as- written mechanics and just page 42 (see Dungeon Master Guide) the hell out of it all.
So what about you? Do you try too hard and produce prepping works of art that you don’t necessary need? Do you feel that the work you do is unappreciated by your players (see my posts about giving and receiving feedback)? How do you deal with that?
And for those who don’t, I have another Friday Chat brewing for you…
Gearing up: The Setting, Pre-Prep and the Adventure Plan
With a new campaign starting, I find myself steeped in new ideas about making the game an exciting experience for my players, pushing my mastery of the game and the DMing arts with new challenges and the desire of sharing everything on this blog.
Today, I’d thought I’d share a bit of my adventure prepping techniques for homebrewed adventures. I’ll start by re-introducing my campaign world and discuss some techniques I’ve been using for planning my bi-monthly games.
Gears of Ruin: Or How Chatty Steals from Everyone for his Campaign.
As many of you know, I’m starting a D&D clockwork campaign called Gears of Ruin set on a dying, water and magic-poor world. One where the gods nearly lost the war against the Primordials and more or less abandoned this ravaged, but resource-rich husk to its own fate.
The world’s main powers (mostly outerplanar outsiders) are the airborne Humans and their humanoid allies, the fierce native mountain dwellers (like the Goliaths) and the scheming denizens of the Elemental Chaos.
The stakes are high: mineral resources abound, water is a very scare strategic asset and the forces of the Elemental Chaos (Efreet, Demons and Slaads) want to to both destroy the whole place and (in true chaotic fashion) take control of it to invade other planes.
Furthermore, the magic scarcity of this world has created technological and biological revolutions of such power and magnitude to rival any magi-centric civilizations. This makes the world a prize beyond belief to whomever controls it all AND a multiversal threat should that ever happen.
You can see my description of on technology here.
I’m as excited, if not more, to play this campaign that I was for my Primal/Within one. I’m pegging its genre as clockwork rather than steampunk because I wanted a more Magitek feel. Plus on a water-poor world, steam machines are downright obscene, making them perfect villain fluff.
From Ideas to the Plan
I usually prep for my adventures on the evenings of the week leading to the game (we play every 2 Fridays baring scheduling issues). But my prepping actually starts on the week before that, I’m just not very formal about it. When I’m done with a game and I’ve posted the game reports, I start brainstorming where the game will go from the last stopping point.
In our case, the PCs were standing in front of a factory built into the side of a mountain. They are accompanied by a wounded Intelligence Officer of their patron’s government and must recover a second agent trapped within the complex. They have also been tasked to investigate the psychic signals likely emanating from within the factory.
This signal seems to have turned all of the world’s autoclanks (i.e. or non-sentient programmable mechanical constructs) into homicidal necrotic-powered undead killer robots. Every clank, that is, except for Holy Clank (Yan’s PC), the Hybrid Fighter/Cleric, possibly the only sentient one in the world.
From this premise, I cast out my subconscious mind with the job of making free associations and bringing me elements that would create an enjoyable level 14 dungeon crawl adventure. My ’specs’ so to speak were to have adventure elements that called to most of my PCs. I also wanted to test explore ways to make dungeon crawling ‘work’ in 4e for me (I may explain why it doesn’t in a future post).
During that brainstorming period, I came up with the concept of the adventure’s villain, a subversion of a classic that will tie in directly with 2 PCs. While I won’t spoil it, I’ll share the ‘pre-stating block template’ I use for NPCs during prepping:
Description: A one/two sentence describing what the NPC looks like and who he/she/it is.
Background: The story behind the bad guy and, more importantly, why his/her/its plans clash with the PCs.
Agenda: What the villain seeks to achieve in the adventure. This is very important as it will drive the decisions and roleplaying for that NPC through the adventure.
Mechanics (optional): A few notes to guide the design of the combat stat block (if the NPC will have to be fought).
Also, during that time I developed the following setting elements:
- Clanks are the setting’s mecha: all sorts of clockwork machines designed to do work/transportation.
- Auto-clanks are programmable clanks used in repeating tasks in factories and on airships.
- The ‘Baron’ (PCs’ patron) has been developing military warclanks and autoclanks.
- People live in airship cities (or fortified encampments) because raging bio-constructs roam the world, destroying everything and killing humanoids on sight!
All these ideas were obtained while woolgathering (I do a lot of that), chatting with friends and emailing buddies. Of course, precious little of this had been written down (this is pre-prepping after all) but by the start of last weekend, I had most of my adventure concept figured out.
For many DMs, like my friend Yan, that (along with a few stat blocs and some rewards/info packets) is enough to run a game. I need a bit more structure. That’s where the Adventure Plan comes from.
The Adventure Plan
During the week leading up to the game, I fire up Microsoft One-Note (a note-taking application) and I write an outline for the adventure, just like I write outlines for complex blog posts and Standard Operating Procedures at my current job.
Here’s my template:
- Treasure Parcels: A bullet list of magic item levels and monetary value of each parcels.
- Dramatis Persona: List of main NPCs to be developed according to earlier template or copied there if already done.
- Existing Quests: Short list of unfinished quests that are relevant to this adventure.
- New Quests: Short description of new quests introduced in this adventure.
- Player Intro: Recap and/or intro to the adventure.
Structure of the Adventure
- Background: Just enough to remind me what the goal of the adventure is and its context in our campaign (usually one-two paragraphs).
- Adventure-Specific Mechanics: List of things I’ll need to design in this adventure (monsters, traps, puzzles, skill challenges).
Scene Breakdown (if event-based) or Area Breakdown (site-based) or Hybrid
- Scene 1: Name of scene
- Goals: What must/can/may be achieved in this scene.
- Scene Summary: High level structure of the scene, including NPCs involved.
- Complications/Rule of Cool: Elements to make things more interesting.
- Expected Outcomes: Short list of possible conclusions and consequences.
or
- Area 1: Name of Area
- Objectives: Why PCs explore/visit this area, what they may gain from doing it.
- Threats and Opportunities: What populates the area and how they can be a challenge/interact with PCs.
- Complications: Anything that may go wrong, make conflict more interesting or blow up in PCs face.
- Expected Outcomes: As above.
Rinse and repeat.
I then go through the plan time and time again, fleshing it out part by part, adding a new scene here, a stat block there and cutting out things I won’t have time do, shifting scope and adding ideas as they come to me. All this time, I try to focus on prioritizing what will bring me to a playable adventure the fastest. Getting lost in the details is so easy so I try to be careful lest I start botching it come Thursday night. After, if there is time, I may add more elements like complex traps and such to make things more exciting.
Often, by the time Friday rolls by, I have a nearly complete adventure that only needs minis and battlemaps to be played. I know I tend to overprep, but I often find myself with material I can recycle into publishable material afterward, so I have an incentive to keep doing it.
What about you? What’s your prepping technique like? NPCs? Scenes? Regardless of system, I’m curious!
Chatty’s Tales of the Arabian Nights
Earlier in the month of January, I celebrated my 37th birthday and received a very special gift: Tales of the Arabian Nights by Z-Man Games. Dave wrote a review of an earlier edition here and suggested fixes for it here. The game I have at home is a latest (2009) edition and has integrated almost all the fixes Dave suggested.
Oddly enough, Dave is also credited in the rules book… and happened to suggest the game to me. 
Anyway, instead of providing another review of the game, I thought I would tell you the story of my ‘character’ to showcase how rich the game is. Note that while I may flourish the prose of my tale a bit (that’s what being a storyteller is all about), what I will present actually happened during the game.
The Tale of Aladdin
Our story starts with a poor boy called Aladdin who dreams of leaving the city of Bagdhad and discover one of the fabled ‘Places of Power’ that legends talk about (Quest #1). He set off and traveled north through Armenia and Eastern Europe where he stumbled on a talking monkey. Calling it an abomination upon Allah, Aladdin slew the beast and was cursed by the released demon. Later, he met a Lost Prince, stole all his gold and got cursed again. (An old persian proverb says “You can’t get cursed twice”)
He then boarded a an ocean-bound boat manned by a band of rogues that eventually grabbed him while on the Indian Ocean and sent him overboard. As Aladdin was drowning, hands grabbed him from below as he blacked out.
He woke up in the kingdom of the Merfolk and explored its marvels and treasures, trying to learn as much as he could from that hidden culture (Quest #1 completed). That’s where he learned that the Merfolk were preparing to wage war on the surface dwellers. Our hero rushed back to the surface and reached a nearby Sultan to inform him of the impeding threat. The Sultan named Aladdin as a peace emissary to the merfolk (Whoa… déjà vu!) and peace was achieved.
Our hero was bestowed the Robe of Renown just as news reached him that the Grand Vizier of Bagdhad had accused him of a vile crime he hadn’t committed. Aladdin had to sneak back home and clear his name with the Caliph. On his way back, he was enchanted and got lost for some time, he found some marvelous Roc eggs but had to flee before getting eaten by the mother. He also discovered the fabled Sword of Invisibility lying there on a dead man!
Dodging the guards of Bagdhad, Aladdin returned home and met a beautiful enchantress. He seduced her, she fell madly in love with him and they soon married. Our now legendary hero asked the Caliph to bless their union in the palace. That’s where Aladdin confronted the Grand Vizier about the false accusations. Outraged, the Caliph had the Vizier beheaded and named Aladdin as the new one.
End Credit.
I played the game with PM and things didn’t go nearly as well for him. We’re pretty sure that the game I described above is not a typical experience but more like those people that lose 20 lbs in 4 days on so called miracle diets. But hot damn was it an awesome game!
Pros:
I can’t describe how much glee I had while playing this game. It is an explorer’s dream come true. You have no idea what’s going to happen and while you get eventually are able to influence how the game goes, you are left guessing most of the time. It feels like the whole ‘choose your own adventures’ and the various skills, statuses and treasures you accumulate allow you to shape how things turn out.
Reading from the book of tales is so cool, seeing the face of the player being told his fate is part of the pleasure of the game. Even when things go bad for you, it’s interesting. At least it is for now… I’ll tell you after a few more games.
Cons
The main mechanic that gives players more control over their fate is represented by status/treasure cards that allow replaying one’s turn after knowing its outcome. While turns are usually short (less than 5 minutes), this will create longer downtimes and slow the game, especially with 5-6 players. Also, accumulating many status cards will complicate the game and create more delays. A variant rule proposes to allow only one status card to affect a player.
Also, much of this game is about reading stories. Playing with non-native English speakers could be a challenge, as it would be with awkward, monotonal or slow readers. On the other hand, it would be great reading practice for kids… except some of the tales are pretty mature in content. Just ask PM what he thought of his stalking love-sick hag.
Finally, the game may be a nightmare for tacticians that need to know the possible outcomes of each decisions. With over 2000 entries in the book of tales, there’s no way to know how your decisions will shape the outcome of your many encounters.
Conclusion:
Along with Dominion, Carcassonne and Battlestar Galactica , Tales of the Arabian Nights has takes a firm place in my “Games I love” collection. It seems to my untrained eye that we are going through a board game Golden Age, and I for one welcome our cardboard masters.
Anyone else tried the game? How was your experience?
Keeping up with the PCs: Part 3, The DM’s Toolbox and Other Dirty Tricks
Welcome back to this series about helping D&D 4e DM’s keep up with players who manage to become more performing than the game’s default assumption.
In part 1, I described the “Secret Synergy Bonus” that made players a lot better at dealing with combat encounters that should otherwise be more challenging. Then in part 2, I started sharing some solutions to bring challenges back to combat encounters, some bad and some easy to implement.
Today, I want to present ideas to make you think about implementing more elaborate solutions to this very interesting phenomenon. I find the Synergy Bonus to be a very cool aspect of D&D 4e, I’m glad it exists, I just wish it was easier for DMs to deal with when it crops up. Fortunately, the game offers the best DM toolbox ever created to deal with such issues, all it needs is some creativity and a little flair for “fun” dirty tricks.
Ruin the PCs’ Game Plan
As my players developed into elite adventurers, I noticed that there was a method to their efficiency. They would pick or settle on a strong point on the battle map. The defenders and leaders would occupy it by forming a line against which the monsters would invariably crash. The melee striker would then close in and create a triangle with that line, catching monsters in the middle and dishing massive damage. The controllers and ranged strikers would just stand behind the line and deal death from afar.
I noticed that the sooner the PCs established this (or similar) pattern, the faster they took control of the fight. That’s what I call the PCs’ game plan. It occurred to me that my goal should be to try to break that plan to swing momentum toward my monsters long enough to worry the players. Turns out that it worked!
Examples:
- Having lurkers pop behind the ranged PCs a few rounds into the fight
- Having defenders get snatched by flying/tentacled monsters and dropped in the middle of monsters/ in a trap
- Forcing high damage striker to attack minions before reaching juicer targets.
- Traps/magical effects that hit large areas and cause forced movement, sending PCs flying all over the place
Of course the PCs will eventually reestablish control of the fight, but chances are more resources will have been spent and the players will feel more satisfied with the challenge.
Complex Encounters
As I said yesterday, mixing monsters, terrain and traps together can make for phenomenal encounters. While you can pick and chose encounter elements rapidly as a quick fix, a DM willing to invest some more time can develop his own evil combos and synergies that will rival the PC’s. Lots of monsters have powers that combine together and with many fantastic terrain and traps. I personally love ‘pinball’ effects where PCs are thrown left and right on the battlefield into traps and ‘interesting’ terrain.
The trick is to combine various elements together and create interrelationships between them. Traps are cooler when they interact with PCs and Monsters, fantastic terrain can hide a monster or push creatures into traps and so forth.
Here’s a simple example:
A cave encounter features a bunch of Kuo Toa (Insane Fish men), a few 3X3 pools of what’s apparently water and many Stalagtites/Stalagmites.
The Stalagmites provide cover and have truncated tops that are great shooting platforms for ranged creatures. They can be climbed but they are covered by some gunky sap that deals acid damage to climbers and slows climbing.
The Stalagtites have been weakened by the acidic gunk such that whenever a creature walks within 1 square of one, it falls and crashes in a burst attack (vs Ref), dealing damage and immobilizing creatures hit by it (It also creates difficult terrain).
The pools are very acidic (notice a theme here?) and slightly neurotoxic. They deal acid damage every per round (5 per tier) and slow any creatures in it (until end of next turn).
But, in those pools are… wait for it…
ACID SHARKS! (Thank you Rich Burlew!)
They are immune to the pool’s effect and have a Grab Bite power, keeping PCs in the pool, getting burned and eaten at the same time.
Finally, the Kuo Toa leader is a Kuo Toa Whip, a controller whose power set includes Sliding PCs….into the stalagmite and pool.
Add a few Brutes, Minions, Artillery (on the Stalagtites) or Skirmishers and you have a a challenging encounter for your players.
Of course, if your players are truly at “that point”, they’ll eventually crack your setup and start throwing monsters into the pool so THEY get eaten by a shark… but that’s part of the fun of it all no?
For a more extreme example here’s an entry I sent for the Wizards of the Coast Holiday Encounter Contest a few weeks back. It’s a toy factory line made of dangerous traps. All monsters have forced movement powers and the line has 2 control panels to trigger traps out of sequence or reverse the direction the whole thing is going. Tons of fun.
Adding complex elements to split the PCs, surprise them and screw their game is the way to catch up to them.
Make Encounters not about Combat Anymore
If the players have reached a point where combat is almost always too easy for them. You may prefer to move away from hyper crunchy encounters (like the examples above) and go another way. You might want to have encounters stop being primarily about combat.
What if combat occurred in encounters where PCs had more pressings things to do? You create scenes where PCs need to perform critical tasks that can’t be interrupted (usually a high-tension skill challenge, one where each failure is harsh for the PCs) and then have monsters come and interrupt the fun! Now PCs must deal with the Skill Challenge and the monsters.
In the current issue of Kobold Quarterly, I wrote an article exactly about using skill challenges in combat (woot 2 plugs in one post) to add new dimensions to them (Woot, plug!).
Other examples:
- PCs must find an object hidden in an area, the longer they search for it, the more monsters pop out and attack
- Indiana Jones Special: The monsters have different roles: Vermin Swarms, Defenders and Rival adventurers!
- Allied Load Bearing King just died and PCs must escape the crumbling castle or be crushed underneath it (a great Skill Challenge just there). However, the elite guards sworn to die with their deceased sovereign face the PCs, accusing them of murder as the castle crumbles around them (Embedded Skill Challenge or Combat!)!
I could write whole posts about those 3 subjects, and maybe I will if there’s a demand for it. This is just a few examples to get your brain going. The Secret Synergy bonus is a great feature of 4e, it’s just that it’s a lot easier to stumble upon it than it is for the DM to master all the elements of the impressive DM’s toolbox to act as a counterweight to it.
I may also revisit this later with a post about helping players transition to the synergistic state.
Thanks for reading, I hope you’ve enjoyed my 1st full series here. I’m starting to enjoy myself a lot!
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