DM Chronicles: Session 6, When Fun Trumps Story, Part 1

Heya all,

I more or less expected to stop playing from late November until mid January. However, by a strange coincidence, we all (i.e. the 6 players and myself) managed to be free on December 19th!

Joy!

Warming up with  the Band!

Some of the group made it to Math’s early enough so we could play some Rockband 2… that’s quite a honorable sequel to the original game.  We played too many Pixies song and we quickly realized that Math’s taste in music does not meet with universal approval from the more Heavy Metal friendly Mike and Franky.

I also unintentionally tortured Franky.  At a certain point he offers to sing and I got to choose the song, and I chose one from Red Hot Chili Pepper.

You gotta remember, English is at best, a second language for us, so a Chili song is quite a feat of speedy signing!

Poor guy, he was exhausted!

Har har har!  I know you’ll get back at me Franky my man!

Setting up the crunch before the Fluff

If you’ve been a regular follower of my campaign logs, you’ll know that we concluded our first D&D 4e mini campaign a few weeks ago with our heroes vanquishing the leadership of the strongest Pirate fleet in the region and stealing their main vessel, an armed airship called the Red Dragon.  This brought the players from level 1 to 4 and closed the storyline .

So this session was to be the start of the second campaign, covering levels 4-6, centered around the Wizards of the Coast published adventure: Thunderspire Labyrinth.  With my limited energy levels and inspiration, I decided to tackle a published adventure I had heard good things about.  This, mostly to allow me to sit back and truly tame this new way to play my favorite game that I both love while still finding some annoying bits I have a harder time digesting.  Treasure parcels, I’m looking at you!

Anyhoo… Thunderspire was to be my ‘rebound’ game. I’m sorry I didn’t write an adventure prep post about this game.  Suffice it to say that it was mostly about reading enough of the adventure to feel comfortable running it and connecting some viable adventure hooks to the group itself.

As more players arrived, we sat around the table so that players could update their character sheets, some people had been missing long enough to have missed two leveling ups.  Also, as agreed upon, each player was free to change whatever they wanted on their characters between mini-campaigns.

For instance, Yan chose to take some new stuff from Martial Powers and made himself a ‘I mark you so stay the frak there’  combo fighter.

What most other players did was adjust feats and take new magic items.  Since I completely fumbled treasure distribution in the first 5 sessions, I let each player pick and choose the usual mix of items allocated to a starting level 4 PC, i.e. a level 5, 4 and 3 item, plus the cash for a level 3 item.

(I may very well keep doing that!)

That worked out perfectly well! Plus it let the players get out all the crunchiness of the game’s prep out of the way in one go.

As we played with the numbers and ordered the Pizza we started fooling around, swapping jokes and being stupid as any group of tired geeks can get.

Literary critic’s little corner

This mood ended up pervading most of the evening and helped a lot…

…because the story of Thunderspire Labyrinth is flimsier than your average “made for DVD” porn flick.  Its true!

Its got a great setting, a ruined underground Minotaur city, and its got some awesome encounters.  However it’s tied around one of the lamest kidnapped-slave/please look into what my evil colleague is doing stories I have read in an adventure module!

Now I’m not criticizing WotC, this adventure is the equivalent of 3,0’s Forge of Fury in terms of the order it was published and it ranks at about the same level … but man this adventure hangs by just a few threads!

Filling in the Gaps

As the group slowly moved from number-driven activities and into ‘let’s play some D&D’ mode we discussed how a few years had passed since the pirates’ defeat in the south seas. We touched on how a few PCs spent their time during that period (I’m taking some slight artistic license here as we never truly got around the whole table to establish this):

• Masaru the Eladrin  Feypact Warlock mused and explored why his powers failed him at such a critical time.
• Takeo the Dragonborn Warlord led his people in raids against the remaining pirate outposts
• Naquist the Elven Cleric of Bahamut was gone on a religious retreat
• Bjerm the Elven Fighter traveled further abroad in the world to learn new fighting styles.
• Fizban the Eladrin Wizard continued his studies and drawings
• Roco the Halfling Rogue got into trouble more often than not but managed to stay alive.

What all PCs had in common during that period was:

• They were considered and recognized as heroes wherever they went in the campaign’s original region.
• They had one last adventure where the crashed the explosive filled Pirate Airship into the Pirate capital, thus putting an end to the regional lycantrophic piracy threat… (boy that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write… but it does reek of the Rule of Cool, dudn’t it?)

I described that over the last two years, a new threat rose centered around a band of goblinoids called ‘the Bloodreavers’.  This group of slavers became bolder and bolder as they took slaves from communities and villages further and further from a landmark mountain, called Thunderspire, where they are believed to hide in.

I explained that as time passed, more and more scared, desperate citizens implored the PCs to stop this scourge and help save disappeared loved ones.

This was an interesting twist.  I had painted the PCs as local heroes, much to the delight of the players, and none of them balked at the idea that being local heroes, they were bound to get requests to deal with stuff like that.  Its like feeling heroic makes you more likely to accept heroic railroading!

I also tested a Player Narrative trick.  I asked if a player was willing to have one relative of his PC be one of the captured slaves.  Mike who plays Takeo, volunteered and said that his brother, a Dragonborn diplomat could have been taken. Our efforts to give him a non stupid sounding Asian-like name failed, much to the mirth of the other player that we settled for some mono-syllabic nonsense finishing in ‘ing or ong’… I forget (I’m writing this one week after the game).

I laid down the regional map that we build as the campaign progresses and I added a road leaving from the Eladrin Capital I had it veer West, pass by a large mountain (Thunderspire) and pass through 2 Human settlements: Winterhaven and one yet unnamed one at the end of the Road.  We established that Takeo’s brother vanished near Thunderspire while he was on a mission to establish contact with the Humans.

I really appreciated doing this and I plan to do more such things in future sessions. I added 8 other slaves and we made a list of people to save.  That was to become the adventure’s main quest.

I also had 2 more Hooks:

• Roco’s father had bought slaves in the past to ‘free’ them by offering them a Gladiator’s life.  He told his son in private that he knew an intermediate guy in Thunderspire that could possibly put the PCs in contact with the Bloodreavers.  In fact he showed him a letter he received recently that said that the Bloodreavers were ready to ‘rebuy’ any slaves Roco’s dad bought because there was a huge demand by the Duergar of Thunderspire.
• Brandobaris the Fat, the party’s old patron, asked the PCs to explore Thunderspire’s Seven Pillared Hall (The Mountain’s Civilized area) for potential business opportunities to be developed away from the influence of the Hall’s Greedy leaders: The Mages of Saruum.  (That hook ended up being the weakest of them all and I may abandon it if no players follow up on it).

Up next: How even a flimsy story can be made interesting by motivated players!