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You are here: Home / Archives for Roleplaying Games / Campaign Logs

Gears of Ruin: The Ruiner’s Gambit’, Session 1, Part 2

February 10, 2010 by The Chatty DM

As stated in Part 1, the first combat encounter was designed to be among the hardest hitting encounter my players had yet faced in D&D 4e while still being designed with an XP budget that somewhere between level 15 and 16 (the PCs are still 14th). The goal was to totally challenge the PCs while having monsters close in levels to the PC (from 12-16) without having the players clamour for an extended rest right after.

Filed Under: Campaign Logs, Musings of the Chatty DM, Roleplaying Games Tagged With: 4e, Chatty's 2009-2010 Campaign, Gears of Ruin

Gears of Ruin: The Ruiner’s Gambit, Session 1, Part 1

February 8, 2010 by The Chatty DM

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.

Filed Under: Campaign Logs, Musings of the Chatty DM, Roleplaying Games Tagged With: 4e, Chatty's 2009-2010 Campaign, Gears of Ruins

Gears of Ruin: Session 1, Revolutions per Machines, Part 3

January 13, 2010 by The Chatty DM

See part 1 and part 2. First Contact This combat encounter had 3 goals: Give players a fairly challenging fight to give them a better feel for their PCs’ powers. Set a hostile first contact with mechanical monsters, in this case some undead warforged (you read that right) Spring  a surprise on the player by […]

Filed Under: Campaign Logs, Musings of the Chatty DM Tagged With: 4e, Chatty's 2009-2010 Campaign, Gears of Ruin

Gears of Ruin: Session 1, Revolutions per Machines, Part 2

January 11, 2010 by The Chatty DM

See part 1 here. Get me some Competence Porn, stat! The first scene had a few goals.  Introduce the PCs to the first important NPCs of the campaign, give them a quest for the night, but more importantly, make them look good! The scene started with the PCs waiting to be summoned to show up […]

Filed Under: Campaign Logs, Musings of the Chatty DM Tagged With: 4e, Chatty's 2009-2010 Campaign, Gears of Ruin, Tropes

Gears of Ruin: Session 1, Revolutions per Machines, Part 1

January 10, 2010 by The Chatty DM

Last Friday we started our Clockwork D&D campaign.  We spent about one hour completing the Party Template I wrote about here then we played a 2 scenes mini-adventure I dubbed ‘RPM’.  🙂 Here’s the 1st game report of what I hope will be yet another awesome campaign. Dramatis Persona Nar-Beth: Female Dwarven Druid from a […]

Filed Under: Campaign Logs, Musings of the Chatty DM, Roleplaying Games Tagged With: 4e, Chatty's 2009-2010 Campaign, Gears of Ruin

Primal/Within: Showdown at the Castle of the Overmind, Part 3

December 2, 2009 by The Chatty DM

Part 1 and Part 2. Last Friday’s session was the final confrontation of the campaign.  It was supposed to be an Epic battle between an Avatar of the setting’s  sentient Dungeon and the PCs. I had a game plan, but it didn’t play out as I wanted…again. The fight ended up being hard and climactic… […]

Filed Under: Campaign Logs, Musings of the Chatty DM, Roleplaying Games Tagged With: 4e, chatty's, Primal/Within

Primal/Within: Showdown at the Castle of the Overmind, Part 2

December 1, 2009 by The Chatty DM

See part 1 here. These last 2 sessions were marked with strong, not so positive emotions on my part.  At the end of session one, I couldn’t believe that we played so little (we started at 7h00-7h30 and ended at around 9h45).  At the end of session two, I was downright angry (and vocally so) […]

Filed Under: Campaign Logs, Musings of the Chatty DM, Roleplaying Games Tagged With: 4e, Chatty's 2009-2010 Campaign, Primal/Within

Primal/Within: Showdown at the Castle of the Overmind, Part 1

November 29, 2009 by The Chatty DM

(This post covers my last two D&D 4e games) Last Friday we concluded our longest D&D 4e campaign yet, clocking it somewhere between 16 and 20 game sessions (almost one year). In order to make posts length easier to manage, here’s the ultra condensed story. Campaign Finale: Redux Using a mysterious 4 part key collected […]

Filed Under: Campaign Logs, Musings of the Chatty DM, Roleplaying Games Tagged With: 4e, Chatty's 2009-2010 Campaign, Primal/Within

Mouse Guard Diaries: The First Duel

November 9, 2009 by The Chatty DM

Oh yes, another series 🙂 Last night my friend PM dropped by the house for an impromptu geekout.  We had a great session of armchair producing of potential remakes of Star Wars  over Pizza and beer.  We than played a game of Carcassone (loved it) and Dominion with Nico (my son won at Dominion, again). […]

Filed Under: Campaign Logs, Musings of the Chatty DM Tagged With: Mouseguard

City of the Overmind: Nipples of Chaos, Part 2

November 6, 2009 by The Chatty DM

See part 1 here. Cursed item to the rescue! The session’s first scene was eventually concluded with the adventure more or less back on track. We had a 20′ tall Flaming Angel instead of a draconic blob.  I was cool with that.  Heck, I would have been happy with the Marshmallow Colossus from Ghostbusters as […]

Filed Under: Campaign Logs, Musings of the Chatty DM Tagged With: 4e, Chatty's 2009-2010 Campaign, Primal/Within

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About the Author

  • The Chatty DM

    The Chatty DM is the "nom de plume" of gamer geek Philippe-Antoine Menard. He has been a GM for over 40 years. An award-winning RPG blogger, game designer, and scriptwriter at Ubisoft. He squats a corner of Critical Hits he affectionately calls "Musings of the Chatty DM." (Email Phil or follow him on Twitter.)

    Email: chattydm@critical-hits.comWeb: https://critical-hits.com//category/chattydm/

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