Abandoning the XP Budget
Encounter Building Sacrosanct What I'm about to suggest to you, some may consider sacrilege. It may be mechanically unsound, "unbalanced" or just plain stupid depending on whom you ask but…
Posted inFourthcore
Unprotected Delving with Multiple Encounters: Saturday Night Delves
Greetings fellow readers, today I’m here to tell you about that very cryptic something that’s been taking up a majority of my free time lately. For once I’ve been absent from blogging for reasons other than my dayjob, life in general, or pure procrastination and I’m really excited to tell you a bit more about it.
I’ve been working with Sersa V from Save Versus Death and a handful of other very talented individuals on a project of somewhat epic proportions, a little something we’re calling Saturday Night Delves.
Saturday Night Devles (SND) are a series of one shot adventures for 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons set within the fourthcore vein, our aim is to recapture the fun and excitement of dungeon crawls of yore. Aimed at actually being able to pick one up and run it on any given night where you and your group have a few free hours, SND’s also come with all the materials you need to run the game along with optional tournament rules for competitive play and scoring.
SND adventures are challenging, innovative, deadly, evocative and most importantly – a ton of fun to play. Saturday Night Delves are not for the faint of heart, they will test both player and character skill as well as the DM’s. If you’re not familiar with what fourthcore is, I can give it to you in a nutshell; it’s a high risk – high reward, over the top challenging and often bleak playscape where ‘step and die’ rings as loud and clear as death bells themselves.
Posted inDungeons and Dragons (D&D)
Dark Sun Goodies!
I've bundled the Bloodsand Arena module Wizards was giving out this year for Free RPG Day, along with some other goodies for all of you. If you're like me and are foaming at the mouth for more 4e Dark Sun material - August can't come any faster for a lot of us. The Bloodsand Arena was created by @blindgeekuk as a great looking PDF complete with highlight-able text (not just raw images) so a huge hats off to him for creating this for all of us.
Posted inDungeons and Dragons (D&D)
D&D Encounters buff recap
For those of you lucky enough to have participated in D&D Encounters, or followed the unfolding news and stories via your preferred source of news consumption you know exactly what these are. For those of you who don’t D&D Encounters was a weekly 1 shot (1-2 hrs tops) encounter played out at your FLGS or other participating venue that’s gone on for the past 12 weeks. Each Wednesday while these were going on @Wizards_DnD sent out random buffs hourly that had an effect on those games. I’m posting an archive of all those buffs here for use in your own game – perhaps make cards, create a table and roll for random effects, or do whatever you will with these little gems. Wizards and D&D players all over are currently gearing up for season 2 which will be set in the Dark Sun campaign setting – which I’m hoping to actually get in on this season.
So without further ado I give you the list, special thanks to @WolfSamurai and his nice little blog over at @matt_james_rpg’s loremaster.org for archiving these too. (I “borrowed” the last 6 weeks or so after advanced google searches got tiring) (Plaintext download HERE if you dislike formatting)
Posted inDungeon Master's Musings
Digital Dungeonmaster: the lack of tactility.
Recently I posted about going 3D with papercraft dungeons and dungeon tiles, another thing I’ve been playing around with lately is the idea of eliminating mini’s and maps and such and just trying to emulate my own Microsoft Surface setup without spending $15k. So last night I ran a session completely off of Masterplan, a very robust and feature filled app that you can grab for free. I hooked my 22″ widescreen up as a secondary display for the players, I know this is no “surface” like the fancy table, but I’ve yet to give this a whirl using a projector to put the images down onto a table (more on that next week).
I crafted a semi elaborate encounter prepared for them, complete with traps and multiple floors as well as dynamic line of sight as their markers moved around the ‘board’. The combat/initiative tracker is very very intuitive and makes short work of a lot of arduous DM record keeping. You can even display video-game style health bars under each PC and Monster that shows their hitpoints – transitioning from green to red as HP is lost. You can even ‘roll’ monsters saving throws for ongoing effects right there in the DM controls. I was prepared for the new apex of my tabletop experience, the holy grail of homebrew nerd-dom but I found myself feeling empty and superficial like I’d stolen the soul of ‘friendly game at the kitchen table’ right outta’ D&D.