Over the weekend, I undertook an endeavor that I’ve not done in quite some time: I put together my own extension of a campaign setting plot. I was using Keep on the Shadowfell as a trial of the 4e D&D rules, and to whet my appetite for adventuring once again and it worked beyond my wildest dreams.

I spent a significant amount of time on Saturday reading through the initial plot notes and encounters that I had created for one of the best campaigns that I had ever run. This inspired me to really put some effort into my fledgling campaign that is just getting underway.

Keep on the Shadowfell gives you a loose campaign setting with some local color around the city of Winterhaven that was begging for me to add some elements to it as I hatched my own plot. I elected to do just that!

The Process

I always start with the important things first: the plot. With the help of my occasional co-DM Kanati, I laid out the general plot points that I want to unfold. From there, I worked backwards to higher level encounters – the bigger fights/events – that would define this plot. After that, I worked back to some glue encounters, which are smaller encounters designed to get the players on the appropriate path.

Encounter Design

All of these encounters are designed in such a way that the players can ignore them or come across them in nearly any order and they still lead them somewhere. A few of them they can explicitly derail and affect the plotline, however based on experience I suspect they will derail some other areas of the plot along the way and that will also change things.

To me, the worst possible thing a DM can do is make the players feel like the plot is unfolding despite their actions. For this reason I use events that are predetermined to happen sparingly in my plots, because in the end the players and their characters should be the focus of the campaign and not the campaign itself. That doesn’t necessarily mean the plot revolves around the players, but the main takeaway is that they should get to affect change within the story.

Last, but certainly not least, I have designed a few encounters entirely for fun and some character development. These are usually true episodic content, designed to be entirely modular and able to be dropped in whenever the fun is lagging or the players need some roleplaying time. These run the gamut from random encounters with friendly NPCs, to random encounters with unfriendly bad guys that can lead to a subplot, to the dispersal of one of the legendary Chuck items created for a specific member of the party. I’ve found that if you want quality roleplaying to happen, this is usually the type of encounter to foster that behavior.

Doing it is all of the battle

For me, the hardest part of doing this process is actually DOING this process. It’s hard to find the time to sit down and plan out plot related elements, let alone design encounters of the varying types I mentioned above. My advice to you is to spend an hour this weekend and try putting your plot to paper.

Work out the motivations of your bad guys, the places they will enact their plans, and some of the collateral damage they will do in the process. Then start stitching these elements together and I will bet you will find success.

Tonight we wrapped the big iconic battle in Keep on the Shadowfell.

!!! CAUTION: SPOILERS BELOW !!!

The Final Battle Went Well

The last two battles of the setting are very demanding, and blindness struck three of our party members which made the last battle even harder. The dynamics of the entire last battle were excellent. The setup, the behavior of the bad guys, the fact I got to use unexpected teleportation… all cool things. Kalarel was really easy to make the focus of the group’s aggression… taunting goes a long way with my particular group of NPCs.

I don’t know if this is technically something that went well, but it certainly went well from my perspective behind the screen. I got to kill one PC and knocked two others unconscious. By the time you add in the other three characters that were rendered largely useless due to blindness, it was a pretty tough fight.

Luckily, the slain PC was an extra. Our group started off small initially, and in order to fully review the Player’s Handbook 2 we allowed our small starting group to create a secondary character. As our group has grown we towed around these additional characters, so thinning one out wasn’t as heavy of a loss it would have been otherwise.

The Thing in the Portal was one of my favorite parts. Its ability to heal Kalarel AND heighten the perceived peril by dragging characters closer to the rift was exciting for everyone. The Portal itself was a very good mechanism to dovetail my own campaign plot into the rest of the world established by the module, so I was very pleased with that.

What Didn’t Go Well

A long, taxing series of battles is a two-edged sword. Kalarel and company stretched our group so thin that a couple of my players didn’t get the “reward of victory” feeling after completing the battle. The group elected to stop for the night before searching the area, so maybe a bit of treasure might be a balm to their battle injuries… but I hate to see them walk away a little frustrated.

I was a little aggrevated with the lack of treasure in the second-to-last battle. I ended up putting a little gold in there so they had something to be excited about after taking the time to search the rest of that giant map.

This had very little to do with Keep on the Shadowfell, but we had a fairly large lull in the middle of the first battle trying to figure out exactly how Barbarian rage worked. Thanks to the ENWorld forums and the help of those that came before us we were able to sort it out, but that mechanic is just a tad clunky and poorly explained in the PHB2. We got past it eventually, but I don’t like it when that type of thing slows down the game.

Wrapping Up

The overall feeling for me that the whole wrap to this module was a giant success. My group is about evenly split between completionists and non-completionists, so I fully suspect there will be a discussion whether or not they go back through and explore the areas of the Keep that they missed on the way down to Kalarel.

I haven’t fully decided if the remaining baddies are going to stay put or if a portion of them are going to scatter after finding out that Kalarel is gone, but it should be interesting to see how they decide.

For those of you that haven’t experienced Keep on the Shadowfell yet, you can test drive it for free thanks to Wizards of the Coast!

Some of you may have noticed a few hours of downtime for us tonight, but it was for a good cause: we have upgraded to WordPress!  This means improved site features, including the legendary Askimet spam filter.  That means those of you that have been plagued by all the spam around here lately have much less to fear!

I went through and removed a shameful 2,000 spam comments from old posts, so we should be starting out nice and clean.  Please be sure to check any links that you may have to older posts, the newly improved search feature should help you locate any old articles.

I tried my best to eliminate disruptions, please let us know if you see any oddities in the coming days.

I have been aware that we have had ongoing issues with a large amount of spam comments.

First off, allow me to apologize to those of you that have endured this issue for quite some time. I did not realize until recently that a number of our older posts have accumulated 30-50 spam comments. I realize that this is very annoying to those of you that have elected to receive email replies to certain posts.

I have turned on comment moderation for all posts over one week old in an effort to curtail the junk. In addition, I have gone through a few months of posts and removed many of the offending comments. I apologize if this inconveniences anyone.

Blogger has a known issue (currently still being worked on) that prevents me from deleting certain posts that contain Chinese language characters. This limits the amount of cleanup that I can efficiently perform, as does the inability to delete a large amount of comments in one go.

I will redouble my efforts to monitor the site and keep the disruption to a minimum. Later this year, we will be migrating the site over to WordPress where we will have full control over my comment and spam monitoring system. At this time I would suspect the situation to dramatically improve.

Thank you for your patience, and thank you all for reading and taking the time to comment. If any of you have Blogger related blogs and have tried to combat this, I would welcome any advice.

— Dante

I was lucky enough to receive a spankin’ new review copy of the Monster Manual 2! I’ve not had the chance to actually exercise any of the new baddies in my campaign, but after reading through the book I am very excited to do just that.

The Good Stuff

There’s a lot to like in the MM2. Some very iconic critters show back up: Rust Monsters, Genasi, Barghests, and the like… all exciting to see again. There is a large 14-page section on Metallic Dragons of varying difficulty levels (something for nearly every party level) and some truly excellent artwork. There’s a whole host of new additions as well, I hope to review these new monsters as I get the chance to unleash them on my unwitting players.

Speaking of excellent artwork, they’ve got the Dimensional Marauder which I believe made a cameo appearance in the new Star Trek movie. I’m pretty sure they reused that artwork from before, but its still pretty striking. The Marauder makes use of a new snatch-and-grab style mechanic that can teleport the player and the Marauder itself around the map, giving close combat a bit more pizazz.

Located confusingly AFTER the glossary there is a single page that has racial traits for Monster Races intended to be NPCs, or if you’re really brave, Player Characters. The options provided are Bullywug, Duergar, and Kenku. My mind immediately went to what havoc Vanir could wreck as a bullywug player character, but its probably wise to not give him any ideas.

The Bad Stuff

It seems that the nerf bat has struck, sadly. Petrification seems to still exist in its normal form, however many of the death effects appear to be AWOL. This was most noticable to me when reading the section on beholders… to me a beholder isn’t a beholder if it can’t kill you with a Ray of Death. Can the abilities of these new beholders still kill your players? Absolutely. They just do so in a more roundabout fashion.

It seems they are taking the opportunity to elaborate on sections previously created in the original Monster Manual… seeing some omissions from the Monster Manual make their return is encouraging, but part of me was wanting for a bit more originality.

Conclusion

The Monster Manual 2 appears to be a pretty solid addition on its surface, but the proof will be in the pudding as I drop some of these monsters in place in the campaign.

For a truly excellent in-depth look at the Monster Manual, head on over to the Critical Hits review. They even take an in-depth look at the contents of the Monster Manual 2 in two excellent articles. They’re worth a read!

I had a good time writing last week’s post on tailormade items, thanks for all of the great comments! As I was thinking about this topic further and reading through all of the insights provided on that thread, I started thinking about an underlying question.

Burning questions

At one point in the discussion, I asked whether or not it was important to have a rules set for generating weapons, armor, and items of that magnitude. Is the “outside the box” thinking that is required to create an item so suited to a player part of the creative fun that is being a DM?

So I’ll turn this question over to you, gentle reader: if a set of rules existed for creating tailormade, high-power (or growing in power) magical items would you use them? Or would you still eschew these rules in favor of doing it by yourselves?

My thoughts

Honestly, it would have to be a VERY flexible rules set for me to consider using it. Often, I will see elements that I would want to have in my magical item but one little aspect of it isn’t quite right… the descriptor isn’t quite fitting, the drawbacks too severe (or not severe enough), the legend or lore that comes along with the item just doesn’t fit with the setting or the intended character, and so on.

For me, magic item creation over a random treasure roll has to be an act of creative fun for me as a Dungeon Master. How about you?

I had a Dungeon Master in college that would handcraft a special (usually awesomely powerful) magic item for each member of the adventuring party and sprinkle them throughout the campaign. Some we found, some we didn’t (and found out about it later), but they all shared some common charactaristics.

These items would be exceedingly powerful. Some had a drawbacks, but in general they would be described as legendary, unique, or spectacular. We even took to calling them “Chuck Items” in the honor of our DM himself.

Usually these items were crafted outside the normal rules system for creating magic items. They would sometimes have complex combinations of effects or very specific rituals that had to be done to activate abilities. They often had significant lore surrounding them that would unveil itself as the campaign unfolded.

An example was a bow that SR’s character came across named Harvester. It had numerous colored gems inlaid in it that could be activated to do different types of elemental damage. Each time you used the colored gems, the bow was drained and it had to be recharged by killing undead. If you activated all of the gems at once, it would do an immense amount of damage. Unbeknownst to her, Chuck later told me that each time she did this there was a chance that the bow would be destroyed but it did not happen during the course of our campaign.

(If anyone is interested in the D&D 3.0 stats for this item, I am told that SR retains a copy she might be willing to share!)

Learning from the Master

I have employed this same pattern in my campaigns. The process of creating an “outside the box” awesome item tailored to your players is alluring, but I have often found that if you don’t temper it with a drawback or some sort of control mechanism it can heavily unbalance your game.

Since we’re quickly approaching the end of the Keep on the Shadowfell module and the beginning of my original campaign content, I am thinking more about how/if I am going to execute this process for my new campaign.

A few words of encouragement: making a tailored magical item that suits a player character is a GREAT way to heavily involve them, especially if you give the item a rich background or legend to go along with it.

The player feels special and gets that moment of sheer excitement every time their awesome toy does what it is supposed to do. To me this is essential to a satisfying D&D experience, especially for new players.

A question to those that have come before

For those of you Dungeon Masters out there: have you tried something like this yourselves? Players, have you ever received a tailor-made item? If so, did it improve your gaming experience?

Finally, if you’re reading this: thanks Chuck. They just don’t make D&D moments like that anymore!!

First off, thanks to everyone that answered the Question of the Day that turned into the Question of the Week. I’ve been dealing with a heavily increased workload in real life since that posting has gone up, so we’re going to exercise some of the great recommendations and get a solo campaign started up for her very soon.

The end of the module as we know it!

We’re getting dangerously close to the end of Keep on the Shadowfell, and now’s the time for me to start infusing some of my own details into the module to prepare my group for life outside the Keep. I’ve got about 10 sessions worth of material storyboarded, which is a new tool in my DM repertoire.

Essentially I’ve been writing out the campaign sessions in a bulleted list outlining the setting, the key players, and expected paths that the group could progress along. If the group goes “off script” I will just make some new bullets for the following session and adjust as needed.

I’m taking several notes of inspiration for this idea from the encounter structure from Keep on the Shadowfell. I really enjoy the two-page encounter style, and I’m also taking some inspiration from Phil the Chatty DM‘s one-page dungeon contest. Succinct representation of roleplaying ideas is a really important skill for busy dungeon masters like me!

Recently, StupidRanger and I have found ourselves with a bit more free time on the weekends. Last weekend she asked me whether or not I could whip up a campaign for just the two of us.

This idea lodged itself sideways in my brain… it strikes me that it could be done but I was having trouble how to logistically scope encounters for a single player. With the intent of trying this out, I’ve put together a few questions that might lead me to some solutions:

1. What plots are best suited to a single player character?
2. How do you scope single player battle encounters in a fulfilling way?
3. In this type of game, is it better to provide NPCs or downscale encounters?
4. For those of you that have done this before, what was the most successful aspect of the game? What was the least?

Thanks for any help you can provide! Hopefully SR and I will be underway before long!

We were fortunate enough to receive a copy of the new Arcane Power sourcebook for review recently. I was particularly excited to get my hands on this, as I had recently rolled up a bard and wanted some new abilities to play with.

The new Prescient Bard build in the book sets the flavor for many of the new bardic abilities. These turn your bard into something of a short-term prophet, able to see the future and to mess with it a little to his advantage. There are a lot of really cool powers to choose from, but on occasion I feel they didn’t try hard enough to engage the player’s imagination and just relied on the combat mechanics. (This is one of my primary complaints with 4e in general, not just this book.) Take for instance the Horrifying Truth power, whose description reads “Your cruel pronouncement becomes truer with every strike.” It deals damage, dazes the target, and stuns the target if it doesn’t save. With that kind of description, I’m expecting a gypsy to hop out of my lute and rub the target’s nose and say “THINNER!”. Or maybe the ghost of a creepy Japanese girl to appear and proclaim the target not a pitcher, but a belly-itcher, causing him 4d8+CHA self-esteem damage.

They’ve added several bardic paragon paths in Arcane Power as well:

• Cunning Prevaricator – basically your bard is fantastic at lying and exaggerating. Somehow this translates into making him and all his allies invisible at strategically opportune times. (As an aside, “Lying Lights” sounds to me like the name of something I would have watched on Cinemax as a teenager when my parents had gone to bed.) Later powers let him misdirect the opponent’s attacks back upon himself or other enemies, presumably so the bard can ask him “why do ya keep hitting yourself?”
• Euphonic Bow – The concept for this one is, in my opinion, one of the coolest things in the book. You’re a bard, except your bow plays notes as you attack. The path description says something about the sound your arrows make as they hit their targets providing percussion for the song of battle, and all I can think of is Freddie Mercury singing, “out of the doorway, the bullets rip — to the sound of the beat!” It’s sort of like multiclassing your bard with an arcane archer, but without quite the range of abilities. Still neat.
• Grave Caller – Apparently they have bardic assassins. Who knew? This one seemed a little out of place to me, since I guess I always imagined assassins as being quiet and not singing. Then again, I’ve watched enough anime in my day to know that a really talented assassin can use anything they want as a weapon, immense size and noise be damned. Either way, if you’re looking to cause grief (possibly in the form of death) to one unlucky creature at a time, the deathmark ability and its associated powers are a good way to get there.
• Half-Elf Emissary – Ever have one of those people in your group that tried to max their Diplomacy skill and use it as often as possible? Well, now that person’s empathy and oratory ability are deadly weapons. (For, ahem, “aggressive negotiations”, I would assume.) This path gets automatic points against it for only being available to half-elves. Because everyone knows dwarves and half-orcs can never, ever be charismatic and likeable. This path’s powers are based largely on him being such a galactically amazing social butterfly that the number of people he can see, friends and enemies alike, make his abilities stronger. I kind of want to bludgeon myself into unconsciousness when I think about this one too hard.
• Karmic Shaper – Sort of the “evolved” form of the Prescient Bard build, this path is all about squaring up karmic debts. Well, sort of. You “interpret” karma, so that means if your enemy does something bad to you, your powers make him pay for it. If one of your allies screws up, you interpret all the good times you’ve had together and replace his attack roll with one of your own. It’s kind of like D&D My Name Is Earl, but backwards and with swords and a touch of godlike power to change fate.
• Life Singer – You’re a bard who comes from this place where some bad stuff happened and evil spirits cursed you with bad weather. Now, in order to combat the evil spirit (which I thusly dub “El Niño”), you become a tree-hugging pacifist hippie. Your power is that of smugness, and atop your ivory tower of morality, you grant bonuses to all your allies only if they do not attack anything. This will almost certainly set a new standard for the paragon everyone regrets picking almost immediately due to everyone hating them forever. This paragon path may ruin long-standing friendships. I worry for the future of gaming now that this is out.

A few odd complaints aside, I would wholeheartedly recommend this book if you’ve got a bard. The only thing I’m really disappointed in is the lack of the 3.5 book Complete Arcane‘s Seeker of the Song prestige class. I had my fingers crossed, and was denied.

Next time, I’ll review the Sorcerer class. Spicy!