Encounter area created using Harrowing Halls Dungeon Tiles

Some of my favorite Dungeons and Dragons accessories in recent years have been the Dungeon Tile product line.  While I’ve written about free methods of creating your own Dungeon Tiles, I appreciate the quality of those published by Wizards of the Coast.  With their two most recent sets, WOTC have added three-dimensional elements to their tile sets allowing for even more interesting map and room layouts. 

The first set to include 3D elements is DU6 Harrowing Halls

2 of the 6 tile sheets contain 3D elements, the remaining 4 sheets consists of mostly wooden floors and furnished rooms with wooden floors.  The 3D elements can assemble as either stone or wooden construction.  The pieces include platforms: 2 pcs 2″ x 4″ x 1″ high, 1 pc 2″ x 2″ x 2″ high, 1 pc 4″ x 4″ x 2″; a 2″ x 4″ x 2″ high set,of stairs, a 2″ wide doorway, and 3 tables.  Also among the 2D tiles is a 2″ x 8″ tile which includes a wooden bridge to stretch between your choice of platforms. 

The second set with 3D elements is DU7 Desert of Athas.

Again, 2 sheets out of 6 are used for 3D elements, the remaining tiles tend to be desert sands on one side, with water and some greenery elements on the other.  The 3D pieces include: a  4″ x 4″ x 2″ high platform of a more sand colored stone, which can reverse to a small adobe/plaster style house, a 2″ x 4″ x 2″ set of stairs colored to go with the large platform, a 2″ x 8″ x 1/2″ high platform printed up as a dock on one side, with gray stone on the other, a 2″ x 4″ x 1/2″ high platform again decorated in the dock/stone combination, a small market stall, a small wooden cart, and a 1″ x 2″ table that reverses to a stone sarcophagus. 

Overall I really love the sets, they assemble fairly easily, though it might be nice if they added some instructions, especially for some of the more unusual elements like the cart and market stall.  I’ve debated about weather the tabs should be a little longer, but as things assemble now, the tabs are close to flush allowing miniatures to stand flat on the various platforms, so I think they’re probably about the right length.  The inclusion of so many water tiles in a desert theme set might be a bit surprising, but I am glad to have those tiles, and I’m looking forward to using them with my RPGA ship tile. 

While I’ll still make use of my free tiles, I also expect I’ll wind up with 2 copies of each of these sets, and if your budget allows, I definitely recommend you buy  a set of each.

Additional photos on my flickr page.

Dark Trail by Scott Hudson (License info below)

Recently I’ve read a number of books about people hiking the Appalachian Trail. The trail stretches approximately 2178 miles from Georgia to Maine and can take 6 months to complete.  Even with all the modern equipment, and with town stops every few days on the trail, the trip is long and fraught with trouble and danger.

Hikers must be wary of bears, snakes, bugs, and the weather.  They haul an average of 40 – 60 lbs of equipment and food, and that’s with modern clothing rather than the various armors worn by most characters.  They have to be careful of slips and falls on the trail.  And though they’re following a marked and maintained trail, they still have to deal with downed trees and washed out sections of trail on occasion.

These stories started me thinking about the difficulties characters might experience when traveling from place to place. While every trip your PCs take shouldn’t be as difficult, a session of wilderness travel could include some challenging encounters, especially if your world design embraces the points of light idea offering small areas of civilization seperated by wide areas of hostile territory.    

I’m not a huge fan of random encounters, but this is the perfect spot for them, replacing the mundane nuisances of bugs, snakes, and bears with more challenging equivilents.  Stirges replace mosquitos, owlbears replace black bears, deathrattle viper or viper swarms in place of rattlesnakes, giant rats replace the mice trying to steal the party’s food while they sleep.  Instead of finding bits of civilization every few days, characters might come upon villages of hostile humanoids, or a giant’s encampment. 

Then there is the simple act of survival.  While you don’t want to turn the trip into a daily combination of skill checks, the trip can be written up as a skill challenge.  Succeeding on early skill checks leaves you better able to handle the random encounters that come later.  For example failing an Endurance check might shift one of the character’s Encounter Powers into a Daily Power for 1d4 days.  Failing a Dungeoneering check might lead to damaged equipment, leaving a character with a penalty to damage or armor class until the equipment can be repaired. Difficult terrain could lead to a fall, injuring the character and decreasing their speed until they spend a full day resting.

Not every trip should be treated as a wilderness excursion, plenty of trips will be over trade routes or through other more well traveled paths, but sometimes how you get there is half the adventure.

Some of the books I’ve read on this topic:

Walking with Spring by Earl Shaffer
On the Beaten Path by Robert Alden Rubin
There Are Mountains to Climb by Jean Deeds

Photo: Dark Trail by Scott Hudson/NJScott is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence.

Monstrous Personalities offers examples of non-combat encounters with monsters, creatures, and critters of the Dungeons and Dragons game.

A messenger approaches the player characters.  He bears a message asking the characters to meet with a potential employer, and offering them a fairly significant payment just to attend the meeting.  If the characters seem suspicious, offer to allow them to arrange the location of the meeting, with the only specification being that it should be somewhere private.

Everything about this meeting is legitimate, the only potential problem is that those requesting the meeting are kobold chief and 3-5 other members of his tribe.  This tribe acted as servants to an elderly dragon who recently died of old age, and now they need protection from other tribes in the area, and from other outsiders who might show up seeking the dragon’s treasure.

What happens from here depends on your players.  They could simply take their payment for attending the meeting and it would end there.  They could do exactly what the kobold fear and decide to go and try to take the dragon’s hoard for themselves.  Or they could accept the offer and this could be the start of a single adventure, or even a campaign where the player characters act as guardians to this kobold tribe.

Should they decide to try to get the treasure for themselves, be sure it is not an easy task.  If the player characters don’t take the job, it is quite likely the kobolds will find some form of protection for their treasure, whether they hire another group of adventurers, or purchase some sort of guardian creature.

If they take the job, they will be expected to protect the treasure from any number of possible opponents: parties of adventurers, rival kobold tribes, another dragon.  And while the kobolds will be somewhat generous due to their sudden wealth, allowing players unfettered access to the magical items in a dragon’s hoard could swiftly imbalance the game.  Either have the magic items missing, already taken by adventurers who took the most valuable objects, or place some of the magic items in a secret room well hidden by the piles of treasure.

The limits of where this encounter leads is only limited by where the players want to go with it.

As a follow-up to last week’s list of WOTC releases I’m looking forward to, here are a few products from other publishers I’m looking forward to.  Because we’re about half way into January at least one of these items may already have hit the shelves.   As with my WOTC list, this is in no particular order:

1) Crime Pays from Goodman Games.  I love playing city based games, and the underworld is always important element of those sessions or campaigns.  Hoping to see find some good ideas to borrow from this one. 

2) GameMastery Flip-Mat: Prison from Paizo.  Perhaps this fits in with Crime Pays, a good prison break scenario, either with the PCs as prisoners, or breaking someone else out of the prison. 

3) Dragon Age: The RPG.  So much chatter about this game.  I haven’t even played the computer version.  I doubt I’ll pick this up, but I hope to get a chance to take a look at it. 

Anything you would reccomend I get a look at?  Please leave a comment.

This would have been a ’5 Most Awaited Products of 2010′ post, but I realized that 3 of the 5 slots would be taken up by the Players Handbook 3, Dungeon Masters Guide 3, and Monster Manual 3. So while I am looking forward to those products, here are a few others that I can’t wait to lay my hands on (in no particular order). I’ve focused on Wizards of the Coast products here, and will have a post of non-WOTC posts next week.

Players Handbook Races: Dragonborn: I’m not neccesarily a huge fan of Dragonborn, but I do like the idea of WOTC bringing out some lower cost handbooks with a tight focus. May not pick up every book in the series, but I’ll certainly pick up this first offering and if it delivers I’ll be picking up versions for some of my favorite races.

Hammerfast: A Dwarven Outpost Adventure Site: Another product coming in at a slightly lower pricepoint. Add to that the fact that it’s about Dwarves, and I’ll almost certainly be picking up a copy of this.

Harrowing Halls: While I’ve written here about free printable dungeon tiles, I still love the tiles put out by WOTC. I think they’re generally gorgeous, and their heavy stock makes them quite durable.  This set is especially exciting because they’re adding in some 3D elements.

Tomb of Horrors: Always enjoy seeing how they update this classic in new editions. Though I don’t pick up many adventures I will be buying this.

Dark Sun: I didn’t pick up the 4E Forgotten Realms Campaign setting, but I will be picking up Dark Sun books. While I love traditional fantasy setting, I’m even more interested in seeing how they handle some of less ‘standard’ mechanics of this setting.

I know there will be products in the second half of the year that are equally interesting, and of course I’ll be picking up at least a few booster packs of the various miniature releases, but these products are the ones I’m most looking forward to seeing.

What products are you looking forward to in 2010?  Please, leave a comment.

Last weekend, at Mind Games in Greenville, NC, I ran the Game Day adventure for Wizards of the Coast World Wide Game Day promoting the new Dungeon Master’s Guide 2. Though I’ve been DMing for a couple of decades, I’ve only run 4th Edition about a half dozen times, so I was a little nervous. The format for this particular Game Day added a bit to my level of nervousness. For those who didn’t participate in Game Day, WOTC provided a map with 2 encounter areas, a pile of minis along with stat cards, and a basic outline with the adventure and encounter specifics to be worked out by a two groups of players on the day of the event. Then the groups would swap DMs so they could play in the adventure designed by the other group.

Unfortunately the store only had enough players for a single table. Fortunately, I’d looked through the packet and come up with a couple of encounters. This avoided a situation where the players designed and then played in their own adventure, though perhaps the folks at WOTC might have prefered that I’d done that, I think I managed to give the players a fun experience.

Four out of the five players had little to no 4E experience. I’m not sure if this made me more, or less nervous. On one hand, I’d hoped for a couple of experienced players to keep me from straying too far from the rules, on the other hand, I was glad not to have a rules lawyer nit-picking every ruling.

I planned the following monsters for each encounter:

Encounter 1: 3 Minotaur Thugs
1 Foulspawn Mangler

Encounter 2: 3 Duerger Guard
1 Duerger Cleric of Asmodeus
1 Foulspawn Hulk

They supplied a few adventure hooks, and based on one of them I decided a the cleric used the cave as a spot to summon the foulspawn creatures. Perhaps I should have ‘reused’ the guards for both encounter areas, but to give a little variety I chose to use the minotaur thugs, with the idea that the cleric either hired, or in some way mentally dominated them into service.

Nothing exceptional occured during the first encounter. Partly because this encounter served to help everyone learn the rules, and partly because everyone had horrible dice rolls, including the DM. This led to a very long encounter. Not sure if it dragged on quite as bad as I thought, but it certainly felt like it went on far too long so I decided the mangler would retreat down the pit to the encounter 2 area. Another reason things stretched on is that the players were afraid to use up their daily powers and so limited themselves slightly.

With the addition of the foulspawn mangler to the second encounter I feared it would be too difficult, and drag like the first, so I made an additional change. I demoted the guards to minion status. I did it simply by dropping HPs to 1, and there probably should have been some additional changes as well, so they were probably minions a level or two lower than the original guards. Quick math shows that assuming level 2 minion status for the guards places this encounter somewhere around level 6.5 vs. the initially planned level 7 encounter.

A combination of the players getting a bit more comfortable with the rules, the fact that they didn’t need to worry about holding back on daily powers, the slightly easier encounter, and perhaps even my own ‘settling in’ led to a much quicker second encounter.

We also had two very entertaining moments during the second encounter: In what was probably not the best of party tactics, the swordmage wound up in base to base contact with BOTH foulspawn creatures. While this eventually led to her being bloodied during the battle, in one round the hulk missed with his smash attack, while all 4 attacks from the mangler’s dagger dance managed to miss.

And in an action that may be against the rules, but was just far too cool not to allow to happen, the barbarian managed to hit with his brutal slam attack against the foulspawn hulk, pushing it 2 squares and leaving it prone. Because of the size difference between the two, perhaps the halfling shouldn’t have been able to pull off one, or both portions of that, but it was simply too exciting a moment to even think of saying ‘Let’s check the rules’. Even in a campaign, I’d probably have to let it stand the first time, unless we’d specifically discussed the issue prior to it occuring.

I left the game store feeling great. It reminded me why I love gaming in general, and DMing specifically. It was an amazing day, and one of the players paid me the ultimate compliment after the game when he said that he’d like to play at my table again some day.

So thanks to everyone: Rai (@Mind_Games), Warren (@wcrow), Kyle, Josh, and _____ (forgive me for forgetting this final name, but if any of the others can refresh my memory it would be greatly appreciated).

Wizards of the Coast: Adventurer's Vault 2

These are the 5 items I think are coolest/neatest/most interesting in Adventurer’s Vault 2. As far as the rules go, you might think them horribly underpowered, or perhaps so overpowered they smell of cheese, but I love the concept behind them.

5) Songbow of Summoning (pq 22): As a daily power if you hit an enemy with a bard power any allies within 5 of you, or that enemy can teleport to a square adjacent to the enemy as a free action. Get everyone to dogpile on a powerful foe, or target an enemy near the edge of a losing battle to speed up a retreat.

4) Door Warden (pg 80): This talking door ornament toughens the door it is placed on, and controls when the door does, or does not open. Talking doors are such a classic bit of fiction it’s great to see them written up in rules. Or create the old puzzle using two doors and two wardens, one speaking only lies, one only truth, and see if your players can choose the proper door.

3) Immurements (pg 88-91): I’m cheating a bit here, and on my next 2 picks. I can’t pick just one of these, the whole concept is so interesting. They’re designed for a higher level of play than my usual games, but the idea of suddenly moving to battle to a new battlefield excites me. I may have to work on a version more suitable to lower level play.

2) Fortune Stones (pg 133): The idea seems simple, a number of stones, each of which allows you a reroll on a specific type of attack as a daily power. The neat thing is that once at least 2 members of the party have one of these stones, you get a +N bonus to the reroll where N is the number of party members possessing a stone. And once five party members own a stone, everyone with a stone gets +2 to initiative and +1 to saving throws.

1) Tattoos of Bond (pg 85-86): And three in a row where I can’t choose a specific item, but love the concept so much that the section makes it on this list. The repeating theme of the Tattoos of bond is: If X happens to one person with a Tattoo of Bond, everyone with a Tattoo of Bond can do/gets Y. Like the fortune stones, I love this because it gives benefit to more than one member of the party, and encourages some unity in the group. Who wants to be the one party member without a stone/tattoo?

What are your favorite items in the book?  Leave your comments below please.

Inspired by my desire to be at GenCon, and my own attempts at creating a Virtual GenCon experience for myself I’m planning on doing a home based onvention for my family, and perhaps a few additional close friends.

For time time being I’m calling it ‘HomeCon’, with the motto, ‘There’s no place like HomeCon’. Basically a weekend of gaming and related activities. Here is a rough schedule for the weekend, though it is certainly subject to change between now and whenever I actually hold the convention (probably early November).

Friday 7:00 Party Mix: get in the kitchen and make a big batch of some version of trail/party mix that we can keep near the gaming table over the course of the weekend. Or provide a wide selection of ingredients and let everyone make they’re own custom mix.

Friday 8:00 PM Movie time. Family friendly fantasy themed movies each night. Current plan is to show “Willow” and the Bass/Rankins animated “Hobbit”. Not sure if it matters which is the Friday movie and which is for Saturday night.

Saturday: 8:00 AM Breakfast. All meals to be basic, perhaps casserols that I can make in advance and bake at the appropriate mealtime. I’ll try to come up with gaming related names for everyday foods. May also look to some Halloween party ideas for suitable ideas. Also, with the exception of breakfast I’m allowing 2 hours for meals so these periods will act as a bit of free time for my kids. While I want them to have a weekend of gaming, I recognize they’ll need some time that isn’t scheduled or planned in advance.

Saturday: 9-10 AM Board games. I would like to find something fantasy related, but perhaps just something like Clue Jr., or Blockus. I also need to check the Circus Maximus rules and see if kids could handle it, or perhaps a modified version of the rules.

Saturday: 10-11 AM Nintendo DS multi-player. We have several games which allow 4 or more players to be playing the same game at the same time using only 1 cartridge and the built in wi-fi. Mario Kart Racing, Diddy Kong Racing, Mario Party DS, StarFox, and probably a couple I’m forgetting about, or don’t realize can handle 4 or more players.

Saturday 11 AM – 1 PM: Lunch.

Saturday 1 PM – 4 PM D&D 4E Dungeon Delve – Low level, 3 encounters, opponents either giant bugs or kobolds (are those both the same??).

Saturday 4 PM – 6 PM Dinner.

Saturday 6 PM – 8 PM – Pokemon card game – need to reset them, but we own 3 or 4 ‘preconstructed decks’ that we can play at least one game of this.

Saturday 8 PM Movie Time

Sunday 8:00 AM Breakfast

Sunday 9 – 11 AM: Board Games/CardGames/or more Nintendo time. Basically a duplication of Saturday’s schedule, though possibly with different games.

Sunday 11 AM – 1 PM Lunch

Sunday 1 PM – 4 PM: D&D 4E: Kill the Dragon. Battle a gargantuan dragon.

Sunday 4 PM – Dinner/Closing ceremonies. I’ll probably spend between $20 and $40 for some Pokemon cards, D&D minis, or other similar items and pass them out as prizes for the weekend. The awards will likely not be too serious, probably just categories made up based on the events of the weekend. Something like “Rolled the Most 1s against the Dragon”, “Silliest Gamer”, “First to Fall Asleep During the Movies”, etc.

I want to design a logo for the even, perhaps to put on some buttons, or t-shirts depending on cost, but also to use on some banners and fliers to post around the house to add to the convention feel.

Maybe I’ll even pass out some poker chips and make them pay me outrageous prices for meals, and send everyone to the bathroom at the same time so everyone must wait in line.

And just so I give credit where credit is due, part of my inspiration for this is Gwendolyn Kestrel and Andy Collins ‘GwenCons‘. Not sure if they’re still hosting them, but you can see some summaries of these events at his web page. According to one page, they had 80 people over the course of one of their GwenCons, but my aim is to server somewhere between 4 and 10 people. It’s primarily aimed at my wife and kids, but I’ll probably invite my niece and nephew, and others who I think might be interested.

Please leave comments!

Last week at GenCon, Wizards of the Coast announced that their campaign setting for 2010 would be Dark Sun.

Prior to the convention I’d heard a lot of people guessing that the next setting would be Dragonlance, and while I would have been happy to see them publish the Dragonlance setting for 4E, I think Dark Sun has the opportunity to be better because some aspects of the world differ greatly from the medieval European flavor present in many other settings.

Here are the top 5 things I’m looking forward to seeing in the Dark Sun campaign setting when it releases next year:

5) Thri-Kreen. Though I don’t believe I ever played one, I thought these psionic insects represented a significant difference from the player character races at the time. It did make me shake my head when I searched on Google to make sure I spelled it right, I found a page titled ‘Thri-Kreen Erotica’ (no link, you’ll have to work if you really want to find it).

4) Nature destroying magic – in the only Dark Sun games I played in, I think this was glossed over a bit during game play, though it was used as the explanation why so much of the world was desolate. When I initially saw the 4E Bullywugs, I thought their mechanic might serve as some version of the blight caused by magic use in Dark Sun.

3) Half-giants – maybe not quite as cool now that we have goliath’s around, though I imagine half giants as even taller and broader than goliaths, and wielding weapons designed for creatures even larger than themselves.

2) Killer environment – While I expect there will be other mechanics created for this, the burning deserts seem like a great place to show off skill challenges.

1) Psionics – Love them, or hate them, the mechanics of psionics always bring something different to the table. Curious whether the idea of replacing encounter powers with ‘Augmentations’ to daily powers as the DDI release of the Psion class does will carry over to other psionic classes as well.

I’m sure all of these will be the topic of some debate/discussion across various Internet forums for the next 10 months or so. I’m also sure the designers will provide some very interesting mechanics, and in the end there’s will probably be something that I’m not expecting that I’ll be interested in when Dark Sun 4E finally hits the shelves.