It’s been awfully quiet here for a long time. It’s not that I have forgotten about D&D, or lost the want to play and write about it. Life just got in the way. In fact I got so busy, I had to put my campaign on indefinite hiatus. Doing so was not an easy decision. I put a LOT of work into it and because of that, I also didn’t want to water it down for lack of prep time. So I put it on hold.

Pausing my campaign allowed me to get some real life stuff done, focus more on Another Passion and getting into iPhone development. None of which has anything to do with D&D – so of course I was craving some gaming. Luckily, I was not alone. Sundering Wrath ran for almost a year with fairly regular gaming, yet we never even made it out the Heroic Tier. Needless to say, myself and a few of my players were curious about playing at a higher level and jonesing to play in general.

Since then, I have managed to put together a one-off adventure for a group of level 18 characters. I’ve only run two sessions in as many months so it’s slow moving even though I am playing with a smaller group. Starting at a higher level means it takes time for everyone to get to know their powers and how best to play them. Besides that, it’s a lot of fun! I thought I would share the outline for the adventure we’re playing here:

The adventurers are captured by an inter-planar gang of thieves led by the efreet lord Garcolth. His grand scheme involves capturing heroes for ransom or to torture for the location of any acquired treasure they might have stashed away. Starting with no gear and worn down from weeks of captivity and interrogation, the adventurers get a chance to break free and must find a way to recover their equipment, get even with their captor and escape his magical castle.

I currently have no plans for further adventures to continue this story, though there is certainly enough material in my notes to build on. I would like to share more about this particular adventure, but it will have to wait until we’ve played at least another session. There are still a few surprises in wait for the players, you see.

This is part 3 in my reporting on the party’s playthrough of “Orcs of Stonefang Pass“. There are spoilers in the following, so if you plan to play this adventure at some point, you should probably stop reading pretty soon. The following covers two encounters well into the adventure. By this point, the heroes been traveling through the pass for a couple of days.

See also: parts 1 and 2 of this series.

Having just defeated an orc shaman, his pet ogre and archer buddies, the heroes rest and continue into the secret section of Stonefang Pass. They are surprised to hear dwarves call out a warning, just before running into another group of orcs. It’s an ambush, but the orcs are no match for the fully rested heroes. After the fight, the heroes meet four exhausted dwarves who have survived using magic to keep the orcs at bay.

Here, the party learns of the titan, trapped underneath the mountain, and that some powerful magical items (of which the characters have one) are required to keep the Titan imprisoned. Another quest is added as the heroes agree to obtain the remaining items.

From that, it’s back into the main pass for another day or so of trudging the dark corridors, before there’s finally a light at the end of the tunnel. Ahead of them, the keep is lit by blazing fires set by the orcs who occupy the stone fortress. The heroes waste no time (apart from resting again and waiting till daylight) before dispatching the courtyard guard. They made clever use of line-of-sight blocking Stinking Cloud and fear causing spells to disrupt tower archers and the scariest looking Orc, mixed with brute force to tackle those on the ground. Again, this encounter proved to be no real challenge for the party, who all leveled (to 7) after the fight.

It seems like the inventiveness of the adventure’s earlier encounters have worn off a little here. On the other hand, the roleplaying encounter, the added quest and the threat of the Titan all worked really well. We have less than a handful encounters to go at this point, and though it has been fun to play a published adventure, I have to admit that I look forward to continuing my homespun campaign. That said the 2-3 levels Stonefang Pass will add to my group fits perfectly into my Grand Scheme.

Insert evil Dungeon Master laugh here.

Whilst traveling down a mountain road, the heroes come to a halt when they find that the bridge across a chasm has been torched. That is just the first obstacle in the 3-encounter delve style side trek.

The Broken Bridge is designed for a party around levels 4-5, but could be easily adjusted. I originally sketched it out for use with my own group, before I happened upon the Orcs of Stonefang Pass, which I ended up running instead. However, that did not keep me from finishing the Broken Bridge delve, so I could share it here.

There are two separate downloads here. The Broken Bridge comes in a 6-page pdf file, but there is also a zip file containing the maps used in this delve. You can print these maps and play with them as is, or just use them as starting points for making your own. There are no custom monsters (links to DDI statblocks provided) or items, but a homegrown encounter hazard (The Bloated Mule) and a skill challenge are included with the delve.

• Download “The Broken Bridge” (pdf).
• Download the maps (zip).

Enjoy!

Like many others, I started gaming in the early 1980s, when the original Red Box was the most current incarnation of Dungeons & Dragons. Throughout the 1990s, I played a multitude of games, and gradually D&D (and/or AD&D) slipped into the background. Skip ahead a decade, during which I worked in bars, got laid and eventually even married, and I’ve come full circle.

Back in the 90s, I was heavily involved in the Danish gaming community. I was a staff writer with the only national rpg-dedicated magazine at the time, and was even paid to run gaming groups in after-school programs. But at some point I got tired of the few but loud people, whose presence can ruin the fun for everyone else. I continued gaming, but just with my friends behind closed doors.

Coming back to Dungeons & Dragons has been great. I’ve a rekindled love for the old game, even though it’s a new game system. I like the way it works now, it’s fast, fun and furious compared to older editions. I’ve written more about that earlier.

However, no community can satisfy all of its members with every change, and though I believe in two-way communication, some people just like to argue. For instance, there’s an “Edition War” going on, where a few old-schoolers who love the older systems diss those who prefer the new system and vice versa. To me that seems just as retarded as the Mac vs. PC debate, which has been raging for decades and refuses to die. It’s pointless. Some prefer one, some the other. Who cares? Just play what you want, already.

I started thinking about this after the most recent “controversy” in the Dungeons & Dragons community, namely the announcement that the Character Builder (software which allows easy creation and management of player characters) will move from being a locally installed program to an online cloud based service. This may not seem like a big deal to some, but others are up in arms about having to be connected to the web, storing their data on Wizards’ servers and a lack of features — specifically a file export feature, allowing third party software to import the character sheets. However, most of the missing features have already been announced as part of future updates, including character export.

The doubters do have a few points worth noting. Wizards of the Coast has a bad track record when it comes to living up to their promises with regard to software. Also, the new online version is based on Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, which is quite the gamble, given the fact that Microsoft has stated they will focus their own efforts on HTML5 – a competing technology generally regarded as the future of web development. Silverlight also does not work on the iOS platform, which means no iPad/iPhone compatibility.

See also: The official FAQ regarding the Character Builder.

However, these are hard facts: The new service is launching in a few weeks. No amount of complaining will change that. Regardless of what some are suggesting, Wizards of the Coast is not actively looking to piss their client base off. I am guessing this is more likely where they are coming from:

Dungeons & Dragons is a niche product, with new additions coming out all the time. The profit margin on hardcover books is, well, marginal. That’s why the new Essentials series is in paperback. Still, Wizards needs a better way to make money and realize that raising the price on the books is not the answer. The solution is to beef up the online subscription service, Dungeons & Dragons Interactive, which up until this point has seemed a little half-assed. Diplomatically put. Especially to Mac users like me, who only has access to half the content even though I pay the same as everyone else. By making it more appealing to subscribe, more players will eventually do so. Part of that is discontinuing support of the old products.

Will this new approach scare away customers? Absolutely, but in the long run – supposing Wizards deliver on their promises this time – I think there’s huge potential in a streamlined suite of web based tools. Of course, I’m thrilled that I’ll finally have access to the Character Builder, but I’m not terribly concerned about iPhone/iPad compatibility at this point in time. I’m hoping they will eventually develop some decent apps for mobile devices, and it is possible to do so, even if the browser version uses Silverlight, as long as the back-end is accessible. So, I’m going to give them a chance and see how they do, before I cancel my subscription in a fit of nerd rage. The critical consumer in me wants everything right now and all the time, but the realist in me knows that the world doesn’t work this way. That said, I’m not going to pay and wait forever.

At the end of the day, D&D is a game. I have no high stakes bets running on next week’s session, and if I get tired of playing it, I’ll move on to something else. As it is though, I don’t see that happening any time soon. Nor do I see myself canceling my D&DI subscription.

This is part 2 of my recap of the published adventure “Orcs of Stonefang Pass“. We are currently playing this in our group and if you plan on playing it too, be warned that there are a few spoilers in the following.

Check out part 1 of this recap.

I originally threw this adventure into my campaign for a number a reasons, the two main ones being: I wanted to try my hands at running a 4th edition adventure not written by myself, and Stonefang Pass happened to fit perfectly into where we were in the game (all I did was throw in a location where the road split and some dwarves were camping out). So far, I have to say that it has been a positive and inspiring experience.

Check the location: The Thirsty Dragon Pub (w. free pdf download).

The variety in the encounters is the most noticeable thing for me as a DM. Each encounter offers something that the previous ones did not have. Whether its flying monsters, earth quake hazards or calls for fresh tactics. The fights are different enough, that it doesn’t matter that most of them are against the good old orc. Not that that bothers me. Orcs have always been a favorite, but for that reason also not the most exotic enemy to throw at a party.

Exotic comes from the details in this adventure. Tattooed dwarves, strange imagery and powerful magic has yet to come together for my group, but definitely has them wondering what’s really going on. There’s been a couple of outburst along the lines of “I have a bad feeling about this”.

Since the first recap, we’ve played through four more encounters. First two fights at the gatehouse inside the pass itself. These are great because first the heroes have to take the gatehouse, then they have to defend it. Same location, two very different scenarios. Those two fights took up a whole session for us, but everyone was enjoying the challenge. Clever use of traps and magic offered lots of opportunity for the players.

Having successfully taken and defended the gatehouse, the heroes opened up the gate and proceeded down the pass. When they came upon a secret doorway, propped open with the corpse of a dwarf, they left the main path to investigate. At this point, I threw in one of the optional encounters, suggested in the back of the adventure; two cave bears and an orc handler. The players did a great job of making use of the cramped quarters to corner the monsters in this one.

Finally, continuing through the newly discovered passage, they entered a tunnel system with a center chamber, where a large pit was surrounded by four magical circles. An orc shaman, his ogre bodyguard and six patrolling archers almost proved more than the party could handle, as they were split into to smaller groups fighting in the tunnels and the chamber both. This was a long and epic fight, which had the party spend almost all their powers and still only barely making it out alive.

That’s where we are now. At this point, the heroes have more questions than answers, but they’ve certainly encountered the orcs that first chased the dwarves out. They have yet to see what’s at the end of the pass, or even at the end of the secret tunnel system. From the looks of it, the party will be a bit into level 7, by the time we complete “Orcs of Stonefang Pass” (they were halfway through level 5 when we started and all are level 6 at this point).

Since TV writing and gaming are different types of episodic storytelling there are natural overlaps between the two, but I have never seen a roleplaying game better suited for the TV drama-show structure, than 4th edition D&D.

I am not the first to make the gaming and television comparison, but I really started thinking about it after watching an interview with Ron Moore about the writing of Battlestar Galactica. He made it sound like the writers on Battlestar were throwing all these surprises out (eg. so-and-so is a cylon!) having only a vague idea of where most of it would lead. They left it open-ended enough, that they could use the framework of the established world to pull it all together in the end (or as needed). I thought this was a very clever way of writing any kind of series, and immediately made the connection to campaign structure.

A 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign is structured in three tiers of 10 levels each. The Heroic, Paragon and Epic tiers each represent a new chapter in the characters’ adventuring career. If we go by how it’s laid out in the rulebooks, you could describe the three tiers as epic, epic’er and epic’est. As DMs, our job is to give the players this feeling of Progressive Epicness (not a real word, but it should be). Above all, it is the DMs responsibility to ensure everyone has fun by being fair, and providing challenges and adventures. And fun for the players ties into expectation and surprise. I will get back to those in a minute. For now, just bear with me.

The structural parallels between TV shows and D&D campaigns are many. Each game tier has a number of adventures, not unlike episodes in a season. And just like on a season of Dexter, Mad Men, Weeds or most other drama series, we want character development along the way, and individually enjoyable episodes that tie into a season-long story or theme. And because there are exactly three tiers in a D&D campaign, it’s possible to plan for an even grander storyline, spanning across all three tiers. Just like Battlestar Galactica, where the ragtag fleet of survivors seek to escape the cylons, and in the last season this – the entire premise of the show – is concluded.

When structuring my campaign I think of individual adventures as episodes, each tier as a season and the campaign as the show in its entirety. As the DM, I act as the executive producer, director and writer. The players are the stars of the show; and writers too, when they contribute to cooperative world building and add ideas for me to use somewhere in the story. However, I also consider the players to be the audience.

This is where expectation and surprise comes in. For any campaign (or TV show) to work, the players must believe in it. At least to the point where the basic assumptions are understood by all, such as magic is real, dragons breathe fire etc. If the game world has normal gravity, we need to have a good reason for suddenly suspending that. If we suddenly make everything zero G with no explanation, the players will know you cut corners and left big holes in your story. And that sucks.

Sharing an understanding of the game setting and storyline makes it easier to suspend disbelief. Unlike the TV show, a D&D game has to create similar mental pictures in the mind of each participant. For that to happen, we take certain things for granted and make basic assumptions, typically based off the rulebook descriptions and the DM’s presentation. In terms of cooperative campaign design and world building, a shared frame of reference also makes it easier for the players to contribute material that fits with the overall mood and style.

Surprise is the second element needed to make your campaign work. Once we’ve given the players a sense of comfort, where they feel in control and relaxed, it’s time to throw them for a loop. The beginning and the half-way point of each tier are perfect times to do this. Just like TV show seasons often present new circumstances for the main characters at the beginning and half-way point of a season.

Effective surprises include killing off important non-player characters without warning (just make sure there’s a good explanation for the heroes to uncover), natural disasters, loss – whether it’s the beloved unicorn mount or the party’s favorite inn that burns down – or any major events that directly affect the characters. Things that keep the players on the edge of their seats, wanting more. Just like in a TV show, it’s important to space these events out and introduce them at just the right time. Use each idea only once per campaign, because it won’t have the same effect the second time around.

During one season of most drama shows, any number of world-shaking events might happen, but main characters rarely die off more than once or twice per season. Romances and other individual storylines develop over the course of an entire season, and focus shifts between the main characters, allowing everyone to share the spotlight. You can split adventures into game sessions, and think of those like individual blocks of a show, split by waiting for next session instead of commercial interruptions. Notice how often those leave off on a cliffhanger, by the way? Or foreshadowing of what’s to come after the break? Steal this trick.

Dramatic structure in a D&D game is not hard to add, if you use the TV approach. When I told my players that this was how I intended to structure our campaign, the immediate reaction was: “Ooh, I hope I’m not the one who gets killed off in the first season!”. The suspense is half the fun for me. Also, it’s a great excuse to watch some cool shows and call it research.

Here is an in-game location I made up prior to starting the current adventure, Orcs of Stonefang Pass. I needed a place where the road could split off onto an old, forgotten pass, and doulbe as a place where the heroes could get the quests for the adventure ahead. They were already on the road, heading into the mountains, so this was my solution.

The Thirsty Dragon Pub is an inn in the middle of nowhere. A place for traveling merchants, pioneers and other restless souls to find a bed and a moment of comfort. And some of the best and most exquisite drinks gold pieces can buy. Alongside the inn itself is a combined guard house and jail, also known as the barracks and outside, you’ll find the wagons and tents of passers through without the luck or means necessary to secure a room.

This location description is pure “fluff” in the sense that there are no statblocks included. There are, however, a number of NPCs with associated quest hooks, some of which could easily be combined into a full fledged adventure. The descriptions also hold information of the type of dangers one might run into in the area in general, maps and links to relevant tags here on the site.

Download “The Thirsty Dragon Pub” here (pdf, 5 pages, free).

I very much appreciate and welcome feedback. I write this stuff for fun, and that’s exactly what I hope you have with the result.

Above is a 5×5 video from my Monday night game. I also call it the “overflow campaign”. My regular group, gaming every two weeks, just isn’t enough to satisfy my D&D cravings, so I got inspired by D&D Encounters to set up a short once-a-week session. We play for just a couple of hours, but because it’s a smaller group the action is also a lot faster. The day we shot the video above, we got through two encounters in two hours – it’s fast, fun and totally satisfies my itch to play.

Currently, we’re playing through the adventure in the Red Box. I make sure to adjust the encounters to match the lower number of characters. It’s all about minimal prep, trying ideas and new material (such as the Essential line). It’s a completely different experience than the regular game, which only makes me appreciate that there are different ways to play. Part of it is playing in public, which just adds a different vibe to the game. You can’t play in coffee shops if you’re shy because people will stare. I don’t mind it though; I’m no closet geek.

As mentioned in an earlier post, I give my players homework and reward them with experience points. This is partly to speed up leveling a little, partly to have more roleplay and less fighting without slowing down the game.

A while back, I gave them a simple form to fill out about their character. I asked them to describe the first impression they believe they leave on others. I gave them some multiple choice options for opinions on Morals, Religion and Wilderness vs. Civilization, and finally asked for a few keywords relating to their fears and leisure activities. It sounds like a lot (and it is), but the form only took a few minutes to fill out.

I reviewed all the answers and handed them back to the players at the next session. Then told them that they were to incorporate at least one of the elements into the game, that they themselves had written in the survey. In any game situation, combat or otherwise, they were encouraged to make their decisions and base their opinions on their own words.

As it turned out, a natural scene presented itself when the party stopped to set up camp. Gathered around the campfire, they exchanged views on the world through casual conversation. The players decided on an order and did a great job of connecting the dots, making it feel like a campfire conversation. In other words: it was fun! I rewarded the player whose story made everyone laugh the most with a symbolic XP bonus, to encourage this kind of friendly competition within the game.

You can download and print out a copy of the form I created, if you’d like to try the same thing in your own game.

I’m trying something different in the campaign: adding a published adventure to the mix. It wasn’t really planned, I just happened to be browsing the D&D shelf and spotted “Orcs of Stonefang Pass” on the shelf. It claimed to be an adventure for 5th level characters, which happened to be where the party was.

There are minor spoilers in the following material. Nothing my players don’t already know (we’re a couple of encounters in so far), but if you’ve never played Orcs of Stonefang Pass and would like to some day, you should stop reading now.

There were more reasons, why I ended up using this adventure. First of all, it actually fits very well into my campaign. In Stonefang Pass, the party is asked to enter an old mountain pass carved by giants, taken over by dwarves and now, infested with Orcs. The dwarves that ask the heroes for help had to seal off the pass, leaving many of their own at the mercy of the orcs. Can the heroes re-open the pass and help the dwarves make it safe again?

From a campaign perspective, a re-opened Stonefang Pass would mean an alternate route to Mortimer, which is where the heroes were heading anyway, in their quest to track down The Divine Order (TDO).

The Glintshield clan (the dwarves) would make an excellent ally for the party as friendly neighbors. Since the fighter of the group, Winston Mortimer, is actually the rightful heir to the lands that bear his family name. With recent rumors of curses, terrible monsters and the presence of TDO, having a bunch of dwarven allies close by could come in handy.

It was pure luck that the party was already heading towards a mountain pass, though I still had to make a few changes to fully incorporate the Stonefang Pass adventure. I decided that Winston knew about the Glintshield castle on the far side of the pass, having grown up not too far from it, he had always heard of the place as an abandoned ruin, located too far up the mountain side for anyone to wander into by accident. Winston did not know about the pass through nearby Stonefang mountain, because it had been unused for so long, the people of Mortimer had forgotten about its existence.