Rime of the Frost Maiden: Caer Konig and Duergar

Having finished the assault on Caer Dineval, the party was rewarded with free room and board by the Town Speaker, Crannoc. The party went a step further by agreeing to police up the bodies, if for no other reason than to take all of the chardalyn amulets.

Deciding that the amulets were too much of a danger to leave out, the party collected them and went to put them in a lockbox and bury them.

At the burial site, they felt they were being watched. After stopping and looking, the party found dwarf tracks! Remembering the warning from the soothsayer about duergar, the party the party planned for something else.

Deciding that they would set a trap for the dwarves, the party lay in wait, and prepared for them.

Seeing no one, but seeing dirt moving, the bard cast faerie fire upon the figures, showing six invisible dwarves… duergar!!

The battle went quickly, the first two being felled within the first round (including surprise round), and the rest being distracted by the cleric’s thaumaturgy spell to throw his voice yelling from the opposite side of the battle.

Burying the bodies, the party took the box of chardalyn and cut a hole into the ice and placed the box in the water, and then placed the ice back on top, remembering where it was for future reference.

The party decided to have Speaker Crannoc hold onto Cora’s son until they could decide how to deal with him and take him back to his mother. In the mean time, they planned on heading towards Caer Konig.

Arriving at Caer Konig, and this time without their local guide (the monk’s player was unavailable this week), the party had to navigate things on their own. They looked at their map for the local inn and upon finding it, were greeted by a drunk silver dragonborn fumbling his way out of a snowdrift.

Speaker Trovus during one of his nightly “patrols”

Introducing himself as Speaker Trovus, I’m drunk and when you’re dealt them with the problem of thievery going on in Caer Konig: the magical lantern for which the Northern Lights Inn is named, a bag of worked pearls from Frozenfar Expeditions (an adventurer outfitting shop), and a pair of goats from the local tavern, the Hook, Line, and Sinker.

Following him into the tavern, the party got more information from the two innkeepers/owners, a pair of sisters, Allie and Cori, who advised them of a set of dwarf footprints found out by the back of her inn. The party saw the prints heading out of town towards Kelvin’s Cairn.

Also looking for information on Garret (the missing husband of the man in Targos; the reason they were in Caer Konig to begin with), the party began to believe that the two were related, seeing how all signs pointed to the Cairn, and headed to Frozenfar to see what they could dig up on Garret. The proprietor, Atenas Swift, remembered him and the adventuring company he traveled with, a goliath warrior, a lightfoot halfling, and a female tiefling. They were heading towards the Cairn for a treasure expedition.

Taking a nice rest, the party headed out the next day.

Tracking the dwarf prints were easier than before as a new set were found in town, heading towards the Cairn.

The party followed them for miles until the tracks were too worn away from the wind and snow. The ranger, however, was very good at his job and soon track down the trail, although heading away from the Cairn. These tracks were joined by an ogre’s tracks about halfway to the destination, northeast of the Cairn.

Proceeding cautiously, it wasn’t long until the party found a small fortress, dwarven by make, in the side of a hill. Being cautious and quiet worked in their favor as they made the approach without being spotted. The party got inside, where they saw the ogre, or rather an ogre zombie, sitting in a cage, which began to wail and saw them. Deciding to move quickly, the party headed to the east through a door. A duerger turned and began to yell, but not before being hit twice with two arrows, killing her.

The party entered further into the room, with the Ranger at last deciding to close the door they just went in through. Just as he closed the door he saw another duergar entering the hall that they just left, looking at the open door to the main hall that they left open. He began yelling for reinforcements to investigate.

The party lay in wait, knowing they were discovered, waiting further in, and having the half-orc cleric stand on the trap door leading to the guard tower, preventing the duergar within from coming into the room with them.

Battle was joined. The ogre zombie and three duergar, all enlarged, came down to engage with them in battle.

The battle was not difficult, but the party took their lumps, including a crit on the ranger from the lead duergar, Nildar.

The party managed to capture and interrogate the last duergar, the one in the trapdoor below, and executed him afterwards, not wanting to give him a chance to escape to his compatriots.

They discovered several bits of knowledge: the first was that Nildar was the son of Xardorok, the duergar that they were warned of; the second was that Xardorok was collecting chardalyn to create a dragon of some kind, and last, that this outpost was chosen to be a staging ground for an invasion against the dwarven mines near the Cairn.

Armed with this information, the party returned the goods and then headed back to the Cairn.

They found a base camp, with a dogsled overturned, and four dogs, cold, hungry, yet friendly, left behind. The ranger got them settled and fed, inside of a tent. They found the lead they needed and looked up the Cairn towards where Garret hopefully was still alive…

Will they find Garret? What about the adventuring party he was with? Will they stop Xardorok from his nefarious plot?

Find out next week when they head up the Cairn to see!

Until next time dear readers!

Miniature Painting Spotlight: 11/1/2020

Here we are again, with another awesome edition of our Miniature Painting Spotlight!

First up is an old 1979 (I think? May be from 80’s, but pewter is pretty worn on the bottom!) metal mini.

Last we saw him…

And here he is now! Done and done!

I am hoping to use him as one of my Red Wizards of Thay in my Tuesday game. Personally, I think he looks mensing enough to be that.

Next up is the progress on my tiefling.

As you can see, I got his belt set and pants begun. He still has quite a ways to go, but I’m not in a hurry with him. Granted, I don’t play too many tieflings, So that may be part of my lack of rush.

Next up, is a mimic I’m working on. My daughter was painting one of the mimics that came in the pack for a miniature painting contest that we went to this last Wednesday. It was an awesome time. I’ll showcase what I painted for that in a bit. But now, the work on the chest mimic!

Yes, still at work in progress but I’m happy with how he’s coming along. I just need a darker brown to dry brush over the lighter brown. Oh well. One day.

Lastly, we have my entry for the miniature painting contest. I actually didn’t enter anything into the contest, and was just there painting a miniature as I was one of the judges. The manager of my local game store was the one who set up the contest and I was happy to help. Frankly, I wish we had had a little bit more of a turnout, but the turnout we had was good quality. Big shout out to Matt for his winning entry!

That said, here’s my night hag:

I am very happy with how she turned out. As a green hag, I put glistening blood paint on her hands as if she just got done taking out a party of adventurers.

Well, that’s all I have this week. Join us next time to see the progress I’m making on the rest of my miniatures!

Until next time, dear readers!

DM Story: The Day the Barbarian Lost His Head and Other Fun Stories

This story takes place some 15ish years ago. It is also a collection of stories from the same campaign adventure. Enjoy!

I was running City of the Spider Queen for my game group, the one that I’d been running for since back in the 2nd Edition days.

Do you all know those games where everything is going well and people are taking the game seriously and everyone’s having a good time? You know those same times where somebody says something funny and it turns into a total comedy hour? Yeah, that’s what happened here.

Story 1:

So the party is lacking in the ability to get things appraised, and the Cleric decides to use an ability she has to cast a select arcane spell to cast find familiar.

She gets: a celestial hedgehog that happens to have a fairly high appraisal skill. The problem is, under rules for familiars and speaking with animals, animals tend to appraise things from their point of view. That means that human appraisal values don’t really mean much to them. When asked to appraise a valuable piece of artwork, I decided that the hedgehog would appraise things based on its value in barrels of nuts.

I thought it was clever. My player thought it was hilarious.

Story 2:

We had a new player join us, can’t remember who he was other than a mutual friend of some of the other players. He decides that he wants to play, but he wants to play a barbarian because he thought Conan was cool. Okay, fine. When asked to engage, he did what he thought a barbarian was supposed to do, which was run right out in front of everyone. In a normal combat situation, that wouldn’t be a terrible idea. The problem was, he played his character like he was an idiot. Although he was not an idiot. Therefore, his character died. A lot. His character died so often, and was brought back by the party so often, that I decided that his god, Tempus, the Lord of Battle, gave him a “Frequent Die-ers Card” which granted every 10th death a free resurrection spell. This got a good laugh from the party, for obvious reasons.

His 10th death? The party saw a balor guarding the entrance to a cave that they needed to go into. For those that are unaware, these particular demons carry a very large great sword that has the ability to cut the head off of anyone that it crits on. The party began formulating a plan to take on the creature when the barbarian’s player tells me he just charges the balor. I look at him. I look at the party. I look back at him.

“Okay. He gets an opportunity attack against you. Also, since you are charging, you get a +2 to attack and a -2 to AC.” (Remember: 3rd Edition)

“That’s fine. I can waste him.”

The party proceeds to groan. I tell them I am rolling in the open for this one. The balor threatens a crit on a 19-20. The barbarian’s AC? 18. The balor’s bonus to hit stuff? +19. Therefore, according to 3rd Edition rules, If my first roll to hit him is a 19 or 20, as long as I don’t roll a 1 on a subsequent roll to confirm the critical, I automatically lob off his head. This is why the party is groaning.

I roll onto the table. It comes up: a NATURAL 20. People, I can’t make this up. I roll the second roll. 19. I describe as the barbarian screams a death cry, charging up to the balor. I also then describe the Baylor casually turning and flicking his sword at the barbarian whose head lops off and rolls back towards the party. Combat ensues.

Story 3:

The party has just finished defeating a Hydra. One of the players, a wizard I believe, knows that parts of a Hydra are good for certain spell components. Therefore, the wizard starts digging into the Hydra for parts. One of the player’s character is very engrossed in the new magic items they had found. He fails his spot check to see the wizard preparing to prank him.

The real world, the player who is getting pranked has his nose in a book trying to look up the properties of a new magic item he acquired and wasn’t really paying attention.

After the wizard makes a crack about swimming in the hydra’s innards being like “warm spaghetti” (becoming a long-time running gag), he pops up over the side of the Hydra wearing its dead head on his own, rolling high to make a convincing hydra roar.

I ask the player who’s nose had been in a book to make another spot check. He looks up at me and rolls.

“Uhhh…what am I rolling for? I’m by the Hydra body, right?”

“You’ll see. Just roll.”

He rolls and gets a rather low roll. I describe how he sees movement out of the corner of his eye. He turns and looks and sees a hydra head coming over the edge of the body. I asked him what he does. He launches a dagger. A magical dagger. The wizard gets hit. Hilarity ensues, with the new phrase “Hey look guys, I’m a hydra!” entering our vernacular for years to come.

This was a great campaign, as I remember it, and I’m sad to say that I haven’t spoken to those guys in over a decade. And so it goes, I guess.

Well, I hope you enjoyed these DM stories! Until next time, dear readers!

How To DM: Fighting on the Fly

This week’s How-To post is by my good friend yourdorkmaterials…

So. You’ve meticulously planned your big boss fight, carefully balanced your CR’s and come up with cool, integral roles tailored beautifully for each player. It’s going to be epic! Aaaaannnd…two players can’t show. Or the wizard goes down early. Or what was supposed to be a running battle turns into a stubborn slug-fest to the death. 

We’ve all had this happen, and – for me – it’s one of the most challenging aspects of DMing to deal with. 

So let’s talk about tips on how to adjust our combat encounters on the fly in this week’s How To DM!

Manage the Damage: I use the average damage provided in the stat blocks for big fights. It dramatically speeds up combat and lets me manage how much damage I’m putting out each round (especially critical hit damage.)

Build a Weak Wave: Build a wave of weaker enemies to shave off some of those Moon Druid/Bear Barbarian hit points. Those players tend to be overly confident (for good reason) and tend to be less worried about combat initially. I might plan on a weak wave reducing their HP by 30%. Once they reach that total, you can always have them “fail a morale check” and retreat. Need some more damage? Bring them in as reinforcements or have them rally.

PCs Don’t Have to Know the Roll: I roll everything openly at my table. I always hated it when I figured out the DM was letting up to save us. They don’t have to know what those extra rolls are for; and they make players more nervous as the combat wears on. For example, if they’re fighting something that has a chance to give them a disease, I make those saves for them without telling them specifically what they’re for. Players tend to get really nervous, really quick when they’re making “mystery saves”. I find it makes them invest more in the fight.

Take ‘Em Alive: Let enemies grapple. If you’re using optional combat rules from the DMD (which I do), let your enemies trip them, shove them prone, or disarm them. This gives you “attacks” to use that don’t necessarily cause damage. I always bring this up in Session 0 and ultimately allow the players to decide which optional rules they want to include, but – anything they can do, their enemies can do!

Give Them Their Clues: If your Big Bad Evils fly, maybe foreshadow that a bit. One time, I had a flying enemy swoop in, fail a grapple check, and fly off before the player really knew what was happening. He was more than a little freaked out. If they need to use fire to stop the enemy from regenerating, find a way to give subtle hints about that weakness (and then make sure they have a way of using that information in case the wizards/sorcerers are down or absent).

What tips, tricks and advice do you folks have? Put them in the comments below, so we can all share in the info. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next week for another installment on How To DM!

The Haunt 2 (Part 2)

DISCLAIMER: LIKE THE PREVIOUS INSTALLMENT WARNED, THIS ADVENTURE IS GRAPHIC AND CONTAINS POSSIBLE TRIGGERS.

YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!!

The party engaged the Oblex, for that is what it was that took the form of an Astral Deva, with it temporarily stealing the memories of the spicy cleric!

After a short battle, the Oblex lay defeated and the party stood, victorious. It was then they decided to take a short rest. That was, until…

The Evil Doll was heard running to and fro in the hallway, seen at the last minute by Iul, the party wizard, as it ran across the ceiling in the hall!

After a short fight, with the Doll escaping, the party rested. Seeing a double door exiting the room to the south, the party declined heading back into the hallway, and elected the south exit.

Opening the door, Iul was presented with an evil aura of negative energy and 6 human-sized maggots of a fiendish nature. The gnome mage quickly shut the door with an audible “Nope.”

Opening the door after a better attack plan, Iul cast a fire-based line spell, hitting three of the creatures, killing them instantly.

Quickly, the blood hunter and monk entered, attacking the last three and being affected by some sort of energy emanating from that section of the hall.

The battle won, the party entered the hall, finding yet another one of the infamous drawings. This one was of the mother being found dead in a tub of water, her wrists cut.

There remained one door. THE door. The one with one of the nurse-creatures, and 14 of the demonic aberrant creatures seen from above before.

The paladin/blackguard rushed in, using a frightening aura ability, causing the room (except for the nurse-like creature) to become frightened, preventing their advancement. The “nurse” attacked, putting up a decent fight, but falling under the onslaught of the paladin’s withering two-handed sword attacks.

After a fireball from Iul, the room was cleared. Inside, the party found the 5th of the drawings, with the accompanying vision.

This time, it was of little Carol Anne, hooked up to various tools and whose consciousness was being placed in, you guessed it, the Evil Doll, killing her in the process.

This would be the end, except the ground began shaking and the building and rooms seem to be reconstituting themselves! The party resolved to quickly exit the building.

Trying to head upstairs, the party reached the stairs only to have them turn into a slick ramp, slick with ectoplasm and blood. It was a hard climb, but with Loris the Artificer’s rope of climbing the physically frail party members were able to overcome the ramp.

Getting to the top, the party realized that the ground floor of the hospital had totally reconstituted to its original form. They attempted to leave, only to find the windows and doors unable to be opened. Then they heard a howl and a scream:

What should appear, but the bloody little brother of the Evil Doll/Carol Anne. The battle was coming to a head when the Evil Doll screeched and launched herself at the party, stabbing and dodging and shadow stepping all over the room.

The cleric/warlock, getting an idea, pulled out the drawings she’d been collecting, and fumbled, sending them all over the room. Between the magic missiles from Iul, and fire bolts from the artificer, the drawings were destroyed sending the Evil Doll into a rage and causing her to retreat.

Wasting no more time, the party beat feet out of the building only to watch it crumble.

Silence fell.

Until…

SHE RETURNED!!! Bursting from the rubble, the Evil Doll launched herself once again at the party!

She screamed at the party: “YOU RUINED EVERYTHING! YOU RUINED MY DRAWINGS! So… NOW YOU DIE!”

The fight was hard fought, but the party was victorious, the monk landing the final blow, and the Evil Doll falling, seemingly once and for all, unmoving.

The party was then greeted with the following ending:

As the dawn begins to lighten the early morning sky, the stormy rain squalls cease. The Evil Doll lays on the sodden ground, unmoving. As the first rays of sunlight hit the empty shell of a body, the porcelain skin, ragged hair, and blood stained dress begin to wither and blacken to flecks of charcoal. A moment passes and the Evil Doll quickly break into a small pile of ash that washes away
into the morning puddles. The day is new, and the goodness of light somehow returns to this once forsaken place. You know that this may not last long, however, but for now the world is a better
place.

Thanks for your reading and until next time, dear readers!

Miniature Painting Spotlight: Finally!

So, dear readers, I finally got some painting done. Of course, some of that painting was done today, thus my late post.

This isn’t going to be a long post, but it will have some cool things I’ve been working on.

First, another dear restoration project.

Finally done!

Next is a Wizard of Thay that I am working on for my Tuesday game (Shhhh… don’t tell them!)

Note that both of these miniatures are, in fact, metal and end up looking a tad different than the plastic or resin miniatures.

Speaking of, here’s the tiefling that I’ve been working on.

As you can see, I have the coat pretty much done. I wanted to the inside of his lapels a different color, gold or copper. Not sure yet.

Next week I will be featuring a couple of miniatures painted by a friend of mine. I don’t make any claims about being an expert painter, although I take pride in my work and think I do a fairly good job. After all, I have had a few people have me do commissions for them. But this guy? This guy makes my work look like garbage! Not going to lie, I’m kind of jealous and have asked him to teach me his ways. Once I have learned them, I will, in turn, teach you all that I have. Sharing is caring and all that.

Until next time, dear readers, keep painting and keep playing!

Feel free to link a picture of your miniature that you’ve been working on in the comments!

Sunday Highlights: Assault on Caer Dineval

It just came to my attention that I mis-scheduled this post today, so it’s late. That said, here it is:

We last left our intrepid band of heroes in Targos, having just disposed of Sephek and Torga, had headed off to Bryn Shander to sell loot and gear up for their next task: going to Caer Dineval to check up on Cora the innkeeper’s (The Buried Treasure in Bremen) son, on their way up to Kelvin’s Cairn to rescue the husband (Garret) of the scrimshander (Keegan) in Targos.

The party arrived in Caer Dineval, not sure where to begin. Deciding that, since the inn had been out of business for the better part of two years, that the Uphill Climb Tavern would be their best bet.

The innkeeper, named Roark, told them that he had no rooms to let, but that they may be able to get lodging up at the Caer (the keep) further up the road in town.

After a short discussion, the party headed up the road.

The uninviting and squat keep stood further up on the hill, overlooking the bay. Walking up to the portcullis, they heard a shout from above asking their business. When the party stated their wish to see the Speaker, they were turned away, saying that he was too ill to be seen. When they said that they had a healer with them, the inhabitants balked, yelling about “heathen remedies.”

Deciding that something was definitely amiss, the party pretended to leave and walked around the east side of the keep, and with the Monk’s shape water ability, they walked up a set of snowy stairs to the battlements above. Seeing nobody in the courtyard, and a tower to their immediate north and south, they decided to enter into the south tower, where they were attacked by barely-competent men and women wearing robes and wielding scimitars and wearing a strange crystal around their necks!

The battle raged, and were soon joined by similarly dressed people coming from the north tower, and then from the stairs in the south tower, as well as the south west tower, and an additional force of two spellcasters from the northwest towers (the party holding the line in and by the southeast tower), with the fallen turning to solid ice statues. After a relatively easy battle between the groups, the party stood, triumphant, with a captured prisoner: Huarwar, the wayward son of Cora the innkeeper. Binding and gagging him, the party knocked him unconscious and left him in a pile of boxes to be retrieved later on.

Entering into the courtyard, the party made a plan to enter the main keep, which they did in short order, meeting a young servant girl, who seemed reluctant to help for fear of someone by the name of Kadroth and Avarice, both tieflings, with Avarice being albino. They asked her to point the way to Kadroth, which she did, and point out where the speaker was being held.

The party went first to Kadroth’s office, running into another of the robed men, whom they dispatched with no difficulty (and who also turned into an ice statue), but not before he alerted Kadroth of their presence. Kadroth came out of his appropriated office, only to be seen wearing the infamous necklace, and was cut down. Kadroth, curiously, did not turn into a statue, although he wore the same crystal.

Kadroth

Heading up to the room where the Speaker was being held, they burst into the room to find the Speaker on the chamber pot, and his jailer standing watch over the room. The party eliminated the guard, and let the Speaker finish his…business…before asking him about his captors. Finding out that the cult members (for that was what they were) were of Levistus, one of the Dukes of the Nine Hells, and were holding several of his servants hostage down in the cistern. Additionally, they heard of a n old soothsayer inside that may also be part of the cult.

Finding out this, the party headed downstairs and into the trap door into the cistern. Not finding much, they found a small alcove where they found a shrine to Levistus. Heading to an adjacent room, the party found an albino tiefling studying over some books, who told them simply, without looking up “Get out. Now.”

The party ignored her and engaged her in conversation. Apparently glad to have Kadroth eliminated, she attempted to make a deal with the party to help her find the Lost Netherese City of Ythryn in exchange for a share of the treasure found there. The party declined, asking her what reason they shouldn’t kill her and just take everything they find, where she turned around holding a staff of frost aimed at them.

Both sides, deciding to cut their losses, the party made her give her word that she would not return to Caer Dineval, although she refused to agree to leaving Ten Towns. The party allowed her to leave, having no more use of Caer Dineval with her cult-members having been decimated.

After rescuing the cold and hungry servants, the party went off to find the soothsayer, who greeted them, knowing her own life was coming to an end, knowing her fate in the Nine Hells, and yet wanting another group to succeed. She spoke of one named Xardorok Sunblight, a duergar warlord, who was preparing some sort of terrible fate for the people of Ten Towns. After giving them the information, she died, and that of old age.

The Cult Soothsayer

Not knowing what she was talking about, the party informed the Speaker of the success of their winning his freedom, and prepared to leave.

Miniature Painting Spotlight: 10/25/2020

Hello, dear readers. Today’s miniature painting spotlight is brought to you by “Unfinished Works”. Unfinished works, were all I’ve done is prime some stuff and paint little else.

In all seriousness I started painting again, but realized a lot of what I needed to paint needed priming first. Remember when I told you that Dungeons & Dragons miniatures aren’t the only thing I paint? Well guess what, I’ve got some inclusions there.

First in our list is Xanathar. I’ve been trying to get this stupid miniature primed for some time now. Unfortunately, I keep finding places where I’ve missed priming. But on a larger mini, I’m not totally surprised about this. I’ll get him all primed before I truly start on him. The biggest problem, as I’ve told you before, is having to paint the inside of his mouth before I could glue on his lips and teeth. Well, I got that done and glued on his lips and teeth. Additionally, I have painted and assembled the base to his miniature.

I’m very satisfied with how it turned out.

Here he is, just sitting on top of his stand:

As you may be able to tell, and for those of you who are unfamiliar with the process, I used liquid green stuff to fill in the gaps around his lips. It’s a little messy, but I got the spots filled in.

Next on our list is one of my restoration projects. You may remember her.

Well, I had a harder time than I had previously thought I would in finding the specific type of green that matches her cloak. It took me two tries but I did get it and I’ve started to restore the back where it was particularly chipped. The staff is already looking very good.

Ashley of our D&D miniatures, is a tiefling warlock that I began. Mostly, I painted his chest hands and tail. He is, of course, largely unfinished, but that won’t last the week.

Lastly, is my attempt at painting my battle tech miniatures of course, they are all plastic and need primer. That’s perfectly fine, but there are a lot of nooks, crannies, and crevices. they send it up being a much more daunting task than I expected, and will likely be using spray primer next time. Priming these things by hand has become the bane of my existence. Thankfully, I’m doing my learning on the two miniatures that came with the starter set. They will likely just augment my normal neck forces so it’s not too big of a deal. That said, I sat next to it and unpainted/primed miniature so that you can see the difference between prime and unprimed in the greys.

If you can’t tell, The one on the left is the one that has been primed. You may be able to notice all the crevices that are still the same color as the one on the right. Part of the problem, was that I didn’t follow my own advice. I forgot to wash the mini before I painted. It’s an important step, but even people who have an idea of what they’re doing can screw up and skip a step once in awhile.

Well, that’s what I got this week. I know you may have wished for more, but so did I. Next week I should have the tiefling done, and my restoration projects completed.

Until next time, dear readers.

DM Stories: My Discord Group and Clarshh’s Sepulchre, a.k.a. How Elren Befriended “Benjamin”

I have a wonderful Discord group that meets (now) on Sunday evenings after I get back from Adventurers League. A big thanks to @Momo (Claa P. Trap), @Bisharp (Elren), @DoctorIcky (Momon), @Lurker (Vin Smoke), and @Legion (Calla), you guys are absolutely awesome. Claa and Calla do not appear in this story as they came in later.

The group began in a small town (in a homebrew world), getting recruited by an Arcane, a blue giant that specialized in magic and magical items. Their job: be caravan guards and delve into a lost sepulchre of a deceased cult leader to acquire a cube of force that Sereen (the name of the Arcane) already had a buyer for.

Sereen was a weird dude…

Once the party arrived at the small abandoned hamlet where the entraunce to the tomb was supposed to lay, the party got to work looking for the items that the clues pointed to.

The party investigated around the town. They found some monsters, destroyed them, and found some answers to some of the clues. All good. All ordinary.

Cool puzzle solving part of this adventure

Until the bathhouse. That stupid bathhouse.

So, there I was, describing this, and I ask for a Wisdom (Perception) check. This was to see if anyone noticed the spider caught in the furthest ceramic tub.

Elren (played by @bisharp, one of the very first players I recruited for this campaign, if not the first; thanks buddy!), saw it. Being a wood elf, he has an… affinity for nature. Sure, he was a monk, but still, a wood elf.

The aasimar rogue (@Lurker) and the wizard (@DoctorIcky) said to kill it with fire and the bathhouse with it.

What was it, you ask?

Well, what I thought I described was:

Picture is property of owner’s. All rights reserved.

But Elren said something to the effect of, “Oh, leave him be. You’re scaring him.”

I asked @bisharp to roll a Wisdom (Handle Animal) and set the DC stupid high for a group of level ones.

It’s at this time I should mention a house/table rule of mine: A roll of a Nat 1, regardless of anything else, ALWAYS fails, and usually (okay, almost always) results in something bad happening, while a roll of a Nat 20, regardless of anything, is ALWAYS a success, with something awesome happening. It is my belief that anyone, regardless of skill, can mess something up or do something awesome by blind luck/misfortune.

Can you guess what that elf rolled?

No?

A NATURAL STUPID 20.

Remember how I described it?

This is what it turned into:

Image belongs to Lucas the Spider. All rights reserved.

And Elren named him Benjamin.

Oooooooooooof course he did.

Of note, later, when the party was in an escapable deathtrap, with a ceiling slowly falling (and partly due to the player being bad at puzzles) yells, “Run Benjamin! Save yourself!!!” The party was thrilled at that one.

But, Benjamin had won over their hearts. Especially when he pulled a…

Image from “Home Alone,” and property of its owner. All rights reserved.

…and saved the party. Go team Benjamin, and go Exploding Rats Party (the name of their band)!

Until next time, dear readers…

How to DM: Creating Memorable Villains

What do you think of when you hear names like, Cruella DeVille, Melificent, Jafar, Scar (other than I can only seem to think of things Disney rolled out…)? They are memorable villains! Who can forget how awesome that fight between Prince Philip and Melificent was when she turned into a dragon? Who can forget the epic fight between an all-powerful sorcerer and a simple rogue? Who, in their right mind, can forget the voice of Jeremy Iron as Scar, his claws in that of Mufasa, leaning in and saying “Long live the king…” while throwing Mufasa to his death?!

What was it about these horrible people that made them so memorable? They had depth and motive. Melificent was evil, but wronged for not being invited to the party for baby Aurora. Jafar was eager to take power over the sultan and take the throne for himself. Scar was similarly motivated, but desired the rulership of the Pridelands to be the ultimate revenge for his brother taking what he believed to be his birthright.

So, how do you build these villains?

Remember how we were building the adventure? Let’s go back there. Let’s say that our adventure is exploring a dungeon with a long buried treasure. Of course there’s going to be plenty of monster encounters, traps, puzzles, etc…You’re an expert now in building encounters, right? Right! But what’s guarding the final treasure room?

This encounter is what is commonly referred to as a BBEG: Big Bad Evil Guy. Of course it doesn’t have to be a guy, but this is the term generally used. The BBEG is the “final boss” of the adventure. In our adventure, depending on the level of the party, it could be as simple as a mummy, or maybe as dangerous as a lich or demilich! The sky’s the limit on this.

One of my favorite movies is The Incredibles. The final villain in the first movie is absolutely awesome, if you think about it. It’s a kid who felt wronged and hurt, who turned that hurt into anger and revenge. His whole goal was to eliminate Mr. Incredible. Also, if you look at it, Mr. Incredible was responsible for creating Syndrome!

Let’s dissect this further. Syndrome obviously had an intimate relationship with Mirage, who turned on him when Mr. Incredible threatened to kill her during his capture. This shows the ruthlessness of Syndrome even in his personal relationships when it comes to his revenge plans. Further, you can see how Syndrome, although he makes the occasional blunder (like making the robot AI too smart), he shows himself to be an insanely smart villain. He planned and executed the death of several of the super heroes. He lured Mr. Incredible to his capture. His technology sales created a mass fortune, enough that he purchased an island, built a huge and elaborate base, and had a personal army/security force at his beck and call.

Then there are his flaws: he believed his plan unstoppable. He monologues enough to nearly be defeated by Mr. Incredible. His arrogance at his belief that his technology was enough to do what superheroes could do. These are all flaws, and some of them fatal.

There’s another school of thought on villains. That of the good guy who is following a path because he truly believes what he is doing is right. I’m not talking about that evil witch “Professor” Umbridge of the Harry Potter universe. She was absolute evil incarnate, and frankly, worse of a villain than that of Voldemort. Fight me if you think I’m wrong. No, I’m talking about those antagonists that believe whose goals are directly opposed to that of the protagonist, but who, themselves, are not “bad guys.” These are awesome and memorable antagonists, because it combines the need to ensure the party’s goals, with the moral and ethical dilemma of defeating a good person. Why are their goals different? Who knows. Maybe it’s a Boromir situation, in which they are taunted by the magical artifact.

Sometimes, and this is a great adventure and even campaign plot, the party are inadvertently the bad guys! One of my favorite episodes of Puffin Forrest involves the party working for a mysterious person, who has tasked them with finding some magic crystals. The only problem? This figure was the BBEG, and the party was inadvertantly putting together his ability to rise to power again!

Then there is this story (beware, wall of text):

I know it’s a little blurry, but hopefully you get the idea. Sometimes the BBEG can be the best good guy.

Personally, I love these kinds of BBEG. The ones you think, “Hmm, I think he has a point…”

When I play video games, especially the ones like Mass Effect or Fable, or even the Fallout series, when I play an evil character, they always have a single virtue (conversely my good characters have a flaw; for example, my good character had a wife in every town, where my evil character was faithful to his wife: Lady Grey). This helps give more depth to the villain.

The other thing I give my villains is a memorable “voice.” Maybe it’s an accent or way of speaking when I, as the DM, speak for him. Maybe he’s got the accent of a Bond Villain. Maybe he’s more “Dr. Evil.” Whatever the case, make your villain’s dialogue unique.

One Villain, the Emperor from my (in)famous pirate campaign was voiced by the player who played him. Beforehand, however, we discussed his cadence, his speech pattern, all of these things when he unmasked himself as the primary villain of the campaign (sort of). Great villain.

So, go out, make a villain, and make him/her awesome!

Until next time, dear readers!

Tuesday Game: The Haunt 2 (part 1)

So today I am going over “The Haunt: 2.” It actually has a “Parental Discretion Advised” warning on the first page. As y’all know, I don’t do things too graphically, but, you know, trigger warning and all that. You’ve been warned.

Last time, on “The Haunt: the Series…”

“The hail’s too much! We have to find shelter!”

“Well, the manor is out, now that it’s crumbled to the ground…”

“Well, surviving the manor won’t matter if we’re crushed under hail stones!”

“Quick! Over there! A stairwell! Maybe we can actually get some shelter from this accursed storm!”

The tagline on this is just the best, right?

The party scrambled downstairs into a large room with a single double door, which appeared to be an old, abandoned, and dilapidated waiting room. After the ordeal in the mansion, the party decided to take a rest, taking them into what was presumably the morning, although one couldn’t tell by the dark and stormy skies above.

In the waiting room was a ruined desk of some sort, maybe a receptionist’s desk. Searching the strangely sturdy portion of the desk (having been broken into with a warhammer!), the spicy cleric found the oddest thing:

Upon picking it up, she was tossed into a vision of a young girl, a very familiar young girl, the one who was stabbed by the doll in the room prior to meeting Gertrude, holding hands and walking and talking with Gertrude! The cleric/warlock got a glimpse of Gertrude’s hag form for a moment, before the vision faded, gleaning some sort of information regarding the girl’s mother and some sort of “present.”

Concluding their rest, the party ventured through the double doors and further into this basement.

They came to a hallway with three possibilities: South, West, and East.

The party decided for the west door. Opening the door, the party was struck with a horrid stench, looking at four, seemingly fresh puddles of vomit. Upon closer inspection, the cleric was attacked by those puddles, as they were some strange form of ooze! The battle was short, but fierce, the party victorious. Finding nothing more, the party moved on to the east door.

There they found several tubs of rusty and algae-covered water as well as a curtain that separated them from another section of room. The spicy cleric tears down the curtain and dust billows around her as she coughs and chokes a little, but otherwise seems okay. What they found was a maternity birthing ward, with holes along the floor. There was a singular bed and bassinet at the end of the room that seemed to have fresh blood in them. Using his shadow step ability, the monk teleported over to see what was going on.

No sooner did he look in then a demonic, bloody, needle-toothed infant jumped from the crib, launching itself with a deadly wail, at the monk. The monk dodged this way and that, and when able to, struck with deadly precision the demonic creature, destroying it utterly.

The party, having checking around the corner, or looking that direction, saw the cleric/warlock wanting to look below. Having someone hold her legs, she was dipped in the hole in the floor only to see some 15 creatures, one seemingly dressed in a nurse’s uniform. The cleric was pulled back up, deciding to skip that room once they come to it, and realizing that there is a floor below theirs.

Understanding that there was only one room remaining, the party headed south.  Opening the door, they were at least six beds, three on either side, with a moaning figure into far back right.  Additionally, being noticed that, besides the double tour the ritual you came into this room, there was another room exiting off this area separated by a door.  Upon closer examination, the figure was an armless and legless ghoul.  The monk, being the morbid sort, flipped it onto its face and tied it onto his back.  They decided to call him Nugget.  The party decided to take a short rest when they heard a familiar girlish giggle…

It leapt from the ceiling, knife and it claws extended, standing the gnome wizard.  It stabbed and slashed at her, and disappeared without a trace after attacking once more, this time at cleric, as it had surprise round and first in initiative.  The party tentatively finished their short rest before heading to the door, and down the stairs they found.

The party came to yet another long hallway, bending to the right. At the bottom of the stairs, though, they found what looked like a large brown carpet. The air felt chilly. Feeling the cold, the dragonborn sorcerer cast fire bolt at the patch, causing it to grow! The whole party began freezing, their skin cracking and damaged from what they realized was brown mold. Seeing the need, the dragonborn used her breath weapon of fire on the whole lot, killing the brown mold and damaging the party in the process.

Seeing the double doors on the left and right, as well as the left, but further along the hall, the party opened the left door, heading east. They saw a horrid sight: four of the creatures dressed as nurses. They didn’t seem to be reacting to the party, and so the party realized that it must not react to any sort of sound. Deciding to see what happened, the monk tossed “Nugget” into the room, at which point it was cut, bitten, and slashed apart by the creatures! A rat ran across the room and the same effect happened. Realizing that the creatures reacted to movement, the party used mage hand to retrieve what appeared to be another child’s drawing. The “nurses” ran after the paper, but the party closed the doors before anything else could come through.

The cleric took the paper, and was subjected to yet another vision…

The young, blonde girl is seen again, and again with Gertrude. This time, they came across the scene of a woman, dead and covered in blood, giving birth to a hideously deformed and demonic-looking child, stillborn. A man, whom they know as General Montarthas, sit nearby, sobbing. Gertrude calls the girl to leave, calling her Carol Anne…

Again the cleric came back from the vision, shaken at what she had seen, telling the party the name of the little girl.

Crossing the hall, the party entered into the last room, seeing a ruined chapel with an angelic deva laying injured on the floor, calling for help. The cleric attempted to cast a ranged healing spell and the deva began dragging itself across the floor towards the cleric who came out towards the deva. Just as the cleric got close, the deva revealed itself to be a large red blob…

Will the party survive the encounter? Will they make it out of this hellish former hospital? Join us next week to find out!

Until next time, dear readers!

Not A Mini-Painting Spotlight: The Haunt (part 2)

As you can tell from the title, this is NOT the mini-painting spotlight that I normally do. This is for two reasons: 1) I have had ZERO time to paint in recent days, and my ability to do so when I am symptomatic are hampered severely, and 2) I have a lot of catching up to do for my various game stories.

Therefore, today will be dedicated to finishing out The Haunt. Enjoy!

When last we left the party, they were preparing to enter into the room with the double doors. They carefully checked it for both traps and locks. Finding none, they entered into the room…

They entered into a large room that appeared to be a spellcasting chamber including three stone practice dummies. Seeing yet another set of double doors to the east, they continued onwards.

A fire had gutted this once beautiful library. Charred books and the remains of several skeletons lay around the ground. The only intact thing in the room seemed to be a leather cloak hanging on a melted metal coat rack on the far back of the room. Ignoring caution, the bloodhunter bounded across the room to examine the cloak. The cloak, not being a cloak but a cloaker, turned on him and attacked, fully enveloping him in its folds!

After a difficult fight, in which the tabaxi bloodhunter was injured as he was wrapped up by the cloaker, with the death of the cloaker and the bloodhunter surviving.

Deciding to go back and finish exploring the rest of the house, they continued to be harried by the evil doll, with the cackling gleeful laughter and horrid lullaby predicating its attack.

Along the way, the party noticed the portcullis covering the stairs was lifted, but the party decided to finish exploring the first level.

They made their way back to the tea room, where the party went to the dining room, seeing a ghostly visage of people eating around the table. The artificer decided to simultaneously and independently check out the fireplace, where the evil doll attacked yet again! Fending her off, who disappeared into the shadows yet again, the party continued onward.

This time, the ghostly visage began anew, and the party was accosted by the visage of, what they could only assume was the General himself. The visage and ghostly meal concluding, the party continued onward toward the double doors to the south.

As soon as they entered, they were witness to a ghostly scene from the past, in which Gertrude and the General made plans to run away together, despite the General’s marriage to his wife. As the scene dissipated, the party noticed that, within this grand ballroom, to the east was a set of mirrored doors. The party set themselves to open it.

They find themselves on the edge of an outdoor pool area, although the pool itself is a murky algae, with the occasional ripple disturbing its surface. On the far side of the pool, laying on the stonework, is a jewel-encrusted sword.

The monk, using his shadowstep ability, teleported to the far side and picked up the sword. What rose from the depths of the algae-covered pool will haunt the nightmares of the party for years to come: a beholder zombie.

Of course, a fight ensued, with one character nearly hit with the creature’s disintegration eye beam! All that, however, was for naught, for the beholder zombie, as the dragonborn sorceress cast a fireball at it, the zombie dodging right into the line of fire (beholder zombie rolled a Nat 1 on it’s Dex save and my table rules state this causes double damage; a way for non-crit type spells to be able to crit)! The beholder zombie was obliterated to ashes at the immense ball of flame that struck it.

Upon examination, the sword ended up being enchanted!

Going back to the stairs, the first level being explored, the party decided to forgo the basement and head upstairs. Seeing a hallway, they followed the hallways to the right, and ended up in a waiting room of sorts, with the killer evil doll smiling demonically at the end.

Initiative began and the doll carved its way into the party but the party was nearly too much for the evil toy, which disappeared at the last, into the shadows once more. Cursing their luck at being unable to defeat the doll for good, the party continued through the next door.

Here, they met a curious sight! A skeleton writing at a desk over a ghostly ledger. The skeleton bade them welcome, telling them that they were expected. Suddenly, the door flew open, sucking in all but two of the party!

There they were met with a ghastly sight: Gertrude, her masked beauty unveiled to show her wicked demeanor as a night hag! The poor general, plastered to the ceiling a green gem stuck in his chest, and some sort of tentacles throughout, seemingly sucking the life out of him.

The battle was quick and brutal, the party successful in defeating Gertrude. At the end, the general fell to the floor, whispering thanks as he disappeared into dust, the evil green gem left behind. It was then the house began to shake.

The party, deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, broke the large bay window and jumped or teleported out of the house to the ground below, watching as the large manor house collapsed upon itself, the party standing in awe.

This is the ending the party received:

“

You manage to escape the falling manor, which has been the epitome of true evil. The night hag, Gertrude, has been defeated and the undead have been laid to rest. You know not who the hag’s victim was, however, but they did leave you the emerald in their departure. Now, standing before you, are the piles of rubble and decayed remains of the manor; finally resting in peace. The night begins to grow old as the first hints of dawn start to creep over the horizon. It is then, among the woods that surround the manor; you all notice a pair of glowing crystal blue eyes.

A horrifying girlish giggle carries over the, now, still night air, and the eyes fade into blackness.”

Suddenly, the previous storm began to produce hail the size of one’s fist, and the party found the rubble of a building, with stairs going down as the only refuge from the storm…

Stay tuned for “The Haunt: 2” this coming Tuesday!

Sunday Game: Rime of the Frost Maiden; Finding Sephek

The ranger, realizing that the creature in the water was a plesiosaurus, quaffed one of his potions of animal friendship and began speaking with it. It responded with a polite “Hello!”

After a short discussion, the party found that this talking plesiosaur was ensorcelled to become sentient by a druid who’s instructions were to terrorize the people of Bremen or else become a dumb creature once again. After some cajoling and convincing, the party managed to convince him that the effect of the spell was permanent and that he did not have to prey on the people of Bremen.

Finding that he did not have a name, the party decided to name him Bob, which he decided was a great name, not having had one before.

Bob towed them back towards Bremen and was asked to wait so they could introduce him to a new friend. Getting Tali, the half-elf whom the journal was for, the party introduced them, much to Tali’s pleasure.

Heading back to the inn, the party found that Sephek asked about them and checked out with the rest of the merchants he travelled with. The ranger attempted to track him, but lost the tracks on the edge of town.

Deciding to rest, the party stayed overnight, and left the next day, heading to Targos and hoping to find evidence of Sephek’s whereabouts.

Arriving in Targos, the party quickly located Torga and her retinue. They found that she and her crew were leaving in the morning.

To kill time, the party decided to partake in a local festival called Liar’s Night. The contest was one of a pumpkin carving contest, of which the monk won with a traditional jack-o’-lantern design. The ensuing chaos over the loss of a ring garnered everyone with a ring that, when worn, imbues the weather with a translucent mask in the design of their pumpkins.

The festivities concluded, the party decided to check out Torga and found that she was a most unsavory character, who engaged in extortion, blackmail, protect rackets, and even murder for hire. The party decided that she, too, should meet her end, and therefore would eliminate all of her retinue.

Setting up an ambush at the fork in the road, a blizzard fell upon the area. The dogsled teams of Torga came into view, led by Sephek himself! The party let loose with a heavy barrage of attacks.

The battle was hard fought, with the balance of advantage teetering one way then the next. After the fall of Torga, Sephek too was soon killed. The remaining four guards followed soon after.

After looting the bodies and disposing of the same, the party took the sleds and dogs, and headed towards Brynn Shander, selling them and splitting the loot.

Deciding not to stay long, the party set their sights onto Caer Dineval, the town on the way to Caer Konig, where they had a search for a missing husband.

Will they find him? What will happen along the way?

Join us next Monday, dear readers, to find out!

Tuesday Game: The Haunt (Part 1)

So, this week, to celebrate “Spooktober,” I decided to run one of my favorite horror-themed adventures, and set this adventure on their path back to Waterdeep.

October is a spook-tacular month in which to run spooky adventures. The brave and dedicated adventurers that investigate the strange and messed up stories are members of a rag-tag group of a B-List group known as “Those Guys.” This is their story.

DUHN DUHN!!!

The heroes began by approaching the house, seeing through the darkened windows a pair of crystal blue eyes. No matter what they tried, the doors to the house would not so much as budge. Deciding to go around back, the door opened, seemingly of its own accord.

Entering the large mansion, party found in the entryway two statues, like that of grotesque demons. Looking around and seeing no sign of what would cause those blue eyes, the party artificer advanced further into the mansion. Once he passed the two statues, they animated and attacked!

The battle did not last long, and the party triumphed easily over the two gargoyles.

Advancing upwards to a landing, the party managed to find a stairwell going up and down, but contained a portcullis blocking the stairs. Tries they might, the parties unable to open it. The party did, however, find a couch with a strange doll laying on it. The party warlock / cleric picked up the doll and tied it to her sentient glass jar of flying mothballs. The artificer found a small statuette with a raised arm of a Griffin.

Pulling down the arm, the party heard a sound as if two doors were opening or shutting. Hearing that it came from the large tea room off of the entryway where they were, the party went down the short stairs onward, seeing an open part of the wall to their right, and another room up a short set of steps to their left.

Deciding to go into the room to the door that was opening and shutting, the party decided to go left towards the door, leaving the bloodhunter by the statue. The artificer crossed to the door when…

CRASH!!!!

…the chandellier above crashed into the middle of the room!

The party waited only a minute before heading onward, before the cleric/warlock realized that the doll was no longer tied to her jar.

That…was not good.

The party called for the bloodhunter to pull the lever, and they observed that the door ahead closed, but they heard two doors move. Deciding that the monk would go in, the monk went inwards, whereas the party stayed outside and had them observe the goings on in the short hall beyond what was likely a secret room. The monk entered and the door behind him was shut as a passage in front of him opened!

The monk stepped through and after doing so, the party, sans the bloodhunter, entered the hallway beyond the secret door, so the party could make their way through. After trying ways to wedge the door and finding none, the party prepared to have the bloodhunter pull the lever, cutting him off from the party and joining them with the monk, who found himself in a large room with a set of double doors to the southeast, and a single door to the south.

The bloodhunter, alone with his thoughts, was attacked, the sound of small footsteps and a girlish giggle predicating it!

The doll, with a knife in hand and claws extended in the other, flew from the ceiling and stabbed and clawed at the bloodhunter, who reeled in pain. The battle lasted only a moment, before the evil doll had disappeared without a trace into the shadows, the sound of giggles and footsteps fading away, as he yelled for the party to come to his aid.

Leaving the cleric/warlock as a companion, the remaining party entered into the room with the monk, who led them to the single door, finding a small wizard’s study. The brittle and ancient remains left only a single scroll tube (containing a spell scroll of invisibility), and a page out of a journal, detailing the descent into madness of the General after a new advisor, Gertrude, had come into the picture.

After seeing that there was nothing left to find, the party decided on heading into the double doors…

What happens next? Join us later for part 2!

Short Announcement

So here’s the deal: I have Multiple Sclerosis. Today has been…challenging and I haven’t been able to finish my posts. Yeah, I know, but I’m symptomatic as all can be, and my pain levels are through the roof.

I am sorry that I couldn’t get content out. I should be good by Monday.

I appreciate your understanding in this time.

Until tomorrow dear readers.

DM How To: Campaign Building

Last week we talked about plot hooks. Remember that post. It becomes important.

Start with building a home base. Usually it’s best to make this a small to medium village where you can flush out a number of NPCs and build out an area from there. All the characters should have a reason for being here. Maybe they are from the area and are starting their adventuring career from here. Maybe they are new adventurers who happen to be passing through. No matter the case, the starting area should have some basic things: and in where they can stay or some other similar place, a general good store where they can purchase adventuring supplies (they don’t have to be able to get everything there necessarily, they just have to be able to get the basics at the least), and usually a blacksmith where they can purchase weapons and/or armor.Now, this is the most common way of doing this, but there’s no reason why you can’t start them in a large metropolis, or a larger town. Additionally, you could start them off as travelers on the road in the middle of a wilderness, or in some harsher environment, like a desert or tundra and their first goal is to find civilization and survive. Just remember, that their home base, wherever it may be, is going to be the basis for where the party will return in between adventures.

Next you want to focus on building your adventures while seating in campaign events. Maybe your campaign is focused on the return of an ancient and powerful dragon. Your first adventure may only have some kind of reference to said dragon or its return. Maybe it’s a kobold cult dedicated to this dragon. Maybe they simply find a shrine or inscription vaguely relating to the return of this dragon. Whatever the case may be, you start seeding in campaign events or minor plot points early, and continue to do so in greater and more blatant numbers as your campaign progresses.

As we talk about campaign progression, is worth noting that many campaigns tend to fizzle out around the tier 3 mark, between 11th and 16th level. Not many campaigns go into the higher levels. Plan your campaigns based on how far and what level you want your adventures to be when the campaign ends. Do you want your campaign to take them all the way to 20th level? This is a daunting task but is very doable. It just takes careful planning.It is always helpful, just like doing so for adventures, to do a rough flow chart or outline for the general direction you want the the campaign to go. Again, don’t forget to plant seeds for your plot as it is being revealed.Next, create a local region. After you have created the home base, you want a local region where, either them majority of the campaign, or the entire campaign, take place. Doing a bit of cartography helps in this. Maybe there is a large forest where the elf kingdom lay. Maybe there is a mountain range where, in our earlier example, the ancient dragon is supposed to be summoned from. Whatever You choose, make sure that you flush it out just enough to give it some structure. If you know exactly what adventures the party will encounter, as well as the level progression you expect, either by milestone leveling or by experience points (this is where doing a flowchart and/or an outline really helps), You can divide the areas out by level. Just remember, players make the decisions for the characters. This is where you’re amazing plot hooks come in, drawing them into the story and keeping them on track within the areas for their own levels. Of course, we don’t want to railroad our players. Maybe we want to give options to where certain adventures can take place. This is why we flesh out the region just enough to give it some structure, but leave us with some flexibility as to where certain events can take place.

Campaign Events

The Dungeon Master guide, as it should, has a lot of good ideas for major campaign events. They refer to them as world – shaking events. It is a good idea to check out that section of chapter one. One of their major recommendations is to have three good campaign shaking events. I highly recommend that you read that section. It should be noted that the campaign does not have to be just about the story you have crafted. Character backgrounds, when provided, offer great opportunities for character development as well as campaign development. Maybe the party has decided they don’t have the strength or power to defeat the big bad evil guy (BBEG). Using the characters backgrounds you can craft adventures that help them gain the power, or maybe find legendary weapons or artifacts, that will help them in defeating the BBEG. Maybe The characters themselves just gain a bit of depth during these adventures. Having your players create a good structure for their backgrounds really helps out here. The podcast/show critical role does a very good job for this in their first season. As a result of the character development, each character also gets an ending/epilogue.

All Good Things Come To An End

It is my belief, that secretly, in the depths of every dungeon master (at least, the very good ones) wants each character to have their “happily ever after.” Of course, campaign events and bad rolls can lead to character death. That said, for the most part, with the exception of a total party wipe out, the individual characters, as well as the party as a whole, should have a nice wrap up with their characters epilogue. These do not have to be elaborate, although they can be, but should provide some sort of satisfying conclusion to the campaign and campaign events. This usually is done by each player, as well as with significant input and inclusion with, the dungeon master.

Well, that’s my counsel and advice on building a campaign. Do you think I missed something? Let me know in the comments below. Is there a topic you would like me to cover, again, let me know in the comments! 

Next week, we will discuss creating memorable villians!

Until tomorrow readers.

Grrr….

So, I meant to put up the post about yesterday’s game, but ended up getting caught up in doing errands literally all day. As a result, I have nothing but this to post. As a result, I’ll post Tuesday’s Game synopsis on Friday, and save the story I had planned for Friday for next Friday!

In the mean time, stay classy dear readers!

Mini Painting Spotlight: 13 October, 2020

Yeah…so if you are seeing this for the first time, you can see that I accidentally posted Thursday’s post today. Sorry to get your hopes up, but you’ll see it in a few days, if that is any consolation.

Onward to discussing miniatures!

This week, as you could tell, I’ve been working on basecoating some of my non-preprimed miniatures. These are the resin ones that, for the most part (like Jarlaxle and Xanathar) one has to assemble before painting.

Another project I’ve been working on is restoring some old miniatures.

That all said, I have one miniature I was finally able to paint:

He’s not too fancy, but I think he’s pretty cool.

I had him painted up last week, but was waiting on getting a specific Effects paint in order to finish him: “Glistening Blood.”

I wanted to do the blood that I wanted to be dripping down the sides of his mouth.

Let me say this: I absolutely love most of the effects paints.

For example, check out my skeletons again:

See the rust on the swords and shields (keeping in mind that I painted upwards of 5 of these!)? This particular effect was done with a paint that was made up, upon drying, to look like what appears to be dried rust.

Another one that I enjoy that I’ve been using is called “Wet Mud.” I’ve been using it a lot for bases along with my grey for stone and rocks.

That’s all I have for this week!

Next week I’ll have some more restorations and new miniatures to show!

Until next time, dear readers!

Sunday Game: Rime of the Frostmaiden; Onward to Bremen

Our heroes left off chasing after some goblins after finding the dead dwarf, killed by a yeti. The party saw the wagon hitched to two angry polar bears. The ranger, thinking he could, sneaked up to the polar bears and calmed them, as well as releasing them. He then fired an arrow into the Goblin boss.

The battle went quickly, the new companions, a gnome wizard, a wood-elf monk, and a half-orc cleric (war domain), joining the throng. Soon, especially after the angry and mistreated polar bears mauled a few of the goblins, the only one left was the goblin boss, who surrendered. Promising all of his treasure and the lost iron bars, the party let him flee with his life.

Heading back to Brynn Shander with the body of the dwarf and the iron ingots, the party was welcomed with great enthusiasm by the dwarves that hired them. They were additionally awarded a permanent 10% discount on any of the work the dwarves would do for them.

The party then decided that the serial killer needed to be dealt with. Knowing that he would be in the town of Bremen, the party mounted their trusty axe beak mounts and rode out to Targos, a stop along the way to Bremen. It was there they decided to rest and explore the town, checking out the general goods store.

Targos Coat of Arms

On the way, the party was accosted by a very friendly sled dog with a broken harness. They were led to a small home, where they met Keegan, who invited them inside for cider. Inside, Keegan told of his husband being possibly in danger, as Boy (the dog) is his favorite dog and would never be left. Pointing the party out towards Kelvin’s Cairn by way of Caer-Konig. Keegan claimed to be friendly with the owner of the local in (The Luskan Arms) to get free rooms as well as some of the trinkets he makes if they help. The party agreed to help after they finished their current task in Bremen. As the party all had mounts, their travel was greatly shortened so they could cover much ground in a short time.

Heading out to Bremen, the party found their way to one of the local inns there, Buried Treasures. The woman running the inn (Cora Mulphoon) was very grateful to have so many customers and fawned over them like royalty. The party began to tip generously, much to her surprise! The party asked around for Sephek, finding out that he was currently inside Black-Bearded Brother tavern. The party bard asked the bartender if he could perform. Rolling high, the bard began a lovely and jaunty performance getting the whole tavern to join in the merriment, with customers from nearby taverns (there were 5 in close proximity) coming to see the show. Buying Sephek a large number of drinks, the party began tracking him outside as he stumbled. As a blizzard began to hit, the party struck, fighting a running battle south along the alleys, late into the evening. The party nearly cornered him several times, but Sephek used misty step, or a form thereof, to get away, even disappearing up on a roof. Deciding to take a short rest, the party stopped and commiserated at being unable to corner Sephek.

Bremen’s Coat of Arms

Deciding to head down to the docks to check out the stories of the lake monster, the party was mistaken for fishermen by the gruff dwarf who apparently ran a fishing business. An androgynous half-elf chided the dwarf for not warning the party of the dangers of the lake monster. Tali, for that was their name, is a researcher and wanted to have someone take notes regarding the monster if they came across it, handing the party a leather-bound journal. Deciding that they may as well, as they were heading out that way anyways.

Deciding to try and make some kind of reward for themselves, the party set about fishing, with several catching more than a few of them, but at the latest, the half-orc cleric was pulled into the water! Helping him out of the frigid water, the party set about getting him dry clothes and a blanket to warm up in. Just as they decided to head back to shore, the waters rippled as a scaled back crested the waters….

Will the party survive what nobody else had survived? Will they catch Sephek?

Only time will tell…

How to Paint Minis: Base Coating

Last time we focused on the supplies one needs to paint miniatures. This time, we are going to discuss base coating.

Why basecoating? For two reasons: to get paint to better stick to your mini, and to prevent future issues with chipping and flaking paint.

Base coating is a multi-step process, and your process really depends on what materials your miniatures are made of.

First, you need a few things: a small towel, an old toothbrush (preferably soft or medium bristle), a mild detergent or soap, and, of course, the miniature or miniatures you are painting, particularly all of the parts if it comes in multiple parts.

It is very important, especially if you are working on a miniature with multiple components, to close your drain if you are working on a mini in your sink! Personally, I use a small plastic bin, so there isn’t a chance of losing any pieces.

Next, gently scrub each miniature and/or part, until it is either shinier or more dull. Thoroughly rinse the miniature and/or parts and let dry completely. This takes a bit of time. Patience is a virtue.

There are basically two schools of thought with basecoating. One either spray paints the minis with a basecoat color, or paints a mini with a basecoat paint. I’ll explain each one’s benefits and drawbacks.

For spray painting miniatures, this is generally used for large numbers or larger miniatures. For those of you into wargaming, like Warhammer or even Battletech, this makes life SO much easier. Consider the following two photos:

Can you imagine trying to paint each of these by hand? Sure, some folks may like assembling and then basecoating each one, but…why?

This is what it can look like once sprayed with the basecoat:

Painted back and front and let dry. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Now, for individual miniatures consider trying to spray paint each one. It would be a waste of paint unless you are basecoating multiple minis at one time. Most of the time, I’m not doing that.
THAT SAID: if it’s a larger mini, like my Balor, spray paint him. Trust me on this, okay? It’ll take long enough to paint him. Get the base coat on as easily as possible.

Ahem.

Here’s a resin mini before he’s base coated. Notice the slight shine to him. Not at ALL ready to be painted.

Jarlaxle

Now, here’s a couple that I’ve already begun basecoating:

Xanathar
Manshoon

Notice the small areas of a lighter grey? Those are spots I missed on my first pass. Most folks like to basecoat in grey or black, so it’s easier to see where you’ve missed a spot. I think the black seeps through too much and the grey works great. It works great for me. You do you.

Notice that I did NOT assemble Xanathar’s mouth. I haven’t painted inside of it, and based on the mouth…

No, I haven’t primed it yet. Sue me.

…I wouldn’t be able to do so. So I’ll prime each one and then paint the mouth before assembling the miniature. This is not usually the way it’s done, but many people do it this way so that the details can be painted without accidentally touching another part with the wrong color of paint. To each their own.

After the basecoating is completed, it’s time to paint!

Remember that vampire I was working on? I finished him. Here he is in all his glory.

A right properly terrifying vampire. Blood dripping down his chin and all.

Well, that’s all I have today. Join me next time for more painting and DMing tips!

Tuesday Adventurers: Catch Up

The party realized that they still owed a favor to the Red Wizards, and were obligated to eliminate a mutual enemy: a fortress cabal of Red Wizard Exiles, survivors of the Red Wizard civil war.

The party found the crumbling fortress easy enough and decided to attack at night.

It was a hard-fought battle, fighting four separate wizards and multiple guards and nights, as well as a small horde of ghouls. One character fell no less than 5 times in battle!

The party fought against an apprentice and an illusionist with the guards at the start. Later, the ghouls joined the fight with a necromancer and an evoker. Before his escape, the necromancer told the evoker that he would hold the invaders off and to warn Khumed that their cabal had been compromised and attacked.

The party had no clue who Khumed was.

After the fight and after looking for more clues as to whom their enemy was, a shooting star streaked across the sky right over their heads, and landing on the edge of the nearby river. Investigating the crater, the party found a most curious sight: a sort of manhole cover, open, and a man poking his head out. Water beginning to flood the crater, the curious man was helped exit the crater.

After using a helm of comprehend languages to bypass their language barrier, the man explained that he was from, not a different plane of existence, but a different world altogether. In point of fact, the man was an artificer from the continent of Khorvair on the world of Eberron.

The party, still confused at his origins, welcomed the new member of their band, who simply wished to document this, to him, strange, backwards, new world.

Heading back to Waterdeep, the party presented the heads of the renegade Red Wizards to the Red Wizard enclave in Waterdeep, thereby gaining the ability to travel to the elemental plane of fire where Connor was set to be.

The party found out that the tuning fork, which was a material component for the spell, was required to be attuned to a creature who was either a native or itself attuned to the plane of fire. The red wizard suggested hunting down a known red dragon in the hills near the Wyrm Forest, some 500-600 miles away.

The party prepared for their journey and headed south, Southeast. It was an uneventful trip, passing through Daggerford, and giving a wide berth to Dragonspire Castle.

After some extensive tracking, the party found the lair of the Red Dragon known as Ember.

What the party hoped for
What they actually found…

The party fawned over the rather large red dragon, an adult. The dragon fell for the party’s flattery and agreed to attune the tuning fork in exchange for a future favor at his calling. Three members of the party submitted themselves to a geas spell where they bound themselves to the dragon’s later whim.

The party travelled back towards Waterdeep, with members very wary of their new commitment, and what it means for them.

What lay in store for our intrepid band of heroes? Will they ever find Connor and retrieve the Nether Scrolls at the Old Owl Well?

Join us next week to see the continuation of our story!

Just a note, as we are in “Spook-tober” next week’s adventure (and likely throughout October) will be horror-based. Join us for our horror spooktactular extravaganza!

DM How To: Creating Adventure Hooks

So you know how to DM. And you know how to build an adventure. And you know how to build an encounter.

The next question, then, is this: how do you get those @#&$+%! players to jump into your awesome adventure filled with equally awesome encounters?

You give ’em a hook, a PLOT HOOK!!

So let’s go fishing.

There are basically only a few kinds of plot hooks: agnostic/general, background-based, story-based, and Deus Ex Machina.

AGNOSTIC/GENERAL

These plot hooks are the ones you may be most familiar with. These are the plot hooks that involve helping a random stranger, for riches and glory, etc… These ones only work if your players are the kind to do things for riches and glory, or out of the kindness of their hearts with no true promise of reward. Examples of this one would be a mysterious stranger approaching the party about an ancient legend of a dungeon guarding an ancient treasure, or the party coming across a strange house in the middle of nowhere. The possibilities here are endless, but many of them have been overdone and not too many players are willing to bite on these poorly baited plot hooks.

BACKGROUND BASED

These plot hugs require quite a bit more work on both your and the player’s parts. The player, out of necessity, should have a background on how and why they became adventurers and what they were doing beforehand. I’m not just talking about that character trait on their character sheet that gives them a proficiency and languages and maybe some gold. I’m talking at least a paragraph of backstory on why that character is the way they are. Using this, you can craft plot hooks that reel in a single player, who can turn to his party and ask for help. Some examples of this are the family farm is going to be overrun by orcs, or the players uncle is leaving the player a keep on his deathbed, or bandits have captured a character’s mentor. With a decent background, there are lots of possibilities here.

DEUS EX MACHINA

This sort of plot hook should be avoided, unless absolutely necessary. These kind of plot hooks involve someone or something of great power pushing the characters into action. An example of this would be a commandment to a divine caster from their deity, or a powerful NPC threatening the characters with total destruction unless they undertake the quest. These sort of plot hooks make players feel as if their characters are being railroaded.

STORY-BASED

These are easily some of the best plot hooks you can find. These are the sort of plot hooks you find in continuing campaigns. The plot hook from Adventure to Adventure revolves around something left undone or some new information that the characters get from a previous adventure. In this way, the characters are prodded on by their own willingness to be part of the story. Examples of this can be found in so many places and in so many pre-published adventures that they are too numerous to list. Practically, one technique that I use is keeping a sort of “quest log” for the party. I list out all unresolved story points that the players haven’t addressed, that I can later exploit for writing an adventure. A recent example, if you’re reading this blog, is the fact that the party is looking for a magic item salesman / wizard named Connor. Why are they looking for Connor? Because Connor has something the party needs that they previously sold to him by mistake. Therefore, the party is willing to undergo a number of tasks in order to get the information and ability to travel to Connor’s location. The party spent the better part of a month and a half simply trying to find where Connor was and gaining the ability to travel to his location. This doesn’t even include the adventures had along the way while they were traveling. an example of this would be the trip from Waterdeep to Memnon, the trip from Memnon to Calimport, the events that occurred there, and their trip back to Waterdeep. These were all story-based adventure hooks. With the party have willingly escorted the princess to Calimport from Memnon? Maybe, maybe not. but the fact that the party needed to get to Calimport anyways made their willingness to accept the plot hook all the easier. Many agnostic / general plot hooks can be made into story plot hooks.

So there you have it. Now you know how to get your players invested into your adventures.

Next week we’re going to talk about campaign building. If there are any other topics you would like me to cover, comment below.

Until tomorrow dear readers.

Tuesday Game: Curing the Beholder’s Mind and Mage Smackdown in the Desert

So I didn’t write during a week when we actually played. As a result, this blog post is going to be rather… long. Yes, it is technically an old recap, but nothing that happened tonight would make sense without it. So I will just catch you up.

For those interested, this takes place as a Part 2 to “Object of Desire” completing that adventure and moving on to Calimport. I am going to be less detailed than usual, so as to be able to catch you all up with where we are now…

So the party managed to help the beholder recover his mind with the potion recipe that they had discovered in the journal of the scribe. Come to find out the beholder was really a sultan who had been transformed by an evil wizard on account of him eloping with the wizard’s daughter. The evil wizard kidnapped his daughter and turned her into a crystal statue while having transformed the sultan into said beholder.

To beholder, having regime is mine, decided to ask the party to help him save his true love. The party agreed to do so. The party infiltrated the evil Wizard’s lair, rescued from enslaved commoners, rescued and enslaved efreeti, rescued a polymorphed apprentice (a talking monkey), stole his personal dining room furniture and decorations, defeated the evil wizard with the help of destroying the wizard’s power base, and with the help of the beholder/sultan helped save his beloved.

The party got back having freed both and restoring the sultan’s form, the party rescued princess Yasmin, and continued on their way to Calimport.

It was there that they discovered that Mhendi was living under the pseudonym of his Calimport crime syndicate name, who was found to have a shop in the slums. On the way, the paladin decided to become a saint by healing the sick and injured of the slums, being dubbed Saint Severn.

At some point during that entire business, the party had an attempted pickpocket whom they decided to take pity on and adopt. This would come to haunt them later.

Mhendi told them that he wanted, as a favor to help them find Connor, to eliminate a business rival of his. The name of the business rival: Artemis Entreri the master assassin. Mhendi’s primary goal was to ensure that Artemis would not be interfering in his business dealings so the party decided to try to pay off Artemis into leaving town for awhile. While trying to decide how to find Artemis, Artemis found them first. His issue with the party? They were softening his son whom he was wanting to live and grow up hard on the streets so that he could groom him into being his protege.

Image is the property of its owner, all rights reserved.

This devastated the spicy cleric, Whitlock, Who cried ugly tears trying to tell Kasim that they could not take him with after all because someone told them that they couldn’t. Kasim became very calm and reassured Whitlock that it was okay and that he would find that person and destroy them for what they did to destroy the life that he could have had.

The players, of course, realize the gravity of what just happened: Artemis’ sun will not grow up to be his protege, but instead grow to hate him and want to kill him. This may come back to haunt them one day.

Artemis agreed to being paid to leave town for a while, which was fortunate as he had a contract to complete in Waterdeep. Having concluded their business, they went back to Mhendi, where they were able to get the information they sought. Connor was on the plane of fire, likely in the City of Brass.

Deciding not to take the oceanic route back to Waterdeep, the party hired a mage to cast teleport on one of them while the rest stayed within the Bag of Lodging (think like a Leomund’s Tiny Hut crossed with a bag of holding).

Unfortunately, there was a mishap and the party ended up in Baldur’s Gate.

Deciding that travelling back to Waterdeep by boat is the best coarse of action, they sailed back.

Getting to Waterdeep, the party realized that they had another job to do, which was to eliminate the Red Wizard Exile fortress and find out what they would about it.

That’s about all I have in me for now.

Friday, since I am playing catch-up, I will finish the story of the assault on the Red Wizard Exile fortress, what they find out, and what they did last night!

Mini-Painting Spotlight 10/6/2020

Hope you enjoyed yesterday’s post!

Today’s post is going to highlight a few different minis that I’ve done recently.

Male Aasimar Paladin. Turned out better than I expected.

Why is this one deathly-pallor gray? Well, once I get a pot of paint that shows that he is bloody around the mouth, he’s going to be a vampire. One look at his clothes, and I thought “Kind of old, even for the time period for most D&D games…” Then I thought about who would be wearing such anachronistic clothes. Vampire. Just waiting on a pot of paint.

The next submission for your approval is a restoration project that is near and dear to my heart.

You see, my mom and dad used to play back in the old first edition AD&D days. My mom and dad having both been players, although my dad would DM alternating within their group, had his two characters and my mother hers. The players would each have two characters as they only had a total of three players across the DM. As such, to round out the party, more characters were needed than players were had.

When I inherited my dad’s things after he and my mom stopped playing, I inherited all of his miniatures as well. Among everything, I found my mom and dad’s old computer miniatures, battered and used. I also, looked with heartbreak on their condition. I found myself with a quandary: restore the miniatures to their former glory, or leave them in their original state.

So I called my folks and asked them their thoughts. Although my dad was unavailable for comment, my mom’s answer was: “We gave them to you so they are yours to do with what you want. I don’t mind if you want to restore them.”

Therefore, my mind was set: I’m going to restore them to their former glory. Considering the extensive color palette of paint that I have, as well as my ability to mix paints fairly accurately, I figured I would have the ability to restore the minis to their original condition. So far, I’ve only had time to restore one of them. The original character’s name was Sabrina, a human fighter. Here are her before and after photos.

Dusty, chipped, faded. Well-used!
Good as new!

As you can see, the original paints used were Testors brand enamel paints. I restored using acrylic paints without using the Delco lacquer that I recently took up using. Also note that I did not use any kind of shading on them. The goal was not to redo the miniature so much as to restore the miniature. As such, they will likely never get used again, holding a special place of honor amongst my other miniatures. Here are the before photos of the other two I intend on restoring.

Amber the Cleric of St. Cuthbert
Erlic the Thief

As you can see, I have my work cut out for me! Although I did not show you pictures of the back sides, they are much worse. More chips and scratches.

Later this week, I’ll do my Miniature Painting How-To on restoring old miniatures to show you step by step how I do it!

Until tomorrow, dear readers!

Rime of the Frost Maiden (part 1)

Hello! I know, again, my posting schedule has previously been erratic. I posting schedule will be more consistent at this point, now that the new season has begun and things have settled down. I plan on posting some more pictures of other minis I did, as well as continuing my series on how to DM and how to paint minis. If there are any other subjects you want me to explore, please let me know in the comments below. With no further ado, here’s the story so far…

Our story begins with a party of four adventurers heading through the Spine of the World, all for varying reasons, and all with a secret…

Before anyone could do anything, a horrific avalanche was triggered and was falling towards them at a frightening speed. The party had nowhere to go. Looking up, they saw Snow White muskrat gesturing towards small fissure that they had previously missed due to the covering of ice and snow.

Following the small rodent, party found themselves sliding into a cave where a talking walrus, called Mother Tusk asked them for help in finding some snow otter scouts. She tells the party that, in exchange for their lives which she had just caused to be saved, she asked that the party check up on the otter, Spritzer, and his company of otters.

Our party is brave heroes consisted of: a half drow bard / warlock, a tabaxi rogue, a half-elf ranger, and a dragonborn sorceress. The Ranger, proficient in these sort of jobs, tracked down evidence of the otters passing. Unfortunately, there were also wolf prints following said otters.

Running ahead, the party came across a group of 12 otters being chased by a group of five wolves, one of which was as large as a horse. It was a dire wolf. Seeing the wolves jump down into large holes in the ground after the otters, the party jumped in after sliding down ice slides until they were dumped ceremoniously into a cavern filled with a foot of water and the five wolves snapping and chasing the poor otters.

The party engaged in a hard-fought fight, with several of their member coming close to dying, only to be saved by the sorceress who had access to healing magic.

The party, cold and wet, used oil from their packs to light the wolf carcasses on fire that they made warm up and dry out off their clothing before heading back.

Their way back was difficult due to a blizzard that hit but they prevailed and getting back to Mother Tusk. As a reward for saving her “children,” she had one of the chipmunks she cares for leave the party towards the road that would lead to the town of Brynn Shader. She also gave them some treasure, to include two scrolls of cure wounds.

Heading into town and towards the end, with nightfall, at an early 2:00 p.m. due to the perpetual winter of the area, the party was approached by an old female dwarf who requested assistance in tracking down and killing a serial killer. The party was also approached by a group of dwarves who requested assistance with tracking down a sled that they had to abandon due to a yeti attack. Lastly, the party heard rumors of some sort of lake monster plaguing the town of Bremen. Accepting both quests the party purchased mounts, winter axebeaks, and headed out to find the aforementioned sled.

The Ranger, still as capable of a tracker as any, found the tracks of small humanoids having taken the sled. Not soon after, the party found the sled being pulled by a number of goblins wearing snowshoes heading towards a large wagon that appeared to be pulled by two angry looking polar bears.

What will happen to the party? Will they succeed in recovering the sled from the goblins? Will the party locate the serial killer?

Only time will tell. Join us next week to see what happens!

Uhg.

It’s been a tough week, folks. Not gonna lie.

That said, I did get some downtime and finished painting one mini and began/finished another. I don’t have any commissions at the moment, so if you would like one done, contact me if you know me, or email me at ldcadventurersleaguedm@gmail.com and we can arrange something.

With no further ado:

He turned out well, I feel.
Glad I did the gold detailing on his shield and cloak. Used a blue wash for the sword as he’s supposed to be a paladin.
Old pewter mini.
Another pewter mini. Still needs a coat of primer.
A particularly infamous assassin from Calimshan… here’s looking at you, Tuesday group!
Work in progress. Aasimar paladin.
All primed up! More than a little intimidated in painting this evil big chungus!
Here he is by the paladin I just finished…between you and me? The balor wins… probably.

What are your thoughts, O Faithful Readers?! What do YOU want me to finish next? Toss me a comment like you’d toss a coin to your Witcher (yes, the show is awesome!) below and let me know!

Mini Painting Update

Still really busy preparing for Rime of the Frost Maiden!

That said, here is the progress I’ve made on some of my projects.

That gold trim was hard to paint!
I had to go back after the fact to fix some things I previously missed!
Still a work in progress…
Hair, edging details, etc…still needed.

And here are some my sons are working on:

A duodron.
Blue dragonborn of Bahamut

Hope you enjoyed!

More Prequel from Tuesday

The party headed off to Waterdeep in search of a scholar to translate the mysterious Netherese inscription.

Arriving in town, the party headed to the Yawning Portal to get a place to stay and a place to have as a home base. They got a large adventurers room to save on coin.

Heading into the North Ward, they found the shop door ajar and nobody home. The place appeared ransacked, although the coin box had been untouched, which was very odd. Looking around the street outside, the party decided to head to the general goods shop directly across the street to find out what was going on.

There, they got a lot of silence and not much cooperation, when suddenly everyone inside went silent, glass-eyed, and then attacked those of the party inside.

On the outside, one of their number spotted an elf with a rod topped with what looked like a small crown, who, upon being spotted, ran away. They joined in with the party and cast sleep on the lot, knocking some out, which brought them to their senses. Upon waking, nobody remembered what happened.

Remembering the rod and wanting to know what it was, they searched for a magic item shop to see what they could find, and discovered Connor’s Magical Goods. Connor was very reluctant to speak, asking over 500 gp to speak so that he could get out of town. The party decided, while questioning Connor, to trade their newly acquired rod of resurrection for a variety of lesser items for each of the party members. Connor left them the deed to the shop, packed his things and disappeared in a flash.

Just as the party were discussing how shady it was that nobody wanted to speak, and those that finally did mentioned a bald man with tattoos and armor with other bald men, a man in dark armor and a dark cloak walked into the shop demanding the scroll that he had paid for up front. Percell, the cleric/druid, handed him a rolled up blank piece of parchment telling him “Don’t open it up until you need it.” The man nodded and left.

The party then headed off back towards the Yawning Portal. Along the way, they were accosted by a man in a dark cloak who claimed to have somebody who could tell them more about what they were facing if they would but follow him down in alleyway. Doing so, they were ambushed by a number of thugs and cut throats. It was a hard fought battle, but the party came out on top. After searching pockets for loose change, on the leader they found a note that said that the party had been asking too many questions and that they were to be eliminated. It was signed Mhendi. Asking around town, they find out that this person is an elf who has begun a new criminal syndicate, supposedly rivaling the Xanathar Guild. Doing some searching and investigating, they found where Mendy keeps his office. Upon arriving, they are told that they were expected and are asked to step into his office. Walking in, they noticed that a fair portion of the objects in the office and the building, while looking expensive, are fakes and knockoffs. Seated behind a nice desk is an elf with a hottie look on his face, who is flanked by two large goliath warriors. Mhendi explains to them that he, himself, was under orders and that it was “just business.” He then put the ball in the player character’s court by asking them if they would rather fight or to calmly discuss their mutual problem. The players chose to talk.

The players found out that Mhendi was strong armed into doing what he had been doing by several members of the Red Wizards of Thay. He says that these are not official members of that organization, and are part of an offshoot. Claims to have been threatened by them into subservience, which he had no choice but to accept. he was unfortunately unable to tell them how to contact them or where to find them but pointed them towards a halfling posing as a child urgent that hangs out elsewhere in the Dock Ward, pleasing people of their gold. He says her name is Tilna.

The druid/cleric of the group asked about the rod, which Mhendi says that he still has and will not give up. The druid/cleric told him that he would one day have a reckoning.

Heading elsewhere in the Dock Ward, they found where Tilna hung out. Approaching her, the party attempted to keep her from running, at which point she threw sand in the druid / clerics eyes, while attempting to flee (“pocket sand!”).

Using his ever useful entangle spell, as well as a hold person spell, the party subdued her. With her, they found out the same information that they had before: tall, bald, and tattooed men threatened her into complying. She knew exactly where they hung out and could even tell them where the drop point was for information that she came across. She wanted 50 gold to be able to disappear. The party, tired of having to bribe people, refused. The party then left, but not before unwittingly being pickpocketed by Tilna. Tilda managed to get a hold of only one object: the druid / cleric’s bag of holding, which held almost all of his worldly possessions, to include the inscription that they had originally come to Waterdeep to translate.

After they realized that they had been pickpocketed, the party went to go find her. After many castings of locate person, they discovered that she was somewhere in the sewers.

Well, that’s all I have time for today. Tune in next time to discover more on this prequel on how the party got where they are.

Posting Schedule

So I know my posting schedule has been a little… Erratic. I understand that some of you may be wondering if my blog is going to continue.

The short answer is that it is. With that let me explain.

At this current time, my Dungeons & Dragons games are in a state of flux and transition. As the organizer for Adventurers League on my Sunday games, we are in the process of transitioning to the new season, Season 10, Rime of the Frost Maiden. As such, I have had sign up sheets and table organizing amongst other things that I have been caught up in. Heck, I haven’t even had much time for painting!

Additionally, one of my tables hasn’t met, my online game, in some time. My Tuesday game is still going on strong, but that game has me doing a lot of campaign planning for it due to the fact that I am running a campaign that I am writing as we go along. I have to base a lot of things on what the players choose to do. I tried to write a lot of it ahead of time, but that ended up falling apart when players made differing decisions. So now I have to restructure things.

All that aside, as of right now, I am writing this via voice to text while I am on my way back from a doctor’s appointment. Yes, I’m fine. It’s one of my routine checks so no worries there.

This should give you some insight as to how and why my writing frequency has fallen off and why am I posting schedule has been off.

As such, knowing that my posting schedule is suffering right now, I’m going to catch up tonight or tomorrow. I’ve made some progress on some of the minis that I’ve been painting and would like to show them off. Additionally I have some other minutes I’ve been working on especially since I’ve got some new paint colors.

In any case, the long and the short of it is this: Yes I am still here, and yes I am still posting. I apologize my posting schedule has been all over the place, but I promise that, especially after the 4th of October, by posting schedule should go back to me it’s normal 6 days a week.

Thanks for your patience in this time of transition for me!

Monthly Group: Birthday One-Shot

In honor of the birthday of one of our number, our group changed it up and one of the players DM while the rest played.

The Adventure Cover

Having adventure together for quite a while, The adventuring party decided it was time for a break and a vacation. Deciding to head for the coast, we ignored multiple calls to adventure knowing that we had been spread too thin.

Hopping from town to town, inn to tavern, we arrived out of town on our map along the way. This town was supposed to be the beginning of our vacation. Unfortunately, when we arrived, the town was empty.

Wandering through, the fighter, and leader of the band, Torbek, had someone go take care of the emaciated horses that had been tied for who knows how long to the post outside of the inn.

At the center of town however was a large circus tent. The party went to investigate.

Inside the tent the party heard the sounds of whimpering, as if from a small child. Drawing their weapons, the party went in and found nothing but a wagon with a small child whimpering outside. The small child described how everyone in town went into the wagon and how nobody had come out.

Something was obviously wrong here. Especially considering that wagon was not big enough for a town full of people.

Investigating the wagon on the party walked inside of it and found some magic items, particularly that of a ring of featherfall which the fighter took. Additionally were some disguise kits and other such sundries. The oddest thing, however, was the open wardrobe which contains stairs going and possibly downward and away from the wagon. Drawing their weapons, the party went into the unknown.

The party soon came across a room with a faceless person. We were asked each to sit in a chair and were asked each to be subject to this faceless person and doing some sort of enchantment. It appeared that if failed to resist the enchantment, we would believe our wildest dreams were in the next room whereas if we resisted the charm, we would be uttered into a different room. The two half-orc brothers, the fighter being one of them, and the human warlock, all “failed” the enchantment. The others were dropped into a room of darkness.

Those I should into the next room found themselves inside of a room with a strange and sadistic man yielding chains with hooks pulling the souls out of people. Deciding that this was a terrible thing, the fighter charged with his halberd, severely wounding the grotesque man with chains. The man fled through a strange door that appeared like a clown’s visage. Looking at the room, the fighter saw that this grotesque man had been storing these souls and bottles. The fighter began freeing these souls hoping that they find their way to a final rest of some sort.

Meanwhile, the other group found themselves in a hall of mirrors. This hall did not merely show the reflections, but showed the reflections of what might have been. Single, crucial forks in the lives of those reflected and what their life may have looked like had they chosen a different path. The Ranger was so disturbed by the visage presented to her, that she shattered panel of glass mirror that she was presented with.

Those back in the soul room continued onwards finding themselves also in the hall of mirrors. The fighter, though, sorry most disturbing sight: him carrying the dead body of his brother. He instinctively knew that this was the result of a decision in his past enabling him to not get to his brother in time to save him. In a moment of pain, the fighter dropped his halberd and put his hand to the mirror at which point he was sucked in! Out of the mirror came a different fighter. He was cold, jaded, and it perpetually angry. Angry with himself over the loss of his brother, having made different life choices that led to that moment. he did not know his companions, for in his experience he never met them. Having been explained what was going on, however, the fighter picked up the fallen halberd and trudged on with the body of his brother, swearing to get revenge on the woman whose carnival this was.

The next room was curious indeed with a being who appeared to be an amalgamation of each member of the party! This being was seated in a chair in a center of an otherwise black room. This being told us that we each must give up a memory to proceed, gaining a different memory in exchange, as well as the ability to proceed onward. Each gave up something, the fighter giving up the memory of how his brother died.

Being allowed to proceed on work, the party found themselves in a disturbing room: arriving massive tentacles was tormenting people in two separate cages, plucking a limb off of one of them and replacing it with a tentacle from their own person.

The fighter left at the tentacled mass, severing several of its tentacles in the process. The bard polymorphed the tentacle mass into a chicken. Taking the key from the chicken, the fighter unlocked the cages freeing the poor villagers that had been trapped within. severing the tentacle from the poor woman and healing her wound, the party proceeded onwards, promising to lead the villagers to safety.

The next room was disturbingly calm, as it was nothing more than a bedroom. This was likely the bedroom of the infamous Tasha for whom this carnival was named. Taking a rest, the party contemplated what horrors would lay and wait further inside this madhouse.

Will the party find their way out? Will they find this Tasha? Will they save the townsfolk?

Stay tuned for next month when we find out!

Mini-Painting

So frankly, I didn’t get a whole lot accomplished this week. Sue me it’s been a busy week.

That said, I did get a couple of notable miniatures finished painted.

As you all may remember I had to deal with this monstrosity:

Well, I finished him. Here he is:

There he is.

On another note, here is the other troll, also finished:

Pretty, isn’t he?

In any case, that is my painting from this week. Hope you liked it!

Sunday League: What the Devil?

The party continued through the dwarven tomb, easily handling the flying crystalline battle axes. They eventually came to the actual tomb, and were mentally accosted by an Entity known as Abidos, who promised help in exchange for its freedom. The party declined, and figured out the puzzle, with the (believed to be) demon trapped in the enchanted pillars.

The dwarven barbarian took the loot, consisting of a shield with the symbol of Dumathoin (a dwarven deity) that was a sentinel shield as well as an adamantine war pick.

The party continued back along their original route, eventually finding a portal. They used the stone key they had found previously (or rather, given in exchange for a task being completed), and passed through, finding themselves in an underground swamp.

Continuing forward, the party ran into a trio of bullywugs that immediately retreated east. The party followed and became acquainted with the leader of the frog-like bullywugs, who spoke entirely in thieve’s cant, asking who they were and what they wanted. Answering that they were just passing through, and being a large, well-armed and armored group, the bullywugs offered to point them to the way to the next level down.

Enjoying the prospect of not having to fight their way through a bunch of bullywugs, the party agreed to pass through.

The party continued through, down a long passage, reaching level 9 of the dungeon.

Soon after arriving, they were approached by an older man with wild gray hair and gray robes. The man looked identical to a portrait they assumed to previously was Hallaster, the infamous Mad Mage, who greeted them warmly and offered any arcane spellcasters the option of studying in their school.

They declined, wishing to continue looking for treasure. Hallaster agreed to let them pass through on the condition that they either provide a single magic item apiece, or deal with a bone devil that was bothersome to their school.

Being who they are, the party chose the latter.

The party was led that direction, and walked into the area with the bone devil. They attempted to make contact and find out if they could deal with it. Finding that is a reasonable fiend, the cleric offered to banish it back to the Nine Hells. Drawing up a contract, which the cleric signed, the bone devil was banished back where it came from.

Additionally, after dealing with the phone devil they found another portal leading further into Undermountain.

Speaking to Hallaster, they left through the portal.

Where did they end up? What is going to happen to them? Will they survive this far in the dungeon?

Until next week…

Rare Times I Have Gotten to Play

So last time I told the story of how I am the “Forever” DM. which is mostly true. I have had sometimes where I’ve been allowed to play on rare occasions.

They were really only a few times in recent history when I’ve been able to play instead of running a game: one time during Adventurers League when I had a new DM to vet, so I played at one of my other League tables.

We were playing Dungeon of the Mad Mage. I had enough DM rewards to create a character of appropriate level, which at this point was 9th level. They had gone back up to the first level for some reason, when my character joined. I was playing an aasimar defender cleric of Kelemvor (death domain; I earned it from the previous season’s Tomb of Annihilation) named Azrael (after the angel of death). He was a very martial, Lawful Neutral, no-nonsense kind of guy. He led by example.

Hey in case, the party was on level one, deciding to do a clearing job of each level. This led them to the goblin bazaar. The goblin with the funny circlet was really getting on Azrael’s nerves. So he decided to take action.

He simply walked up to this goblin in disguise, and took off his circlet. he then proceeded to pick up the goblin by the scruff of the neck and explain to him, and no uncertain circumstances, that he was the boss now. He demanded that the goblin acknowledge his new boss. The DM explained and described how a puddle of yellow liquid was forming it on the floor beneath him. I smiled. I asked him where his treasure lay. He pointed me to his back room. Going back there, he smiled seeing his four bugbear bodyguards. Azrael called them together, almost conspiratoriously, asking to speak with them. I asked the DM how they were approaching, spread out or all together. He said they approached together looking as if they thought their strength in numbers was an advantage.

The rest of the party waited outside, mind you.

When they got close enough, I told the DM: “I cast flame strike.”

He looked at me, with eyes wide open. “Wait, what was that?”

“You heard me, I said, ‘I cast flame strike.'”

He describes a heavenly column of flames engulfing all of the bug bears as I roll out my dice, tallying up over 35 points of damage. Those bugbears were absolutely toast. Literally.

I brought the sniveling goblin up to face me, again by the scruff of his neck.

“Who’s in charge?” Azrael asked the goblin.

“You are, sir! You are definitely in charge.

I can’t remember much of what happened after that, but everyone did seem to be having a good time, and I really enjoyed getting to play my clarity, even if it was the only and last time I got to play in.

How to DM: Encounter Building

This week’s How to DM, we are looking at building encounters.

Last week, we talked about Adventure Planning, where we decided what sorts of encounters the party would face while getting to their goal. I break encounters up into four categories:

  1. Monsters
  2. Role-playing/NPCs
  3. Puzzle-solving
  4. Traps

Sure, there are other kinds, but in my opinion, all of these are subsets of the above four.

Let’s talk about them!

Monsters

These are pretty easy to define.

Image is the property of Wizards of the Coast; all rights reserved.

Monsters are those pesky things that are usually hiding, guarding, or hoarding treasure. They come in all shapes and sizes, but more importantly, they come in differing ecologies. As such, take a look at your adventure encounters. Do you want a goblin there? Why is it there? Is it in a city, and if so why? The monster descriptions tell you the sort of place or environment that the particular critter is supposed to be found in. It doesn’t really make sense for a fire elemental to be found on the Elemental Plane of Water, for example.

That said, I ask myself the following questions when placing a monster somewhere:

  1. Why is it there?
  2. What does it want, if anything?
  3. What is it doing when the party encounters it?
  4. Does the party have to kill or defeat it in order to complete the encounter?
  5. Can the party bypass the monster with words or actions?
  6. How did it get there?
  7. What is on it, be it treasure, weapons, or other (keys or other such plot-important items)?

Keep in mind that if you can justify why something is where it is, it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t technically belong. Maybe that’s a mystery the party of adventurers is meant to discover, maybe not. Sometimes, the strangest placement of a weird critter can be a memorable encounter (“Remember that imp we found in the Seven Heavens? Weird, right?”).

Puzzles

These are always fun for the party…sometimes.

Of course, I kid, but sometimes…not really. Remember when we looked at types of adventures? Well, I forgot a crucial point: do the sorts of adventures that your players enjoy. If they enjoy combat, roll some good combat encounters. If they enjoy puzzles, toss them in. If they DO NOT ENJOY PUZZLES don’t do many, if any at all. Trust me on this.

Personally, I love the puzzles that involve a player miming themselves through. No joke, I got a player to do the Cha-cha Slide which was written down one step at a time, in order for them to get across a floor to the other side where a lever would disable the rest of the floor. It was awesome and that whole dungeon had everyone laughing and enjoying themselves. The best part? The party was okay with puzzles, so they could get into it. A good time was had by all.

That said, be careful with puzzles…

I’m not trying to insult the intelligence of players here, so don’t get me wrong. The issue is that, if they’ve been running combat encounter after combat encounter, sometimes a player is not in the headspace to be able to solve a riddle or work through a puzzle. Be careful on how much thinking you really want the party to go through.

Traps

This is also pretty self-explanatory. Of note however, regardless of how cool your trap may be, let me offer a bit of advice: stay away of instant kill traps. I mean, if there are clear warnings that “Death Ahead: Bridge over lava is out!” are ignored, please, by all means, let the player that walks through the door die. But no inescapable pits of acid, no death drops into lava, etc…

That said, if you are running the sort of “meat-grinder” that The Tomb of Horrors entails, make sure that the party is fully aware that the death of their characters is a VERY real possibility. This keeps the party in the mindset that behind every door is the possibility of death.

Also, traps, with few exceptions, should be able to be disabled. Don’t take the job from the rogue and make sure that the rogue gets a chance to do one of his many jobs.

Role-playing/NPCs

This is the bread and butter of D&D, and partly why it is a social game. This is where the players get to talk as their characters, interacting with one another as well as the wonderfully deep and structured (::snort:: – who am I joking?) Non-player characters.

This is where the players get to have their characters get to explore their backgrounds (“Wait…what do you mean you were a sailor? We’ve been on this sailing ship for ages and you’ve said NOTHING!”), get to resolve inter-party conflicts, and much, much more.

A word of note: it really helps to incorporate your players’ backstories into the campaign to encourage role-playing. The characters’ backstories can provide a veritable HOST of adventure ideas.

Am I right, DMs?

I hope you found this helpful. If you think there’s something I missed, tell me in the comments!

Tuesday Game: Object of Desire

I was exhausted coming home last night from my normal game so I didn’t write this until today. Sue me.

So the when I last ended, the party were slaves and were heading for the slave market.

Unfortunately, I had decided that I shouldn’t have done that and was considering a Deus Ex Machina.

Mood.

To add insult to injury, I had 4 players who were unable to come for various reasons: my earth genasai barbarian can’t come any longer due to work/new home distance, the monk was out of town, as was the Pally/Warlock, and Bubby, the kobold wizard had a rough day at work and needed to take the night off.

Oof. BIG oof.

Again, mood.

That said, another table had most of his table not show. This table is DM’d by the same guy who plays/played Moe, the tabaxi swashbuckler.

I make a proposition: take who you have and bring them to my table. Agreements were made all around, for Moe’s player and the two from his table that showed up. Then, we had the new guy from Sunday’s game (the one playing the half-orc barbarian/paladin, remember him?) playing a wrestler-type character, show up as well. With the three from my original table (the paladin, the bloodhunter/sorcerer, and the warlock/cleric), we had a nice, full table.

I thought to myself: think, Daily DM! You’ve improved worse! How do you get them out of slavery while at the same time incorporating the new members?!

Then it came to me: I have the perfect filler adventure!!

I was a huge reader, back in the day, of the Dungeon Magazines. HUGE fan. Ready made adventures, with the occasional adventure path that formed a mini- or full campaign. WONDERFUL resource for DMs. I had to go searching for it, but I found it: The Object of Desire by Gary O’Connell and Lucya Szzachnowski (if you are interested, it’s in issue #50).

So, here’s how it went:

The three new folks were in the employ of the sultan of Memnon. He, in the story of the adventure, needed adventurers to escort his niece to Calimport to marry her beloved, a prince (Nice story so far, right?). Needing more people to fill out the escort, the three were tasked with going to the slave market and offering freedom to a group of adventurers it was rumored that came in with a rumored pirate ship that doubled as a slaver ship. The pirate ship would be, in turn, captured and the crew enslaved for engaging in piracy, and their gear returned to them. In return for their freedom, they would only need to agree to escort the princess Yasmin to her beloved out in Calimport.

Knowing that they were heading that way anyhow, the party agreed. Yes, I know that this may seem…lazy. And, to be frank, it was. I had not had the time to campaign plan and I really didn’t want to do the whole “Yeah, the last week was a dream…yeah, that’s right. You wake up and everything that happened with the slaver ship never happened.” THAT, my dear readers, is lazy. Like…too lazy.

ANYHOW

The party began the voyage. Moe, the swashbuckler, was a pirate and helped with the ship, as had one of his players that was playing at my table. After a day of sailing, the ship was attacked by a giant sea snake, which the party handily defeated and whom also chose to skin and fillet.

After dealing with the constant whining from the vizier who was the chaperone of the princess (as well as the cousin of the sultan), his egotistical and insufferable attitude, and belittling treatment of everyone, the party was attacked by a large force of four-armed gargoyles.

In the midst of battle, one party member saw a flash under the door of the princess’s cabin, and a tiny ball of scintillating light float away towards the coastline. Finishing off the gargoyles, the party set out in the 8-person dinghy towards the shore, finding a beach and 5 caves. The party left the man-sized crabs they found on the beach alone (although the wrestler-esque character wanted to eat crab) and proceeded into the dark caves where they were attacked by three ghouls, which the paladin dispatched quite easily with his glaive.

Finding a chest with treasures (and splitting said treasures which included a ring of truthtelling, an enchanted ring that gives advantage on Wisdom (Insight) checks to detect someone lying to you), as well as stairs going up, the party continued onward towards the stairs which led to a small room and then up to a narrow ravine, with more rough-hewn stairs, eventually overlooking the lagoon where the ship was left. Looking back to the deck, they saw that the vizier was having his things moved to the princess’s cabin. Jerk.

The party looked around, and in the distance, further inland across much sand (about 3-4 miles away) was a large structure with two towers. Heading there, the party figured that was the only clue as to where the princess might be.

Upon arriving, they walk through the ruins, just rubble now, of small walls, previously of what was at least a small town, and more likely a larger city. They come to the qal’at, with a stone wall all around and the following inscription above the entrance:

Let it be known that this qal’at and the court of Sultan Firouz al-Algarin are cursed by the wizard Nazir al-Azrad, whose anger is mighty and whose vengeance is eternal.

Sounds…foreboding. One of the party remembered the story of how, a long time ago, a sultan married the daughter of a crazy wizard, who came on their wedding day and turned him into a hideous monster, while fleeing to parts unknown with his daughter, for flaunting his wishes and spiriting her away in the first place. Legend has it that he placed a curse even upon his own daughter for her betrayal.

Upon entering into the courtyard, they see a dried fountain (which they avoid) and several statues in various poses on their left. Checking out the statues, they find that they are the petrified remains of adventurers that apparently came to this place and turned to stone. The erosion was so bad, however, that they would not be able to be saved. Looking around the base, the party found a dropped item, called a staff of striking which the wrestler took.

Wandering into the palace itself, they saw a curious sight: A beholder laying on a stack of silken cushions, with a beautiful woman attending to it, with the princess in a gilded cage.

Image was taken from the magazine adventure. All rights reserved and are the property of Dungeon Magazine and Paizo Publishing.

Upon watching, the woman is told that her beauty doesn’t please the beholder any longer, and is turned to stone, while being told that the princess would be his bride!

Before the party can rush in to stop this, a ghost appears, bearing the resemblance of a slight man with a bookish look to him, beckoning them not to attack and waving them on towards one of the stair cases.

Following him there, the party finds the study of the now long-deceased royal librarian and scribe. Looking at his desk, they find a curious account…

Image was taken from the magazine adventure. All rights reserved and are the property of Dungeon Magazine and Paizo Publishing.

Oof again.

Using dust made from crushing some of the warlock/cleric’s candy, they found they could sprinkle it in the scratch marks the pen had made, regardless of the ink spilled on the page, and found that they needed a pearl from the cleric that was to marry them (supposedly killed by Nazir during the wedding), a golden cup, and the purest water. The pearl would dissolve in the cup with the prayer uttered in the chapel, and if given to the cursed sultan.

After gathering the cup and finding an elaborate silken wedding dress, we ended for the night.

I hope you all stick around for next week when we conclude this adventure and continue with the search for Mhendi in Calimport!

Miniature Painting Spotlight

So today my post is going to be about works in progress. I am going to highlight several of the works that I have not finished. At the end I will show you my most recent finished miniature so that you can see something that is done.

Our first contestant is an unfinished human druid or sorcerer. Whatever he is, he’s definitely a spellcaster. I’ve been having problems with painting behind and around his cape as well as his beard which is not attached to the model itself but to the model’s head which is glued on differently. In any case, it’s been a pain and I’ve been working on him for weeks. It’s a commission I’m doing for a buddy of mine.

Yeah, I know. He’s pretty rough. I’ll get him done this week likely. Not sure if I’ll be happy with how he ends up turning out, but I will end up doing my best work with him in the end.

Our next contestant is a miniature I’m doing for my daughter and character she plays on my Tuesday game. She’s not playing any longer, due to school, but I still wanted to paint her gnome wizard.

As you can see, she’s still in rough shape with only the plum colored robes painted. She’s going to turn out great when I’m done, especially if I can get a steady enough hand to paint the detail on the front of the robe.

Lastly is my second troll. Just so you know that I’m not posting the original troll twice, I’m going to give you a picture of both of them side by side. The one on the left is the original (I did go back and do some additional work on him to try to darken his warts but it didn’t turn out perfectly; I’m going to make a nice dark green and dab his warts later), and on the right will be the newer one.

You may notice that there is a difference between the shade of green. I ended up picking up a shade of hunter green that I really liked and wanted to use for this troll. Granted his skin is not painted in more than one coat or so but I’m looking forward to what he looks like when he’s done. Here’s a picture all by his lonesome.

As you can tell everything is still in its rough stages. His cuffs are not done, his teeth have not been detailed, and of course he’s lacking shader which I intend on using green shade instead of a dark shade. I’m hoping it turns out well.

And now for the moment you are waiting for: the actual finished mini that I have completed.

He turned out quite well, as far as I’m concerned. This is a tiefling sorcerer that I did as a commission. Do you remember the human barbarian I previously painted? It’s for the same guy. He likes my miniature painting apparently. I’m just glad that I can do something nice for somebody.

Well, that’s all I got for today. We’ll see you next week with more painted minis!

Sunday Adventures: Into Muiral’s Lair

Sorry for the late post! I scheduled the post and forgot to change the time. That said, enjoy!

So the party was light this week due to Labor Day, and consisted only of the goliath bloodhunter/sorcerer, the half-elf monk, the goblin ranger

, and the tiefling fighter/wizard, all 9th level.

Heading now to the next level down (the 10th level, known as Muiral’s Gauntlet), the party first noticed tons of broken glass from mirrors in this hallway. searching around they find a secret doorway and tracks leading to the west. Heading that direction they run into a skeleton carrying a wand of the war mage. Heading deeper in they come out of another secret door into a hallway going left and right. The party here sound coming from the right and so move on that way. The voice they hear is from the drow priestess that they met back on level four.

The voice seems to be making announcements, proselytizing, and issuing commands. Being the sneaky sort of person that he is, the monk looked around the corner. He beheld four spectral drought priestesses as well as a large scorpion with the torso of a man in place of its head: Muiral himself. Sneaking back, the party quickly makes a plan as to what to do. Unfortunately, Muiral heard them and shouted for The Intruders to identify themselves. Successfully bluffing Muiral, The party went the other direction. Looking around they find the beginnings of what looks like a laboratory. At that point, Muiral has seen through the deception and has figured the party is intruding on his laboratory. Attacking the party mural begins casting spell after spell at them. At one point, the wizard/fighter found himself turning into stone, which ended as soon as the Goblin Ranger was turned into a mule. Jokes about the goblin being made an ass of himself ensued. After taking a large amount of damage from the ranger before being polymorphed, as well as taking additional damage from others (including the Fighter (Eldritch Knight)/Wizard who had just learned fireball), Muiral decided that discretion was the better part of valor and retreated, vowing to return.

The fighter/wizard was so happy…

The party decided that they would continue into the laboratory where they found another one of Hallaster’s gates. Realizing that the riddle on the gate indicated that someone invisible had to be in front of the mirror to activate it, the party entered finding themselves in a large room with a set of basil double doors heading north.

The party easily opened the door to find a large clay altar and beyond that several duergar and cloakers milling about below the dice that they found themselves standing on. The fighter/wizard turned invisible intending to not be seen by the duergar, Only to trigger the alters guardian, a large clay golem. Striking a deal with the duergar, The party agrees to slay the clay golem in exchange for safe passage throughout this level, which they found was the 6th, and the wrong direction.

The party, with the help of a new companion, a half orc Paladin/barbarian, made short work of the Clay golem, leaving the duergar in awe of his brute strength. The party traveled inward to this seemingly abandoned dwarven fortress and tomb, looking for treasures that they may plunder. As it so happened, the party came across several of the all too familiar gates they had been traveling through from level to level. deciding that they were unable to activate the ones they found, the party continued onwards until they found a secret door into the tomb of a supposedly dead king. Bursting open the seals of the sarcophagus, all of the swords from around the room animated to attack.

Join us next week to see how our heroes fare!

Goblin Ranger for the win!
Art not my own, source unknown

How To: Miniature Painting

So this week I had time to paint only two miniatures. The one we’re going to discuss today is Robin Hood.

The last time we discussed painting miniatures, my advice was just a pain miniatures despite how good or not so good You are skills may be. Today we’re going to discuss the tools of the trade.

It seems to go without saying, but you need a few good brushes. There are several types out there, but in reality you could do with five decent brushes. You would need a large brush for painting on shading, a medium brush for doing some larger areas, a small brush for smaller details, and then a very small fine detail brush for doing fine detail work. For me, I have a rather nice and large brush set that my wife purchased for me for Christmas. I use maybe four brushes out of the whole thing. mostly because they’re nice brushes, I use older brushes for things like slathering on shade. Now, I know some of these terms I’m using maybe foreign but will explain those later, at a different date.

In addition to brushes, you obviously need paints. there are several paints from various companies that you can choose from. Vallejo is one commonly trusted name, as are the paints from Games Workshop, typically used for Warhammer games, but work well for any miniature painting. Personally, I have enjoyed using the Army Painter brand. They are the same quality as the other brands, but come in droppers, which make mixing paints and measuring out just the right amount of paint you need much easier than with paint pots from other brands. Again, this is just my humble opinion. There are other brands of acrylic paints, but remember: you get what you pay for. If you buy cheap paints, they won’t likely last very long. Trust me, I know this from personal experience.

Next up, you’re going to need something to use as a palette. I use a specific brand of plant-based breakfast sausage cartons which work very nicely for me. You can, of course, purchase a paint palette from any hobby store. I think that’s a waste of money. You do you.

Having a container of nail polish remover is always helpful. Nail polish remover is great for taking off that dried on paint that you change your mind on which color was going to go on. It’s also helpful for removing paint from other surfaces. Just remember, nail polish remover will take varnish off of wooden furniture and surfaces.

Lastly, you’re going to need some kind of container to hold water so that you can clean your brush in between colors. Acrylic paints are water soluble. As such, you want to be able to clean your brushes off with water. My wife and I like to buy tea from a company that provides loose leaf tea in small half pint jars made of glass with a metal lid. These work perfectly for me. Again, find something that works for you. Keep in mind, plastic will get stained.

Now that you have assembled all your tools and your paints, it’s time to get painting!

Next time we’re going to talk about differing techniques in base coating.

I hope to see you then!

This is a Robin Hood mini I painted this week.
Reverse side

Tuesday, the Prequel

So I’ve decided to do a slightly more detailed recap of my Tuesday game, as much of it won’t make sense on why they are doing what they are doing.

The party began the standard Mines of Phandelvin questline, eventually going to Old Owl Well to deal with rumors of undead. Of course, for any of you familiar with that module, there is a Red Wizard of Thay, specifically a necromancer, who is excavating the site for ancient artifacts of Netheril. When I read that, I got the idea for the campaign. So I changed some stuff up. Here’s how it changed:

The party, after defeating the necromancer and the zombies, having found the Netherese ring of protection that the necromancer had found, decided to check out the tower site more. One of them found an inscription. The druid/cleric, being an archeologist, immediately checked it out. The script was draconic, but it appeared to be gibberish. The gnome wizard in the group, with a sufficient History check, determined that it is actually Netherese, the language of Netheril (actually the lower Netheril, but they haven’t figured that out yet). Deciding to try pronouncing it phonetically, the member who spoke found themselves in a dark room. Unable to see, he stood there, doing nothing. The next was the gnome wizard, who tried to prank the earth genasai barbarian, without success. Next was the divination wizard. Meanwhile, those above were unable to figure out the pronunciation of the words and had no clue as to what is going on. Detect magic only shows that the whole site contains overwhelmingly large amounts of magic.

Below, a light spell is cast, and the three below see that they are in a 20′ x 20′ stone block room, with an inscription on the wall in the same language as the inscription as found beforehand above. There are also two large chests made of a strange metal they cannot identify, and a strange stone portal with draconic characters around the outer edge. Additionally, there was a staircase, although it was choked with dirt and rubble.

The group chose to ignore the archway in favor of the chests. The barbarian, in the absence of a rogue to detect and/or disarm any traps, opens the chest and falls like a stone (pun totally intended). The two wizards begin discussing what to do, as all examination shows that the barbarian is dead. In reality, he only appears dead, as an effect that causes one to mimic death hit him. Looking in the chest, there were thousands of 1″ diameter coins, shaped like a 4-sided pyramid, with runes along each edge. They were tarnished but still gold. The barbarian wakes up at this point, having no understanding of what just happened. The three realized that the air was getting mighty thin, and the barbarian began digging them out through the stairwell. The divination wizard, thinking something in the other chest may help, opened it and actually fell dead. Looking inside, as she was sort of useless for excavating the stairs, finding a rod, a wand, and a dagger. Seeing that nothing there will help, attempted to go about clearing rubble, eventually passing out from oxygen loss.

The barbarian enters a rage to increase his ability to dig.

The rest of the party was at a loss until Percell, the cleric/druid, cast a spell to communicate with digging and underground animals. The moles and other such advised him of the stairwell, so he and the other two got to digging. After some very narrowly good roles, they broke through to each other and those below did not die of asphyxiation. After identifying everything, they found that the rod is a rod of resurrection, the wand a wand of wonder, and the dagger is a dagger of returning. Using the rod, the party brought back Halen, the divination wizard, and took a long rest.

The party now had to find someone to translate the inscription…closest place to do that would be Neverwinter, but nobody wanted to go back there, so they decided to head to Waterdeep…

Well, that’s all I have in me to write today. I’ll post more of the prequel to Tuesday later in the week. I have my Discord game, Sunday, and Tuesday to do as they come, with these coming in between.

How to DM: Adventure Writing

Last time, I wrote about running games as the best way to learn how to DM. And while that is true, you will eventually want to turn one of your cool ideas into an adventure or an ongoing campaign. Let me clarify some definitions for you:

Adventure: a one or more session story with a definitive beginning and end.
Campaign: a series of adventures with an overall story or plot-line, linking the adventures together, even by way of “We are just seeking one adventure after another” (what I like to call an “episodic” campaign, as there is no overarching story, with the adventures being more like episodes of an 80’s action show)

Today I am going to write about adventure planning. Most folks and even the Dungeon Master’s Guide will tell you to plan small and work your way bigger. That’s cool an all, and I get that, but I don’t do that. At the beginning, I told you that I would give you my methods, so that’s what I am going to do.

I start with deciding what kind of adventure I am going to run.

There are several types according the the Dungeon Master’s guide (Chapter 3, beginning on page 71), which they label as Location-based (like a dungeon, castle, or other such place where things happen based on rooms or other such locations), event based (the villain stole the king’s royal crown or there is a crime spree happening throughout the hamlet the Player Characters are travelling through and they are blamed), mystery (the party is invited to a party and the host is found dead, or a strange creature is found terrorizing the townsfolk in the middle of town and nobody knows where it came from), or intrigue (the party is sent as a diplomatic envoy to the elven nation they are at war with, or the king is trying to name a royal successor, and a local noble wants the party’s help to get them named over the other prospects). Some can be a combination of two or more types, or even all four!

Think I can’t do it? I’m coming up with this on the fly as I write, but here it goes: the king has agreed to bestow a fiefdom upon anyone who can find out why an ancient temple (location-based) mysteriously (mystery) rose out of the ocean off of the coast of his kingdom. The party must race to solve the mystery before another adventuring party (event-based as things each party does can effect the other, even within the temple), hired by one of the corrupt nobles in the king’s court, hoping to curry favor with the king in order to be gain standing with the royal household (intrigue).

Don’t like it? I came up with it on the fly. If you think of something better, put it in the comments below. The best idea gets a shoutout next week from me.

In any case, after I figure out what type of adventure I am running, I begin outlining.

Yes, outlining. That is that skill you may have learned as far back as 5th or 6th grade that your teacher said would be important? That.

So, what are we outlining? The adventure, of course! A before, a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Now, since this is can be so daunting, I recommend using a template to help you along. Personally I use this one here (with a BIG thank you to the Welsh Piper for coming up with it!). Let’s take a look at it and you can see why I love it for adventure planning. There are others available online, but I really like this one so that’s what I will use for our example.

Let’s start from the top and work our way down, shall we?

See that grey box? I use that to put in the adventure name. If I know what I’m calling it, based on some theme or such that I’m making in the adventure, I’ll put it there. If not, I’ll leave it blank until the end.

Next we have “Hook.” This is the thing that gets the party interested in the adventure. Unless the adventure hinges on a specific hook (like, “A man walks into the tavern you are at carrying a sea chest, dressed as a sailor, limping on a cane, and falls unconscious as he enters!” or something similar), you can leave this blank for now. We’ll come back to it.

The next is the background and end goal. This is where we answer the question as to what happened before the party got involved in this particular narrative and leading up to the problem to be solved. Remember, D&D is a cooperative story-telling game! If you treat this like telling a story, it becomes much easier. And like we said earlier, a story has a beginning a middle, and an end. The only difference is that an adventure has background to give the antagonist (the “badguys” or other sort of adversaries, who may or may not be “bad” but whose goals are opposed to, in some way, the party’s goals) a reason for doing what they do.

As an example, let’s say your adventure is about exploring a dungeon. At this point you have to ask yourself: why was the dungeon built? Was it built to protect something like treasure or a specific item? Was it made to keep people away from something, like a dangerous magic item or to lock away a dangerous monster? Maybe it is a long forgotten tomb of an ancient wizard. This is all called background. This is otherwise known as everything that happened before the adventurers showed up.


In addition to this, this box is for including what the and goal for the adventurers should be. Should they destroy the ancient evil found beneath? Should they free whatever is trapped inside? Should they find all the treasure? Whatever it is, this is the end goal for the party of adventurers who will be playing this adventure.

The next box is the rewards. This isn’t the box to put down all of the individual treasures that the party will receive at the end, but to generalize. is the reward the everlasting friendship of the Duke whose son they rescued? Is it the treasure that they will get from slaying the dragon? Maybe it is information leading to another adventure. The possibilities here are endless but dependent on the type of adventure you’re going to run (as discussed earlier).

The epilogue is where I generally put how, if it is a campaign, the overarching villain or story runs as a result of what the party does. Even if it’s not a campaign, depending on how the party performs or what their actions are, towns can be on fire, dungeons can be collapsed, and all sorts of other, either positive or negative, consequences can happen as a result of the parties involvement in the adventure.

For the next section, You build the encounters that the party will have throughout the adventure. How do they get from point A to point B? If this is location-based, it is easy to number each of the rooms in the dungeon, Castle, whatever, and put whatever monster, trap, or other such obstacle down for each encounter. Of course, there are only eight slots on the sheet. This is why this is a template and not necessarily an all encompassing worksheet. This section, with eight encounters, is much better for encounter based adventures. It could also work well for mystery adventures or intrigue adventures (which, In my opinion, our types of encounter-based adventures). I simply write in the encounter and what sorts of things happen within the encounter. A short summary works just fine.

Now, as I may or may not have said, I play Dungeons & Dragons 5e. The specific columns under the “Foes” section don’t really mean much to me. For me, I write out what and how many of each monster or NPC is for each encounter.

I will discuss encounter building another time, but suffice it to say that this is where I list out the monsters, if any, for each encounter, numbered as per the encounters above.

You may notice that there is a large grid area on the top right corner of the sheet. If there is any significant locations or possibly even the map of the dungeon can be drawn up here. Personally, I like to draw larger maps on graph paper and attach it to the sheet, with a particularly significant encounter area in this corner grid area (just a note, you can download one with hex instead of grid if you prefer that sort of thing).

Look back over your sheet, now that you have everything filled in. Congratulations, you have your adventure planned out!

You’ll notice that, in addition to not discussing creating encounters, I haven’t discussed describing rooms. I intend on covering that in another post as well.

In the mean-time, revel in the fact that you have, in fact, just created your first adventure!

The Tuesday Chacters

Due to a family emergency, I was unable to run my table as normal this week, so I have an alternative post. Enjoy!

I’ve realized that I’ve done a considerable amount of describing this and that without talking about the individual players. This is mostly on purpose, as I value my players’ privacy.

That said, their characters are fair game. I will be dividing the characters into former and current.

Former: Iul the gnome war caster wizard (dropped due to school), Percell the druid (spore)/cleric (dropped due to table swap), Halen the elven divination wizard (dropped due to family issues), Calvin the human Ranger (dropped due to work schedule), Moe Spots the tabaxi swashbuckler rogue (dropped to DM another table), and Gra’ Kel the half-orc barbarian (dropped due to work schedule).

Current: Dexter the tabaxi blood hunter/sorcerer, Gram-gram the dwarven cleric/warlock, Severn the human paladin, the dragonborn sorcerer, the shadow Monk, and the kobold wizard.

Yes, there are names I can’t remember right now. My bad.

In any case, the party began with all of the former, but included Severn, then became the current over a month’s time, about the time August came around.

I really hate Covid, you know?

How To: Painting Minis

Before I begin, I want to say that I know, for some of you, the idea of taking the blank canvas of a miniature, and turning it into some sort of amazing piece of gamecraft that you are proud of is a truly daunting task.

I get that. I really do.

If you are not one of those people, I envy you. I am on the former.

Looking at a blank miniature, even worse, one that doesn’t even have primer on it, can be daunting as all can be. There are days I don’t even know how to begin! But don’t worry, today I’m going to talk to you about how to prep for painting minis.

Like most things relating to D&D, and dungeon mastering for that matter, It all boils down to your state of mind.

“But Daily DM,” you might say. “I get all anxious when even looking at blank miniatures.” So did I random reader. But you want to know how I got over that? I had, what you could call, a miniature hoarding problem. I have, literally, hundreds of miniatures. Easily half those have never had paint touch them. The worst part is that 2/3 of those actually have primer on them, as they either came pre-primed, or I’ve actually taken the time to prime it.

For me, especially since I have nothing better to do between blog posts, I have decided to paint. And paint I will do. I was discussing this very concept with a good friend of mine, whom I will call “A.”

“A” said something particularly profound. He said, “A blank miniature is like a placeholder. It’s not until you put paint that it develops a story.” Like I said, profound.

Do you know what I did, when I made the decision that my miniatures needed painting? I sat down, I prepared my tablespace, and I began to paint. Now, I won’t say my first attempt was great. I won’t say it was perfect. In fact, the shading job I did on it was pretty shoddy. Am I happy with the job I did overall? Absolutely. I painted a miniature. Granted, I still have to paint the base, but that’s fine. I’ll get to that eventually. What’s important is that the miniature itself has been given life, so to speak.

You may remember me having posted this before. As you can see, I could have done a better job with the shading. Oh well. But this is what I want you to turn your attention to: I put a lot of heart and soul into that miniature. The level of detail on the shield, the detail on the armor, the detail on the gloves and the sword. Here’s the back of it:

See the detail of the back of the shield, the detail of the dagger on the hip. The part where I’m apparently do not touch up the boot and dripped a little paint onto the boot. The detail of the hair.

Now, I’m not trying to brag by any means. I know that there are many people who could have done a better job than I did. But, it was the first miniature I had painted in over 25 years. And even then, I was too intimidated to consider the idea of painting a miniature in full. I had a half a dozen primed miniatures lying around. Most of them painted with gloss paint. I don’t prefer that any longer.

So what did I do? I stripped every single miniature that I had previously done that wasn’t completed, and I began planning on repainting it. I’ll show you some as I get them done. This particular one was just an old pewter mini that I had inherited from my dad’s collection. He looked like he needed to be painted. And so, I took the better part of an hour or two and painted him.

So when I talk about how to paint a mini, you have to get in the right headspace. The headspace that says: it is okay not to get it perfect the first time. It’s okay to do it badly the first time. I mean, seriously, have you ever been picked up anything and been perfect at it the first time? You’re likely answer is no. So give yourself enough grace to be able to paint without judging yourself before you’ve even begun.

If you are really and truly worried, pick up something easy, or relatively easy, to paint. Like a pack of spiders or a gelatinous cube or something of that nature which doesn’t require a whole lot of paints but can still be very fun to throw down on. The idea is that you just start painting.

Now, if I get some requests to do more, I’ll do a couple of posts on my process for painting miniatures as I post pictures of the miniatures I’ve painted.

So you all around!

Merch

Just a reminder, you don’t have to be a continuous patron on our Patreon page to buy our merch. You can support us by buying a sticker, coffee mug, t-shirt, or hoodie, or whatever else is up there. First person to send me a picture with a piece of merch look at a free miniature painted by myself!*

That said, I have a wonderful graphic artist working on a new logo. Once I have that, all of my merch will change, so get your “vintage” DDMB logo merch while you can!

*I will need an address to send it to you…

Sunday League

Okay, folks, I can’t make this stuff up…

Everything started pretty normal, right? They continued from the strange room with the illusionary walls, behind one of which was a secret door that the kenku rogue found. Travelling further, they see a set of stairs going down.

Deciding that they had gone far enough and needed to make good on their deal with the fairy dragon, they headed back to the portal that would lead them to the castle.

Still, everything normal.

Gathered in the castle portal room, the kenku opens the door to see a skeletal human with robes floating in the hallway, looking at them. “Oh, look. A party of adventurers…” he purrs. “How…fun…” he says as he casts power word stun on the rogue. Initiative begins, and the party whispers/says/shouts an expletive as I write on my small board lich in the initiative order. Maddgoth came home to his castle, and was not happy to find intruders. The lich went first. The lich was in his lair. The lich has three legendary actions each round.

Now, trying to do a play-by-play of their encounter would be nearly impossible, but here is the summation of what happened:

The party wizard realized, via History check, that this was, indeed, Maddgoth, who is a serial killer, and his favorite targets are wizards. In fact, it is said that his desk and chair are made of the lacquered spellbooks of his victims. Lovely.

Maddgoth casts a spell, and the wizard cast counterspell on it, making the check!! Maddgoth was not…shall we say…pleased with the wizard. The party opens the portal. The party attempts to retreat through the portal. Magdoth used his paralyzing touch ability to paralyze the monk. The kenku, getting unstunned, grabs the monk and retreats through the portal. The wizard is the only one left, and Maddgoth cast finger of death on him, killing him instantly, then follows the party through the portal. The party try running, and the kenku, still carrying the monk, runs right into the lich, who somehow appeared in front of him. The lich cast power word kill killing the kenku, and then left the monk to deal with the rest of the party, who ran right into the lich. The party runs right into the lich and turns around. The lich casts fireball a few times, nearly wiping the party. Repeatedly. The party tries to go back through the portal (at this point, only the tortle cleric), only to find that the door the lich came through is shut and the wizard is laying dead. The cleric casts revivify bringing the wizard back. They head back into the portal, where the rest of the party is bleeding out, dead, dominated, or fighting with the dominated party member. Maddgoth comes into the room casting fireball.

This is where things get…interesting.

The dwarf barbarian is raging. Every time Maddgoth fires off an area of effect spell, if the barbarian succeeds, due to his taking half damage from raging, he ends up taking half of that damage, bringing the total down to a quarter. It nearly saved the party.

The damage from the fireball spell brought the barbarian out of being dominated. Good deal. The cleric tried to run back through the portal to find a squad of 8 mezzoloth with spears coming at him. Deciding that dying by lich is more preferable, he walks back through the portal.

At this point, the lich is getting hacked on by the dwarf. A lot. The dwarf is hitting actual critical hits repeatedly. Frankly, I was very impressed.

That all said, it was a losing battle with the lich, as he was just too powerful, and the party perished. Or did they?

They had brief visions of waking up in individual coffin-like containers with connectors on themselves, and then darkness.

Upon waking, they found themselves in their room at the Yawning Portal Inn. After trying to figure out what happened, they go downstairs to find the infamous Portal bricked up!

Something was not adding up.

After trying to talk to Durnan, the proprietor, the barbarian realized something wasn’t right and informed the party. Turning to confront Durnan, they see him sitting on the bar.

“Hmm…you figured it out sooner than most groups…” he began.

Realizing that they were in some sort of weird illusiory Matrix-like thing, the party demanded to be let out. The entity only agreed after getting the party to agree to several things:

  1. Helping the fairy dragon at Maddgoth’s castle as this helps them help him
  2. Eliminate the Githyanki on level 16
  3. Eliminate the Githyanki on level 17

After this, he says, still masquerading as Durnan, he will let them have safe passage through his domain on level 17, although if they make it that far, he will be asking another favor when they get there and meet in person. The party agreed.

Everything went black for the party and they found themselves back in the portal room in Maddgoth’s castle. Locating the homunculus they agreed to eliminate, they were offered, by the homunculus, to kill the fairy dragon, which was tormenting it and trespassing in its master’s castle. The party decided to kill the homunculus, and then loot the castle.

The party then made out like bandits, finding and destroying Maddgoth’s chair and desk, made of captured spellbooks, as well as several rubbings of a stone spell page from a statue of Maddgoth who was holding a spellbook open to a Mordenkainen’s Sword spell.

Heading back to the surface and selling their loot, the party planned on their next jaunt into the depths of Undermountain…

Saturday Home Game

For reference: my Saturday game is my family game.

The party, having finish taking care of some bandits trying to steal the Duke’s coin molds capturing the leader, proceeded on to a port city having troubles with an alleged ghost ship.

The party, deciding to follow up on this based on the level of reward of 1,000 gold pieces each, looked around for a survivor of the ghost ship attacks. The survivor they found was a man who drank much ale and did not have a whole lot of information that was useful to the party.

Deciding that the reward made things worth it anyways, the party hired a ship set sale looking for this alleged ghost ship.

It wasn’t long and their voyage when the ghost ship attacked.the party fought a tough fight and found it on that these alleged undead were bleeding upon being struck and dropped from the attacks the party was doling out. The fight was hard one but the party came out on top. Having collected the treasure and taking a prisoner, the party said that sale with their new magical submersible ship back to the city of Koll.

You’re going to the heart master and collecting the reward, the Harvard Master was expecting the party to relinquish the ship as recompense for the financial damage that the pirates masquerading as undead had done.

The party argued that the contract did not stipulate that they were to give over any kind of or sort of ship. After threatening violence and deciding to take things to the magister, the party was able to walk away (or sail away, rather) with the ship, but with an edict of banishment for all times from the Port City of Koll.

Setting through the neighboring province, which also happened to be another nation, the party landed in the Port City of Red Fern.

Not long after docking their ship and entering into the market, looking at all the wonderful things offered there, a strange, wing and snake approach them with a scroll to attach to them marked “Open Me.”

Opening the scroll tube, the Party Warlock read aloud the note inside. Some sick and twisted person force the party into a game of finding fireballs frozen in stasis field hitting across the City. The party quickly went to work, solving the cruise, and collecting the crystals housing untold destruction.

Realizing that this city also has the infamous Bruce “Bruiser” Halloway, whom they were responsible for having been arrested in a previous adventure with bandits, the party quickly surmised that this was a distraction to break out Bruce.

Securing the scoundrel and moving him to another secure location, the party finished going after the crystals. After disposing of them into the harbor where it could harm nothing and no one, the party realized that there were eight explosions, and not the seven that they had expected. Realizing that there was a failed jailbreak happening at that moment, the party ran off to apprehend the bandit trying to break out Bruiser.

After some quick thinking from the sorcerer, who put him to sleep with a spell, the party the dude him and turned him over to the authorities. This guard of the favor of the Duke of Red Fern as well as a small reward.

As a capstone to their adventure, the party celebrated in style at the Duke’s estate with a feast.

Why I Am the Forever DM

Yeah, that’s me, the Forever DM. I rarely get to play at a table, and that’s okay. Recently, I had a brief conversation with one of my players after our game session:

Of course, Bubby is his character. His other character, Vaxis is in my monthly game and has the luck of a lodestone.

But I digress.
This is what makes me enjoy DMing. Over the last quarter of a decade that I’ve been DMing, I have had some successful and some…not so successful campaigns. Some of the best long-term games I’ve had were ones that had an engaging story overall, with plenty of opportunities for each character to shine, and me trying to weave the background stories of each player’s character into the narrative.

Would it surprise you to know that I’ve only had a total of five campaigns actually make it to completion (sometimes satisfying for everyone, sometimes bittersweet).

The first was a more episodic campaign that didn’t have an overall story, but was a series of stories strung together. That was from back in high school into early adulthood. It was a great campaign and I had some good players. It predated the dawn of 3rd Edition, and was back when TSR was still a thing.

The second was my (in)famous “Pirate” campaign. That campaign lasted upwards of two years, and actually went from level 1 to 20, and that was back in the 3e/3.5e days. It had a very nautical theme, and I had one player, whose idea it was, as a plant (he was actually playing the sub-BBEG, if you can believe it), who betrayed the party at a penultimate moment in the campaign. Man, the party was both thrilled and totally pissed. I mean, it was that level of betrayal. Imagine, if you will, Luke Skywalker going through the whole series only to have it revealed that Han Solo was the Emperor. It was on that level of betrayal. I could not POSSIBLY have planned that better. It was a one-time campaign that I will never be able to reproduce. So much of it was finding pre-written adventures to string together with the narrative, with storyline in between. Of course, the storyline in between was memorable, but otherwise, it was cool.

The third was my Githyanki Invasion campaign. It was pretty cool, I guess. It was based on a total invasion of the githyanki into the material plane. This was also back in the 3rd Edition days. A lot of good friends, some new some old. Pretty fun with a somewhat satisfying conclusion.

The fourth highlighted the love I had for Dungeon Magazine (I know, I’m dating myself here), and their first full-length adventure path, particularly the Shackled City adventure path. It was easily one of my favorites, with lots of cool locations and highlights. Ended as it should have.

The fifth is my infamous Fallout campaign, using d20 Modern/Future/Apocalypse source books. It ended well, with the Paladin of the Brotherhood of Steel sacrificing himself and the party to stop the BBEG and his army, using a Fatman round rigged to explode when struck against the ground. It was an epic end to an epic campaign. When my family moved away, I received a super mutant Pop! figure signed by all of my players. I still have it proudly displayed in my game room.

I say all of that to say this: I love being the DM. I’m sure many people love playing and I know that many people absolutely hate being DM. Me? I love it. I’m not always great at it. Sometimes I get ahead of myself and don’t take my own advice and I don’t pace the campaign. Sometimes the story I am telling is not as cool on the table as it is in my head.

Despite everything, though, I love it. I love looking at everyone’s various story arcs get resolved, watching the party succeed and flounder, and I love most of all the fact that I can craft something and share it with friends that help make it even better.

Quick announcement: I’ve launched a Patreon in the hopes that, with support, I can expand The Blog and give you more and even better content. I feel I’ve made the awards attractive and I hope to see you all donate!

My Patreon can be found at: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=41279593

DM Tip: How to DM

So many a DM has shared their processes and tips for this, so I am going to share my own.

Really, it boils down to one thing: run games.

Sure it seems that there is more to it than that, but for new and/or aspiring DMs, my biggest “tip” for you is to actually run games.

THAT SAID:

Most new DMs will have a great story that they want to tell and will start right out of the bullpen trying to run or write their first adventure module or campaign, starting with the end and having an idea how it begins, but having zero real plans for the in-between. DO NOT FALL INTO THIS TRAP! This rarely works out.

If You have a story you want to tell, if you have a good idea for a campaign, write down some notes about it and hold on to it for later. Trust me.

What you really want to do is find a module that is already been written, known as I published adventure. There are many different sources for this. The first one, of course, are the ones published by Wizards of the Coast. They have a wonderfully large selection. Even better if you can purchase them via D&D Beyond, which is cheaper than buying them hardcover. That and it’s easier to take them with you to read.

Read through the adventure a few times, focusing on the chapter or section that your group of players will likely encounter in a session. Then do it again. And then again. Read over the stop blocks. Then do it again. Then read over the section and the stat blocks. See where I’m going with this?

If you haven’t guessed it, dungeon mastering involves an exorbitantly large amount of reading. Yes, reading. Writing will come later, but reading comes first. I’m not going to say that there aren’t dungeon masters out there that can pick up a pencil and the dungeon masters guide and the monster manual and sit down and write a module. Most of the people that can do those sorts of things have been storytelling coherent narratives for years.

Remember that Dungeons & dragons is a cooperative storytelling game. As a dungeon master, your job is to present the characters with the story that they play out. The more works that you put into the module, the more fun everyone generally has, or so my 25 years of experience with dungeon mastering has shown me. If you think differently, fight me.

In any case, back to the topic at hand: pre-published adventures. The other source that you can find these kind of adventures, even for free for those who are budget conscious, is the DMs Guild website (https://www.dmsguild.com). They have a wealth of information, to include adventures, new monsters, and short one shots, just to name a few.

Now, there our multiple reasons for running pre-published adventures to start out. The first reason is that it takes the guesswork out of most planning for sessions. All you’d have to do, as I outlined above, is read through the appropriate section a few times to make sure you understand the flow and the general nature of that section of the adventure, and roll with it at game time. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

The second reason is that it exposes you to different kinds and styles of adventure writing. More specifically, it exposes you to how good adventures flow. there are several different kinds of adventures and encounters, all of which you can find in the DM’s Guide. Therefore, I’m not going to outline them here, but having a balanced and buried number of encounters throughout an adventure session is generally considered important for player and DM sanity. This of course assumes that you understand what play style your players want to engage in. Are they the kind that likes to solve puzzles? Give them a few more puzzles than normal. Are they big into role-playing? Give them opportunities to role play, both with each other and with non-player characters. Are they really into kicking down doors and killing monsters and breaking people’s stuff? Give them those Sweet, sweet combat encounters where they can shine. But notice that I’m not saying to give them all one thing or another. People get bored with monotony. Give them a variety still. It’s kind of like your parents telling you that you can’t just eat the main entree, but you have to eat your vegetables. It’s good for a player to have a variety.

The last reason is that, especially for time conscious Dungeon Masters, there’s a lot less work put into preparing your campaign session. I know I’ve touched on this with both of the previous reasons but it cannot be stressed enough how much life can get in the way of session planning. I’ve seen websites, particularly one whose name escapes me for the moment, that posted a how-to guide on Adventure riding and campaign planning in 30 minutes. That is wonderful for experienced dungeon masters, but terrible for new ones. Why, you may ask? because if you don’t have the foundational skill set, one of which is just experience, a lot of that campaign writing counsel is not going to be much use.

The last tip I am going to share for DMing is to actually read the DMs Guide and Player’s Handbook. Now, you don’t have to read it cover to cover, either of them. But you should be at least passingly familiar with the various rules regarding combat and movement and the individual classes and what their abilities are. You don’t even have to read it all at once. These two resources are essential.

Well, those are my tips for Dungeon Mastering for today. I’ll have more tips next week.

Have any comments? Leave them below!

Welcome to DMing…

Tuesday Adult D&D Night

This group is probably the furthest along in any of my campaigns, Sundays aside (mostly because they are tooling around with new characters after finishing Avernus, Lost Laboratory of Kwalish, and then Tomb of Horrors).

They are playing a campaign based on some magical items that I found in an old 2e sourcebook on the Forgotten Realms nation of Netheril: the Nether Scrolls.

Long story short, they sold a magical item that they needed to get into another area of the first place they had explored that began the campaign, which I placed below Old Owl Well.

The party is 6th level and found, via an informer, the man they needed to find was currently residing in Calimshan, particularly in Calimport. Unfortunately, there were no ships in Waterdeep that were traveling directly to Calimport, and therefore had to take a ship to the nearest port, which ended up being the city of Memnon, the city directly north of Calimport, connected by the most southernly section of the Trade Way.

The party found that it would be a four month trip, and so settled in as sailors and guards for the small shipping sailing ship, with the kobold wizard borrowing one of the eponymous Nether Scrolls from their wizard friend Iul, still studying inside the bag of lodging.

About a month into the trip, the ship was attacked by a group of 8 scags (water-dwelling trolls), which the rogue (who was introduced as the ship’s navigator) helped defeat by club hauling the ship to throw off the trolls from the edge of the ship.

After that encounter, the party’s craft watched in the distance as another ship was torn apart by something with large tentacles. The ship opened their sales, and ran for all their worth.

A time later, the lookout spotted an island that appeared to be the same as was on a treasure map that was purchased by the party’s kobold wizard. Going ashore, the party found the treasure, keeping it from the ship’s captain.

Next was the run-in with the kraken priest, demanding the party sacrifice their most treasured items, or be destroyed. The cleric/warlock (we call her a “spicy cleric”) sacrificed a higher level spell scroll, and with the dragonborn sorcerer’s intimidating speech, the kraken priest takes the sacrifice and leaves…for now.

Having seen much, the party’s ship came across a 40′ diameter tree sticking out of the water! Not on any kind of island, but in the middle of the ocean, did they find this tree, its trunk extended as far below the surface as they could see. It had beautiful foliage with some sort of delicious-looking fruit. The party approached the tree, curious as to its origins.

After watching the kobold wizard eat of the tree with seemiy no I’ll effect (or rather, a seemingly good effect, similar to a goodberry), The barbarian, the spicy cleric, and the wizard began gathering the fruit. Simply watched on wary of the strange tree. Upon picking the fruit, the cleric/warlock felt something devastatingly wrong: she lost her connection to her deity. All of her cleric abilities ceased to function. The wizard, angry for his friend, punched the tree causing some sort of curse to befall him.

The three of those who had picked the fruit, began to get more than a little worried. The cleric especially was terrified at what just happened. The Paladin of the group thought on the situation and cast ceremony to allow the cleric to atone for what was clearly an offense to her goddess. The cleric, realizing that this tree must have been sacred to her goddess was determined to follow the counsel of the paladin, which included two days of constant prayer and fasting, both day and night for 48 hours. All three of them began, with the wizard and barbarian both failing, never having had to do this activity before.

After the first day, the cleric determined to complete her atonement, the party spotted a ship in the distance. Only after it was close did they see the flag: the Jolly Roger. They chose to fight instead of running, and found themselves faced with the largest ship they’d seen. It was a massive galleon with a huge crew, and at least 30 ballista pointed their direction. After several attempts by the wizard to destroy the opposing ship with spells like fireball, counterspelled by the pirate ship’s wizard, the party’s new rogue friend (the ship navigator) attempted to parlay, without success.

Seeing no recourse, the party surrendered, and were placed in the brig, the cleric continuing her atonement without ceasing. The barbarian, seeing a single opportunity, placed the bag of lodging down his pants, hoping against hope that they could at least keep that from the pirates and keep their other friends inside safe.

After almost 2 weeks, they felt the ship stop. they were locked into hand and foot medicals chained together between them, other prisoners in the ship’s hold included, all together some 100 people. Seeing an opportunity,

Upon being led out of the hold, the party found themselves in a port city with a hot sun beating upon them above. Yes, they were in Memnon, their destination, but instead of as adventuring, they found themselves headed for the slave market.

Will they escape their circumstances? Will the party recover their gear and get revenge on the pirates that had them enslaved? Only time will tell…

This is the troll I painted yesterday. I was very happy how it turned out, except its warts. I’m thinking of dry brushing them darker. Give me your thoughts in the comments below!

Miniature Painting

So I said that I will, on occasion, do a post and add a picture of a miniature that I have painted. I have a considerable amount of time on my hands, so doing one or two miniatures a week is not that difficult. In fact, I often sit down and complete an entire miniature in a few hours.

Fun times, I know. It relaxes me.

That said, the barbarian that I painted previously was, in my humble opinion, one of my absolute favorite and best works yet. There’s only one piece of work that I enjoyed having completed more than that: a human paladin I did a few months ago in the middle of the quarantine.

This particular mini took considerable amount of time to accomplish and was a pewter mini. I put a considerable amount of detail into the shield and the sword, which I hope you’ve noticed and appreciate. For those interested, I used a dark shader to fill in the gaps in details.

And yes, I know that I did not paint the base. I’m getting to that. Eventually.

Front
Rear

Until tomorrow!

Sunday Adventurers League

So our heroes continue to plumb the depths of Undermountain, the massive dungeon that lies below the Yawning Portal, beneath the city of Waterdeep.

Having barely defeating the dreaded Aboleth, our heroes continue on their journey below, coming to the level containing Wyllowwood. After finding a docking port, with an oddly intact rowboat tied up, two party members noticed the boat…moving.

Assuming something sinister, the party’s kenku rogue took a shot at the boat, which roared and revealed itself to be an overly large mimic! After defeating said mimic, with no small help from the party’s dwarven barbarian, the party continued onwards, reaching a large stone bridge, and finding the oddest sight: a large green dragon (usually evil creatures) with a sword embedded in its head. The creature was found to be of good character and good conversation.

The dragon told its story and gave the party directions to one of their goals: reaching an enemy creature to retrieve the second of a pair of boots of elvenkind. Having defeated the werebat goblin that had it in its possession (the goblin being of a mean and evil disposition, and having attacked them first), the party traveled to the next area, which took them two levels below their current location.

The party, after much long travel, heard of clinging and banging as if metal on stone coming from the east. The kenku rogue scouted ahead, finding evidence of stone giants. The party followed and spoke to the first stone giant they met, convincing him that they were no threat. The stone giant told of the laws of being tormented by some unknown entity.

Not soon afterwards, the party experienced this trickery and found that the culprit was nothing more than a fairy dragon named Otto. Convincing the fairy dragon to cease tormenting the poor stone giants, The party found that the fairy dragon needed assistance in hunting a homunculus. Party agreed to go to the nearby underground fortress to assist in destroying a magical item.

During their search of the castle, the party came across a stone portal, which they have realized transports them to other parts of the dungeon. The party, having figured out the key to opening the portal (solving a riddle), Entered into the portal for getting their commitment to the fairy dragon.

Party found an elaborate room, and traveled onwards discovering not much more than secret doors and traps.

One such room held a hole that led down to the next level, containing several incorporeal, and likely dangerous, beings. Deciding that discretion is the better part of our, the party left that location and continued on in their search.

Traveling further, the party ran into several yugoloths, a mezzoloth and a nycanoloth. The battle was hard fought but the party scraped by, defeating their foes. Resting and licking their wounds, the party decided to rest, thus ending our session, the party advancing to the 8th experience level.

Will they be able to find their way further down? It is too soon to tell. Join us next week to see where the party ends up!