I took my keyboard apart yesterday to clean it. Took forever. Would not recommend doing it yourself...I'll probably just buy a new keyboard next time. Psh.

I did enjoy taking pictures of the removed keys though.

Gnolls and Mirrors

With Borris back the party went after the remaining gnolls. Highlights include:

1. Everyone being very impressed by the Barlgura. He didn’t end up being a very effective damage dealer, but he was scary! Also, I got to play around with using a stunt to grab Borris and carry him along.

2. Carolyn being pretty funny with her character’s women’s lib shtick. She kept bugging the female Gnoll Scourge about a rally and how great it was that she was an empowered woman and stuff. Then the gnoll and barlgura knocked her unconscious.

3. Getting everyone to talk to some teiflings instead of killing them.

4. Having cool stuff to give when they searched the Scourge’s room.

The Hall of Enforced Retrospection was an encounter that I was really excited about running, because it was quite different than anything we had done before. Didn’t work out perfectly though.

1. Dakkon’s low will defense and his charge ahead attitude got him sent to a separate room to battle a crazed and starving gnoll alone. He rolled a crit though, and I ruled that since he did more than the creature’s bloodied value in one hit, he took him out. Cool, but ended up boring for Brian since he basically had to sit the rest of the encounter out. I should have been more obvious about how to get him out.

2. Aderes spent most of the battle trying to get Dakkon out of the Oubliette of the Empty Mind, and succeeded on a skill challenge to get him out.

3. Everyone took advantage of the teleporting mirrors after they were identified, and used them to traverse the room. This was kind of cool.

4. Boneclaw skellies exploding a lot. Makes a DM proud.

One problem I keep running into that is hard to get past is not knowing how much info to provide the players. I don’t want to give everything away, but if they don’t get enough info they are just confused, not curious. I guess I’ll just keep giving them more, and see when it gets to be too much. We are just trying to have fun, after all.

Borris' Big Day

So, what did Borris do while the party was slaying gnolls?

I had read that the skill challenge with the ghosts in the Well of Demons wasn’t very fun, and had decided before that I was going to skip it. Borris’ absence allowed for something more interesting, though. I had him encounter the ghosts and be possessed by them, allowing him to play out a couple encounters leading to them finding the Well of Demons. It also allowed me to give the players some hints about the challenges to come, and even a hint or two about a fabulous treasure they could seek out.

Jacque wanted to be a burly dude, so I made her a goliath cleric of Kord. Katrina didn’t care, but I know how much she hates missing, so I made her an elven avenger (basically Buffy the Demon Slayer). I wanted to give Brian something different to try, so I made him a Deva Invoker. Stu just got to play Borris, since he was inhabiting the body of a dwarven fighter. This way he could reasonably get experience to catch up with the group and the others could glean info or even treasure.

Since I was fairly sure that our group could not do more than two encounters (at least not the way we do them now) in one night, I planned:

1. The gelatinous cube random encounter from the Thunderspire Labyrinth book. I like making the gelatinous cube out of jello, and I really liked the hook of the tablet inside the cube protected by wraiths. This would have worked great if I hadn’t created a party of divine characters that immediately annihilated the wraiths. Whoops. I think they had fun though!

2. An encounter with an iron dragon and her vampire minions on the face of thunderspire mountain. I used Heroscape tiles to make this encounter, and that was really cool. Running a solo was a learning experience though. I’ll have to think a lot more about how to that next time. Here I gave more hints to the “fabulous treasure” from the cube’s tablet, and Brian’s Deva ripped a vial containing blood of an immortal from the chest of the slain dragon. Why did she keep it there? Dragons don’t have pockets, silly.

After those fights Borris flashed in and out of consciousness, and caught some glimpses of the challenges that lay ahead. Katrina’s avenger walking blindfolded through a room of mirrors and holding a black mask. Jacque’s cleric covered in blood fighting a demon, and then holding a huge dagger. Brian’s Deva crying out a warning as he was grabbed by a column of bodies and then holding a bell, grimacing. Finally I had him regain consciousness in his own time, with the bodies of his temporary adventuring companions strewn about him. I had each player pick a piece of treasure from the bodies for Borris to bring back to them.

It was pretty fun, I think. J

I played a game of D&D with my almost 3 year old son Finley. It was super fun, and he's MUCH better at in game conversation than I am.

It started because I took him with me to buy some minis. He loved playing with them and wanted to add most of them to his birthday list. I tried to balance shared excitement with a desire to not have to buy a bunch of extra minis because my son mangled them. We left with a couple new monsters, and I spent the ride home trying to explain to my son why a Wrackspawn has no eyes (for the record, he didn't know its name, we just called it a red guy) and whether or not he was a good guy.

Back at home, he was very excited to play this game that I bought little guys for. I said OK, then proceeded to play a whole little adventure without using any guys. Whoops. He didnt' seem to mind, though.

I started by telling him that he was in a small town and a dragon had stolen the princess. No need to get complicated, I thought. I asked what he wanted to do:

Finn-fight the dragon!
Dad-ok, do you want to buy anything before you leave town?
F-a sword. a poky sword (this means a rapier). a purple poky sword!
D-ok, anything else?
F-a zappin thing (i wrote down wand of lightning)
D-ok, ready to go? are you going to take the road, the river, or the forest?

He chose forest, and on his way out of town he was stopped by his friend Tika (yeah yeah, I read lots of Dragonlance back in the day). She told him it was dangerous and that he shouldn't go. He was confused for a moment, and then told her he had to save the princess! I wasn't sure he would even have remembered that. We talked some more and I was really impressed with how he took on the role. WAY better than I do when I'm trying to role play. Throughout the little adventure, he found an adventuring buddy or three, fought giant spiders and found a rifle in one of their webs, hid from boar-riding hill dwarves, and saved the princess. And after many repeated instances of "I want to fight the dragon", he ended up bartering for his and the princess' life with the rifle, which the dragon considered a fantastic treasure. I was so proud of his use of diplomacy to solve the problem, and he can always go back to fight the dragon another day...