book keeping

One of the most important things about DnD is continuity, especially in a larger campaign that stretches over months or even years. In cases like this, especially at the age after you leave high school (something thats well past for both me and DK) where people often have many commitments and DnD can be sidelined, leaving the party down a member or two for any number of sessions. While it can be easy to adjudicate easier encounters for fewer people, this is rarely the problem.
The problem is maintaining the continuity.
If there is anywhere over a week between sessions it can be difficult to remember exactly what went on, leaving people in the dark over important encounters, meetings and NPCs. Plus all the great random jokes and weird comments which are always a big part of our campaigns. This is an especially big problem if, for whatever reason, there is a dry spell in your sessions.
The easiest way to prevent this is to keep a diary of events as to what's going on each session. Unfortunately this will put even more pressure on the DM.... unless one of the players keeps it. This is easily the best way to handle the situation.
A player picks up on all the things that they enjoyed most from the session, giving a different light on the encounters and the PCs. you know who they hate, like, what they enjoy, what they skip over as unimportant. Plus it maintains the ever so important continuity and makes a great way to ease into the session at the beginning.
The problem may be finding a willing player, but lets face it, they owe you a little something for preparing that great session they're having.
As a side note, how on earth do you only spend 1-4 hours creating a dungeon? that DMG for 4th ed suggests this is entirely possible. I sure couldn't.

party death

this in memorandum of the 4 players that i managed to murder mercilessly with one of the hard encounters i set up against them.

Not that there's really much remorse there.
Having learned from my mistakes, i shall hereon try not to make the hard encounters almost solely out of creatures that are higher than the party's level.

Also don't underestimate the power of the humble stirge.. lvl 1 lurker that packs a surprising punch.

Design design design

Along a similar vein to D's character design thread, the monster design for 4th ed is also vastly simplified.
Even before my realisation of the DM's toolbox in the DMG, I found it easy to look at other monsters of similar level and work off that. In 3rd ed, with the large number of different publications and the definite increase of power of things as time went by, it became a struggle to find any real semblance of balance in ones own creature design.
If anyone has read the description of the storm elemental in the MM3 they'll know what i mean. That creature's opening ability is already a party killer.
The table provided near the back of the DMG for 4th ed is a godsend for those who like to make something a little off centre, becoming more and more useful as players get to know the monsters you throw at them and hence are easily bored by them (or so i feel)
It will only be my 4th ever session of 4th ed but already i've crafted some delightful surprises for the PCs, not that they know any of the monsters from the MM at all yet.

However, i do find that the trap component of the DMG is rather lacking, as it was in the DMG for 3rd ed. This time round there are some tables that help but for some reasons i continually draw blanks as to designing interesting traps, despite loving what they add to an encounter.

Bah, it will work out.

New Classes in Progress

Well, Jetse's posting, I suppose I should make an appearance too ^^

I'm currently working on a couple of new classes - I quite like designing classes for 4th Edition, it feels a lot more straightforward than it did in 3rd. There is a few reasons there:

• 3rd Edition, some classes do feel like there is consideration made for what the class gets when - for example, the Swashbuckler class (findable in Complete Warrior) is very frontloaded, has considerable powers in their higher levels, and it seems like in compensation, its middle levels are barren.
  
  In 4th Edition, classes seem to be aimed at the 'now', which makes things far easier to work with, and there is a tight structure for what sort of things a class gets when. This and the Niche design of 4th are a really handy combination for class design.
  
  
• 4th Edition classes have defined roles, which while 'restricting', thats actually really handy for designing a class. You say to yourself "this is a striker", and you know, based on the other striker classes, where this needs to be in terms of power.
  
  
• 4th Edition has one unified system for class abilities (well, there is also the "class features", but they are not nearly as extensive in quantity). This makes many things really, really straightforward.
  
  For example, one class I'm homebrewing is a Martial Artist - a striker specialising in unarmed combat. For designing his "at-will" damage dealer (he has several, but I notice the ranger and rogue tend to have a 'key' power for this). I can see immediately what this power needs to be like, by looking at the key at will damage dealers of these classes.

For those interested (though I'm pretty sure just jetse and qwillion ever look at this ^^), the classes I'm whipping up are Druid, Barbarian, Martial Artist, the Witch (Jetse's had a strong hand in this one), and a fencing based defender.

After a long lapse of writing anything interesting on here (uni being on holiday i had nothing to procrastinate from) I thought i'd snag a quick post in regards to both keep on the shadowfell and my own dungeoncrawl adventure. Both of these are being run in 4th ed.
I had a bag of holding's worth of misgivings about 4th ed (type 3 if anyones interested) but this may have come largely from having been part of some form of 3rd ed DnD session for the last 10 years or so. Having now played it several times (including the opportunity to test it out at my local gaming store pre-release to the actual books) i can easily say that i thoroughly enjoy it.
Lets face it, they've got the combat right and i do mean RIGHT. A couple of examples to this would be (from my campaign) the players facing more than 10 goblins of varying levels on a bridge of ice over a gaping chasm as well as a warlock at lvl 4... with them only being lvl 1 and having just fought their way through the first part of the ransacked water temple (see earlier post for the teaser)
I'm not saying it was easy, hell it took 3 of the 5 party members down, but by god it was fun. Intense even.
Secondly the keep on the shadowfell. We had a poor turnout with only 3 player characters. D was kind enough to let us ding to 2 (for balance) and we soon found out why. after a close call on the king's road (no healers save for my fighter with the heal skill who managed to get the others back on their feet mid-combat with a well placed action point) we fought our way through a horde of kobolds at the entrance to their cavern. Literally, a goddamn horde. with a vast amount of luck and no small amount of skill we managed with 3 people to beat the encounter that most 5 man parties apparently TPK on. hooray for us! I believe the turnaround point was the ranger (after most of us telling him that if he didnt roll that 20 to stabilise, we'd all be dead) rolled that 20.
Naturally i still have some gripes about the system, like no craft skills, but to be honest all of these can be gotten around with some easy ad libbing and house ruling. Nothing us veteran players or DMs should balk at or fear.
4th ed ftw.

Going Forward

Well, I've caved and bought the 4th books - my gaming group, since Jetse's 4th Ed dungeoncrawl sessions, has been raving about it. From Jetse's description of the dungeoncrawl, I would say a decent amount of said raving is due to fun design on his part (including a rather cool trap-as-an-event encounter, on a crumbling stone spire), but some of that raving is about concepts I really like.

I've also ordered Keep on the Shadowfel, which I'll run to get a better understanding of the system. After that, its updating time - things that I've been tinkering away on, now to tinker further, adjusting to 4th. I suspect I won't make anything I'm happy with the idea of publishing for a long time. It's like me running campaigns.

Anyways, should be interesting. I've ordered the books from Amazon, so they will most likely arrive in 2 weeks or so.

System Shock

So, Jetse ran his 1st 4th Ed session yesterday - regretfully, I missed it (had a hangover day instead), but I'm sure he'll have more to say. I was going to play a dagger-throwing ranger ^^ Reports I've heard from people playing sounded good though.

In the meantime, I'm just stuck in between systems - there's too many I like. This happens so frequently in my case. I get into 3rd Ed, and just when I want to start running something, discover Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved. I want to start running Arcana Evolved, and get into Iron Heroes. That's awesome, and I invest a lot of time in an IH project... then Monte puts out his first Book of Experimental Might, with a promise of a follow up BoXM too!. I'm in the middle of a big BoXM based campaign, based on Lame Mage's Western Marches idea (google Ars Ludi, it's one of the best pen and paper rpg blogs around). So, of course, right on time to distract me, 4th comes out.

I'm considering a new, efficient DM'ing system where I just pick a system and ignore everything else, because currently, while I learn alot, its really distracting.

Steam

As your small party of adventurers rounds a bend in the road, you spot a man lying face-down in the mud underneath a small copse of trees. His blue robes are charred and foul with mud and muck and his bald head sports a fresh wound that has caked his face in dried blood. Nearby tracks reveal that he must have stumbled out from the woods across a nearby field where a thin stream of smoke or steam is just visible, twisting in the wind.

.... now what?
Just a teaser for a quick adventure i hope to be running soon. Funsies!

Ingenuity

There's nothing like being level 1 again (or level 2, 3 or 4 for that matter) to really feel vulnerable. Any off chance crit from some NPC or other could easily bring your fun new character's adventuring career to a grinding halt and while this isn't exactly a bad thing, it certainly does bring out a high level of danger that just cant really be experienced at the higher levels without edging onto the ridiculous. Similarly, simple obstacles like crevasses, cliff faces, raging rivers and any number of others, can make really tough challenges without any need for horrid demons and vast armies.
Without access to key spells like stone shape, fly and any number of other utility spells available at lvl 5 and onwards, it takes a serious amount of ingenuity to pass obstacles of a non-combative sort and its an aspect of DnD that can easily be overlooked.
Inventing genius plans and strange contraptions with whatever may be handy really cements a party together, pooling aspects of everyone's skills together and enforcing ideas of teamwork. Taking a 20ft crevasse as an example, characters will need to find some sort of makeshift bridge, get it across, secure it, possibly still needing to balance if its a crappy bridge, theres no way in hell they're jumping the damn thing. Basically, fun for the whole family.
Seeing as its something that can really die out at higher levels, get in on the action as much as possible and cackle with inner glee as your players attempt to cross that deep lake with nothing but 3 pints of oil, a rope and some dead trees... and succeed.

Release Avenue

Right, just a minor update: I've decided on DriveThroughRPG as our release avenue. I've used their site for a while now, and always found it fairly easy to use. Having talked to one of their publisher relations people, releasing products via their site seems to be pretty easy too.

Now its just a matter of jumping through the right hoops, as well as learning the in and outs of actually making a good pdf.

Content wise, I'm trying to make Trouble Under Eisenstadt as useful as I can, with sections of leading into the adventure (i.e. generic hooks), as well as notes on playing it under alternative systems (i.e. AE, Iron Heroes, and utilising Experimental Might). Maps and such will be provided, as well as printable combat maps (Eisenstadt has fairly easily describe-able areas, but I'm fond of using minitures for tactical combat).

Generics

David recently introduced me to the idea that most DMs have a standard sort of adventure that they tend to tie themselves to. A style that they tend to design around. To start with i laughed off the idea in the vain hope that ALL of my adventures are unique and wonderful.
How wrong i was.
After a thoroughly enjoyable testing session of the Eisenstadt mines i thought i'd do my own little one-off adventure. Lo and behold, i instantly cracked into a staple favourite of mine; the retaken building. As an example of this, think a temple/castle/mansion/whatever that once belonged to someone else, that was used for specific purposes (ie kitchens, guard rooms, prayer halls) that have now been converted to different purposes.
The reason i like this format so much is the chance to show what the building once was as well as what it is now, hopefully in a way to be interesting to the players.
But, stepping aside from this, i feel that i'd get a richer campaign and a more rewarding experience as a DM if i decided to go against that initial desire. To bring in new and exciting elements that i'd otherwise not really thought about. As a recent example, one of my campaign arcs is set in a travelling refugee camp and mostly is about the struggle for power therein. Something different, incredibly challenging but ultimately rewarding when it works.

Find your default favourite, by all means work it hard (as you'll undoubtedly be comfortable in running it later) but try to step outside your stereotype now and again, who knows, you might even get a fancy new favourite.

Trouble Below Eisenstadt

Standing on the boardwalk of the Hammer and Chisel, you scrape the mud off your boots before heading inside. It's the only bar in Eisenstadt, and while it's certainly not fancy, it is spacious, laid out with many tables and chairs to accommodate the mine workers, who make up a fair portion of the small town's population.

Gregory Hanlan, your contact and town mayor, is immediately visible - other than the bartender, he's pretty much the only patron in the bar. He's an older man, slightly overweight from living a comfy life in recent years, but his bent posture and strong shoulders hark back to his earlier days as a miner. There are dark rings around his eyes - Gregory has obviously not slept well in days.

"So, you must be the delvers we sent for" he says, in his small town drawl "I suppose I'd better fill you in. We've got a miner problem nowadays, and its no small issue. It started about a fortnight ago, with a flash in the night sky, and a small forest fire. Couple of days later, our miners breached a new cavern, and things turned to havoc - they've gone mad, we had to pull down the ladder and bracing just to stop them climbing out." Mining was the life blood of Eisenstadt, and the desperation in the mayor's voice is clear.

The bartender brings over pints of ale after a gesture from Gregory. Gregory nods his head at the dreary scene beyond the window "Adding insult to injury, this rain started a week ago, and now in every way, my town is mired. I know its been an unpleasant trip, in these conditions, but how soon can you begin?"

---

Trouble Below Eisenstadt is a stand-alone adventure, designed for a party of approximately 3rd level, and can be completed in about 4-5 hours (based on its playtesting session with a core party). Release plans are somewhat sketchy - as Splintercat's first adventure, there's a handful of things to sort out, such as pdf design and release avenue.

An Introduction

Studio Splintercat is the working name for a collaboration between myself (David), and an associate (Jetse), and is intended to be an outlet for various D&D, and D20 adventures, and alternative rules, as well as some miscellaneous projects.

On this blog, you'll find our musings on various subjects, as well as news and previews of current projects.