Session 21 and Greenwood

Ricorin recovered one of the five sacred hammer of the gods and brought it back to the Deep Dwarf King. With the help of the King, Ricorin and his adventuring friends convinced the upper city to help in the war at Athanor. In honor of Ricorin's courage, he was declared the King's Champion for the year during a lively dwarven celebration.

After recovering from the effects of drinking too much dwarven ale, the party decided to make their next move and travel along the high road back to Athanor. They encountered a human merchant caravan and managed to convince the leader to hire them as guards. The first days journey was uneventful, but Edilimas noticed one of the young women of the caravan was watching Sidara's every move.

As they caravan made camp, the leader explained to the group that they travelled with an old wise woman who could see the future. She wished to read the future of each member of the party utilizing fortune cards. Cornellic and Sidara readily agreed.

She read Cornellic's future and predicted he would come into conflict with his family. The path he would tread would be narrow and result in many consequences for the people of his home. Something of great power awaited him in the forest of Pelnorem, but its exact nature was obscured by the sky stones.

Sidara's reading was equally vague. She read her palm and predicted she would have to make a dark choice and that to fight darkness, one must sometimes utilize the darkness. An ancient presence had its eyes on her with great interest.

As the night pressed on, Sidara approached the young woman who had been watching her and engaged her in idle conversation. The young woman introduced herself as Melinda and hesitatingly asked if Sidara could help her gain favour with the mistress of the darkness. Sidara was slightly confused and asked why Melinda would think to ask her such a request.

Melinda tried to excuse herself and feign ignorance but Sidara pressed her on the matter, and Melinda haltingly explained that Sidar wielded the dark blade of the order. She mistakenly believed Sidara was a high priest of the dark order who lingered in the grove of the forest of Pelnorem.


After the night's events, the group decided that all the signs were pointing to the forest of Pelnorem and they should make their way there as it was only slightly off the path on the way to Athanor. They parted ways with the caravan and headed up the less travelled road into the forest. They came across and old watch tower with a make shift toll with two guards manning the barrier.

They made camp at the watchtower and were able to gain information from the captain of the guard, a pleasant but strong woman by the name of Alinda. There were a set of old sky stones located up on a hill near a lake that was deep in the forest. Alinda cautioned that the locals were a wild, independent sort and the forest was filled with dangers.

They encountered a strange wandering minstrel who was fishing along the lake. They decided he was not quite right in the head and declined his offer to join the group. Following the trail around the lake and up the hill, they found the sky stones; five ancient sculpted rocks that reached up out of the ground like fingers.

They waited for the sun to set, and witnessed a peculiar arrangement of light and shadow as the sun's rays cast down between the stones. The light seemed to focus on a distant hill across the lake. The group again decided this was a sign and went to investigate the far hill across the way.

The opposite hill seemed nondescript at first, but after Sidara and Edilimas did a thorough investigation they were able to determine that an illusion of some sort hid a secret passageway down into the hill. Throwing caution into the wind, Sidara wandered into the darkness and was able to feel her way though the passageway for several feet.

Once through the darkness, they discovered a staircase leading down into the earth that opened up into a natural cavern with a still pool of water watched over by an ancient statue of a lizardman like creature, worn smooth from years of dripping water. They were startled when the statue began to speak in a slow deep rasping voice.

It was at this point that I broke out a new card game I recently bought called Dominion. I decided that the statue would reveal that Xandriel was defeated by his children who then bickered over his crown. This also revealed that Sidara, Cornellic, Daskus, Edilimas, and Bjorn were descendants of Xandriel. The winner of the game would determine which descendant of Xandriel (ancestor of the player's character) had won the crown.

Reworking Palace of the Silver Princess

I wanted to pay homage to Jean Wells and so dug up my old downloaded copy of Palace of the Silver Princess. There was a time when Wizards of the Coast offered the original unedited version of the adventure as a free download. I am not sure if it is still available these days but it is quite different in tone than the Moldvay edited version that was released.

Still, as with most modules I have gone through, B3 is a very large place to explore. It would take several sessions for the group to make it through the palace as presented and I did not want them to dwell too long in one place since the general scheme of the campaign was that they were ambassadors moving from country to country.

After reading Mike Mearls talk about how exploration would be one of the design mantras for the next version of Dungeons and Dragons, I decided to try and keep some of the expansiveness of the palace. I kept quite a few rooms empty but utilized Ms. Wells' descriptions from the module. Some of her room descriptions are very evocative and detailed but still contain mundane items.

In making these maps, I keyed the room numbers to the original module for ease of reference. The K series of room numbers are for level one, and the L series is for level two. Technically, there is a level three for the top most level of the tower, but since it was just one room, I left it out of the map. My thoughts on the tower were that it would be an additional way into the palace if they player's thought of utilizing grappling hooks to climb up the tower.

While reading through Jean Wells's original version, I started to get an eerie creepy haunted vibe from the descriptions of the rooms. Running with that idea, I decided to make the entire place haunted and filled with poltergeists instead of having any living monsters. In the dress makers room, I had a ghost inhabit the dress makers doll and attack the party when they least expected it (with scissors).

I have always liked linking up multiple level dungeons with stairs, trap doors, and water systems. The cave like room at the bottom of the level one map basically serves as a sewer system. The wine cellar also has a cave with water that is probably just below the bathrooms above.

The player's had a blast making their way through the dungeon. It was a nice change of pace from the set piece encounters that are the traditional fare when going through a 4E style adventure. They started to distrust every item they encountered since a poltergeist could be around to animate anything not bolted down.

Putting together and running this adventure also confirmed that all I need to run a dungeon is a one page map, and one page to have brief descriptions of what lies within each keyed encounter on the map. Having ten or so keyed rooms per level is the sweet spot for me. Throwing in a couple of empty rooms can complete the map and I can easily make up additional details by using the keyed descriptions as guidelines for what is going on in the dungeon.

Thoughts on Dungeons and Dragons Open Playtest Rules

Like quite a few D&D enthusiasts, I signed up for the D&D Next May 24th open playtest and was finally able to download the pdfs late in the evening. Much like the recent Diablo outage, there were technical difficulties preventing many from being able to download the zip file containing the pdfs. After skimming through the pdfs, here are a couple of my thoughts on the rules as presented.

Somewhat surprising, my first reaction upon reading the rules is how unimportant most rules are to me. I glanced over the bestiary of monsters and thought; hit points, damage, experience points-- all standard fare stuff. I flipped through the pages (digitally) of the How to Play pdf very quickly and the various rules in the beginning barely caught my eye due to the nature of the material being "old hat".

To my mind, the bulk of the rules that need to be internalized by a Dungeon Master are what are the player's characters allowed to do. Magic users were one of the problematic classes to me from the older game due to the inherent power infused into the player's character. Conjuring, teleporting, wishes handed the power to control reality into the player's hands instead of the Dungeon Master. And that is a GOOD thing when the player works his way up the levelling system.

So, I immediately jumped to the five pregenerated characters that were included in the playtest and tried to get a feel for the rules governing the player's characters powers. There is a bit of a mix of old school vibe and newer 3E and 4E mechanics infused into the character sheets. There is also quite a few things that take a completely new direction. The actual character building process is not detailed in the pdfs and has to be ascertained from reading the options presented on the character sheets (and is subject to change, of course).

It appears there are quite a few 2E kit like options in the character building process. After picking a class, there must be an option to pick a background and a theme. There are two pregenerated clerics included in the open playtest, so by comparing them, we can get a feel for how backgrounds and themes work.

One of the clerics is a dwarf cleric of Moradin. His background is Knight and his theme is Guardian. The Knight background gives bonuses to a few skills such as diplomacy and religious knowledge. It also spells out social benefits that a Knight would receive with nobility. The Guardian theme gives a mechanical benefit to using a shield as protection for allies in battle.

One of the clerics is a human cleric of Pelor. His background is Priest and receives similar bonuses to skills as well as social benefits at temples and the like. For this cleric, the theme is Healer, which grants access to a herbalism feat. That, in turn, gives the ability to make healing potions and mend wounds at a higher rate.

I like the idea of kits as it gives new players (and even some experienced players) little idea hooks on which to roleplay and personalize their characters. The big drawback of 2E kits was the power imbalance inherent in the multitude of options to choose from. There is also a drawback to having to buy 8 different splat books to get access to all the kits that were available. I often wondered what 3E would have been like if they had simply started with 2E and all the class kit books and tried to condense it down into one manageable Player's Handbook.

My general impression of the rules are they reject many of the systems as presented in 4E and are looking for ways to bring back more of the older 3E and 2E style of game play. I would like to give the rules a fair shake and play through them with my regular group. They certainly seem sufficient enough to run a game but I am also of the opinion that the magic of Dungeons and Dragons does not lie within the actual details of the rules. Any version of the game published so far is sufficient to act as a springboard to having a fun time at the gaming table.

Martin Thomas wrote a series of posts about having fun with any edition of Dungeons and Dragons.
Mike Mearls posts a follow up to the playtest release.