Saying Yes, Or How I Winged It

On Tuesday I ran Songs of Erui after about a month of down time. The party had traveled to the mostly-dwarf city, Cindervault, looking for the second fragment of a song that’s been the primary focus of the campaign since the ass-end of the first adventure. When they arrived they found that it was mostly abandoned, but figured out later that night that it was now under the occupation of a shit-ton of drow. Not wanting to end up as spider-chow, they made a beeline for Cindervault’s fortress under the assumption that something really expensive would be locked up there.

En route they ran into various drow entries cribbed from the Monster Manual (de-leveled of course to account for the fact that they were only level 9), in addition to a web golem, blade spiders, and some summoned mezzodemons (a drow demonologist needs him some demons). Now, after a few encounters they got to choose which way to take trying to get into the castle: the main gate or the access ramp for wagons and cripples, and deciding to tackle the main gate. Unfortunately, the gate was guarded by a purple dragon that I had to change to a black dragon after I realized that purple dragons go as’plode in the sun (WHOOPS), but in the end a summoned unicorn took it down and they got a level for their troubles. The session ended with the party on top of the ramparts observing 20+ drow and a drider communicating to a formorian king through a visual- and audio-only window.

That was all just pointless recap. The actual point to this post is that the following session they decided to stick to the wall and attempt to loop around the side of the walls where they hoped drow wouldn’t be skulking about as they so often do. Now, my plans were to have them more or less make a direct assault, using the various siege engines on the walls to give them an edge. I did not think that they would just side-step all the encounters I’d had planned. So…time to wing it.

There was a lot of wall to cover, and several towers, so I used towers as indicators for where encounters could still rationally occur. It was just a matter of rapidly populating them in the span of a few seconds. Blade spiders were level 10, so in the first tower I just had one using it as a lair. Inside they found that there was one lurking on the ceiling amidst the suspended, putrefied corpses of dwarves. One of the characters opened the doors, and they had the druid go in under the guise of a Medium-sized spider. Discovering the spider, she tried to communicate with it, and trick it into thinking that there was a threat just outside. A few Bluff and Nature checks later, the druid was able to distract it long enough for the ranger and cleric to take a few pot-shots at it.

The highlight of the combat was when the druid used pounce to latch onto its face and pull it off of the ceiling, and then the ranger made a very nice grab and bull rush checks to slam in onto a ballista, which the cleric used to launch it off of the ramparts, taking a total of, “enough damage to say it died without bothering to roll.”

That was the first instance of the session where I had to make up rules on the fly. How much damage does a ballista do? I dunno, 3d8 plus Intelligence modifier? How do I resolve the attack?  Make a level plus Intelligence modifier attack. I didnt want to make it just deal a shitload of damage, for fear the party would try and lug them around and potentially backstab shit with them. So, going off of damage that ogres can dole out with boulders, I think it was a nice benchmark that made it worthwhile. Anyway, it wasn’t the bolt that killed the spider, but the push effect that knocked it over the edge. A fairly easy kill, but all those nice rolls (including the use of memory of a thousand lifetimes)…fuck it. It was awesome.

The second moment came when the party decided to look for hidden passages into Cindervault so that they could avoid taking the door. I thought, sure, fuck it, give me a roll. After a Perception of 33 I was like, okay, you find a narrow crevasse that a halfling or gnome could safely get through. I figured that they could squeeze into it and that I could throw in some insect or vermin swarms to mix things up. Nope, not gonna happen: the druid used some level 10 daily that let her turn everyone into ferrets. Or rather, spider-ferrets (its D&D, animal combinations happen) and rapidly scurry through the opening.

And that was last night’s session. The players easily steamrolled my encounters through liberal use of bull rush, push-effects, and clever thinking. Easy XP, awesome session.

Adventure Tools Update

Adventure Tools got updated to include both all the content from Monster Manual 3 (including the block layout) as well as a slightly improved interface, by which I mean that the buttons are larger and have text along with the graphic. Everything else is basically the same, until you try to create and/or edit a monster. 

Powers are automatically ordered by either traits or its action-type (if you switch the action type while editing a power, it gets moved to the appropriate category). The power menus also got some changes to reflect how powers are now written. For example, if the power is an attack, there are buttons that let you cycle between the power’s hit, miss, and effect…effects. For damage, the drop-down menu has normal, limited use, and none options (limited use actually tells you by how much it is increasing the damage by), and there’s also an average damage field to calculate it for you.

Ultimately, most of the changes are just organizational. There’s a few extra fields here and there, which might confuse you for a sec but if you’ve used Monster Builder before then it won’t take long to get the hang of it. In the end you get a monster that follows the new layout conventions, and as a plus it automatically updates all the existing monsters to follow it as well. Here’s a comparison between the two blocks on one of my custom monsters.

Before…

…and after…

The block’s a bit longer, but narrower, and for me that’s good because it’ll fit better in column layouts in Microsoft Word (the old one fit snugly in two-columns, but not so much when in threes). Otherwise, I haven’t had a chance to try them out so I can’t say for sure if they are more efficient. They do look better organized, though. 

The Mind’s Eye Opened

This is one of the best articles on Dungeon I’ve seen in a long time. Its divided into three parts, providing advice on injecting psionic elements into your game and an entire psionic monster theme so that you can swap out powers on existing monsters to represent being fucked with by psionics and/or the Far Realm. It works out well even if you dont like psionics, as most games will still use aberrants and the monster theme is pretty damned extensive.

The first part focuses on various ways to introduce psionic stuff into your game, from running a one-shot to see how your players like it to saying fuck-all to continuity and allowing immediate retraining of MC powers. Personally, I would probably have players retrain feats or let them pick up “psionic talents”. Talents are just a flavor-word for boons, and using legendary boons is an excellent way to give characters access to psionic powers without being too overt, and can easily be threaded into the narrative by writing it off as exposure to reality warping energies. Kind of like mutations, just psionic instead of radioactive. There are five featured in the article, with a broad level range and encounter item power built into each that can only be used with un-augmented at-will attacks.

The lion’s share of the article, however, is the Far Realm Mutant Theme. It works off of rules presented in DMG2, which does a good job of allowing you to reflavor monsters somewhat without making entire monsters from scratch that are just other monsters with a twist. There are eleven individual powers, divided into attack and utility powers.

• Grasping tentacle is a given. The monster can grab a target and each turn they remain grabbed they take automatic damage. It deals no damage by itself, but there’s a penalty to escape attempts. Very nice.
• Secret face causes a monster to peel apart when bloodied, pushing enemies back and causing them to grant combat advantage. The idea is similar in effect to all those latest Resident Evil games, when after you riddle a zombie with a shit-ton of bullets, causing a bunch of crazy shit to bust out of it and make your day a lot worse. I endorse this idea.
• Unpredictable mind causes a kind of psychic backlash whenever you hit it with something that deals psychic damage. In past editions I would fucking HATE this, so I’m really happy that psychic damage isnt relegated to just disciplines: it gives it a nice, wide blanket effect on classes.

Great article if you like psionic or aberrant shit. If you like both, then hey, bonus.