My Greyhawk campaign had a fairly successful session yesterday, with Martin’s new character (a druid) being the perfect new character for the adventure I’d planned: a delve into the cairn of an old druid leader.
We were operating out of Diamond Lake (yes, the Diamond Lake that the players had experienced from the Paizo’s Age of Worms adventure path), and I’ve introduced the character of Balabar Smenk, Junior, just to interact with them and give the players a reason to feel superior. Allustan is also making an appearance as local sage who can translate the old druidic runes – they’re in Primordial; I’ve got this theory that the really ancient runes are in Primordial, the more recent ones are in Elven.
There were three encounters in the cairn, each one of which I’d pulled together during the afternoon using the D&D Compendium. Boy, I love being able to copy and paste the monster stats! They were a combination of nature/elemental creatures and undead. One of the players made a comment about there being a lot of undead in a druid cairn. Great! There is a reason for it, which they’ll discover as they go deeper.
The funniest thing in the adventure was that I removed a secret door from my original plan as it led to the locked stairs to the next level when the keys were in another room. The PCs wandered right past the door and explored the rest of the complex. Heh. Secret or not, they didn’t pay attention to it.
My copies of BattleTech: Tactical Operations (bunches of optional rules) and Technical Readout: 3050 Upgrade have arrived. TO is *huge* – it’s slightly over 400 pages long, heavy glossy paper, and full colour. Catalyst Labs have been doing a good job with that line. The reason I wanted it took up one page – the ejection rules. However, Randy has been muttering about not being able to set the forest on fire in our last game, so he’ll be happy with the rules for that.
I’m more looking forward to Strategic Operations and – especially – Interstellar Operations, the last dealing with really big-scale commands (entire factions). Still, TO is a fun book.
Josh’s copy of PHB2 has also arrived, so he’ll get that tomorrow.
Otherwise, I played a couple of games of Combat Commander: Pacific with Randy on Thursday. Interesting games – both went heavily against me, as I just couldn’t deal with Randy’s Japs. I’m trying to teach myself the OCS game “Burma” at home, but the rulebook is slightly unclear, and the placement of certain tables on the map… which is very, very big, isn’t conducive to quick lookup.
Tomorrow I get to run another session of Pyramid of Shadows, which should clear out the bottom level. I guess we’ve got 3 sessions left of this adventure (and the heroic tier).