This week saw the lowest turn-out since this season began, primarily due to a rather major convention (PAX) being run down in Melbourne, as well as illnesses afflicting several players. We had only 25 players – I expect numbers to rebound next week significantly. My own table continued to accompany the caravan north towards Waterdeep. I’ve cut out a lot of the intervening space – … Continue reading Hoard of the Dragon Queen, session 10
This session saw the characters proceeding northwards with the caravan, spending a day in Daggerford, and ingratiating themselves with the cultists. I had a full table this week, with seven players and myself as DM. All in all, we had slightly above 30 players participating this week at Good Games Ballarat. My session focused a little more on role-playing and story this time around. I … Continue reading Hoard of the Dragon Queen, session 9
There’s a lot of creativity required from the Dungeon Master when running this stage of the adventure, which is aided by preparation. I’ve been a bit distracted of late, so I haven’t been able to prepare as much as I really should be doing. Thus, for this session, I kept things fairly simple as the adventurers continued to accompany the cultist’s wagon up the Sword … Continue reading Hoard of the Dragon Queen, session 8
With this session, my group left the safe harbours of the D&D Encounters program and wandered into the murky waters of Casual play. All of which means that I’ve stopped ignoring the pacing guidelines of the D&D Encounters version of Hoard (which would have had us going for a few more weeks in any case), and are now working from the adventure text directly. And … Continue reading Hoard of the Dragon Queen, session 7
We had our lowest attendance for D&D Encounters this week – a mere 30 players – although I expect numbers will rebound somewhat next week as several players return from birthday parties and the like. We were also missing two Dungeon Masters – as it happened, from the tables who were missing most of the players – so we merged those two tables and Sam … Continue reading D&D Encounters – Hoard of the Dragon Queen, session 6
This was the first session where we split the Encounters groups so that five of the groups played at 5.30 pm, and the final group played at 7.30 pm. It worked pretty well, and Kris was glad to be able to hear his DM in the later session. Overall, we were a little down on numbers, but that still meant there were 36 people participating. … Continue reading D&D Encounters – Hoard of the Dragon Queen, session 5
The fifth session of Lost Mine was a fairly short session, delayed as we waited for people to return from dinner, and it was spent entirely in the confines of Cragmaw Castle as the group went through two rather big battles that used a lot of the battlemat. By the end of it, the party were rather hurt, but there were a lot of dead … Continue reading Lost Mine of Phandelver – Saturday session 5
Our numbers were slightly down this week from our all-time high of last week, but – at 36 players – it was still the second highest turnout in our store! It wasn’t as simple as six people couldn’t make it, though, as a couple of players who missed last week were here for this session. The fluctuating player base is one of the reasons that … Continue reading D&D Encounters: Hoard of the Dragon Queen, session 3
Our latest session of the Friday campaign saw us continuing through Lost Mine of Phandelver. We’d ended the previous session with the group starting their explorations of Cragmaw Castle; this session saw them conclude their explorations. Harbek, Martin’s dwarf fighter, could hear movement to the south through a small passage the goblins had made through the rubble. He set up guard near the doorway to … Continue reading Goblins of the Lost Mine (Friday session 4)
Most of the Starter Kit scenarios that Michael and I have been playing are quite short, although the later SK3 scenarios with tanks are taking us longer to resolve. However, this scenario, the second-last scenario in Starter Kit #3, took us a much longer time to play through: almost 5 hours in total, split between two Friday afternoons. (I recorded the location of all the … Continue reading Advanced Squad Leader report: S26 Last Ally, Last Victory
