Tonight, we played through a Dungeon Crawl Classics Funnel session. The adventure? Sailors on the Starless Sea. The experience? Unforgettable. As in, I’ve now done it once, and I never want to do it again. Dungeon Crawl Classics is an old-school revival game that takes the silliest things of old-school play – the things that you probably didn’t experience and only heard about – and … Continue reading The Dungeon Crawl Classics Funnel
Here’s my advice to anyone wanting the players to really bond with the other non-player characters (NPCs) in the setting. Keep them around. Keep them interacting with the heroes. But pay attention to which NPCs the players enjoy interacting with. Those are the ones you want to keep. The other side of it: You need to enjoy running the NPC! It’s no good doing something … Continue reading Keep Your Non-Player Characters Around
The game of Dungeons & Dragons runs on rules. Something I expect the designers of the game to do is respect those rules. In this case, from Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk, they did not. In the original version of this room in The Lost Mine of Phandelver, there are two bandits. The revision, which keeps adding monsters to make it a more challenging … Continue reading I hate “Just handwave it”
We played our seventh session of Shadow of the Dragon Queen on Monday, July 3, 2023, proceeding through Chapter 5: The Northern Wastes. At the end of the last session, the party had rescued the young human Clystran from either drowning or being eaten by giant spiders (or both!) and were now taken by him to the town of Heart’s Hollow. At present, they had … Continue reading Shadow of the Dragon Queen, sesson 7
Our fifth session of Shadow of the Dragon Queen was played on Monday, June 26, 2023. The party consisted of: These events take place at the beginning of Chapter 5: The Northern Wastes. Kalaman was in uproar. Their council had been slaughtered by Lord Soth and his undead knights, and some magic of great significance stolen from the Catacombs. The heroes were summoned before Marshal … Continue reading Shadow of the Dragon Queen, session 6
My group is playing through Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk on every Monday evening. (I will get to finishing the Dragonlance reports, I promise – I just wanted to get this down while it was fresh). We are playing on Roll20 using D&D Beyond (Beyond20 integration). Skype for voice. Two players are quite experienced, the third, playing a sorcerer, not so much. An NPC … Continue reading Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk, session 1
An interesting thread on EN World posed this question: What is the best introductory D&D adventure? Here is my answer: Are you asking which is the best first adventure for a group of new players, or is the DM meant to be new as well? Because I have substantially different answers depending on that. For a new DM, stay far away from Keep on the … Continue reading Great Introductory D&D Adventures?
We played the fifth session of Shadow of the Dragon Queen on June 19th, 2023. These events occur during the latter portion of Chapter 4: Shadow of War. With the death of Qinh, his player rolled up a new human barbarian, Hrothkar, for the rest of the campaign. One of the real drawbacks of having only four characters is that you have much less room … Continue reading Shadow of the Dragon Queen, session 5
We played our fourth Shadow of the Dragon Queen session on June 12th, 2023. As you can see, I’m a little late getting to the report. This lateness will be a feature of the rest of these reports. As seen in our previous sessions, the Red Dragonarmy had laid waste to Vogler, a small town on the edge of the Waste, and was now getting … Continue reading Shadow of the Dragon Queen, Session 4
Our third session of Shadow of the Dragon Queen saw us start on Chapter 4, bringing the characters and refugees from Vogler to the great city of Kalaman. (I note that I am writing this report several months after the session. I’m just preparing for the final session of the campaign.) At least, it’s a great city for the villagers. Krynn is mostly devoid of … Continue reading Shadow of the Dragon Queen, session 3
