Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition: Looks like we're the grognards, now.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition: Looks like we're the grognards, now.

Drake_263: Mar 31, 2010

Hokay, so, I got roped into GMing some Dungeons and dragons for a group at the local gaming club. I picked 4th edition because I'm the most familiar with that and 3.5 and let's face it, 3.ANYTHING is a pain in the neck to teach to players unfamiliar with the system.. and out of the four players I currently have, three qualify. (Trying to hunt for a fith, I have a few weeks to get everything built up.) Since most of the players are new to the system I'm running PHB1 only - not out of grognardism, I love having more options, but I don't want to overwhelm the newbies. If they end up enjoying the game and want to later branch out, I'll be all up for the idea.

I decided to build my own adventure/campaign since I've had some ideas for ages and all the pre-made adventures I've found are, well, the quality's come up before.

quote:

Brief Synopsis: The PCs are traveling with a merchant caravan to Glimwall, a small mountainside mining village. On arrival, they find the town surrounded by camps of belligerent Orcs - and the town itself ravaged by a plague that's tainted their water supply. The PCs will have to descend into the depths of the silver mine the town was named for and neutralize the source of the plague in order to save Glimwall.

The adventure's going to be divided roughly into three separate sections, each with its own themes and challenges.

quote:

Part the first: Glimwall and its environs.

This will be essentially the intro sequence for the adventure - I'll start the group out in the caravan on the last leg of its journey Glimwall. (Sidenote, I'm going to basically tell each of the players to make me up a reason why their character would be going to Glimwall and tweak things accordingly - I'm all for letting the players build the story with me, so if one of them happens to have a reclusive minor nobleman for a cousin who lives there, gently caress, a little manor there will be! The more engaged they are, the better.)

A strange, thick, sickly-sweet-smelling fog has risen with the dawn, making it hard to navigate - it's going to be slow going, but the caravan can follow along the road easily enough. This is basically a little period for roleplaying, a moment to get things established, until suddenly the fog fades away, revealing the town gates dead ahead - and a multitude of Orcish camps to both sides, who look just as surprised to see the caravan there as they are!

This will be the first combat encounter of the adventure - bands of more excitable warriors will separate from the camps, intent on looting the caravan. The players are going to have to fight off the Orcs and protect the caravan during their mad dash for safety - the gate guards are going to open the gates to let them pass once they get close enough. If things get TOO hairy I'll give the players some ranged support via crossbows from the gate ramparts, too. I'm aiming for a tense encounter, slowly opening gates on one side, hordes or advancing Orcs on the other, so by the time they reach safety their blood will be pumping.

Once they reach the town interior, I'm going to let them have a breather - there'll be a few places of interest in the town actual, but the biggest is going to be the temple of Moradin. With the town besieged, it's probably the safest place to be - the vast majority of the women and children in the town are holed up in there. This is where the party's going to meat Gregor the warpriest, in temporary command of the guard (basically the main quest giver, if you will). From Gregor and the other townsfolk, they can get a more clear picture of the situation:

*It's been roughly a week since the orcs arrived - Brand, the guard captain, ordered the gates shut against them. So far they haven't massed for a single big attack yet, but every now and then a group of warriors manages to fire itself up enough to try an attack on the gates. So far they've managed to hold, but each time there's a little more Orcs and a few less guards on the walls.

(Orcs in this setting are less 'dumb brutes' and more 'noble savages' and more diplomatically minded PCs might try to negotiate with the them - in fact, each grayskin tribe has its own little warcamp, and characters who play their cards right can get an audience with the shaman of one of the less hotheaded camps. Each camp is lead by a shaman, following his visions - they're on the trail of a fallen shaman gone mad, marked for death by the spirits, and the trail leads through Glimwall. It's possible for the players to convince some of the shamans to wait for a little longer, playing time for the town, though of course some of the tribes are less interested in waiting.)

*The town gets its water from a well fed by an underground stream - and a few days after the Orc warcamps arrived, the water went bad. It's tainted with a vicious disease of some sort - the afflicted are crippled with a rising fever. Those who aren't incapacitated by the fever go slowly blind - Gregor and the other clerics in town do their best to purify the water and curb the disease, but there's only so much they can do. They're running low on clean water - and just as importantly they're also running low on powdered silver, a primary material in the sacred oils and incenses they need for healing and purification rituals.

*Glimwall is basically built around a trading post for caravans and miner housing - but they haven't had contact with the mine in a while. Guards who volunteered to scout back the trail to the mine haven't returned, and now there's few enough guards to defend the town - they can't spare a whole squad to try for the mines, but accessing the stores of silver ore would let them hold for a little more.

*Gregor himself is an ex-mercenary warpriest, now retired to be the ranking cleric in Moradin's temple. (Why isn't this godlike GMPC (sarcasm!) taking care of the issue himself? He's retired, he's needed to direct the guard - and most importantly his wife is among the women and children in the temple, nine months pregnant with their first child. If it wasn't for her he'd hit the mines by himself if need be, but now he's torn between his duties to the town and his family.) He's going to do his best to persuade the party to go explore the mines and retrieve them silver, and besides actually joining the party he'll do everything in his power to help them out.

Getting up to the mine itself is going to be the rest of part 1 - it's not a long trip, but long enough for the party to be possibly ambushed by wild animals or the random Orc patrol. The main point, however, will be reaching..

quote:

Part the Second: Upper Mines

The mines, the players will find, are empty - there's signs of struggle, scattered equipment, splatters of blood, but of the miners themselves there's simply no sign. What they will find, however, is the occasional cave-dwelling creature - and traps. Traps in a mine, why the hell? Because there's a complication - namely, a tribe of kobolds. A little less than a week ago, a tribe of kobolds tunneled by accident into the upper mine - and finding the place abandoned, they set up shop. A tunnel collapse, however, shut them off from their original warren - and now they're trapped between angry orcs outside and what waits in the lower mines. To make things worse, the blinding disease is spreading among them, too. Shortly put, they're backed into a corner, trapped and desperate - they've fortified themselves up into the upper mine with all the nasty tricks they can come up with. The players can either negotiate with them (I'll drop a few hooks for this into the sections before they reach the main camp) or they can fight their way through them. It is, in fact, possible for them to negotiate a treaty between the kobolds and Glimwall - kobolds are an industrious species, afterall, and they'd be happy to run the mine by themselves.

quote:

Part the Three: Lower Mines, Where the Plot gets Back on Track

Part one had a main theme of Orcs for enemies. Part two was Traps and Kobolds. Part three? Zombies.

The lower mines have been taken over by none other but the insane shaman mentioned in part 1. Driven mad by visions of doom, he fell into dealing with spirits of disease, death and decay and was exiled from his tribe for it. Lead by his visions, he managed to sneak into the mines, overwhelming the miners with his magic and undead minions. Now, he has set himself up a plague altar in the depths of the mine, attended by rotting Orcs, miners and kobolds - it's the presence of this altar that has tainted the stream that feeds Glimwall's wells. The party's going to have to fight its way through his plague-ridden minions, into a final battle with the shaman himself - slaying him and destroying the altar will cleanse the stream, and once the town has access to pure water they'll be able to recover from the plague if given enough time. Meanwhile, bringing the orcs proof of the fallen shaman's death will satisfy most of the tribe shamans, sending them off.

At the end of the adventure the players will have, hopefully, netted themselves a handy contact (Gregor will be extemely thankful and will make for a convenient ally when it comes to getting certain rituals performed or equipment crafted), the thankfulness of the entire town, some good loot and their first taste of feeling like big drat heroes. Of course, in due time they'll be haunted by the mad shaman's last words - that the deaths he was bringing were a mercy compared to the future..

# ¿ Feb 14, 2014 14:37

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 00:06

Drake_263: Mar 31, 2010

Iiii have been so long out of the loop with DnD, I don't even know Essentials, to be perfectly honest!

# ¿ Feb 14, 2014 15:53

Drake_263: Mar 31, 2010

It occurs to me that I intend on using Orcs as opponents for a first-level party, but all the books I have at hand (MM1-3, Monster Vault) have orcs statted as lv3-6-is foes. Looks like I'm going to have to get creative and make up some weaker orcs.. and gently caress the MM1 'bloodied -> healing surge' ability, that's just more hit points, the free attack when killed sounds more interesting. I'll just explain it away that the lv1-2 orcs are hotheaded, young and eager warriors, while their bigger buddies just have had more time to learn on account of not pouncing random PCs :p

# ¿ Feb 15, 2014 21:39

Drake_263: Mar 31, 2010

Thank you both - I don't have access to DDI so I'll do it by hand. I'll just swap the bloodied-healing-surge power for the standard-action-when-killed one and lower their stats accordingly. I'm not averse to fudging things up a little so if they turn out to be too powerful for the party I'll just have a couple guards at the gates start taking potshots at the orcs. Or add in more orcs if they turn out too easy.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2014 22:31

Drake_263: Mar 31, 2010

Rexides posted:

By the way, this is either out of date, or misleading. The defenses section is correct, but the "24"s that are mentioned in the HP refer to level 1 monsters, not level 0 (like the starting defenses). It shouldn't matter for higher levels, but one extra swing to take down a level 1 monster could make a big difference in an encounter with 5 of them.

So hang on, let me get this straight. To build MM3 style monsters that aren't long buring unfun slogs, I'll want to make sure:

1: Their basic stats roughly comform to the list on the top, increasing by 1 per each level of the monster;

2: For monsters cribbed from MM1/2, I'll
-increase the average damage done by a monster swing by ~25-50%
-increase damage done by brute-type monsters by another 25%
-reduce the damage done my monsters with Aoe effects by ~25%
-halve the damage inflicted by minions
-double the hit points on elites, quadruple them on solos

3: For monsters I'm creating from scratch, use the HP and AC bonus by role table?

For the record, I've mainly DMed 3.5 before so it feels kind of weird to not build huge 3.whatever-type statblocks. Liberating, but weird.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2014 00:18

Drake_263: Mar 31, 2010

Alrighty, that makes more sense. Thanks for clearing that out - lucky I have at least a few weeks to get things prepared before the first actual game session!

# ¿ Feb 16, 2014 10:38

Drake_263: Mar 31, 2010

My party composition is going to be INTERESTING - one of the players I had considered dropping out so I persuaded a different friend to play.. and then the player who was waffling decided to join, after all, so now I have six players. As all roles in the party were already filled (two strikers, one of each other) I told her to pick anything she wanted in the PHB.. and she went with a second wizard. Looks like I'm going to be loading up on minions for most fights!

# ¿ Mar 11, 2014 12:22

Drake_263: Mar 31, 2010

Well, that problem was solved. We had the final setup session tonight (finishing up characters, bouncing story concepts, all that) and the player of the original wizard ended up convincing the other player to play something easier - so now she's playing Puck the Fey-pact halfling Warlock. Already had one warlock in the group but he's Star Pact and they're rather different personality- and theme-wise, too, so it should work out. So now they have 3 strikers (fey pact warlock, star pact warlock, and a rogue), one controller (wizard), one defender (a paladin) and a leader (support cleric) - this should make things a little easier.

Meanwhile the original wizard is now named Ginharia Widhad (Say it out loud fast), and random table conversation involved things like using a couple castings of Tenser's Floating Disc to pull their wagon, later replacing the wheels entirely by permanenced Floating Disc effects, even later mounting what essentially boils down to a quintessence-powered ramjet engine into the rear of it, then finally mounting a pair of open bags of holding in designated crumple zones within said wagon to turn it into a mystical vortex warhead to kill gigantic dragons with..

We haven't gotten to actually play yet, yrt the jokes are flying and we're having a lot of fun. I have a good feeling about this!

# ¿ Mar 11, 2014 20:56

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 00:06

Drake_263: Mar 31, 2010

I must have some hidden sadistic tendencies. I'm designing some lowbie encounters for my adventure - the basic idea for this segment is that the party's going to explore an abandoned silver mine, in search of silver dust to save a town from a plague. The complication is, of course, that the mines aren't occupied - case in point, there's a kobold tribe living in the upper mines. They've been infected by the plague, too, and to make things harder, a hive of kruthiks recently breached the mines - so the kobolds are now caught between kruthiks in the upper mines and zombies in the lower mines. Predictably, they've fortified the hell out of their domain - I'm going to scatter simple pitfall and rockslide traps into the encounters to drive the point home, and the crown jewel..

3 wasp swarms (rat swarm with flight speed, lv1 skirmisher, 100xp) = 300xp
1 rock slide trap (lv1 lurker trap, 100xp) = 100xp
2 false floor traps (lv1 Warder trap, 100xp) = 200xp
Total 600 xp (This is a lv1 encounter for a party of six, to tweak it down for 5 players remove one bee swarm)

The idea is that the party's exploring the mines, and happens into a slightly larger chamber, a crossroads of sorts. One of the forks from the tunnel leads upwards at a fairly smooth angle - this is the trapped tunnel. Tripping a hidden tripwire fires the trap - and sets off a bunch of rocks sliding down from the upper end of the tunnel, frontmost being an Indiana Jones-type big freaking boulder rolling at high speed at them. (Before the trap fires, a character may hear a faint humming noise from up ahead - and one making a good Spot check may notice something funny about the lead boulder, namely that the thing looks to be made out of paper mache..)

On impact (whether the wall at the larger room or a character who fails to run for it) the boulder bursts apart - and proves itself to be an obscenely big wasp hive. The wasps, predictably, are pissed to high hell and proceed to swarm the characters, while the aftereffects of the rockslide are still going on around them. The characters now have to contend with clouds of angry wasps, hampered by difficult terrain from the rockslide - and the fact that the kobolds of course have set a couple of pitfall traps in the room the characters are likely to flee back to..

# ¿ May 6, 2014 11:49

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition: Looks like we're the grognards, now.