Jeremy Mac Donald's page

So I ended up in a debate with my players on a corner case ruling in my 4E game last session which turned into something of a debate on 4E versus 5E and what rules light meant. I was searching for an example of 5E being a rules light game and it was difficult - because I have not read 5E. I came up with rules for being swallowed whole and contended that this was likely an example of something that the rules would cover in 3.5 as well as 4E but was more likely to be something that the DM would adjudicate in 5E.

Of course that got me wondering if it was actually true - are there any rules for being swallowed whole in 5E?

I've been toying with the idea of getting a cartographer to create a more professional looking map of my campaign world done in a style I saw over at the Cartographer's Guild and have been wondering what the ball park is for how much that would cost.

Not actually what I want but I think a comparable project would be along the lines of 'take the D&D known world (Mysteria I believe) and redo it in a different artistic style'.

Any idea's on what a cartographer might charge for a project like that?

So I'm always looking for good ideas for encounters. 4E's combat can take quite a bit of time and its important to make sure that the battles are interesting. So I'm interested in people describing some of their favourite encounters and what made them so great. That way we might be able to steal some good ideas off each other.

One of my favourites was from Bordin's Watch (I think - I was a player).

The premise of the encounter is that Orcs are attacking through the sewers(?) and the PCs need to get to this mechanism in this room to close off the sewers and then escape.

The room was large with a ramp that ran around edges slowly climbing higher as it circled the room. There was a kind of tower in the middle of the room that could be reached easily from the ramp but only near the top. There where entrances into the room leading onto the ramps every 40 feet or so. The room had some powerful Orc baddies but their real problem was a constant influx of Orc minions into the room. The result was a desperate race toward the tower so we could perform the skill challenge necessary to close the grates and stop the constant influx of Orcs.

This created a series of interesting choices for the group on who would cover the rear, how we where going to fight our way forward and eventually a gambit where we sent the rogue to climb up the tower to start on the skill challenge and we just hoped we could fight pour way to his relief in time.

200 years ago today the United States declared war on Great Britain initiating the War of 1812. While not particularly well remembered in the United States it was a seminal event in Canadian History.

Ironically without the U.S. declaration of war Canada would have likely been absorbed into the United States somewhere along the way mainly because it would likely have been jammed full of Americans. Even in the years leading up to the war recent American immigrants where the largest 'ethnic' group in Canada outnumbering French Canadians and British Canadians and there is little reason to think that this demographic trend would have ceased without the war.

What the War 1812 did most for Canada was provide a wellspring of myths and legends, which are fundamentally what nation states are built on that would pretty much tide the nation over until the 20th century when rising clout in world affairs (and Lord Stanly's Cup) would provide new myths and legends for the nation.

Most importantly it turned all of the Americans living in Canada into Canadians. Its a little known fact that the Americans where able to raise roughly as many militia in Canada as the British where, an impressive feat considering that at least when things started the British controlled the territory. By wars end pretty much every new Canadian that had originally identified more with their America roots and figures like Paul Revere would now swear on his mothers grave that he was there in the redoubt with 7 other guys while they held off 400 Yankees. When peace was concluded there where no Americans in Canada...every last one of them had apparently descended from Empire Loyalists...

So I'm back in the DMs chair with my main group and busily prepping for my next campaign. Going to talk about it on this thread. Now most campaign threads belong in a different section of the boards but my purpose here is not to talk about what happens in my campaign so much as to talk about 4E based on the the types of things that come to my attention while prepping and playing in this campaign. I do a lot of conversions of adventures from older editions so there is likely a lot of focus on elements of converting adventures to 4E.

I've decided to start my campaign off with with Tim and Eileen Conners Escape From Meenlock Prison and I'm about halfway through that conversion at this point. I'll delve into my thoughts on converting this adventure in my next post.

SO my Death Cleric has returned to his Goddess due to a rather sudden switch from our DM playing soft ball to playing hard ball with the group.

Something I applauded in the abstract but maybe slightly less so when its my character getting ganked.

In any case I'm now trying to come up with some kind of a build and am thinking of a hard bitten mercenary, she'll be ugly as sin with an attitude to match.

Mechanically I'm looking for a build that works around loading a crossbow with munitions that blow up real good and maybe throwing bombs and such.

I'm mid Paragon so there is no real significant restrictions to 'realizing' the build. However since I generally play a single character until dead and am not really one to create builds just for fun I'm hoping the forum goers here can help with some ideas on how to realize a build like this as I'm not really sure where to start. I'm vaguely thinking Ranger/Artificer Hybrid but not sure if that works out.

Honestly not sure how I feel about this. I really respect Monte Cook but I'm not at all sure I want to go where he may lead.

And Now for Some Exciting News

It's funny to look back and realize that I've written this column once a week for over eight months. Alas, as with all things, it's time for my involvement with this column to end. However, that does not mean that Legends & Lore is going away. We've been very happy with the response to the series, the interest it has created, and the feedback we've received.

Starting next week, I'm turning this column over to acclaimed game designer Monte Cook. Monte should be familiar to D&D fans for his work on the Planescape campaign setting, Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, Arcana Unearthed, the mammoth Ptolus city sourcebook, and, of course, Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition.

I've spent the past several months talking about D&D's past and how that relates to its future. It's now time to focus much more on the future of the game. Monte has an unmatched design pedigree in the RPG field, and for that reason we've brought him on board to work with R&D in making D&D the greatest RPG the world has seen. Over the next few weeks, Monte will use this column to share his thoughts about the game. As we look to chart D&D's future course, this column will continue to be a place where we share our ideas and listen to yours, and we hope you'll keep reading, discussing the contents, and sharing your feedback and thoughts with us and the larger D&D community. That's what makes Legends & Lore a conversation that we can all participate in.

So I see that the new Lair Assault program is just about to kick off.

This actually looks pretty interesting to me. I'm not usually an 'in store' type player because I can't stand the weak role playing element but this might not be so bad. Kind of like playing a complex 4E based version of Descent.

Interested in the 'repeat if you all die' element.

When I'm DMing I don't really face any problems because my newbs are not really able to break any part of the game and I find myself subtly encouraging them to use stunts.

The real problem that has come up recently in the game I am a player in. Here we have a mix of players - some of which are pretty heavy optimizers, others not so much. At lower levels the DM seemed to encourage stunts but he is heavily toning back on that.

The main issue would seem to be the Charging Thief. The problem is that the only real weakness of the Charging Thief is that it is sometimes difficult to handle enemies that are flying or have tactically difficult to reach positions. However the nature of a Charging Thief is such that it comes with acrobatics more or less maxed out. Thus what we have begun to see as we move toward mid paragon is a situation where, if we are engaged with a Dragon say, the Charging Thief will counter the dragons advantage by readying an action to charge and then wait for the dragon to come flying into range. She then runs up convenient wall (or ship masts etc.) and uses a stunt to push off from the wall and fling herself across to the dragon, stab it and then fall, using acrobatics to make any falling damage pretty trivial. I believe there is a magic item involved that gives the Charging Thief a climb speed which is how she gets part way up the walls so easily.

Of course at this point what we are really seeing is not exactly a stunt any more...if this is how you handle everything that flies then your not exactly using a stunt any more - if we define a stunt as an improvised manoeuvre then having it become routine makes it not really a stunt. Its no longer an ad hoc action hero move but something more common. Maybe none to surprisingly the DM is coming down with heavy restrictions on such routine use of stunts to negate flying opponents.

If the Charging Thief were the only character effected everything might end right there...but the group also has a very manoeuvrable monk who's schtick seems to be to do cool stuff, because the character is not particularly optimized his stunts where never a problem...but, with the DM laying down the law he has become one frustrated gamer since, for him, all of a sudden the game hates his character and he can't seem to do what he historically could.

I'm curious how other 4E DMs handle stunts in general and how you might deal with this issue in particular. I did a search over on the WotC site but stunts don't seem to have gotten much discussion and I have not really seen anything that insightful regarding this issue.

This is an idea for a Paizo product I would be interested in. I love Paizo's art and art direction and find myself scanning material from the APs I own or swiping something from the blog to use as a handout reasonably often. Still that means searching for a picture through the blog and there is a lot of artwork that Paizo has that I don't ever get to see, mainly because the product in question is not one I have bought.

The product I would like to see would be a PDF compilations of Paizo artwork that I could buy. Presumably always older material (say artwork that came out in products at least 18 months ago).

For anyone who has not seen this, check it out.

Roll a D6

Loved the video and, on a good night, this is what its all about - the DM and the players buying into the game and having a good time.

From a comment made on a recently locked thread.

Probably the least favorite thing about the system to me is skill challenges, which feel poorly structured and ill-explained; the scenarios skill challenges describe are, to me, the most fun sequences to role play, and telling players, "You can use these skills X times, and you need Y successes before Z failures" makes a story element far more mechanical than it should be. (Of course, I'm new to running this system, so maybe I'm just Doing It Wrong.)

Two quick tips that will help significantly here.

Don't tell the players that they are now in a Skill Challenge and don't get to bent out of shape trying to get everyone involved by asking them what they are doing or telling them which skills to use. Just tell them the situation they are in and let them tell you what they are going to do...then ask for rolls. The best skill challenges don't involve the DM leading the action, let the players lead the action.

There is a lot more after this, and even here there are exceptions where going against my advice is actually a better plan, but start here and you should see a significant improvement right from the get go.

Got this from a paper from www.thirdway.org and thought it interesting enough to share.

Its basically a reciept, like in a grocery store but for the median US taxpayer. For those not familiar with statistics median is the middle - so half of Americans paid more then this and half of Americans paid less. Its like the more common mean (usually just called the average) but is used when you want to eliminate extremes. So the average American makes much more then this but that average is driven up by a small but significant number of people making truly obscene amounts of money.

-----------

Bill and provides them the exact contribution they made towards twenty to thirty budget items of interest.

Below is an example of what a receipt might look like for a typical taxpayer with a 2009 U.S. median income of $34,140, who paid $5,400 in federal income tax and FICA. It is very easy to generate and extremely informative to taxpayers.

What You Paid For
2009 tax receipt for a taxpayer earning $34,140 and paying $5,400 in federal income tax and FICA (selected items)

Social Security..................................$1,040.70
Medicare.........................................$625.51
Medicaid.........................................$385.28
Interest on the National Debt....................$287.03
Combat Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan........$229.17
Military Personnel...............................$192.79
Veteran’s Benefits...............................$74.65
Federal Highways.................................$63.89
Health care research (NIH).......................$46.54
Foreign Aid......................................$46.08
Education Funding for Low Income K-12 Students...$38.17
Military Retirement Benefits.....................$32.60
Pell Grants for Low Income College Students......$29.75
NASA Space Program...............................$28.09
Internal Revenue Service.........................$17.69
Environmental Clean Up (EPA).....................$11.67
The FBI..........................................$11.21
Head Start.......................................$10.91
Public Housing...................................$10.50
National Parks...................................$4.27
Drug Enforcement Agency..........................$3.14
Amtrak...........................................$2.23
Smithsonian Museum...............................$1.12
Funding for the Arts.............................$0.24
Salaries and benefits for members of Congress....$0.19

Thread title kind of covers the gist of my idea.

I've started to find that I often have a tough time keeping track of who is who. Not sure how feasible it is or even if it'd be the kind of thing that the rest of the readership would find useful. I'd personally be interested in seeing something like this included, maybe in the 6th installment of an AP and have it include a brief description as well as the first place (or all instances would even be better) the listed person or place makes an appearance in the AP.

I've noticed that 4E seems to have something of a dearth of dead PCs. It kind of seems as if there are only two real states for a party to be in. Either everyone makes it (though it may have been close there for a bit) or there is a TPK or something close to a TPK.

This actually came up for me when we got into a debate among the players in my group on changing characters. One of the players opinioned that changing characters was fine but at least try and go out with a 'heroic death'.

I jumped in with "don't do that - you'll get us all killed'. I'm pretty sure its basically true as well. Pretty much there is enough healing in the party to access something close to every surge the our characters have, hence the probability of a character actually staying down seems remote unless the whole group is basically tapped on healing surges. Even in that case its improbable that some one would not stabilize the character - heck just being within 5 squares of my worshiper of the Raven Queen means +5 to death saves (Harbringer of Rebirth feat). In effect I have no doubt that the DM could pretty easily make an encounter too hard for us to beat but I'm not sure he can make an encounter that we beat but loose a comrade in the process.

Things seem to have gotten to the point where we are 'unkillable' simply because I'm near certain that the DM is going to move heaven and earth not to have a full on TPK - I know that when I was acting the role of 'killer DM' in 3.5 I had no compunction against killing a character but I'd not do a whole party wipe, TPKs are extremely disruptive to the campaign while the odd dead comrade adds to the role playing and allows a certain amount of 'new' to the party dynamic as well as keeping the players on their toes.

There appears to be no middle ground between everyone lives and pretty much everyone dies. I can think of maybe some corner case situations, mainly involving a player going down while the (slow) monsters have driven the party back - at which point we evaluate the situation and decide to flee - the monsters being slow can't catch us and we run off. But this somewhat improbable as a lot of factors have to be in place for this to even be a possibility.

The obvious way out of this is liberal use, by the DM, of coup de grace. But I really see some issues with that activity. In fact I'd not be surprised to find that the single most common house rule in 4E was 'Monsters don't coup de grace'. In effect all monsters leave downed characters alone. No surprise to me that this is generally the case. Unless the DM is always having the monsters kill downed characters we have moved into the realm of the DM playing favorites. A situation where the DM decides essentially which PCs get to stick around and which will be offed. Almost all DMs avoid getting into this space if at all possible as its one hell of a tightrope to walk - much easier to just let the dice decide peoples fates then to be activly choosing whether or not to kill a character.

Part of the issue here is that, if the DM does go with coup de grace's its basically always lethal. Fairly few characters can survive even a single hit by a monster after they have gone into negatives. Certainly having monsters always hit downed characters would return the lethality but now we potentially get a game that's even more lethal then the famed meat grinder that was 3.5 simply because 3.5 parties had access to a ton of magical resources that could act as a get out of jail free card for a comrade in real danger. Magic of this power is just not usually on hand for a 4E party.

The whole thing has left me with something of a conundrum both as a player and as a DM. As a player myself and my group are getting angsy with the lack of real threat. I know some of the other players are complaining to the DM that we never feel like we are really in danger and its effecting the tension level at the table and therefore the level of fun - especially in a combat heavy campaign as one gets with Scales of War.

I've noticed the issue as well as a DM in my newbs campaign. So far I'm fine because my players have not clued into the issue and still think they are in constant danger of some one dying. But I can't actually see how I could kill one of them without either slaughtering them all or arbitrary choosing to perform a coup de grace on one of them when they went down...which just seems to be unfair and unfun.

Just stuff I noticed while working on my Age of Worms conversion and was curios if anyone has answers too.

#1: Is there any actual purpose for the ability scores on the monsters? What the heck are the pluses and minuses after the ability scores? Do these actually follow any kind of a pattern at all? The Dire Boar I just finished adding to my adventure has Chr 8(+2) - seems real odd.

#2: How the heck do you assign an encounter an encounter level? Particularly if the encounter is non-standard. For example 'Beast' in Three Faces of Evil is a single Dire Boar. Chances are he'll be released during a larger fight and will become part of that encounter but that is not a sure thing, if the PCs stop him from being released then they may encounter him all alone. If so I'm dealing with a single creature worth 250 XP. How do I work out what a single Dire Boars Encounter Level is? Does the fact that I'm designing for 4 players change this number vis a vis designing for 5 (or some other number) players?

Not sure if I'm just somehow overlooking this - are there any caltrops in 4E? If so could I get a book and page number.

I've become enamored with the special one use terrains in DMG2 and am thinking about glass cabinets and such that could be shattered in the midst of combat covering the ground with broken glass. Thinking of looking at caltrops for idea's on how I might implement this.

As an example of my problem I've just read over the final encounter in Whispering Cairn. Some air elemental dukes will fight the players in a circular chamber. This actually has a few points in its favour - circles are good and there is a drop to add some excitement but its not really very exciting for the BBEG fight of the module.

So I was part of a great session last Wednesday except for the heated fight over treasure parcels. Essentially the table breaks down into two groups with half the players thinking that asking for your own magic gear is great and the other half considering to be deeply lame.

Both sides, of course, have their points. In fact we could probably ad a little half paragraph top the end of the different types of players list in the DMG that covers whether or not players of that type want to pick out their own loot or would rather find unique loot. I bet explorers want to be surprised while planners want to know in advance whats coming.

In any case what got me really interested was one of the justifications for picking ones own loot. Essentially the argument goes that 4E is designed for wish lists and if the DM were to devise some kind of a random system then the characters would soon be underpowered for their level.

I'm curious as to what extent the posters here agree or disagree with this.

So I just came home with Civilization IV Complete - I'm so excited I really loved II and III.

Thing is it just loaded 4 different games onto my system when it installed and I'm confused. I understand that Colonization is really a completely different game and needs to be loaded separately but what about original Civ IV vs. Warlords vs. Beyond the Sword?

From reading reviews of these games its unclear if Warlords and Beyond the Sword are fundamentally different games then basic Civ IV or if they are just expansions with extra units and more cool stuff.

If its just extra units and more cool stuff it would make sense to just play the latest of the three (Beyond the Sword) but if they are more like tweaks to the basic game to give one a different play experience then presumably I should Civ IV basic until I'm ready for a tweaked version.

I'm honestly stumped on which version to play!

I'm prepping a game for neophytes and near neophytes and, after some consideration, I've decided that 4E's character building segment is simple enough that I will allow the players to make their own characters for their first session. It'll take a while with Neophytes but its pretty core to the D&D experience and three or four hours on that won't necessarily be a waste of time.

That said I'm interested in suggestions on how to most easily bring the players up to speed on this sort of thing. I can't use the character builder, at least initially, because only one player can look at the character builder at a time and its likely easier to cover the basic game concepts by instead putting blank character sheets in front of the players and having them each go through the various steps at the same time in a group.

While I'm definitely open to ideas on how to best handle aspects of this one of the things that immediately strikes me as a useful tool would be a list of classes broken down by character role (defender, leader etc.) and a list of which races work best with each class.

The idea is to speed up the part where the players choose their class and race. I know I'll limit the characters to just a single defender and force 50% of the group to choose strikers (to avoid the dreaded Grind) hence a list that clearly notes which role each class fulfills would be useful and help new players shorten their choices down from what really is something of a plethora of options to something a little easier.

Beyond that it'd be convent to have a list of what races are good with what classes, again to avoid the problem where new players are drowned in too much choice and become lost and confused.

Essentially I'm looking for a bit of a cheat sheet for introducing new players to 4th edition character creation.

Does anyone know of lists similar to this?

In order to avoid increasingly cluttering up the Darksun 4E thread with discussions on Dragonlance I'm opening a new thread.

So the excellent thread on how to deal with the loot system in 4E reminded me of something that I wanted to get opinions on from the community.

The current system presumes that the DM will tailor the treasure to the players. My issue is I don't want to do that when it comes my turn to DM in 4E. While tailoring the equipment is a perfectly valid way to play the game I noticed that the general economic system in 4E (specifically the fact that you buy for 100% of an items value but sell for only 20%) struck me as a really excellent middle ground between 1st and 2nd editions magic model and 3rd editions magic model.

What I want to do is essentially return to the model of handing out random loot (or at least loot thats not decided upon based on the players but instead based on what makes sense for the adventure) but don't want to unbalance things to badly. Since the players have the ability to buy items as well (but it ain't cheap) this mitigates, to some extent, the problem of finding +1 Short Swords when the party fighter already has a flaming bastard sword.

During 1st and 2nd edition, one of the more interesting aspects of the game, in my opinion, was watching as the players decided what to do with the magic they found. 4E allows one to return to that with the caveat that if the item really sucks they'll pawn it.

Still I have to assume that if I'm rolling randomly to decide what the magic is going to be then the stuff coming up, on average, won't be as ideal for the players as it would be if I was taking a list from them and putting what they wanted. Now I've got no desire to gip my players. They should still get lots of sweet luchre and, on average I want their power level to stay about on par with what it should be for 4E.

So my question is how might I add to the loot in order to keep them about as powerful if I'm not tailoring the items specifically to the players.

Some of the ideas I'm considering is increasing the amount of coinage around. That will help with the players being able to buy some of the stuff they want but even if I double or triple the coinage it sure won't give out the same level of power. I'm also considering increasing the amount of magic they get. Possibly by adding in a higher tier item to the list - so a 1st level party should find 1 fifth level item prior to making 2nd level normally but I'd go beyond that and throw in a 6th level item as well. Or maybe its better to add a 2nd 1st, 3rd and 5th level item?

My other concern here is, if I add to the loot and the players will have more magic then normal, but it'll generally be weaker. Here I'm concerned that the rule that says you can only use one items power per mile stone (at the heroic tier) will be to detrimental because the players will have more weak items on average. I wonder if it will damage the game much if I increase the number of items you can use per tier by 1 so that in the heroic tier you can use up to two items per mile stone?

Anyway I'm interested in others opinions on how a more 'naturalistic' treasure system might be designed for 4E.

Been skimming over A History of Ashes again. This being one of my favourites of the AP issues. Fantastic adventure, awesome land (I'll be stealing ideas liberally for the badlands in my homebrew) interesting write up of the inhabitants a fantastic beastiary, heck I even liked the fiction (though I always like the fiction). Not so often that I am enthused with every single feature in an issue.

OK on to my main point, which is what the heck do the Aurochs and Scrub Rats eat? Especially the Aurochs. When reading over the ecology of the land the whole thing kind of made a lot of sense until we got down to what the main prey creatures subsisted on and then that was just kind of never answered. I have a hard time figuring out how the Cinderlands can support herds of Auroch, what they drink is another big issue - though I could kind of fathom a type of Auroch that retains water and travels from one water hole to the next (whole hers could probably deplete such a water hole in the course of an afternoon devastating the local ecological system until the next rains came).

I'm also a little iffy on 8 inches of rain in a place with Auroch though just maybe this is sustainable.

Some I'm running this and getting confused a bit by the original intent of the Greater Halls.

I understand that Eli has basically bypassed the defences of Maure castle proper by tunneling in from the side using disintigrate but I can't really figure out what the Great Hall is. It seems to have some connection to the original Maure and yet we are told that there are no actual routes between this complex and Maure Castle proper.

So who built the Great Halls and why?

OK that may be taking things a little far but I do want to say that I just noticed the search forum feature and am really happy to have such a powerful tool.

So me and the fellow players have been hashing out how we are going to handle loot. One of the things we really wanted to avoid for this campaign was a major accounting system. The system had to be simple, easy to use and fair. I thought I'd pass on what we came up with as I'm really impressed with it and wanted to share. Most of what follows are a fellow players ideas. My main contribution was complaining until my concerns were addressed.

---------------------

*DIBS 2.0*

Every time we get treasure, we divide up the magic items and the
gp-equivalents.

*MAGIC ITEMS*

Everyone adds up the total levels of all the magic items they have acquired via picks (but excluding any bought items). We establish a 'dibs' order based on this, with the person with the least total levels in magic picking first and the the person with the most picking last. Ties (which I think will become increasingly rare over time) are broken by a simple die roll.

We pass around the pile of magic items, and the person who picks first can either pick one or pass the pile. Same for the second person, and so on. We keep going around the order until either all the items are picked, or everyone passes on the pile without picking an item. If there are any items that get passed on by everyone, they get sold and their gp gets added to the gp-equivalent pile.

*GP AND EQUIVALENTS*

Divided evenly among everyone who participated in an adventure. People can spend their share on whatever they wish, and magic items bought this way don't count for establishing dibs order. An adventure, in this case is defined as a single module of the Scales of War AP. Any player that participates in any part of an adventure is entitled to a share of the loot. If you miss so many sessions that you don't make it to any session of an adventure you do not get a share of the loot. The DM has agreed to tell us when we begin a new adventure if its not clearly obvious.

*NOTES AND CORNER CASES*

If there are any utility items that don't directly benefit anyone but benefit everyone (many or most wonderous items appear to fall in this category). A Utility item is an item that everyone or almost everyone in the party can use. If an item falls into this category and its passed over by everyone then it goes around again but is considered to have only half its value (players might balk at being the bearer of an item that really helps everyone in the party if its treated as having its full value)

If someone has an item from a drop that they are replacing or no longer using, then the old item should go back into the dibs pool, and be treated like any other found item (i.e. it goes around the dibs order until someone picks it or everyone passes on it, in which case it gets sold for cash and the cash is divided equally among everyone).

If an item drops that would clearly be good for someone who is not present (a magical axe drops and Tim is not there), if everyone passes on it we hold it aside until the next session that the missing player is present. If they want it, they can have it, otherwise it gets sold like any other item that everyone has passed on.

Potions and other charged items only count toward your dib total for one adventure.

So I'm going to need some guns for my home brew campaign and I thought that might be an interesting topic to consider.

So anyone have any interesting suggestions on how to incorporate gunpowder weaponry in 4E?

Also I have an interest in ideas on how I might make the specific guns in use in my homebrew might mechanically work. I recognize that my long winded post on the topic certianly won't be of interest for everyone and is probably not as interesting as the general topic of guns in 4E so I've spoilered it, but, if you do have specific suggestions for me in this regard I'm definitly interested.

I've noticed that I can no longer find some of the older threads that were kicking around. In some cases I'd slip an unusual word into a post on a thread I thought I might want to reference in the future and for years that worked like a charm but these days I've noticed that throwing Picasso into the search function no longer brings up the thread where I worked that word in. I've tried this with a couple of other threads that I did the same sort of thing with and I keep getting blanks for some of the older material.

Why are the APs listed in order of their publication?

Would it not make more sense to have the most recent one at the top?

So I'm going to be giving up my DM screen to one of my players for our first 4E campaign. The player in question has a pretty tough task in front of him as he's never DMed before and, maybe worse for him, I created a real hardcore 'Player vs. the DM' environment in our 3.5 campaign. I'm pretty sure thats not going to be his style but I'm not sure how quick the other players will be to give up their antagonism. Especially for two of the players that have played under me for decades and now have 'The DM is ENEMY #1' engraved into their psyche.

In a related note my DM will almost certianly run the new Dungeon Magazine AP which may not provide him as much support for running a good game as would be ideal (especially if your DMing for the first time for a group of players used to playing under a very experienced and generally very [over]confident DM).

So whats some good advice for a player playing under a fledgling DM in order to make the game a better experience for everyone at the table?

Now I consider thread jacking to be a virtual art form. However, just for a little variety I decided to pull this quote out of the Artificer thread and answer it in its own thread.

Without diving headfirst into the lengthy back and forth going on here, I did want to point out two situations that merit having a system for "regular" people (be that a 1st level commoner or a 5th level expert, 3rd level aristocrat, etc.)

1) The PCs are talking with the NPC, get upset with them and attack. I want to be able to run that combat for a round or two to see if they kill the NPC before the guards and/or the NPCs buddies come to see what's going on. Using the minion rules of one hit = one kill is too simplistic in my opinion - if you can roll a 1 on damage, that shouldn't necessarily kill the guy - while he might not be a challenge or important, whether he lives or dies can be important in terms of the consequences - assault vs. murder charges in this case.

2) The PCs rescue one or more NPC prisoners, but have to keep them alive on the way out of the dungeon (or are escorting a mechant and his family through dangerous terrain, etc.) Knowing their combat stats might be important if some of the real opponents can slip past the PCs and start fighting the soft yummie easy targets. An example of this type of scenario can be found in Paizo's very own Rise of the Runelords very first scene, when protecting the town from a goblin attack.

OK I can see this point. Now I think others, such as David Marks, have pointed out a number of good ways of creating human commoners as monsters and such and I think those ways would really work. Still if your set on having a Commoner Class it dawns on me that it might be pretty easy to create a pretty authentic feeling one. Works like this:

If you look at the classes in the PHB you'll notice that every class starts with this table called CLASS TRAITS. Everything after this table is all sorts of cool class features and powers for the individual classes presented. Thing is we can fill out that first table for the Commoner and not worry about cool powers or wicked class features - he or she is a commoner and does not get any cool class features or neat powers. OK so here goes:

***************

COMMONER
CLASS TRAITS
Role: Plot Exposition. Pray; on your knees; in the dirt; that your purpose in life is not to die a grisly death at the hands of one of the DMs monsters. If your really lucky you'll be the cute female that the PCs will save - or the child, that pretty much grants you immunity if the DM uses a screen.
Power Source: None. Shya right, you wish
Key Abilities: None really or as dictated by plot or th NPCs job.

Armour Proficiencies: Cloth, sometimes also Hide. If your some cool NPC like a Fantasy Mohawk Indian then you can wear animal furs.
Weapon Proficiencies: Simple Melee, Simple Ranged or, occasionally, as dictated by job or plot.
Implements: None.
Bonus to Defence: None. Well their is DM fiat. Repeat after me...Please be good DM fiat...Please be good DM fiat, I don't want to be the guy that expires from his wounds seconds after giving the PCs their new quest.

Hit Points at First Level: 10+Constitution Score. This is the same as the wizard who is probably the most 'Commoner like' class in many ways as he or she is a Commoner that wields magic. This is probably good for clerks, fat bar keeps and the like. Making it 12 through 16 + constitution score is reasonable if the Commoner is a Farmer or hard working Miner or a Commoner with a job or role that makes him or her particularly tough.
Hit Points Gained Per Level: None or 4 through 6. I'd say none but 4 would be the same as the Wizard. My feeling here is that Commoners just don't have levels, Thats for PCs or NPCs with other classes. If they kill Goblins or some such they morph into a PC class like Fighter or Ranger or some such. Essentially if they do something special then they become something special just like the PCs. But if your really disagree with me on this I suppose 4 through 6 would be valid depending on what the NPCs role or job is.
Healing Surges Per day: 1 + Constitution Modifier. 6 would be the wizard. Here though this might just be a too much for an NPC. Two or three (depending on that con score) is probably a better choice. Enough that the PCs can be trying to dramatically save the NPC without things just devolving into some kind of lunacy with the Terrible Monster dropping the Commoner and the PCs using healing or some such to bring him back round after round like some kind of Monty Python skit - I'm dead...no I'm not...wait yes I am...Thank God I'm back...Aw shucks, I'm dead again...I've returned!...Crud, killed again...

Trained Skills:Whatever is demanded by the plot, role or job.

Build Options: Gruff Dwarven Armourer, Busty Tavern Wench, Effusive Shop Owner, Worshipful Street Urchin, Aloof Elven Artisan...The list just goes on and on.
Class Features: Free skills and feats based on DM fiat.

*************************

Ability Scores
Now this gives you the basics of a class. If you wanted to fill out a character sheet you'd need two more aspects of your NPC. You'd need to know his or her Ability Scores. You can set them based on some presumption of what Commoners represent, for example 8,9,10,11,12,13. I figure every DM has to decide what kind of ability scores the Commoners get in their campaign world. I'd probably be a little more generous then the above and then assume that Commoners that morph into character classes get a boost to their Ability Points to make them equal to the PCs and that this represents training or a flowering of talent that came out when the Commoner morphed into a PC class.

Race
The other thing you need to know about your Commoner is race. I'd just apply the race as per normal. Presumably all Dragonborn can breathe (they must have really nasty domestic disputes).

Finis
Now you should have everything you need to fill out a character sheet. If you have weapons you always attack using the base attack.

So my first group of Newbs looks like its coming together and we'll probably play in three or so weeks. Enough Time for me to put together an adventure and to obsess about some issues.

The adventure I'd like to use for them is Whispering Cairn. I'll have to convert it of course but that is not that hard. I like this adventure as it involves a number of switches between going into and out of an interesting, almost classical feeling Dungeon, but mixing that up with interesting missions around the town.

So I'm interested in advice in two areas in particular (of course I'll consider advice on all relevant topics however).

One of the things that has me thinking is the starting characters. In this case I don't have a group thats prepping for a campaign. I have a group that wants to try a game. Big difference - no matter how good I am I'm sure some of the players will never play again, they'll have tried D&D and decided its not for them. Thats fine, but I want to emphasize that I have maybe 10 hours or so in which to show off the game. If its good enough in that period I might get even the reluctant players to come back and 'finish' this adventure in the following week. My main goal here is to rope in the players that would be interested but are just not aware of it yet. Those that could realize that they really like this game but they just have not tried it. Essentially I have one session to possibly get some new blood into the game.

This consideration has me wondering about a couple of issues in starting up a new campaign. First off how do you think I should get them their initial characters.

OPTION #1:

I can simply make the characters for them - If I did this I would probably stat up pretty much all the quick start characters they have in the PHB using an appropreate race for each. Thats fast and easy for the new players - they look them over and maybe read over a paragraph I provide regarding each character. This is quick and easy but maybe not satisfying enough?

OPTION #2:
A more middle ground option is to list out the main example classes and my players will each get to choose one of these 'archetypes'. I'll lead them through the process of otherwise statting up their characters. This is a method that will tell them more about how their characters work but its fraught with issues. First thing you do with making a character like this is you pick the ability scores and I can just see a whole table of six players not understanding how to do point buy and scared to ask me to explain it for the third time. These are teens and very young adults and I'm in my mid thirties and am an over the hill geezer as far as they are concerned, I'm concerned they'll be paralysed by indecision.

Still most of them have probably played video games with ability scores before. So this might not be a disaster, they might muddle through. Even beyond this I do face the problem of being the only person that knows whats going on and I probably will have only two PHBs (Mine and one I'll borrow) even if I run around the table answering questions and make them share the books character creation seems likely to result in lots of players not doing anything while they are waiting their turn to ask me a question or look at the books.

So any advice on which of these I should choose for having them get their first characters? If you have alternative ideas I'm all ears for that as well.

OK On to my second dilemma.

Diamond Lake is such a rich and interesting town. I'm not really sure what to do with the players in regards to it. Essentially my choices are to start them off in the town with a background that they all know each other and have all been training mainly for the express purpose of getting out of this hell whole - becoming adventurers being one way to pull that off. I then let them bump around town until at some point they presumably head for Whispering Cairn? This does a great job of showing off Diamond Lake but I'm concerned that they won't know what to do or worse yet some of them won't know what to really do while others get distracted and run amuk never getting back together and heading for Whispering Cairn.

My other option would be to give them a background that pretty much puts them in front of Whispering Cairn at the start of the adventure. This however does feel somewhat contrived, fails to show off any real role playing aspects until later in the adventure and makes introducing the town part and parcel of the quest to get the Land's bones for proper burial - which might not really be the best time to spring it (though maybe its not a terrible time either).

So what do you guys think about this little dilemma. Should I let the Newbs run amuk? Or railroad them straight into the dungeon?

So I recall seeing something in the previews on action points and the idea that characters would gain 1 per two encounters. As I recall I was excited by the idea that a DM could set it up so that the PCs could get a bunch of action points early in the adventure and use them later in the adventure, however it was pointed out to me that there was some kind of cap on Action Points.

Now I've just got through action points in the DMG and don't see any mention of some kind of cap on how many a player can have earned between long rests.

Am I just missing that part or did they remove the cap on Action Points?

Just for fun.

What race and class are you currently considering for your first character and why?

I'll go first.

I'll definitly play human, I pretty much never play any other race - I guess I just love Humans more then any Elf or Dwarf I ever met. Come to think of it I don't really meet many races but Humans in my day to day life - but I usually like the Humans I do meet.

I was considering a number of classes but now that I actually have the books I've suddenly got a hankering to play a class I usually hate - the Cleric. Something about casting sanctuary by smacking the baddie upside the head with a mace is really rather appealing.

I think I'll model my first cleric on a kind of really laid back style priest - you know the kind that wears jeans and is really accepting of everyone flaws and all. I think I'll have him be rather flawed himself in terms of the faith. Always forgets holy days until there is only 20 minutes left in the day, potty mouth, really bad case of wandering eye, when talking to females he carries on conversations with their breasts, etc.

So I decided to play with the numbers on this disease just to see what I'd end up with and I thought others might be interested in the conclusions.

OK first thing I did was go back and look at the DMG to see what kind of healing from the people with class levels would be available. Interestingly I noted that with 19000 people Korvosa City has roughly 950 Adepts - but their all 1st level. They can purify food and drink like nobodies business but the DMG presumes that there is 1 higher level adept in a city but makes no mention that there are any other Adepts with levels except for a single high level one and a huge number of 1st level adepts. Rather odd but there it is.

I noticed that there should be the ability to heal roughly 140 odd people a day - but that the vast majority of this healing is coming from very few people. Basically 3 higher level clerics and 3 higher level druids take care of about a third of this healing - presuming their using their higher level slots to take the 3rd level cure disease spell.

Its interesting to consider this - it would seem that clerics and druids can easily and quickly stop a plague if its caught early and halted immediately. They can pretty much just magic it away at its initial stages but plagues that break out among a lot of people are - as James noted in the introduction to this AP, beyond the ability of magic to halt once the numbers start to get up there. I was also a little surprised to notice that the Paladins are virtually worthless at halting a plague. Their cure disease abilities are once or twice per week and are great for an adventuring party but can't help large numbers of sick.

I ran the numbers through a spread sheet to see what the mortality of this plague is and, presuming your a first level commoner with 10 in either Con or Chr you have about a 1/3 chance of recovering - that is at some point managing to make the DC 16 save twice in a row. Its fractionally less then a 1/3 - I have 319 people recovering per 1000 exposed but I think thats close enough to 1/3 for DMs to just use 1/3 as a rule of thumb should it come up.

The adventure is not really clear on how long the plague lasts but I'd think that its about ~2 weeks from the time that its really out of control until the time when its gotten small enough that magic can be used to eradicate it. Thats a bit of a compressed time scale but its almost needed since there is the problem that if only 300 people have the disease on a given day then thats something that magic should be able to actually handle.

So I played around with this in a spread sheet and realized that we could get numbers that are roughly reflective of what the module is telling us pretty easily.

I presumed that on day one 800 people where infected by the coins. Every day every two infected people would infect 1 new person (I tried a formula that was more infectious but had trouble making it work). On day 2 magic will start to be employed to combat the disease, cures 50 people on day 2, 100 on day 3 and 150 from day 4 through 7, after that its back down to 100 as resources get harder to come by.

Using these numbers almost 3800 people will die of the disease, about 900 will have gotten it and fought it off, another 1400 will have gotten the disease and were cured by magic.

The disease will reach its apex on day 6 with about 1500 sick, on day 11 people will be confident that the worst is over as only 1000 people will be sick and this number drops rapidly over the next few days until everything is under control by day 14.

The single biggest factor knocking the number of sick down - the dead, after day 7 many people start to die and once dead they can't infect new people (presumably). Magic essentially takes a bite out of this disease and eradicates it when the number of sick get small enough but mainly this plague (presuming the numbers I'm using here) burns itself out.

Obviously most of us will be more or less hand waving this but heres some basic numbers that are roughly in line with the adventure should you want them.

I was responding to a post by a lady who was having issues with Holding a Charge, the fact that under the rules about holding a charge it specifies that you can touch multiple people (six as a full round action) and the implications for a spell like cure light wounds.

My original answer was less then concise and I deleted it after posting in order to take another crack at making a concise post.

Now I can't find this lady's post anywhere and searches are not bringing it up.

If I'm just being blind and the post is still around I'd love some one to point it out to me. On the other hand if I somehow deleted her post along with mine (something I should not have the power to do) then I feel pretty bad about that as her post included a number of quotes from the Players Handbook along with page number references and probably took some time to create.

Hence if there is some kind of a bug that results in a whole thread vanishing when some poster hits delete I'd love for that to be cleared up. In this case the OPs post was the only one in the thread until I made my response and then choose to delete. That might or might not have something to do with this bug.

Let me count the ways I wuv it...

So I've finally finished reading this and I felt it was really an excellent adventure. I'm going to touch on various aspects of the adventure here and I'll mention some of the stuff I was not so fond of along the way but my over all feeling was that this was just an excellent adventure.

OK so starting off we have the Scribbler and his little dungeon. Sadly, for me anyway, this was a bit of a low point for this PF. I mean we've just finished off Against the Stone Giants ... err I mean Fortress of the Stone Giants which was largely a big dungeon, we get back to Sandpoint and, lo and behold, there's a dungeon and it'll take us to another even bigger dungeon. Now I love dungeons but here we desperately need to mix it up a bit.

The Scribblers pretty cool himself and I like the idea of him trying to get intel I'm just not sure its all that cool if its done in a dungeon. Maybe have him in some kind of a hostage situation or something might be more interesting. My feeling is some kind of a social encounter right about here would have really hit the spot, negotiating for clues with an ancient mad man might have been unique and entertaining.

I'm concerned with the actual clues themselves. I liked the idea of a puzzle and I think this was a good place for it but I'm not sure this puzzle quite works. Still at least we got a puzzle, that's something.

My other complaint is that this 'baby' dungeon is taking up a fair bit of space. Not sure if a social encounter could have saved on the word count or not but there is a descent chance it could have since you'd not have to explain as many environments. There'd be the environment where the social encounter took place and that's it – it'd have to be pretty complex to take up as much space as a little dungeon and I feel the word count probably could have been used in the big dungeon coming up.

OK moving right along – We get heads and a White Dragon, some stairs with Elementals – I liked all of this, especially the White Dragon, except for the idea that the Dragon sneaks into the pocket dimension after the PCs. That sounds fraught with problems. Better to have the Dragon wait to ambush them when they come back out, IMO.

The Sinners rules involving wizard schools and actual sinning was kind of confusing. I think just going with the PCs sins would have been better and then throwing a 'designers note' box basically saying – if you've not tracked your PCs sins then here are some rules for making wizard schools act as Sins.

BTW I love the dialogue boxes in this adventure. I mean I like 'em in all adventures but here they were particularly thought provoking. I like the way they addressed aspects of D&D game theory in terms of the design and implementation of aspects of this adventure. I'd love to see more of that sort of thing.

I also really liked how unique many of the features of this dungeon were. I'm not actually sure I like the Disjunction trap as a trap in and of itself but I was impressed that such an interesting trap existed here. It got me to stop and think in a way that a 50 foot pit or a rolling boulder would not have. Many features were unique and I did not feel as if I was seeing just another rehash of stuff that had gone before. Even if I choose to cut something like the Disjuction trap at least it has me thinking about my game and why I would or would not cut such a trap.

I was initially pretty distressed to see all the humanoids filling this dungeon out. Generally if I'm dealing with a big dungeon at higher levels I like them full of things with lots of teeth. This is because its generally pretty dang hard to justify packing some place chalk full of nasties with lots of of teeth unless you come up with some kind of a rationale for a Dungeon. You can make a lot of other interesting encounters in many interesting environment but only the Dungeon can make it at all believable that big nasty A lives near big nasty B which in turn is not far from big nasty C. A good excuse for a Dungeon full of monstrosities is a wonderful thing.

However I'll forgive Greer in this case. These humanoids where generally all pretty unique. All of them had interesting twists and quirks. They were complicated in a way that a toothsome monster rarely is and that justifies their inclusion.

Krazan did not really speak to me particularly and seems to exist mostly to die – which is fine as far as it goes and he does make a neat threat so there is no real issue here. Especially considering how interesting the rest of the dungeons denizens are.

I really liked the Mithral Mage but maybe even more then the Mithral Mage I loved his Mephits. Actually I think this encounter as written is basically a mistake. It seems to start of tilting to a fight and then offers some possibility that maybe this won't be a fight. I feel this encounter should have started from the premise that there was not going to be a fight and then mentioned what to do if the PCs are bloodthirsty and insist on a battle. These guys are a great chance to insert some humour into this adventure and get a good RP scene going. Their story made me laugh and I suspect that PCs might really get a powerful emotional kick out of the release of tension from a peaceful and funny version of this encounter. Obviously groups that just sat down at the table and resumed from last weeks game won't get anything really powerful out of this encounter but on average most parties will come upon this encounter probably after at least a few fights and maybe after hours of battling the denizens of this Dungeon. A little some what light hearted RP and some humour will make for an emotionally powerful encounter for such groups. SO yeah – these Mephits are great but less hack and more yack would have been good here. They should be able to reveal some weakness of the Mithral Mage to reward PCs who talk with them. They obviously hate the guy so engineering a reason for them to want to parley with the PCs should be easy to work into the adventure.

I liked the Iron Cages a lot. In fact this is one of the rare encounters where I actually think that the having the PCs battle the Mistress of these halls or parley with her would both be very interesting encounters. She'd make a great RP encounter. She's got a really interesting personality. Very evil of course but she's stuck in a bottle (or Demi-plane as it where). Which means PCs can deal with her and not have to really deal with the fact that their aiding evil over good – there is no good in this place, just evil. That said she and her daughters have a neato prestige class and some cool abilities. They'd make an interesting fight as well. I suppose I'll just leave this to the PCs and see how they run with it without even trying to influence them to my preferred outcome since I don't really have a preferred outcome.

OK on too the Shimmering Veil ... screwed up with his clone regime – oh that is too funny. Here again I really liked this part of the Dungeon. The background material is good – I certianly found it an interesting and often funny read and really this whole place was loaded with atmosphere - the busted Simulacrum are a great touch. Their commentary during the battle should be a lot of fun and I love it when an adventure gives me good ideas about how to role play bad guys during a fight 'cause it makes the fights so much more interesting. My only real complaint was that it was about here that I began to clue into what this whole dungeon was about. Their should have been some kind of a synopsis earlier on - or if their was a synopsis it should have been clearer 'cause I certianly never clued into its existance.

I liked the Halls of Wrath as well and felt that a more martial orientated battle would play well after fighting all these mages. They should be a bit better organized however – I mean if they have done nothing but train their whole lives you'd think they'd do more then stand around waiting for the PCs to beat them one group at a time.

...and finally the PCs wrap up the adventure with Kerzog intervening. This is another interesting encounter - plus I finally get a toothsome monster. I like how the adventure peels back a bit like an onion and slowly reveals to the PCs how they can use things here to help in their battle with Kerzog. That element of discovery is pretty cool – though I think it should have been spelled out for the DM earlier.

To sum up...

Mr. Greer you have really hit the nail on the head with this. An excellent adventure over all – on par with that masterpiece Tides of Dread.

So I'm going to start on this for my players. However I'm running this in my home brew and it also needs to conform to my adventure needs and plot line.

Beyond these modifications I have to rework some of the combats to get them to become a lot more interactive with, well whatever I can think of really, just so long as it makes furniture fly around and creates interesting and dynamic combats as my players have become pretty jaded with the basic table top combat system as of late so I'm working hard to make things seem more dynamic.

Thus I want to add and delete material. I got my business partner to buy the download from Paizo under the assumption that I could use that for my needs but having just spent 30 minutes playing with this I have not so far been able to get anything really useful to my word processor. Basic copy and paste creates lines that contain parts of all three columns wich is, of course, highly distorted.

Anyone know how to transfer this material to a word processor so I can work in my modifications? I have access to a Windows and Linux systems.

Just wanted to give a shout out to the authour of this fine adventure. I've been converting it for use in my home brew and I just love it. This is a really fine piece of work.

These boards are getting pretty huge, which is cool and all but I'd love it if the search feature received an upgrade so we could be a little more exacting in our searches. If one is trying to dig something out of the archives it can get very difficult as your essentially trying to think of a single word that would have been used on that thread but on almost no other threads. If we could put sentences in quotes and have searches that only include both word X AND word Y this would make the search feature much more powerful and therefore useful.

So I'm taking a break from working on my latest adventure to check out the boards and a post got me thinking about the existance of a significant number of spell casters in our worlds.

Of course here we are standing dangerously close to actually examining what the existance of the spells in the SRD would actually mean for the world.

One of the strangest conceits of Dungeons & Dragons is that our worlds are not allowed to accurately reflect what the widespread existance of magic would actually mean.

I mean we still play in worlds were caravans led by merchants and guarded by caravan guards haul goods through dangerous passes teaming with the threat of bandits or worse. Hmm...whats it cost to get a mage to cast teleport? There are a variety of good spells that will allow one to store goods in things like extra dimensional spaces. Are we really sure that caravan is the best way of getting this years grain crop to market? I have my doubts.

We routinely deal with situations where place A does not know what is happening in Place B. But the book is loaded with communication spells. Should not the moderate sized urban areas all be in easy contact with each other?

Essentially the question that I'm asking is:

Have you gone through the spell lists and asked yourself "how does the existance of this spell effect my world?"

I see no evidence that this has been done with Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk for sure and I've never really evaluated how all the spells would effect my homebrew. Honestly I'm rather scared of the prospect. Caravans with caravan guards are well understood fantasy trope - do we really want to deal with the actual implications of the spell lists? I have a gut feeling that, while we would get a world that was more internally consistent, we might, paradoxically, get one that does not 'feel' realistic.

So I've scanned Foxglove Manor and am attempting to convert this to a perspective view of the building. That means I'm looking very closely at the cartography of this.

Wow. Its just amazing. The level of detail is spot on. Its beautiful without being so crowded that a DM is just overwhelmed.

So this is a shout out to Mr. Lazzaretti for some really exceptional work.

I commented on this thread that I would like to do a thread centred on creating and running a horror adventure. Since my PCs have indicated they are following up on the plot hook that leads to my horror themed adventure I'm going to try that out.

My plans are to outline my trials and tribulations in this endeavor on this thread. So I'm going to cover my attempts to create this adventure and then cover what happens when I throw my players at this – however in the part where my players go through this the emphasis will be on where my adventure works and where it falls down and not really on what the PCs did in chronological order.

Being Part I or Hmm...I think I tied my Hands in This Thing

So I sit down to start writing this up using an outline I've pretty much distilled from Paizo's Writer Guidelines for Dungeon Magazine. This is a great source for the mechanics of putting together an adventure in a step by step manner. I'd link it but I can no longer find it on the Paizo site anywhere. If they have guidelines for Game Mastery or Pathfinder material that amount to the same thing I'm unable to find this either. This is unfortunate as it really is a good resource and I'm glad I downloaded the Dungeon Guidelines to my home system.

However it quickly becomes apparent that I'm not even at the introduction stage to doing this adventure yet. Fortunately for me some of the players are on holiday and when they come back they still have at least one session of other adventuring before they come back to this hook and Christmas will probably have come and gone before I actually need to unveil this adventure. Hence I've got prep time to spare.

So my first issue is that I need to get myself into a horror frame of mind. My players are pretty much hack and slash players who like a bit of a plot to their adventuring. As a DM I like to mostly give them what they want but I also want to try and improve them as players and I want to improve myself as a DM. Hence the campaign mostly focuses on what they want to play (and what I want to DM) which is hack heavy but I threw in a (not so successful) Urban Intrigue adventure and here I'm throwing in a Horror Adventure.

Instead of starting with the writing I decide to grab some horror related gaming material and bone up on this whole horror thing. Well it does not take long before I realize that I've tied my hands from the get go in this.

What I realize is that I've already committed some mistakes in writing horror just with the set up. Here I better cover the set up. Basically speaking the PCs have spent the first 10 levels of the campaign dealing with the fact that the Empire they are citizens of is under attack by Goblinoids and worse and cities are falling on a weekly basis, If this keeps up the whole Empire will collapse and be overrun by Goblinoids. The PCs have been on adventures meant to help combat this. One of the problems is that the Emperor is lawful good but unfit to rule. From the PCs perspective their might be an answer however. He once had a heir. She died in a terrible cataclysm five or so years ago when the city she was the princess of (basically training wheels for Empresses – start with a city and move up to the Empire) was engulfed in something called The Curse of Night. Think Ravenloft Demi-Plane and your basically there.

So everyone who is anyone is pretty sure she's dead. But the PCs have been hearing rumours from peasants and such that she still lives from the start of the campaign. During their Urban Adventure they managed to talk with the Emperor and get some of the details on this. Mainly they learned that divination spells don't work in The Curse of Night so no one actually knows what happened to the Princess but several expeditions to find her have failed and the Curse of Night is an extremely hostile environment which should make getting in an getting out somewhat difficult. The main adventure will take place in The Princesses fortified manor in the middle of a necropolis and I need to make this feel like a horror adventure. Basically the PCs know where her last know location (her manor) was before the Curse of Night hit because divination spells work right up to the triggering of The Curse of Night. They don't know what happened to her afterword. Of course I know what happened to her, in general anyway. Her loyal servants and guards held off the hordes of undead long enough for the Princess to retreat to a secret 'panic' room protected by spells and what not where she awaited a rescue. The rescue never came and all alone she slowly starved to death as her supplies dwindled away. Since there is no resurrection in my game death is final – for the PCs and the NPCs. The players can find her emancipated corpse but that's the end of it. The peasants are wrong she's dead and will never have a chance to save the Empire.

Now I don't usually do adventures that are ultimately futile. The players have lost before they even begin in this one. But this is horror and as a 'once a campaign' type thing I don't think this is really a problem.

So to get into the right frame of mind for this I consider rereading I6: Ravenloft but one of my players has already done Ravenloft and I've read it several times though not in a few years now. Still if I'm looking for an example of a horror adventure I seem to be in luck. I've just gotten to Foxglove Manor in Pathfinder 2: The Skinsaw Murders. So it looks like I've got a ready made example of of horror in my bedtime reading. Not sure how far I can take this example. The surrounding circumstances are far apart but at least its a neat example. I especially like the idea of a time line fore the building. I think I'll do a detailed one of what happened when the Princesses Manor was overrun – that should provide me with lots of ideas on detailing this event.

I pick up Liber Mortis and go through it but in skimming through this I basically come away with nothing. I mean maybe I'll use the evolved template and the skeleton rat swarm but otherwise I did not really find anything in this. I never was to impressed with this book and the fact that I can't make it really work for me when I'm doing a horror adventure does not raise its esteem in my eyes.

Hero's of Horror is next and actually this ones so far proving more interesting. Well the fluff at the beginning is anyway. I've yet to get to the crunch but I don't expect that much from the crunch as I won't be using taint and IIRC the crunch is so taint related its pretty useless when your not using taint.

The fluff from Hero's of Horror is making me nervous however. From what I'm reading I may have set myself up for a fall. A lot of what is being talked about in this book I've already failed on. The most blatant example is the villain. The book talks a lot about the villain. I don't even have a solid villain here. The demi-plane itself is the 'mastermind' and I think I'll use a powerful mummy for the biggest undead critter in the Princesses manor but these are not really villains per se.

The advice also emphasizes having the horror make sense in retrospect. I can't do that – I'm not going to explain to the players why the Curse of Night erupted and undead overran the place. That's a whole campaign unto itself not revelations for some PCs that are just passing through. Plus I've never really hammered this answer down myself and I don't intend to tie my hands for future campaigns by actually working out the answer. That's a secret for another day. OK so this seems to be strike two.

My third conundrum is trying to make the adventure styles work. My experience, in the distant past of my youth, in horror is that its the unknown that is frightening. Once I tell the players to roll for initiative I've pretty much lost the fear factor. But I've already set myself up with a plot line that says that the Demi-Plane will sense the PCs and send undead after them. This means that, while they explore the manor looking for clues Undead are going to start entering the manor looking for them. On the surface that seems like a neat idea but I'm not sure if I'll just break the mood. I'm hoping it will work great but I just don't know.

So I'm caught in a bit of a conundrum with a specific aspect of wealth by level and I'm a bit curious how this works at various tables.

The issue pertains to keeping the players on track in terms of wealth by level. Presuming you hand out the recommended treasure, and presuming that nothing too extreme took place during this process your players should have received approximately the correct amount of treasure for their level – up to here I'm golden.

My issue is what to do after this point?

If they invest their money with wise bankers and make 7.5% interest compounded daily does that add to their treasure? Or is that free money they get for wise investments? More likely examples are if they fund part of say a merchant caravan or other similar idea.

Alternately what happens if a player tries to bribe his way into high office? Win or loose he's broke at the end – is that money that just going to regenerate through higher treasure later or will he always be behind the curve? A more likely example would be if the players are robbed or, for those DMs that use it, money spent on resurrections. Do they get this money back through higher treasure later or is it tough kitty toenails?

Part of what has prompted this is trying to figure out how I should value magic items that players are likely to find in treasure hoards. Many players sell the items but then some players don't – if they consistently sell them then there is a lot less gold floating about – so should these items really be valued as their buying value – on the other hand if the items are kept and I'm saying magic items are worth ½ their gp value in terms of wealth by level then excess gold seems to be entering the system.

For me this issue is being exasperated by my players – their all over the map in terms of behaviour regarding treasure. For the first 7 levels they instituted Communism. Everything went into the party pool (though the starting wealth loop hole created something oddly resembling a black market). After 7th level there was a revolution and everyone got their own share of the wealth with a small stipend going to a communal party pool and all the players complained about high 'taxs' until they where desperately in need of something that should have gone into the party pool – then they blamed each other for being greedy and short sighted.

Anyway after the end of the 'communist' era the players went freaken nuts with their gold. Depending on the player there are all sorts of ways they spend their cash. Some players are hoarders. They avoid at all cost buying charged or limited use items, more interestingly they'll take their money and happily buy the bad guys magic items from the party pool. Sure its not exactly what they wanted but its still a pretty good magic item and they get more gold if they keep it then if they sell it for ½ price.

Other players are more extravagant, loaded down with potions and such 'just in case' they're quick to down that one time boost to make them more powerful and they 'trade upward' in terms of magic items and such so that they not only sell their share of the magic treasure for ½ price to get stuff they actually want – their likely to actually sell these magic items (again for ½ price) in two or three levels in order to buy an even better ring or pair of boots etc.

I even have character that's really nuts in this aspect – not only does he do this but he psychically reforms his character to be optimized nearly every level. Quick explanation – psychic reformation is a psionic power that allows one to change your feats. Since none of the players are psionic this player is buying this power much like you buy a magic spell from an NPC mage. This is costing this player about a 1,500 gp every time he does it - 'course he has really good feats – but its making it very noticeable that his wealth by level is dropping compared to the rest of the players – especially the penny pinchers.

So what's a DM to do? If my players behavour is all over the map do I even bother paying attention to their wealth? Or just pay attention to what I gave them in the first place? Furthermore, in terms of wealth by level just how valuable is a magic item anyway? What you buy it for or what you sell it for?

Anyone know about the rules for burning stuff?

Are there such rules? My players will likely start tossing fireballs at some war galleys manned by minitours next session and I can't seem to locate any kind of rules for dealing with this.

Any suggestions?

It may just be me but after reading the Ap and comparing it to the first two adventures of the other APs it seems much less challenging.

What do you guys think about the relative difficulty of this AP?