Bumamgar's page

Two player campaign, one is a Cleric/Fighter Gestalt, the other a Wizard/Rogue Gestalt.

Enter Moltenwing's lair, fly over the lava to the shelf. Moltenwing emerges from the lava just south of them, demands to know why they are disturbing his sanctum. (Used a move to get out of the lava, free action to demand an explanation).

Cleric replies we're here to destroy the Cagewrights, so Moltenwing uses his standard action for his disintegrate breath weapon. Save or die, both characters in a line. Both made their saves (barely).

Next up, Wizard: Split Ray Avasculate (two touch attacks, both hit, brings Moltenwing to 1/4th hp, no save)

Then, Cleric: Power Word Kill (Moltenwing > 100 hp due to 2x Avasculate, dies, no save).

Needless to say, party feels pretty uber now :)

My party just defeated Telekin and have discovered Xyzog's lair. We play for 4 - 5 hours every Saturday, barring holidays or other wierdness. If I've counted things right, we've had 29 sessions so far. Assuming they finish up Hall of Harsh Reflections next session, we're averaging 7.5 sessions per "module", or about 2 and a half months real time.

Yeah, my group is kind of slow, I figure it'll take us about three years total to complete AoW :)

This was a fairly confusing point for me and my group.

I kept searching for information regarding the entrances to the various temples, and couldn't find anything :) But then the keys were mentioned, so the inconsistancy threw me for a loop.

I ended up doing some handwaving and my players realised that these weren't the keys they were looking for and everything was ok...

Luckily for me, none of my players are immune to Jedi mind tricks.

I use the maps from the online suppliments, scaled to 50px per grid-square.

I also create tokens for all the creatures, using either images from the internet or from the online suppliments. These I scale to fit in 50x50 squares (or 100x100 for 10' creatures, etc).

I also pull in the hand-outs from the online suppliment, to share with the players online.

Everything else I just use straight out of the magazine.

However, my group uses Ventrilo alongside Fantasy Grounds so I actually read the room descriptions out-loud, etc. There is rarely any "chat" in Fantasy Grounds, just dice rolls and the movement of tokens on the maps.

For Three Faces of Evil, I experimented with typing in the description blocks and entering in stat blocks for monsters and prominent NPCs, but it didn't really add any value over just having the magazine open in front of me. That, and the fact that I rarely have the time to type everything in, keeps me from doing it for future modules.

One of my players posts an adventuring journal to our group website, which details, in-character, everything that has gone on in the campaign, but other than that, we don't have any chat logs of the sessions. These journal entries are available at: http://www.cyberdeck.org/viewtopic.php?t=91 and are posted from the perspective of Tia, the group's Wizard and apprentice to Allustan.

With well placed Web and Entangle spells, it's pretty easy to deal with the Lizardfolks. And these are low level spells (compared to a fireball).

Actually, Web isn't useful here (a mistake I made as well).

From the spell description (d20-SRD):
Web creates a many-layered mass of strong, sticky strands. These strands trap those caught in them. The strands are similar to spider webs but far larger and tougher. These masses must be anchored to two or more solid and diametrically opposed points or else the web collapses upon itself and disappears.

(Emphesis mine)

Web only works indoors, in heavily wooded areas, or in dungeons. It doesn't work in large rooms or wide open spaces, since there aren't "two or more diametrically opposed points" to anchor the web within it's 20' radius area of effect. You could web in between the stable and the keep, but other than that, it's a wide open area around Blackwell Keep, imho.

Of course, I didn't check the spell description closely when my players were in this encounter and so they used Web to great effect. It was only later that one of them pointed out to me that they shouldn't have been able to :)

Ie. How long they take to play?, do we play for a couple of hours per week?? Is it in real time, or is the game updatd when you logg on?

It's no different than playing using pen and paper.

The sessions last as long as the group wants them to, and the group meets as often as they want.

Fantasy Grounds is just a virtual/shared tabletop. I'm not sure what you mean by "is it in real time, or is the game updated when you log on"

It's as "real time" as any DnD session.

Also, keep in mind, you'll need a DM, and other players :) If you get the Lite license, then you are only able to be a player, not a DM. So you'll have to find a group who is running AoW and join them. According to other posts I've seen on this forum and on the Fantasy Grounds forums, I believe there are several AoW campaigns running via Fantasy Grounds. One of them might have an opening.

Mine currently doesn't. We've got five active players and a well-rounded party.

James,

What you say makes sense. In fact, it's what I realised after my party waltzed through this adventure without breaking a sweat.

However, the way the module is written doesn't make this clear to the DM, and, in fact, stresses the exact opposite:

--Quote (Dungeon p. 20)
If the PCs charge the keep, they have to deal with all of the lizardfolk as a large group. Barring a few lucky fireballs or something similar, the PCs can't win--twelve normal lizardfolk are EL 8, a tough challenge for 5th-level PCs, and if fighting thirty such creatures could be measured accurately on the EL scale, they'd be at least an EL 11--certain death barring a freak combination of rolls in the PCs' favor.
--End Quote

When the siege plays out, and turns out to be pretty much the opposite of this description, I can understand why many DM's might think something has gone wrong.

Now, if the module had said what you say above, we DM's would have realised this was intended to be an ego booster and wouldn't be so concerned that we've mis-interpreted something.

I've done tokens for everything up to Hall of Harsh Reflections, 50x50

However, I gave up on entering all the stat-blocks etc into FG. I just keep the magazines at hand as though it were pen-and-paper DnD.

I just don't have the hours in a day to re-type everything :) Besides, I tend to just use /die ?1d20+mod instead of hotkeys or dragging modifiers from Personality boxes. Mostly this is because it's much faster for me. I can type way faster than I can click-n-drag, especially if I have to click a couple times to get to the proper tab with the information, etc.

However, if my campaign weren't already past TFoE, I'd certianly take advantage of the offers of pretyped stat blocks :)

As an aside, I also use the D20SRD. In fact, I'm in the process of developing an official D20SRD character sheet for FG that Digital Adventures will be making available as a freebie add-on to the SRD. I've got some other FG related development work going on as well in conjunction with Digital Adventures, but the details of those projects are covered by my NDA :)

A bag of holding is actually a portal to an nondimensional space.

It doesn't state this clearly in the DMG, but I suspect that it probably has objective directional gravity with "down" being always away from the entrance to the space (ie: the opening of the bag is always up, the "bottom" of the bag is always down.) As someone else pointed out, it's a move equivalent action to retrieve a specific item from a bag of holding. A full round action if it contains more than a normal backpack.

I'd rule that it would take the same time to put an item INTO the bag, especially Alchemists Fire which is already fairly unstable.

However, in the players defense, the DMG does state that if a bag of holding is turned inside out, its contents spill out unharmed. That could be used as a way to dump the contents of the bag out quickly.

As a side note, I'm a tad curious to know how your party got a hold of a Type IV bag of holding by 9th level. I know there's a Type I bag in Hall of Harsh Reflections, but unless you've been running some side treks for cash, 10,000 gp for a Type IV bag should still be out of your party's reach financially by the Champions Belt.

Hi Shane,

I have one I made specifically for minatures thats uses 50X50 pixel squares that's perfect for FG. I will gladly share it
Email me at oldcoast@comcast.net

Me too :)

I added a good 30' or so border around the base map so that there was room to actually lay siege from a respectable distance.

I'm more than happy to share my version, just drop me a line at countzero at cyberdeck dot org

So... there's at least 3 of us running AoW via Fantasy Grounds... I wonder how many more? :)

My party made excellent use of the "Silence" spell which effectively blinded the Grimlocks and made the encounters in this area fairly easy.

Yes, compared to the rest of the adventures in the series, Blackwell Keep is very easy.

My players mowed through all opposition without breaking a sweat.

Well, all until the final encounter with the Spawn of Kyuss in the basement of the keep.

The way I read it, there were three spawn by the time the players returned to the keep, and the fear aura from three spawn ended up sending the entire party fleeing for 7 or 8 rounds. That just caused even more soldiers to get infected and it was a real challenge for the party to take out spawn with half the party feared at any one time. (Yes, a successful save makes you immune to that particular spawn's fear effect, but not others)

The party prevailed, in the end they had to fight a total of 6 spawn, and I believe the party's fighters spent the entire encounter feared :)

I followed the initial text of the module where it said there where 40 lizard folk laying siege (yes, I know it later says 6 groups of 5 for 30 total, but I already knew that 30 wouldn't be a challenge for my party)

Of course, the "poster map" included with this adventure must have assumed that the proper way to lay seige to a tower was to stand within 20' of it. I had to expand the size of that map considerably to have enough room.

If the party purchases horses (which they can easily afford after TFoE) it takes right at one day to get from Diamond Lake to Blackwell keep, and gives the party a significant advantage in breaking the siege if they stay on horseback. I am fairly certain the author didn't factor that in, as the module seemed to assume it would take several days to complete the journey (complete with "getting to know you" sessions with Alustan, etc)

Ah well, it certainly was fun for the PCs, they really got to flex their muscles and didn't feel like they were up against impossible odds. I believe it was a welcome break from the rest of the fairly difficult adventures in this adventure path.

I'm completely fine with this- it fits his character. However, I just have one question- who would it apply to? I understand there are certain people who are obviously Ebon Triad members (all of the people in TFoE, that Bazol Zahol (or whatever his name is), but what about people that nobody knows to be Ebon Triad members, like Loris Raknian? Or, more importantly, what about Lashonna? She's the one that started it, but she isn't exactly a member, since she knows it's all a hoax, right?

I guess this is mainly a question regarding the Favored ORganization ability, but as far as the Age of Worms Adventure Path is concerned, could someone give me a run-down of who all is part of the Ebon Triad?

Of course, none of us have read anything beyond Redhand, but I suspect that there won't be any more Ebon Triad related encounters beyond that adventure since the players should figure out it's a front/fake organisation in that adventure. Frankly, the Ebon Triad is a red-herring, and you may be doing your player a disservice letting them choose that organisation as a favored enemy. Of course, up until Redhand your players won't *know* it's a red-herring, so you don't want to give it away to early.

I just can't help but wondering if the Ranger in question won't feel a bit put-out when he finds out that he's been duped. Sure, everyone else has too, but he actually made character development decisions based on a false pretense, which likely won't benefit his character at all in the final legs of the adventure path.

I use the high-res maps from the PDF, converted to 50px squares, in Fantasy Grounds, as my Age of Worms campaign is played over the internet :)

It's very interesting to note how the "full" maps are created. If you use the "selection" tool in the PDF, you'll notice that most of the components on the "DM" map (Room numbers, secret doors, etc) are true "text" overlayed on the map images directly in the PDF. They aren't part of the actual image!

Also, you may have noticed that most of the maps are made up of multiple images. This is normally fine, but sometimes the images themselves are too small or don't line up exactly, but have been stretched in the PDF to make them line up properly. This causes me no end of hastle, as I have to try and dupelicate the same stretch-n-align operation in Photoshop to reconstruct the maps. Sometimes it's so severe that I have to give up, and just take a screenshot of the PDF map, and then resize that in Photoshop to be a proper scale for use as a battlemat. Kind of defeats the purpose of grabbing the high-res version of the PDF. There have only been a few maps that exhibited this annoying problem. I think "Sodden Hold" was one of them, but I may be mis-remembering.

Anyway, yes, it would be very nice if I didn't have to go in and cover up secret areas and other "DM only" items that sometimes sneak into the player version of the maps.

No, it's a peer-to-peer application. The DM uses the 'full' version ($34.95) and hosts the game. Players use the 'light' version ($19.95) and connect directly to the DM. Fantasy Grounds servers aren't involved, although they do offer a free "servername" feature where they basically assign a random name to your IP and allow the clients to use that name instead of your actual IP. (In other words, instead of telling your players "connect to 207.141.23.127" you say "connect to 'frozen orc healthy orc'" and FG handles mapping that name to your IP.)

Other than the one-time purchase of their product, there are no fees or hidden costs.

It's extremely customizable, and there are 3rd party companies who have developed custom rulesets and map/token/module add-ons. Digital Adventures has a few modules and the complete d20-SRD available, CodeMonkey has a FG conversion of "The Sunless Citadel" etc.

I recommend Fantasy Grounds (http://www.fantasygrounds.com)

I use it to DM a weekly Age of Worms campaign, and it's fantastic. It's not PBM, but a virtual gaming tabletop. There's an active community so finding players isn't hard.

I am currently running a campaign following the Age of Worms adventure path published in Dungeon starting with #124.

I was very pleased with the Wormfood article in Dragon #333 and plan on encouraging my players to utilise this ruined mine office as a home-base.

However, my campaign is being played via GhostOrb, an online "electronic tabletop" and so all the maps and images I use are in electronic format. The online supplements to Dungeon have provided me with all the key maps and NPC images for "The Whispering Cairn" and I really appreciate that, as it saves me from having to invest in a scanner.

I was wondering if the map to the ruined mine office was going to be made available as an online supplement as well?

Thank you.

EbbTide: GhostOrb has indicated that they hope to go "live" sometime in June, so hopefully they'll be opening up the service to everyone in the next few weeks. If I end up having to use NPCs to suplement the party, then once GhostOrb is open to the general public, I'll be replacing those NPCs with interested players (You'd just start at whatever level the party is currently at).

Maveric28: I sent you an e-mail with the details, hope to hear from you soon :)

Did a "getting to know each other" session today with the two players currently signed up.

Had a fairly bad echo in the voice-chat, was a bit disconcerting, but other than that we were able to setup our character sheets and spend some time fleshing out the character's backstories, and filling them in on "common knowledge" regarding Diamond Lake (One character is a native, the other is apprenticed to Allustan)

So far we have a Wizard and a Rogue. If we get at least one more, I'll flesh out the party with an NPC short term till we get a 4th human player. Hopefully next Saturday we'll actually start the campaign :)

Yeah, I was one of the early "Storm Crow" adopters :) I guess that is limiting the available pool of players. I hadn't realised that only "Storm Crows" had access to Ghost Orb right now, I just thought that anyone who registered now wasn't considered a "Storm Crow", but that they could still use the service.

I'll definately keep you guys updated with how it goes. This will be my first online-only campaign, so it should be interesting :)

I'm starting up a Ghost Orb campaign following this adventure path, and have room for 2 - 3 more players if anyone is interested.

We'll be playing Saturday afternoons for 4 - 5 hours a session. We have 2 players signed up and we'll start tomorrow (June 11th) if I get at least 2 more, otherwise we'll start next Saturday (June 18th). I believe the sessions will start at 1pm EST, however that time is flexible based on player schedules.

See my thread in the Campaign section of the GhostOrb forums, or simply send me a PM on GhostOrb (my username there is Bumamgar, same as here). Alternately, you can send me an e-mail if you are interested. (countzero AT cyberdeck.org)

Ob-topic: I also would be very pleased with an "official" digital copy of the Diamond Lake area map pull-out, and was disappointed that it wasn't included in the Online Suppliment.