Connor Thorud's page

Hey all,

I've always had this idea in my head in which a large population of ratfolk live in a tunnel system between the surface and the under dark. And I mean BIG; like small cities and towns inside of massive caverns, connected by tunnels nearly a kilometer wide. Thus, when a player of mine said he wanted to play a solo campaign as a ratfolk character, I was ridiculously excited.

Anyways, I am working now on the deities that will be present in the campaign. Creating deities for elves, humans, dwarves, and the like is a simple enough thing for me to do, however I would like to incorporate a small pantheon of gods for the ratfolk specifically. One part of the rat folk history concerns a cult who worships a god of pestilence, but they were "wiped out" a century before the campaign. I am having trouble deciding alignment and a set of domains for this god, and for the other deities the rat folk worship.

Any ideas and suggestions are welcome!

Hi guys, I'm a GM, except that I don't always have a large group of players to work with. I most often am Game Mastering for my little brother, and him alone. The core rulebooks do a very good job of helping you balance out encounters and adventures to be suitable for your player characters, but I do think that there is a lack of support for situations where you have a single player. I have tried using encounters with a CR set to the character's level, but I find that these often, especially at lvl. 1, are too overwhelming for the character. One solution I found works well is using encounters with a trio of kobolds, a dire rat, or a couple goblins, but this gets VERY boring after the second encounter. Is there a happy medium for this sort of thing? How can I introduce cooler encounters without killing the player character?

Hey guys, my brother has had the flu and decided he'll no longer be playing.

Nightdeath, sorry about mine and my brother's character sheets, we both just got super sick like overnight... I'll try and get mine up by tonight.

I'm running a Tiefling sorcerer.

I'm on, but my little brother's not on the community.

I'm putting together a Half-Elf Rogue.

And I'm in by the way :)

Ok, do you want me to go set up a gameplay thread, or would you like to?

Also, Orelius, I don't mind what you guys use for characters, but if nightdeath, or whoever else ends up GMing, has anything he'd like to leave out, then it should be up to him.

I'm up for whatever AP or module you guys would like to run. If everyone agrees, it sounds like night death would be willing to GM. I took a look at the Silent Tide module which Farmer Mo suggested, and that sounds like fun, but again, whatever you guys want to play, I'm totally down for!

Hey all,

I am interested in starting an online campaign to play. I GM for my little brother at home, but I don't ever get the opportunity to play a game for myself. I love being behind the reigns, but sometimes it's nice to sit back and enjoy the ride! Anyways, if you are interested, please comment lad let me know; we can discuss the details later on, but for right now, I'd like to get a group of four or five (Including a GM), and focus on the logistics of the situation later.

Thanks,

Connor

Connor Thorud wrote:

Hugo Rune wrote:

For forests, it's certainly a good approach. Though instead of making the thickets impenetrable you should assign them as difficult terrain, make frequent checks for the party to become lost etc and include forest based wandering monsters. That way you are allowing the party to go wherever they want, but it will be easiest for them to follow the trails.

For hills and mountains you could follow a similar approach, where if the party go off trail they have frequent climb and/or acrobatics checks as well as natural hazards that together slow movement and make encounters with local wildlife more dangerous.

That makes sense, but what could be used as completely impassable terrain?

There isn't much in the way of impassable terrain. An extremely dense grove of large trees with some nasty thorny plants between might work in a forest and a chasm might work in hills. Having lots of these though breaks versimiltude and players will feel railroaded rather than having free choice.

I posted a reply to Climbing a mountain that could be adapted as an alternative. Essentially create a nodal tree/network across the forest or hills terrain and if the players try and cross between connections then have a standard difficult terrain description plus 0-3 wandering monsters. This way all of your staged encounters can still be met on the route they chooise to go and they have at least 3 routes to choose from, i.e. left, right and off-path with off-path consistently being the hardest.

So, in a sense, you'd be using a network of paths connecting each important encounter, each with varying difficulty and challenges to face, as well as a chance for the appearance of a random monster?

Mountains and forests tend to be a lot bigger than a dungeon, and on open plains if you encounter an enemy you may spot them at great distances. A lot of people use hex crawls for overland exploration (I'm sure you can find an online resource that would contain a lot more examples than I could link to here), while others just have a hand-drawn map and explain the surrounding area.

One of the difficulties with overland combat is that it's possible to spot enemies at great distances. You'd need an enormous battlemap to deal with a situation where combat begins at 1000 feet range (200 tiles), and I sincerely doubt you'd want to actually draw a whole forest between you and the enemy. Keeping things abstract until they get into close quarters is a good idea.

My general approach is to draft a fairly straightforward map of the area, marking down any places of interest or natural formations. I then keep some "generic" battlemap areas for various environs in my notebook. When close combat occurs, I pull one out and use it (sometimes quickly jotting down extra modifications as appropriate).

Also remember that "impassible" is largely meaningless in the context of a natural wilderness. Rock formations can be climbed, and a machete can make your way through the thickest of brush (though don't forget to use difficult terrain - that should be common in natural environs). Trips to the wilderness should be a chance for people with the survival, climb, and swim skills to shine.

This is an interesting approach as well, and thanks for the advice. My thought is that rather than placing an entire forest in front of the players, you could give them smaller areas of the forest, introducing these through a battlemap little by little until they reach their destination. While this could mean a session or two of travel, you can also introduce small clues and story elements about the final cave, dungeon, temple or what have you using the surrounding area as a setting. For example, let's say I run an adventure arc where the party needs to search the forest for an old fort that's been overrun by monsters. I could then give clues about what monsters will be faced in the final dungeon, as well as historical factoids about the fort, by seeding small encounters in the adventures set in the forest.

For forests, it's certainly a good approach. Though instead of making the thickets impenetrable you should assign them as difficult terrain, make frequent checks for the party to become lost etc and include forest based wandering monsters. That way you are allowing the party to go wherever they want, but it will be easiest for them to follow the trails.

For hills and mountains you could follow a similar approach, where if the party go off trail they have frequent climb and/or acrobatics checks as well as natural hazards that together slow movement and make encounters with local wildlife more dangerous.

That makes sense, but what could be used as completely impassable terrain?

Ok, so I've been GM-ing the beginner box with my brother for a few weeks now, and I'm having trouble determining whether a forest or mountainous/hilly area could be created and played in the same manner as a dungeon. The way that I have run things so far is that I'll draw up a labyrinth of a map, which we would call a forested area, and the walls would be considered a thicket of trees and other plants that were too dense to traverse. Is this how you would do forests, or would you just set up small, random encounters in between dungeons? My thought is that a forest or mountain range can offer just as much potential for exploration and navigation as a dungeon, so it doesn't make sense to run them any differently. Any feedback would be thoroughly appreciated.