Dr. Pweent's page

Five years from start to finish (with some extended breaks scattered throughout for events such as the birth of children and the release of major operating systems), but we have at long last finished the Age of Worms campaign! Some notes:

- Began Dec 8, 2006; finished Dec 29, 2011.
- Started in D&D 3e; finished in 4e at level 28.
- Ran the campaign in Eberron, with Diamond Lake placed in Karrnath.

Party during Whispering Cairn:
- Octavius (Ocho), changeling Binder
- Weltschmerz, warforged Cleric
- D, warforged Fighter
- Doro d'Jorasco, halfling Warlock
- Karver d'Orien, human ranger

Party during Dawn of a New Age
- Octavius (Ocho), changeling Warlock (Binder pact)
- Gottleib, warforged Invoker (Weltschmerz eventually felt a name change was necessary)
- Gillian (JJ) d'Ghallanda, halfling Artificer
- Angry uncle Ethan d'Orien, human Fighter

We ended the game with four of the five players we began with still playing.

Party fatalities:
- Doro d'Jorasco died in the Ebon Triad's temple under Diamond Lake, charging back into combat with Grallak Kur just after being magically healed the previous turn's near brush with death. Who knew death priests might have a death touch...?

- Karver d'Orien made the mistake of separating from the rest of the party to chase down the fleeing Faceless One in the Ebon Triad's temple. The Faceless One summoned a fiendish ape which rended Karver in two, and ensured the Faceless One's place as the most hated recurring villain of the campaign.

- D was eaten by Madtooth the Hungry, a battle that they were mis-prepared and under-prepared for after some treachery during the Champions' Games. He was reincarnated a half-orc, but found the meat-body transition too shocking, and wandered off to hunt for "his own kind".

- Heilegas was killed in battle with the pit fiend Buldumech, who was guarding the Unlife Vortex (and other treasures) under Alhaster. The party was high enough level to resurrect him for the end battle, but it cost them a day of being holed up in the undead-warded Cathedral of Blessed Rest while things outside went from bad to worse.

In the end, Kyuss was defeated, and the Alhaster spire began to collapse. JJ was already flying off looking for something when the collapse began, and the others quickly put their plans into action - Gottleib grabbed Prince Zeech's unconscious half-fiend daughter Hemriss and leapt off the spire with his ring of Feather Fall; Ocho followed, able to fly under his own power for short period of time; and Angry Uncle Ethan announced he was leaping off too.

GM: "Okay, how are you going to stop yourself from falling?"
Ethan's player: "Um, I have no idea."
GM: "...falling damage at this hight is 55d10."
Ethan's player: "Yeah... I eat it. No! Wait! Ring of the Phoenix! I've never had to use it before! I hit, explode in a fireball, then reform a turn later!"

And that is how you escape in style.

-----

In the aftermath, I mentioned that one person who HADN'T escaped the collapsing tower alive was Prince Zeech -- to which Ocho the Changeling responded, "You know what? I beg to differ." He pulled off a natural 20 with his initial bluff check against Hemriss, and (the surviving population of) the town of Alhaster lived (relatively) happily ever after under "Zeech's" somewhat less oppressive rule.

The two members of dragonmarked houses went on to eventually control their houses, with Ethan managing to stage a family coup to wrest control of the house away from his (condescendingly) fearsome grandmother.

Heilegas took the Rod of Seven Parts with him off to bring LAW to the Demon Wastes.

And I vowed never to commit myself to running a campaign that involved again, nor 3rd or 4th edition D&D at levels so high. It's nice to have that campaign under my belt at last.

Next stops: Shadowrun, Gamma World, Warhammer Fantasy 3rd.

Can you list the names of a couple of "good" Big Finish Audio Dramas? I listened to one that I think was called the Four Doctors, with Paul McGann and Sylvester McCoy and a few others, and I must say I thought it was one of the biggest wastes of time in recent memory. The script was terrible, the actors were clearly recording their parts in isolation, and the whole thing just sort of reeked of embarrassing fanfic.

But I know there must be some decent ones, right?

I mean, right?

Absolutely. The one you listened to previously sounds like "Zagreus," which was... not generally considered to be Big Finish's finest hour. (A lot of people dropped out of the line entirely at that point.) Here are a few good ones, especially with an eye towards Colin Baker performances.

The Spectre of Lanyon Moor
Early Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker), a very traditional Doctor Who ghost story.

The Holy Terror
The Sixth Doctor and a shapeshifting penguin in a black comedy about religion and godhood. No, really.

Doctor Who and the Pirates
Colin Baker again, in an unreliable narrator story with a surprising contrast in tones throughout. Plus pirates. (If you are the sort who flatly rejects musicals of all stripes, tread carefully here.)

Davros
Colin Baker in a character study of my least favorite Doctor Who villain. I think Davros totally undermines the Daleks, but this is a story that really works, largely by not being particularly about the Daleks.

Spare Parts
My own favorite of the line. A Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) story detailing the origins of the Cybermen.

Sounds fun, Jeremy. Did you have a set number of minion lizardfolk, or did you just more or less throw lizardfolk at them as long as it remained fun? If the former, about how many did you use, and of what level relative to the PCs?

We were still playing 3.5 when I ran Blackwall Keep. We've since converted to 4e and are in the midst of Kings of the Rift. I've found it trickier to make satisfying conversions as we go along - 3e tends to assume fights in which the opposition is a group of the same creature, or single opponents, so direct conversions tend to be heavy on solos and elites. Kings of the Rift is especially challenging as it stages fights against multiple dragons at once. Be prepared to get your hands dirty creating custom statblocks! (That said, last week's fight against a nearly-stock heroslayer hydra and fire giant lavamaster was pretty memorable and didn't require much heavy lifting on my part.)

I've loaded a few PDFs into my iPad using GoodReader. It's pretty nice so far, though I've noticed some text corruption in the section introductions of Pathfinder 31's "Stolen Land". I'll see if I can upload some images later. I was going to chalk it up to the usual Preview vs. Adobe Reader issues, but I believe GoodReader actually rolls their own PDF rendering engine rather than relying on Apple's native engine, so this one may not be Apple's problem to solve. There are also some color rendering issues I've seen - the art in the Eclipse Phase PDF is incredibly dark as compared to the displayed artwork on my Macbook Pro. None of it is a deal breaker, though.

Really, I'm crossing my fingers that OS 4 will bring with it improved native PDF support, either incorporated into iBooks or as Preview for iPad. Pretty nice so far though - apart from the Pathfinder rendering issues, the PDFs are incredibly legible in portrait display.

Edit: here is a sample of the corrupted text in Pathfinder 31. And TriOmega - I haven't tried it yet, but i am told you can add PDFs to GoodReader in iTunes and sync them to the iPad without gong through the whole file sharing rigamarole.

I passed on Terminator 3, but the third trailer for Terminator Salvation convinced me that it was going to be a movie I'd enjoy, and so I'd been looking forward to seeing it for a couple of months. While it had some nice bits, I ended up being pretty disappointed by the film. In the end it's an idiot plot. Pretty significant spoilers follow:

I didn't hate the movie, but I can't recommend it.

Cintra Bristol wrote:

hopeless wrote:

How long before 4e eberron is to be released?

Eberron Campaign Guide - June '09

Eberron Player's Guide - July '09

For some reason, Amazon shows it in reverse order. But the WotC site still shows it in this order. Hmmm...

Sounds like Amazon may be right. LivingDice.com reports on Scott Rouse speaking at GTS 2009. Amongst the tidbits dropped:

“Eberron Player’s Guide” comes out 6-16-09. “Eberron Campaign Guide” coues out 7-21-09.

Assuming it's not a misquote, it sounds like the order of the two has been exchanged. Sounds good to me; the material in the Campaign Guide will most likely be updates and additions to material I already have, but the Player's Guide is what all my players are chomping at the bit for. We've got two players who really need the 4e dragonmark rules, one of whom is an artificer, and a changeling who wouldn't object to some racial feats.

We'll fix on Monday.

Thanks, Vic!