Jackanory's page

I'm currently formulating ideas for a dungeon crawl using the beginner box rules for some of my buddies. They aren't roleplayers (though we do play a lot of skirmish miniature games like Malifaux and Infinity) but we ran through the beginner box and really enjoyed it and I think another simple, single-session hack and slash/puzzler dungeon would go down well!

I just wanted to bounce the ideas I'd had for the dungeon off the forum to see if the more seasoned DMs might have some cool suggestions for what I could throw at them.

The basic theme of the dungeon is mold and fungus. The backstory is that some strange zombies wandered into town and were killed and that the party have been sent out to investigate their source. The party have followed their tracks back to the dungeon where the adventure starts. Almost the whole place is filled with rot, and spores hang heavy in the air. I'm imagining that some of the enemies they face (and that I'd have to convert to fit the BB) would be things like toads, myconids, goblins wearing mushroom hats and yellow musk zombies (which was what started the whole thing). I had this idea that in the end of the dungeon they'd find a man in suspended animation in a crystal tube, the idea being that he was a wizard who contracted some kind of fungal rot. He attempted to cure himself and ended up putting himself in the crystal as part of the process. When they look inside the tube he looks completely clean, in stark contrast to the rest of the dungeon. Although he has been cured, he has now been trapped in his tube for years and fungal essence, empowered by his magic has seeped out and filled the dungeon. Maybe some of the dungeon denizens worship him as their creator.

Do you have any ideas for the kinds of encounters they could face in this dungeon? Maybe some traps or puzzles or roleplaying possibilities? Do you see any holes in my ideas? How would they discover what actually happened here? I guess they could find his journal to find out that he was trying to cure himself but how could they make the jump to realise that he's the source of the proliferation of all of this?

Is there a limit to how much water one can create in a day using the Create Water spell? It's an orison so it can be cast an infinite amount of times a day but surely it would get ridiculous if a 1st level cleric can just keep casting it out of combat. Its rules say it's a maximum of 2 gallons/level but is that per day or per casting? If it's per casting, casting it every 6 seconds (per round) they end up with 28,800 gallons over 24 hours!

Would you be able to used the beginner box iconic characters in a real adventure path (Legacy of Fire)?
The people I'm going to be playing with are all brand new to RPGs, apart from playing through the beginner box and the character sheets that you get in there just have everything laid out so nicely and clearly that it'll make things super easy to run. This will also be my first time DMing so I want it to be as easy as possible for me!
The idea would be to run through level 1 with those beginner sheets and then maybe once they've dinged level 2, let them customise things further, maybe even roll up brand new characters with all the options.

On another note, are there any other pregen character sheets out there that are laid out like that, with all the extra notes?

I'm a brand new DM about to start up Legacy of fire with some of my gaming buddies who are generally pretty experienced with tabletop gaming but relatively inexperienced with RPGs. I've played a lot of DnD as a PC but not as a DM before and I've always played in balanced parties (ie tank, stabby guy, spellcaster and healer). I'm a bit worried with how the party's line up is so far. We've got a half-orc monk, a drow swashbuckler (type of rogue), a gnome summoner, another guy who's leaning towards rogue or ranger and a final guy who I have no idea about yet (not sure if he knows either).

I'm just a bit worried that we're going to be creating a group with a really high damage output but not much else. We really need a healer of some sorts but I don't want to make people take a cleric or anything like that as I want them to make characters they're going to enjoy. If worst comes to worst I'll roll up an NPC healer of some sort to tag along with them but do you think they'll struggle through the campaign with this line up?

The final thing to ask is that the guy who's leaning towards rogue/ranger has a lot of really cool ideas for his character as he's really into fantasy writing but I'm not sure how to incorporate them. The main thing is that he wants his character to have the ability to spontaneously craft tiny golems out of anything he picks up. He also wants to be skilled and dextrous when he fights, which is why we were thinking rogue or ranger, and also good at talking his way out of sticky situations.