pinky_si's page

I recently bought the Eberron setting (and think it is the coolest thing since sliced bread!) but would prefer to run the published adventures for it with quite a small gaming group. Unfortunately, our regular group has slowly grown until we have a GM and 6-8 players on a weekly basis.

Thinking creatively, me and one of the other lads who regularly GMs decided to try and run a two party split adventure, with one side working for the Lhesh Haruuc (Hobgoblins of Dharguun) and the other side working for the King's Dark Lanterns (Breland).

Our initial outline is for a coulpe of short adventures with each group working separately, followed by a mammoth session in which both groups enter the same abandoned stronghold (from different ways) and clash over the same goal (a Dhakkani relic).

Im hoping that the revisit to playing in smaller groups will inspire our players to crave more smaller party games (since the 3 people who GM regularly in our group are all having to extensively rework adventures to accomodate the veritable warband of PCs which invariably turn up).

I was just wondering whether any of you gurus out there had run similar style campaigns (not neccessarily in Eberron) and if you had any advice on runing a party versus party type game?

I came across a nice illustration of this discussion in a dragonlance game I played in not so long ago. We were playing through the original dragonlance modules, with some of the players playing Goldmoon / reiverwind et al and some players bringing other characters into the fray (I played a minotaur bounty-hunter with a life debt to one of his ex-quarries).

During the course of our adventures, Shadowstar, a plainsman barbarian got himself killed by Draconians and subsequently raised by Goldmoon. Awed by this miracle of healing magic in a setting deprived of it, Shadowstar's player had him convert to worship of Mishakal - he followed Goldmoon around for two whole modules bugging her with questions about the return of the gods, before taking a level of cleric during the interlude between DL3 and DL4.

LOL - I remember running Dragon Mountain for a Basic D&D party during a bit of a powergaming phase. The party were so tanked up that the Kobolds could only hit them with a critical 20.

"Excellent" thought almost all of the player's simultaneously, "this is gonna be a cakewalk."

I have never rolled so many 20s as a GM and coupled with the fact that I was using a homebrewed critical hit table for what happened when a critical was scored (inspired by the MERP tables ;), the poor players never knew what hit them. I had to stop using my screen after a little while 'cos the players didn't believe I was actually rolling that many crits.

I've been tempted to convert Dragon Mountain to 3E and run it through with my current group, although I think that some of the Kobold leaders could do with being given a couple of class levels. Does anyone know whether this has already been attempted somewhere online, or is it in the works somewhere in the bowels of WOTC?