Power Score

Episode 79: The Nightmare Scenario

Ross and Rachel are both guest stars this week. Last week's show was awesome, looking forward to what will happen tonight!

The Party

(Rachel Seeley) Miranda- Elf Druid
(Ross) Wumba - Batiri Goblin
(Anna) Evelyn - Human Paladin of Lathander
(ProJared) Diath - Human Rogue
(Holly) Strix - Tiefling Sorcerer
(Nathan) Paultin - Human Bard

Nate got in on the show a bit late, but it didn't affect anything. Looks like Chris is running this from home. He's sick, but he's still running the game. Dedication!

Last time, Evelyn ended up in the tomb, Diath is in some weird version of Waterdeep where the yuan-ti are trying to recruit him. and Strix is in a maze with Ubtao. Miranda is in the yuan-ti temple with Paultin, Dragonbait, the animals, and vegepygmies.

Miranda creates a gloaming court, a safe place to rest. She asks Paultin about the ring of winter. She explains that the elves sent the ring away for a reason. Miranda doesn't think it's safe in his hands.

Strix is in the mazes with Ubtao. She's really angry about her situation. The Evelyn doll consoles her.

Strix hears something big coming toward her from the mazes. The trees that make up the maze split open. Here comes a hut walking on chicken feet. It's Baba Yaga's dancing hut!

Ubtao wants her to run, but she refuses. The Diath puppet is on her hat.

Meanwhile in the tomb, Evelyn comes to a room with a panel. She has the egg bomb that, if set off, will create a massive explosion of force damage.

She tries to calm down and prays: "Lathander, it's me. Evelyn your servant. I don't know what to do. I don't know why you blessed me with these people. Their souls are in danger, I don't know how to stop it. I'm nothing without you."

She asks for help in deciphering the symbols on the wall.

Oh no. Guess who's here? Wumba..! Wumba tries to answer her prayer, pretending to be Lathander but she sees right through it.

He sees the console and the black egg bomb. There are a few creatures heading this way - gargoyles with four arms. Wumba spits in Evelyn's face. I hate this dude.

Wumba starts messing with the dials. The nearby rooms shake and rotate. The gargoyles are no longer able to get at Evelyn.

Meanwhile, Diath has three yuan-ti ladies writhing around him. He asks them, "What makes you think I have an ancient soul?" He gets to his feet.

Fenthaza strokes his face and says he'd be so much prettier with scales.

She points him to a door that opens on its own. Fenthaza says, "We can't help you, you must face him alone." In the room is a rectangular room with a slab of stone with a bleeding dead body on it. Looks like a tiefling.

Ras Nsi is in here! Diath draws Gutter and he charges Ras Nsi.

Elsewhere, Paultin is hanging out. He can detect Waffles' sense of failure. Paultin tells her he's looking for a new group. Miranda points out that she lost her group, too.

In the mazes, Strix spots Ubtao's talisman hooked on a tree and takes it. She looks at the maze inscribed on it and notes that there is no exit.

Strix remembers that Ubtai will grant favor to the one who can find their path through his maze. She traces her finger through the maze and gets a number of splinters. She tries to use her tongue to find her way through the maze.I can't imagine how painful that must be!

The air in front of her rips open... it's a gash in the fabric of the realm. She sticks her head in. She sees Diath. He runs right past her (Jared rolled a one on his perception check to notice her).Jared attacks Ras Nsi.

In the tomb, Wumba slips out of Evelyn's grasp. He tries to reason with her. Evelyn makes him flinch and he poops his pants a little bit.

He tells her, "I'm the only people you got.." and he dabs.

There are pipes in here. Something is crawling through them. It's another Wumba..?! Ross controls both of them. A hashtag is born: #Dab4Dendar.

Evelyn tries to stop Wumba from hitting a button. She hits him for 14 damage. He presses a button.

Evelyn hits the blue button. Everyone in the party suddenly hears a sound like a PA system coming on. A third Wumba pops out.

Paultin agrees to sneak back into the yuan-ti lair using pass without a trace. Paultin and Miranda go down by the water, near the door that enters the yuan-ti lair. There's a giant serpentine creature in the water. Paultin heard it but can't see it. Here's a second head.. third.. fourth.. it's a hydra!

Paultin aggressively turns on the sun sword like Kylo Ren. a five-headed! He's going to fight it!

Chris loses his connection and Jared quickly takes over as DM, dispensing 80 potions of healing. Chris is back.

It's Ras Nsi's turn. Ras slices into Diath and drops him, but Diath is death-warded. He has one hit point. Ras Nsi slices into him again! He's dying. Ras constricts Strix.

The Wumbas form a battlestack. OK, that's pretty good. The stack is one foot taller than Evelyn. The Wumbas offer to help with the buttons and levers. All three Wumbas spit on Evelyn. Guh.

Wumba throws anpther wounded Wumba at her.

Miranda goes in to the dungeon and she can hear Strix screaming.

Strix misty steps away from the grasp of Ras Nsi and she drops a fireball on him. She kills him! His sword clatters to the ground.

Chris almost skipped her turn, but the chat set things straight. That was pretty big right there.

Evelyn converts one of the Wumbas to Lathander?!!? Hilarious. Evelyn tells Lathander that "Even the lowest of us are blessed by your holy light." Wumba is offended.

Chris's dog Milo appears on camera! Rare.

Evelyn pulls the lever.. the floor opens up. She and the Wumbas fall into the room where Strix and Diath are. No more Wumbas. And here comes Miranda and Paultin.

Paultin's down. Miranda heals her. She quickly picks up Ras Nsi's sword.

Miranda is sad.. her firends are dead. Evelyn walks over to Strix.

Evelyn initiates a group hug and includes Miranda.

Strix asks Diath if he's an angel.

Make perception checks... Miranda rolls a 27.

They hear ticking! The egg bomb!!!

That's where we stop.

Overall

Great episode! It was a surreal half-dream episode, but very cool. Chris actually split the entire party and made it work! Pretty awesome.

We talked about this episode on Waffle Talk with Anna Prosser Robinson! Was epic:

You can order Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes here.

The new D&D book is coming out in May! It's called Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, and it going to be somewhat similar to Volo's Guide to Monsters. It has new monsters, new character race options and tons of lore.

What exactly is in this book has been discussed on a number of D&D shows so far. I watched them all and present them to you in text form via the series of tubes known as the internet.

Quite a bit of cool stuff was put out in playtest form months ago. A final version of these races will appear in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes:

Elf Subraces: Avariel, grugach, sea elves, and shadar-kai.
Variant Tieflings (tieflings bound to archdevils such as Dispater, Glasya, Mephistopheles, and others). Also, demonic boons, details on different cults of demons and devils.

General Notes

The overall idea is that this book focuses on grand cosmic conflicts. Mordenkainen, a legendary wizard, keeps an eye on everything and does his bet to maintain a balance. He believes that if one side wins in one of these conflicts (such as the demon wiping out the devils completely) then the entire multiverse might be in danger.

Mordenkainen leaves little notes in the book like Volo did in Volo's. Apparently, Shemeshka (a Planescape NPC) is somehow featured too. It was said on one broadcast that Shemeshka tole Mordenkainen's notes and cobbled them together to form this book.

As far as the tone of he notes, this was said: :Mordenkainen is very sassy."

Player Stuff

Tons of new race options:

Elf Subraces: Avariel, grugach, sea elves and shadar-kai. Also, a new, expanded version of the eladrin.
Tieflings with special abilities linked to the different archdevils.
Githzerai and githyanki as player races.
Duergar as a playable race.

Lore

This book gives tons of detail on certain races, factions, and conflicts.

Dwarves and Duergar: The origin of the dwarves and their war with the duergar.

Elves and Drow: We got quite a bit of information on elf-related content:

Elves have fey ancestry. The book delves into the creation story of the elves. Sounds like they're changing/adding some stuff. Up until now it is believed that the first elves formed from the tears of Corellon.
Details on the schism between the drow and the other elves.
Details on actual elves high elves, wood elves, eladrin, and shadar kai.
Dicussion on the elven gods.- gods of the elves
The eladrin and their relationship with their elven kin. Unlike other elves, the eladrin have connected deeply to the Feywild. Other eladrin are so transformed by the Feywild that they become fey.. or even archfey.
Some archfey have gone to Arvandor to dwell with the elf gods.
"This book has elfy elves."
Corellon, the parent of elves, playful inattentive parent. Lolth provided direction and definition. Lolth long ago convinced almost all of the elves to go with her. Toward the end, many of the elves had regrets about siding with Lolth and they flinched before going over the edge.
Why are there so many kinds of elves? There is a strong story reason. In their original fey form, elves could assume all sorts of different forms.

The Blood War (demons vs. devils): We get information on the blood war. Everywhere in the cosmos is a potential battleground. The book will include ways that the blood war can be intertwined with lower level adventurers.

Githyanki and Githzerai: There was a weird comment about gith art. "We can't use any old art from Dragon or previous adventures or OP event art..." Why? Their "..costuming is very different."

The book includes a painting of Vlaakith, the lich queen. She still leads the githyanki.

Halflings and Gnomes: The book also details Two unusual cultures that have no major conflicts - halflings and gnomes.

The gnome section includes lots of clockwork creatures like "A little robot guy with two shields" and "a little mechanical frog." There's a table for creating crazy gnome inventions, which sounds great.
Do you think they include giant space hamsters?

Monsters

Half of Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes is devoted to new monsters. About half of the monsters in the book are Challenge 10 or higher.

Archdevils: There are stats for all of the archdevils (Asmodeus, Mephistopheles, and the others).
Moloch is also statted out.

Moloch?!

The Idolin: The idol on the 1e player's handbook is iconic. What was it supposed to be? It is a monster first mae in 4e known as an "idolin", a giant animated statue. Supposedly, Dave Trampier (the artist of the 1e cover) nicknamed it Molly, short for "Moloch". It does look quite similar to early depictions of Moloch.

Moloch: The deposed archdevil Moloch is statted out in this book.

Eladrin: There are eladrin in the monstrous section

Elder Elementals: There are a number of "elder elementals" in the book. One is apparently known as "The Leviathan". These are city-destroying type creatures with power on the level of the Tarrasque.

I imagine this might include the elemental lords of good (Ben Hadar, Sunni, and the others) and probably a bunch of 4e primordials..?

Yugoloths: The neutral evil mercenary fiends.

Shadowfell-Themed Creatures: On one show it was noted that Volo's had a lot of feywild material. This book focuses on the Shadowfell. Some of the Shadowfell monsters are brand new.

Cambions: There are cambion variants - abilities you can apply to the cambion stat block

Cultists: Lots of info on creating infernal and abyssal cults. This book has add-on powers that can be applied to the base cultist stat blocks in the Monster Manual.
I'll be updating this with previews and information as I learn more!

You can order Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes on amazon right here.

Most of you are probably aware that I've been recapping Dice, Camera, Action since the show began. I am a big Chris Perkins fan, so when I heard about the show I wanted to watch him run a game and see what I could learn.

Chris Perkins: I first became aware of this D&D author/entity called Chris Perkins when I was a kid. He worked on Dungeon Magazine, which I would get in the mail once every 2 months or so. He wrote two adventures in Dungeon Magazine that I was dying to run: Umbra and Bzallin's Blacksphere.

I ran a wobbly version of Umbra for my friends right after that issue came out. I sat on Bzallin's Blacksphere for two decades before finally running it for my 5e Planescape group a few months ago. Bzallin's is a very high-level adventure, so I found it very hard to fit it in to a campaign.

During the 4th edition era, Chris wrote a column called the "DM Experience", where he wrote about running D&D. I love those articles, though they're hard to find now. It was at that time when hi stuff really resonated with me.

I was running tons of 4e, and I didn't know many other people doing the same. Chris would write about stuff I experienced, and hi article helped me figure out the bet way to run 4th edition.

So I've been writing these Dice, Camera, Action recap every week for a few years now. Every once in a while on twitter, one of the members of the show would interact with me. Each time, I'd get all cold and sweaty. I'd type out a response, then erase it and run outside while screaming.

Once I started running live D&D shows on Twitch, I knew I wanted to do a DCA post-show with some of my friends, who are also DCA super-fans. That's Scarlet Moth and Shaun Nakasone.

Scarlet Moth is a cosplayer and artist from Australia. She plays in my Tomb of Annihilation games. She's a very good player and I really admire her social media skills.

Shaun Nakasone is a cosplayer and artist. He plays in my Mezro/Omu/Tomb group. He's one of those exemplary D&D players that is always focused, is funny/fun to play with, and comes up with cool character concepts.

Both of them are big DCA fans like myself, so what the heck! Sounds like fun, right?

Doing the Show: What I did not expect is for the cast to go out of their way to mention it and promote it on the actual Dice, Camera, Action show! Our first episode of Waffle Talk got a heck of a lot more viewers than I expected.

The following week, some members of the cast expressed interest in actually being on the show! From that point on, I've been in a sort of dream-like trance. How lucky am I?

I'm not a show host. I'm just a dude who likes D&D. But..! Being a dungeon master gives you life skills! Running a game of D&D is like running a meeting at work, or planning a party, or hosting an event. You've got to wrangle people, keep an eye on everyone, and get through the event in a smooth manner while helping everyone enjoy themselves.

So hosting the show is not a big deal for me. This is one of those occasions where I'm "DMing life". When I was a manager at a toy store and we had to move shelving around, I'd DM the plan-o-gram and give each worker a "quest". I mean, not literally, but that's what was going on in my head.

Not that I'm the best host or anything like that, but I am saying I can do it and get through it.

The technical side can be a bit of a pain. On one episode, my computer just froze. I have absolutely no idea what happened. I had to reboot. It sucked.

Then on another show, I had a minute where my overlay (the thing you see on the screen) messed up. It's a bit hard to explain. When using Skype to connect with everyone, I pull video from Skype and place it under the overlay. If that Skype page gets shifted for some reason, everything gets screwed up. My giant head will be half in one box and half in another.

So I'm a bit wobbly, but overall the show is going great. I got to talk with two of my favorite D&D stream people!

Guest Stars: Holly was awesome. I really want to pick her brain about Planescape and old versions of Strix, but I'm not sure how much most DCA fans want to hear about that. There's more pressing issues to deal with!

Anna was great, too. I was worried that I was wasting too much of her time, so I tried to end the show after about half an hour, but she actually wanted to stay longer! She talked a bit about a version of Evelyn that she used in a prior campaign (on Misscliks Outbreak, I believe). had absolutely no idea about any of that!

Once those guest star episodes aired, I got a big pile of new subscribers to both my youtube channel and my Twitch channel.

The best thing of all is that madi monimoliburb actually made us a logo out of the blue! How awesome is that? I immediately stuck it on everything.

Overall: I'm not religious, but I feel very "blessed". Thank you to everyone who has supported me! I never thought I'd get to actually talk to Holly or Anna. It was surreal. It was sort of like watching Iron Man 2, and then Robert Downey, jr, looks at me through the movie screen and starts talking to me.

Fun fact: I once ran a game where a player insisted that she have NPC Robert Downey, jr. as a sidekick for her D&D character. Not an NPC who looked like Robert Downey, jr. It was literally Robert Downey, jr. He got killed by two selkies.

You can watch us waffle talk every Tuesday on my Twitch channel or on the Youtube machine.

If you have fan art that you want me to use on the show, send it to me, bah gawd!

Also, if you have questions about Dice, Camera, Action, ask them in the live chat or email them to me. Check out the DCA subreddit, too.

Thanks to everyone for reading this, buying my DMs Guild products and watching my goofy games. Because of your support, I am getting to do a lot of fun things and I greatly appreciate it.

I ran some more Tomb of Annihilation last night and I have a lot of thoughts running through my head.

You can watch it on twitch here. It will be on youtube in a few weeks.

I got art of the epic aboleth fight from last week. Check it out:

Pretty cool, right? It is by Vaughn Distrito.

When I first started using this artist, I really wasn't too sure about the comic book style, but now I'm very happy with it. It's a fun idea to have a different art style for each group. It's sort of like in 2e how they had one main artist for Dark Sun, another for Al Qadim, and another for Planescape.

Missing Players: Two players couldn't make it this week, so it was just Ramrod, Mistletoe, and Asana. We've had a death in each of the last three sessions, so I was definitely worried.

"Writing out" characters is something I don't worry about any more. Way back when, I'd spend time trying to think of a logical way to explain why they're gone or inactive.

Over time, I have found that the best way to handle it is to just move on. Otherwise, you'll end up jumping through hoops that can affect the session in weird ways. I never want to be in a position where an absent player's character dies. That does not go well at all, ever!

Handling the Tomb: There are a bunch of groups in the tomb at the same time. They've been leaving each other notes. I've been doing a lousy job of remembering what notes are where.

Basically, I've been missing a million little things, and it's driving me nuts. On the second level of the central stairwell, there is a plaque that I have repeatedly forgotten to mention or describe. It's got clues that would have been helpful to the heroes.

Using Roaming Monsters: Before the game, I had a tough choice to make. Withers and the tomb dwarves are supposed to come up and reset traps. Poor Lemuel died in the wine room, so that needs to be reset. From page 141: "At dawn the next day, Withers sends tomb dwarves to clean up the room and tunnel, after which the wine cisterns magically refill and the trap resets."

That means I probably should have started this session with a battle against more tomb dwarves, assuming the heroes go to check out the wine room. During their long rest, the adventurers heard the wine spill out of the room and cascade down the central stairwell.

A fight against tomb dwarves felt like a drag to me - a time-waster. There's enough to do in this place, right? I don't want to bog it down with a fight I've run a few times already.

I can and probably should be having Withers attacking the groups while they rest, but that would mean sessions full of battles with the same creatures, and I really want to get on with it.

Also... I was looking through the book to see where Withers might be lurking once his office was trashed. For a moment I thought I remembered that he was way down with the hags. It turns out I got mixed up. There's a guy named Mister Threadneedle down there. In my head, Mister Threadneedle is quite similar to Withers - a thin flunky that serves the main bad guys.

Mr. Threadneedle is described on page 183. He doesn't talk at all.

The group awoke and made their way to the wine room. Were they going to trigger the trap? They found poor Lemuel's dead body and grabbed the two skeleton keys. After a lot of careful searching, they drained one tunnel of wine and found a crawlspace within.

This crawlspace led to Nangnang's tomb on page 143. The deal here is that there's a magic circle holding an invisible monster (a grey slaad). There's a sarcophagus in here, too.

I couldn't remember how everything worked in this room, and scrambled to re-read it as I ran it. I had the slaad attack the group as soon as they stepped foot in the circle. Two notes about this place:

The slaad is free if someone enters the boundary area of the circle.
You should probably not have the slaad attack until someone opens the urn and gets hit with the trap. Deadly!

The slaad attacked the group, did piles of damage, but then the tide turned against it. It turned invisible so it could move without provoking a billion opportunity attacks.

Dispel Magic vs. Invisibility: That's when a tough question came up. Does dispel magic work on invisibility? The dispel magic entry does not say "....on a target you can see". Does that mean you can just cast dispel magic blindly to shut off invisibility?

At the time, I ruled that the caster could do it, because I had went out of my way to tell the group that they could hear the slaad moving around. I figured that the caster had a general idea of where the slaad was.

Looking it up now, here's an official answer.

It looks like I made a good call. If the caster has a good idea of where the invisible creature is (probably by listening for it), then they can dispel the invisibility. If the caster has no idea where the invisible creature might be, they cannot dispel it.

Looking at the invisible condition on PH page 291, it says: "For the purposes of hiding, the creature is heavily obscured."

Heavily obscured is one of those really annoying hard-to-find things in the PH. It's on page 183. "A creature effectively suffers from the blinded condition when trying to see something in that area."

Room 57: The slaad ended up trying to plane shift away but it went wrong (he got sucked into room 57). Later, they freed the genie (immediately) from page 142. She also tried to plane shift and ended up in room 57! It might be fun to roll out the battle going on in there - otyugh vs slaad, winner fights the genie?

Later, the heroes encountered the giant stone head in room 18. The group was very cautious, which is a good thing. The hole in the mouth leads down to room 35b, one of the rooms I've had a really hard time getting a handle on.

The one thing I'm really happy with is that I remembered to use the purple mold (see "alien growth" on page 146). Mistletoe used a flaming sphere to destroy one patch at a time, causing others to sprout eyestalks and shoot rays at him.

He got very lucky! I rolled randomly, and kept getting the "slow" ray.

Flaming Sphere: One question that came up - can he control the flaming sphere without looking at it? He was in another room. I decided that he did need to see it. He's trying to run over patches of mold, it seems like there's a good chance he'd struggle trying to do it blindly.

The heroes ended up smartly going all the way around and finding the exterior of room 35b. I think I understand this area now, but just barely. It's something I will definitely need to re-read right before I run it.

I'm really enjoying the tomb so far!

I'll be running a special Spelljammer game tonight on Twitch! I'd better get preparing for that, now.

Episode 80: Kaboom it May Concern

Rachel has returned and will be playing Miranda again tonight! This was a heck of an episode.

The Party

(Rachel Seeley) Miranda- Elf Druid
(Anna) Evelyn - Human Paladin of Lathander
(ProJared) Diath - Human Rogue
(Holly) Strix - Tiefling Sorcerer
(Nathan) Paultin - Human Bard

Last time, a magic egg-bomb had activated. This thing is counting down and the explosion will have the power of 10,000 magic missiles. That's like 10,000d4 + 10,000 force damage, at least!

The group rolls initiative. The heroes are in the fane of the night serpent. Lying nearby is the corpse of someone Miranda knew.

Evelyn says she's going to use the bomb to destroy the Soulmonger. Paultin goes invisible.

Diath realizes that this thing is going to explode in less than one minute.

Diath has a great idea. He wants Paultin to freeze it!

Chris has a real life stopwatch going. The players freak out.

Paultin thinks the waffle hut could survive the nuke. The group determines that there is no time to cast leomund's tiny hut. It takes one minute to cast.

Evelyn wants to defuse the egg bomb. Insight check.. 9. No luck.

Strix wants to take it and dimension door outside. No.. she casts dimension door and throws it through. Now it's outside.

Paultin casts suggestion on Paultin and tells him to call Shemeshka. Diath and Strix are really angry about this. Paultin forces Diath to use the key on Gutter to summon Shemeshka.

Diath asks Shemeshka for help. She says, "I have to protect my one percent." She casts banishment on him! He is shunted to his home plane!? Sigil?

Diath appears at an elegant costume party. There are humans, a tiefling, and gnome servants holding platters with flutes of wine on them. They're talking in small groups.

There's a band in one corner performing live. The ceiling is arched and has glass panels. Through the glass panels Diath can see .. a city above. He's in Sigil. Sigil is built on the inside of a hollow donut with weird gravity, so when you look up you see building tops.

Shemeshka puts a paw on his shoulder. Diath says he wants to go back, but she says that would be suicide.

Paultin declares that he thought this would work out a little better.

Estavan

Estavan is here? Cameo! He's a semi-major NPC from the 2e Planescape products.

Diath tries to put the key in the blade of his sword, but nothing happens.

He puts the blade on himself and says, "If you want your investment, put me back..."

Back in Omu, Evelyn's flying down below in the caves with her boots of flying. She comes upon a boat floating on the underground river.

Strix starts crying. Paultin actually yells at her and tells her to try something. Miranda tells Paultin to step back. Paultin goes invisible and he takes a step forward and becomes visible, being somewhat menacing.

Paultin argues with Miranda, then uses his mandolin to fly after Evelyn. Yo...

Back in Sigil, Diath asks again... "How do I disable the Halruaan bomb?"

"You can't. It's too late." Shemeshka says two of the group will survive because of their bonus souls.

Diath looks up and sees a huge, weird clock. The hands are moving in weird ways.

He creeps up to Shemeshka and puts the tip of his blade in her back. Yiikkeesss. "Return me or save them all."

"What if you go back and you can't save them? What will you have gained?"

I'll save them. If I don't... their fate is the same as mine."

"I suppose I won't lose anything in the long run. But you owe me. Agreed?"

Diath hands over a key and appears back in Omu, right next to the Halruaan bomb. It's lying in the garden of a crumbled down palace.

Evelyn is outside in the Lost City of Omu. Sunlight reflects off her blade and shines toward a cliff far away. She sees Dragonbait leading the sidekicks and pets into the jungle, trying to get them to a safe place in case the egg explodes..

Evelyn sees the bomb.. she wants to grab it and fly up. Diath stops her.

Strix is in gaseous form. She shuts it off and casts gaseous form on Miranda. Wait.. no. Miranda points out she doesn't need that spell, as she can turn into a bird. They agree to fly out of there as fast as possible.

Outside, Diath notices that there's a keyhole on the bomb. Diath busts out his thieves' tools.. no, first he'll try a Shemeshka key. He sticks the key in. It turns. it clicks. The bomb stops. His key disintegrates.

The group is safe! Bomb is shut off.

Diath is not happy with Paultin and chastises him. Strix isn't happy with him either.

Paultin says it all worked out and he doesn't appreciate the wrist slap. Paultin casts dimension door and ditches the party. He takes Simon with him.

Uh oh.... little yuan-ti Typho comes out of nowhere and stabs Miranda in the back... 32 points of damage from the sneak attack and 5 from the poison! Miranda survives! The group attacks him. She drops an insect plague on him and Typho is done for.

Diath calls out for Paultin. That's where we stop.

Overall

I have a lot of theories! Very good show. I agree with Paultin... they were all about to die. He saved them. Go ahead and be mad, at least you're alive!

We did a lot of waffle talking about this episode right here:

Trapped in the Birdcage is a new D&D show set in Sigil (!) run by Holly, who plays Strix on Dice, Camera, Action. Let's take a gander at what happened and how it went.

You can watch this show on Twitch right here.

The group is starting off at 3rd level.

The Party

(Anna) Wilhelmina - Human Rogue
(Jimmy Whetzel) Saturn - Human Bard
(Chad Quandt) Reader - Warforged Rogue
(Hadeel) Nejma - Elf Wizard

The show starts off with an intro involving a real-life set piece that Holly made, depicting the spire in the Outlands and 4 hanging cages. It's pretty awesome.

Each hero receives a magic scroll that sucks them into a dark, small room. Maybe a closet. Each scroll has a short phrase on it. I caught one: "I have passed to the innermost portal..."

Wilhelmina gasps, grabs Saturn's arm and tries to pick his pocket. It's the triangle. Saturn is a bard who plays the triangle. Jimmy actually has a triangle and it is tremendously amusing. He admits that it will be an uphill battle to convince the public to buy in to triangle-based music, but he is truly passionate about his craft.

Nejma, being an elf, has darkvision. She apparently just set fire to a circus tent prior to appearing here.. well, someone else did. Not her. We eventually learn that this is, in fact, a 3-alarm fire.

They find a door that opens into some kind of storage area that smells like old books. Yellow and green light. Behind a curtain, they hear clattering - they might be in a restaurant.

They see a black beak - it's a humanoid bird-woman. It's a wereraven! She tells the group to wait right there.

I just want to note that this show has 1,469 live viewers watching right now. Dice, Camera, Action has been getting about 2,300 lately. Holly is tremendously popular!

Bariaur

It turns out that we are in a tea shop. Customers: A bariaur (a goatman/centaur). A white-haired, blue-skinned woman with an owl on her shoulder, writing something. Two burly men with curled horns having a quiet conversation.

The wereraven's name is Crone. Wilhelmina wants to pick Crone's pocket. Sleight of Hand.. 22! She nabs a small plush dog.. kind of ratty, loved like a child. Holly says she has made a list of 100 trinkets to pull from. Tremendous.

Crone wants everyone to share their secrets with each other. Nejma is all ears. Reader, being a very literal sort of warforged, starts his tale with the day he emerged from the forge. He is on a quest to find out who killed his creator.

Crone leads the group to a room down below the tea shop, where there is a massive rotating planar thing known as the pentacosm. This is a magical planar device that has drawn the heroes here. The group has been "chosen" to help with an important task.

The adventurers agree to help. Crone wants to test the group. She says has a bit of a rat problem under the tea shop. She notes that there are also steam mephits down there that steam water for her tea.

Mephits

Reader sticks a candle and puts it on his head and down we go. Reader thinks that if he makes rat sounds, he can draw the rats out. "Squeak. Squeak."

The mephits are alarmed by the group's presence and attack! A mephit lets out a blast of steam. Saturn takes 11 points of damage. He's got 27 hit points.

Nejma calls out that she's a bad bitch... she is hilarious. Saturn stabs a mephit through the heart and slays it.

The remaining mephit lets out a burst of steam. Everyone makes their save except Saturn again. Only 5 damage this time.

They cast sleep on the other mephit. It fails its save. Reader thinks that the mephit is a child and he cradles it in his arms.

The group realizes that they don't have a healer and groaning ensues. The heroes are annoyed at Crone. They start heckling her, shouting up the stairs.

Saturn hears something calling his name. Thousands of voices. Now they're calling for Wilhelimina. There's something beyond a door.

There's a rat on Nejma's shoulder... no, there's nothing there.

Reader tucks his baby in to some blankets and puts him somewhere safe. He approaches the door. Burned on the door is the word: "Rats". Beyond the door is a long dark hallway.. a shard of light, black water around some stones.

The heroes try to create a light source, but the light is gobbled up by the darkness in the hallway. Some entities speak all of their names at once.

Reader boldly walks down the hallway. He finds a large mirror that is fastened to a large, iron rat claw.

He sees a vision in the mirror. Rats rampaging through the streets of a city ripping everything apart. They feel a need to consume and destroy. As the image fades, a voice in their mind says, "We are the Us. We know you now. And we will find you."

I don't know if this is a spoiler or not, o skip this paragraph if you don't want to know the deal with the rats. The Us is a cranium rat hive-mind. Cranium rats have psychic powers, and when they get together, they combine into a swarm that has incredible psychic power. They're in Volo's Guide to Monsters and in most 2nd edition Planescape products.

Wilhelmina tries to remove the mirror from the big claw, but the mirror is fastened tightly. After the group messes with it a bit, it shatters. Wilhelmina feels a rush of cold air. She pockets a shard of the mirror.
The group figures out that this was a scrying mirror attuned to a killer rat-thing.

The group leaves the hallway. The mephit is snoozing. Saturn wants to kick it. Saturn is injured badly and is not happy about it at all. He curbstomps it for 1 point!

The mephit wakes up. It's about to attack. Wilhelmina wiggles the doll she stole at it. The idea of them treating the mephit like a baby cracks me up.

Saturn wants to kick it again. The group isn't having it.

Reader asks, "Are we the bad guys?"

Saturn kicks the mephit and knocks it out. Then he snatches the doll.

The adventurers hear Crone call out "No!" They go upstairs. Crone asks them if they broke the mirror. Nejma immediately sells out Wil.

Crone, dismayed, explains that she used the mirror to spy on the rats, her enemy. Nejma goes, "Maybe we can just tape it back together" and I die laughing.

Crone wants the shard of the mirror that Wil stole. She says she can protect the group from the Us, but that they will need to work with her.

There's a frantic knocking on the tea shop door. It's the bariaur who was in the shop earlier. He's begging to come back in. Crone opens it. The bariaur falls to the ground, a bloody mess.

That's where we stop!

Overall

Maybe I am biased because I am a Holly fan, but I honestly feel like she is a natural when it comes to DMing. The whole thing flowed really well, smooth from beginning to end. Holly seemed extremely comfortable and totally at home in the DM's chair.

Any time she needed to look something up, she did it in mere seconds. Clearly she was well-prepared.

I really like all of the players, especially Hadeel. I think she's hilarious and I love her character.

There are a lot of D&D shows out there, so I get that you might not have time to watch more, but this one was really good. It didn't drag like a lot of them do. I floated through the whole 2 hours without watching the clock at all.

You won't be overburdened with Planescape lore, either. Holly kept it simple, which I think is smart. The factions, the Lady, the layout of the city, the Outlands, and all of that stuff is a bit complicated. Easing the players and the viewers in to the Planescape experience seems like a good decision.

Check it out! It's good stuff and a nice way to learn about, or get re-acquainted with, Planescape.

Today I'm going to write about a D&D villain who has been the focus of four published adventures and yet has a fairly low profile in the D&D world: Flame, the red dragon.

Flame was the subject of the iconic image that is the cover of the very first issue of Dungeon Magazine. Over the years, Flame kept being brought back in weirder ways. By 4th edition, he was actually the subject of a time travel adventure!

Here's some quick general notes:

Flame does things on a big scale. He likes to steal sailing ships and buildings.
Tiamat becomes fond of Flame as these adventures progress.
Flame has a number of awesome lairs, including one inside a giant floating diamond.
We learn how mortal Vecna died! Seriously. I don't know if this is still canon.
Flame made babies with kobolds, giants and crocodiles.
There's a Flame clone, a Skeletal flame, and a demilich Flame!

Dungeon Magazine #1: "Into the Fire"

Written by Grant and David Boucher, this adventure is a classic assault on a dragon's lair. The group will have to deal with a number of random encounters o the approach and, once inside, the group must overcome the dragon's clever trap. If they survive, Flame has an absolutely massive dragon hoard ripe for the pillaging!

Backstory: 15 years ago, a prince vanished. Nobody knows it, but the prince's ship.. the entire ship!.. was pulled out of the sea by the red dragon known as Flame. Everyone on board died. That ship is now in Flame's treasure hoard.

The prince's necklace was recently found in some snowy mountains. The heroes are asked to head there and find out what happened to the prince.

Random Encounters: Along the way the heroes might have the misfortune of running into:

20 ogres led by an ogre mage
A lone grey elf looking for shelter and "some companionship" (well!).
Fire giants
An avalanche
A volcanic eruption
A wolfwere that tries to join the party to steal their magic items.

The Fallen Tower: The dragon lives in a crater at the top of a long-dormant volcano. The crater contains a lake filled with magma-heated water rising from old lava vents. Long ago, a wizard had built a tower in the crater, with the lake acting as a moat. Flame actually tipped the tower over and killed the wizard.

Flame's Trap: This is pretty rough. As the adventurers wander down a hallucinatory corridor:

A portcullis drops and possibly impales a character. The portcullis likely splits the party.
A pit opens up under the feet of the rear of the party, which drops them about 20 feet.
Flame breathes down the corridor. The fire fills the corridor and hits everyone in it, though the people who fell in the pit take half damage.

The idea here is that only the PCs in the front of the portcullis can fight the dragon. Flame hovers over a huge open cavern. The PCs will have to either walk out onto a side ledge or jump down 30 feet to engage Flame.

Flame Has Magic: Flame can see invisible, polymorph other, wears a necklace of frost resistance and has an ioun stone that frees him from the need to breathe.

Flame's Escape Plan: Flame will flee if he has to. There's a note that he'll probably fly right through the party to get out, giving each PC a free attack on him.

Once Flame is dead, the heroes get to search his lair for his mighty horde

Flame's Sleeping Chamber: Great flavor for his sleeping chamber: "You enter the chamber to see what was obviously the sleeping chamber for the great dragon. Tons of assorted clothes, furs, and cloth lie heaped on the ground, fully 20 feet thick at its deepest point. You can't help but think about all the beings that have been slain just to make this beast's bed. A large headboard, that appears to be made from the outer wall of a house, has the word "Flame" crudely burned into it."

The Treasure Hoard: This is the perfect flavor text for a dragon hoard:

"At last, you see the treasure of treasures, the dragon's hoard. The ransom of a king pales in comparison. The incredible might and ancient age of the dragon becomes apparent as you try to drink in the hundreds of contrasting period pieces. An imperial coach rests atop a massive pile of coins, its strong box precariously balanced on the roof. Even from this distance, you can see a pile of jewelry within.

Now your eye catches a silver-tipped beam of wood jutting away from you. You follow it back to its source and see the entire hull of a merchants' ship on one side of the cave. Scarred and battered, it lies tilted toward you with its masts broken off. Out of the ruptured hull spill the jewels of a thousand royal houses. Hundreds of similarly interesting artifacts duel for your attention. For a few moments, the sheer immensity of wealth holds you in a trance."

There's some awesome loot:

A pot of gold with a pile of little bones (yes, Flame killed a leprechaun and stole his pot of gold).
A large platinum chess set. The pieces are shaped in the forms of various creatures of good and evil.
A royal carriage made of oak with a tiara in it (maybe he killed Cinderella?!).
The boat! A "slightly crushed" merchant ship.
Chunks of adamantite stolen from a dwarven mine.

To me, this is a perfect "classic" dragon lair. It's unique, the dragon has a plan, the dragon is dangerous, and the treasure hoard is awesome.

Dungeon Magazine #17 - Out of the Ashes

The sequel! This one is for characters 8th to 12th level.

Backstory: The city of Justiminium is home to merchants, adventurers, and thieves guilds. Near it is the forest of Nograheim, a monster refuge. The law states: "Do not eliminate any cultures, clear section of the forest, or set up permanent fortifications." Awesome idea!

This adventure assumes that Flame was slain. We learn that, before he died, Flame had used a wish spell that would allow him to return to life were he to be slain. Tiamat granted the wish!

Tiamat: It is said that a dragon who dies of old age takes their treasure with them to Tiamat's lair, where the size of their "donation" determines their place in Tiamat's court. That might not work out so well with the looting that took place in the first adventure.

When slain, Flame returned to the material plane stripped of all spellcasting powers and treasures.

The Valley of Diamonds: Flame took refuge in a forest ruled by kobolds. The kobolds led Flame through the Valley of Diamonds to the Ring of Flame, a circle of volcanic mountains. At the center was a collapsed volcanic crater full of uncut diamonds. Flame touched the diamonds, and somehow regained his spells and some of his treasure.

In the center of the crater is a massive crystalline palace shaped like a huge diamond made of frozen fire magically suspended over a pool of lava. This is some crazy crap, right?

This was the home of Opikus the Dark, an evil mage. Flame killed him and claimed the place as his new lair. There's a vault inside that flame can't open. Supposedly there is a giant diamond in the vault worth 1 million gold!

Disguising himself as Opikus, Flame decided to hire adventurers to break the vault open.

Opikus: An old man with long graying red hair, a full beard and a bushy mustache. His black silk robes are embroidered in gold and silver. In life, Opikus was obsessed with obtaining the hand and eye of Vecna. He has a library dedicated to books and scrolls on the subject.

Vecna: As a reward, Opikus offers the group the hand and eye of Vecna!!

We learn more. According to this adventure, Vecna died in a mage-war that took place near the Ring of Flame. His corpse was flung into the great pool of lava in the crater, which triggered a huge eruption that destroyed all of the other wizards who took part in the mage war. The eruption brought forth a fountain of diamonds that rained down on the valley.

One of Vecna's minions survived and escaped with the eye and hand of Vecna.

Elemental Evil: When Vecna was thrown into the central volcano, the immortal forces of evil took revenge by sending the entire region into flame. Ogremoch caused a huge eruption that left a massive crater.

The god of good stepped in and made it so that the only way Ogremoch could get the diamonds back was to have someone summon the elemental prince of evil there, or to sacrifice the diamonds to him.

Opikus had been taking advantage of this. He'd been sending diamonds to Ogremoch in exchange for favors.

Tiamat wants to use the huge diamond to make a gem-topped staff to rival the powerful scepter of Asmodeus.

The Living Pass: This pass has animated frescoes that depict the mage-war. There are two frescoes:

One begins with the forces of good heading toward the ring of flame, and it ends with the death of Vecna.
The other depicts the forces of evil triumphing over the slayers of Vecna. This scene ends depicting one of Vecna's minions fleeing with hand and eye.

There are a number of encounters in the valley:

A geyser that is a portal to the Elemental Plane of Water.
A band of frost giants led by Shegor the Strong and his pet dragon, Gerk (gerk means 'stupid' in giant). They were partying heavily when Flame showed up.
There's a monolith that, if touched, causes a djinn named Aradullah to appear. She wears flowing green silk and holds a silver goblet full of ruby red wine. She has been commanded to help good travelers only. Drinking from her goblet imparts knowledge.
There's a second monolith. This one is linked to Flame. Once you get within 50 feet of it, a magic mouth yells, "You're getting hotter!" and a fairly nasty trap goes off.

Inside the lair is all sorts of wackiness:

A gallery of cages holding a vampire, a medusa, and a beholder!!!
A maze of crystal-clear walls.
A frozen library that preserves books from decay.
Zagyg's flowing flagon: A magic item that will get you really, really drunk.
Giant golden balls that chase specific characters.
Guarding the vault is Geldoran, a type VI demon (I think that's a balor).

Dungeon Magazine #100 - Old Embers Never Die

Now we enter 3rd edition! Flame has been killed twice, now. We learn that, as an adult red dragon, Flame entrusted a githyanki wizard with a small chunk of his flesh, to be used to clone him should he meet an untimely end.

In addition to that, Flame's skeleton has become animated! A bunch of kobolds worship it in a swamp. So this adventure features two Flames.

Here is the description of skeletal flame: "A truly gigantic skeletal creature, the red pinpoint gleams in its eyesockets betray its animate nature... Bony wings creak and flap uselessly as it moves to attack."

The githyanki-raised Flame traveled to the western mountains, and found that fire giants had taken up residence in his lair from Into the Fire. He took control of the fire giant clan and "...fathered a half-dragon child with a comely fire giant maiden."

Underlings: Here are some of Flame's minions and offspring:

Skreebo, a half-red dragon/kobold who wields a red dragonfang greatsword. He's got two dire weasels.
Vermilona, a "dracolyte", which is a cultist who worships the dragon.
Dragonthralls: Creatures who pledge their life to the service of chromatic dragons.
2 Ettins and a pack of hellhounds.
Pyrathax, half-red dragon, half fire giant.
A half-red dragon/giant crocodile.

In case you're wondering where the draconic crocodiles came from, the adventure has you covered:
"One night about thirty years ago, after consuming an entire wagon of strong dwarven ale, the dragon polymorphed into a giant crocodile and frolicked with the crocodile denizens of the lake. By morning, Flame had forgotten all about the night before - but one particular female giant crocodile hadn't."

Battling the raised Flame actually involves returning to the original lair! It has been altered quite a bit. Pretty awesome.

Dungeon #200 - Flame's Last Flicker

Flame's been slain at least three times! Now what?

Well, Tiamat took Flame's soul and transformed him into one of her exalted - a trusted servant with designs on becoming an exarch. Technically, she turned him into a dragon demilich.

Flame has concocted a scheme to siphon off Bahamut's power and transfer it to Tiamat. She can use that power to drive Zehir from Tytherion (in 4e, Tiamat shares a plane with a snake god. They're at war).

Flame uses a stolen relic of Bahamut to divert souls to an area in the astral sea.

The heroes must find and destroy Flame's phylactery. Flame has multiple phylacteries, and hid them in the past.

Flame created a crystal island in the astral plane to divert the souls of Bahamut's faithful from their final rest.

From there, the heroes use an artifact sword called Justice's Edge to travel back in time. They're got to find and destroy three different phylacteries. Maybe I'm blind, but I don't see the first one anywhere in this adventure. I hit ctrl + f and everything.

The final battle is against Flame in his demilich form. Yes, he really is a giant, floating dragon skull!

What Comes After Demilich?

Could you make a 5th adventure? A ghost Flame? A planar dragon Flame?

Maybe the son or daughter of Flame?

Why not, right? Flame's whole gimmick is that he keeps coming back in different ways.

Pretty awesome! There's tons and tons of ideas to mine from these adventures, so definitely check them out!

OK, people! It's time for Birdcage, episode 2. I loved this episode. Definitely check it out if you have the time.

Also, check out the subreddit for Trapped in the Birdcage.

The Party

(Anna) Wilhelmine - Human Rogue
(Jimmy Whetzel) Saturn - Human Bard
(Chad Quandt) Reader - Warforged Rogue
(Hadeel) Nejma - Elf Wizard

Last time, the group was magically sucked into a tea shop run by an old wereraven named Crone. She needed the heroes to deal with a few problems. She showed the group her gigantic pentacosm and then the adventurers went under the tea shop, where they fought two mephits. They saw a vision in a magic mirror of cranium rats killing people in Sigil. An injured dude stumbled into the tea shop. That's where we left off.

Holly says that this injured fellow is a bariaur named Wooly Cupgrass! That's an NPC from Faces of Sigil! He lies there, bleeding, as the group stares at him. He asks for healing.

Wooly Cupgrass

Saturn realizes that he can cast cure wounds. He's hurt, and is inclined to heal himself. Crone sighs and gives Wooly a healing potion.

Crone tells the group that they need to find two other wereraven women named Mother and Crone. Nejma isn't thrilled with the idea of going to find Mother.. thinking it's her Mother. Nejma apparently broke some stuff and isn't welcome. Nejma is awesome.

We are told that Maiden is in the Great Gymnasium, which is a location from In the Cage. I love how Holly is using all of this stuff right out of the books.

Crone mentions in passing that "Crone" isn't her realm name, and that her real name is really boring. And... now the group must know. She doesn't want to say. Saturn casts zone of truth! Thee people are hilarious.

He casts it. Crone is going to make a Wisdom save... failed. We learn that her real name is Adele.

The adventurers hit the streets of Sigil to check on Wooly's shop. They get a look at the weirdness of the city.. it's inside a hollow donut... there's city above them.. planar citizens...

Nejma had kept a piece of the broken mirror. Looking through it, he can see a sort of augmented reality.

Wooly's trail of blood is easy to follow. The group gets distracted, though, to Reader's consternation.

The group witnesses some sort of transaction go down. Nejma makes an insight..a 2. he thinks it is a planar crack deal.

Wil wants to steal stuff. There's a good looking aasimar selling fruits. Wil leans forward, says 'nice wings', and tries to steal some fruit. Batting her eyelashes. She stole it.. rolled a 25.

Saturn wants to steal stuff. Wil tells him, "Stick to your triangle." Died laughing.

Wil steals more fruit.

The group realizes they should have asked Crone for more details instead of bugging her about her name.

Reader can't help but notice that a child slips in the blood trail that the group should be following.

The group chats up a tiefling rug seller. They cast charm person on him.

Saturn notice that a rug is shaking. He wants to steal it. How is he going to hide it? Who knows.. he touches it. It's a rug of smothering!

Wil is hiding. Here comes some (I assume) Harmonium officers. They're looking for thieves. Wil makes another stealth. 14. She has this magic omnidress that can change forms. She changes her gown into a glamorous blue toga type thing.

Reader tries to pull the rug off of Saturn. Another rug jumps him! The adventurers realize that this tiefling is not selling decorative rugs.. these are security rugs!

Nejma wants to set the rug on fire. I love the idea that she is always starting 3 alarm fires everywhere she goes.

A crowd is gathering. Nejma goes, "Ladies and gentlemen, please stand back... please step out of the splash/burn zone". Died laughing. Performance check: 16!

The crowd thinks it's a show. One dretch is super into it.

Dretch

Reader is blinded and restrained. Reader takes 7 damage. He's down! Defeated by a rug. Death save... 1 success.

Nejma makes a minor image of huge moths, which scares off the rugs. The tiefling is unhappy. Saturn solves this by kissing the tiefling. The tiefling smells bad.

The group grabs unconscious Reader by the ankles and drag him along.

Knowing that the rats have been abducting potion sellers, the group decides to buy some healing potions. They find a potion dealer. They test the potions.. rub it on their gums.. I absolutely love the idea of expired potions of healing. What weird side effect could they have?

Nejma sips it. Her tongue turns purple. They dump it in Reader's mouth. It does heal him, but he also turns green. Groggy, he asks, "Did we buy the rug?"

Reader really wants to follow that blood trail now. The adventurers leave the vendor.

Wil scans the streets for a wealthy person.. spots a tiefling. Gold on their horns. Possibly a magic user. Wil says, "Look at the coin purse on that one."

"Please, no" says Reader.

Wil tries to pick the tiefling's pocket. Rolls an 8. Uh oh.. the tiefling yells, "guards!"

The two armored guards look right at Wil. She tries to bluff..

Nejma casts darkness! The heroes flee into Imel's Happy Tongue, which is also detailed in In the Cage: A Guide to Sigil. A waitress asks, "How many?"

"Four Please." They hide their faces in the menus. Holly is rolling with all of this incredibly well. She is so smooth and polished. I think a lot of DMs would struggle with these shenanigans. Some might try to railroad the group. Others might get too heavy-handed with the town guards. Holly's 100% along for the ride and it makes this very enjoyable.

Saturn turns Wil invisible. The guards approach the group... ask around.. clueless breaking laws.

There's a monkey. Nejma wants to steal it. She ends up in an opposed strength contest with the monkey. The monkey rolls a NATURAL 20. It takes her mirror piece and runs. Nejma snatches he monkey with a mage hand and drags it back over.

Wil, invisible, takes advantage of the chaos and snatches the cash box/tip jar. 10 gold.

Reader, flummoxed, starts writing all of their crimes in a book. I love the idea that he starts keeping track of things the group does - fires started, things stolen, seduction attempts, etc.

The monkey leads the group through the streets for about a mile. They get to an open area of marble and stone. Like a Greek coliseum. The Great Gymnasium! Lots of naked people. Jimmy uses the Zoom in function on his camera for effect. Dude is hilarious.

A woman groans. Are these the people they sent me?" It is Kylie! Kylie the tout is a fairly famous Planescape NPC. She helps people get where they are going in the city. She has this furry pet called an ethyk. Its name is Dib (Dybb?).

Wil starts ripping on Kylie."Your monkey smells. Your ponytail is wack." Moments later, Wil humbly concedes that Kylie's ponytail is not actually wack.

Reader wants to find someone to talk to about the crimes he wrote down. This poor dude is totally out of his element, it is very amusing.

The heroes can't help bu notice that there's a bunch of naked people working out in this Great Gymnasium. Kylie leaves the group for a minute and Saturn immediately starts talking to dudes.

He flirts with a guy who has buzzed hair and a lovely mustache and sideburns combo. His pickup line: "Can I play my triangle all the way to your heart?" Rolls a 10. Amazing.

Nejma flees the depravity and hides. She is uncomfortable around all of this gratuitous nudity.

Wil steals from a gym bag. She loots... an onyx panther figurine. Holly has a trinket chart she's rolling on.

Reader again tries to nudge the group on. He reminds them that most crimes that aren't solved in the first 48 hours go unsolved. Again... I died laughing. Great show!

Kylie comes back. he is crying. What...? She melts into rats! They swarm all over.

Saturn busts out a thunderwave. Jimmy is new to the game but he is all over this. Yes, the triangle triggers the thunderwave. He hits his allies, too. Reader's down. Nejma uses another potion on him.

All the athletes look right at the group. Saturn winks at all of them.

Their dretch fan from earlier is here, cheering them on. He chucks gold at them.

Uh oh... everything is melting away. This entire thing is an illusion! They see cranium rats everywhere, even in the sky.

Then, suddenly, Kylie's next to them. "What are you doing? We have to get going!"

That's where we stop!

Overall

I love this show! Holly is a really, really good DM. The group is firing off curveballs left and right, but she doesn't miss a beat. It's so smooth - no pauses or stumbling. The rug thing - did she pull that off the top of her head? If so... amazing.

I guess if you are wanting the plot to progress, you might not like this episode as much as I did. But if you like shenanigans, you definitely need to check this one out. What a great group!

Artist is right here

Episode 81: Alignment

Rachel has returned and will be playing Miranda again tonight! This was a heck of an episode.

The group is level 10!

Diath: Took a feat. He won't reveal which one. His Wisdom is now a 15.
Evelyn: Aura of courage: Noone can be frightened.
Paultin: Got some new spells. His bardic inspiration is bumped up to a d10.

The Party

(Rachel Seeley) Miranda- Elf Druid
(Anna) Evelyn - Human Paladin of Lathander
(ProJared) Diath - Human Rogue
(Holly) Strix - Tiefling Sorcerer
(Nathan) Paultin - Human Bard

Last time, Paultin stormed off and took Simon with him. The group is in the lost city of Omu. They just deactivated an egg bomb, stopping it from exploding and possibly killing everyone.

It's night. Strix flies up above the city and looks for him. No sign of Paultin. It will be very hard to find him at night.

Miranda blames the ring. She says that her people (the elves) made it. It houses an evil entity.

Evelyn performs a eulogy for Typho and keeps asking for details because she didn't know Typho at all, which amuses me greatly. The group is bummed and decides to sleep.

Miranda summons a little protective zone that makes it hard for enemies to find them.

The next morning, Paultin returns. Strix is the only one awake. He ignores her.

Paultin is heading into the gloaming thing. I get the feeling he is going after Miranda.

Paultin stares at Diath. Roll initiative! Evelyn refuses to get involved. Anna does not roll init.

Paultin draws the sunsword! Wow. He runs up, is about to swing.. then he disappears. Invisible! He becomes visible a moment later. The sword is at Diath's back. Is he going to...?

Then Paultin starts laughing. He says he was joking. Huh. The group is not sure what to make of this.

Diath tells him not to do that again.

Paultin asks what the deal with Shemeshka. There's a lot of interpersonal weirdness.

Diath hands a key over to Strix and tells her that no matter what, he needs to hold on to this key. He gives her a pep talk and tells her she's powerful. It's true! She is. He forces the key into her hand.

When he hands the key to Stirix, a pulse goes out from the keys. That doesn't sound good. The group assumes the worst.

Parsnip the vegepygmy shows up. Green bean is here, too. Miranda is overjoyed.

Paultin approaches Evelyn. He puts his hands on her shoulders and tells her everything is fine and he's right where he needs to be.

Awkward! Evelyn is stunned. By the time she is able to bring herself to react, the moment has passed.

A vegepygmy gives a flower to Paultin. This quote is uttered: "Evelyn has something for morning glories, you can't remember exactly what."

Evelyn takes the flower, flies and spins in the air. She summons her horse, Morning Glory!

It has been a long time. Morning Glory is no longer an undead monstrosity. His mane and tail are golden. The horse does not have wings, but does have a wing pattern emblazoned on her shoulders.

Evelyn quietly apologizes to the horse. Strix is chewing on the key.. she smashes it on the ground.

The heroes head out into the city of Omu. There's shrines out there to be explored. They come upon an icy clearing. A frozen garden of death. Lots of dead vegepygmies. Did Paultin do this the night before with the ring of winter?

Parsnip points back at Paultin, blaming him for what happened. Evelyn wonders aloud if maybe there's some other handsome bard out there in Omu.

Miranda ha had enough. She wants Paultin to take the ring off.Paultin refuses. Strix tries to cast hold person on Paultin. Paultin shuts it down with counterspell! Wow, Nate. Wow!

Something is coming through the trees. It's Waffles!

The group asks Simon if Paultin killed the vegepygmies. Simon shakes his head no. It wasn't Paultin.

Diath talks about the weird vision he had of Paultin with glowing blue eyes. He tells Evelyn she wasn't in the dream at all. She sadly notes that she knows she is not the main character.

Paultin takes off the ring of winter. He puts it in his pocket.

Diath remembers trying to take the ring off of Paultin, and Paultin's reaction was much different. Diath makes an insight.

Also... where's Handrew? It's gone. Paultin says that the hand got lost in the cold. I don't know where he went, says Paultin.

Miranda casts detect magic. Paultin's an illusion! The ring's not there either! Paultin draws the sunsword. He stabs himself and melts. Yep, he's a simulacrum.

Diath tackles Simon, trying to get him away from Paultin. The only thing that's real is the sunword.

Evelyn realizes that Paultin touching her shoulders.. that wasn't real. Man... Evelyn's having a rough life.

Miranda tries to cheer Evelyn up by making her a Lathander bouquet.

Diath asks Simon where the real Paultin is. Simon points into the city. The group decides to go find the real Paultin and deal with this ring of winter problem.

Suddenly, Diath feels a stabbing icy pain in his brain. He takes 25 points of psychic damage. Blood pours out of his nose and eyes. The geas!

That's where we stop.

Overall

The players filled this session on their own and it was fun to watch!

Anna says that she will run a 5e game?! She's running the starter set adventure! Episode 1 is next Tuesday after DCA on Misscliks. Rachel is also starting a show with a great name: Shit Goes Down.

We talked about this episode on Waffle Talk:

Episode 82: Drinking Man's Game

This episode actually starts with the old Curse of Strahd intro. The group is more than a little perturbed by this.

The Party

(Rachel Seeley) Miranda- Elf Druid
(Anna) Evelyn - Human Paladin of Lathander
(ProJared) Diath - Human Rogue
(Holly) Strix - Tiefling Sorcerer
(Nathan) Paultin - Human Bard

PREVIOUSLY: Way back when, Paultin rescued Evelyn's spirit after she sacrificed herself to save Strix and Diath. Paultin and Evelyn were hurled into a dark plane. A stick creature (the Raven Queen!) gave him a severed hand of hell.

The Raven Queen told Paultin that the hand would help him find a chalice - the skull chalice of Chigakare. That's an item from Tomb of Annihilation on page 189.

Paultin has a geas, placed on him by Shemeshka. He is magically bound to go on a quest to find Mr Fox, get his spectacles and obtain the X the Mystic book.

Last week, a simulacrum of Paultin messed with the group and then melted itself with the actual sunsword.

Diath's geas prevented him from going after Paultin. Strix casts remove curse, ending the geas! Huh. I didn't realize you could do that. It's right there in the description, though.

They come upon some crypts. Evelyn senses that there is a horde of undead here. Balls of light..! Will o wisps!

So this is weird. They're sort of minotaur/will o wisps. Minotaur spirits. Evelyn attacks the undead with treebane. She rolls two natural 20's, which is most un-Wafflelike.

The group keeps rolling well. Diath with a natural 20! The wisps have been defeated.
The heroes spot Simon running into a crypt an they follow. In it is a rotten black mummy... deteriorated... The mummy is missing one of its hands. So..! This is where Handrew came from?

We cut from the group to wherever Paultin is. He's in a forest with twisted trees. He has found the skull chalice of chigakare, which the Raven Queen wanted him to obtain.

The ring of winter tells Paultin, "I feel like I know which way to go", The ring of winter believes that this realm is where it was made.

Paultin comes upon a carriage pulled by Meathook, an ogre zombie. It's waiting there. A dude is nearby, peeing on a tree. It's a dusk elf dressed in Victorian garb. His clothes haven't been mended in a long time.
A female voice in the carriage says "This is taking too long!" Her name is Marisiano.

The pee person is named Lavardo. Lavardo is drunk.

So I can't tell if these dusk elves are shadar kai. It's funny, I never really thought about it, but they're extremely similar to each other. Shadar kai have more tattoos and piercings.

Shadar Kai

Paultin makes friends with them. He rides in the carriage with them. They pass by "leering buffalo", which might be catoblepases. Lavardo explains that Paultin is in the Shadowfell.

Back in Omu, the group is checking out the body of Ch'g'kare. They notice something else in here - a portal! Diath goes through. Everyone goes through.Waffles comes through the portal, too.

In the carriage, the ring of winter tells Paultin that it believes they were meant to be together in this place.
The road splits. Perched atop a hill is a snow-covered, dilapidated tavern. There's a lot of twig glyphs, protective wards and old crow cages hanging from the building.

Oh.. we learn that Marisiana has a bag of carved-off faces. And knives...

She pulls out a silver teardrop earring. A real teardrop frozen on the end of a hook. A gift from a grandmother to a grand daughter.

Meanwhile, Simon leads the waffle crew through the Shadowfell, hopefully toward Paultin. They begin to feel despair. The characters gain flaws imposed on them by the dark realm.

Evelyn and Diath: "I can't tell what's real anymore."
Strix: "I am convinced that this place is going to kill me."
Miranda: "I don't believe I can make a difference to anyone or anything."

Up ahead is a dude with a sack on his head riding a horse. He has a longsword. His name is Lord Nihil. The waffle crew makes a new friend!

Lord Nihil asks the adventurers, "Have you seen a coach pulled by an undead ogre? They attacked my estate?" He pulls the sack off.. his face has been shorn off.

Waffles is suffering from despair. She can't tell what's real! She attacks Miranda. Chris is making his weekly Miranda assassination attempt but she just won't die. It would be funny for him to up the stakes every week, making it more ridiculous/obvious. Like... a house falls on her. Make a Dex save.

To curb the owlbear's aggression, Strix turns Waffles into a baby chick.

At the bar, Paultin asks about the faces. The shadar kai want Paultin's face. They have a drinking contest. If Paultin loses, they get to cut off his face. This is like.. lose-lose.

Paultin loses. He wakes up later in room in the inn. He feels his face. It's still there. He checks the mirror... yep, he still has his face. He comes downstairs. The dusk elves are drunk. They stop cavorting and laugh. They were just kidding! He can keep his face.

Then they tell him they want to help kill Paultin's friends...

Overall

The Shadowfell! Pretty cool. These face-cutting villains are apparently from the upcoming Tome of Foes.

This party split/conflict is really weird, but it's fun to watch because I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen.

We talked with Holly about this episode right here:

Episode 83: Ice in the Veins

Waffle Crew vs. Paultin? I guess we'll see. We get the Barovia intro again.

The Party

(Rachel Seeley) Miranda- Elf Druid
(Anna) Evelyn - Human Paladin of Lathander
(ProJared) Diath - Human Rogue
(Holly) Strix - Tiefling Sorcerer
(Nathan) Paultin - Human Bard
Previously.. the crew was separated. Paultin has the ring of winter, which is turning him evil, and he ran off into the Shadowfell with it. He also took his severed hand and the skull chalice of Ch'g'kare.

The rest of the group went after him.

Paultin is in the Dead-Eyed Drunk, a tavern.
Simon is leading the heroes to Paultin.
Miranda is suffering from apathy.
Diath and Evelyn can't tell what is real and what is not.
Strix is full of dread. Moreso.
Waffles is suffering, too. Waffles attacked Miranda last episode.

Quite a bit of time has passed. Chris declares that the group has been traveling for a month! Diath and Strix are sharing the protective ring. Their max hp drop by 16! Well, that's not good.

Each week, the viewer count has been going higher and higher. Right now it is at 2,032 viewers. The highest I've seen is 2,300.

Paultin's hair has turned black and grown quite a bit. His skin has taken on a blueish tinge. He's not bothered by the cold. Outside, he hears laughter.

Nariciano and Levarda are out there having fun.It's snowing. The shadar kai want to make a plan to fight the waffle crew. They're concerned with the heroes who can fly.

200 people joined. There are 2,226 viewers at 7:14 PM EST.

The waffle crew is walking along in the Shadowfell. They come upon someone hanging from a tree via noose. Wait... just a shadow. Only Diath can see it. Jared says that Paultin has this sense that he is going to let his friends down. He is trying to fight it.

The group has blindfolded Waffles so she doesn't attack anyone else.

Lord Nihil is traveling with the group. He says that if he dies, he asks the group to avenge him. The shadar kai murdered his family and tore off his face.

The shadar kai start talking about the Raven Queen. The ring says it was her elves who made the ring of winter.

Paultin is checking out the chalice. The shadar kai want to buy the chalice from him.

A carriage arrives. It's a gypsy wagon.

2,313 viewers at 7:29 PM EST. That's the highest viewer count I can recall.

There's a wine delivery. Paultin casts locate creature. He wants to see if Diath is within a thousand feet. He thought it was a trap! Wow. It's not a trap.

Driving this carriage is... Izek! Strix's brother! He's got some guards. The alcohol he's delivering is from Gauntlgrym - dwarven ale. Eep. That's where Strahd's puppet is!

Izek says "hurry up, we've got to go. This is a rotten place." It looks like he lost his demon arm.

Paultin doesn't remember who he is. He strikes up a conversation with him.

One of the shadar kai asks Paultin who he's talking to. She suggests killing the guy. Paultin rolls to see if he can remember. Natural 1. The rest of the group knows it's Izek, but Nate doesn't. I think he missed the biggest Izek episode and Dee filled in for him.

The ring says, "You know what we need? A dragon." An ice dragon?! Or are they going to seek out a shadow dragon? The ring says, "An ice dragon that you can ride... into battle."

Meanwhile, the heroes see the wagon heading toward them. It is pulled by two horses. Evelyn rolls to see if she thinks it is real. Natural 20!

Strix sees Izek and screams for the group to run. Miranda shrugs and gets on Lord Nihil's horse.

Strix confronts Izek. He says he's a changed man. He says he lost his devil arm when he tried holding on to the wagon way back when.

Izek says that when the arm came off, something in him died. The part of him that could only see hate and fear went away.

Izek tells Strix, "We were both cast aside, left to the mercy of those in that terrible place called Barovia."

Diath despises Izek. Izek hung him way, wayyy back then. Diath is shaking. Strix holds his hand.

Evelyn walks up and goes, "This wagon is totally real."

Izek makes dolls. Like Blinsky? He tosses something to her. The Strahd puppet! Mr. Shambleface! Izek says "we got this in Gauntlgrym." Drizz't brought it there long ago.

The Strahd doll! Is the group happy? No. No they are not.

Evelyn really likes Drizz't. She says she misses him. Hey, Drizz't is a cool guy. How weird will it be if the group ends up higher level than Drizz't?

Izek says that Strahd might be the only one that can save them from Paultin and the ring of winter. Lady Wachter told Izek to bring Strix the doll. Wachter cares about Strix.

Viewer count: 2,418 at 7:56 PM EST. Sweet jaysus.

How many charges will Paultin spend to make his ice dragon? The ring has 20. He uses 9 and his attempt fails.. Hmm. He might have to use all 20.

The ring is on page 207 of Tomb of Annihilation. Normally, making an ice creature costs 4 charges and the creature needs to have a CR 2 or less. This must be a special thing. Pretty awesome!

Normally the ring has 12 charges, but in the Shadowfell it has 20.

Paultin goes to bed. The shadar kai climb in with him..?

Here we go. The Waffle Crew has arrived at the inn. The group sees Paultin. He has blue veins on his arms and neck.

Somewhere in here we learn the backstory of the Raven Queen. She and a few elves tried to cast a big spell, but it did not go off as intended. In despair, she sunk into the Shadowfell. She put a lot into the spell and became weakened.

Many of her elven servants followed her to the Shadowfell. They became shadar kai.

She became a deity bound to the Shadowfell, an emblem of death who uses ravens to make sure souls get where they need to go. Sometimes she locks away special souls to keep - people of destiny. Good and evil people. She helps them achieve their full destiny.

A raven approaches Miranda. Uhhh... Raven Queen? It wants a trinket or memento. She pulls out her yew wand. The raven accepts it.

Then... Paultin meets... the Raven Queen. Twigs and stuff. She gives Paultin a wand.

4e Raven Queen

Strix assumes the form of Strahd. She flies ahead of the group. Strahd on a flying broom.

She sees the tavern - it's 1,500 feet away. Snow is weighing down the roof. Battered coach with an ogre zombie strapped to it.

Paultin runs into the tavern and rearranges furniture. He spots a hunched crone made entirely of twigs. Paultin pulls out the chalice. She's making creepy noises and pulls back into the shadows. She's gone.

Strix is attacked by the shadar kai assassins. 34 damage from one. She's down. The other one stabs her again! She fails two death saves.

Lariciana loots Strix. She has the Strahd doll. Paultin wants that doll gone right now.

Marinda runs up to the tavern. There's all these snowmen outside the tavern. They start moving. She uses her ring of the ram on one. The snow comes off - it is an ice sculpture of Paultin. All of them are! 100 ice sculptures of Paultin.

Diath can't fly. He's running toward the tavern. He keeps saying: "This isn't real." He runs through the field of ice Paultins, dodging them. Evelyn flies through, smashing them when she can.

In the tavern. Strix disappears in a cloud of oily smoke! Just like when she was summoned by Acquisitions, Inc. Holly is going to be on C-Team tomorrow.

Miranda gets darted. Simon! She needs to make a save vs. the poison. 19!

Paultin decides to attack Miranda. He casts banishment on her. She need to make a saving throw, or she magically teleported back to her home plane. She rolls a 17! She makes her save. That's where we stop.

Overall

Very good show. Nate knows his stuff! I love it.

We talked with Rachel about this episode on Waffle Talk:

New issue of Dragon+! The last one was a bit skimpy. This one is loaded with stuff.

You can check this issue out right here.

We start things off with an interview with Vance Kelly, the guy who did the alternate cover.

Preview: Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes

This article starts out listing basic info about the book. Then it gives us some art and previews!

Geryon: One of the major archdevils! In 4th, he had 3 heads. It was weird. Here he is in 5e:

Stuff we learn:

10 feet tall, 30 feet long.
Carries a horn featuring minotaur imagery
Attacks with claws and a stinger

Marut: The marut is a weird, powerful monster that originally looked sort of like an elephant-person. They have completely changed what it looks like:

I think that looks really cool. In previous editions, I actually went out of my way not to use them because I didn't like the way they looked. This new marut looks awesome, if a bit modron-y. But then, there might be a reason for that.

We learn that they have a contract written in arcane light stamped on their chest. Awesome!

Astral Dreadnaught

Holy crap! The monster from the 1e and 4e Manual of the Planes covers. I think this is a monster that is almost never used, though maybe that will changed now. I used it once in 4e and the players crapped their pants.

It emits a cone of anti-magic that negates magical effects in its area.

D&D Classic

We get a reprint of one of those stories from old Dragon Magazines where famous wizards meet each other. This one involvesElminster and Mordenkainen. The author is hiding in a suit of armor watching this event.

Fun fact: I had my Al Qadim group find that guy (he was D&D author Roger Moore in my campaign) hiding in a suit of armor. He ended up becoming a zombie.

Then they reprint the 4e reprint of the classic Nine Hells article by Ed Greenwood!

We get a 5e conversion of the havoc orb from Dragon 363. This thing is really awesome.

Rancor: A short story about a character from Baldur's Gate named Dorn il-Khan. They even whipped up a 5th edition character sheet for him. They are sparing no expense in this issue.

Doing it for the Fans: Details on Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition.

Check out the art for the Neverwinter MMO Omu expansio. It features Fenthaza and Acererak.

Neverwinter Goes TRPG: They turned one of their quests into a 5e module! Crypts of Kelemvor! It's 15 pages. Man, this issue is loaded with stuff.

The Gribbits Detective Agency: This is another 5e adventure linked to the Dragon Friends D&D show.

Dragonfire: Dragonfire is a deck-building game. You can download a free Dragonfire scenario.

DMs Guild Spotlight: You can get one of the guild adept adventures for free. The Risen Mists. It's gigantic! Hopefully I'll be able to run it soon.

Plane Shift: Ixalan: Magic: The Gathering mixed with D&D.

Port Nyanzaru: Jason Thompson makes a detailed map of Port Nyanzaru. This map kicks so much ass. Here's a piece:

Behind the Screen: Lessons from Live Play: An article about how livestreams are influencing players and creating new fans. Apparently half of all new D&D players got into it through livestreams.

Map of the Month: More free maps from Tomb of Annihilation and Out of the Abyss!

Overall

This issue is overloaded with 5e content! Absolutely tremendous. Come for the Tome of Foes preview, stay for the havoc orb!

You can watch this episode right here.

Anna, who plays Evelyn on Dice, Camera, Action, is going to DM her first game! She's running the Lost Mine of Phandelver, which is the introductory adventure from the D&D Starter Set, which you can get right here.

I love it when people run official adventures because I can either learn what's in it or, if I own it, I can check the book and see what's next.

I ran the goblin caves portion of this adventure in a game store a few years ago and I really enjoyed it. I actually wrote about that session in this blog, which was the only time I ran a game for the "would you like to buy papercut insurance?" guy.

This is one of those basic, classic fantasy adventures done in a way that feels pretty fresh. The goblin caves have a really cool gimmick that makes sense and can lead to a lot of fun things.

The players are using the pregens. This group usually plays 2e (!) so they're going to be learning 5e as we go.

Anna is using Roll20, which is a site that lets you put maps and tokens on the screen. It has all sorts of cool features, but it is very complex. A reader was nice enough to give me a tutorial on it a while back, an I quickly decided that it was too complicated for me. I might take a stab at it again some time.

The Party

(Neal Koibu) Guy - Human Fighter
(Genevieve) Thoradin - Dwarf Cleric
(Trump) Lylow - Halfling Rogue
(Vie) Desdonia - Elf Wizard

Gundren Rockseeker has asked the group to bring supplies to Phandalin. Gundren and his brothers are onto something big. Gundred went out ahead of the heroes with Sildar Hallwinter to take care of business.

The group veered east on the Triboar trail, where bandits and outlaws are known to cause problems.
We learn a bit about the heroes:

Guy Claypool: A slender and malnourished fellow, Guy is trying to raise money for his family. He's a lover, not a fighter and he wears sandals that his cousin made for him.
Desdonia: She's out and about looking for new spells, and has some sort of secret mission involving an altar.
Lylow: He's all smiles and he's looking for easy money. A gang know as the Red Brands put a hit out on him.
Thoradin Frostbeard: A cleric of ...Moradin? The deity changes every time Thoradin speaks.Thoradin declares himself the "punisher" of the Red Brands. He's going to teach them a lesson. Thugs have been throwing their weight around in Phandalin, and this "sturdy little man" has had enough of it. Genevieve is cracking herself up, which cracks me up.

How did they meet, you may ask. Here's how:

Guy and Thoradin met due to a mutual interest in beards.
Desdonia and Lylow met playing a game of Three Dragon Ante. We learn that one time, Lylow was playing cards and the Red Brands tried to kill him, but he escaped. He won't say why they're after him. We also learn that Desdonia might know a wizard named Glasstaff. She's not saying anything more about that.

The adventurers travel down the high road. It's nice out. Thoradin feels like Moradin is giving him a warm hug. Guy is driving the wagon.

Thoradin uses his ability to speak with animals to make friends with the Oxen pulling the cart. The oxen is named Jeanette.

They come upon two horses slain by arrows with black feathers on them.

The group is alarmed and they get into a long conversation. Guy talks about the goddess Sune, who might be Thoradin's new god. It sounds like the deity Thoradin wants to worship is Mielikki.

Lylow wonders if it is an ambush. Something's in the bushes, giggling. Guy approaches.

There's a pair of goblins in there! They attack.

Desdonia nails them with a burning hands. Guy is hit with an arrow and takes 5 damage. A goblin gets a critical hit on Thoradin. The poor fellow is truck in the buttocks. The die roll for the damage is low, luckily for the dwarf.

Desdonia kills a goblin with her sword and quickly cleans the blood off her blade. Lylow kills the other one.

Thoradin is outraged that the goblins killed those poor defenseless horses. She wants to bury them, and she takes hold of her combat shovel! She wants to use this deadly implement of war to dig holes. Guy thinks this is a bad idea - there's no time for this. Thoradin agrees and says a short prayer over the dead beats.

Lylow is impressed that Desi uses a sword.

The group suddenly realizes that these horses belong to Gundrin and Sildar, the people who hired them!

The game is running pretty smoothly so far. The things that tripped them up are the usual suspects: Cover (which I can never remember or find) and knowing your spell DC and your spell attack bonuses.

Genevieve keeps switching the deity she worships. Now it's Sylvanus.

The group decides to look in the cart their oxen ha been pulling. In it is flour, pork, kegs of ale, shovels (not combat shovels), 5 lanterns, stuff like that. It's about 100 gp worth of goods.

After searching the area near the dead horses, the group finds a hidden trail. They heal up and follow it. Thoradin does not hack through the brush - he gently pushes it aside. Thoradin is a friend of nature, you see.

Thoradin wants to climb a tree and scope out the area. She observes that Lylow's tiny little halfling legs are practically useless.

Thoradin gets stuck halfway up. Lylow climbs right past him and high fives him on the way up and again on the way down. He's a pleasant little fellow.

He scopes out the trail ahead. No sign of goblins.

The adventurers follow the trail some more and they spot a snare trap. The heroes decide to try to trap the trappers by pretending to be caught in the very trap the trappers set!

No, maybe not. Guy climbs a tree.. rolls bad.. he falls and takes 5 damage. He's hurt bad. The group is very unsettled by this. Thoradin is a bit bummed to have to use his other heal spell.

When Thoradin heals people, he does it via comforting: "There, there..."

Continuing on, the group spots an odd pile of leaves. They chuck some sticks at it. Pit trap! The group avoids it.

The trail leads the adventurers to a cave.

Lylow is super-confident and he says that he wants to go scout it out. He walks up through a shallow stream.. suddenly, an arrow comes shooting out of a bush!

More arrows.. Desdonia is hit. Lylow is hit! He's down! Uh oh...

Thoradin wants to drag the halfling to cover. Guy kills one goblin and intimidates the other, who flees.

That's where we stop!

Overall

Very good show! It's a perfect stream to watch if you're new to D&D. Anna has played a lot, so that is probably what has helped her avoid a lot of the common little mistakes new DMs make.

The biggest thing I've seen new DMs struggle with is pacing. When do you end a scene? When do you hand-wave time and travel? Every DM handles it a bit differently, so it can be a big stumbling block in the beginning that can lead to boring sessions if you are not careful. Anna avoided this for the most part.

The players are pretty fun to watch. I think that Genevieve is hilarious and she has a very good attitude when it comes to D&D. She seems like she is fun to spend time with, which is really valuable in tabletop RPGs.

Trump is the most likeable dude on the planet. I don't know why, he just is.

Good show! I am very interested to see how the group fares in the goblin caves!

Episode 84: Domain Event

This is it! The crew vs. Paultin. Chris himself said he had no idea what would happen.

The Party

(Rachel Seeley) Miranda- Elf Druid
(Anna) Evelyn - Human Paladin of Lathander
(ProJared) Diath - Human Rogue
(Holly) Strix - Tiefling Sorcerer
(Nathan) Paultin - Human Bard

The group is in the Shadowfell. They're in the middle of a big battle against their friend Paultin, who has been turned evil by the ring of winter. Last session, Strix vanished (she went on an adventure with the Acquisitions Inc. C Team). Mr. Shambleface, the doll containing the spirit of Strahd, was taken off of Strix before she vanished.

So, here we go. Miranda is surrounded by ice Paultins. She ends up on the roof of the tavern. There's a hole in the roof. Peering through it, he can see the innkeeper's quarters.

Diath does a moonsault and throws down oil in Evelyn's path. Evelyn holds her burning sword above the oil. If she light it, the tavern will be ablaze.

She tries to enter the inn, but a soft unseen force keeps her out. We later learn that the weird twig glyphs on the tavern block non-evil creatures from entering.

Evelyn spots Paultin in the dark room. His eyes are glowing blue. Evelyn says to him, "If you care anything for us and me... take the ring off right now.

The ring tell Paultin, "Don't listen to her! They left you alone in Castle Ravenloft! Same with the fire giant citadel!"

Paultin casts freezing sphere, which has a 60 foot radius. It explodes fills the tavern, explodes through the walls, and rockets up every crack. Everybody (except Strix) must make a constitution save. Jared rolls a natural 20! Lots of 20's lately for the crew.

10d6 damage. 18 cold damage for those who made their save.

Evelyn says that Paultin is truly gone. She lights the oil and the tavern catches fire.

The two shadar kai are still lurking about. Mariciana tosses Mr. Shambleface to Lavardo.

Miranda wild shapes into a giant vulture. She perches herself on a weathervane.

Izek smashes through some of the ice Paultins. Lord Nihil is not doing so well.

Eventually we get to a point where Evelyn has Simon, and she's trying to get through to Paultin, who's still holed up in the tavern.

The ring keeps filling Paultin with fake news. "She's threatening us! She's going to hurt Simon!"

Paultin tells her to put Simon down. Evelyn shakes her head sadly and backs away. Chris finds this very funny.

Paultin casts crown of madness on Izek. He's not an ally, so he doesn't get the bonus to his save from Evelyn's aura. Izek turns his hateful gaze upon Evelyn.

Miranda casts call lightning on Izek. 28 damage. He's still up.

Diath looks at Paultin and says, "All I want is for you to see how lucky you are."

Paultin says he doesn't see what luck has to do with this.

The ground turns into a mouth. Strix crawls through! With her is a stone statue - a petrified dwarf.

Strix uses a stop watch that Omin gave her. It stops time! She pulls out her iron scissors. She must make an Arcana check.

Time stops... for everyone but Miranda. She sees the falling snow hang in the air. The wind is absent. The weathervane freezes in place. She sees Diath, Izek, Evelyn, Simon, Lord Nihil, and the Paultins all frozen.

Everything is perfectly still except for her. She drops into the tavern. She look at Strix and Paultin, both frozen.

Miranda slides the ring off of Paultin's finger.

Then she spots the two shadar kai.. they step through the doorway. They are unaffected by the time stop as well.

Miranda wants to make a deal with them. She ant to give them two magic items in exchange for them letting her leave with the ring of winter.

They don't want items. They want her face. She thinks and goes "OK... you can have it."

Time kicks in. From Strix's perspective, the clock didn't work.

Paultin... the cold in his veins fades. He comes to his senses. All of the Paultin statues are immobile. Some fall over.

An invisible hand throws Holly out of the tavern into the snow.

The time stop ceases. Miranda and the shadar kai are nowhere to be found. They have the ring of winter and the Strahd doll.

Evelyn attacks Izek, who is still under the effect of the crown of madness. She wants to knock him out. Jared quietly points out that "Izek is my Boss fight."

Strix turns Izek into a long-tailed chicken.

Paultin is sitting in a frost-covered chair with a thousand-yard stare. He asks, "Why is it so cold?"

Only evil can enter the tavern.... Strix could go in because she had the Strahd puppet on her.

Paultin leaves the tavern. Evelyn looks closely at his eyes. She touches his hair (which is now long and black) and says it looks good. He blow right by her, drinks some wine and smashes it an ice Paultin.

Evelyn sighs. She is resigned and disappointed.

Strix tries to remove the wards from the tavern... looks like she can't affect them.

Strix fireballs the building. Four fireballs! That did it. The tavern is a steaming pile of burned timbers. The spell upon it is destroyed. She tears the glyphs apart.

She digs up the dwarf statue. Its arm is broken off. She thinks a mending spell could fix it.

Diath leads Simon over to Paultin. Simon hugs Paultin's kneecaps. Paultin looks at him, doesn't say anything.

They start looking for Miranda. Evelyn is wondering if Miranda was real at all.

Strix starts looking for portals.

Paultin takes off the death curse ring and throws it to Diath. He casts locate creature to see if Miranda is nearby. She is not.

Strix says, "I was going to cut your finger off, but I didn't because you are my friend." She explained that her stopwatch stopped time. Apparently it didn't affect elves.

Paultin says that the group needs to get the ring back and that it should be destroyed.

They spot three sets of foot prints. Looks like Miranda and the shadar kai got in the wagon and left.

Lord Nihil is down... backstabbed. He's dead. Izek's two guards are dead.

Meanwhile, Miranda is sitting in the coach with the shadar kai. The ring is telling her of the great wonders it has seen. It is trying to win her over.

She still has her face. It turns out that the shadar kai were joking again about face-cutting. Lavardo is drinking dwarven ale.

Miranda uses a cord to tie the ring around her neck. The shadar kai tell her not to let the waffle crew get the ring.

She feels like the ring is safe in her hands. The shadar kai seem to agree.

They'll go north.

That's where we stop.

Chris says he has a funny feeling we'll see Miranda again. The group applauds Rachel for lasting so long.

Chris says he had no idea how this would play out.

Overall

Fun show! I really don't get why the group is so lenient with Paultin. They told him from the beginning that he shouldn't put on the ring of winter, but he did it anyway and look what happened. The dude doesn't even say he's sorry!

This is a campaign that is very character-driven. The players have become very into their characters, and things get pretty emotional. I think that's the unique appeal of this campaign. It has presented a style of play that a lot of people want to take part in.

Chris has been able to adapt to their "sub-optimal" (character-focused) style of play, and it's a beautiful thing. He's loose enough to go along for the ride when the characters take the game in unexpected directions.

I think that's a very valuable example to put out there, especially for newer DMs. They can see how you can handle the unpredictable thing players do, and that it can make the game much better if you go ahead and roll with it. It's scary at first, but it can be done.

As usual, I am very curious to see what happens next.

I've been running tomb of annihilation on my twitch channel. It's been going great! The Tomb of the Nine Gods is awesome.

I am making a lot of little mistakes in almost every room. I want to write this down so you can avoid the pitfalls that I waddled into.

The Elemental Cells

We played through the area I was most worried about in the entire dungeons - the elemental cells on page 158.

The group opened the secret door and took a gander at the fire cell. There' a lit candle in there. When you enter the cell, lave start pouring out of the ceiling, dealing out 22 fire damage.

The group was super-cautious. Two things came up:

A character tried to snuff out the flame with a ranged weapon. Does that work? It probably should. But if nobody is in the cell when it is snuffed out, nobody teleports to the next cell.

The group would have to light the candle and blow it out to move on, right?

I declared that the ranged attack didn't work.

A character ran in and blew out the candle. Should the lava have hit her? Probably. I decided it didn't. Lava's a bit slow, isn't it?

And then... does the lava keep flowing? Does it stop? I should have had it flow, but I didn't.

Two characters appeared in the air cell. They immediately started suffocating. I think I got that right. You suffocate your Con mod in rounds (minimum 1 round), and then you are dying.

I think I did a good job describing this cell. I gave subtle clues that astute players would pick up on. And they did.

Shagambi's Tomb

The group ended up being teleported to room 48. This is the one with the 48 terracotta warriors.

I immediately made a mistake. If you appear on the north rune - it malfunctions and does 18 damage. I forgot about that, but was able to work it in once I recognized the error.

The group made noise and got their one warning. The heroes crept up to the coffin. The music box set the warriors off.

The heroes had a good idea. If they smash the music box, maybe the warriors will stop attacking? In the "Coffin" section it says that the music box rouses "...the terracotta warriors if they can hear its haunting melody." So do they stop if the melody stops? I ruled no. It was a tough call to make in the heat of the moment.

The ceiling in most tomb rooms is 12 feet high. Can the heroes use fly to avoid the reach of the warriors? Can they squish against the ceiling so that they occupy the 2 feet, thus keeping a 5 foot space between them?

Characters used jump spells to maneuver about. I liked this idea, so I gave it a thumbs up, although - jumping over 4 terracotta warriors in a room with a 12-foot high ceiling seems like a bit of a stretch. The arc of the jump wouldn't work - you' either hit the ceiling and drop, or you'd soar low enough that you'd provoke attacks of opportunity.

I declared that jumping provoked one opportunity attack on the way up, and one on the way down. I just thought the jumping was cool. It's magic, so maybe the magic lets you jump in weird arcs and angles.

Maybe it's like Super Mario, where he's jumping through the air, and you hit a button that causes him to shoot straight down, possibly squashing an enemy.

Or maybe you can double jump in mid air!

Maze of Death

The group went to the maze of death, area 49 (page 161). This room is simple, but I had a hard time understanding it. Anything with stone blocks that go up and down confuses me, for some reason.

It boils down to this:

You raise your left hand, palm out to get in.
You raise your severed right arm to get out.

When you take the crown, the bodaks come out and the blocks seal you in.

Modified Spells: The group tried to use dimension door to escape. If you look at the "modified spells" section on page 128, it says that dimension door deposits you in room 57... if you use it to enter or exit the tomb. Over in the side column, it says that spells that would normally allow you to enter or exit the tomb either fail or deposit their characters in area 57.

So, does dimension door work when you're traveling within the tomb?

In my game, if someone uses dimension door or a similar spell to try to go anywhere, they go to area 57. It feels too easy to allow teleportation within the tomb, though misty step is OK. Dimension door would let you bypass a number of obstacles in here - the cells, the water hallway, the terracotta room, the flooded room, etc.

Mirror of Life Trapping

Then there's the mirror. Something to remember... constructs don't trigger the mirror.

A few sessions back, I had let the group use the scrying pool in level 2 to see a tomb guardian walk into the mirror room. I described it in a way as to depict the tomb guardian purposely not looking at the mirror. By doing so, I was warning the group about the mirror.

But the tomb guardian probably should have looked into it. I guess I can say that the tomb guardian avoided looking at it out of habit, or because it does give the tomb guardian a weird feeling even though the magical effect doesn't go off.

Two things I need to add to my guide:

1. A cheat sheet for handling the purple mold on level 4 that shoots rays. I want to list the rays and all the weird little rules. The mold is really cool and I think it's very easy to forget about it.

2. A cheat sheet that has stats of all the NPCs in the mirror. If they all come out a once, that's wayyy too much page-flipping for any singular DM.

Oubliette

Room 57. Two characters ended up in here. The otyugh attacked them, and they decided to pull some levers. They pulled the lever that causes the gullet to pull everything in the room into its maw.

There's a note that "everything in the room" is affected. That includes the otyugh and THE CORPSES, right?

Wouldn't these corpses be flying through the air, hitting the heroes? Probably, right?

Describing how the heroes resist the suction is difficult. There's nothing to grab onto except for the lip of the maw, but if you're holding the lip of the maw, corpse are crashing into you.. and the otyugh is flying into you, too!

I kept it simple. If they made their saves, the heroes held their ground somehow. The otyugh failed its save and got sucked in, which was nice for the group.

As this suction thing is happening, they wanted to pull the other lever. Can you pull the second lever while the first one is going? Do you have to wait for the full one minute to pass until the suction lever goes back to its position?

Does the character have to make a special check to pull the other lever? I mean, it's right by the mouth that's sucking everything in!

Again, I kept it simple.

The two heroes both rolled exactly the number they needed to succeed on their saves. It was very intense. They pulled the other level and survived.

I am thoroughly enjoying the tomb. It's classic stuff and honestly, it's not THAT deadly. I do think that the final battle is ridiculous, though. I see many a TPK coming up.

These are all the weird little things that I struggle with during the game. Hopefully this can help you run the tomb more smoothly!

You can buy this in print or pdf form here.

A long time ago, I made a list of the 10 D&D adventures that I think are the best. One of them is A Dozen an One Adventures, a 2nd edition Al Qadim supplement.

I saw that it is available in print on the DMs Guild and immediately ordered it.

The original version comes in a thin box. It has two booklets, a bunch of card stock maps, and a poster map. I wondered, how would DrivethruRPG smoosh that all into one book?

It pains me to say that DrivethruRPG screwed this up really badly. What I got in the mail was a reprint of just one of the booklets. Nothing from the other booklet. Nothing from the card stock maps. Nothing from the poster map.

That means that you get the main adventures, but you don't have the maps that go to the adventures!

This is the second booklet that should have been part of the DrivethruRPG print book.

The booklet they did include contains the 13 adventures that the box is centered around. They're fun. But I was really disappointed. How can they do this? How can they sell you less than half of what you paid for?

Setting that aside, let's check out what we did get.

The book itself is really nice. The cover is sturdy. I don't know why they used the cover of the "Muluk, City of Kings" booklet. They should have used the cover of the boxed set!

On the inside, they actually went out of their way to keep the gold ink, which is a very pleasant surprise. It really does look almost as good as the original!

The new print is on the left.

Major disappointment! But, I figure I'll take this opportunity to tell you why I like a Dozen and One Adventures so much. Let's run down the 13 adventures that you do get in the Drivethru RPG print book.

Flick of the Tail

Some jerk grabbed a guy's talking ruby-scaled fish and threw it in a well. The group's got to go down and get it.

There's more to it - the fish is actually a pahari, an Al Qadim mermaid variant. Where are her stats? On one of the sheets not included in this book.

The well connects to an abandoned bath house. The bath house is a bit of an "empty dungeon", but it's pretty interesting. Bath houses in D&D always make me laugh for some reason.

It turns out that this creepy old woman has the fish. She speaks backwards, and only understands people who speak to her backwards.

If the group attacks her, they're in big trouble, as she's actually a powerful monster. They might end up having to brush the old lady's hair.

This is a good example of an Al Qadim scenario - strange twists and an emphasis on non-combat solutions.

Nine Flawed Sapphires

This scenario completely changed my Al Qadim campaign that I ran as a kid. It's one of those landmark moments in my "D&D career".

The group is hired to steal some ledgers from a group operating in Sakina Falls. Sakina Falls is a secret cave complex hidden behind a waterfall. If you walk up to the waterfall and say, "Sakina, draw aside!" the waterfall shifts to the left and allows you to access the caves beyond.

The bad guy are making drugged, contraband wine. One of the leaders is Hanzala, a half-elf mage and member of the Brotherhood of True Flame. Hanzala became the most popular NPCs I ever ran. She stuck around for the rest of the campaign, which was 100+ sessions.

In my game, Hanzala was a villain who slowly became good thanks to the influence of the heroes.

The group needs to creep by these vats where hired goons are stomping on grapes. They'll need to find the ledger and get out of there alive.

Invitation to a Funeral

A bad guy needs a place to dump dead bodies, right? So he cuts a deal with ghouls - he brings them bodies, they keep their yaps shut. Al Qadim "ghuls" are a bit more intelligent and civilized than normal D&D ghouls.

Basically, the big bad guy tricks the group into being part of a funeral procession... but it's a hit! Once the group bring the coffin into a crypt, ghouls jump the heroes.

The crypt is a little dungeon complex with one room that smells so bad, you need to make a saving throw or temporarily lose 2-5 points of Strength and Con from retching.

Eleven Baneful Gates

I really love this one. There is a scroll that describes the Eleven Baneful Gates. Each "baneful gate" is an obstacle that prevents mortal from becoming immortal. A villain named Azaltin studied these scrolls, desperate to learn the secrets of immortality.

The heroes must travel to the ruins where the scroll is said to be located. The ruins are now the home of a sort of generic type of genie known as the jann. There's 27 of them! The group will have to befriend them.

Then the adventures will need to make heir way through 11 magic gates, each with its own deadly challenge.

Every single gate is an awesome encounter. In addition to outright death, you might end up falling asleep for d10 days or becoming transfixed by your own beauty and dying of starvation.

At the end there's a very Al Qadim twist. This adventure kicks ass.

The Hermit's Riddle

The heroes go to rescue a hermit who has been abducted by a genie who commands a pack of werehyenas. The group has to travel a few days across a desert to get to the lair. During that time, the werehyenas play psychological games with them.

The genie, a dao, is not so smart and he's very sensitive about it. The hermit has challenged the genie to solve a riddle. Each day, the genie gives an answer - always wrong. The hermit has been able to keep himself alive through this, and the group can exploit this flaw to defeat the dao and rescue the hermit.

Sibling Rivalry

This is an Al Qadim version of a dragon's lair. In Al Qadim, there are things called vishaps - wingless dragons. In this adventure, a disguised vishap recruits the group to kill her sister, Fakhira, of whom she is jealous.

In the lair, Fakhira has a few tricks up her sleeve. If the group has Fakhira hurt, the jealous sister reveals herself and goes in for the kill. The group might realize that they've been duped, and that maybe Fakhira isn't so bad after all.

The Djinni's Lover

A really attractive genie tries to convince the heroes to help her friend to escape its magical imprisonment in an astrolabe.

The group can haggle with her and agree to do it if the genie will serve them for 1,001 days, which is pretty awesome.

This is all linked to a plot where a sha'ir (a spellcaster with power over genies) is trying to get a genie to build a tower. The sha'ir has a desert giant and shapeshifters working for her.

The group will need to either break in and steal the astrolabe or attack. The astrolabe has a spell called "aversion" cast on it, causing it to flee from anyone who isn't the caster.That ill make for a really chaotic final encounter!

Salt Bond

This one is about the bond of salt. In Al Qadim, once you sit down with someone and share a meal that has salt in it, a special deal has been struck. The host is responsible for your welfare for three days. You, in turn, agree not to bring harm to the host.

The group enters this bond with a dude, and it turns out the guy is a magnet for trouble. Over the next three days, shapeshifters and pyromaniac wizards show up, and the group has to protect their host from them.

A Boasting Contest

This one is short, but I love it. A genie challenges the group to a boasting contest! It will wager one of its magic items against one that the group has. It's got a list of things the genie will brag about and everything.

Weave of the Carpet

A guy who makes magic carpet has been robbed. The group must do some detective work to track it down. This leads to a situation where the bad guy is making gallons and gallons of "liquid star" (elemental fire) so that he can blow up the main palace in the city!

Dead Bearing Witness

The body of a legendary vizier needs to be exhumed, but the body has been animated and now belongs to... the Head. A severed head/lich. Awesome bad guy, awesome adventure!

Zarastro's Three Daughters

This guy Zarastro tried to summon and bind a water genie, but he failed miserably. The genie killed him and did terrible things to his three daughters:

One was turned to stone, but only from the waist down.
Another was turned into a green hag.
The last one became a naga.

There's a portal to the plane of water - if shut, the genie is sucked in and gone.

Endgame

The Leper King is in charge of all the beggars in the city. He's involved in a dispute between two other factions.

Basically, the group has to deal with all the bad guys and organization from the other adventures in this book at the same time.

That's it! Each adventure is short, easy to read, and full of fun ideas.

What's in the other book, you may ask. Check it out...

Muluk: A chapter detailing the city of Muluk, a "fiercely independent martial state". It is ruled by Caliph Aswiyah al-Muftahir, who is grooming her daughter, a powerful sha'ir, to take her place.

The city has a number of secret societies causing problems - fire mages, assassins, and beggar-thieves.

The Haunted Lands: A description of the "Haunted" Lands" near the city. This area includes a huge swath of land that is essentially a desert with salt instead of sand. The nearby Weeping Desert is full of undead giants (!).

There's a bunch of Haunted Lands encounters. My favorite one involves the group entering into a bond of salt with a sphinx, who hangs out with them for three days.

There's another one where the group comes upon a genie who is buried up to its neck in sand. It is cursed and is magically bound to stay where he is until he can convince someone to help him. Branded on his forehead is a word: "LIAR".

Krak al-Niraan: A description of the fortress that the Brotherhood of True Flame calls home. There's a genie named "Three-Seeing Eye" who guards the treasury. This is the part of the box that I like least. It's pretty dry, and kind of a waste of a poster map.

Then there's a list of items, some magic, some not. Here are my favorites...

Dreambliss: A drug/poison that can put you into a euphoric "sleep of bliss" for 24 hours.

Astrolabe of Entrapment: This is 12 genie prisons in one! Only one prison is active per month. The astrolabe is keyed to the constellations.

Roses of Forgetfulness: Sniff the rose, gain amnesia!

Wand of the Sun: A magic weapon often used by members of the Brotherhood of True Flame. This thing casts sunscorch spells. "The luminous beam strikes its target unerringly."

So, there you go. I used this boxed set constantly! I built my entire Al Qadim campaign around it.

I really do think it is one of the greatest D&D products of all time, and I hope you check it out.

You can buy this right here.

Al Qadim is a D&D campaign setting that was released in the early 90's. Based on Arabian folk lore and mythology, it hit right at the same time that Disney released Aladdin, which was mega-popular around where I lived.

Arabian Adventures: I ran a ton of Al Qadim stuff and I loved it. I think that, in general, people liked the idea of Arabian adventures, but it was usually their 3rd or 4th choice as far as D&D settings go. I think a lot of people would say, "I'll run some Al Qadim after I run campaigns in Ravenloft and Planescape." Most people never get that far!

So Al Qadim has always been this untouched jewel of a setting, a product line loaded with fantastic adventures and concepts that a lot of people are unaware of.

This is partly why I was so pleased to see Genies Great and Small released on the DM's Guild from Kobold Press. Kobold Press is run by Wolfgang Baur, the guy who wrote one of my absolute favorite Al Qadim products: Secrets of the Lamp.

This book details and stats out a bunch of different types of genies, many of which are 5e conversions of genie variants found in 2e products.

Art: They actually got Karl Waller to do the art. He's the guy who did virtually all of the interior art for every single Al Qadim product. That makes this feel very "official".

The Cover: The one thing that sticks out to me as a negative has to do with the look of the book. The cover has black and white art, but also utilizes blue text and a blue border.

It feels odd to have a color cover with black and white art on it. I guess you could pull it off if you did it Sin City style, but that's not really Al Qadim at all.

The font is very, very 90's. It's the "Image comics Youngblood issue 3 is coming soon!" font. I would have preferred it if they went with a font more in keeping with the tone of an Arabian setting.

The blue border bugs me, too. Why is it there? The old Al Qadim books have these very intricate patterns for borders, I'd have preferred something like that.

The Genies: So, what's in the book? Here's a quick overview.

Gen: We start off with gens, who have always been mega-popular in my games.

A gen is a little servant that "fetches spells" for a spellcaster (called a sha'ir). In some products, gens are described as elemental animals, but in my campaigns they were always one-foot tall genie people. They were always mega-popular NPCs.

I am very happy to say that they are depicted in this book as little genie people. We get art, stats and everything. That's actually a fire gen on the cover.

Each of them has a description of how they die in their stat block. Earth gens disintegrate into crystalline powder, stuff like that.

Bottled Genie: We get a special description and template of bottled genies. These bottled genies are insane and have mind-affecting powers.

I would use this, but I definitely wouldn't declare that all genies that are trapped in a bottle go insane, as that cuts down on the fun things you can do with a bottled genie.

New Genies: We get some new genie types:

Alnnakhi: Lone genies who dwell in lonely, isolated places.
Khamsir: Genies made of shifting sand.
Nafurzi: Water genies who have been banished from their home plane. They are bound to a single body of water, such as a lake or river. I really like this one.

Tasked Genies: There are tons of these, all pulled from 2e. Some are a bit dull - an architect genie? A miner genie?

Others are really cool. Oathbinder genies create and enforce contracts between two parties. Guardian genie have two faces on their heads and.. guard stuff.

It's a short book. 20 pages! But nothing wrong with that. It's very well done and has a lot of very useful things in it.

Print Version: The print version of this book is great! It has a nice sturdy cover and smooth interior pages with gold color used generously.

Overall: I would say that any campaign can benefit from the inclusion of a gen sidekick, a genie in a bottle, or a harem guarded by a tasked genie. The pdf is only five bucks!

Good stuff!

Today I want to ramble a little bit about something that I probably do too much of - throwing high level enemies at low level heroes.

Yesterday, I ran a session of Dungeon Academy, a campaign I'm running for people who are brand new to D&D. In this session, four level 3 heroes fought a lich. They, uh... killed it.

Not really something that should happen! I definitely feel like I made some mistakes and I'd like to take you through my thought process.

Scaling: In D&D, I think it is important to have the players understand that not everything in the world is scaled to their level. Some creatures are really powerful. My thinking is that by having a group interact with something much more powerful than they are, then that will build anticipation for when they're finally strong enough to face that creature.

I think it makes leveling feel more important. It builds anticipation and gives the players a sense of accomplishment.

Making the Encounter: My idea here was to give the group an item that could hold back the bad guy - beads of force. When you throw a bead, it does 5d4 damage and traps the target in a sphere of force.

That's good, right? The group can trap the lich and run for their lives!

The heroes needed to obtain some elemental gems. So, in theory, they can grab the gems, run, and then keep the lich at bay with the beads of force.

Troubleshooting: I think you should always plan for the possibility that the bad guy defeats the group. In this instance, I decided that the lich would take them - alive - to the Temple of Elemental Evil for questioning (This campaign involves the original 1e Temple of Elemental Evil).

These players are very, very new to D&D. To expect them to figure this out on their own is probably a bit much. I knew I'd have to drop hints, but I didn't want to hint too strongly. Unfortunately, I didn't really have an NPC who I could speak through, so it was not easy.

It went like this. The lich left his carriage, which was drawn by skeletal horses (cool, right?), to go get his gems.

The group stole his carriage and looted it - they got one of the lich's spellbooks and his beads of force.

Can Liches be Blinded? Another character was able to snag the gems when the lich was unexpectedly blinded by the death of a darkling. I had to look real quick - are liches immune to blindness? No.

He has truesight. Does that mean he has blindsense? I had no idea so, in the heat of the moment, I just said that yes, he could be blinded.

Truesight is on page 9 of the Monster Manual. Looks like I was right - he was blinded.

I should note that I had actually used two of the lich's legendary resistances, so it's plausible that he'd save the third one an accept the short-term blindness.

This was all part of a sprawling chase where the lich dimension door-ed onto the roof of the carriage and fought the heroes. I pulled my punches in the first round, using only a paralyzing touch and no legendary actions. But in round 2, things got real. I had him casting rays of frost with his legendary actions.

During this battle, the ranger rolled TWO critical hits, launching arrows into the lich's skull.

Cantrips and Monsters: I had another quick quandary. Do cantrips scale up for monsters? In the heat of the moment, I couldn't remember. I knew that ray of frost does 3d8 for spellcasters of 11th level and 4d8 for 17th level casters.

Looking now, I see that the lich is a CR 21! In his stat block on page 202 of the Monster Manual, it says he's an 18th level spellcaster. So that mean his rays of frost do 4d8. I got that right, then.

This whole thing boiled down to the lich flying and chasing the group, who were fleeing in the carriage.

I kind of awkwardly let them make an arcana check when the beads were mentioned. One of them rolled high on the check, and realized what the beads did. Two heroes tied beads around their arrows with gauze from their healer' kits (which is an awesome idea, IMO). Seraphine, the cleric, fired.. and rolled a critical hit!

The damage ended up being something like 10d4+2d6 +another 2d6 from some beneficial effect from another party member that I can't recall.

The lich was already injured pretty bad. The bead of force critical actually blew him up!

The group cheered. I made sure to depict the lich's wispy spirit blinking out of existence. He's not dead, he's reforming near his phylactery.

Mr. Softee: I feel like this was a real borderline case (at best). I was definitely going too soft and I should have put more "failsafes" in place. I should have come up with a reason why the lich doesn't want to hurt the group (maybe he doesn't want harm to come to his carriage?) or I could have had some other powerful entity show up and hold him off.

The group enjoyed it, so I didn't feel too bad about it. I've done worse! Want to hear about it?

The Shackled City

I'll give you an example of a time I royally screwed up. Back in 2008, I ran a Shackled City campaign converted to 4th edition rules.

Dysfunction: I ran this for my old high school group. We seem to be that rare bunch that actually sort of grew apart in adulthood. I see all of these other groups out there who've played together for 30 years. We just can't do that any more, and this campaign showed why.

For a long time, I had a tendency to go too harsh when DMing - specifically, my monsters did too much damage. I was very concerned about challenging the group, as I knew what it felt like when the game was too easy - it sucks. What's the point?

But the 4e rules were brand new and I made a lot of math mistakes when creating monsters converted from 3e.

The first three sessions of this campaign were brutal. I royally screwed up the damage conversions. Once I figured it out, I apologized to the group and we continued on. Good, right?

No. I still would get complaints about things being too hard, or weird, or whatever.

The Baby: There was one scene in particular that stood out. There's an encounter where a bad guy is holding a baby out of a window above a city street, threatening to drop it. The adventure is very clear... one wrong move and the bad guy lets the baby go.

The group is meant to negotiate with the bad guy in a tense roleplaying scene.

Nope. Two of the heroes charged, using a fly spell to soar to the tower at top speed. The group was something like 50 feet away.

I gave them a chance to take it back, but they were convinced that what they were attempting should work. I had the one character who got close make some kind of check to catch the baby in time. The DC should be hard, right? The adventure says it's virtually impossible. DC 20, right?

The character rolled a 17, and was really upset that he failed. He felt that the DC was too high. We had a whole thing about it.

I Gave Up: From that point on, I erred on the side of caution. When in doubt, lower the DC and the damage. This is what they want, right? I was definitely being a bit passive-aggressive about it.

The next session, the group had to navigate a lava flow. In theory, they'd jump from rock to rock. There were some frightened citizens on a rock in the lava that needed rescuing.

Lava damage in 4e was different in every product, probably due to the whole concept of scaling threats to match the level of the group.

After looking through some products and scoping out lava damage, I erred on the side of too low - 15 damage per round.

The party's tiefling... Etheria von Kalypse - a legendary character played by a really fun player - realized that she could swim through the lava because, as a tiefling, she had fire resistance 10, which means she subtracts 10 from any fire damage she takes!

So yeah, she swam through molten lava.

Lukewarm Lava: Some of the players moaned about this, and I was outraged. They complained when it was too hard. They complained when it was too easy. I made some sarcastic comment telling them not to worry, I had made sure to give them some low damage "marshmallow lava" because I didn't want to hear them cry about it.

Fun game, right? Not my finest moments, that's for sure.

We got to the end of the campaign. Shackled City is really cool. It doesn't quite gel as a story, but there are a heck of a lot of cool ideas and scenarios in there.

The Final Battle: The final battle is against an angel/demon lord named Adimarchus who is trapped in an asylum in the plane of Carceri.

Again, I erred on the side of too low. When the battle commenced and I dealt out some of my measly damage, even Etheria said "Oooohh" sarcastically.

So.. yeah. Scaling damage in D&D. Not easy! It can get ugly!

Intermingling with Powerful Creatures: What I learned is that if you're going to use monsters that are much more powerful than the heroes, give the players a heads-up: "Just so you know, there are some creatures in here that are much higher level than you, and you probably won't be able to kill them outright."

To me, that's fair. Everyone has different meta-game expectations. Players who play a lot of video games normally expect that anything they encounter is created to be an appropriate challenge for them.

If you do make an encounter where there's a higher level villain, make sure you have at least one way for the heroes to survive unscathed. Things like:

A big ballista that fires lightning bolt (8d6!).
A scroll with a powerful spell on it that can banish, ward off, or subdue the bad guy.
A reason that the villain doesn't want the heroes dead - the villain wants to corrupt them, the villain wants to mess with their heads, or the villain wants to manipulate them
Summoning a powerful creature to hold off the bad guy.
A timed event that kicks in right when the villain is about to kill the group - an earthquake, avalanche or explosion of some kind.

Tomorrow I'll be hosting Waffle Talk on my Twitch Channel.

Also, I've been adding notes to my Guide to Tomb of Annihilation as I play through it. I made a number of mistakes that I think I can help you avoid. It's so hard to remember every little detail of that massive dungeon!

Episode 85: Two and Two Together

Very good show! A lot of the players went to conventions this weekend and got sick. They're all here though.

The Party

(Anna) Evelyn - Human Paladin of Lathander
(ProJared) Diath - Human Rogue
(Holly) Strix - Tiefling Sorcerer
(Nathan) Paultin - Human Bard

The group is in the Shadowfell. Last time, the ring of winter ditched them. The heroes don't know what happened to it, or where Miranda went to. Lord Nihil was slain. There's fallen ice sculptures all around him.

Meathook, the undead ogre zombie, is still here. Strix puts a blanket on his head and declares that his new name is Hooky the 3rd. Chris says that Meathook's full name is, I think, Meathook Enderavente.

The heroes are cold. There's nothing to salvage in the inn. Nate is really sick in real life, but he's here. What a trooper.

The group gets into the carriage. Meathook can pull it, but they need to motivate him to do so. They get Meathook to walk by dangling food in front of him with a stick.

Izek, Strix's brother, is still with the group. Izek is upset because his dolls are gone. Strix begins to argue with him. He takes one of Strix's dolls and chucks it out of the cart. Diath goes to get it. Strix explains to Izek that he needs friends.

Izek points out that Diath is a Lorcatha, "The family that tried to destroy us". Izek tells Strix, "You can't be friends with him". Izek yells at her.

At this point, the carriage is stopped. Evelyn pins Izek to the ground. She casts zone of truth. It affects Izek.. also, Diath. Paultin is in the zone and says, truthfully: "I don't feel good."

The group grills Izek about the Lorcathas. Are the Lorcatha angel-people?

Izek: "The Lorcatha are a human family."

Izek mentions something called the Ashton Concordance: No Skizzix or Lorcatha can ever be together. No friendship or alliance.

Izek urges Strix to kill him. "If you stay with him, you'll destroy everything. You two can't be together!"

Evelyn: "What do you mean they can't. They are!"

Diath throws Gutter to the ground and points at the sword. "Apparently that's his. Ashton. He's no father of mine."

Izek wants Strix to go to Vallaki and look at Lady Wachter's books. The group could learn more about the Skizzixes. Diath points out that they have more pressing issues. They need to stop the Soulmonger.

Paultin makes a snow angel and goes, "Look, it's Diath."

Strix polymorphs Izek into a chicken. Strix tells him she's not leaving the group. She changes him into a spider and the group leaves him behind.

15 days pass. Each character (except for Evelyn) loses 5 from their max hit points due to the death curse. I think Diath is down to 18 hit points!

Each day, Evelyn becomes more distant from the group. She spends quite a bit of time away from them.

One morning, when Evelyn goes off to pray alone, Paultin follows her. He sees her praying out loud.

Evelyn says that she thought she was special... she thought Lathander would bless her with a life mate. And she thought Paultin was hers. She has been tempted by darkness. She's been weak and selfish. She loves Paultin more than she should and it's turned her... it's more than she can handle on her own. She asks Lathander to wash it away and pledges her loyalty to the Morninglord.

Then it starts to rain.

Paultin goes, "Did you really mean all that?" He casually sits next to her. "You put a lot of faith in that god of yours. You should be working for yourself rather than hoping that Santa Claus is going to help."

Paultin asks if she remembers when he tried to kill everyone. Paultin apologizes He said he wanted the ring of winter.. he lip in a comment about how everyone in the subreddit deserves an explanation haha!

Paultin says he never felt like a contributing member. He was always dragged along. The others have so much they're good at. Strix is magic, Diath looks he's 18 forever, and Evelyn is the strongest person... really strong. Paultin is just the drunk, the silent player.

Wow. Tremendous!

When Paultin saw the ring, he thought he'd finally found a way that he could contribute. He realizes now that the ring led him down a dark path.

The rain makes it look like Evelyn is crying. Evelyn says that she should do her job better and that she's sorry, too.
Paultin says they should never talk about it again.

Meanwhile... Diath tells Strix he's a bit worried to tell her stuff.. because he's afraid. The ogre zombie farts.

Paultin and Evelyn hug. Paultin looks at you, the viewer and says, "Chat, you can't rush this stuff."

The heroes travel on for a few more days. The air changes quite a bit. They can hear the sound of the ocean.

Uh oh. They realize that Meathook is about to walk them off a cliff!

Holly tries to remember the command word to make him stop. "Spaghetti!" Yikes. That's the one to make Meathook go faster.

Saving throws. They rolled bad, except Jared, who got a 34.

Diath gets out, and grabs Simon and pulls him to safety. Paultin holds onto the cliff. Diath pulls him up.

Evelyn plummets over the side. 100 feet! Strix saved herself via flight. She looks for Evelyn through the fog. Evelyn survived. She pulls herself free. Meathook is in four pieces... impaled through a rock.

The group checks out the beach. All along the coast are wrecks of hundreds of ships. They create a jagged mass impaled on tooth-like shards of stone. The walls of the cliff are white. The beach is black, dark pebbles.

Snow on the beach? Nope. bones. Millions of bones!

Strix casts remove curse on Evelyn. It gets rid of the Shadowfell despair. She does the same on Diath. Ha! That spell does everything.

There's a cave in the stone of the cliffs. The group hopes there's a portal home in there.

Evelyn senses undead from the ships.

Paultin and Diath see.. swooping down from high above.. a gigantic, roc-sized bird. Its black. A gargantuan raven!

It transforms into thousands of ravens. They coalesce into a figure. The Raven Queen! A 6 foot tall human-shaped mound of twigs. A walking nest.

She is speaking in Celestial. Evelyn translates in a very polite manner. "I have come for the chalice and hand".

Evelyn asks, "Which hand, my friend?"

The Hand of Ch'ga'kare.

"Your fate has been stolen from you. You no longer need those treasures."

"For what purpose did he need the treasures?"

"Return them to me and I shall reward you. A consolation prize."

Strix is on the ground covering her head. She's a little panicky.

Paultin hands the items over. Ravens swoop down and snatch the items away.

Suddenly, the Raven Queen goes from 40 feet away to 5 feet away. She's right in Paultin's face.

"Is there something I can give you? I know what you want."

What's this? Simon, the evil little golem, suddenly ha a human mouth. Has he become real?

That's where we stop!

Overall

Great show! If you are looking for action, then you might not like this one. But if you're into the characters, you'll love it.

We discussed all the gory details on Waffle Talk:

Episode 86: Simon Says

Strix wlll be in Idle Champions: Heroes of the Forgotten Realms. Holly says that she cries, throws things, and is overall a suboptimal champion

The Party

(Anna) Evelyn - Human Paladin of Lathander
(ProJared) Diath - Human Rogue
(Holly) Strix - Tiefling Sorcerer
(Nathan) Paultin - Human Bard

Chris kicks this session off with a rundown of things the characters can do.

Paultin

Has the canaith mandolin. He can use it to cast levitate, fly, cure wounds, dispel magic, and protection against lightning
Eyes of charming
Disguise kit with two costumes: Pterodactyl and perkins

Evelyn

Broken axe - lightfall
Treebane, the magical axe.
The Heart of Spinelli, a flaming sword.
Holy symbol of ravenkind.
She is a construct, has many immunities.
She received a boon from Lathander. She has holy oil in her veins, extra constitution.
Evelyn's book of etiquette
Flying boots
Magical steed

Diath

Gutter, the short sword of backstabbing.
Mysterious key ring - the keys can summon Shemeshka.
Gloves of thievery
Horn of blasting
Padlock from Barovia
ring of protection +1
Luckstone

Previously, the ring of winter disappeared and Paultin came to his senses. Simon is still a puppet, but now he has an animated mouth. He says: "Oh my stars.. i can tell jokes!"

What kind of jokes, you ask? Here they are, right here:

Why was Strix late for the Waffle Crew reunion?
Her broom overswept.

What does a clock do when it's hungry?
It goes back for seconds.

How do you make a clown cry?
You kill his family.

What did the shoe say to the pants?
"Sup, britches?"

Why did the scarecrow win a prize?
Because it was outstanding in its field. 9this one killed me).

Where does Papa Paultin keep his gold?
In snowbanks.

The group is on a beach in the Shadowfell. There's a hole in the cliff wall. Looks like a tunnel.

They sense the presence of the ring of winter.

Paultin's invisible. He uses one of his candles for light and he creeps around in the tunnel. Inside are colored floor tiles that form paths down the corridor like snakes.

Gold tiles.. red.. purple. This is from the Tomb of Annihilation adventure, but altered. There is a gash in the roof of the tunnel.

Why was the zombie upset with his job?
He wanted a raise.

The heroes decide to walk the golden path. Tentacles drop down through the crack and attack.

Diath stabs it and rolls a critical. He does 56 points of damage.

The tentacle thing has legendary actions?! It does piles of damage, but the group is able to wound it.

It has Evelyn! It teleports away into a rough-hewn rocky chimney.It's not far.. Strix flies on her broom up the chimney and hits it with a fireball for 52.

The fire fills the tunnel! It drops Strix. Simon goes down.

This monster is a balhannoth... a magic-eating tentacle monster. It will apparently be in the upcoming Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes.

Pieces of Evelyn come falling out of the crevasse.. there's her head. The head rolls over to Paultin's feet.

Paultin hits the balhannoth with a thunderwave and destroys it.

Evelyn is dead!

Her spirit arrives in a strange realm. There are many towers... and twisters that connect to an amorphous moon with limbs attached to it. It's impossibly huge!

She's not alone. There are other beings. Like her, they are spectral.

The other creatures gathered here:

A scrawny tiefling
A gnome in a vest
An elven woman
The ghosts of the acq inc battle balloon crew.
An old woman wearing the symbol of Lathander who is comforting a young boy...

The gnome looks at Evelyn and says "I know you! from Omu!"

The old woman introduces herself to Evelyn. Her name is Zaress. She is a champion of the church, and she took the faith to some of the darkest corners of Faerun

The spirit of an orc appears and joins the congregation. There's little for them to do except to wait to be devoured by the massive entity.

The entity extends long tentacles. The tentacles wrap abound the tiefling and pull him into the sky. he yells "I hope you choke on me!"

Zaress looks at Evelyn and says, "I sense something strange about you.. something different than all the other ghosts."

They talk for a bit. Evelyn's the worm in the apple. Zaress thinks that if the atropal tries to devour her, she will destroy it.

Zaress says, "Everything will be alright. You are loved."

Evelyn flies up and tells the atropal to take her instead. Persuasion.. natural 20!

She's drawn up into the vortex. Perception check: natural 20. Seriously.

The towers are shuddering.. one collapses...

Back in the Shdowfell, Paultin calls out, "Lathander you punk bitch, give her back! Hallowed be thy name, gg."

He checks on Simon. Simon is dead - a burnt hunk of metal. Face is burnt off.

The ghost of Simon appears on the tower with the other spirits.

Evelyn is drawn into the vile gullet of the atropal. It is an unborn god...

Evelyn transforms into sunbeams that tear into everything.

Throughout the multiverse, all hit point maximums are restored. The death curse is over!

Overall

Crazy! I was trying to figure out what the city was. Is it Khin Oin? Probably not..

Very good show! We talked about this extensively on Waffle Talk:

Dice, Camera, Action Episode 79 - Tomb of Annihilation

What is Known About Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes

Hosting Waffle Talk: The Dice, Camera, Reaction Show

More Thoughts on Running the Tomb of Annihilation

Dice, Camera, Action Episode 80 - Tomb of Annihilation

Trapped in the Birdcage Episode 1

Dungeons & Dragons - A Guide to Flame

Trapped in the Birdcage Episode 2

Dice, Camera, Action Episode 81 - Tomb of Annihilation

Dice, Camera, Action Episode 82 - Tomb of Annihilation

Dice, Camera, Action Episode 83 - Tomb of Annihilation

Dragon+ Issue 18

Misscliks: Lost Mine Episode 1

Dice, Camera, Action Episode 84 - Tomb of Annihilation

Further Thoughts on Running the Actual Tomb of Annihilation

Dungeons & Dragons - A Dozen and One Adventures

Dungeons & Dragons - Genies Great & Small: 21 New Genies of Zakhara

Dungeons & Dragons - High Level Threats and Low Level Heroes

Dice, Camera, Action Episode 85 - Tomb of Annihilation

Dice, Camera, Action Episode 86 - Tomb of Annihilation