The store was brimming over with players tonight. 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons is doing fantastically well around these parts.We had four tables, each with 6 or 7 players. New people are popping up every week and sticking around. The store is literally full of people playing D&D.

Tyranny of Dragons Minis

I realized over the week that I should be using the new minis for this game. I should have bought a bunch of cultists from the new set for the early episodes, as well as a few guard drakes (which are very cool minis). I picked up 3 minis tonight - a drake, a red wizard (to use for Azbara Jos and Rath Modar) and the Rezmir mini.

I plan on grabbing the dragons to use as they appear in this storyline.

A lot of characters hit level 5 last week (thanks to me overloading them with XP). There is a big difference between level 4 and level 5. The rogue can take half damage from one attack each round, and the paladin now has 2 attacks per round.

My goal for tonight was to get the PCs to Castle Naerytar and to begin playing out that scenario. I also wanted to inject some of the cool Mere of Dead Men concepts I came upon in this article by Ed Greenwood.

Snapjaw

The heroes came upon a resting area with lean-tos used by the lizardfolk, who are transporting all of this treasure to the Castle. The adventurers decided to lurk in the swamp and watch the place. This paid off. Nine lizardfolk showed up in canoes to camp for the night.

The deal here is that one lizardfolk named Snapjaw begs to be spared. He wants to recruit the heroes for a sort of civil war in Castle Naerytar. I wondered going in if the group would just kill him or not.

They slaughtered the lizardfolk in a well-executed ambush and then they heard Snapjaw out and let him live. He told them about the situation at Castle Naerytar...

Sweet fancy moses, it took a long time to prepare this episode. A full castle with 3 floors and a basement dungeon, 4 major NPC villains and multiple factions. I will add more thoughts and cautionary tales in my Guide to Tyranny of Dragons.

But basically, as a DM you need to know this place like the back of your hand to run it the way they want you to. It's meant to be a location that the PCs can deal with how they wish - sneak/infiltrate, create friction, or hack through. The true goal here is that there's a portal in the basement that the PCs need to go through.

A lot of times as a DM I am just not up to the challenge when it comes to these kind of scenarios involving factions and a large locale. Often I kind of bail out and only really allow one route - usually hack and slash.

The Map

But in this instance, I gave the castle a lot of time and thought. I even scratched out a hand drawn map before I headed to the store.

So what happened was that I showed the players the map as Snapjaw told them all about Castle Naerytar, and how the bullywugs were lording it over them and blah blah blah. He answered their questions about the layout of the castle.

The group, mostly kids, loved this. They seemed to be genuinely shocked that they could deal with the castle in any way they choose. They started comparing it to video games (Assassin's Creed, I think).

One of them got up and asked the store to photocopy my map so each player could have one. I was really not prepared for that. Then they put their heads together and excitedly plotted various routes.

Bullywugs
 
The journey continued. I added in an encounter as the heroes were canoeing through the swamp. A bunch of bullywugs riding giant leeches attacked!

I highly recommend adding this encounter in. I placed some swamp islands on the map and the heroes were in three separate canoes. The PCs had to decide if they wanted to spend an action rowing their canoe to dry land, or to try to fight on their shaky canoes.

It was a very good battle. The players were still consumed with the castle map, and plotted when it wasn't their turn to go.

There was a moment when Sparky the baby dragon was hit by a spear and attacked by a leech. The group freaked out.

The Baby Dragon

We are really getting somewhere with the baby dragon, "Sparky". He eats "swamp sticks" for fun, and especially likes them when Dark the dragon sorceress makes them cold with her icy rays spell.

I made sure to play up how she fears one PC (Dark's dad, who at one time almost killed Sparky..!) and likes Dark and another rogue who treat him nice. Now the group sees that how they treat the dragon has consequences, and they're all trying to get Sparky to like them... except Dark's dad, who just wants it dead.

When Dark's player showed up tonight (she's a 4th grader), she showed me two drawings she did. One was of some chicken-person from some cartoon she likes. The other was of Sparky. She colored it grey, but the wings were multi-colored.

Recruiting the Lizardfolk

From there, the heroes met with some lizardfolk at a guard station on the way to the Castle. Snapjaw made his charisma roll and the lizardfolk signed on to this plan.

The group went to the castle and made their way to the lizardfolk lodges outside the Castle. The rolls were poor. The lizardfolk were not convinced that the heroes could help them defeat the bullywugs and their hated villain with the great name: Pharblex Splattergoo.

Then the PCs (with a bit of a hint from me) showed them the baby black dragon. The lizardfolk were in awe. They agreed to the plan.

Next week, the heroes are going to set the lizardfolk loose on the bullywugs in Castle Naerytar. They don't know it, but they'll have the opportunity to interact with the main villain Rezmir and/or Azbara Jos.

Overall it was another classic night. Every time I show up, everyone is already sitting at the table waiting for me politely. They pay attention and genuinely enjoy the game. I am hoping we can get all the way through this storyline before the next one starts.

Azbara Jos

5th edition Dungeons & Dragons is doing extremely well in our store. We have four tables going and every one of them is filled to capacity. There is literally no more room in the building.

Factions

I was a bit worried coming in to tonight's game. I am not too good at using factions in dungeons. I decided to just take it one step at a time and to try to roll with it. There's so many moving parts, it is difficult to juggle everything.

The adventurers had allied themselves with the lizardfolk and were set to take out the bullywugs in Castle Naerytar. My main concern in scenarios like this is that sometimes the PCs expect 30 NPCs to come with them from room-to-room in the dungeon. That makes the dungeon fairly useless and brings up all sorts of issues.

Planning to Finish the Campaign by March
 
Before we started, I asked the players if they were willing to do some extra sessions over the holidays. Looking at The Rise of Tiamat, I am worried we won't get to the end. It would suck for use to get to 12th level in March and then have to decide whether to finish Tyranny of Dragons or start the new Elemental Evil storyline. I want us to be done and ready by the time the new season rolls around.

The players agreed to do a couple of bonus sessions on Sundays over the next few weeks. Hopefully it all works out. They seemed happy about it.

The Lizardfolk Raid

The heroes waited until night and led 30 lizardfolk allies into the barbican. The bullywugs questioned the heroes. A couple thieves crept up to the roof and got the bullywugs up there to come downstairs. Then the lizardfolk attacked the bullywugs.

Thus began the scenario where our heroes explore Castle Naerytar to the backdrop of lizardfolk slaughtering bullywugs.  It was a quiet operation in the beginning - this was intentional on my part, as I wanted something special to happen a bit later.

The Dagger of Venom

The adventurers went into the chapel (1l.) and killed some dragonclaws. There was a wooden statue of Tiamat. I hate missed treasure, and there was a magic dagger in a secret compartment in the black dragon Tiamat head.

I tried to give them a clue by having Sparky the baby black dragon claw at the black dragon head. A rogue picked up on it, and found the dagger of venom.

The group, made up mostly of kids around the age of 13, freaked out. This is only the second magic item found so far. The first one was a lousy +1 bow. There is something about handing out the certificates that really gets them excited about getting a magic item.

Stealth Gone Wrong
 
After some excited rolling-off, the heroes searched some adjacent rooms. I decided that all the loud arguing alerted the cultists upstairs. The cultists came down and were also slaughtered.

Two rogues crept up the tower alone, snooping around. Split the party, they did! We have a party with 3 rogues, a paladin, a fighter and DARK THE DRAGON SORCERESS so there's a lot of sneaking, hiding and creeping in these sessions.

The pair of rogues went up to the third floor and found Rezmir's room. They didn't check for traps or anything. They set off her wardrobe trap. Both rogues were sprayed with acid (the damage of which was whittled down thanks to rogue abilities) and the acid destroyed the contents of the wardrobe.

The adventurers regrouped and went back out into the courtyard. They decided, to my delight, to go to the Great Hall...

Showdown in the Great Hall

1Q. is the Great Hall. It's a room where there's a ton of stolen treasure and a lot of guards - cultists, dragonwings and drakes, depending on the time of day.

When preparing this, I had decided that if possible I wanted the heroes to have a chance to encounter the uber-bad guys. The idea in the adventure is that once chaos breaks out, Rezmir (she's the big villain of this book, more or less) and the red wizard Azbara Jos flee through the portal in the basement.

I wanted the heroes to stumble on a meeting between Rezmir, Azbara and the two Castle Naerytar leaders - Dralmorrer (the elf) and Pharblex Splattergoo (the bullywug leader).

I had the idea that the PCs could see this meeting, maybe do some eavesdropping and then decide what to do from there. With the meeting over, I'd have the bad guys retire to their rooms. The PCs could theoretically follow Rezmir to her room. I was kind of amused just to see what they'd do given this scenario. I couldn't guess.

Rezmir's Evil Sentient Sword

Rezmir is loaded with magic items. She has the black dragon mask, Hazirawn the evil sentient sword, and some magic gloves.  I wanted them to have a chance to interact with the bad guys in any way they choose. At the very least, we could foreshadow who the big bad guys were and build to big battles down the road.

The heroes smartly peeked in the hall and listened to the conversation. I dropped a lot of factoids that they could learn from Talis the White in the next chapter - there's a flying castle, the cult is working with a white dragon called Glazhael the Cloudchaser, etc.

The heroes excitedly convened and plotted. The plan was for two PCs to burst into the room, posing as cultists, and warn that the lizardfolk were on a rampage. Then once the guards were away, the heroes could pick off a leader or two.

I made sure to describe Rezmir's badass items. The players demanded to see the art of the bad guy NPCs.

Dark is played by a 4th grade girl. I showed everyone Rezmir's picture and said: "Rezmir is a black dragon lady and she is a super-evil bad guy!"

Dark excitedly and earnestly shouted: "I am a super-evil good guy!"

The plan didn't go so well. They burst in to the room and yelled that there was an attack. Azbara Jos immediately recognized the heroes from the caravan journey. And also... the heroes rolled a 1 on their deception check.

A massive melee ensued. Some heroes were by one entrance, most were at the other one. Rezmir and Azbara decided to head downstairs and head to the portal.

The Fateful Disarm

The party fighter would have none of this. Rezmir had LOOT! He fired a range attack on her - a disarming strike. She dropped Hazirawn. He ran over, taking some opportunity attacks and snatched it up.

He and the PCs focused on Rezmir, all of us rolling natural 20's. It was crazy. Rezmir was staggered by a critical, then she responded with a critical (she has 2 legendary actions per round). She dropped the fighter with her acid breath.

The PCs started dropping. One of the rogues ran across the courtyard where lizardfolk were slaughtering the bullywugs in 1G. He started leading them back, telling them that their hated enemy Pharblex Splattergoo was there.

Rezmir has 90 hit points. She was down to 26. She and Azbara Jos fled as Dralmorrer fired off magic missiles and Pharblex readied a thunderwave.

About 3 PCs are down. Lizardfolk are on the way. We had to stop there, as we ran out of time.

Overall

It was a great session. I was wondering if the PCs would get their hands on the black dragon mask. It looks like it's going to get away. They'll have one more chance to snatch it in chapter 8, but that's a tricky proposition.

Very good game!

I've been branching out in my Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG World Tour game lately. The DCC RPG is great for running fantasy adventures of any system. I ran SlaughterGrid with it, and it worked great.

I have this shelf of D&D adventures I want to run some day. Some of the adventures on this shelf include:

• Labyrinth of Madness 
• Vault of the Iron Overlord 
• Crypt of the Devil Lich (I even have a mini of the villain for this)
• A tattered, cover-less copy of Dragon Magazine #83 from March 1984

The Dancing Hut
 
In that magazine is the original "Baba Yaga" adventure: "The Dancing Hut", by Roger Moore. I ran the 2nd edition version by Lisa Smedman, but people always say the original is the best, so I put it on my shelf.

I decided to run "The Dancing Hut" for my group. I sat down and began to prepare (I take handwritten notes to help me absorb and retain the details). As I got into it, I was shocked to see that tons of details are glossed over.

Basically, the hut is home to a sort of demi-god witch. On the outside, the hut looks tiny, but the inside is a massive extra-dimensional space (like the TARDIS from "Doctor Who"). There are 48 rooms in here, arranged like a tesseract.

A lot of these rooms contain trophies, monsters or people from many different dimensions. One room even has a soviet tank from Earth. This wacky stuff is part of the reason I felt this would fit perfectly with DCC RPG.

4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons to the Rescue

But I got to room 2 on page 39, where the are 6 glass statues that each have a different color. They have powers relating to the prismatic sphere spell. The details are not given. We have to look it up and figure it out on our own.

OK, well, no big deal. I can look that up. Then in Room 9, there's a fungus garden. There's a fountain. The adventure says: "Anyone who drinks from the fountain will suffer some strange effects from each drink; the DM can invent a random-roll table of peculiar effects..."

Click for full size

I was appalled. It's an old adventure, so this kind of thing was more common back then. Now I think the prevailing mindset is that an adventure does not give you homework. The homework is done for you. That's the whole point of buying an adventure.

I knew what to do. There was a 4th edition version of this adventure published in Dungeon #196. I dug it up, and by gawd the author Craig Campbell filled in all the details. All that is needed is some slight game rules translation, which is no problem. The 4th edition fungus room has a giant table for the magic pool!

Even better, this adventure has full color maps by mighty Mike Schley (my favorite map guy) for every single room .

So basically, I am running the 1e version with details and maps stolen from 4e.

The Adventure Begins
 
We started this adventure last Monday night. We had a newb join us - the group is almost getting too big. I had to do some story stuff involving a cleric and androids before we started the hut. The end result was that the PCs got their hands on some blaster pistols, grenades and a rifle from Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.

They also stole the bad guys' little spaceship/pod. I wanted this to happen, just to see what the PCs would do with it.

With that out of the way, I dropped the Hut hook on them. An evil double of a PC is an apprentice of Baba Yaga, blah blah blah. The hut is a few miles to the north of the PCs' home (the fortress from Sailors on the Starless Sea).

Outside Baba Yaga's Hut

The exterior of the Hut is a very elaborate encounter. There's a ton of details:

• It is surrounded by a fence topped with 24 talking skulls that can shoot fireballs if the PCs jump the fence rather than using the gate.
• The hut is on chicken legs and spins. The PCs must figure out how to make it stop spinning.
• The hut has a mouth instead of a front door. The PCs must issue a passphrase to be allowed to cause a door to appear. The hut's mouth makes it a point to warn: "Spies and thieves will be eaten."

Since this is an RPG game, the PCs did something I didn't expect. They tried to fly their spaceship over the fence. Fireballs were launched, the ship exploded and our heroes barely survived. They had to rest and come back.

They made their way in to the hut (with the aid of a mysterious raven familiar that one PC acquired during Blades Against Death),

Room 1.

This is just a normal-looking hut interior. In here is a talking cat named Vladmir. The adventure kind of lets the DM use Vladmir in any way they wish. Vlad explained some things to the PCs and took a shine to the party cleric, who is a cat-man (thanks to a potion from The Emerald Enchanter).

Room 2. Entry Hall
This is a room with incredibly valuable tapestries made of gold, silver adamantite and platinum wire. Each is worth 40,000 gp. They are guarded by the six glass statues that each have a prismatic sphere power.

The party rogue tries to steal everything, but the heroes begged her to leave the tapestries alone.

Room 5. Recreation and Dance

The heroes took a left door and ended up in this weird room which has a lot of hobby-oriented stuff. There's a table for playing cards, there's sewing stuff, and in the middle is a performance area. There's a performer nervously practicing for a gig in here. Baba Yaga has told him that he must perform for her, and if it is not up to par, she's going to eat him.

I made him one of those guys with an accordian and a helper monkey who collects tips in his little hat. I did this mostly so I could do my bad Russian accent.

The group took a liking to the guy and convinced him to come along with them. They are going to try and help him escape the hut.

Not sure why the PCs wouldn't just go out the exit, drop him off at home, and come back. I also wonder what the skull-fence and the hut itself would think of this.

Room 4. Art Gallery

This is the art gallery with a lack of description. I placed art from my old D&D campaigns, references the players wouldn't get but I would. I do stuff like that just for me - I like having a continuity among my campaigns. They all exist in the same cosmos. Baba Yaga has appeared in many of my old games, so I included references to all the other times I used her.

I took an idea from the 4e version of this room, and had a medusa in here. She was veiled and acted like a pleasant museum guide. There were many statues of terrified adventurers in here.

The group immediately realized she was a medusa and panicked. Ekim's Mystical Mask was cast (it can aid against petrification attacks). Somehow, a PC ended up making out with the medusa with the mystic mask on, don't ask me how.

During this panic, two PCs fled through a door...

Room 3. Audience Chamber

Those two PCs stumbled right into Baba Yaga's audience chamber. The great witch was sitting on her ruby throne.

One PC, a chaotic wizard, was about to attack her but he saw the look on my face, meta-gamed, and backed down. I didn't mind... I mean, she'd kill them. I guess she could have just gave them a curse or something. In the 4e version, there's som detailed curses which are fantastic. Maybe I'll do that next week.

She has two hill giant skeletons in here and there's a trapper on the floor under their feet.

My intention here was to have Baba Yaga declare the whole gimmick I had in mind for this adventure:

Her new apprentice, an evil double of a wizard PC, asked her to lure the PCs to the hut and kill them. She decided that her apprentice would have to kill them himself, to prove he was worthy of being her apprentice at all.

So this adventure is meant to be a jaunt through the hut where the apprentice messes with the PCs and uses the rooms to try to kill them.

For example, when the PCs go into the prison room, I am going to have him free the hydra. When the PCs come to the trophy room, he's going to be in the tank and will fire the cannon at them.

We had to stop there. We'll do more next Monday.

So far I like the adventure. It's very much a "sandbox". I do not appreciate the lack of details in the original, but the 4e version solves that problem and then some.

In this column I am going to blab about playing to your strengths when being a Dungeon Master. Down at the bottom of this page I tacked on what I think makes for a good player.

I decided to use artwork from the great Wayne Reynolds for this one. While I am more of a Larry Elmore/Clyde Caldwell guy, I think there's a strong argument to be made that Wayne is the greatest D&D artist of all time. 

I try to follow a few high-profile DMs that blog regularly on being a DM. Some of them include:

• Merric Blackman
• Derek Myers of Dungeon's Master
• Vobeskhan

These people are our kin! They run stuff every week, and they have a lot of valuable information for us to sift through.

I was reading a post by Merric about Hoard of the Dragon Queen a week or two back. In it, he made a passing comment about how he felt like he wasn't good at role-playing and was more of a numbers guy. The way he said it made me think he doubted himself.

Merric is clearly a good DM. He always has a full table of players. He's had them for years. He likes the game, he knows the game, and is respected the world over for his skills as a Dungeon Master. Why would he doubt himself?

Multi-tasking

We doubt ourselves for this reason: Being a DM is ridiculously hard. It's like having a second job that you don't get paid for. You are responsible for so many things at the same time:

• Be properly prepared to fill a session
• Know the rules of the game
• Entertain the players
• Have a sense of pacing - know when to gloss over and know when to focus in on a scene
• Know your material
• Be ready to improvise
• Make sure your players are the stars
• Manage the table dynamic to keep things running smoothly
• Remember that the ultimate point of the game is to have fun

Play To Your Strengths

Nobody is perfect. Everyone is better at some things than others. None of us are the perfect DM. What we can do is follow this simple credo:  
Accentuate your strengths and hide your weaknesses.

I personally feel my strength lies in portraying NPCs. My weaknesses include knowing rules and keeping numbers straight. So my style of game is full of wacky NPCs and stupid voices and maybe some goofy song I came up with (I ended my Skull and Shackles campaign with a terrible, profanity-laden end-credits rap).

A lot of times I describe scenes as if they are in a bad special effects movie, using words like "fog machine" and "you catch a glimpse of a hand manipulating the mouth of the dragon puppet". I make lots of sound effects.

That's my style. It's a bunch of goofy crap, but when it's time to get serious, we get serious. But I know where my bread is buttered - I try to make them smile and in turn they make me smile.

I am up front with them about being bad with rules. Usually there is a player in my group who jumps in on rules questions and looks stuff up if needed. Sometimes I have a group that doesn't care about the rules and is along for the ride. 

Identify Your Weaknesses

How do you identify your weaknesses? Get feedback from your players, to start with. The problem there is that it can be painful, and your players may not want to say certain things that might hurt your feelings.

If you're really serious about this stuff, then here is what you do. Record your session on your phone/camera/digital recorder (I use a digital recorder). Make sure your players know you're doing this, and that you aren't going to put it on the internet or anything. Listen to it. You will hear so much that you missed while administrating the game. You will immediately catch things you can do better. 

To keep yourself from getting depressed, make sure to skip to the parts where somebody made some funny jokes. That's the most important part. I have a few audio files of hilarious crap from old D&D sessions saved on my computer that I listen to from time to time to give myself a boost when I have a bad session.

Develop Your Style

As Chris Perkins has said, a DM is like a director of a movie. You have your own vision of the game and you get to present it. Your players are your stars and your audience. You should think about what your vision is. Think of great or popular directors and what traits describe you:

• Alfred Hitchcock (Sharp plots and building tension)
• Quentin Tarantino (Edgy, intense, profane)
• Michael Bay (Giant explosions and sweaty bare midriffs)

If you are a "numbers" person, there is nothing wrong with that. Most people don't like to act or do voices. That is the great thing about D&D - you can shape it to fit what you like.

I can remember my friend telling me about a game he was in, where the group played out every minute of every day in the game. Most of the campaign seemed to take place in a single town. They played out every purchase, every interaction with an NPC on the street. They played this game for a year or two, and at the end they were 3rd level. The DM made gaining a level this truly epic achievement.

There is a guy at the game store I run in who runs a Pathfinder game. He's been playing since the D&D white box. He always has a table of 10 players. He insists on running his adventures completely improvised. I could never do that. It sounds terrifying. But this guy makes it work. His players are loyal to the campaign and have been playing for years. It's a lethal old school game with no regard to scaling of any kind.

The rules are just a guideline. As long as your players are OK with it, make it your own. Use the game to express your vision, but allow your players to tap dance all over it. That's the fun of the game for you - to see what your players do with the scenario you concocted.

How to be a Good Player

• Show up on time
• Be polite
• Don't look at or use your phone during the game.
• Bring food or chip in for food.
• Have your character ready and know what your character can do
• Don't do negative things in the game and then claim "that's what my character would do". Don't make that character.
• As always, don't deal with out of game issues in the game.
• When you roll bad, deal with it. It's just a game.

This is the second session of the adventure. You might want to read the first one in case you missed it. I am running the 1e Dragon Magazine version enhanced by the 4e version, which fills in details and has great maps.

The Store Was Very Loud and Annoying

We got through a bit more of Baba Yaga's Hut last Monday, but wow were there some problems.

Usually the game store that I run this campaign in is pretty full of Magic players going through a tournament. This time, there wasn't much Magic going on at all, but there were a lot of board games. Loud, loud board games.

It was brutal. I told them to be quiet, and they were for a few minutes, but then it went right back up again. I ended up just shutting the game down early as I couldn't take it any more.

The Dancing Hut is Too Sandbox-y
 
I had prepared the rest of the hut in the week leading up to the session. What I found was that this dungeon has a problem: It's too wide-open. A lot of the rooms just have a fun little note about a hag sweeping the floor, and not much else. The hut seems to be meant to be a place to send the PCs to go on a mission in. Exploring it like a normal dungeon is going to be very uneventful.

Plus, if you consider the fact that the PCs are probably being watched by Baba Yaga through her magic mirror, she could just pop up and destroy the PCs whenever she liked (her stats are insane - she is like a demigod).

The 4e version fixes this by expanding on it and making many of the rooms full blown encounter areas. This works for 4th edition, because that is what 4e does. 4e is all about encounters. I am running this for DCC RPG, however. I want some encounters, but also lots of exploration and tinkering with motivation.

Baba Yaga's Apprentice

I have set this scenario up with an evil double of a PC being an apprentice of Baba Yaga. Baba Yaga has allowed him to lure the PCs to the hut, and to use the hut to kill them. She is watching and finds the whole thing entertaining, as well as a test for her apprentice.

There is a pool in one of the final rooms of the hut that makes doubles. I have decided that the apprentice has mastered the pool, and can create doubles of himself that do his bidding. So basically, when PCs enter certain rooms, a double is waiting to do some nefarious deed. The PCs are going through the hut trying to find the real apprentice.

Room 6. Grand Throne Room

We left off in Baba Yaga's audience hall. A PC came very close to attacking her but decided against it. Baba Yaga explained to the PCs what was going on.

The heroes made their way to Room 6, which is a throne room. There's 4 giant skulls that shoot paralyzation beams, and a magic throne that has powers. It can create a prismatic sphere, cast rulership (I had this just dominate a lone PC) and creates a globe of invulnerability to protect the person sitting on it.

I had a double in the throne cackling as the PCs were pelted with skull lasers and a prismatic sphere. I did a gimmick where when a skull was destroyed, the globe flickered. PCs could ready and stab the double when a skull was destroyed. They caught on and eventually stuffed a barrier peaks grenade in his mouth and shot him with a laser pistol.

During this battle, the dwarf tried to use her pulse rifle and it malfunctioned. It blew up and almost killed her and a cleric.

Once people were healed (the cleric had to be rolled over... he made his luck check) the thief tried to pry a gem off the throne. Those gems are protected by a save or die effect! She pried one, seized up, but made her save. These crazy old school adventures and their instant death traps... good gawd.

Room 9. Fungus Gardens

There was some more exploring, and our heroes came to the fungus room. I like this one. It has a magic fountain that, when you drink from it, issues random magic effects. That is one of my favorite D&D tropes. The 1e version of the adventure leaves the effects up to the DM, but the 4e version has a fantastic list that I modified and used.

What ended up happening was that the PCs drank from the fountain and rolled very well. They kept getting the best result: one of their items becomes a sentient +1 magic item. The cleric had his sniper rifle (which he got when the heroes went to 1986 New York) enchanted. It was hilarious.

Room 10. Grand Museum
 
More exploring eventually led to one of the most memorable rooms in the whole dungeon: The museum. This room has a world war 2 soviet tank in it, as well as a steam-powered cannon taken from some steampunk world.

I had a double of the bad guy hiding in the tank. When the PCs entered and began exploring, the double fired an explosive shell at the PCs!

There was a massive explosion and the PCs were hurt really bad. I figured they would use the cannon, but instead they just kind of panicked (and remained in a clump, which made them great targets for a follow up blast.

The party thief bravely ran up to the tank, opened the hatch, and battled the double. This prevented him from firing again. He tried to hit her with force manipulation (the most feared spell in DCC RPG) but it fizzled. She stabbed him to death with Luna, the blood-drinking blade from Slaughtergrid.

The Breaking Point

It was at this point that it just got too loud in the store and I decided to just shut the game down for the night. The players were openly discussing playing this game somewhere else. I do not want to do that. I'll talk to the store about figuring out a way to move us to a quieter spot.

I think next session, if the PCs are amenable, I will have Vladmir the cat lead them to the notable rooms so we can bypass the uneventful rooms and get to the good stuff. There's so many doors and secret hatches that the constant choosing grinds the game to a halt.

Natasha the Dark

I was determined to finish this adventure on Monday night. This is session 3 of my attempt to run a modified version of "The Dancing Hut" using the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG rules.

As I have mentioned previously, the original Dragon Magazine version of this adventure leaves out a lot of details for the DM to fill in, which is annoying. I was able to use the 4th edition version of the adventure to fill in most of the gaps.

Reign of Winter

But I still had a problem - this place is supposed to be full of magic items, and I had few to choose from. So I dug items out of another source - Pathfinder's Reign of Winter adventure path. This is an entire adventure path about Baba Yaga!

I almost ran Reign of Winter when it came out, during my traditional hemming and hawing campaign planning procedure. I have almost-ran many a great campaign. I spent months working on a Castle Greyhawk campaign that I ultimately decided not to run. I spent two months prepping Spelljammer, which I have pretty much decided against running. And Age of Worms has been almost-run on three separate occasions!

Reign of Winter is loaded with perfect unique magic items to place in the hut. I loaded the place up with DCC versions of these things, which includes a magic ushanka (furry hat with ear flaps) and a magic snowglobe that creates a blizzard in a two mile radius when shattered.

The Store

The store was thankfully less crowded tonight. Last week, the noise was unbearable. Usually Monday nights are full due to Magic tournaments, but lately there has been a massive drop-off in Magic attendance. I don't know what the deal is with that.

Since we run Adventurer's League stuff in the store, we got the 5th edition Dungeon Master's Guide early. I bought it and am working on a review. It is a really, really great book. And it even has a full page image of baba yaga's hut!

Room 8. Bestiary

If you recall, our heroes are in the hut because an evil double of a PC is an apprentice to Baba Yaga. I had Vladmir the telepathic cat guide the PCs through the hut, to cut down on wasted time.

The heroes came upon a bestiary/zoo, which I stocked with a bunch of monsters and references to my other campaigns which nobody else would get, though if you read this blog you would. I put a Predator in a cell, which caused the players to explode with laughter. Robert Downey, jr. was in another. I don't think I ever told this story, but last year I ran a session of Dungeon of the Bear with some new players. Short version - one of the newbies really wanted Robert Downey, jr. as her sidekick.

Basically our bad guy opened a cell and unleashed a DCC RPG hydra on the PCs. On paper, the hydra didn't look so tough. It had 7 heads, each head had 7 hit points. When you "kill" a head, two more grow back two rounds later. So basically, you have to chop off all the heads to kill it.

It was a little - a lot - more deadly than I anticipated! We came real close to a TPK, but the heroes persevered thanks to the use of some barrier peaks grenades.

Smirnoff the accordian player was torn to shreds. His little cymbal-playing monkey named Bristly was sad, but the heroes cheered him up. They have done drawings of him in real life, and insist that his name is "Mr. Peanut". I don't know why.

The heroes freed Robert Downey, jr. He became their new buddy.

Room 11. The Lakeland
 
This room has a lake with two "elf maidens" in it who beckon to the heroes. The heroes were wary, and decided that Robert Downey, jr. should go hit on them. He did. He rolled well. The PCs decided he'd be safe here and continue on.

They didn't know that these elf maidens were hags in disguise. As soon as the PCs left, they tore Robert to shreds. Poor guy could never catch a break in my campaigns.

Room 12. Treasure Vaults

This is where I loaded up the treasure. I altered this to have a single basilisk guardian. I figured Baba Yaga's good treasure was elsewhere. This excursion into the hut is really her testing her apprentice and the PCs for a special mission.

The Daughters of Baba Yaga

Somewhere around this time, the heroes met with Baba Yaga's adopted daughters.

Natasha the Dark: An evil, raven-haired sorceress. In some D&D editions, Natasha is said to actually be Iggwilv, the legendary villain from Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth and the Savage Tide adventure path. The heroes had an awkward meeting with her and moved on.

Elena the Fair: In the 1e version, she's a nice wizard. In the 4e version, she's gone mad and is being manipulated by a devil. I like the "nice" version so I used that.

Room 13. The Chasm

There's a chasm in here. If you fall in, you take a one-way trip to the astral plane.

A PC decided to fly into the chasm to check it out (he got bat wings from Slaughtergrid). And.. poof. He's gone forever. And of course, he's the one the evil double is trying to hunt down and kill! The double would have to settle for trying to kill the PCs, and then beg Baba Yaga to take the hut to the astral sea to finish off his rival.

Room 22. Smithy

This room is super-hot. You take 1 point of damage per round you are in it. In here are fiery beings called salamanders who are putting the finishing touches on a magic sword.

I have one player who is obsessed with magic items. He couldn't resist. He went in alone, took out the salamanders and snatched the sword. It was a cursed berserking sword. So basically, he was filled with the urge to murder his own allies.

An epic battle took place. The party rogue used her ring of super-muscles (also from Slaughtergrid) to wrestle him to the ground and disarm him.

Then another PC decided to pick it up and throw it into the chasm. As soon as he picked it up, he began berserking.

These kind of scenarios are very old school and should be used with extreme caution, but wow... it was effective.

The PC was subdued and the cursed berserking sword was moved without being touched directly. The heroes chucked it into the chasm.

So... there's probably a bat-winged dude with a cursed berserking sword rampaging across the astral sea.

Room 35. Fountain of Life

A good old-fashioned healing fountain! This was useful. DCC is a super-deadly game, so this fountain was used quite a bit over the course of the session.

Room 40. Crystal Grotto

This room is where the pool is that makes doubles of people. The bad guy was waiting here with some diakkas (bird-servants of Baba Yaga).

He had these magic boots from Reign of Winter which can turn you into a frost giant for ten minutes per day! An epic battle was had, with the dwarf hanging from the giant's beard and crowbarring it to death (with her crowbar - her pulse rifle had been destroyed).

Once the bad guy was slain, the PCs met with Baba Yaga. She wanted to cut them a deal: They could have the hut for a time if they would kill a mutual enemy of hers - Noohl of the Court of Chaos.

This campaign is ending soon, so I want to finish it with a bang. I am going to give the PCs the hut in its' magic item form and let them use it to battle a major enemy.

The hut is cool, but the original version is not fleshed out enough! You also need to create a reason/goal for the PCs to explore it. It's a classic adventure, everyone should probably play a version of it at least once.

The Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition Dungeon Master's Guide is here, and now we officially have a full set of books to go ahead and run a 5th edition campaign.

I am going to go through the book and discuss the best and worst parts. I will have to take pictures of the stuff I want to show you, so please forgive the awkward blurs and tilti-ness.

I think I am going to divide this review into three parts, just as the DMG is divided into three parts:

Part 1: Master of Worlds
Part 2: Master of Adventures
Part 3: Master of Rules

The Art

As you might be aware, I am very picky about art. In this book, they continue to do that page rip thing with the art, so it sort of looks like the image is tearing through the page or something. But this time, there's red smears and some ink stains to jazz it up a little. It looks better than in the other books, but I still don't like it. I also don't like all of the elaborate border stuff they do that overlaps the full page art.

I am also starting to think that map artist Mike Schley might actually be the best artist of this edition. I tried to track down the art from this book online, but I couldn't find much. So I'm afraid that you'll have to settle for photos for the most part.

Chapter 1: A World of Your Own

In the overview, there is an interesting comment:

"As a referee, the DM acts as a mediator between the rules and the players. A player tells the DM what he or she wants to do, and the DM determines whether it is successful or not, in some cases asking the player to make a die roll to determine success."

There's also the ever-popular section that identifies different player types. This time around, we've got classics like "The Actor" and "Hack and Slash Guy". But there's some new ones, which I've pictured here. The Instigator! The Optimizer! I find these vastly amusing.

The Gods

There's a discussion about Gods. There's a great chart of the "prime" gods used in 4th edition, now known as the "Dawn War Deities". The list includes The Raven Queen, Tiamat, Vecna and Corellon. It even notes the real-life literary sources of these gods. Only three were created from scratch: Ioun, Melora and Torog.

Settlements

There's a fantastic section on settlements. It suggests what scale to use when creating maps, and then goes into what the difference between villages and towns are. I loved this stuff from the 3rd edition book and am happy to see it here. A village holds up to 1,000 people, a town goes up to 6,000.

There's a list of different types of governments. I get a kick out of the "kleptocracy" - a kingdom run by thieves guilds. What an awesome idea.

Then we get into building a campaign. There is a very cool note about "false action" - having a combat for the sake of a combat. The book advises against this. That's interesting, because aren't most adventures and dungeons full of unnecessary combats and encounters? I see what they are saying, but dungeons could be boiled down to a hallway and a room if you were trying to avoid false action.

There are a few pages of awesome ideas for you to draw on for your campaign. There's lists of different types of scenarios, everything from extinction (magic fades, or unicorns dying out) to cataclysmic disasters (Rain of fire/meteors or divine judgment - awesome).

Play Style

There is talk about the two main types of play: Hack and Slash and Immersive Roleplaying. Most groups are somewhere in between. It asks a lot of great questions to get you thinking about what kind of game you want to run.

I really like the question: "Is bold action key, or do the players need to be thoughtful and cautious?"

There's been a lot of games derailed by this. My groups growing up went by "the stupid rule". As in, if you do something stupid, let the dice fall where they may. The problem there is that what one person sees as "stupid" is not always the same. So, as DM, I would issue a very clear warning when someone was taking on a course of action that would likely lead to death. I would give them a chance to change their mind. This avoids a lot of drama if things go wrong.

Chapter 2: Creating a Multiverse

We kick this one off with a great full page depiction of adventurers hiding from a horde of marching modrons. I love all of the references to books and D&D lore.

There's a handy guideline for DMs who want to make their own cosmology with a fantastic "bare minimum" list.

There's some talk of inventing your own planes. Someone should do a contest or something where people submit new planes.

We get inspired and concise discussion of most of the planes out there. The astral plane is described as primarily the home of the githyanki. The ethereal plane, a place I often confused with the astral plane when I was younger, is given a nice description as a fog that overlaps the prime material plane.

The Feywild and Shadowfell are perhaps two of the most significant contributions to D&D lore from 4th edition. There's a great chart describing how time works differently in the Feywild. If the PCs are in the Feywild for a day or more and then go home, it is possible that they return home days, weeks or years later!

We get a nice little rundown of all the planes. The section on The Abyss seemed a little bare bones.

We of course are on our way to a full Hell scholarship here at Power Score, so you'll be delighted to see a full section on each of the nine levels of hell. Not too many changes or surprises. I note there is a separate section elsewhere for an entirely different realm known as "Hades". There is almost no description of it at all... odd.

Part One is awesome. I already love this book. Click here to continue to part 2.

Pharblex Splattergoo

We had a very good night at the store this week for Hoard of the Dragon Queen. All 4 tables are full of players that show up every week. It is pretty amazing.

I made out like a bandit tonight. One of the players from my old high school gaming days gave me a bunch of stuff - a marvel superheroes boxed set and a handful of his old character sheets. He knows that I like keeping files of our old adventures, and the character sheets are a goldmine!

Just as good, the 4th grader who plays Dark the Dragon Sorceress did some drawings for me tonight. She even did one of Dark. As you can see, Dark is the most cheerful black dragon-blooded sorceress you are likely to meet in all of the Forgotten Realms.

We didn't get to play last week, as there was a snow storm. So this week I was anxious to get the group as far as possible. I am hellbent on finishing The Rise of Tiamat by March 11.

Dark the Dragon Sorceress

Back to Castle Naerytar

We had left off last time in Castle Naerytar, where the heroes were battling a horde of bad guys at once. Half the party was down. We resumed there, and lizardfolk began joining in to aid the heroes each round.

It was interesting. The heroes healed each other and hid as the lizardfolk battled Pharblex Splattergoo, who devastated them with Thunderwave spells.

In the end, Pharblex was slaughtered by a horde of lizardfolk and Dralmorrer fled into the dungeon.

The heroes took a short rest, while a horde of lizardfolk rampaged into the dungeon. I kind of went room by room, rolling a single d20 to see how the lizardfolk generally fared. They slaughtered their way to the lake in 6 & 7, where they had an epic battle with the giant frogs and bullywugs. They all died.
The PCs rested. The party fighter had stolen the magic sword Hazirawn from Rezmir before she fled. I read up on attunement. I had thought it took a week to attune to a weapon, but it is just one short rest. This sword is powerful! It casts spells and does an extra 2d6 damage! It is also sentient and evil, which should be interesting..

Dralmorrer

Once they rested, the heroes made their way into the dungeon and followed the trail of carnage. They eventually found Dralmorrer hiding in Room 11, protected by ten bullywugs. The heroes did their flaming oil trick, where the rogues toss oil containers and dark casts twinned firebolts, scorching a pile of bad guys.

As you are aware, I really like this group both as players and as people. I love it when they do little tricks like that. They are very into the game and pretty much every time I walk into the store they are all already there, sitting at the table and patiently waiting to get started.

I had Dralmorrer panic and flee into Pharblex's chamber Room 12). I had him try to shove the treasure chest out to the heroes to convince them to leave him be. The chest was trapped - 6 pots fell to the ground, releasing hallucinogenic gas. Dralmorrer began to hallucinate. It was very amusing.

The heroes had found the teleportation circle before battling the bullywugs. They knew they needed the password. It's in Dralmorrer's chambers way back up in the castle. I really wanted the PCs to move on to chapter 7, so I dropped some hints and they swiftly realized that Dralmorrer knew it. They easily convinced the dude to give up the command word.

Dark's dad coldly shot an arrow through his head, to the shock of the heroes. Dark's dad does not mess around!

The heroes went through the portal and appeared outside the Hunting Lodge. They were attacked by the perytons that lived on the roof of the lodge, and made quick work of them with some good rolls. The guy wielding Hazirawn rolled a critical, doing massive damage. And the rogue with the dagger of venom flung it and rolled a critical as well.

Another great session! I have no idea how they'll deal with the hunting lodge. It could go quick, or it might take a few weeks. We'll see.

Welcome back to part 2 of an extensive look at the Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition Dungeon Master's Guide. Part one is here.

I am trying to write these to give you an idea of what is in the book so that you can decide if it is something you like. It is tricky to figure out how much is OK to show you. I could fill this column with photos of the charts (because I love them) but I shouldn't be giving the content away. So basically I am trying to say that I took a bunch of pictures of charts and then deleted them.

Part 2: Master of Adventures

This section kicks off with a full page image of the tarrasque, which is awesome. I was sure it was re-used art from the cover of a 4e issue of Dragon magazine, but it's not. I have them both here for the sake of comparison. How weird - they are very similar and they appear to be by the same artist, but it's a different piece. I like it, it's just weird.
On the very next page is a full page piece of art of Baba Yaga's hut! How crazy is that? I just finished running that adventure. They even included the skull fence and their glowing eyes (who shot down my DCC RPG players' spaceship... long story).

Chapter 3: Creating Adventures

I need to wear gloves when I read these books. There's something gross about my thumbs that causes the ink in these books to just rub right off. The 4e books were much worse than these in that regard, though.

This chapter starts off by detailing the basic concepts of making an adventure, and then gives piles of charts with ideas for you to use. I love charts. These are great. There's lists of goals for dungeon adventures, types of villains, adventure introductions... amazing. One that is especially useful to me is the list of adventure climaxes. I am terrible at making interesting final encounters.

There's lists for event-based adventures, and discussion of how to run a mystery. There's even a great chart of plot twists!

Combat Encounters

Then we get into an important area. Combat Encounter difficulty. Basically, the book gives you an XP value per PC. So, a medium challenge for a 1st level PC would be a monster or monsters worth 50 XP. If you have a party of 4 1st level PCs, a medium difficulty encounter would have monsters worth 200 XP. If you are throwing 1 monster at this party worth 200 XP, that's fine. But if it's four 50 XP monsters, that's a little tougher, so there's a formula to know what is a challenge.

According to the DMG, the average band of heroes can handle 6 to 8 encounters in a day, and will take two short rests.

There's a few pages on when to use random encounters that feels spot-on. There' a nice sylvan forest random encounter chart, complete with a picture of an owlbear with blood on its' beak. Someone at Wizards really has a thing for owlbears, huh?

Chapter 4: Creating Non-Player Characters

I love NPCs! We get piles o' charts to help detail your NPCs, from appearance to abilities. I especially like the charts on ideals and the one on secrets. A lot of this stuff is right out of Chris Perkins' DM Experience columns.

We get into NPC party members. Here is a golden rule for you which is laid out right away: "Any NPC that accompanies the adventurers acts as a party member and earns a full share of experience points." This comes up a lot, especially if the PCs have rescued prisoners in a dungeon or are working on a pirate ship or something. It does make sense that the PCs would have their pirates follow them into combat. Sharing XP will put a halt to that in a big hurry and you won't have to run these gigantic, unwieldy encounters.

There's a cool optional rule for loyalty. An NPC has a secret loyalty score that the DM tracks. The max score is equal to the highest CHA score among the PCs.

The section on villains is phenomenal. So many ideas! The list of villainous schemes alone is enough to get you all fired up.

Then we get in to some character concepts for villains or evil clerics. There's a cleric of death and an oathbreaker paladin (a paladin who betrayed his god's cause and now serves evil).

Chapter 5: Adventure Environments

This is another great section, featuring stuff for dungeons and wilderness adventures. There's almost a full page devoted to slimes and molds. At the end is a few pages of traps, which are all the classics.

There's also more settlement material, including a tavern name generator. I rolled "The Barking Satyr".

I love the section on foraging. If you look through the AD&D Wilderness Explorer's Guide, Gary Gygax made this ridiculously intricate system for fishing, hunting and foraging which was just way too unwieldy to implement (I tried). Foraging in 5th edition is simple. Make a Wisdom(Survival) check. The DC varies depending on where you are, obviously. On a success, toll d6+WIS. That's how much food in pounds you find. Roll again for water, which you find in gallons. A small or medium creature needs 1 pound of food and one gallon of water per day.

We get prices for vehicles. A sailing ship is 10,000 gp. There's some great notes about owning a ship. Each crew member must be paid 2 gp per day, and a ship has a damage threshold. A sailing ship has a threshold of 15, which means you have to do more than 15 damage in a single shot to damage it at all.

Repairing a ship costs 20 gp per day, and you can fix 1 hit point per day. A sailing ship has 300 hit points, so wow that might take a long time. I like it!

Chapter 6: Between Adventures

This chapter deals with the "Downtime" system, a handy way to do stuff that's always been a royal pain to do in D&D. We're talking stuff like running a business (which has an epic chart), building a stronghold and even CAROUSING.

The stronghold part makes me very happy, as in previous editions I've often felt completely at a loss as to what to charge PCs for building a castle. Now we know: building a tower costs 15,000 gp and building a large castle costs a cool 500,000 gp.

There's upkeep costs involved in owning buildings, and it's per day! Farms will run you only 5 sp per day, plus you'll need 5 skilled hirelings and 3 unskilled. Running an inn (which sounds like a lot of fun) costs 5 gp per day, and requires one skilled hireling and 5 untrained ones.

There's also simple rules for crafting and even selling magic items. What an awesome, succinct chapter.

Speaking of magic items, there's so much to say I am going to discuss Chapter 7 in an entirely separate blog post. I hope this has been informative in some way for you.

I am going through the 5th edition DMG slowly and carefully, doing my best to highlight the most interesting parts to give you a good idea of what's in the book and what 5th edition is like. The section on magic items is so gigantic that I've decided to give it an entire post.

If you missed the first two parts, they are here:

Part 1: Play Style, Creating a World, The Planes
Part 2: Adventures, Encounters, NPCs

The first thing to note, and this really cool, they have art of almost every single magic item in the game. It is pretty amazing. I imagine this was inspired by Pathfinder and their item decks. I think it is a great idea for wizards to eventually put out cards with an item's picture on one side and what it does on the back. I already give my players index cards with what their item does, so this will just save me time and will make my game cooler.

This chapter kicks off with a full page piece of art featuring a dragon and a wizard on a flying carpet. I think it is a William O'Connor. Pretty cool!

We get into charts of gemstones and art objects. Then there's a discussion on magic item rarity and how much they are worth. There's a handy chart for that, too.

Identifying Magic Items

Identifying a magic item is always a tricky thing in D&D. It's nice to let PCs fiddle with an item and try to figure out if it is magic, but that wastes a lot of precious table time and sometimes the players get frustrated when they spend so much time testing a bunch of mundane items. On the other hand, it doesn't make much sense for a hero to touch an item and immediately know that it can store spells.

This is probably my favorite. I love the eyes

The DMG has a simple way to work around this (aside from the identify spell). A PC can take a short rest and focus on an item, and at the end of the rest they will know what it does. Potions are an exception to this - they have their own delightful tasting rules.

Attunement

Most of the more powerful items require "attunement". Attunement means that you take a short rest and bond with the item. Once attuned, you can use the item's magic properties. You can only be attuned to three items at a time. This is an interesting way to prevent PCs from being overloaded with powerful magic items. Not sure if it will work. I guess we'll see as time goes on.

There's pages of tables to create a magic item's backstory. There are also piles of tables to roll on to see what magic items, if any, your PCs have found in a treasure hoard. When I was a kid I used to love to sit around and roll on the charts in the 2nd edition DMG. After that comes the list of magic items..


When I first saw the above image, I thought it was a photo. There's a pile of fun little details in there.

I am going to go through and detail a bunch of magic items in the book, to give you an idea of how magic items work in 5e. There's some interesting things that they've done to try to keep the items from becoming too powerful, mainly by using the "X charges per day" gimmick.

A chart of all the items listed by rarity can be found here.

Amulet of the Planes: Pick a plane, make a DC 15 INT check. Success means you plane-shifted there. Fail means you and everyone within 15 feet travel to a random destination or plane. Yikes.

Bag of Beans: I always loved this item in AD&D 2nd edition. You can plant them in the ground and then roll on a chart to see what happens. A bean might spawn a treant (!), or a statue in your likeness that badmouths you to everyone nearby, or a fruit tree whose fruit mimics the effect of a magic potion. How awesome is that?


Cloak of Displacement: I love the art of this, as it makes it clear that the cloak is made from the hide of a displacer beast. This cloak is pretty epic - creatures have disadvantage to hit you due to the displacement effect. If you are hit, the effect ceases to function until the start of your next turn.

Deck of Many Things: I've talked a lot about this item before. If you look at the art, you will see that wizards is using the same art as they did for the 4th edition version of the deck. Now is a great time for you to track down the Madness at Gardmore Abbey boxed set. In it is an actual deck of many things. You'll also get some awesome poster maps and counters, as well as a well-regarded 4th edition adventure. I am seeing one on ebay for $17.50, which in my opinion is a great deal for the deck and the poster maps alone.

Efreeti Bottle: You open this and summon a fire genie. You roll on a chart. Most of the time, the genie will serve you for an hour, then you have to wait 24 hours to use the bottle again. There's a 10% chance the genie will attack you, and a 10% chance the genie will grant you three wishes (!). You might want to use the genie wish rules from Al Qadim, which I talked about here.

Flame Tongue: Who doesn't like a fire sword?! It does an extra 2d6 damage and sheds light in a 40 foot radius.

Gauntlets of Ogre Power: Bumps your Strength up to 19.

Helm of Teleportation: It has 3 charges. You can use a charge to teleport as per the spell. 1d3 expended charges come back at dawn. I like the way they are handling charges in this edition. The old way of having a set amount of charges and then either questing to find a way to re-charge it never really worked out (did anyone ever make an adventure about going to a place to re-charge an item? They should have if they didn't).

Immovable Rod: It has a button on it. Press it, and the rod just stays where it is, even if in mid-air. It can hold up to 8,000 pounds in weight. Press the button again to make it movable. A clever player can do all sorts of fun things with this.

Manual of Bodily Health: Bumps your constitution by 2 once you've spent 48 hours reading it.

Nine Lives Stealer: This sword is a +2 weapon and has d8+1 charges. If you get a critical hit on a creature with less than 100 hit points, they must make a constitution save or be slain instantly "...as the sword tears its life force from its body". It loses 1 charge when this happens. Get a load of this: "When the sword has no charges remaining, it loses this property". Use it sparingly!

Oil of Slipperiness: It's black and sticky and when you cover yourself in it, it's like the freedom of movement spell has been cast on you. If you dump it on the ground, it's like a grease spell.

Potion of Speed: You gain the effects of the haste spell for one minute. Haste was a huge problem spell in earlier editions. Let's see what 5e haste does: Doubles your speed, +2 to AC, advantage on Dex saves and gives you an additional action on your turns! Wow. That action can "only" be used to attack, dash, disengage or hide. This is a pretty great potion.

Ring of Regeneration: You gain d6 hit points every 10 minutes if you have at least one hit point. If you lose a body part, it regrows in d6+1 days. That is interesting. Older versions of the ring had you regain a hit point every round.

Sphere of Annihilation: This is a 2-foot-diamter hole in the multiverse! It obliterates all matter it comes in contact with except for artifacts. It does 4d10 damage to anything that touches it. You can try to control it with a DC 25 Intelligence (Arcana) check. There's rules for when two people try to fight for control of it, and an awesome chart of effects for when the sphere comes in contact with a planar portal.

Talisman of the Sphere: This thing gives you a bonus to control a sphere of annihilation and lets you move it farther per round. I love the art of this one, as it refers to one of the most iconic D&D adventures.

Vorpal Sword: This is a +3 weapon that, when you roll a natural 20, beheads the target. If it's a hydra or something and wouldn't die from this, it takes an extra 6d8 damage. Not sure how I feel about the art of this one. The blade is red and black. It's cool, I guess.

Wand of Fireballs: It's got 7 charges (d6+1 expended charges come back each day)  and each charge can be used to cast a fireball spell. If you spend additional charges, you can bump the spell slot up by one. So if you spend 6 charges, you can cast a fireball that does 14d6! I think if I was a player, that would be my gimmick. I'd do one ridiculously massive fireball every day. If you use all 7 charges, you have to roll a d20. If you roll a 1, the wand crumbles into ashes.

Artifacts

The book has stats for many iconic artifacts, including the Wand of Orcus, The Hand and Eye of Vecna, and all three White Plume Mountain artifacts (Blackrazor, Wave and Whelm). There are charts to make your own artifact. I decided to go ahead and make one using the charts.

As I rolled its' properties, it became clear that this ring was tied to fey concepts. You can roll both good properties and bad properties, minor and major. I rolled a bunch of good ones, and the 2 bad ones - one minor and one major. They ended up having a "madness" theme. I used lore from the great 4e "Heroes of the Feywild" sourcebook to add backstory and flavor. Here is the artifact:

The Shinaelestra Ring

This ring was worn by Calenon Thay, the ranger lord of the Feywild city of Shinaelestra, passed down from generation to generation. The city was claimed by the wilderness. The ring whispers that the wearer must reclaim the city, promising great rewards. The fey rangers of Shinaelestra hunt for the ring and want it back. Shinaelestra periodically appears in the mortal realm at midnight, and a band of hunters scour the lands searching for it.

They want the ring to battle their enemy Queen Connomae, a fomorian who lives in the Feydark beneath the city.The ring was made to aid in the killing of giants. The spirits of past wearers has seeped into the ring to create a semi-mad consciousness obsessed with killing all giants.

• The ring is made of mithril and silver, and glows in moonlight
• The ring glows when a giant is within 120 feet
• The ring grumbles and mutters in Elven, sometimes offering useful information
• The wearer gains +2 to constitution when wearing the ring
• The wearer of the ring can't be charmed or frightened
• As an action, the wearer can cast the True Strike cantrip. For one round after, the wearer can speak and understand Elven and will mutter in elven as the ring floods the wearer with memories of the glory days of Shinaelestra.
• The wearer can cast stoneskin once per day. For the duration of the spell, the wearer sees those with evil alignments as giants and feels the urge to destroy them. 
• Creatures can't take long or short rests within 100 feet of the wearer, because as the wearer rests the area slowly becomes overgrown with fey vines and foliage.

It seems a little weak for an artifact, but that is what I rolled. I'd probably add regeneration, or +3d6 damage to giants, or maybe give giants disadvantage to hit the wearer. Or maybe give the wearer the ability to become giant-sized. something like that.

Other Rewards

At the end of the chapter there are alternate rewards, stuff like land, titles, charms and my favorite, blessings. Blessings are when a deity rewards a PC by enchanting their item, or enhancing a stat, etc. Very cool.

The last page lists "epic boons", special powers only available to level 20 PCs who have accomplished a great deed. The boons grant all sorts of crazy abilities, including the innate power to plane shift to a specific plane of your choosing, adding 40 hit points to your maximum, or even immortality - you stop aging.

We're almost done! Nest up is the final part, which covers what is my favorite part of the book. Click here to check it out.

Here we are at the fourth and final part of my comprehensive look at the 5th edition DMG. I still have to rely on photos from the book for the most part, so I apologize in advance.

If you missed them and you want to start from the beginning, here's some links to the earlier parts of this review:

Part 1: Master of Worlds
Part 2: Master of Adventures
Part 3: Magic Items

Chapter 8: Running the Game

We kick this thing off with a few pages on table etiquette and the pros and cons of rolling in front of your players. I always roll right in front of them. I have this gigantic grey d20 that always seems to roll high... they hate it.

We go over the basics of a Difficulty Class. It goes like this:

Easy: 5
Moderate: 10
Hard: 20
Very Hard: 25

Inspiration

We get details on when Inspiration should be handed out. It's meant as a reward for role-playing, acts of heroism, and "genre emulation". Genre emulation refers to a player doing things that fit the style of your game, like not being able to resist a dame (or dude) in a noir-style game.

What really interests me is this: "Remember that a player with inspiration can award it to another player." I had no idea this was an option. In my Hoard of the Dragon Queen game, I have two players who are constantly getting inspiration for doing cool team maneuvers in combat (mostly revolving around the elf throwing the gnome at monsters). This ought to help quite a bit, as I've had trouble getting my players to use their bonds and flaws to get inspiration.

We get a nifty chart on convincing NPCs to do stuff. We are given a nice little list of object hit points (a fragile barrel has 4 hit points, a resilient barrel has 18!).

There's a great chart for improvising damage which is a nice guideline. If you are submerged in LAVA, you take 18d10 damage. I remember some 4e adventures where you took 15 damage per round or something. That was pretty goofy, glad they fixed it. Seems like getting hit by lightning should do more than 2d10.

Chases

I love the juice in the d4

There's a great section on chases. Basically, you'll use a dash action each round. Once you've dashed 3 + your Con mod in rounds, you'll need to roll each round to avoid becoming exhausted.

There's a big table for complications that occur during a chase, like a crowd blocking your way or the classic 'two guys carrying a stained glass window' thing.

We get into siege equipment. They thought of everything! This book is really great. In case you are wondering:

Ballista: +6 to hit, 3d10 damage It takes an action to load, an action to aim, and an action to fire
Trebuchet: +5 to hit, 8d10 damage Two actions to load, two actions to aim, one action to fire

There's details on diseases, poisons and... madness! Let's roll up a long-term madness. I rolled a 22:

"The character suffers extreme paranoia. The character has disadvantage on Wisdom and Charisma checks."

Chapter 9: Dungeon Master's Workshop

This chapter kicks off with some seriously intense optional rules. Hero points?! A PC starts with 5 hero points and can use them to add +d6 to a die roll.

Get a load of this: new stats! Sanity and Honor! Honor might work well with the "Station" rules in Al Qadim. Sanity is obviously a horror game device, like in Call of Cthulhu. Failing Sanity saving throws would give you madness effects from the chart in the previous chapter.

There's rules for a "gritty" game where a short rest is 8 hours and a long rest is 7 days. I kind of like that, as it helps make time pass in the campaign. It always bothers me when the PCs go from level 1 to 10 in 2 weeks of in-game time.

Lingering Injuries

I love this section. There's a chart for special injuries, perhaps used when there's a critical hit, failing a death save by 5 or more, that kind of thing. It reminds me of the Paizo critical hit deck, which I converted to 4e when I ran Scales of War and everyone loved it. Conversely, nobody - and I mean NOBODY - wanted me to use the fumble deck.

I think I might ask my players if they want to use the lingering injuries chart in Hoard of the Dragon Queen. There's no beheading, it's stuff like losing an eye, arm, or leg and getting a scar or broken ribs.

There are a pile of pages on making monster stats and monster abilities. I will be re-skinning so this doesn't interest me much. There's a neat little section on making your own spells, with guidelines for how much damage spells of different levels should do.

Then we get into rules on making your own races and a spell point system.

Appendix A: Random Dungeons

This is a pile of charts to help you make a dungeon. I hope some intrepid individual turns this into an online program to generate random dungeons at the click of a button.

There's charts for different kinds of dungeons, including mazes, planar gates and death trap dungeons. Let's roll up a trap:

• A doorway that, when opened, causes spears to shoot out of the floor at an angle doing d10 damage (I rolled: Moved through, setback, spears on page 297)

Now let's roll a random trick:

• Brain preserved in a jar that, when touched, moves other objects nearby. That is great. You could have it animate shards of broken glass to strike the PCs, or you could have the PCs touch certain lobes to telekinetically move objects to help solve a puzzle or something.

Let's give our dungeon some dungeon dressing:

• The air is damp and the smell of manure stings your nostrils. You can hear a shuffling noise echoing in the distance. A broken five foot pole lies on the ground. (Maybe the pole has manure on it? Or maybe... uh... let's move on..)

Appendix B: Monsters

This section lists monsters by environment. In the arctic section, there's a yeti. In the desert, there's a giant scorpion. That kind of thing.

Then there's monsters listed by challenge rating.

Appendix C: Maps

We get a few pages of great maps by Mike Schley. Some of these maps are from previous releases. I think one of these is the map to Vault of the Dracolich, and the ship map is from Talon of Umberlee (which is in my opinion the best ship map out there by far).

It's nice to have these and all, but I'd like it if they released some of these as poster maps. The inn, the ship, a dungeon and the cave seem like good ones to start with.

I don't know, maybe the poster map packs don't sell well?

Overall

So after 4 posts of ranting and raving, I think you can tell that I really like this book. It seems like they thought of everything.

It's funny, in 4e the general feeling seemed to be that a DMG was something that was difficult to make content for. But here, there's everything and the kitchen sink. They included all the little things that often get forgotten - the cost of a building, how to maintain a business, useful magic item creation, and cool variant rules like the injury chart.

I also greatly appreciate the random dungeon charts. They are extremely useful and inspiring. The NPC and villain generators are top-notch, too.

If you have any interest at all in being a DM, you should get this book. Heck, even if you're a player and you want to be able to refer to the magic items or plan your downtime properly, you should get this book.

The 5e Dungeon Master's Guide is a home run, and it is easily the best of the three core books.

Welcome to the fourth article in my series on the greatest DMs of all time. This one has been particularly difficult, as I have had a hard time finding campaign details. Lucky for me, game designer Sean K. Reynolds posted quite a bit about the Praemal campaign online.

If you missed it, these are the first three great DMs (in no particular order):

Ed Greenwood - The man who created the Forgotten Realms, the biggest campaign world of all time.

Dave Arneson - The father of role-playing.

Chris Perkins - Probably the best DM in the world right now (and also the most-googled entry on my blog).

The Legacy of Monte Cook
 
Monte Cook has done so much in the RPG industry. He was the main guy behind the massively popular 3rd edition of Dungeons & Dragons. He was a driving creative force in Planescape. His sci-fi RPG Numenara is a huge hit. And, most importantly to me, he wrote a string of truly inspired D&D adventures. A Paladin in Hell, Dead Gods, Vecna Reborn and Demon God's Fane just scratch the surface. His adventures were classic but moved the genre forward, full of creativity and excitement.

Monte ran one of the most influential campaigns in modern memory - Praemal. This is the campaign that D&D designers used to playtest what would become the D&D 3rd edition rules. It was also the foundation and past history for what became the gigantic and popular Ptolus setting.

Monte the Dungeon Master

I can't find it now, but if I remember correctly, Monte once wrote a blog post about when he first started working in the RPG industry. He worked for a company called Iron Crown Enterprises that made a game called Rolemaster. To Monte's shock, he found that most of the employees didn't even play the game and seemed to have a lack of enthusiasm for RPGs in general.

What did Monte do? He started a Rolemaster campaign for them. Why? I think it is because Monte Cook is a dungeon master through and through. He runs games because he loves running games, and that has never changed throughout his entire career. When you run a good game, you can light a spark in the people who play it.

My idea here is that I am going to dig up as many details about the actual Praemal campaign to illustrate why Monte is one of the great DMs of all time and perhaps as a tool for the rest of us to become better Dungeon Masters ourselves. His game was a cauldron of ideas that inspired a bunch of designers to make extremely popular changes to the game of Dungeons & Dragons.

Also, I just get a kick out of hearing about other people's campaigns.

The Praemal Campaign
 
Way back in the summer of 1999, Chris Perkins wrote about Praemal in an editorial in Dungeon Magazine #75:

"For the past two years, I've played a fighter in the world of Praemal, Monte Cook's ongoing AD&D campaign. The world is ambitious and peculiar, much as you'd expect from someone who's spent the last several years invoking the wacky, other-worldly idiosyncrasies of the Planescape setting.

In Praemal, all great heroes have destinies, all major villains have world-spanning ambitions, and all important features of the land have a surreal majesty. A door is seldom a door, a forest is never what it seems, and the laws of physics are routinely trampled.

Week after week, Monte reminds me that weird can work - and that fun sometimes means breaking the rules."

Later on, Perkins gave more details in this column:

"A few months after I joined Wizards of the Coast, Monte Cook told me about a new D&D campaign designed to test some experimental rules. He offered me a seat at his game table, and once a week for three years we explored the world of Praemal (the lesser-known precursor to Monte's more famous Ptolus campaign) and playtested rules that would gradually evolve into what is currently referred to as '3rd Edition.'
 
The Praemal campaign ended spectacularly with the PCs crashing a moon into a planet. It sounds absurd, I know, but really it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The Praemal and Ptolus campaigns are distant memories. I don't remember the names of all the player characters or all of the villains we faced, just the really weird stuff and the really big stuff . . . like the time my elf rogue/wizard/fighter banished his dark elf nemesis to the sun's core. That doesn't happen every day."

When doing research on Praemal, sometimes it is hard to distinguish between what happened in the Praemal game and what happened in the follow-up Ptolus campaign (Ptolus is set 20,000 years after Praemal). Just keep that in mind, some of my details may be off.

Hero Points

This campaign used Hero Points, which were used to perform impossible feats, evade a lethal blow, or do massive damage. Chris Perkins said: "A Hero Point is the DM's way of saying, 'You have my permission to bend the rules... once".

The Heroes of the Praemal Campaign

The players included TSR editors and game designers:

(Bruce Cordell) Kaleb - Human rogue/invoker
(Michele Carter) Sharien - Human ranger/paladin
(Teresa Reid) Aerina - Human Cleric
(Keri Reynolds) Jonah - Human fighter
(Sean K. Reynolds) Nosh - An Indiana Jones-wizard who had a whip and tried to make peace whenever possible
Chris Perkins had 3 characters over the course of the campaign:

• Laurus - "A human raised by dwarves who was killed by an evil duplicate of himself"
• Ves - Lizard man fighter who left the group to reunite with his tribe
• Aurum Ironshard - Dwarf barbarian

The Premise

Sean K. Reynolds wrote a nice article that gives a good overview of the campaign here.

"The world was largely unexplored, with strange creatures being created by the proximity to the gods during the creation of the world, and many strange terrain features being formed because the gods were battling against Praemus, the overgod (with whom his children disagreed about free will for the mortal races). At the same time, there were these extraplanar beings called the galchut that were vesting their power into five evil mortals to help take over our world.
 
"People that were to have a great destiny in this world always had some sort of birthmark, either on their hand or face. There were initially 4 types of these marks (for fighter, cleric, rogue, and wizard), with each person having a unique variant, and some people having birthmarks (which were called "runes" by the people) that combined two of the archetypical shapes. The first generation of humans all had the runes, and they were becoming less frequent with each successive generation."

Major Events

- Two PCs were killed by a cone of cold, the rest of the PCs battled a 90 foot-tall yuan-ti on a half-shattered tower

- Sean K. Reynolds said in a recent Paizo blog post:  "Monte Cook used a memory-erasing witch to have his Praemal campaign PCs re-explore a lair they had already explored."

- Michele Carter's character made the ultimate sacrifice:

"Sharien began as a ranger named Shian, seeking out dire wolves and their allies. When she was slain while on a quest, an NPC cleric named Karienne used a magic item to rekindle her life at the expense of his, and thereafter she was a paladin. Changing her name to remember the one who saved her, Sharien considered herself living on borrowed time, and was ready to sacrifice herself to save others for the greater good--which she did at the end of the campaign, insisting that Nosh teleport away from an imminent explosion just so he and Darternae could spend their lives together. 

Because of Sharien’s sacrifice, a rift between the world of the living and the dead was closed, destroying the abnormal winter it caused and weakening the many undead that had crawled through it. This climactic event ended the Praemal campaign."

This seems to contradict the "moon crashes into the planet" stuff from earlier, but I found some more info here:

"Our last adventure was a long one, involving Vladaam, a powerful sorcerer (and one of the Vested) that tore the veil between the living and the dead, causing winter to fall upon the world and flooding it with undead."

"The only way to close the rift between worlds was by steering one of three powerful magics into it: The First Dream (a flying ship owned by the elves), the Heart of The Golden Stag (a large enchanted gem), or a piece of the vallis moon (the third moon that provided much of the magic to the world). "

"We ended up questing for an item that would grant us a wish, which we used to tear a piece of the moon free and allowed us to steer it (by standing on it, and concentrating) into the rift. Michele Carter's ranger-turned-paladin, Sharienne, sacrificed herself so that the black dragon Vladaam sent to alter our steering wouldn't be able to divert us off-course. She died when the piece of the moon hit the rift, sealing it. Oh, and the act of tearing that piece free from the moon altered the moon's orbit, and it was not to approach the world again for 20,000 years."

Other Campaigns

Ptolus: This was set 20,000 years after Praemal. Monte ran two groups in the same world. Once in a while they'd team up.

Documented events include the group battling a green dragon, "hackfests" involving hired mercenaries, and dusting off and leveling old characters for a huge fight (were these the Praemal characters?).

Sean K. Reynolds tells an awesome Chris Perkins Ptolus story:

"One player (Chris Perkins) ran a character in both games. His characters were twin brothers, and sometimes they would switch groups, and not tell anyone. It came out in the course of the game, and people would start to ask which twin he was. Then it became even more complicated: one of the two characters was kidnapped by Drow, and then replaced with a spellcaster in disguise. Monte knew Chris well enough to know it would fly with him. Chris played the replacement."

Veins of the Earth: An underdark campaign where, apparently, the PCs never came up to the surface at all. It was hard to find info on this, but a player kept a blog on the campaign, one post of which is here. The party had a fateful jaunt into the astral plane where they tried to stop a githyanki from becoming a lich (wonder if this has anything to do with Vlaakith or Gith?).

Monte started writing about this campaign in his blog here, focusing on his rules tweaks.

Original D&D: A D&D campaign using the 1974 rules set with some house rules. It involves the PCs making their way through a dungeon. They've had all sorts of hijinx. Right off the bat 4 PCs died. On later excursions, they charmed an orc with a tentacle for a head and found an obnoxious intelligent sword.

Numenara - Mauro's Quest: A campaign about heroes tracking down a mysterious transmission deep in the mountains.

There is one great DM left to go. I bet you can guess who he is! Thanks for reading.

Trepsin and his Mossy Cape

I got to the store a little early tonight for our next session of Hoard of the Dragon Queen. I had a chance to talk with the owner, and he told me that he is stunned at how well the Dungeon Master's Guide is selling. He also noted that his distributor is out of Player's Handbooks. So I can say, at least here in New York, 5th edition is continuing to do incredibly well. The tables are full (and growing) every single week.

Unfortunately our little buddy Dark the Dragon Sorceress was sick this week. So we had five players for the exploration of Episode 7. This entire chapter can be skipped if the PCs decide to just head on down the road. This would be a problem, as they'd be a level behind when attempting to foil the villains in the final episode.

Experimenting With New DMG Rules

I love a lot of the weird little rules in the DMG, so I decided to experiment with one this week. I used the "lingering injuries" chart. When a PC rolled a 20, the bad guy had to roll on the chart for a horrible effect like losing an eye or getting broken ribs. The players liked it and want to keep it, even though they are aware it will effect them as well.

Some of the "lingering injuries" are cured with the regenerate spell. So I checked page 11 of the Adventurer's League Player's Guide and discovered that regenerate is not on the list of spells PCs can pay to have cast. I figured I would just see what level spell regenerate was, and use the other prices to figure out what an appropriate price regenerate should be.

Get a load of this. Raise Dead is a 5th level spell. Regenerate is 7th! That's weird, right? It's harder to regrow a living arm than it is to bring someone back from the dead?! I could see players who lost an arm deciding to kill themselves and be raised because it's less expensive, but there's this quote in the raise dead spell: "This spell closes all mortal wounds, but it doesn't restore missing body parts. If the creature is lacking body parts or organs integral for its' survival - it's head, for instance - the spell automatically fails."

Looking around a bit more, I see that the reincarnate spell (also 5th level) does not have this restriction. The trade-off is that the PC is reborn as a member of a random race.

Next week we will try out Hero Points.

Scouting Out the Lodge
 
At the end of last week's session, the heroes had appeared by the lodge and were attacked by some perytons. The heroes slaughtered the perytons with critical hits. This week, they headed into the forest and rested in a cave behind a waterfall (I placed it in the forest so the PCs could have a safe place to rest).

Tonight was all about awkward planing and schemes. It took the PCs a long time to figure out what they wanted to do. The Lodge is home to a high-ranking cultist named Talis the White. She had wanted to be the bearer of the white dragon mask, but it went to her rival, Varram (who will be encountered in The Rise of Tiamat). Now she is in the lodge, stewing.

Magic Items!

The heroes scoped out the place. A rogue climbed onto the roof and looted the peryton nest. He found the arrow-catching shield. Finally, the PCs are starting to get some magic items! The arrow-catching shield was a bit underwhelming, but that's just one of many items in the lodge. A note to fellow DMs - the stats of the shield in the .pdf supplement are not the same as the official DMG version of the item! The shield in the DMG is more powerful.

The heroes took so long huddled outside of the lodge arguing that I had the patrol that consisted of 2 trolls and their drakes emerge from the forest, returning from their patrol.

The group went through a long freak-out process that ultimately led to the heroes battling the trolls in room 11 of the lodge.

The Mossy Cape

Long story short, the PCs fought a troll, 6 drakes and Trepsin the four-armed troll. The magic sword Hazirawn's wounding ability came in handy here. One troll dropped, then Trepsin took down the party paladin with his five.. yes... five attacks!

He was wearing this moss cape that protected him from fire. The group was very wary of the cape, so I "trolled" them (sorry) by continuously describing Trepsin as playing with the cape and adjusting it. Any chance I got, I would describe the cape, and some of the players were extremely alarmed by what potential dangers the cape had to offer. They correctly guessed that it protected the troll from fire. It didn't matter anyway, because the heroes were trying to throw oil and start a fire, but nobody wanted to "waste" an action to start the fire. So we just had a battle in an oil-soaked room. After killing the bad guys, the heroes fled the building and hid out in the woods. Some of them were hurt bad.

Running the Lodge in a Realistic Manner

I am always nervous about running a dungeon in a "real" way, but I tried tonight. I made an effort to play it as if it was a building full of living beings rather than a collection of static encounters that do not leave their locations. So in the case of the troll fight, I had decided that Trepsin had sent the third troll up to Talis to warn her that there were attackers in her lodge.

The heroes rested in the cave and returned to the lodge. I decided that Talis had put her two gargoyles on the roof to watch for the interlopers.

The Prisoners

We had a lot more planning, hemming and hawing. The heroes ultimately waited until 1 AM and snuck in the back door. They made their way down into the basement and found 3 prisoners:

Brother Caemon - Priest of Amaunator.
Miresella - Woman who was traveling and stumbled on the lodge.
Craggnor - Dwarf cultist who got on Talis' bad side.

The PCs interrogated them, and freed all three. They bound the dwarf, and plan on interrogating him next time.

As the heroes fled the lodge with the prisoners, the paladin rolled a one on his stealth. The gargoyles noticed and took flight!

Next week, we'll kick off from there. It was a decent session. The group needs a leader. Dark's dad can step up and he probably should. Good game!

As time goes on, I realize how lucky I was to be a kid in the 80's.  A lot of great stuff that is still relevant to this day came out then. Shows and movies such as Transformers, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and my favorite as a kid: G.I. Joe. One cartoon that is relevant to this blog and a favorite of my youth was the Dungeons & Dragons animated series.

This show was right up there with a bunch of movies that fueled my imagination and ended up leaking out into my D&D games:

The Dark Crystal - For me, this is the ultimate 80's D&D movie.
Labyrinth - I assume everyone who watched this ended up with a crush on either Jennifer Connelly or David Bowie.
The Last Unicorn - Which was too scary and freaky for me. The drunk skeleton made me turn off the movie every time.
The Secret of NIMH - Nicodemus is one of my favorite NPCs ever.

The Olden Days Before the Internet
 
For those of you who are younger than I am, you may have a hard time wrapping your head around this: If you missed an episode of your favorite TV show, you might never see it again. Some people had VCRs, but your parents only have so many blank tapes and often someone would tape over a show you recorded, anyway. Plus, those old VCRs had a penchant for "eating" tapes.

And even worse, sometimes kids at school would lie and tell you about episodes that didn't even exist! There was no internet, so there was no way to verify anything. Bunch of liars, they were.

There was an episode of G.I. Joe that I saw once - just the second half of it. I thought it was so awesome that I spent years waiting to see it again, but I never did. Flash forward 20 years. I saw it. It sucked.

The Point of This

I'm going to watch and talk about each episode of this series. Being that this is a blog about being a dungeon master in real life, I will extract the cool concepts from each episode for you to steal for your D&D game. This show had a lot of cool ideas in it and you can either re-purpose it or just drop it into your campaign if none of your players have seen the show. There is a great fansite that provides details on all of these shows. It is called dungeonsanddragonscartoon.com and was of great help.

The Creative People Involved
 
The creative team on this show included some awesome people:

Paul Dini: He would go on to create "Batman the Animated Series" with Bruce Timm.
Mark Evanier: A comic book veteran best known for his work on Groo with Sergio Aragones.
Steve Gerber: Creator of the "Howard the Duck" comic by Marvel, which in its' original inception was considered a really good book.
Gary Gygax: The founder of D&D who worked in some of his "Unearthed Arcana" classes and concepts into the show - Cavalier, Acrobat, etc. He'd come back to TSR to find it bleeding money. He published Unearthed Arcana along with some other books to bring some money in and to save the whole enterprise. Soon after he was ousted from his own company by the heiress to the "Buck Rogers" fortune.
Peter Cullen: He did the voice of Optimus Prime on Transformers, and does a fantastic job as Venger.

The show lasted for three seasons. For the first two, the show did extremely well. At the start of the third season, a violence warning appeared at the start of each episode due in part to the anti-D&D sentiment prevalent at the time. It was cancelled at the end of Season 3.

The Concept

A bunch of kids from the 80's take a roller coaster that somehow sucks them into "The Realm", which is this vague, nebulous D&D setting. Their origin is only told in the intro to the show. There is no episode that details how they met Dungeon Master, how they got their magic items, or how they met Uni. That always bothered me.

The show is mostly comprised of self-contained episodes, which I always hated. The idea was that a child could sit down and watch any episode and understand what was going on. The downside to this is that by not allowing the shows to link from one episode to the next, there's no momentum and almost every episode feels like filler.

At the time, this show was considered to be the most violent cartoon on TV. The show had a lot of restrictions as to what it could depict. So basically this means that the combats involve the PCs running away, getting shot at but never hit, and a lot of restraining.

The Plot
 
As far as I can tell, the over-arching story goes like this. People from many different worlds were sucked into The Realm. Venger, the bad guy, wants to rule The Realm. But Tiamat, a rampaging dragon god, is in the way. So he needs the magic items to defeat Tiamat. These items were apparently stolen from Tiamat's home - The Dragon's Graveyard.

Venger is Dungeon Master's son, who was corrupted by The Nameless One 1,000 years ago. Dungeon Master makes the PCs jump through a lot of hoops before finally leading them to the Edge of the Realm, where they can redeem Venger's spirit. Dungeon Master is a real creepy weirdo on this show. He could send the kids home at any time, but instead he throws them into deadly situations week after week. What's awful is that it appears that he can easily solve all of those situations on his own.

The Heroes

Hank: The leader, a ranger with a magic bow that can do just about anything.
Eric: The whiny jerk that the group laughs at, has a magic shield.
Bobby: A kid with a magic club that can make earthquakes. Likes his pet unicorn a little too much.
Presto: A geeky kid with a magic hat that he can't control very well.
Shiela: Bobby's older sister, has an invisibility cloak. You can find plenty of questionable fan art of Sheila out there.
Diana: She has the lamest magic item - a pole that extends. Yup.
Uni: A baby unicorn that follows Bobby around.

Episode 1 - The Night of No Tomorrow

We just jump right into it. The heroes have their magic items and they've met Dungeon Master before. He tells them about Venger. The heroes just so happen to end up in front of a cave with Tiamat in it and barely survive. Dungeon Master sends the party to meet Merlin in a floating castle. Really. Merlin! Presto decides to stay with Merlin and be his apprentice. This is played up for big drama, despite the fact this is the very first episode and the viewer has no connection to anybody.

Basically, Venger pretends to be Merlin and tricks Presto into unleashing a bunch of dragons on the town of Helix. Presto banishes the dragons

The Town of Helix: Full of gnomes? They're short, that's for sure. Merlin cast a spell that banished dragons from Helix.

Episode 2 - The Eye of the Beholder

This episode features an annoying cowardly knight named Sir John and a beholder guarding a portal to earth. Venger makes Sir John lead the party to the beholder and ditch them.

Yeah, they really had a beholder on this show! Pretty cool. It just shoots lasers and not the many different spell effects in the actual D&D game. It also can create webby tendrils to ensnare people, which is odd. And it can shoot this massive pulse beam from its' central eye.

The beholder is defeated by a flower shoved in its' face. The beauty of this flower is so INTENSE that the beholder literally melts into liquid. This episode is skippable. It is fun to see a beholder on TV, though.

The Valley of the Beholder: A once beautiful valley turned gray and barren due to a beholder who destroys all things of beauty. As soon as the beholder is defeated, the valley returns to its' former state, lush and green and full of purple flowers.

The Village of Pendrake: This village is located near a forest of giant mushrooms. The town pays one knight to protect them. It seems to be inhabited by humans, halflings and dwarves.

Episode 3 - The Hall of Bones

The story here is that the power of the magic items are fading and need to be recharged. Yes, they are fading on episode three.

The heroes need a guide, so they go to some city and end up getting chased by monsters who want their money. The heroes come to a dead-end alley. A woman opens a side-door for them. She is LOLTH.

Lolth, demon queen of spiders! Seriously! She leads the adventurers into a trap. The PCs fall onto a web suspended over a bottomless pit. Venger is buddies with Lolth (maybe they go on dates or something) and grabs the magic items. Then Lolth comes down to eat them, but Uni ends up hurtling her into the bottomless pit. Lolth, one of the most powerful villains in the game ad the star of the entire Gygax Drow/Giants series was defeated, and maybe killed, by... Uni.

A battle on a web over a bottomless pit. That is an awesome encounter.

Then the heroes stumble on an epic battle between Venger and Tiamat. Venger tries to use the magic items on Tiamat, but their power has faded so they're "useless". He chucks them and runs away.

The heroes recover the items and meet a crap-tastic NPC named "Hector the halfling". He is Venger in disguise. He leads the PCs to the Hall of Bones so the can recharge their items.

So... Venger could just take their items right now. I mean, they're just a bunch of kids with magic items that have no power. He could kill them with his magic and fly on his nightmare to the hall to charge the items himself. But instead he allows them to go there, charge the items, and then he tries to take the items from them. Venger is foiled by the spirits of the Hall of Bones and the whole place explodes.

The Dragon's Tooth: A bar in some city. The city seems full of monstrous humanoid races. In the bar are drunk trolls, bugbears, lizardfolk and orcs (classic pig-nosed orcs).

The Hall of Bones: A gigantic tomb filled with the bones of The Realm's greatest warriors. In it is the Skull of Power, a huge floating skull bathed in green energy which can recharge magic items when items are placed in its' mouth. The skull is powered by the spirit of the heroes buried there.

Episode 4 - Valley of the Unicorns

This is a fantastic episode to turn into an adventure. This crazy evil wizard Kelek is kidnapping unicorns and stealing their horns which will give him the power to kill and replace Venger. The episode starts off with Kelek and his wolves going after a black unicorn named Silvermane. It is revealed that unicorns have the power to teleport once per day. But conveniently, Uni is too young to have mastered the ability.

Kelek snatches Uni when the black unicorn gets away. He brings her to his incredibly awesome lair.  Our heroes sneak in and rescue the hornless unicorns and Uni, who are all gray and depressed. The unicorns lead the party back to the secret valley of the unicorns. Kelek follows them and snatches the last 3 unicorns.
 
The heroes get a very D&D idea. They decide to summon Venger to take out Kelek!

This is something I really like about this show. Sometimes, the bad guys fight each other. The entire premise of the show is weird - Venger's enemy is Tiamat, another villain. The party is trying to survive in this world where all these bad guys are at war with each other. It's pretty cool.

In the end, Venger traps Kelek in a force bubble and the whole citadel drops back into the earth. The heroes barely escape on the teleporting unicorns (Uni teleports too, with ease). The party wonders if Venger is dead, but then he appears in the clouds... awesome.

This has to be one of the best episodes of the entire series. Kelek is a great enemy. Whoever voiced him gave a fantastic performance. My friend used to say all the time: "The unicorn horns shall be mine!"

Kelek's Citadel: There's a vast field of thorns. Kelek can move the thorns aside as he wishes. When Kelek commands it, the thorns part and his massive citadel rises from the earth! The place is utterly gigantic. Inside is a demon statue with many arms. There's a slot in each hand for a unicorn horn to be placed.

The Lost Valley of the Unicorns: Accessed by passing though a rainbow waterfall. You pass through a cavern where liquid of different colors trickles down from the ceiling. The tunnel leads to a lush valley where the unicorns live, protected by the black unicorn, Silvermane.

Fun fact: Kelek has been used in two 3rd edition D&D adventures. He was in the Age of Worms path, and he was also in Expedition to Castle Greyhawk. I believe he also appeared in the basic D&D supplement "Shady Dragon Inn".

Episode 5 - In Search of the Dungeon Master

This one also has a great premise. A bounty hunter named Warduke and a bunch of bullywugs captures Dungeon Master. I wrote a giant article about Warduke here, compiling all of his appearances in D&D products.

The heroes go to rescue Dungeon Master, but are captured by orcs and put to work in the slave mines of deramorn. Eric had ditched the party and wanders in a swamp. He runs into a zombie and runs, screaming. This was really freaky to me as a kid. I didn't know what a zombie was and it scared the crap out of me.

Uni ends up in a cage. Presumably the orcs plan to eat her. Why she doesn't just teleport out to safety is beyond me. I assume that the teleportation was just a one-episode thing.
 
Sheila frees the party and gives them their weapons. Luckily, Dungeon Master is being held right on the other side of the very wall they were digging on. The party goes to free DM, but Venger and Warduke are there to stop them.

Up above, Erik is running from a giant turtle and falls into a giant crack... and lands on Warduke. Hank takes this opportunity to get a ridiculous critical hit which disarms Warduke and frees Dungeon Master, all in one shot.

Dungeon Master then utterly defeats Venger, discorporating him somehow.

Hank frees the dwarves in hilarious fashion. We already saw the mines - they are vast and there's clearly a lot of dwarves there. All Hank does is shout "come on", and all of the dwarves immediately walk out. The orcs and Warduke somehow missed this while they were whipping the dwarves. They give chase.

Dungeon Master waves his hand and destroys the entire slave mines, causing a wave of lava to chase off Warduke and his army of bullywugs and orcs.

At the end, Dungeon Master admits that he let the bad guys capture him. I guess this was to manipulate the heroes into freeing the dwarves and to see if Venger would turn good and free him? Venger actually tried to kill Dungeon Master while he was frozen, shooting a beam that drained Dungeon Master's "life force". His own son tried to kill him.

This was a good episode mostly because Warduke is so cool. It is a real bummer that Warduke is never seen again. What a waste!

The Slave Mines of Deramorn: A vast underground area run by orcs. The place is accessed by a magic key that shoots a beam that splits a stone wall and creates an entrance. The base of the complex is littered with mini-volcanoes full of lava. I can't tell what they are mining. All we see are carts full of rocks. If Warduke is already running what looks like a profitable slave mine, why does he need to sell Dungeon Master to Venger? Why is Warduke running a slaving operation, anyway?

The Know Tree: A tree that knows everything there is to know.

Episode 6 - Beauty and the Bogbeast

This is a "laugh at Eric" episode. A flower turns him into a frog-man, known as a "bogbeast". The party had split up looking for a river that is upside-down.

There's this evil ogre called Kawamung that dammed up the river of the cowardly bogbeasts. The bogbeasts look so weird, it completely goes against the art style of the show. It is very off-putting.

The poor dwarves of The Realm are constantly getting enslaved. In this episode, Kawamung has enslaved them and is forcing them to make weapons to use to attack the bogbeasts. He has this magic yin-yang amulet that can shoot beams and encase people in crystal (which is a pretty common effect in The Realm).

Kawamung looks like an oni or ogre mage. Man, this episode is terrible. The dam is broken with a frisbee (don't ask). They snatch the yin-yang and it turns out the ogre is just a bogbeast who was transformed by the amulet. The amulet can cure Eric, but the heroes want to get back home so they ride a log up the river. They actually get home, but Eric is a bogbeast. The amulet doesn't work on Earth. So they have to go back to cure Eric, and the portal closes. Terrible.

Eric is cured and the bogbeasts call him ugly. Everyone, of course, laughs at him. This episode is awful in every way.

I'll continue on in part two of this review. Here, for your consideration, are lists of things that amuse me on this show:

Stuff that Presto's Hat Does

1. Summons a cow. It licks Presto. Everyone laughs at him.
2. Successfully summons a giant purple carpet
3. Produces a birthday cake with candles when the party needs light
4. Puts a bucket on Presto's head when he wants to "banish these snail-things from my sight"
5. Presto needs a shield. It summons a garbage can lid.
6. Presto needs something to fight Venger with. It summons a bicycle horn.
7. The party needs money. Presto pulls out a chicken, then a dragon's head
8. Successfully gets some carrots for Uni
9. Summons a ham for attacking wolves
10. Tries to summon Venger, and instead sends Presto to Venger's castle.
11. Presto tries to summon horns on the unicorns' heads. Trumpets appear on their heads.
12. Presto successfully summons a unicorn horn onto Uni's head
13. Accidentally summons giant flies that feed attacking bullywugs
14. Needs something to stop a stone golem from attacking. Summons a stop sign.
15. Tries to help the party escape the slave mines. Summons.. a puff of smoke. What the hell?
16. Tries to remove Eric's frogman-curse. It instead puts Eric in a woman's dress with a long red wig.
17. He tries to cure Eric again. It changes Eric's head into that of a reptile donkey.
18. He tries a third time and scorches Eric, turning him back into bogbeast form.
19. Tries to summon something to defeat the ogre. Summons a frisbee.

Eric's Life is Horrible Because:

1. The heroes force him to ride a cow while they ride horses and laugh at him
2. The party laughs at him when he sits on a bike horn
3. Eric brags that the bad guys ran away because of his great strength. Diana says "It's because they took one look at your grody face." Everyone laughs.
4. He saves the party from falling rocks and is stuck under rubble, holding it up with his shield. Dungeon Master gives a speech about how bad people can do good things. Diana leans into the rubble and says, "You listening, Eric?".
5. Eric groans at some of Dungeon Master's BS riddle-talk. Uni bleats at him and he falls into a stream. Everybody enjoys his humiliation.
6. A bogbeast calls him ugly, and everyone laughs at him.

Hank's Bow Can:

1. Fire one arrow and produce many fireworks in the sky, lighting an area
2. Scare off bullywugs with fireworks
3. Create a tunnel through 15-30 feet of solid rock.
4. Disarm Warduke and send his sword hurtling right into a petrified Dungeon Master, making the sword shatter the crystal, thus freeing him.
4. Create an arrow that Bobby and Uni can ride through the air like a witches' broom, and somehow land safely.
5. Melt a metal giant's feet together in one round
6. Detect water in a desert.
7. Shoot a necklace, causing the arrow to pull it off an ogre's neck, and fly it back to Hank like the arrow was a boomerang. Hank catches it.

Welcome to Part 2 of my comprehensive look at every episode of the classic Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. Along the way, we'll pull out concepts from the show for you to steal for your campaign, with the help of the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon encyclopedia.

Click here for Part One.

Episode 7 - Prison Without Walls

Guess what this episode has? More dwarf slaves! Wait, no, they're gnomes. They say things like: "So tired. Can't.... work... anymore!" They're mining "mystic gems for Venger." There's a spell that prevents the gnomes from leaving.

There's a wizard named Lukyan who can break the spell, but Venger turned him into a shambling mound (apparently he was designed to look like Marvel's Man-Thing, as a sort of tribute to this episode's author Steve Gerber, who created that character).
 
Why wouldn't Venger just kill Lukyan? Just saying. And all of Lukyan's wizard stuff, including an important magic gem, is just sitting in the hollow of a tree.

I assume Lukyan is a gnome wizard. Here's a question: What race is Dungeon Master? A dwarf? A gnome? I'd guess he's some kind of god-like being that can take any form he chooses.

Anyway, we get to a really cool part. The heroes return to where the slaves are. It's a crater with an open sky and there's all these mystic gems embedded in the walls. The heroes place a gem in the chest of a dragon statue, and when all four suns align, they send a beam of light that strikes the gem, which reflects light beams to all the embedded gems, creating a grid of rainbow laser light. Each point where the light intersects is a portal to a different world.

The Realm is apparently some sort of prison plane, and all of the races were dragged in from their homeworlds.

This set-up is awesome and is begging to be stolen for a home game. You can do so many cool things with this.

Venger animates these metal or stone colossus things (looks similar to the one from that awful bogbeast episode). One grabs Uni, and Bobby yells at Uni to teleport! Uni does. I did not expect that.

Lukyan beats Venger in a wizard duel but tragically, the gem that would have created a portal to Earth was destroyed.

This is an OK episode, but the gnome area is really cool.

The Swamp of Sorrows: A swamp that is home to mushrooms with tentacles, zombies that protect a shack and a wizard cursed to wander as a shambling mound.

Vale of Mists: The gnome place.

Episode 8 - Servant of Evil
 
We kick it off with Bobby's birthday. I guess they used Presto's hat to get wrapping paper? With Presto's hat they can probably pull out all sorts of cool gifts. Eric gives Bobby a basket full of little.. heads? He's not going to eat them, is he?

Venger's lizardmen capture the heroes, minus Bobby and Uni. They are taken to the prison of agony. Wow, this is another really cool location. It's a prison fortress suspended over a pool of lava.

The prisoners in there include a busty lady in pink with wide-rimmed glasses. What the hell? There's also a frog-man with a kangaroo pouch and a really weird monster that looks like dungeon master with a long snout.

There's all sorts of fun easter eggs in these scenes. Eric fans himself with a spider-man comic. We also see Diana affectionately leaning on Hank! Well, they are the two oldest of the group. And she's walking around in that fur bikini all the time.

Strongheart the Paladin is in the prison. He's another major NPC who got his own figure. Why the hell did they make an action figure of him and not ones of the stars of the show? Apparently he had a magic item too - a golden hammer. Venger has it.

Bobby comes to the rescue, armed with an amulet that repels Venger's spells and he recruits an ogre to betray Venger.
 
The heroes escape, and Venger sicks lizardmen on them. The lizardmen have the heroes' weapons. That s a cool idea.

There's a really weird part where Venger shoots the floor and a dragon made of lave oozes through and attacks the heroes. A DRAGON MADE OF LAVA. It has two heads!

Venger gets his ass kicked again thanks in part to the Dungeon Master's Amulet of Venger Repellant. The whole place blows up just as all the prisoners escape.

An above-average episode due mostly to the awesome location and the fact that the creators put a whole lot of fun little easter eggs in this one.

The Prison of Agony: A fortress suspended over a pool of lava by massive chains.

Episode 9 - Quest of the Skeleton Warrior
 
A skeleton warrior (reluctant servant of Venger) brings the heroes to a tower that tests their fears. If the heroes can survive the challenges, they can obtain the circle of power, a magic item that can bring them home. Venger wants the circle for himself. The party gets split up in the tower...

Hank: Is on stairs that begin to collapse, revealing outer space. He runs up the stairs as they collapse behind him. This scenario is burned deep in my brain. I think I had dreams about it after seeing it as a kid. Hank figures out it's a dream right away and appears near the circle of power. He yells to everyone that they are being attacked by their own worst fear. His fear is that he's not a capable leader.

Shiela: She falls into a vast, empty demiplane. She's scared of being alone. Once she hears Hank, she knows she's not alone and is no longer afraid. She appears near Hank.

Erik & Presto: End up in a swamp. Wights or spectres show up and steal Presto's glasses. They hover about the pair, making fun of Eric, whose ears and nose have grown to freakish proportions. What an odd episode. They hear Hank's voice. A wight just sort of drops Presto's glasses. Then Presto summons... an aircraft carrier. Not kidding! Why? Who knows? Somehow this cures Eric and they appear with their friends.

Well, OK then. That is a nipple.

Sheila, Bobby & Uni: They wander in a hall of mirrored crystal. The mirrors transform them. Bobby becomes a baby and Diana becomes an old lady. Old lady Diana REALLY freaked me out as a little kid. She just looks wretched. And, well, I'm pretty sure we can see her nipple. Look for yourself.

A bunch of stuff happens. The skeleton warrior tries to redeem himself. Venger wants the circle of power. Hanks destroys the circle of power. It's a memorable episode. Not great, but interesting.

The Lost Tower of the Celestial Knights: Only one pure of heart can enter the tower and survive its' test of courage.

Celestial Knights: They seem like Swordmages who ride griffons.

Episode 10 - The Garden of Zinn

This giant monster "scratches" Bobby's arm and snaps Shiela's magic pole in two. She calmly fuses it back together. What?! Bobby is poisoned or something. Dungeon Master lies and says he can't cure him. The cure is in the garden of Queen Zinn - a yellow dragon.

There's a lot of stuff involving foraging for food. Presto can summon an aircraft carrier! Something tells me he could summon a cooked turkey after a few tries.
 
There's a really weird part with two phantom stalkers both pretending to be dungeon master that trick the heroes into going down a certain path. 

The heroes are dragged down into this tunnel where there's a giant monster worm. Why it isn't a purple worm, I have no idea. It is defeated like this: Diana jumps on it. Taps it with the staff a few times. Then it is tamed and easily ridden.

Now that they've passed the ultra-difficult test of the worm, the heroes are brought before Queen Zinn. She wants to marry Eric. It turns out that the yellow dragon is a flower. She hands them a spore, which will cure Bobby. Eric plans to stay and marry the queen

At the wedding, in attendance is a dwarf, an orc, a lizardman, a bugbear, and a really weird cartoon-y little turtle.

This episode is pretty lousy. There's a monster who's actually the king and is tansformed back into his human form by one of Sheila's tears. This show really runs the "don't judge a book by its' cover" trope right into the ground.

Let's not even mention that the King wants to marry Shiela at the end. How old is she supposed to be, anyway?

Episode 11 - The Box
 
This one has a really cool premise. The adventurers find a box that should only be opened in a certain spot at a certain time of day. But as the heroes are dragging it to the spot (which is a day away), bullywugs attack and end up opening the box. They climb in. Inside is an entire demiplane!

Dungeon Master says his friend Zandora was trapped in there by Venger.

The heroes have to bring the box to skull mountain and place it under the skull's shadow at noon. But they go to the wrong skull mountain! Pretty amusing. It's actually a giant illusion created by Venger.

They open the box and there's stairs that go down. This is another episode burned into my brain from childhood. I probably ripped off this scenario three times when I first started running games.

The stairs lead down into this crazy chessboard dreamscape. They fall through the black squares into this vertical shaft with cage rungs on the side. The heroes hang onto the rungs and are attacked by a giant wasp. What an epic encounter.

Venger's trusty sidekick, shadow demon, closes the lid. The heroes are trapped inside the demi-plane even after they defeat the giant wasp. Bobby just smashes the lid open with his club. Oh. OK. 

The heroes free Zandora, who is like a female Dungeon Master. She moves the box to a spot that, if opened, will lead to earth. The heroes climb in and actually fall into the roller coaster car and return home. But get a load of this: Venger follows them!

For some reason, Venger's magic works on Earth, but the heroes' magic items don't. The heroes decide they'd better go back to The Realm, otherwise Venger will destroy Earth.

They go back and Venger follows them. Zandora tricks Venger into going into the box. The stairs lead Venger to a cave with a door in it. He opens the door. Behind it is Tiamat! What? Why? Where? Who knows, it's pretty cool.

Of course, the spot that leads to Earth is destroyed. At the end, Zandora and Dungeon Master wink to each other. Is she his wife, or sister?

This episode is very good and it has a really great premise for you to use in your own game: A chest that opens to different random planes, depending on where you open it.

Episode 12 - The Lost Children
  
This is a really bad one. Venger has captured a spaceship. An alien ("the elder") is repairing it. The other aliens, children, live in The Realm looking for their elder. Dungeon Master tells the heroes that the space ship can take them home, so the heroes team up with the lost children to try to rescue the elder and steal the ship from Venger.

The series has shown Venger's home numerous times. It is built in hanging rock and it has these rock walkways. But in this episode, Venger is in a smaller dwelling.

Shiela sneaks in alone and gets captured by Venger, who disguised himself as a prisoner (?). The heroes bust in and free her and the elder - who is pretty much a wookie.

The heroes steal the ship and then Venger shoots it down. The ship crashes and will take 15 years to prepare. What a horrible episode. Ridiculous even by the show's own standards. Let's just pretend none of this ever happened.

Episode 13 - P-R-E-S-T-O Spells Disaster

The adventurers are chased by a stegosaurus into a cave full of orcs. The heroes do their usual "evasive combat".
 

I can really feel the yearning

There is a moment where Diana flips through the air and lands in Hanks' arms and they have a moment. I wonder how many clues to this relationship there are throughout the series? There was a moment in "The Box" where Hank saves Shiela and it's a little romance-y. I wonder if there is a hidden love triangle going on?

This is a really lousy, unpleasant episode. The heroes are stuck in a giant's castle being chased around by the giant's pet "slime beast" (which for some reason is the same monster they ran from in the prison of agony - which blew up).

Presto ends up climbing this giant petrified tree after almost losing Uni in a game of chance. Of all the characters to focus an episode on, they pick Presto. Horrible.

The giant is stealing gold dragon eggs. For some reason the gold dragon doesn't have wings. Skip this episode!

More Presto's Hat

20. An orc is attacking Eric. Presto pulls out his hat and goes: "Kabeeble kazip! Send that orc on a trip!" The orc is suddenly wearing a hawaiian shirt and wielding a ukulele. I do not accept this.
21. Summons weed killer to fend off a swamp creature. It is very effective.
22. Summons a cannon to fight a colossus. Presto needs a cannonball. Summons ball bearings.
23. He wants a cannon again. Instead he creates a flower explosion.
24. A lizardman has Presto's hat, and expertly uses it to summon an eagle that steals Strongheart's golden hammer.
25. Presto needs something to fight the lava dragon. He summons a working fire hose.
26. Presto tries to teleport the skeleton warrior away. Summons a telephone.
27. He tries to "get rid of a wall" and summons purple smoke that chokes the party.
28. Presto wanted to summon an aircraft carrier. He did. It was really odd.
29. Erik was sprayed by a skunk. Presto tries to cure the odor. He summons a gas mask.
30. Presto tries to create bug spray to kill a giant wasp. He summons a cloud that creates a second giant wasp.
31. Presto tries to summon an umbrella, but instead pulls out a vampire bat.
32. Presto tries to "put Venger's troopers in the lost and found". The bad guys vanish, leaving their robes behind.
33. Tries to summon a 20-ton tank. Gets a little toy tank. Venger steps on it and it explodes in a light show.
34. To escape orcs, Presto summons a magic cyclone that causes the entire party to ve whisked to a giant's castle save for Presto and Uni.
35. Uni uses the hat (yes really) to summon a magic flying carpet.
36. Presto creates a birdcage that traps "Willy the slime beast".

The Group Makes Fun of Eric by:

7. Eric makes a comment about giving gifts on your own birthday. Dungeon Master embarrasses him by pointing out that Bobby gave him the gift of freedom when he freed him from the Prison of Agony. Everyone laughs as Eric stammers an apology.
8. Erik is cursed to have donkey ears and a big nose. Presto calls him a nerd and laughs at him.
9. Dungeon Master turns him into a blue-nosed baboon just for fun. Everyone laughs at him.
10. Eric frantically tries to keep bullywugs in a magic box. Everyone laughs at him as he panics and begs for help.

Hank's Bow can:

8. Explode at the feet of two orcs, sending them hurtling into the air, crashing into scaffolding and falling unconscious
9. Make Swamp Thing grow in size and strength
10. ...Not stop zombies. Hey, that's what they said.
11. ...Not do much against a stone colossus
12. Fire one arrow that splits into two and totally annihilates two lizardmen who were grabbing Sheila.
13. ...Not harm Strongheart's hammer.
14. ...Not harm Bobby's club.
15. Collapse a ceiling on a two-headed lava dragon.
16. Raise a lever that four lizardmen could barely lift.
17. ...Not harm the skeleton warrior (he caught the lightning arrow in his hand and squashed it!)
18. ...Not take down a wall in the Celestial Tower (despite blowing open a tunnel through solid rock a few episodes back)
19. Destroy the circle of power in one shot
20. Fire an arrow that wraps around a monster's snout, tying it shut.
21. Fire an arrow and tie up a phantom stalker
22. ...Not effect tentacle vines
23. Wrap around a phantom stalker, pinning it to a tree trunk.
24. Create fireworks that scare off bullywugs. I am pretty sure this is re-used animation from a previous episode.
25. Create Light
26. Fire an arrow that literally grabs a ladder rung and remain extended as if Spiderman fired off a webstrand.
27. Fire arrows through giant wasp wings and stop them from flapping.
28. Create a lightning rope that everyone can climb...?! Really?!
29: Critical Miss: Fires an arrow that bounces off a ring wraith's staff, hit's Eric's shield and sends him flying, then bounces back at Hank and disarms him of the very bow that shot the arrow.
30. Shoots an orc's mace, sending him hurtling back into two more orcs, knocking them all out.
31. Actually hit a lizardman and knock him out.
32. Create an explosion that scatters 5 orcs
33. Critical Hit: This one is utterly ridiculous. Hank shoots an arrow that ricochets off a wall and floor, hits Bobby's club and carries Bobby all the way up to a giant's windowsill.
34. Shoots a massive curtain, tears it clean off, causing it to fall on a giant and blind him.

Talis the White

We finished up Episode 7 tonight. The players, mostly kids around the age of 13, were exceptionally hyper-active tonight. I assume it is because of Christmas.

Usually they are fine, but I had to tell them to be quiet quite a few times. Not a big deal, though. It was another good night of D&D.

Tear of Bahamut

This is a special magic item included in the DM pack, one for each PC. I decided to hand them out tonight wherever it felt like they'd fit in the story. These items have a real-life expiration date of February 2015, so I want to get these items to the PCs now so they have time to use them. The tear is a consumable that brings a character back to life, basically.

Hero Points

I tried using Hero Points from the DMG tonight. Basically, a PC gets 5 + their level in hero points. The points can be used to give a player an extra d6 to a roll. This felt like it made the game way, way too easy. I probably won't use them again.

Chaos at the Lodge
 
We left off last time outside the Hunting Lodge. I had decided to run this section as a "living dungeon", and in retrospect I might have been better off making it more video-gamey. The players could not focus when it was time to make a decision.

In general, I've found that in real life there aren't many players who want to step up and take a leader role in the party. It is pretty interesting.

The heroes battled two gargoyles, and ended up drawing out a troll and three drakes, too. Two of the thieves in the party like to do "team maneuvers" which usually consist of the elf throwing the gnome at a monster.

In this case, the elf overshot the troll and the gnome landed on the roof of the shed behind him. The gnome made some rolls and was able to avoid falling through the moss roof and actually jumped on and stabbed the troll.

Dark decided she wanted to get in on this too. She wanted the black dragon wyrmling, Sparky, to carry her up to the troll. I had planned to make Sparky's first time flying a big deal, so this was good timing. Sparky made a good roll, and actually was able to take flight for the first time in his life. He dropped Dark on the troll, who commenced to stabbing. Dark has a very high strength, you see.

It was also noted that our gnome has a set of bagpipes. He had bought them some time back. We were talking about where he could carry the bagpipes - his pack is undoubtedly overflowing with Trepsin's Mossy Cape as it is.

Exploring the Ground Floor

With that battle dealt with, the heroes decided to park their three freed prisoners in the shed and continue exploring. I made sure they visited the stables and learned that there were once wyverns in there.

The heroes went through the lower floor of the lodge and battled the helmed horror. It summoned Evard's black tentacles and was a decent challenge.

The evil sword Hazirawn is extremely powerful in the hands of the party fighter and I am starting to get worried it is doing too much damage. The sword did do less damage than normal against the helmed horror, due to the horror's many resistances.

There was a lot of exploring and chaos at this point. The players were having a hard time staying focused. There were simply too many doors to choose from. One of the rogues looted the banner, which may come into play in Episode 8.

They found the magic tapestry that teleports those who step into it one-way to "a random location within 5 miles". Seeing how Parnast, the town in episode 8, is five miles away, I decided that they'd just appear outside of Parnast. This would be a nice way to just get to episode 8 and be done with this lodge, which feels a lot like filler.

But what happened was that the PCs went through the tapestry, saw Parnast, and decided to walk back to the lodge. D'oh.

Talis the White
 

Wand of Winter

Eventually the adventurers headed upstairs and stumbled right in to Talis the White's room. She was there with her three guards, and wanted to cut a deal.

The story with Talis is that she is angry that she wasn't given the white dragon mask, so she wants to recruit the heroes to mess with the cult. The party eventually agreed, and she dumped a bunch of information.

The bad part to this is that Talis has some cool magic items that the party will miss out on, simply by not killing her. Talis has a "Wand of Winter" that Dark would have liked.

Basically, the cult has a flying castle controlled by a storm giant parked at Parnast. Talis swooned as she talked about the white dragon, Glazhael the Cloudchaser, who was lurking in the flying castle with Rezmir and Azbara Jos.

Our heroes geared up and headed through the tapestry again, at last ready to tackle the climactic final episode of Hoard of the Dragon Queen.

I wrapped up my Shadowrun campaign a few weeks ago and have assembled a group for a new D&D 5e campaign. I will be running the Dungeons & Dragons Expeditions adventures for them. Expeditions adventures are meant to be run in a game store or at conventions in 4 hour slots. They are set in the Forgotten Realms and deal with the Tyranny of Dragons storyline.

I am running these at home in an unofficial capacity to get familiar with them in case I need to run them at the store, and also so I can write about them in this blog.

In the first half of this post, I am going to present what I think are the essential notes on Phlan that you need to run a proper fleshed-out session. In the second half, I will report on what happened when I ran "Defiance in Phlan".

Phlan

As I started preparing this campaign, I saw that all of the lower level Expeditions adventures are set in Phlan which apparently was where the classic "Pool of Radiance" computer game/novel took place. I'm not a Forgotten Realms guy, so I wasn't very familiar with it. Finding details on Phlan was not easy.

The Adventurers League site has a history of Phlan, but it doesn't give town details.

There's a great rundown of Phlan in a 4th edition adventure called "Monument of Ancients" in Dungeon Magazine issue 170.

I went through the Expeditions adventures released so far and noted the NPCs and locations to try to build a 5e Phlan.

Ruler: Phlan's previous ruler died in a mysterious "construction accident" last year. Phlan is currently being run by Ector Brahms, who also runs the "police" - The Black Fist. Phlan is under martial law.

Black Fist: A band of corrupt individuals, worshipers of Bane. Members include:

• Aleyd Bural: A woman in her 40's with fading blonde hair. She is one of the few non-corrupt members, and she pops up in a bunch of Expeditions adventures.
• Hurn: An old fellow, broods a lot, very bribe-able.

The Welcomers: The thieves' guild of Phlan, actively hunted by the Black Fist. Most members of the guild are missing an ear, which is a trademark of the guild or something. The Black Fist captures, tries and hangs the thieves. The corpses of many dead members are hanging at the Stojanow gate. Members include:

• Glevith: A guy with slicked back hair.
• Allar "Blockjaw": A big, tough, thug kind of guy.
• Trunkey Lighttouch: A female halfling who is a bit of a softy.
• "Dark" Linsa: A grey-skinned half-elf who is a very cold person.

Merchant Guilds: There's four guilds. There's not much information on them: House Sokol, House Jannarsk, House Cadorna, and House Bivant. Sokol has a keep on Thorn Island, which is detailed in the second Expeditions adventure, "Secrets of Sokol Keep".

Locations in Phlan

Podol Plaza: Where merchants sell wares. Children sell scraps of parchment with the day's news on them for 1 copper.

Mantor's Library: This location comes up in a few different adventures. The head curator is Master Openrael, a meticulous and excitable fellow. He's assisted by an awkwardly shy halfling named Cassra Brandywine.

The Laughing Goblin Inn: This is apparently the most popular place to drink in town. It's located at the docks and draws a rough crowd. There's a carved totem of a laughing goblin. The place is run by Imizael, a no-nonsense kind of lady. A waiter named Markoth is quite popular among adventurers, as he always knows what is going on in town.

Zelhingen Graveyard: This place is actually located outside the city, just across the river. It's accessed by a bridge. This place comes up quite a bit in the Expeditions adventures. It's maintained by priests of Kelemvor, and overseen by Doomguide Yovir Glandon. Brother Keefe, a solemn fellow, keeps records. Cassyt is a very happy, chatty acolyte who has a role in one of the adventures.

Other Inns: The Cracked Crown, Nat Wyler's Bell, Madame Freona's Tea Kettle, The Bitter Blade.

Places To Shop: Brice Vang (armor), Randolph Tzintin (leather), Alero the Smithy (weapons), Cockburn's Grocery (adventuring gear. Seriously. "Cockburn"?!) and there's a fence named Jerome who can buy stolen goods.

There's also a "festhall" (which is Forgotten Realms-code for brothel) called The Velvet Doublet which I have found almost no details on.

DDEX 1-1 Defiance in Phlan

This adventure starts in Madame Freona's Tea Kettle, an inn run by a halfling and her five daughters. The scenario is broken into five "missions"/mini-adventures. Each mission introduces one of Freona's five daughters, which I really got a kick out of.

As this was a home game, I made especially sure to give the PCs ample opportunity to use the downtime rules. I was hoping for some rolls on the Carousing table. I kind of wondered if they'd try to set up a stall in Podol Plaza to sell their ill-gotten gains. I was really struggling with trying to decide how much it would cost to set up a stall. Do they need a permit for that kind of thing? I guess all it takes is a bribe, as that is how the Black Fist seems to handle everything in Phlan.

Mission 1: The Meeting at Deepnight

In this scenario, the heroes are hired by a member of the Harpers to go and impersonate a merchant. The adventurer's job is to buy a red dragon egg off of these mysterious sellers and plant a magic pin on them. The pin will allow the Harpers to track the sellers (who may be part of the Cult of the Dragon). The Harper gives the PCs a sack of fake diamonds to buy the egg with.

When the heroes go to make the sale, members of the thieves' guild show up to try to steal the egg.

I was wondering how this would go. The heroes were clever. They got an elaborate hat from the bard's costume kit and dumped the diamonds in it. They planted the pin amongst the hat's feathers and just handed the whole thing over. Pretty good!

The buy went down OK. The heroes wanted to inspect the egg (it's actually fake, but the PCs need to roll very high to realize that). The thieves showed up. The thug leader is really tough. He has two attacks and 32 hit points! Seems too dangerous. But I rolled really poorly, so the heroes did just fine.

The PCs handed the egg over to the Harper and collected their reward.

Downtime and Lifestyle

I decided there would be five days before the second mission, so we could mess around with lifestyle and downtime. Two of the PCs have the performance skill, which means they can perform in Poldol Plaza and earn 4 gp a day to live a wealthy lifestyle.

Another PC decided she wanted to live a wretched lifestyle, because it was free and she is a barbarian. She also wanted to spend her downtime days picking through garbage looking for stuff to sell.

This, uh, is not covered in the downtime rules. So I had her roll to search garbage, and then I rolled on the trinket table in the player's handbook to see what she found. She actually found a bank note someone discarded, from a bank in a nearby town.

Mission 2: The Screams at Dawn
 
In this one, a woman comes to town and is in a panic. Her family was abducted by goblins. The Black Fist guards explain that they can't investigate because her farm is outside their jurisdiction. One of the PCs took offense to this, and tried to shame the guards into going out there. The guards got into it with the PC, and slapped him with a promissory note. The PCs would get 50 gold if they were able to save the family.

This was more of a standard dungeon crawl. I was really taken aback by the map to this place. It's hand-drawn on blue graph paper. It's pretty nice, but still, this is a Wizards of the Coast product! I am guessing there's 50 people who would jump at the chance to make a really nice map free of charge just to get their foot in the door with the company. I know these adventures aren't going to be seen by many people, but still...

The dungeon has a hallway with goblins firing arrows though holes in a wall, then a tripwire (cleverly avoided by our wretched trinket-gathering barbarian), and a large chamber with goblins who can release wolves from cages to attack our heroes.

The bard really wanted to "keep" a wolf. She cast animal friendship on one, and was successful. The wolf is charmed by her for 24 hours.

So much time had been spent on hijinks, that this was as far as we got. We had to stop here for the night. We'll do more next week.

I really like this adventure, particularly the next mission, which has a very neat little dungeon. I really like how this is broken up into five smaller scenarios.

So far, everyone loves it.  I'd like to have seen more Expeditions adventures with this format.

For the next few weeks, we will be playing Hoard of the Dragon Queen on Sundays. D&D Encounters is usually run on Wednesdays, but because of the holidays, the store will be closed for the next two weeks (Christmas eve and New Year's eve). I am obsessed with making sure we finish the Tyranny of Dragons path by March.

The heroes are level 7 and I am noticing a big difference now. The heroes are getting multiple attacks and doing a lot of damage. Dark the Dragon Sorceress has access to some pretty powerful spells, including greater invisibility. The party has three rogues, all of which have evasion - which means that on saving throws instead of taking half damage on a save, they take no damage. It is extremely effective and will really help the party against the dragons in the path.

Parnast

The deal in Parnast is that the flying ice castle is landed here. The heroes have about an hour before it takes off. I was wondering if they'd try to sneak on right away, or explore the town first.

It turns out that the players have been waiting a very long time to do some shopping. They bought everything from flasks of oil, to full plate armor, to potions of healing (I let them stock up, as the party doesn't have a healer). They took so much time shopping that the castle took to the sky.

The heroes found the wyvern stables. The idea here is that the heroes can ride the wyverns to the flying castle, and wave the banner that they found in the Hunting Lodge to prevent being attacked. To put a saddle on a wyvern, a PC needs to make an animal handling check. This was interesting, because not many players pick animal handling as a skill. If this check fails, the wyvern stings the PC for a huge pile of damage: 11 damage and 24 poison!
 
Of course, Dark rolled really high and climbed on a wyvern and was riding it in no time (once on it, you need to make a couple animal handling checks to understand the different commands it responds to). The rest of the party had a harder time. A rogue got stung, but in the end they took flight.

Skyreach Castle

I printed out some maps of the castle for the players. In retrospect, I should have given them maps with room numbers, as without them it was very difficult to indicate where they were or where they wanted to go. The heroes parked their wyverns and wandered around a bit.

They ended up heading right to Rezmir's room, completely by chance. The lock on the door is very tough to pick (the DC is a 25). They ended up going to the room with the two red wizards. Dark immediately charmed them, twinning charm person (sorcerers can spend sorcery points to "twin" a spell, which allows the spell to affect a second target)! I rolled terribly on both of my saves. This was completely unexpected by me.

I had to make a snap decision. Charm Person says that if the spell is cast during a battle, then the victims have advantage on their saving throws. Technically, exploding into the room and casting that spell might be the beginning of a combat - a surprise round. Azbara Jos has battled the heroes before, and as soon as he sees them, he knows the deal.
 
But if there was to be a combat, the other red wizard Rath Modar just tries to flee, leaving Azbara and a gargoyle to battle the PCs. It's not much of an encounter. I liked the idea of the PCs using the wizards to lure out Rezmir, and then leaving (which would allow Rath to flee with ease) so I let it happen.
 
After a bit of discussion, Dark convinced her new friends to go lure out Rezmir to show her Dark's pet black dragon, Sparky. They agreed.

A big fight with Rezmir broke out. Rezmir created a globe of darkness which really messed with the party. Still, Rezmir was hurt bad right away from the surprise assault, and stumbled into her room. A rogue raced after her, but was jumped by the rug of smothering which blocked the doorway. The drakes dropped the rogue, and Rezmir yelled out that she would kill the rogue if they didn't leave at once.

The party was in a tough spot. The doorway was blocked by the rug, technically a monster. It was the paladin's turn. I figured he'd slash at the rug. He's a handy guy, always keeping close to an ally and blocking attacks with his shield. I did not expect him to misty step - teleporting behind Rezmir and stabbing her in the back, killing her! It was awesome.

The Treasure

The PCs wanted that black dragon mask that Rezmir has. It's in a locked chest in her room. If she dies, all the contents of her chest are teleported away. That's kind of a bummer, right? The PCs killed the big villain and got no treasure. If a party wants that treasure, they'll need to sneak in while she's alive somehow, pick the trapped lock of the chest, and steal it.

The Icy Tower

The adventurers headed to the upper courtyard and told the ogre guards on the roof that they were "inspectors". The heroes rolled well. The deal with this tower is that the interior is hollow, and the only way to get to an above room is to speak a magic word. The heroes didn't know this word, but tricked the ogres into saying it. The word was "Esclarotta", the name of the giant spirit that powers the castle.

The heroes appeared in the secret room, which held a sarcophagus holding Esclarotta's bones. That's all that's in there. The only way out is to say another magic word: "Blagothkus", the name of the giant steering the castle (and the husband of the dead giant). We had ourselves a problem: The PCs were trapped in this room and had no way of knowing the exit password!

So what did they do? They cast fire spells to escape, melting their way out.

We had to stop there. The heroes still need to battle Glazhael the Cloudchaser, a white dragon. This will be the first time the heroes will ever fight a dragon. It should happen next week, and I think it will be awesome.

We've been playing Hoard of the Dragon Queen on Sundays, because we usually play on Wednesday but Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve both fall on that day this year. We only have until March 11 to get all of Rise of Tiamat done. Time is of the essence!

The heroes began exploring Skyreach Castle last session. This is the location of the final episode of Hoard, a flying ice castle that is home to a wide assortment of bad guys. As fate would have it, this week their exploration took them directly to two of the major villains of the adventure - the vampire and the white dragon.

The adventurers came upon another tower, partly crumbled. The only working entrance to the interior was on a balcony 75 feet up. Dark the Dragon Sorceress loves casting spider climb and used it to get the party up there.

Sandesyl

On the other side of the door is a single room containing a coffin guarded by two vampire spawn. This is the lair of Sandesyl, a vampire complete with legendary actions.

A huge fight broke out. Dark, played by a 4th grader, wanted to be a vampire really badly. It was very amusing. We also have a running joke that the party's gnome thief lives in garbage. I'm not sure how it started. But Dark's player did a hilarious cute-sy drawing of him in her notebook (which is full of drawings). He was a trash can with a smiley face.

The vampires are very deadly, and this was the toughest fight in a while. Basically, the vampire can grab you and drink your blood, dealing 7 regular damage and 10 necrotic. The necrotic also lowers your maximum hit points (!) until you take a long rest. Worse, Sandesyl can use 2 legendary actions to bite again at the end of a PC's turn!

Two characters were hurt very badly. The heroes defeated the vampires and needed a rest. It turns out that this tower is a pretty great place to rest in Skyreach Castle, because it's very inaccessible.

During the rest, I could have had enemy NPCs mobilize and go on patrol, alerted to the PCs' presence (the heroes had left the red wizard Azbara Jos alive, locked in a room). But I did this in the hunting lodge and it actually made that episode less fun to play, so I decided to make this place more "static" (aka rooms full of monsters that don't move around the dungeon) and see how that went. It went fine.
 
Fully rested, our heroes descended the tower and decided to investigate the ice tunnels. These tunnels all lead to the monster on the cover of the module, the white dragon: Glazhael the Cloudchaser!

I made a simple, massive map using a blank poster map grid and a bunch of dungeon tiles, just a giant room split in half. The tiles represented the "ledge" that was 30 feet higher than the section of the cave where the treasure was. The PCs emerged on this ledge. The treasure below was covered in a thin sheet of ice. They could spot magic items - bracers, a sword, armor, piles of gold. They were excited, as magic items are very hard to come by in this adventure.

The dragon is hanging upside down on the ceiling as the heroes enter. The heroes tried to talk with the dragon. The dragon has strong feelings about food. If you have food for him, you're a friend. If you don't, you're an enemy. The PCs picked up on this and tried to give him rations, but rations aren't going to cut it!

Glazhael let out his frightful presence power. Every single PC failed their saving throw! That means none of them could come closer to him, and they all had disadvantage on attack rolls and saving throws! The PCs get to save again at the end of each of their turns, but they kept rolling really low on their saving throws.

We rolled initiative, and the dragon went third. The dragon breathed ice on half of the party, doing 54 damage! A few PCs went down. On the character's turns, they couldn't do much because they couldn't get close to the dragon due to being frightened. It was actually looking like a TPK.

On the dragon's next turn, it landed in front of a few PCs and dropped one PC with a claw/claw bite, and then used it's legendary actions to drop another PC with tail attacks, each doing 15 damage.

There was a point where only one PC was standing - the gnome thief.
 
A party thief actually failed his death saves and died. This is the first time that this has happened in this encounters game. I had given the PCs each a tear of bahamut a few sessions back, which could bring him back to life. Someone used their tear to bring the dead thief back to life with one hit point.

Somehow the heroes rallied (I was wondering if I needed to fudge some rolls, but it turned out I didn't). The paladin probably saved the entire party with a spell he'd never cast before - aid. Aid healed three dying PCs and brought them back up. Suddenly, the entire party was standing. The hero who wielded Hazirawn, the evil magic sword, tore into Glazhael with a series of attacks. He rolled a natural 20 on one of them and killed the dragon!

The players were very happy as they split up the loot. We talked about how this was one of the toughest fights they've been in (as it should be, IMO). They immediately brought up the last fight that felt this hard. I wracked my brain trying to think of the last deadly fight. I don't pay attention to that kind of thing, so I couldn't guess. They said it was... the stirges. The stirges in episode 2! I was very amused. I hate stirges, but that was a cool encounter, with the stirges and the bats flying all around. Who would guess that the two toughest fights the party would ever have would be against a dragon and a bunch of stirges?

Going in to this, I was very concerned that the dragon fight would either be too hard or too easy. I decided to just run it as written and see what happened. It turns out that it was absolutely perfectly balanced. It was exactly how a "boss fight" should be.

Next week, we will start The Rise of Tiamat!

I've prepared the first few chapters, and updated my Guide to Tyranny of Dragons accordingly.

We finished Hoard of the Dragon Queen on Sunday, so I figured I'd run down my final thoughts on the adventure. It seems like a number of people online don't like this book much at all. While I don't think it's perfect, I certainly didn't think it was bad.

I am going to list the things I like the most about the adventure, and then follow up with the things I liked least. Overall this was a very enjoyable scenario for me and my players. My players show up every week, exactly on time or early, eager to get back into it. I think that says a lot about Hoard of the Dragon Queen.



The NPCs

I loved quite a few of the NPCs in this adventure. I think they could have used just one more sentence in some cases to flesh out their personalities more, but in general we had enough to go on. In particular I liked:

Linan Swift: The mother fighting off kobolds in Greenest. This was a great way to kick off the whole adventure. she is a very heroic character, and there's a lot of fun things you can do with this.

Langdedrosa Cyanwraith: A blue half-dragon who may duel/pummel a PC in episode one and then face the heroes again in episode three, this guy is actually more interesting than his boss, Frulam Mondath. You can get a lot of mileage out of this jerk. The only problem is that he is meant to die so early in the path.

The Caravan NPCs:

• Edhelri Lewel: The moon elf who loves animals and hates people.
• Green Imsa: The woman who has green skin and hair, is searching for a cure for he condition and does not want anyone to know what happened to her.
• Losvius Longnose: The halfling who wants to know everyone's business.
• Samardag the Hoper: The extremely optimistic guy with the incredibly fragile cargo.

Pharblex Splattergoo: He's the leader of the bullywugs and he has a fish on his head! What's not to like? You could make him into a very memorable and loathsome NPC.

Trepsin: This four-armed troll is a very cool and formidable villain. He's got his pack of drakes, he's a hunter, this is a pretty scary and memorable dude.

Blagothkus: This is the giant who is flying Castle Skyreach. The place is powered by the spirit of his dead wife. His reasoning for working with the cult is pretty flimsy (he wants to summon Tiamat so that he can unite the giants to kill the dragons..?!) but I like the whole concept of this giant who can be persuaded to join the PCs' cause, aided perhaps by the spirit of his wife. There's also potential for the PCs to enrage this guy if they mess with his dead wife's bones.

The Encounters

This edition isn't like 4th edition, where a good encounter can be a really good encounter (Scales of War had a bunch of truly epic, memorable encounters). That said, this adventure has some good stuff:

All of Episode 1: The entire scenario is fantastic. A town is under siege by an army and a blue dragon! And you are right in the middle of it. That is really cool, what a great way to kick the whole thing off.

The Stirges in Episode 3: My group really liked fighting the stirges in a cloud of shrieking bats. The cloud of bats made it impossible for the PCs to see more than 5 feet and also gave the stirges +2 to their AC. Very clever and creative encounter, I thought.

Roadside Hospitality: There's a number of cool encounters in episode 4. There's the growing fungi and the guy buried up to his neck in the road. But the one I liked the best is the one I didn't even run. It involves "two buxom twin sisters". I don't want to spoil it, but with the right group all sorts of hilarity could have resulted. I didn't run this one because I felt that my players were too young for anything involving the phrase "buxom twin sisters".

Certain Areas in The Lodge: For a fairly useless location, this place had a number of cool things in it. The suits of armor with magical effects were very cool, and I personally loved the magic tapestry and all of the possible outcomes that could result from it.

The Ogre Ballista: It fires javelins! Nuff said.

Castle Skyreach: The flying ice castle itself is a very cool location. I liked it, though I think it could have used one extra-magic room in it (I like random charts and I'd have liked it if Escarlotta's hidden tomb could grant magic effects/punishments or something). I think the dragon's lair in particular was very cool.

Breath of Fresh Air

I loved 4th edition. Loved it! But wow, this edition is so nice. The game is so wide open again. Combats don't take an hour. Magic items feel like "magic" rather than a math necessity. And this adventure is such a pleasure to read and run, because it feels like a sprawling story. We're back to what D&D should be - an epic saga. This adventure doesn't pull it off perfectly, but it gets us off to a very good start.

The Actual Book

I love the paper it's printed on, I love the design, and I greatly appreciate that they put a healthy amount of art in the book. I still would have liked more art, but maybe I am being greedy. The fact that they even had magic item art is a very nice touch.

The Adventure Path Concept

This makes me so happy. Paizo has a good thing going with their adventure path systems. It's a nice way to keep fresh products coming out. I like that Wizards of the Coast is following suit in their own way and tying it in to their encounters program. I love adventures and I'm very happy that there will be adventures for me to buy and run for the foreseeable future.


Lack of Magic Items

I think they should have included more treasure in this adventure. They were extremely stingy throughout. Basically, some of your PCs will get their first +1 item at 7th level after they kill a white dragon. Maybe the idea in this edition is to scale back on items in general, but that feels very jarring. I do like that +1 and +2 items are more of a big deal and don't feel like "trash" in this edition, but I think players might get a bit frustrated by the lack of rewards.

Let's go on a little tangent, here. I am a little perplexed by the inclusion of the evil sentient sword, Hazirawn. Any PC would want to keep this thing. But I am having a hard time figuring out how to play the sword. It's sentient. It's evil. It has detection powers. Would it want to trick it's good owner into a suicidal situation? Is it loyal to the cult's cause?

The party fighter is doing some serious damage with this thing. Check this out:

• 2d6 damage (because it is a greatsword)
• +2d6 necrotic damage (a property of Hazirawn)
• +2 damage (Hazirawn is a +2 weapon)
• +4 damage (the PC has an 18 strength, I believe)
• +d8 superiority die (the fighter can spend a superiority die to feint, which means he gets advantage on his attack roll and if he hits, he does +d8 damage)

So we are looking at a guy who can do this damage at 8th level: 4d6+d8+6 (and he re-rolls 1's and 2's due to great weapon fighting).

He can only use his superiority die 4 times, then he has to rest, but even without that die he is doing a lot of damage. And he attacks twice per round!

Consider that the white dragon had 200 hit points. This fighter rolled a critical hit, which means he rolled 8d6 +1d8 +6! You can see going in why I was worried that the dragon would end up being too easy.

But I followed the adventure's advice and kept the dragon in the air, at least in the beginning. Frightful presence absolutely decimated the party, as did the breath weapon. If I had rolled one more recharge, I'm pretty sure the entire party would have been dead.

The Scale of the Maps

Jared Blando does some cool maps. There's some errors on some of these (Castle Naerytar has a few numbers in the wrong spot), but that kind of thing happens in most RPG products. I loved his map of Castle Skyreach. The thing I don't like about the maps in this edition is that they are not to miniature scale. One of my favorite things about 4th edition was that I could blow up the maps in photoshop, bring them to office depot and make a black and white poster map for $3. The players loved it. It added a lot to the game.

In this edition, the maps are not to scale. Sometimes a square equals 15 feet. I could still blow these maps up and make poster maps, but it will lead to a lot of confusing situations. A character moving 25 feet on a map with 15 foot squares might be more trouble than it's worth.

The Plot

The overall idea is good - an army is attacking and looting settlements and stealing people's stuff. But somehow this adventure almost entirely involves the heroes following the trail of the loot, and that trail is completely ridiculous. The bad guys are putting the loot in a flying castle. Why are they spending two months transporting it in carts? Why not just have the castle hover above the army as they attack, then lower it to the ground and fill it with treasure?

I think this adventure would have been much better off if more episodes dealt with the cult's attacks. There could have been a whole episode where the PCs went to a town in advance and helped fortify it against an attack. There could have been another episode where the PCs are part of a small ragtag army that makes a counter-attack. I always wanted to see an adventure where the PCs are on a battlefield in the middle of a mass combat.

Episode 7
 
When I read episode 7, I hated it. It felt like filler. The hunting lodge itself is cool. But it is a useless locale, one place too many for the PCs to stop off at en route to their ultimate destination.

Sometimes a scenario that looks bad on paper ends up coming off great when you run it. That was not the case here.  While there are cool things in this building, it can't overcome the fact that the lodge is one stopover too many on the journey to Castle Skyreach. I think they'd have been better off making this episode all about Parnast, with the castle hidden up in the clouds. We could have gotten a whole episode out of stealing wyvern mounts and flying up into the castle.

This and the roadhouse were the low points of the adventure.

The Lack of Detail

This whole adventure felt too sparse. I think this was done for space considerations. The authors had to cram 8 scenarios into 94 pages! But certain things could have been done. For example, during the journey in episode 4, why were none of the cultists given any personality, names or details? The tension with the cultists was supposed to be the focus of the whole chapter, and the DM could have used some help making it happen.

So there you go. I think over the course of these last few months I have really gotten my money's worth out of this adventure. I suspect subsequent adventures will be much better, just as Age of Worms improved on The Shackled City. Hoard of the Dragon Queen isn't perfect, but on the whole it is a good way to kick off the new edition.

Thanks for reading! Check out my Guide to Tyranny of Dragons, which contains helpful DM notes and ideas on each episode of Hoard and Rise of Tiamat.