Category Archives: What’s he playing?

And what does he wish he was playing?

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Not a whole lot of plot progress in this session of the Storm Point game.

I gave my players the option at the start of the session of continuing with the attempts to delay the advancing army or jumping ahead to the next phase of the adventure – the defense of the dwarf mines near Storm Point. They decided to stick with the army, but wanted to devote their efforts toward clearing the path of the humanoid force of civilians and livestock, both to keep the civilians safe and to deny the enemy the resources. There was even some discussion of burning the fields in order to do the whole Russian-falling-back-to-Moscow thing that messed up both Napoleon and Hitler.

They decided not to go quite that far, though.

So, the flew around on their hippogriffs, warning people, and generally clearing the line of advance. I threw one encounter with a raiding party at them, and then recalled them to the mines.

Couple of interesting observations from the game. First, the addition of the hippogriff mounts did a fair bit to enhance the group’s combat effectiveness. Even the characters that didn’t use the mounts a whole bunch were able to drop out of the sky on the first round and attack, which they liked. And having a couple of extra targets on the table helps to dilute the damage that the enemy dishes out.

And hippogriffs bite really hard.

The raiding party was a 7th-level encounter for my players*, which is a party of six 5th-level characters. I expected it to be a tough, desperate fight, but it was pretty much a cakewalk. I’m going to have to take a closer read of the DMG and PHB rules for mounts, and check out the info on companion creatures in the forthcoming DMG2 to make sure I’m handling things right. I imagine that I will need to add some extra monsters to the fights where the hippogriffs play a role.

The other observation is a little more unsettling. It seems my players are one thin excuse away from vicarious Vietnam flashbacks. After killing the raiding party, they decided to drag the bodies back into the path of the advancing army. Fine. Then they started talking about arranging the bodies as a warning. Okay… Then they started talking about mutilating the corpses in graphic and obscene ways to instill fear in the enemy.

I drew the line at this point, stating unequivocally that doing so was an evil act*, thereby crushing their desire to recreate Apocalypse Now in my heroic fantasy game.

I swear, I gotta get those guys to watch less TV and fewer movies.

And that was it for another session.

*2 dire boars, 1 ogre savage, 6 orc warriors, and 1 orc eye of Gruumsh, 1,900 xp. Back

*”It’s not evil. The American forces did things like this in Vietnam.” Pause. “Okay. I see your point.” Back

Where Are We Now? – Maps in RPGs

By | | What's he playing?
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One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately as I develop The Phoenix Covenant and the Hunter game is the role of maps in roleplaying games.

I’ve found that, over the years, the way I use maps in games has changed significantly. When I was much younger, I would spend hours mapping out complex dungeons on reams of graph paper, trying to make the most interesting labyrinths I could for my players to wind their way through. Now, I hate those huge, involved dungeons where adventurers are trapped to wander for session upon session.

I still love maps, though. A lot.

These days, I use maps as player handouts. I love watching players pore over the things, trying to figure out where everything fits, and what things I’ve left out, and what things are just plain wrong. They are in-game documents and, as such, I do my best to make them attractive and useful. Unfortunately, I suck at the visual arts, which makes the creation of attractive maps very difficult for me.

There are a number of programs available these days to build maps, though. Personally, I like Campaign Cartographer 3 from ProFantasy. It’s not cheap (especially if you get the add-ons like Dungeon Designer and City Designer) and there’s a bit of a learning curve with it, but it really does make it a lot easier to produce a map that I’m not ashamed to put in the hands of my players. I used it to create the maps for The Phoenix Covenant that you can see here and here. Sure, no one’s ever going to mistake my work for that of a professional, but the maps aren’t ugly, they are evocative of the setting, and they have useful information on them. The map of the empire took me about five hours to do to my satisfaction, and the map of the province took about two.

Ideally, when I create a map like these, I’m trying to accomplish a few related goals:

  1. Show the players where stuff is. Give them a geographical context for the adventures.
  2. Give some indication about the culture that produced the map. For the map of the empire, for example, I used a style based on the Mercator maps of the 16th and 17th centuries. I wanted to evoke some of the sense of exploration and the great empires of that period. The map of the province is much more spare and functional, as befits a remote region with limited resources.
  3. Generate curiosity to spur adventures. A few evocatively named locales or isolated features of interest will draw adventurers like lodestones.

That means that, as I create maps, I keep a few questions in mind:

  1. Who is making the map? What kind of culture do they come from? Do they have an agenda?
  2. What’s in the area that I’m mapping?
  3. What does the map-maker know about?
  4. What does he or she want to keep secret?
  5. What information is the map-maker trying to convey?
  6. What has changed since the map was made?

Now, I don’t have the chops to give actual tutorials on building maps – for that you should check out these guys. I just muddle through, trying different things until the map looks okay to me. And by okay, I’m looking for something that conveys the information and impressions I want and is not so ugly that I’m ashamed to put it in front of my players.

The other type of map I usually make is a battle map. For that, I use Dundjinni, which is a great, flexible tool for this exact purpose. I like it a lot, but it’s not as well-supported as I might wish. Still, it turns out wonderful maps to roll out on the table and push figures around on.

But what about those huge dungeon maps I used to love? I don’t use them anymore.

I’ve found that I, and my players, don’t like the idea of spending hours carefully moving from room to room, making choices that have little to no actual impact on the game. My players will spend a half-hour trying different things in empty rooms just to make sure they haven’t missed anything, and they wind up bored and frustrated. So do I.

What I’ve started to do – and this is not just with dungeons, but with pretty much all adventures – is use a flow chart. This lets me show the relationship and pathways through all the encounters (combat or otherwise) that I have in the adventure. White Wolf does this with their SAS system, and it works nicely there. It works just as well with other types of adventures.

I use Visio for these flowcharts, winding up with something that looks like this. Now, it doesn’t have all of the room details on it, but that’s what the key is for. I make my notes about the sizes and shapes and contents of the areas in a different document, flesh out the description and creatures and NPCs and situations, do up any battlemaps that I want to use, and I’m ready to roll.

This format lets me use some narrative devices to speed things along when the players start to get bored, too. I can say something like, “You’ve spent hours scouring the various workrooms, storerooms, and back hallways in this part of the castle, finding nothing of real value. Now, as you stand in the kitchen, you see and ominous glow leaking under the door to the dining hall. What do you do?”

And you know what? Not once has someone asked to go back and search the empty part more carefully. That’s a real departure from the standard tactics of my party when I actually had them going room-by-room through a fully mapped out dungeon.

The other advantage of this sort of mapping is that you can make sure that choices are meaningful. Forcing the party to choose left or right at every corner when it’s just rearranging the order of the fights is not a real meaningful choice. Flow charts spell out, very clearly, that option A leads to situation 1, and option B leads to situation 2. All the meaningless choices can be filtered out in the narration, with a line like, “After wandering through the twisty back alleys, you finally think you’ve found your informant.”

I guess that what I’m saying is that different kinds of maps serve different purposes. When you’re making a map, think about what you need it to do in the game, and then design accordingly. I tend to find that, for GM-only maps, simple flowcharts work best, while more elaborate and attractive maps are best for hand-outs.

Of course, if you’re good at drawing maps, and you like to do it, go nuts. And don’t be shy about posting your maps on the web.

I love looking at good maps, for inspiration if nothing else.

Post Tenebras Lux Report

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Latest session of Post Tenebras Lux last night. I was scrambling during the afternoon to prep, because I discovered that my updated adventure notes were on a computer that I did not have access to at that time – I had forgotten to e-mail them to myself. That meant I had to try and rebuild the information from memory in a couple of hours.

Now, the encounters weren’t too difficult to pull together, but I had notes on things that could happen in each little village the party passed through on their journey down to the Thornwaste to check out the rumours of the returned Ghostlord. I also had extensive notes on the nomad tribes of the Thornwaste, with political factions and character notes for important nomads and, I dunno, names and stuff, most of which I just couldn’t recall off the top of my head.

I was able to pull together a few things, though. The characters decided not to go directly to the Thornwaste, but to detour up to Vraath Keep to speak to the original Heroes of Brindol who destroyed the Ghostlord a dozen years previously. This gave one of the new players a chance to bring some of her background into play, as she had written up that she was the daughter of one of the Heroes of Brindol and had been trained by another. We had a bit of nice roleplaying there, with some insight into Jaks’s character and history, as well as getting details of the destruction of the Ghostlord.

When they headed down to the Thornwaste after that, they made some History and Insight rolls to see if they knew anything about the tribes in the area. As is becoming usual with this group, they aced the knowledge rolls, and learned about the three main nomad tribes:

  • The Grass Dragons, a tribe of human nomads who breed and raise drakes.
  • The Blood Hawks, a tribe of halflings who train birds to aid them in hunting, scouting, and combat.
  • The Stone Swimmers, a tribe of goliaths who have domesticated a number of land sharks.

The also got an idea of the territories each tribe claimed, and some insight into the nomad culture – somewhat isolationist and xenophobic, with a strong warrior culture, given to raiding each other and nearby farms, but also willing to trade from time to time. With this information, the group decided to speak with the Grass Dragons, the nearest tribe, to try and get more information.

Now, I had been going back and forth on how to do this – the skill challenge rules certainly work well for this sort of thing, but when I use them explicitly in my games, it always seems kind of jarring, like a move away from roleplaying to a very gamist system. I wanted the discussions with the tribes to be more fluid and natural for the players, so I decided not to use my normal method for skill challenges.

What I did was play the chieftain of the Grass Dragons as an older man, a traditionalist, a strong leader, but very resistant to change. Also, given that the situation involved a newly-arrived tribe of gnolls camping around the Ghostlord’s tower and stealing the children of the tribes for conversion into undead slaves, I decided that he felt helpless and angry, ready to lash out at anyone who stepped wrong.

And then I just ran it as a roleplaying encounter. Well, mostly. Secretly, it was a skill challenge, but I never told anyone that. For the most part, I just let the party talk, and replied as the chieftain would. When one of the party members said or did something that had the potential of winning some support from the tribe, I asked them to make a roll on whatever persuasive skill seemed most appropriate at the time and kept track of successes, describing the reaction of the tribe.

They got off to a bit of a rough start, what with the chieftain being especially prickly, and not very receptive to these outsiders coming into his lands and telling him that he needed to abandon the traditional ways of his people to unite with the other nomad tribes if they wanted to be able to drive out the Dog Ghost tribe – what they called the gnolls. A couple of missteps got interpreted as being threatening or insulting, and only backpedaling and apologizing, along with the intervention of the tribes shaman, got things settled down enough for the chieftain to agree to meet with the other tribal chiefs if they could be persuaded.

The information the party gained was that hundreds of gnolls were camped around the Ghostlord’s tower, and that they were sending out raiding and culling parties against all the tribes. No one tribe was strong enough to stand up to them, and the nomads were faced with the choice of leaving the area again or being killed off.

The party decided to go have a look at the Dog Ghost territory on their way down to the Stone Swimmer tribe, both to see what sort of force they were up against, and to try and get some trophies to lend weight to their words when they spoke to the other tribes. To oblige them and start showing some of the complications that await their investigation, I gave them a combat encounter with a Dog Ghost culling party.

In addition to the two gnoll huntmasters and four gnoll minions, I threw in two witherlings from the MM2, describing them as mummified children with dog skulls where their heads should be, in order to show the type of nastiness the gnolls were getting up to. Leading them all was an oni devourer disguised as a gnoll, which came as a bit of a shock to the players, and I think has a couple of them asking questions about what’s actually going on here. The whole encounter came to 1,250 xp, which is a level 5 encounter for 6 players.

So, now the party has the following information:

  1. Lights have been seen in the Ghostlord’s tower.
  2. The nomad tribes have been raiding farther afield. Some of this might be the action of the gnolls.
  3. A large army of gnolls has encamped around the Ghostlord’s tower.
  4. When the Heroes of Brindol destroyed the Ghostlord and his power sources, they split the Pool of Rebirth before breaking it’s connection to the Heart of the Lion, causing the enchanted waters to spill into the ground of the Thornwaste before rendering it powerless.
  5. The gnolls are creating undead servants.
  6. There was at least one oni involved, leading a party of gnolls.

This has got them thinking and making guesses about what’s actually going on. It’s also getting them a little worried.

Which I like.

All in all, despite the fact that I didn’t have my complete notes for the session, the game went pretty well, and everyone seemed to have fun. I’m looking forward to the next session.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Subtitle: Maybe Now My Players Will Stop Whining For An Update. Also, Hippogriffs.

Yeah, I’ve been kind of letting the update slide, mainly because I was at GenCon this past week. Now, I’m home and I’m getting caught up on stuff, including prepping for a Post Tenebras Lux game tonight and putting up this post.

The Storm Point game was the Sunday before GenCon, and we had a full house for it, which is always fun. Of course, it generated a lot of cross-talk and diversions, but it was still fun.

In the previous session, the characters had uncovered a planned attack on Storm Point by an army of mixed humanoids, headed by a cabal of shadar-kai. Out of game, I gave the players the option of defending Storm Point; exploring nearby ruins for treas… I mean, items to aid the defense of the town; or leaving the defense to the town officials and going on with another adventure, letting the attack happen in the background. They chose almost unanimously to defend the town.

So, I divided the attack into four phases:

  1. Scouting the advancing army and trying to delay it.
  2. Defending a dwarven mine that’s about a half-day out of Storm Point.
  3. Defending Storm Point during the siege.
  4. Breaking the siege.

I intended to have each phase take one session, running it in very episodic fashion, with a little narrative to fill in the gaps. I built what I thought would be a suitable number of events for the first phase to fill a session, and set up a quick outline of what sorts of effects success and failure in each event would have.

And, of course, my players managed to break my planning in two.

First off, they didn’t get through more than about two of the events that I had set up – simple skill challenges to track the army and scout its composition. They managed to walk right into an ambush by a sentry party*, which was a pretty good fight, and by then it was getting to be close to the end of the evening.

While I was trying to decide whether to run another session on this phase or jump ahead to the next phase, I described the camp of the enemy army to them. Trying to give them an impression of how the disparate humanoid groups fit together, I told them the goblin area was a maze of tiny tents and small campfires, while the orc section had larger hide tents in numerous small groupings, and the gnoll area was hard to spot because most of the shelters were camouflaged. The centre of the camp had a permanent shadow over it, where the shadar-kai were.

Then I described the hobgoblin area. I told them about the orderly rows of tents, the cookfires set up near long mess tables, the array of banners. And, because the next phase has a wave of hobgoblins mounted on hippogriffs, I described the corral of hippogriffs*.

You see it, don’t you? I knew it was going to happen as soon as I mentioned the hippogriffs, but by then it was too late.

Nothing would do for my players but that they get the hippogriffs for themselves.

My first instinct was to say, “Nope. Way too many hobgoblins and such for you to get there.” But then I thought about it. Why not let the players have some hippogriffs? It’s a good thing, in my opinion, both to try and say yes to players and to let them have some of the cool that all too often seems to be the province of NPCs or enemies. I was going to have a wave of hobgoblin cavalry mounted on hippogriffs assault the defensive wall of the dwarven mine. Why not let the players nip that in the bud and claim the hippogriffs for themselves?

So, I made them work for it. It was too late in the evening to start another fight, especially one as big as this was going to be, so I let them do it as a skill challenge. They worked up a convoluted plan involving distracting some sentries, creating a diversion elsewhere, and using Thrun as a bowling ball. With some very good rolls, they managed to not only snag one hippogriff for each of the characters, but also to chase off the remaining ones.

In the end, I like the way it worked out.

So, now I’m looking at what they accomplished. They didn’t get to do a lot of delaying of the army, but they did steal a valuable resource and show the enemy that they are vulnerable. I figure that will give them a bit of a delay, but not all that much. The big bonus is that now the party has hippogriffs and the enemy doesn’t. Together, this means not much time to prepare the defenses of the mine or Storm Point, but the fight has a reduced threat without the air cavalry.

All in all, a win, I think.

* 3 goblin sharpshooters, 2 gnoll marauders, 2 hyenas, and a dark creeper. 1,325 xp, a level 6 encounter for 6 characters. Back

* Because if I hadn’t, next phase everyone would have wanted to know where the hell the hobgoblins had got their hippogriffs and why hadn’t they seen any at the camp. Back

GenCon Update

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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So, by now, pretty much everyone knows about the next setting for 4E: Dark Sun.

That’s cool. I thought the original Dark Sun setting was pretty interesting, and I’m curious to see what they do with it in 4E. It makes a lot of sense, especially considering how the PHB3 is going to introduce the psionics power source for the game.

I’m not entirely thrilled, though. I mean, they talk in the announcement about how they wanted to do something a little less baseline fantasy, and I respect them for that. And I can understand how they want to tap into an existing fan market for the world, especially in the current economic climate.

But I keep thinking about the other two finalists of their setting search, and wondering about the two 100-page setting bibles locked away in WotC’s vault.

I think about them, and I really wish they had picked one of them to do. Why? Partly because I’m curious, and partly because I wanted a fresh new idea. Dark Sun is a neat setting, but I’ve already seen one iteration of it. I’d prefer something new. That may just be me, though. I expect that the 4E version of the world will be every bit as cool and well-done as Forgotten Realms and Eberron were.

Had another nice dinner with Gwen, Brian, and Julie from Sigh Co. Graphics. This time, we went to Alcatraz Brewing Co. Food was good, and the server, Rayna (Raina? I dunno.) was great. Lots of fun.

Now, I’m back in the room, and I’m going to spend the rest of the evening reading Geist. So, far it’s really pushing a lot of my mythology buttons – people who die, then come back from the dead with something extra from the other side; syncretized religion and ceremony to enable supernatural powers; twisted, half-human archetypes bound to the souls of people who must both control and serve them; a system for players to construct their own mythology for their characters; stuff like that. I’m having a lot of fun with it.

And, speaking of fun, the count for today was 12. That’s down 72% from last year’s record of 43. It’s not the lowest score – that was 3, on the year GenCon first moved to Indianapolis – but it’s the first time since then that the count has decreased. We discussed it, and think that it may be an indicator that casual gamers are not attending in high numbers due to the economy. Certainly, sales this year are down over last year.

And that’s it for tonight. Tomorrow around noon, we hit the road for home, and another GenCon – my tenth – will be behind us.

Mid GenCon Update

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Two days down, two to go.

It’s been a fun convention so far. We got into Indy around two on Wednesday, and I caught up with Scott Glancy and Jared Wallace (of Pagan Publishing and Dagon Industries, respectively) to head over to the convention centre to set up the booth.

Now, they don’t put the air conditioning on during set-up, so it’s hot, sweaty, and pretty smelly in there, what with hundreds of vendors setting up their booths while the convention centre staff lays down the carpet. We’re also sharing the booth with Arc Dream and Greg Stolze, which makes for a fun crowd.

After we finished, we went to the Rock Bottom Brewery for dinner. It’s got good food, and isn’t afraid of us geeks.

The con opened yesterday morning, with the Very Important Gamers coming in an hour before the hoi-polloi were admitted. Of course, there’s always a scramble on the first morning, trying to get all the last-minute stuff done.

And then things got busy.

That evening, we went back to Rock Bottom, this time with the folk from Sigh Co. Graphics, which is always a good time.

Today was more of the same, with the exception that I got to go for lunch with Clint, which was nice, because we often don’t see each other much during the show. Tonight, Scott is running a playtest, and I’m taking it easy in the hotel, reading my new purchases. And what are those purchases?

  • Innsmouth Horror. This is the new supplement for Arkham Horror. I haven’t looked too closely at it, yet, because these games always have a ton of components, and I don’t want to risk losing any.
  • The Stars Are Right. This is a new Cthulhu-themed game from Steve Jackson Games. I’ve looked at the rules, and they seem a little complex. I’m going to try and sit on a demo if I have time, because I think that’ll make thing a lot clearer.
  • Geist: The Sin-Eaters. The new World of Darkness game from White Wolf. I’ve just started reading it, and it looks interesting.
  • Eclipse Phase. A transhuman conspiracy RPG from Catalyst Games. The book is beautiful, and the bit I’ve read looks fun. I haven’t got to any of the system, yet, so I’m still not completely sold. But it looks great!
  • A Couple of Shirts from Sigh Co. I’ve been looking at their great stuff for years, and I finally got a couple. This one and this one, to be precise.

I’ve also picked up a surprise or two for friends back home that I’m not going to talk about.

Not a lot of new stuff at the show, as far as I can tell, but that’s sort of par for the course in this economic climate.

All in all, I’m having fun. And I hope to be in Scott’s playtest tomorrow night, if there’s room.

Quick Update – GenCon Indy

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I’m sitting in my hotel room in Indianapolis, getting ready for GenCon to start tomorrow. I’m once again helping out with Pagan Publishing and Dagon Industries at booth 706. If you’re at the show, feel free to stop by and say hello, and I’ll do my level best to sell you some stuff.

I’m also going to try and report what I see that’s interesting at the show, but I’m going to be playing in a playtest for at least a couple of evenings, so the posts may not be very long or very detailed. Still, I’ll do my best.

I’ve also got a Storm Point game to tell you about, but I’m not sure I’m going to have time before Sunday evening to do that. We’ll see.

Anyway, GenCon. It’s my tenth year attending, and my ninth working for Pagan. It’s always a blast, and I don’t think this year is going to be any different. We got the booth set up today, and then Scott Glancy, Jared Wallace, and I went out to the Rock Bottom Brewery for a nice dinner.

Tomorrow, the madness begins.

One Shot, Part Deux

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I borrowed that title from Clint, so he gets at least half the praise or blame, as your taste dictates.

Last night we went back to the post-apocalyptic world of the Devourers, and continued our quest to warn Junkyard of the impending army of robots coming to eat them. We didn’t quite finish the adventure this time, either, so we’re looking at one last session.

No combat this session, which was nice in a lot of ways. There is a drive in a lot of games to have at least one good fight every session – I know I try and do that in most of the D&D games I run, because the combats are fun. But it’s nice to have a session where there isn’t any fight, and the whole thing comes down to roleplaying, with some skill checks, and player decisions.

Also, we were running somewhat low on resources, so best save those for the big fight we know is coming at the end.

Once again, Clint crammed a wonderful variety of post-apocalyptic tropes together into a fun-filled evening. We hid in ruined buildings to avoid scavenging robots. We ran from a Devourer that looked a little like a Veritech Fighter in robot form, only with guns and blades replacing the hands. We met a society of somewhat mutated psychics in the abandoned sewers of Many Police, and bartered with their God of the Pit, an insane Devourer that had developed enough of a mind for the psychics to affect it. We worked with the psychics to telepathically warn Junkyard that the attacks was coming, completing the most important part of our mission. We evaded a large group of feral humans, not wanting to risk the delay or combat that might result. We scavenged the communications panel from an old suit of powered armour, and used it to uncover a hidden cache of weapons from before the Harrowing, including an armed hover transport, which we plan to take back to Junkyard and use against the invading Devourers.

But it was late then, and we wrapped it up.

So, Brother Puddler is coming back for one more night to hack through the soulless Iron with his faith-powered chain sword.

I’m glad.

Worldwide D&D Game Day – Dungeon Master’s Guide 2

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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From the WotC site:

Show Them Real Adventure!

Bring your friends and join in the fun as we celebrate the release of Dungeon Master’s Guide 2, packed with new options for your Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition game.

In the spirit of Dungeon Mastering, we’re giving you the opportunity to create and show off your very own adventure! Work as a team to build encounters using the materials provided. After your team has finished, play another team’s adventure or DM the one your team created. We provide you with everything you need — maps, miniatures, monster stats, and how-to instructions. Just bring your imagination, a pencil or pen, and some dice!

Just for playing, you’ll take home the pregenerated character sheet and a miniature of the character you played. If you DM the game, you’ll take home a poster map of the encounter areas and a pack of monster miniatures used in the adventure.

This is a very special activity that has never before been a part of Worldwide D&D Game Day! But don’t worry if you just want to play; you can participate in as much or as little of the adventure-building activity as you want. Nothing, however, beats the satisfaction of hearing another team howl in terror as they fight the foes and traps you placed for them!

A Passage Into Mystery is a special team-created 6th-level adventure that uses tiles from DU3 Caves of Carnage and monsters from the Monster Manual: Legendary Evils miniatures expansion. Come out on September 19 and be a part of the adventure!

On September 19, I will be running this event at Imagine Games and Hobbies here in Winnipeg. Because of the way this event seems to be set up, I’m looking to start at 1:00 with the adventure building part, and hopefully get to the playing part by 3:00.

So, come 0n down and play. It’ll be fun.

Eberron Campaign Guide Review

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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As you may have gathered previously, I have some real love for the Eberron campaign setting. It is, in fact, my published game world of choice for D&D. So, I had some pretty high standards for this book.

It measures up.

As has become my habit, let’s walk through the book chapter by chapter for my scintillating insights.

Art and Maps

I’m not a big one for judging the art in game books. Some of it I like, some of it I don’t, but it’s all really a personal call. That said, the look of Eberron (strongly established in 3E by the wonderful covers and opening spreads by Wayne Reynolds) always appealed to me. The art in the new books, with very few exceptions, holds up those high standards.

The maps, though, blow me away.

One of my two main complaints about the 3E Eberron stuff was the maps. There wasn’t a good political map for the continent, and the miniature maps in the various sections just didn’t show how things connected between the various nations. The new map in the Campaign Guide is wonderful – detailed, attractive, and useful. And the battle maps on the reverse are very nice.

Kudos to WotC for this.

Introduction

The introduction reprints the Ten Important Facts section from the Eberron Player’s Guide. Except for referencing DM-centred books rather than player-centred books in the first point, the section is identical.

After that, there’s a section on what other books you need to use Eberron to its fullest, and a sidebar on looting the book for ideas.

A nice, quick introduction.

Chapter 1: Adventures

There’s a shift in design philosophy that came along with 4E. It’s subtle, but it showed up in the Forgotten Realms setting books last year, and it’s been carried over in the Eberron books this year even more strongly. Prior to this edition, campaign settings seemed to be aimed at creating vibrant, interesting, dynamic worlds in which the characters could adventure. Now, campaign settings seemd to be aimed at creating vibrant, interesting, dynamic settings for adventures*.

What I’m getting at is that the books are less focused on showing you how cool the world is, and more focused on showing you how to build cool adventures using the cool stuff in the world. This chapter is the core of that design, and does a very good job of showing how to make D&D adventures into Eberron adventures.

The chapter starts with an overall look at the world, discussing the three dragons, and giving us a map of the globe. It does a good job of laying the groundwork to incorporate Eberron’s rather idiosyncratic cosmology into the default 4E cosmology without eliminating the flavour, as well as a quick peek at history.

Then comes a long section on campaign themes. It lists five different themes that are central to the campaign world, and talks at length about how to incorporate elements of each one into your game. Some of the most valuable advice in the opening of this section is at risk of being overlooked by the reader – don’t try to cram all five themes in. Just focus on one or two major themes and go deep with them*.

There follows several pages covering three global threats, which brings me to my other complaint about the 3E Eberron books: they had a number of spoilers for the players embedded in sections that the players might read. The division of information between a player’s guide and a campaign guide nicely solves that problem. Or, at least, alleviates it somewhat*. Anyway, this is where you find out about the Aurum, the Chamber, and the Lords of Dust, none of whom are (as I recall) mentioned in the player’s guide. Details are given as to methods, objectives, and a couple of stat blocks for each organization – all very useful for integrating these threats as elements of your ongoing campaign.

History is next, with several pages of narrative and an “abbreviated” timeline that looks pretty complete to me. A lot of it is lifted right from the 3E campaign setting, with what looks like a couple of additions from other 3E Eberron books. The emphasis here is to show how the history of Eberron influences the possibilities of adventures for your game – it’s far cooler to investigate ruins of a Dhakaani goblin empire warren that was overrun by fleshwarped abominations during the war against the Daelkyr than it is to investigate a goblin cave where some aberrations are hiding.

Following that is a section dealing with integrating the magical technology of Eberron into the game – what sorts of magical services and toys are available, how magic is used in everyday life, and who’s doing the using of it. As this is one of the major flavour differences between Eberron and most other settings, the extra space discussing it and how it fits in the world is nice to see.

Finally, the chapter closes with a section on wondrous locations: sites of magic and mystery that you can use to add another fantastic element to your game. Again, the emphasis is on how to incorporate these things into the adventures you create for your game.

At this point, you could almost close the book and have a good chance at running a very Eberron-flavoured game. And you’re only on page 59.

Chapter 2: City of Towers

Chapter 3: The Five Nations

Chapter 4: Greater Khorvaire

Chapter 5: Beyond Khorvaire

I’m lumping these four chapters together, because they’re all essentially the same. They each deal with the geographic location in the title of the chapter, breaking down into smaller areas within each chapter.  The focus is on providing adventure hooks and secrets for each locale, giving the GM lots of material for creating interesting adventures. And the individual maps are far more useful than the 3E ones.

Chapter 6: Dragonmarks

In many ways, the Dragonmarked Houses are dealt with in the same manner as the locales in previous chapters. The difference, of course, is that they’re more geographically diverse, spread around Khorvaire rather than being in any one particular spot.

The Dragonmarks support the guild-like structure of Khorvaire’s economy in interesting and gameable ways, and I’ve always liked them. The focus in this chapter on how they fit together (and where the points of friction are) is nicely clear, and gives you lots of intrigue fodder.

Chapter 7: Gods and Cosmology

The religions of Eberron are dealt with pretty well in the player’s guide. Here they expand a little on that information, and provide some of the secrets and adventure hooks that aren’t in the player’s guide. It also finishes addressing the non-standard planes of Eberron, complete with a nice diagram of them. Nothing really new, here, though some of the secrets of the Blood of Vol are spelled out a little more clearly than anywhere else I’ve seen, and the Khyber Cultist family was a nice addition.

Appendix: The Mark of Prophecy

This is the introductory adventure, and it’s not bad. As most WotC adventures, it’s a string of fights, but the Eberron flavour is emphasized through a flashback to the Last War and the Day of Mourning, an investigative skill challenge to track someone through Sharn, some interesting Prophecy Marks, and an eldritch doomsday device. It’s these touches of flavour that make all the difference.

Also evident is that this is not a site-based adventure – it follows on the Eberron tradition of moving action, shifting scenes, and a more cinematic approach to adventure design. It’s an approach of which I heartily approve.

 

So, there it is. The Eberron Campaign Guide does not disappoint. It is more than a worthy successor to the 3E version; it is a definite step forward for the world of Eberron.

 

 

 

*I said it was subtle. Back

*For the curious, the five themes are The Last War, The Draconic Prophecy, The Dragonmarked, Urban Intrigue, and Dungeon Delving. Back

*Let’s face it – nothing can be done to stop players who want spoilers from getting them, and it’s not worth it even to try. The best that you can hope for is to keep spoilers away from players who don’t want them, which is where the 3E book failed drastically. I’m looking at you, entries on Karrnath and Blood of Vol. Back