Chaos Rift - Campaign Primer

I've let this slide onto the back burner for a while, but now I feel ready to step in and really start laying things out. That said, don't be surpirsed if I have long dry spells in the blogging department.

The Chaos Rift is my first 4e campaign. We decided to start from scratch with a brand new campaign to really work within the 4e way of doing things.

The Players

My group consists of myself and 5 players, somewhat advantageous for me with the new expected character count in 4e. Experience ranges all over the place with this group. My wife Amanda has been playing for about eight years now; her brother Steven has only recently gotten into role-playing in the last year or so; my friend and fellow DM Travis has been playing and running RPGs since the mid 80s; my friend Brian also has around 8 years of experience; my friend Cindy has been playing for the last 2-3 years; our recent addition/replacement in this game is Chanel, who has been playing for about 2 years on and off now.

The World

I decided to make things easy on myself and use as much of the assumed setting as I could. I even named the city they began in Fallcrest (though I didn't use anything else about the city). My rough world-sketch has them on a large island just off the northwestern coast of the main continent (think Britain, though the island is about twice the size). Fallcrest is the capitol of the island and the kingdoms of the mainland are mostly content to leave them alone. However, there is a large goblinoid population within the mountains of the island. Fallcrest is also flanked to the north and south by a pair of towers that were constructed during the height of the Turathi Empire. Over the last thousand years the towers have been mostly sealed and vacant.

Now we come to what what is my favorite part of role-playing: character creation. I gave the players the basic breakdown of the world and let them work together to figure out the major differences between 3.5 and 4e classes and races. It's probably a good idea to mention that for each of the players concept comes before mechanics so their characters are rarely optimized. That will be very aparent with the first character, I think.

The Characters

We used a non-standard ability score generation method for this campaign: all the players rolled 4d6 and I added a single d6 and we dropped the lowest 3 dice. They could then arrange the numbers as they liked, giving everyone an equal platform to work from without the generic sameness of point-buy.

Amanda was the first to decide on her concept, and boy was it out there: eladrin paladin with arcane initiate. Yes, she was well aware that there was little to no synergy between paladin and wizard (and paladin and eladrin, for that matter). But I was intrigued to see just how robust the multi-classing via feats process would be, and with Kord as her patron some things began to make a little sense. She got started by favoring Str, then Int and Wis, then Cha, then Con, and finally Dex. Ooh boy, this was looking bizarre. Obviously she was focused on the Str side of pally. She picked up Thunderwave to have a small degree of Wis synergy and to pull in the Kord flavor. Starting in plate and two-handing a longsword (for Eladrin Soldier later) gave her something she had tried for in the past and missed on: a spellsword (sort of). Things were off to a defenderish start.

Brian was next, and he had been eyballing a warlord long before the books were available, so class choice was rather quick. He did take longer to decide on race, though not much. So a dragonborn warlord was added to the mix. He went the inspiring path and decided to go with a glaive as his primary weapon. Flavoring the character as "The Firey Kirak," it was pretty obvious what his breath weapon was going to be. Eschewing multiclassing, he decided to start in scale armor to compensate for putting Int and Dex at the bottom of the priority list stat-wise.

Steven decided next, and hearing us discuss the breath weapon was all he needed to hear to pick dragonborn. Looking through the classes, he decided to try his hand at a fighter, doubling up the defenders. Pumping Str all the way to 20, he was off to a powerful start. He went with a pick and shield combo, something I was very suprised at. With the breath weapon being the primary draw to dragonborn he decided to get Enlarged Dragon Breath (acid, what fun) and we were over half-way through with no strikers or controllers.

Travis was next, and he filled one of the gaps. The 3.5 warlock had appealed to us both, but we never actually got a chance to play one. This gave him his starting point. He then decided to up the dragonborn count to three, also going with fire breath. He chose the fey pact, which would play an important role in the group dynamic later on. He also chose to multi, picking up Initiate of the Faith and worshiping Tiamat. Oh, goody. Like the three players before him, he chose Unaligned, allaying some of my fears. He then asked if he could dump two points of Str (the lowest combo of dice they had equaled 8, which would have put him at a 10 Str) for his concept, a dragonborn who was ridiculed as a weakling by his clan. I saw no problem in that, and so entered a negative Str mod on a dragonborn.

Cindy is usually the slowest to decide on a character concept, and this campaign was no different. She also has a tendency to avoid PHB races, and I had agreed to allow MM races in the game. And so, after much thought, a minotaur fighter was brought in. Now things looked oddly slanted in both the melee and defender directions, something I hadn't expected this group to try in our first 4e game. She went with a greataxe (increased in size for her) and went with a simple Weapon Focus feat choice.

Now I had to consider what kind of a group my unorthodoxed players had put together. Obviously they were bound to double up a role somewhere, but I hadn't expected them to triple a role, especially not defender. Hrm. The fighters looked to be sufficiently different in both play style and power selection, so I wasn't concerned with too much overlap. They were obviously missing a full time controller, but only one character lacked an AoE effect of some kind. They had plenty of healing to go around and a lot of surges to play with on a daily basis. Overall, the group looked to be a solid melee threat with plenty of tricks. Now to decide how they would come together.

Brian, Amanda and Steven decided that they would already be a small mercenary squad (all had chosen Kord as a patron) that had traveled to the island to avoid competition with more established groups and to escape from a group of slavers that were hunting them for absconding with some "property." Brian in particular had established Kirak as wanting to eventually found an empire of his own, bringing together the Fey races and the dragonborn to bring peace and establish a more consitent rule than humans could ever provide. Akhmed (Steven's DB fighter) was part of Kirak's clan and knew of Kirak's ability to lead despite his lack of experience. Shalimar (Amanda's eladrin paladin) had met Kirak months before and had spoken at length with him regarding his dreams and had decided to join him as the fey front of the group. More recently they had freed Horns (Cindy's minotaur fighter) from gladiatorial slavery, and she had joined with them to be better protected from the slavers who had originally captured her, as well as anyone else who sought to use her only for her strength.

This left Ghorin (Travis' DB warlock) out of the group at the start of the campaign. Now his pact choice really became a good thing, as he could be very important to Kirak's long term goals as a dragonborn with strong ties to the Feywild. However, Ghorin had a deep distrust of other dragonborn, which would make integrating him into the group a challenge.

So that's it for now. I'll begin to cover the story so far over the next few posts.