This is a little story I threw together to cover my deva avenger's background at the start of the FR campaign my friend is GMing. It was inspired in large part by the Ecology of the Deva article in a recent Dragon issue. Enjoy!

I. THE RETURNING
25 Hammer 1479

Enabria, steward of one of Tempus’s sacred circles, glanced up from her dinner preparations and stared hard toward the clearing outside her modest cottage. Her eladrin heritage had blessed her with outstanding hearing; hearing that hadn’t faded much over all her twenty plus decades of life. She was certain she had heard something different – something unnatural – cutting through the brisk winter breeze rattling off the Star Mounts. Swirls of falling snow brushed against the window. Her still-sharp eyes could make out nothing unusual other than the bright snow and the swaying trees and the rugged mountainside beyond the circle.

“Kendrus? Are you awake?” She glanced toward the bedroom she shared with her fellow steward and life companion.

A grunt of assent reached her ears, followed by the rustling sounds of Kendrus rolling over in the bed and rearranging the sheets around his body.

She let a brief smile tug at her mouth, then called again. “Kendrus. I heard something outside. Something…,” she searched for a likely word, “…unusual.”

Another grunt from Kendrus was her answer, but she heard him sigh and get out of the bed soon enough. He shuffled into the main living area of their cottage as he wrapped a thick bedrobe more comfortably around his shoulders. “Eh, what’s that, Ennie? Sommat outside?” He rubbed his bleary eyes.

Enabria pointed her paring knife at the window. “Out there, somewhere near the circle. I didn’t see anything. Just heard something through the wind.”

Kendrus snorted, then cleared his throat. “Well, all the same. I best go on out and have a look. Can’t imagine getting a visitor in this weather, though.” He waved a hand toward the falling snow outside. “I don’t expect the next supply delivery until Ches. No one wants to make the trip through the forest or up these mountains, not in this weather.”

Enabria nodded at Kendrus’s statements and then turned back to her dinner makings. He was reasonably intelligent, for a human midway through his sixth decade. Over her shoulder, she said, “While you’re out there, bring in some more wood for the stove. We could use a little extra tonight, I think. Feels like it’s going to get colder.”

By now, Kendrus had traded his bedrobe for hunter’s leggings and tunic, and had pulled on his boots and thrown a heavy cloak over his shoulders. “That’s all it does in Hammer, love. Get colder. Won’t feel a warm spell for a few months yet.”

He slipped a dagger into the top of one boot and grabbed his shortbow and quiver of arrows. He pulled the cloak shut in front of his modest belly and nodded at her. “I’ll be but a minute or two. While I’m up, I might as well check the traps too. See if we can get us some meat for that Midwinter stew you have in mind.”

She responded with a nod of her own, then braced herself against the sudden chill as he opened the door and pushed himself out into the cold Grey Vale winter.

~~~

Kendrus moved through the door and shut it behind him quick as he could, hoping to preserve what warmth he could inside the house for Ennie’s benefit. Wouldn’t do for her to get cold as well, even though her fey blood somehow kept her comfortable except in the worst cold snaps. He latched the door shut, hunkered down into his cloak, then trudged out into the inches-deep snow toward the treeline, where he’d set up several small game traps.

Much to his pleasure, two of the traps had borne fruit. He cleaned and dressed the trapped beasts, then reset the traps, using a little salted meat as bait. Kendrus headed toward the sacred circle, careful to nod his head in deference, quietly reciting the litany of thanks to the gods for the bounties from the traps.

He paused in his recital, squinted at the circle. He hadn’t heard anything over the crisp wind, but he could have sworn he saw…

Frowning now, the litany forgotten, he took a few steps closer to the circle. He generally didn’t get this close to it except for when he and Ennie came out every month to ritually purify it, but he was a steward of the circle, same as her, and there was something going on inside it that he’d never seen before. By the blood of Tempus, he had never even heard of it before, not even from the stewards he’d inherited the circle from.

Inside the circle, at roughly chest-height, a whirlpool of silvery light spun at a slow, measured pace. A faint humming sound reached his ears. At first he wasn’t sure what it was, and jiggled a finger judiciously in one ear to help clear it in case he was hearing things, but no. The hum grew in volume as the lights picked up pace, spinning faster in alternating tight and loose circles and swirls. The lights separated into more, smaller, lights, and soon thin strands of silvery energy coalesced within the sacred circle, lengthening to a foot, two feet, more.

The hackles on the back of his neck danced and his teeth chattered, if not from the chill, then from a deep crawling sensation within his belly. Something was happening here, something he’d never experienced before. He didn’t understand it, but he felt it. It had the feeling of something otherworldly, monumental.

He glanced back toward the cottage, but saw little of it through the swirling snow. He turned back to the swirling energies within the circle. By now the silvery strands swirled some seven feet in height, from the ground up, and spun around right at the edges of the sacred circle. The strands were spinning so fast now that he had lost count of how many there were. The strands had become ribbons and the ribbons had morphed into a curtained pillar of bright silver energy.

As he stared at the energies, he felt Ennie’s hand press into one of his own. He glanced down at her, at his side, and offered a surprised smile. She had a long black cloak on, clenched shut against the weather. She stared her bright eyes at the curtain of light and smiled.

“It’s happening, Kendrus. By all the gods and the mighty hand of Tempus, it’s happening.” She blinked back tears. “In all my years, I never thought I’d see such a sight.”

Kendrus stared at her, noted that she had a folded burgundy cloak under her free arm. He focused on the spinning, glowing curtain. “Is it a sign from the gods?”

Ennie squeezed his hand. “It’s a Returning.”

As if in confirmation of her statement, the pillar of silver light reached its maximum spinning speed, and the humming modulated into a howl. Then, with a clap of thunder and a flash of blinding light, the whole pillar exploded in a fireworks display of sound and color, and then, all was calm aside from the falling snow and the constant breeze.

Kendrus blinked his eyes several times, trying to clear the bright spots the explosion of light had created. Ennie gave a sharp intake of breath. Together, they stared up and into the sacred circle.

Standing in the center of the circle, on ground strangely devoid of snow, stood a tall man, naked to the elements. At first Kendrus thought the man must be frozen, as he had light blue skin streaked with darker shades, but no. It was the man’s natural skin color, if such a thing could be considered natural. The man had shoulder length hair, dark blue in color.

As Kendrus stared, the man blinked his iris-less ivory eyes and then turned toward Kendrus and Ennie. In a quiet, almost hesitant voice, the man said, “Greetings. I am…,” and here he paused, as if remembering something from the shadowy depths of time. “My name is Amulek.”

Scribe Ineti

So, after running a nice 12-session arc of a 4e Eberron game last year, my group took a bit of a break from gaming but have been getting back to it of late. One of the players in the group has started a 4e Forgotten Realms game, and I'm really enjoying the opportunity to play the game for the first time as something other than the DM.

I'm playing a deva avenger based out of the Grey Vales, and so far the story has centered around that area. We just hit second level last week, and tonight's session will be the first to showcase our new leet skills. Or whatever.

The game is just as much fun to play as it is to DM, so that's a plus. What's even better is that the online tools (particularly the character builder and the compendium) are much farther along than they were when I was DMing Eberron, so the FR game is just that much better organized.

In the coming days, I'll post some stuff on my character in the the FR game in addition to my notes on getting my Eberron game ready for the next story arc.

To paraphrase Scotty from the new Trek movie, "I love this game. It's exciting!"

Scribe Ineti

For all two of you reading this blog....

The game didn't actually die. We ran a solid twelve sessions and got the PCs to fifth level before taking a break for the 2008 holidays, and then once the new year rolled around the group of players were caught up in life and other things.

One of the players started running a 4e Forgotten Realms game about a month ago, and now I'm in the process of playing that but also getting my notes together to run the next short arc of Eberron sessions. I expect we'll start soon.

As part of the return, I'm hoping to get my session notes from the first twelve sessions together so that I can actually get around to updating this blog!

Scribe Ineti

I had a chance last night to download and mess with the character builder software that's currently in closed beta for DDI. I was quite impressed. It looks like it'll be a great tool once it's fully operational.

Unfortunately, my party is currently 4th level about to hit 5th level, so the builder beta is of somewhat limited immediate use.

However, I plugged in two of the characters and realized that we had erred on some math, so we made corrections to our homebrew sheets.

Anyway, once the builder is fully operational, it plus the encounter tool will more than cover the subscription cost, in my eyes. Getting Dungeon and Dragon free is a bonus.

Scribe Ineti

While I haven't been posting to this blog in some time, the game has been going on since I stopped posting. The players sort of stopped compiling notes for the sessions, and I haven't had time to compile them myself.

We'll be running the eleventh session of the game this week, at which point Book I of the campaign will close and we'll take a short break for the holidays before continuing the story. I expect to use part of the break to revise all the raw notes I have in hand and to bring this blog fully up to date.

I see a lot of my posts have many reads but no comments, so someone is reading.

Scribe Ineti

I ran the fourth session of my 4e game last night, and I thought it was a good session. A lot of excellent RP coupled with a fun and exciting challenging encounter for the PCs to mess with.

During the session, I was able to sit back as DM and just listen to the players engage in a lengthy discussion in-character, about the next steps the characters were going to take.

Through the first three sessions, I had dropped in several plot hooks and threads, and the players' RP decisions ended up creating several more plot hooks that they could follow if they wanted to.

They picked one plot thread in specific to focus on, one that I hadn't really thought would be as interesting as some of the others. None of them were the 'right' decision or the 'wrong' decision, but I found myself sitting back to wonder why players choose one plot hook over another.

In games past I tended to have an NPC in the group that I use to bounce questions off the other characters, but I didn't want to do that in this game (no real reason--just wanted to try something different). So, without that NPC to ask questions and maybe occasionally gently direct the PCs into one direction or another, it's entirely up to the players and their PCs.

Anyway, just some ruminations on players and the decisions they make, whether they're anticipated or not.

Scribe Ineti

Thought it might be interesting to post the house rules I'm using in my game and check out what others are using in their own games...

House rules worth noting:

Luck points will be represented by blue poker chips. Luck points are earned by doing cool game-related things, like making a miniature for your character, writing a story or journal entry or the like, giving the GM good food or other bribes, managing the initiative tracker, taking session notes, etc. Luck points can be spent by a player at any time to provide a +1 modifier to any die roll that player's character makes in the game (attack, damage, skill roll, saving throw, etc.).

DM Comment: I like to have some sort of fate point or the like in my games, to help out whenever players happen to just miss a difficulty check or are having a rough die rolling night.

You may spend three (3) Luck Points to reroll a single d20 die roll (for skill uses, combat, saves, etc.).

DM Comment: Again, an effort to help players when they're having bad dice luck, specifically when they roll poorly when using a pricey daily power.

Scribe Ineti

Stream of consciousness comments about this session...

I bought the 4e Monster Manual as a PDF and using that and a freeware screenshot program, it was insanely easy to cut out exactly the stat blocks I needed and stick them into a Word document encounter sheet for use during the game. With a cheat sheet in hand and the encounter sheets, I didn't have to do any page-flipping in the hardcovers, which was just awesome. Saved a ton of time that was better spent on narrating and role-playing.

The combat encounter went really fast; seven baddies vs three PCs whose players were fairly comfortable with 4e (after two playtest sessions). Total encounter time was under an hour, and it never felt like it slowed down, and was full of good moments.

The players did some really good roleplaying, and one of the players (Matt, playing Malkaius) took really good notes.

I haven't run D&D in any form since 1989, when the second edition came out, so this was a very refreshing change of pace. I think the session went really well and I'm looking forward to running many more to come.

The three PCs each gained 308 XP in the session, so it looks like my initial estimate of gaining one level every three sessions is about right. I had originally estimated 90 sessions to get from level 1 to level 30...

Scribe Ineti

Well, I call them map packs for lack of a better term. I went to my local Books-a-Million the other day and in their RPG section they had a couple little shrink-wrapped packages containing two full color minis maps and a short booklet of adventure hooks and encounters.

One is titled City of Peril and the other is Fields of Ruin. The maps are really nice, though I noted that two of the maps in the FoR booklet are reprinted in the Keep on the Shadowfell adventure. Oops. Had I been looking more closely, I probably would not have bought FoR, but that's all right. More maps is good, and now I have dupes if one should get torn up or spilt upon.

The booklets are all right, though I doubt I'll use any of the encounters contained therein, esp. since these were written for 3.5, and not 4e. Though I do hope WOTC does something like these products for 4e eventually. For artistically-challenged DMs like me, full color maps are a good thing.

Are there any other map books like this out there? I'll have to hunt the WOTC site. At any rate, if you're a DM looking for a few more full-color maps to use for your minis games or your RPGs using minis, check these out.

Scribe Ineti

So, over the past two weeks or so, my group and I have been talking about 4e and setting up plans for an extended 4e campaign. In the process, the players have been bandying ideas back and forth about which class and race their characters will be.

Almost all of the players have had two or three or more changes of heart on what class or race they want to play, mostly because they've all commented on how many options they have, and in some cases, how hard it is to choose between the classes.

I like to think this means 4e did something right in terms of making each class and race cool and interesting, enough so that a player can't simply dismiss a class or race outright as I have seen done in the past with other editions of the game.

I haven't looked at the PHB in great detail, since I've been focusing on the DMG and MM, but I will say that the few times I sat down to check out the character classes, I caught myself thinking like a player--"Oooh, that's a cool power. I'd like to play this class" or "Oh, man. That's even better!"

So, kudos to the 4e design team for forcing players to really look at the options and not entirely stick with their originally intended characters.

Scribe Ineti

So, today marked the completion of the second of two 4e playtests I wanted to run with my group before we committed ourselves to a 4e campaign.

The two playtests went very, very well, much better than any of us could have hoped for. Combat was fast and furious, and most importantly, FUN for everyone. Skill challenges were an interesting angle to the game, RP was excellent as it often is with this particular batch of players, and overall it was a stunningly positive experience.

With those positive vibes to build on, I'll be starting a 4e Eberron campaign in three weeks. I already have a very rough overarching metaplot, and a title for the entire campaign, "The Dragonthrone Heirs."

The players are discussing what classes and races they'll play, and I'm working on plot notes, and starting to build some encounters for them to deal with. All in all, I'm looking forward to this.

This will be my first D&D campaign as a DM in nearly 20 years. The last time I ran D&D was just after 2nd edition came out, back in 1989. I ran a couple good campaigns, then moved on to other games and settings. I played 3.0 and 3.5 a couple times, but could never drum up the desire or enthusiasm to run a game.

4e has definitely relit my creative D&D fires, and I am eager to jump into this new campaign and see if I can get these 1st level heroes on the path to 30th level immortality.

I encourage you to join us on that journey! Happy reading.

Scribe Ineti