Scorpienne
First Post
Okay. There are *some* spoilers here, but they're relatively minor. I'm not telling you what the mods were about, but some people don't want ANY information so I wanted to make sure people could avoid this if they want to. TLDR - they're very cool and you should play them.
Spoiler space.
No seriously.
Go back.
Author only spoilers.
Do not continue.
Achtung!
Deadpool wuz here.
Hey go look over there.
Really.
Seriously.
SPOILERS.
More spoilers.
Spoilers.
Cuidado!
Spoilers.
Spoilers.
Donde esta su pantalones?
Spoilers.
Spoilers.
Spoilers.
I'm only going to give you some spoilers because part of the wonder of these mods is that they are a great unknown. I'm not going to take that away from you. Trust me. You'll thank me for it later. I played AOs from Greg Marks (Taming of Elisande), Alan Patrick (Window to the Past), and Travis Woodall (Space Between the Spaces). They are all wonderful. Don't ask me which one of them I love best.
Greg's was great for it's old-school feel and many, many, many branching plotlines. In four hours, we explored maybe a quarter of what he had to show us. If I ever get the great privilege of playing it again, I bet I'll see some completely different things. And in the middle of all this crisis, you're fighting a metabattle for the soul of someone who's going to be Important in Faerun. In a sense that's the real adventure.
Alan's had absolutely incredible atmosphere. It was the D&D equivalent of the creepy terrifying atmosphere of the first Alien movie when they know something else is running around the Nostromo (their ship) and they don't know what it is and they're trapped in there with it. I'm a horror junkie and I love stories with terrible consequences and Alan was right there in my sweet spot for these things. Plus, the ramifications for what happens in his AO are tremendous. I can't wait - and I dread - what comes next in that storyline.
Travis' mod goes to a place where we (as an organized play community) haven't ever been. So you get to explore this cool new place with a great mission, and you get to interact with some of the best NPCs I've seen in D&DAL. (Shout out to Hum the mindflayer, he'd fit in well in this mod.) Travis is also a #@$&!ing hilarious DM, and his voices and jokes just make the experience. (Buy him a beer while you're playing. Trust me on this one.) In the end, you make the biggest possible difference to someone that you have known for a long time.
The stories were great. You get into kind of a rhythm with DDAL mods where you know about how many fights there have to be to get the XP you need. No such thing here. Since ONLY the author is running them, he (sadly, no ladies writing AOs yet) can adjust and adapt on the fly because he knows the module and it's backstory and can tell the story in multiple ways.
The difficulty was appropriate. As in "scary, but not a TPK". Definitely challenging. You know why? Because the DM in question is an adroit enough DM and designer to understand that our party was a bunch of highly technically proficient 13th-16th level characters played by people who'd been in organized play for a decade, and playing D&D for multiple decades. There are few modules that stand up to Valor Bard (archer) 16, Light cleric (pew pew) 16, lore bard (ALL the spells) 13, dragon sorcerer (ka-ZAP!) 13, lore bard (also ALL the spells) 14, and cleric (why yes I'm the tank), 14 and so on. We're tough to challenge. But, these guys knew how to challenge us in fun ways. The awesome thing is, if we'd been playing 3rd level characters, it would have been the same - really tough, and really fun. This was not these guys first rodeo - they know what they're doing. So in that sense it was like the difficulty in a well run game (organized play or home game) from any other edition - the difficulty was perfect.
There were cool items and story rewards. I have a character who has a disfiguring disease - and is now a Zor in Mulmaster living high on Thayan largess and worried about his disease, his future, and his new allies. I have a character with a really amazing sentient shield that's going to call her out and twist away from her (decreasing her armor class btw) if she ever backs down from a fight. I have a character that is now professional colleagues with an awakened butterfly who is going to be taking bard levels if Madame Flutterbee can avoid being hugged to death by the creepiest little girl ever known.
Modules ran the full 4 hours. These guys have great stories to tell and I bet they could run them for eight hours if they chose.
They are, hands down, some of the best organized play modules I've ever played. Certainly the best in D&DAL. There are a few old Living Force and Living Death and Witchhunter modules that are in that league, but they're very few and far between.
Paige
Spoiler space.
No seriously.
Go back.
Author only spoilers.
Do not continue.
Achtung!
Deadpool wuz here.
Hey go look over there.
Really.
Seriously.
SPOILERS.
More spoilers.
Spoilers.
Cuidado!
Spoilers.
Spoilers.
Donde esta su pantalones?
Spoilers.
Spoilers.
Spoilers.
I'm only going to give you some spoilers because part of the wonder of these mods is that they are a great unknown. I'm not going to take that away from you. Trust me. You'll thank me for it later. I played AOs from Greg Marks (Taming of Elisande), Alan Patrick (Window to the Past), and Travis Woodall (Space Between the Spaces). They are all wonderful. Don't ask me which one of them I love best.
Greg's was great for it's old-school feel and many, many, many branching plotlines. In four hours, we explored maybe a quarter of what he had to show us. If I ever get the great privilege of playing it again, I bet I'll see some completely different things. And in the middle of all this crisis, you're fighting a metabattle for the soul of someone who's going to be Important in Faerun. In a sense that's the real adventure.
Alan's had absolutely incredible atmosphere. It was the D&D equivalent of the creepy terrifying atmosphere of the first Alien movie when they know something else is running around the Nostromo (their ship) and they don't know what it is and they're trapped in there with it. I'm a horror junkie and I love stories with terrible consequences and Alan was right there in my sweet spot for these things. Plus, the ramifications for what happens in his AO are tremendous. I can't wait - and I dread - what comes next in that storyline.
Travis' mod goes to a place where we (as an organized play community) haven't ever been. So you get to explore this cool new place with a great mission, and you get to interact with some of the best NPCs I've seen in D&DAL. (Shout out to Hum the mindflayer, he'd fit in well in this mod.) Travis is also a #@$&!ing hilarious DM, and his voices and jokes just make the experience. (Buy him a beer while you're playing. Trust me on this one.) In the end, you make the biggest possible difference to someone that you have known for a long time.
The stories were great. You get into kind of a rhythm with DDAL mods where you know about how many fights there have to be to get the XP you need. No such thing here. Since ONLY the author is running them, he (sadly, no ladies writing AOs yet) can adjust and adapt on the fly because he knows the module and it's backstory and can tell the story in multiple ways.
The difficulty was appropriate. As in "scary, but not a TPK". Definitely challenging. You know why? Because the DM in question is an adroit enough DM and designer to understand that our party was a bunch of highly technically proficient 13th-16th level characters played by people who'd been in organized play for a decade, and playing D&D for multiple decades. There are few modules that stand up to Valor Bard (archer) 16, Light cleric (pew pew) 16, lore bard (ALL the spells) 13, dragon sorcerer (ka-ZAP!) 13, lore bard (also ALL the spells) 14, and cleric (why yes I'm the tank), 14 and so on. We're tough to challenge. But, these guys knew how to challenge us in fun ways. The awesome thing is, if we'd been playing 3rd level characters, it would have been the same - really tough, and really fun. This was not these guys first rodeo - they know what they're doing. So in that sense it was like the difficulty in a well run game (organized play or home game) from any other edition - the difficulty was perfect.
There were cool items and story rewards. I have a character who has a disfiguring disease - and is now a Zor in Mulmaster living high on Thayan largess and worried about his disease, his future, and his new allies. I have a character with a really amazing sentient shield that's going to call her out and twist away from her (decreasing her armor class btw) if she ever backs down from a fight. I have a character that is now professional colleagues with an awakened butterfly who is going to be taking bard levels if Madame Flutterbee can avoid being hugged to death by the creepiest little girl ever known.
Modules ran the full 4 hours. These guys have great stories to tell and I bet they could run them for eight hours if they chose.
They are, hands down, some of the best organized play modules I've ever played. Certainly the best in D&DAL. There are a few old Living Force and Living Death and Witchhunter modules that are in that league, but they're very few and far between.
Paige
