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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Phebius" data-source="post: 5745842" data-attributes="member: 12648">Crossposted from rpg.netWell, last night's game was a success, though it went in a completely different way than I'd planned it, (as happens roughly 100% of the time in my campaigns.) For starters, I was fighting off a massive cold and was doped up on Day Quil and lack of sleep which made for some interesting DMing. I would not reccommend this as a matter of course for aspiring DM's, but if you do, it's good to take notes. I'm currently looking over said notes after a day of sleeping and they're interesting. Here's a recap:As we were waiting in the study lounge on campus for the room we'd reserved to open up, someone who I've met a few times and is friends with one of the players wandered by, saw our dice and asked if he could play. He'd never played 4E before, but had played a few Pathfinder games so it wasn't too hard to bring him up to speed. He wound up having a great time and loving the system and will be gaming with us regularly. (Wait a minute? A fan of BOTH Pathfinder and 4E? But how????!!!  ) Kidding aside, and speaking as a fan of both games and as a DM with time limitations, I really have to give the nod to 4E both for teaching new people and for character creation and encounter building and alteration on the fly. With the character builder, we had a character for him in 15 minutes. Admittedly we hurridly chose some options with the idea of him being able to redo things he didn't like once he got a look at it later, but even that said, he wound up changing I think one power. So the party now contains a Deva Druid. Of the Raven Queen. Which is about the coolest idea I've ever seen a new person come up with. I'll probably need some help again making that as interesting as possible but more on that later.Anyway, the previous session had ended with the PCs having fled from the setting of The Slaying Stone both they and the city itself more than a bit worse for the wear by their having been in it. I changed it so that the stone was more than a one shot gun, but have yet to solidify what the hell it is. (I do things like that a lot. The player who had it has never gamed at all before and was really interested in the stone and made a throwaway comment about it probably having hidden powers, and so as of right then, it sure did. After seeing the thing blast away about 20 orcs, she's terrified of it, but doesn't trust anyone else with it. Her background involves a lot of trust issues and she is beginning to suspect that her mentor isn't as competent as he comes across. (She's right)So I had the Deva be aware of their coming and presence and he decided to just walk up to them and demand what the hell they were doing in his forest. This led to about an hour's worth of roleplaying with each other and deciding to join up. (I see your party lacks an immortal worshiper of death.") And then combat.My initial plan was to go the Firefly episode "Bushwacked" route, and have them come across the scene of a caravan that had been hit with evidence that it may have been done by undead with some partially eaten corpses, but nowhere near enough to account for everyone, and one survivor who'd go feral on them. At the last moment I decided to just run the opening scene from KOTS with the alteration of the kobolds attacking a caravan. The shopkeeper Bairwin from Winterhaven was in the caravan and was the only survivor because he was a cult leader who'd set the whole thing up to take out some enemies and provide Kalarel with sacrifice victims. The new guy wasn't familiar with the system and 2 of the other players need practice on some things, so I thought between that and my foggy brain, I'd just go with that, adding the survivor who'd still go feral on them. Combat went well, and the players are starting to figure out how to work as a unit much better than they have. But in the course of my brain getting more and more foggy, I completely forgot to have fleeing survivors, which I wanted because it would have added some initial credibility to Bairwin's cover story and also a means to lead them right to him when they turned up missing later. As expected, the PCs were suspicious of the sole survivor with no apparant injuries, but I managed to make that work when one of them flat out asked him how he managed to survive and I had him just explode on her, saying how dare you call me coward, those were my apprentices killed back there, is this the sort of thing we have to expect from adventurers, etc. (Oh yeah, I also forgot to have the feral survivor. I'll work that in later.)So off to Fellcrest they went, the Wizard meanwhile getting a message through magic talking sparrow, (which I made up on the spot because it seemed really funny to me just then) from her mentor saying, "please confirm or deny that the goblin city of Gorrisbad was annihilated by a cataclysmic event." She responded in a rambling narrative that was trying to say something without saying anything, at which point, one of the other players said, "I think you only get 140 characters per tweet," which means he also thought it was funny, so hurray! I also gave the rest of them their own tweets from varying contacts, the ranger getting one from Ninaren the ranger who is her mentor of sorts. The fun bit is that, in the adventure itself, Ninaren is the most obvious of obvious traitors, but the PCs haven't even considered not trusting him. The halfling rogue got a reminder from someone named Spyder that I made up on the spot that she owed money, and the others got other plot things. We ended things in fallcrest with the wizard deciding not to answer the sparrow, which led to three more sparrows, all of which she fed to her dragonling who has now taken to eating every sparrow she sees. The party is of course being like all wise parties and splitting up, the halfling going to her wizard friend in the seedy part of town to ask him about the Slaying Stone, as well as to pay off whomever Spyder is. I used my last bit of creativity to have the halfling spot Bairwin rather hurredly moving with a purpose somewhere.So, in an adventure that I planned on having them end up in the thick of things in Winterhaven, they wind up in Fallcrest with a bunch of complications that they weren't expecting. So now I have to figure out what Fallcrest's criminal underworld is all about and find some interesting things for a Deva Druid of Death to do.</blockquote>

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