NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Piratecat" data-source="post: 5311113" data-attributes="member: 2">Some notes from this game:- The froghemoth was less than half an encounter (one lvl+1 elite vs a whole party) on purpose. I wanted a fun, fast fight that was challenging but quickly finished. As a result, I put him in a tactically challenging location and set him up to dish out lots of damage. Never fall into the trap that every one of your fights has to be against the requisite number and strength of monsters specified in the DMG. So long as there's a challenge or an interesting element, pacing is much more important.- It's a little odd to have a trap-filled dungeon out in the middle of the swamp. But by God, it's called Dungeons & Dragons for a reason, and it had been too long since we'd done anything with tricks and traps. If I can tie this into larger world secrets (and that's the plan), I feel pretty good about it, particularly when they got to meet the forgotten Grey Guardsman Grimble Thimbletick. I think he's my favorite NPC in ages.- You'll notice that I try to handle traps in a way that requires the players to think. To wit: getting sunlight down past the muddy water didn't require many skill rolls (a nature check to find the tree, a make whole ritual to plug its holes after carving it out) but did require them to think outside the box. Likewise, the hallway trap required a small skill challenge to handle, and with every success I told them another piece. "the lever is attached to huge counterweights." "The counterweights probably move walls." They figured the rest out on their own. Likewise, the room with the mist could be solved without damage if the PCs thought it through. They ended up using a strategy I didn't consider, and it worked wonderfully. The goal there was to make them use class abilities, feats and magic items I was pretty sure ("Hey! I have a familiar!") they had forgotten about.We're not done with that floor yet. There's some fun still to come!- Grimble is a psionic defender. Very brave, fairly competent, completely eccentric, convinced that the sky talks to him and tells him about the horrible things waiting beyond it. He's been out in the swamp a long time.- I love mimics and froghemoths. There was a funny exchange where Eli Caldwell said "What, a monster that looks like a chest? That's ludicrous. Next thing you know there will be monsters designed for square hallways, or monsters that are supposed to look like a ceiling or a floor or a cloak. Ludicrous."- Caldwell reacted really badly to Stron's use of the animate dead spell. The phrase "necromancer" got bandied around. Stron doesn't seem to know what all the fuss is.Finally, I wanted to mention that everyone in our group is a current or former staff member of <a href="http://www.otherworld.org" target="_blank">Otherworld</a>. We're filling up the final slots for this year's event, and we would absolutely love it if some of you guys came. So we're inviting you! Shoot me questions by email (kevin dot kulp at gmail) or in <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/291782-so-what-you-doing-oct-8-10th.html" target="_blank">this thread.</a></blockquote>

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