Thursday Night, Wizards Conference Room (Wayne Manor).
Campaign Arc: Castle Smoulderthorn
DM: Dave Noonan
Players: Bruce Cordell, Richard Baker, Logan Bonner, and Toby Latin
I’ve been playing a chaos gnome warlock in Dave Noonan’s 3rd Edition Eberron game for a while now. When it came time to start playtesting the new edition with non-Wizards employees, Dave decided to convert the current campaign instead of beginning anew. We’re smack-dab in the middle of the floating fortress Castle Smoulderthorn, so it would have been unfortunate if we didn’t get a chance to untether its bound elemental and send the whole evil place floating off to Siberys.
I was playing with Rich Baker, Bruce Cordell, and Toby Latin-Stoermer (our resident non-WotC employee). Our characters were Karhun (originally a warblade/warmage played by Rich), Infandous (an elan psion played by Bruce), Hammer (a warforged paladin played by Toby), and Dessin (a chaos gnome warlock played by myself).
Conversion was far from 100% accurate. Not only have the classes changed, but we’re also using plenty of stuff that wasn’t in the playtest document. Several of us needed new races. Luckily, we had some versions kicking around. These hadn’t been developed yet, but we used them anyway. Rich’s character was tougher. He was playing a warblade/warmage in the 3rd Edition game, which didn’t really convert at all. Fortunately, he was able to pick a class that was focused on tactics, and he picked up some wizard powers to feel similar to the old character. We didn’t have a psion for Bruce, so he rolled up a wizard and tweaked some of the names to fit thematically.
The characters were pretty different now, but we all had some pretty interesting stuff to do. We were very curious what Toby would think since he wasn’t familiar with the system like the rest of us. Turns out he enjoyed himself (but we found out the warforged he was using was kinda broken).
We started off the session just after the encounter we had last week. Before we had time to heal up, we were attacked again. Our enemies crossed a snake theme with a fire theme, so they had a fire snake, a fire sorcerer who turned into a snake, and six azers who brought plenty of fire but forgot about the snake bit. Dessin, my warlock, mostly stayed at the back. He was just making enemies attack each other, firing some eldritch blasts, and concentrating fire on badly damaged foes (turns out that makes him do more damage). Most of the azers got taken down relatively quickly. The big surprise of the encounter was the sorcerer becoming a snake and grabbing our poor paladin. Turns out that even if you’re a snake, and even if you’re on fire, adventurers will still kill you.
After the battle, it was a little different than the procedure that follows a 3E battle. Turns out the enemies don’t need magic weapons to be effective (because the math doesn’t need them to), so we didn’t have a bunch of magic loot that we didn’t really need and would only end up selling. It was a bit of a disconnect, but nothing we’d miss in the long run. We got to cut out the middleman and grabbed some coins and XP (though later we did find some cool magic loot that we could actually use).
