It’s been a while since I wrote up about any of my DMing for Wednesday night’s Adventurers League. For the past five months, my players have been experiencing the Underdark via the ‘Out of the Abyss’ adventure book.
Continue Reading
Over the last week (since the party returned from defeating the evil necromancer), small tremors have been felt — driving animals crazy (“barking horses”) and causing all sorts of unrest in the town. Just as the party was starting to get restless and considering moving on, a large sinkhole opened up in the center of town — four young children dropped down into the opening. The adventurers wasted no time in mounting a rescue — Goliath Tom lowered down Gnome Krieger with a rope, and they group proceeded to bring the children up, two at a time. As the rescue was going on, Krieger took a moment to examine his surroundings… a natural cave with two exits… one to the north and one to the east. The one to the north was a natural fissure, but the east passageway was obviously (to a Deep Gnome) carved/chiseled into a hallway.
Continue Reading
Tonight’s Encounters session wrapped up a three-part storyline called “The Necromancer’s Cave.” Because this adventure was spread over three weeks, the players were not given a long rest… meaning that spell casters were all out of spell slots and those players who had not yet died and burned up their hit dice during a few short rests were most likely very low on HP. This was a slog, pure and simple… and the players were definitely on their guard tonight (sort of).
Continue Reading
Things are getting a bit crazy on the outskirts of Red Larch–who could have guessed this small town would have so many unusual activities and dangerous locales within walking distance? This week, Session 5 picked up where Session 4 ended… the players had begun exploring a cave where a few of the town constable’s deputies went looking for trouble… and found it.
Continue Reading
My players hadn’t even been back in town for an hour after last week’s Big Chicken Hunt when they were asked by the town’s unofficial leader, Elak, if they might undertake a rescue mission.
Continue Reading
Session 3 — The Haunted Tomb. With a title like that, I had to come up with something a little more involved than what was provided in the DM handout. The basic adventure provided to DMs allowed for a two-room tomb and a couple of encounters, but I wanted to give my players something special — they’re rooting around in an unknown tomb, the final resting place of someone who’d never done them a disservice, so come on… don’t they deserve any harsh punishments that come their way?
Continue Reading
Things are rolling again with the Adventurers League–the new season has started with the Elemental Evil theme, and I’m back in the weekly DM chair for at least another four to five months. Before I get started, I can already hear a bunch of you asking “where’s the DM report for Session 1?” I’ll give a little summary shortly of what happened last week, but the truth of the matter is I had just returned from spring break with my family and was completely swamped with work when I returned. But not this week… NOPE! I had a chance to sit down and do some prep work for what I hope my players really enjoyed.
Continue Reading
Last night, my six players wrapped up the second-half of my latest mini-adventure titled “A Bright Light.” Now that it’s over, I can share many more details than I was able to share last week. Please keep in mind that if you’re a player looking for something different, you might want to ask your DM to read this post (and Part I) and see if he or she is willing to run it. Reading any further will spoil some of the surprises, so consider yourself warned.
Continue Reading
Spoiler alert: If you are a regular player and have a DM, you might ask your DM to read this post FIRST and decide whether they’re interested in running it. I tell you this only because if you continue to read, you’ll be exposed to some major giveaways for this week’s two-part adventure I’ve titled “A Bright Light.”
Continue Reading
Last night as I was setting up my table for the night’s game, I began to receive some fun and interesting comments about my 3D creation for running the second-half of my mini-adventure, The Road to Elturel. Our game night coordinator, Topher, continues to call me an over-achiever. I can live with that. I’ve always tried to push myself to give my players a memorable game; when I was younger, I would create props and sketches to hand out at different points in a game. Now that I’m a bit older and wiser (and have a debit card), I’m finding I have even more fun and interesting ideas to toss at my players… such as the situation where my players found themselves tonight.
Continue Reading
For this week’s game, I chose to create a two-part mini-adventure that takes place on the road halfway between Greenest and Elturel. Given the cultists and a few other bad guys/creatures encountered in earlier sessions, I decided to try and create an adventure that would be loosely linked to the goings-on along the Sword Coast. Joining my table for the night were the following adventurers:
Essie – Human Fighter
Chi Tan – Human Fighter
Oenn – Dwarf Cleric
Rolann – Elf Ranger
Edaliu – Gnome Bard
Borax – Dwarf Cleric
Last night’s session was a little bittersweet for me, I must admit. For the last eighteen weeks, I’ve sat side-by-side with a number of new friends as we took on the evil cultists in the Hoard of the Dragon Queen adventure. I’ll go in to a bit more detail about this shortly, but as I begin preparing for my role as DM (starting on Jan 7, 2015), I have to bid farewell to Niloshis, my (now) level 4 sorcerer.
Continue Reading
Tonight’s gathering of players included our long lost Rolan D’Crits, wood elf ranger. In addition to Rolan, returning players included:
Essie – Human Fighter
Borax – Dwarf Cleric
Edna – Gnome Bard
Anton – Human Rogue
Umbra – Drow Ranger
Niloshis – Half-Elf Sorcerer
Yep… seven players. Missing was Chi, Human Fighter (and his human player). When we left Session 16, the party had destroyed two dragon eggs (one black, one green) and our sneaky Drow ranger was trying to sneak a second black dragon egg by the group. Wasn’t happening, and when the party left the large cavern and returned to the altar room, the question was whether we would try to take a short rest or flee the cave. And so, Session 17 started with all but Rolan in the altar room.
Continue Reading
My original plan had been to summarize my first 10 sessions of the Adventurers League Encounters event for GeekDad.com and share with readers my thoughts and experiences as I returned to the most important game of my youth. I planned on continuing to play each Wednesday night at Titan Games & Comics in Atlanta, GA but would discontinue my session reports. Apparently that was a mistake. For the past few weeks, I’ve continued to receive email requests to “keep going.”
Continue Reading
This week, I was fortunate to be sitting at a table when a brand new player, Ryan, walked in. He’d never played D&D before, and only understood basic concepts of levels and XP from the video games he’d played. It’s important to remember that the Encounters events are designed for new players; although almost everyone at my event has past experience with D&D, it’s still nice to see how a novice is welcomed and made to feel at home. We got him up to speed on the rules, provided him with a pre-generated character (a level 1 Halfing Rogue) and we had a good mix of combat and role-playing provided by DM Martin. When the night’s game was over, Ryan told us he’ll see us next week… a good sign that he enjoyed the night’s adventure. He tells us he’s going to create a custom character, too… can’t wait to see what he comes up with.
Continue Reading
My apologies to those of you following along with my session reports for the D&D Encounters event. Last week got a bit crazy with some work-related items and I was unable to get the Session 8 report submitted. So… this week I’ll be catching you up on the events for Sessions 8 and 9 — these two gaming nights added to Session 7 make up Chapter 2 of the Hoard of the Dragon Queen.
Continue Reading
I’m still smiling over the adventure my group shared with Session 7 on Wednesday night. It was an amazing amount of fun that I’ll discuss shortly. This week’s gathering of players at Titan Games & Comics looked to about 26 players and four DMs — based on the noise coming from other tables, I’m guessing the other players felt the same way about this week’s adventure.
Continue Reading
Back in August, I had a fun time sitting down and going through the new 5th edition D&D Player’s Handbook and creating a new character for the Encounters hosted events that happen every Wednesday evening. Unlike the AD&D rules that I was most familiar with, my return to D&D came with some nice changes regarding leveling and Ability Score bonuses and more. With AD&D, every class had its own Experience Point chart — leveling for a fighter required less XP than leveling for a magic-user, for example. The new 5e Player’s Handbook not only strips out the complexities (instead offering a single XP chart for leaving of all classes, for example) that I recall with AD&D, but adds a lot of new (to me) interesting twists such as Feats and class-specific choices that offer even more customization and fun ways to play a character.
Continue Reading
For Session 5, our regular DM (Martin) was out, and in stepped Chris. I’d had Chris as a DM a few weekend back at Expeditions where he ran four of us through one of the five hour-long mini-adventures in the Defiance in Phlan story. Chris probably remembered my character as the sorcerer who decided to grab a handful of gold at a very poorly chosen opportunity, triggering a trap and causing some tense moments with my fellow party members. Won’t do that again. Lesson learned. Well, Chris stepped in for Martin and was forced to create a custom mini-quest on the spot. And he nailed it.
Continue Reading
I learned an interesting bit of news about the Encounters adventure I’m currently participating in with a bunch of fellow players — until this “episode” is completed (Another six weeks!) it will be very difficult to take a Long Rest. For those of you familiar with the new 5e rules, a Long Rest is needed to restore Hit Dice (used to heal up during a Short Rest) but more importantly… our party needs one to restore spells! Spellcasters only have a fixed number of spell slots they can use, and these slots aren’t restored without a Long Rest. This doesn’t affect cantrips, so it’s not like my Sorcerer is completely powerless, but it made a few of my fellow players and I squirm last night when we realized how many more sessions we have ahead of us before we can have our spells restored.
Continue Reading
Once again this week I was fortunate to grab a chair at the same DM’s table (Martin) so I could pick up where my party left off. It was suggested to me that a good idea might be to change tables and experience another DM as well as see how a transition to an earlier or later part of the adventure is handled. Fortunately, I was able to see one way it could be handled when a player from another table joined our group this week — that player had already finished a small piece of our upcoming night’s adventure. The DM had a private (and quick) chat with that player to determine what he knew (and didn’t know) and was able to tweak a bit of the adventure to keep it new for all involved.
Continue Reading
Okay, so I had some comments and a few emails regarding yesterday’s post about the new 2014 D&D5e Player’s Handbook and the character I will use Wednesday night for the kickoff of the Adventurers League Encounters event.
Continue Reading