Author: Wil

Last weekend, I started a 4E campaign for my son Nolan and his friends. The plan is to take them through the entire Keep on the Shadowfell module, and then probably into Thunderspire Labyrinth, with possible detours into various level-appropriate Delves, or something from Monte Cook's awesome new project, Dungeon-a-Day, if it makes sense to incorporate it into the campaign. This is continued from Part II.

Well,
okay, it wasn't a dragon, exactly. It was a White Dragon Wyrmling … but the mini I
had for it was the young green dragon from the D&D minis starter set, and when I put it on the map, the excitement
and apprehension that rippled through the three of them was just
awesome. It made me excited for the day that they're near 20th level, and they're ready to fight the Black Dragon that I have a strong feeling is going to attack and destroy large parts of Fallcrest.

I reached back behind my DM screen, and grabbed my Sonos controller. I'd been playing some soft Celtic music since we began, but I'd queued up something special for this final encounter: the soundtrack from the Two Towers began to play, originality be damned.

"This isn't as scary as this mini looks," I said, "but it's
still pretty scary to your characters. You hear the cracking of ancient tile and the
scraping of giant claws. The room gets colder as you see a white dragon
wyrmling come around this corner. Do any of you speak Draconic?"

They all looked at their character sheets. None of them did.

"Can
we make, um…" Nolan's friend looked at his sheet, "…some kind of
check to see if maybe we catch the basics of the language? I mean, what
if Draconic shares some language roots with Eladrin?"

Normally, I
wouldn't allow something like that in combat except as a standard
action with a substantial penalty for the circumstances, but this was
one of those instances where the opportunity to give a player something
cool and fun – and reward his clever thinking – was too good to pass
up. They all made Nature checks, but none of them rolled better than 11.

"Sorry,
all you know is that this dragon is pretty pissed that you're in her
lair, and the Kobolds down here," I pointed to the end of the corridor,
"are coming toward you, now."

"Oh! It's a she!" Nolan's other friend said. "That's so cool!"

"The
dragon moves her head back and forth on her long, slender neck. She
cocks her head to one side and then to the other. Her lips curl back,
as she slowly opens her mouth."

I glanced up at them. Their eyes were all wide.

"She rears back, and a blast of freezing cold dragon breath surrounds you!"

As I rolled for each of them, Nolan noticed the change in the music. "Did you do that on purpose?" He said. I told him that I had.

"That's really cool," he said.

"Okay, the wyrmling's freezing breath fills the chamber, but Immeral and Koka flinch away in time to avoid any real damage. Kika, you weren't as fast, and take," I rolled damage, "17 cold damage, so you're slowed and weakened." In a happy coincidence, the music swelled.

"Wow we totally lucked out," his friend said.

"Totally," the other agreed.

"Speak for yourselves," Nolan said. "I'm bloodied."

The fight continued, the wyrmling getting a few good hits on them, but missing more often than not.

"Can I flank her?" Nolan's friend, who was playing the halfling, said.

"If you can figure out a way to get behind her," I said, "sure."

The
encounter as written in the book takes place in a simple 12×4 room with
nothing but a magical bearskin run on the floor, but I have this cool
dungeon tile that has these little statues down the long sides of the room.
I decided that it would create a better throne room than a plain, empty rectangle,
and it would give the PCs and monsters a few places to grab cover, so I
used that when I put the encounter together. At the moment, the PCs
were in a line, facing the wyrmling. On either side of her, there were
statues that blocked movement through the chamber.

"But you can't move through these statues," I said.

"Can I try to make an acrobatics check to swing around them?" He said.

I
thought for a second. "Um, I think that would be athletics," I said, "but yeah, of course you can try. If you miff the roll, though, he
consequences will be … dire. Either way, you'll provoke an attack of
opportunity."

He looked up at Nolan and their other friend. "If
I get behind her, I can get out of reach of her claws, and I do all
kinds of cool stuff when I'm flanking someone."

Yeah, this kid is really into being a rogue.

They agreed that he could go for it. I decided that this was incredibly difficult: DC 20.

"Make an athletics check," I said. Then, "are you sure you want to do this?"

But the die was out of his hand. It rolled across the table in front of him and landed at the edge of the map: 19.

"What's your athletics bonus?" I said.

"Plus 1," he said.

"Well, I can't believe you pulled it off, but you did it."

"YES!" He said, with a major fist pump.

"Let's see if the Dragon hits you, as you leap away," I said. She rolled a four.

"As
you crouch down to leap away, she looks down at you and snorts contemptuously. She
slashes at you with her left claw, but when it snaps closed, you've
already lept through her grasp! You lock your hands around the neck of
this statue, and spin around it, tucking your feet in and avoiding the
wyrmling's bite. You let go of the statue, somersault in the air, and
land on your feet behind her."

"That was so cool," Nolan said.

His friend and I both nodded. I realized that I was having a lot of fun visualizing the action in my head, and describing it to them all as evocatively as possible.

They
ended up killing the dragon shortly after that, thanks to Nolan's
successful use of his Daily Power, a Brute Strike that hit for 23.

"Drawing
on all your strength, focus and training, you pull your maul back and
let out a mighty Dwarven battle cry as you swing it around your head.
The wyrmling's eyes narrow, then widen in surprise as you land a mighty
blow right on her skull. She howls in rage as the force of your attack slams her head against the wall. She lets out a short, sharp, yelp of pain, and then collapses to
the ground," I tipped the mini over on its side and after a brief but dramatic pause I added, "you have
killed the dragon."

The three of them cheered.

"Yeah, baby! That's what happens when you mess with the Dwarves!" Nolan said. We all laughed.

Concluded in Part IV…

Over the weekend, I started a 4E campaign for my son Nolan and his friends. The plan is to take them through the entire Keep on the Shadowfell module, and then probably into Thunderspire Labyrinth, with possible detours into various level-appropriate Delves, or something from Monte Cook's awesome new project, Dungeon-a-Day, if it makes sense to incorporate it into the campaign. This is continued from Part I.

If you've read the Delve I'm talking about, you can probably see the
first change I made: rather than make this a mine, I made it a tower,
primarily because I had dungeon tiles that supported that (as you can
see in the photo), but also because I wanted to challenge myself to
make small modifications right away – we're only going to have 3 PCs
for most of this, I think, and I'll be required to make a lot of
adjustments as the campaign unfolds. 

The Delve I took them
through has three encounters that are supposed to get increasingly
difficult. The first one takes place on the surface, and the last two
are in different areas beneath the tower (or the mine, if you run it
verbatim from the book.) I scaled the difficulty back a little bit,
because it was just the three of them. I was genuinely worried that the
last encounter may kill them, but I was surprised when the second encounter nearly killed them all.

It's not a particularly difficult encounter. The PCs come down some stairs, where they find some rubble (difficult terrain) in a small chamber. Beyond the chamber, there's a hallway with a large statue in the middle of it. Tapestries line the wall, and a few Kobolds lurk in the darkness. In our session, one of the minions from the first encounter had fled down the stairs, so the bad guys knew the PCs were coming.

Nolan's friend who played the rogue wanted to sneak down to the bottom of the stairs and see if he could pick anything up about the room. I had him make stealth and perceptions checks while I rolled perception checks for the Kobolds. He rolled very well, and they did not, so I told him, "You creep down the stairs as silently as you can. When you get to the bottom, you see that there's some dried blood on the rubble. You also see a hallway, with a statue of a dwarf in it," I grabbed some dungeon tiles from behind my screen and set them out. I didn't have a statue tile, so I used a little Chessex dice box for it. "You can hear some creatures in the hallway. What was your perception roll, again?"

"28," he said.

"Wow, nice." I said. "You can see that the statue looks unstable, and it's been seriously defaced. There are two Kobolds lurking behind it."

"I'm going to sneak back up the stairs and tell them all this," he said.

"Okay, go ahead."

I was pleased that they were making an effort to be quiet. In the first encounter, they'd all sort of run around the ground outside the tower, making no effort to be stealthy at all, even after they'd spotted little Kobold clawprints in the muck around the place. This gave the Kobolds a surprise round as soon as one of the PCs moved into their line of sight, and that PC (the wizard) ended up immobilized for several rounds by a gluepot.

They decided that the wizard would attack the statue with a magic missile, because it does force damage.

I thought this was a very clever idea, but I was completely unprepared for it, and didn't even think to suggest he use Mage Hand instead until just now, as I was writing this post. (Looking at the pre-gen character he's using, though, I see that it doesn't list Mage Hand, even though it's in the PHB as a wizard class feature, which is kind of lame. I'll have to correct that before our next session.) Anyway, I knew that the statue would topple with a DC 10 strength check, but I didn't see anywhere in the rules that said magic missile actually pushed anything. I wanted to reward clever thinking, though, and I always want my players to feel like anything is possible, so I decided that any roll better than 10 would score a hit, and if he rolled a critical or max damage, it would topple the statue. Imperfect, but it was the best I could come up with in the 5 seconds I had to make the decision. (Looking through the DMG last night, I see that what I came up with on the fly is close to what I'd have found in the book: statues are hit on a 5 or better, and this one would have had 10HP, so … go me.)

The wizard hit, but only rolled 5 points of damage.

"Magical energy crackles out of your hands and streaks across the chamber, trailing little sparkles behind it."

They all looked at me.

"What?" I said, knowing exactly why.

"It hits the statue square in the beard, but only leaves a scorched mark."

"I don't like that this eladrin is damaging a stature of a dwarf," Nolan said.

"I'm just trying to crush the monsters," his friend said.

I noted this on the obligatory DM's scratch pad. "From inside the hallway, you hear grunting and snarling. Roll initiative," I said. Dice clattered across the table, and I arranged their character's initiative cards accordingly.

In the first
encounter, they didn't work together as a team, mostly because they were getting used to the idea of playing this game together. I tried to nudge them,
but I didn't want to interfere too much – hey, if they're going to get
themselves killed, they're going to get themselves killed – and it was
just the encounter itself being pretty easy that saved them from any
real threat of TPK. They didn't start working together as a team in this encounter, either. That,
combined with the monsters rolling well and the PCs rolling poorly,
nearly killed them. But when they started getting clobbered, I saw a shift in the party dynamic: Nolan, who has a great deal of RPG
(tabletop and computer) experience, started suggesting tactics for them
all, and that's the only reason they survived.

The statue ended up falling down when the Kobolds behind it pushed it over toward the rogue and the fighter, but it missed them. One of the creatures, though, a Kobold Wyrmpriest, really put the hurt on them. The rogue was eventually knocked unconscious, and though he made his death save on the next turn, I could tell that it shook them all up.

"That's good," I thought, "they need to feel like something real is at stake here, and they're not just going to respawn if they die."

When the encounter was over, I reminded them that they could climb back up the stairs if they wanted to, and take an extended rest in the camp, where they thought they'd be safe. Instead, they decided to rest for 6 hours in the dungeon. I thought that there was a chance they'd be interrupted by some kind of wandering monster (like a small level 1 encounter of Kobolds or something) so I made six rolls – one for each hour – but I guess the Kobolds were all out watching the Kobold World Series or something, because nobody showed up to harrass them.

"Okay, you're all rested up, and nobody harrassed you. What would you like to do?"

"I want to do something about the statue," Nolan said. "I don't like that it's just all crumbled down there like that."

"Sure," I said. "You spend some time gathering up the pieces as best as you can, and you say a prayer to Moradin. You feel a little better."

I didn't tell him, but I gave him 25XP for good roleplaying, and they all walked down the hallway to the closed doors that separated them from the final encounter.

The kids are playing
a Halfling Rogue, an Eladrin Wizard, and a Dwarf Fighter. The kid who
is playing the Rogue is really into being a thief, and from the moment
he sat down, he wanted to pick locks and detect traps. In the description of the area, the
doors that separate the second and third encounters aren't anything
special, but I wanted to give him something fun to
do, so when he asked me if he could check for traps, I let him. There
weren't any, but I decided to lock the doors so he could try to pick
them. He made a bunch of really good stealth, perception, and thievery
rolls all in succession, so I decided that everything went perfectly
for him. He wanted to peek through the door, so I let him do that, too.
All four Kobolds on the other side of the door rolled single-digit
perception checks, and he rolled over 20 on his stealth, so I decided
that meant they didn't see him peeking through a small crack between
the doors.

Nolan looked at the situation and said, "Okay, here's
what we do: I'm going to kick in this door. Koka [the halfling] is
going to charge into the room and sneak attack that guy there. Immeral [the wizard],
you hang back and cast magic missile on him."

I was so proud of
their teamwork and ingenuity, I decided that if the dwarf was able to
kick in the door (DC 15 – it's wooden and very old) they would get a
surprise round. Nolan rolled 19, and the final encounter began with a
bang.

They made quick work of some minions and bloodied one of
the two Kobold Slyblades (who I'd expected would be very serious
threats) in the first two rounds. That's when they saw the dragon.

Continued in Part 3…

There are spoilers in the rest of this post, so if you're a player in Keep on the Shadowfell, or plan to be, you should skip this until you've completed the adventure.

Otherwise, follow me, as they say, after the jump, for something pretty funny…

(more…)

Over the weekend, I started a 4E campaign for Nolan and his friends. The plan is to take them through the entire Keep on the Shadowfell module, and then probably into Thunderspire Labyrinth, with possible detours into various level-appropriate Delves, or something from Monte Cook's awesome new project, Dungeon-a-Day, if it makes sense to incorporate it into the campaign. If my memories of running campaigns are any indication, they'll find some way to go storming into some tower or sewer or whatever that isn't in the actual module, and I figured I should have at least one Delve prepared, just in case.  

I haven't DMed anything in ages, and I haven't DMed 4E ever, so rather than start them out in Winterhaven with the events of H1, I started them out in Fallcrest, and planned to run them through a slightly-modified version of the first level Dungeon Delve. I thought this would be a good way for me to remember how to ride the bike, and a good way to introduce them to the new combat mechanics in 4E. And I'll be honest, here: I love a good dungeon crawl as much as anyone. Because I'm running this campaign for teenagers, I didn't think it was wise to dump them into serious roleplaying right away, and I'd use a play session that was primarily combat-based to get them comfortable with each other as players, and with me as a DM.

We had a lot of fun, and played for just under five hours. I had
planned for about four hours, but I had to spend more time than I
thought I would refreshing my memory in the DMG.

We sat around the table, and I began…

"You've known each other for some time, and train together at a small adventuring school founded by your friend and mentor, Douven Staul.

"For weeks, Spring has struggled to pull the Nentir Vale out of Winter's icy grip, and on this day, it just may have succeeded. The sky is cloudless and the Sun spreads warmth wherever there is not shadow.

"Douven Staul gathers you in his small office, and says, 'One month ago, my good friend Bekar Copperknight learned that a small nearby tower, abandoned for an age, had actually been built by his ancestors. Bekar, like all Dwarves, is proud, and he took a small party of prospectors with him to examine the ruins, before he reclaimed it for his family.'

"Douven pauses, and gives you all a very grave look. 'I have heard nothing from him or his party, and I fear that foul work is afoot. I am needed…' He looks uncomfortable for a moment '… elsewhere, so I have selected you, my brightest and best students, to discover his fate."

I looked up at the three of them while I spoke. One of Nolan's friends made notes as I talked, another grinned back at me. Nolan spun a d20 on the table as he listened. I kept a straight face, but inside I was bursting with joy.

"He gives you a map. On the banks of the Winter River, about a day's journey from Fallcrest, he's drawn a small building. 'The tower is here,' he says, 'you must leave immediately, for I am beginning to fear the worst.'"

"This is what you've been waiting for," I said. "You return to your rooms and gather your gear."

Continued in Part 2…