Looting for Ideas

As a DM, one of the fun things you get to do is keep on the lookout for neat ideas to incorporate into your game. Yes, I primarily run stuff from published modules these days, but I find myself constantly tweaking and massaging ideas to get various story threads (such as they are) into the mix. I especially like to throw random side treks of my own devising between main events.

I've recently come into possession of a $2 copy of the first D&D "module" ever, Palace of the Vampire Queen. I would track down an original, but they're a little out of my price range. Published back in 1976 (before TSR themselves ever did a module) by a little mom & pop shop called Wee Warriors, it tells the harrowing tale of how the Princess of Baylor was abducted by the fearsome Vampire Queen and her minions. As you can imagine, it's pretty raw, but it seems like it might be fun to try. If I can ever find people who collectively want to learn and play OD&D, it would be neat to give it a shot.

More likely, I might plunder it for ideas to throw into our ongoing 4E game. If a madman with 25 house cats or a guardpost consisting of a crossbow and a screech owl ever turns up in our game, now you'll know where they came from.

P.S. There is nothing better than the sound of a cat contentedly snoring on the couch next to you, as Scully is right now. Well, she was until I played that screech owl sound. Sorry, Scully.

Sometimes Planning Pays Off

I had just confessed to Tony the other day that I had been spending a bunch of time recently planning for my next few D&D sessions, but I feared it was all going to be for naught. You see, we're finally moving on to H2: Thunderspire Labyrinth after taking the better part of 19 sessions (wow!) to get through the first adventure and change. This means a new base town, set of NPCs, and quest hooks to establish and keep straight. It feels like I usually execute poorly no matter how much planning I've done. Either I mess something up in the delivery, don't have the knowledge I need at my fingertips, or make horrible errors in combat rendering them mostly meaningless. Even when things do go well, you can get sidetracked by a bored player who tries to pick the pocket (or worse) of every NPC in sight.

To my relief, I think this week went extremely well. I suppose the two party members who semi-regularly read this can bring me back to Earth in the comments section if I'm delusional. Everyone got a quick tour of the new "town", a number of quest proposals were delivered, I kept my characterizations straight, and we mostly kept bored party members in check despite not having a real combat in the first 3 hours. When we did get to the combat, my planned tactics worked well for once. Thoes pesky Bloodreavers ate up a pretty decent chunk of party resources for a level-1 encounter. It would have gone even better for me if I hadn't made a horrible error about 5 rounds in, but what are you gonna do?

Have no fear, I'm not about to turn this blog into a campaign journal or anything. Just wanted to toot my own horn for a second after the first non-frustrating session as DM in awhile. It's good motivation to keep putting the same level of thought and care into future sessions.

Speaking of motivation, apologies to those of you expecting a post-Watchmen entry by now. I have a bad habit of talking to readers in person about things I would post about and losing my motivation to actually put it out here. For those of you who I don't talk to as much, there is a post forthcoming. I just need to work it in between today's trip to the Electric Fetus and our planned evening of local music and a friend's St. Patty's Day celebration.

Exodus & Numbers

Great googly moogly. April? Time flies when you're busy, I guess.

With apologies to Leviticus, let me tell you what I've been so busy with (besides work) over the last few months.

Exodus:


We're moving! Well, it'd be more apt to say that we're fleeing. Back in mid-May our landlord provided the straw that broke the camel's back. She requested that we no longer use our nice fenced-in yard (one of the reasons that we chose to live here) as Zelda's bathroom because of the burn marks in the lawn from her and the downstairs dog's pee. Our dog could still play in the yard, just not go to the bathroom in it. If you've ever had a dog, you can likely recognize the fallacy in that request. It didn't help that at the time the wonderful lawn was disheveled, unkempt, and a foot tall in places.

I told her that this new request was unreasonable and after a quick Google search regarding lawn burns offered her a number of reasonable alternatives to banning us from the lawn outright. My alternatives were ignored, and she told me that if she was "so unreasonable then I'd like you to seriously reconsider your tenancy with me." We called her bluff, so we're moving. One block away. To another house with a fenced-in yard which we can actually use guilt free.

We later learned that our downstairs neighbor (we're in a duplex) moved out at the end of May for the exact same reason, so it's apparently not just us. Our landlord has been having difficulty renting out either half of the duplex since we announced our departure. I can't say I'm feeling all that sorry.

Speaking of the move, since it's just a block away we've been slowly moving our stuff over in multiple trips. However, we have 5 or 6 larger items that are too big for me and Meaghan to move on our own. If any of my regular readers (if I still have any) are available this Saturday or Sunday and are feeling burly enough, we could really use the help of 1 or 2 kind souls. I'll send an e-mail out tomorrow and hopefully we'll get a bite. We pay well in any kind of food you desire.


Numbers:


The 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons came out on June 6th. I've mentioned in passing before that we have a game group that meets pretty regularly. Up until about the beginning of April we'd been content to continue playing the 3rd Edition of the storied franchise, but then as more and more information leaked my friends and I became interested in switching over to the new version.

So what, you say? Well, as the "Dungeon Master" of our group I had to rapidly read and assimilate three large books (over 800 pages) of mostly new game rules as well as prepare the first adventure for play. Our first 4E game was on June 19th, so that gave me about 3 weeks (the books were leaked in PDF format a week early) to digest it all. That's a heck of a lot of reading.

It's all been worth it so far, though. We've played twice, and I think everyone is having much more fun with the new game. That may just be because it's new, but hopefully it'll last. Next game's this Thursday.


P.S. Congratulations to the denizens of HarrisWorld! Their number is now 3.

P.P.S. Thanks for all of the Disney planning, Ma. Between the move, work, and Meaghan's ongoing job search, we really couldn't have done it justice without you.

Dungeons, Dragons, and Dorks

Last night was my weekly get together with friends to play D and D. I'm currently the DM of our little group, despite my tenuous grasp on the rules that make up the game. Not much of note happened. The party continues to spam the heal wand on their trek through Baron Harkyn's castle in their quest to recover the Star of Tochiro. They took down a couple of smallish blue dragons in a smoke-filled lair, but not before their erstwhile goblin companion Grignak (a cookie to the first person to spot the reference) was felled by a killer line of lightning.

Anyway, the real reason I'm talking about this is because we learned two of my friend Mike's lifelong goals: 1) To beat Space Quest II 2) To play any of the Leisure Suit Larry games

As luck would have it, the all-consuming conglomerate Vivendi released some reasonably priced compilations just last year. Keep that in mind come birthday time, friends of Mike! Come to think of it, I would probably even like these. I have great memories of playing the first Space Quest on our trusty old Apple IIc back in the day.