Last Friday my group finished Act 1 of the Reavers of Harkenwold adventure. They’ve done very well so far, enlisting the aid of the riverboat halfling clan, the farmers of Tors hold and the forest elves in their quest to rid the Harkenwold of the Iron Circle menace. They’ve suffered only 1 PC death ( paladin of the Raven Queen) and he was brought back as a Revenant.

Act 2 opens with a massive pitched battle between a hundred Iron Circle mercenaries & the rebel alliance at town of Albridge. The adventure book calls for 3 separate fights for the PC’s during this battle, each taking place away from the main fighting. I’ve talked on here about my plans to play out the battle itself using homebrew wargaming rules instead of doing the 3 fights. My players are onboard for this and I’ve run two playtests of the battle. Its a hard fight and both times the rebels lost, mainly due to improper troop placement before the battle. It’s a deceptive fight because the players naturally want to setup defenses on the north side of the rivet spanning bridge and force the Iron Circle to cross the bridge, but the Iron Circle has better ranged attack units and in each playtest have drawn the rebels south across the bridge where they were slaughtered to the last man. So if the players hope to win they have to position their troops south of the bridge.

One of the players was in one of the playtests and really wants to tell the group what they should do, based on his playtest experience. Thankfully he asked me first and I told him no. That’s direct meta-gaming, but I do want to feed the players some clues, in-game, about how they might best position themselves. I’m thinking a skill challenge type structure, using History and Nature to determine what kind of advice or plans I’ll give the players.

We were planning to do the battle this Friday but one of the players is going to be at an anime convention (MTAC), so we’ll push the battle to next week. Which means that this week I need something for them to do that isn’t covered in the adventure book.

I don’t know the statistics on whether DM’s prefer their own adventures or published adventures, but I usually run with my own adventures. This is actually the first time I’ve used a published adventure and I mainly choose to do so this time because I’m still new to 4th edition and wanted to run something that I assumed would be balanced as my first major foray in the 4th edition. I like making up my own stories and adventures though and I recently started a bi-weekly Sunday night game set in my own homebrew world. So I don’t mind gaming outside the published adventure lines, to borrow a metaphor.

What I decided to do is to have the session be an extended RP session with th PC’s organizing the town’s defenses over the course of 2 or 3 days before the big battle. The group likes to RP and we’ve had limited time for that recently so I think they’ll enjoy an extended RP session. But at its heart D&D is a combat RPG so I want to have them fight something during the session as well. There’s been talk on various D&D blogs lately about ignoring the XP budget when designing encounters and instead building them more for aesthetic  and story purposes. Theres merits and drawbacks for both ways of doing it, but I do use the the XP budget when designing encounters. If I’m pulling together a random encounter with monsters from the Monster Vault I’ll check the budget and pick ones that fit both with the story and the budget.

But if I’m custom making the monster, as I did for this Friday’s session, I generally ignore it and just make something that’s cool and fits the story. For example, this is the monster I made for the game Friday, the dreaded Vampire. He’s a level 5 solo brute that can dominate and drain healing surges in a single turn (The PC’s are 3rd level, by the way). The vampire will sneak into the town during the night, killing a few rebel pickets to get to the PC’s house and then try to kill each of them in their sleep. Realistically it won’t kill anyone in their sleep but it will start the combat with biting the PC while their sleeping in bed. A great opportunity to give them the heebie jeebies, and they’ll probably be fighting in the combat without their heavy armor on (since it’ll be attacking in the middle of the night). The PC’s might set a watch, but their sleeping in town with the whole rebel alliance guarding the town. They’re not that paranoid. Yet.

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In other gaming news, one of my players is an old friend of Robert Schwalb and encouraged me to start using Robert’s forum as a place for OOC chatter and IC RP’ing when we’re not at the table. Though I’m an experienced PbP’er, I haven’t done much with on this forum aside from setting up the OOC thread. One of the players has started an IC thread as a continuation of the RP that we ended with last session.

I think it’s a neat idea and I encouraged the players to log on and post whatever they want. I don’t know how much I’ll be able to keep up with the forum threads as much as I’d like to, but it’s an interesting alternative to Obsidian Portal (which I use as well and like, no complaints here) and it’ll allow the players to RP some more, as we are limited to a 4 hour time slot at the gaming store.

Good gaming!