Valiant Swords of Greyhawk - Session 1

 

With characters made but a few weeks left before the full team could gather I talked to the available players and we decided to get together and play some prequel sessions. This came together fairly quickly so was searching a bit to find some decent and short intro adventures. I didn't have anything home-brewed for 5th so I went back to my Saltmarsh idea. Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, as presented in 5E's Ghosts of Saltmarsh, is nicely divided into two parts. This was a perfect fit since I had time for two sessions so I read through the thing, focusing on the Haunted House part  in particular. This was a good fit for an opening adventure of a new campaign and a new set of rules. It also pushed the nostalgia button pretty hard as Saltmarsh was the first published adventure I ever played in back when it was new - and all of us playing it were still fairly new too. 

So I started things off telling the players they needed to think of why their characters would have made the journey to Saltmarsh and what  they might be looking for as they poked around town for news & rumors. our cast of characters:

• Paladin Steve: Human Paladin
• Boom-Gun Brandon: Human Fighter
• Shootist Will: Mechanist Human Cleric
• Blaster:  Human-ish Wizard
• Official Spouse: Dwarf Warlock

So ... a couple of new bits of information there. Steve settled on trying out the new Paladin which most of us thought he would. Will is embracing the troupe-style play by making a cleric as his "backup" character while still intending to play a mechanist in the main campaign. Blaster went with wizard and not an elf which is uncommon for him but he has a concept he is pretty fired up about. Finally, the Official Spouse joined the game for her first RPG session ever! She figured she ought to play at least a few games so she would understand what we're all talking about and maybe get more of the jokes/references - even more nostalgia triggers are firing off here now.  

I want to mention that Brandon is Steve's son and Steve is a friend I have known since the 80's.  Blaster is my own son, and with the Official Spouse joining this run is a family-heavy affair and it is a blast. If you get a chance to play with your kids as they grow up it is incredibly rewarding. 

So with a 5-person party of first level characters roaming around the village of Saltmarsh, nostalgia feelings active, they head off to that same Haunted House I did with my friends back in 1981, right? 

No.

I made the mistake of mentioning that outside of town there were actually two main areas of interest. The haunted house is one but there is also ... the Tower of Zenopus! Yes, they put that reference in the 5E version! Did they put the dungeon in it? No! Of course not! Did the greedy wizard immediately focus on "definite wizard's tower" over "possibly haunted house" and push the party to go that way? Yes, yes he did.

Insert DM scramble here. The blog's namesake tower is the intro dungeon from the Holmes Basic Set circa 1977. It was the first dungeon I ever saw, ever read, and ever ran for some very uncertain friends around 1980. I pulled up a 5th edition version of it that I found a while back - because I couldn't find the one I did myself years ago - and started describing stone steps down into darkness ...

Side track - if you think it's tricky to tell people what D&D is about now you should envision what it was like then when there were no video or computer games to use as references, fantasy movies were mostly terrible, and the concept of an RPG was so unknown we hadn't even had the satanic panic yet. it was tricky to say the least.

So, drowning in more nostalgia feelings than I had expected I started describing the sights and sounds as our brave heroes formed up a marching order, cast some light spells, and descended into the dungeon. 

The short version is "they went right" and ended up in the ghoul room where "Two fanged and clawed humanoids are lurking...". This is where the group discovers that Sir Kentor (the paladin) has a -1 Dex modifier as he pulls off a mighty "zero" for his initiative. Despite this the group manages to take down the ghouls in just a couple of rounds with no one being paralyzed. The warlock is figuring out that a) eldritch blast is a pretty handy thing in a fight and b) a pseudodragon familiar (she's pact of the chain) with unlimited range for seeing and hearing through it is a damn handy thing everywhere else.

Ghouls are a tough first encounter for a new party but there were only two of them and the party is strong with ranged attacks. Paladin-Fighter-Fighty Cleric is a strong front line and a Wizard-Warlock backfield means they can do some damage at range. I was just glad we didn't immediately get into a multiple party member paralysis situation.

The party finds a long dirt tunnel leading out of the room and the familiar gets sent off down the thing first until it finds a group of people in a room chanting around an idol. That draws the rest of the PC's in and despite being offered a chance to join in the ritual our heroes choose violence when the Paladin throws a hammer at the lead cultist as he finishes his invitation. This goes poorly for the cultists and they are soon relieved of their lives and their nice shiny silver masks. The quick assessment is that this was a group of Orcus cultists (given the statue) trying to animate another ghoul (given the dead body laying at it's feet) and they probably did a good thing here. The cleric and paladin rebury the body and then we all move along.

This is a new section added as an optional piece by this version. It's a good addition as it adds a little more to the goings-on both in the dungeon and potentially to the town. Orcus cultists in the big graveyard outside of town? Sounds like trouble!

 

Heading south the group moves into a  smaller room and finds 3 skeletons leaning against the walls. apparently they are angry skeletons because they animate and attack! This is another short, though bloodier, fight as the party takes down the undead but the cleric takes a rusty sword to the gut (a critical) and goes down as well. Now the party gets a quick refresh on how death saves work and the cleric lives though it's a little tricky for him as he is the only one with healing magic - the paladin used his lay on hands earlier after taking some damage in the ghoul fight. 

This is normally an empty room but I wanted to keep things lively so I'm dropping wandering monster entries into these for now. The cleric only had 10 hit points so he couldn't do much about that hit. That's just how it goes at low levels sometimes - one hit can drop you.

This is an important lesson re-learned. Our heroes decide to pull back to the village to regroup and get the cleric back into shape. They end up with roughly 150 gold each after some wheeling and dealing with the local silversmith and retire to the inn to review the day's events. 

The next morning the party stops by the local temple to pick up some healing potions and the warlock decides to stay in town to do some "research". The rest gear back up and head back down, retracing their old steps. 

The next room they enter is full of piles of trash and they quickly spot multiple giant rats who look to charge as they enter the room but ranged attacks cut down many of them and Sir Kentor manages to kill one with an opportunity attack thanks to one of his talents when it tries to bite the fighter instead of him.

The party is getting more organized here as they wiped out most of the rats at range and then finished them off in melee on round 2. Strategies are starting to form.

Kicking down another door we find a seemingly empty room until someone looks up - and sees a couple of giant spiders hanging on the ceiling. The party does manage to get the drop on them and kill one quickly which is fortunate as the other starts shooing web across the room trying to entangle the fighters. It's not enough and soon the fight is over. 

This could have been a dangerous fight but the spiders did not have great luck and there were not enough of them to offset some bad rolls. 

Our heroes press on and find a long hallway with a couple of door options. Opening one reveals a round room with stairs going up... and the biggest snake they've ever seen lounging on those stairs. It notices them and raises its head but otherwise does not move. They decide it's time to head on back and recruit some help before they try to fight or sneak past this thing and so the second expedition ends with a rapid withdrawal to the surface and then to the village.

There was some dissension here between "oh we can take 'im" and "we're doing well so let's not screw it up at the end of the night." They chose caution and made it out OK. Once we worked through things these 4 had gained enough XP to make 2nd level.

Some initial thoughts on the game:

• I see people talking like ToV has power creep over 5E and it might but it's not because of stat inflation. Sure, you get more points but you lose the racial stat bonuses so you can end up slightly lower as the points do not make up for sticking another +1 or +2 on top of a 16. Having to buy those at full cost keeps the ability scores down more than you might think.
• The index for ToV is not great. Look under H for healing - nothing. Look under P for potions  - nothing. Look under C for cure - nothing. Look under S for skills - nothing. That's just a few seemingly obvious things from the first session. It's not crippling but it is inconvenient.
• My guys are a well-oiled machine when it comes to playing D&D. They know what they are doing at this point even with some new rules. It snaps back into place for me too hanging the initiative trackers on the new screen, knocking off hit points, watching for conditions ... it's a lot of fun and flows really easily. 
• Luck is looking like a pretty decent mechanic as it was earned and used for various things all during this session. My players love it.
• The updated version of the tower is good - you can find it here.

So there's our first run done - the next one is this weekend so more to come!

Temple of Elemental Evil - 5E Style - Experience Points & The Nodes

 

Ah, the Nodes  ... the most controversial part of the physical dungeon! If you've looked into online discussions of running the adventure - in any edition - you will find a lot of people either dislike the nodes or decide to drop them entirely. That's four separate dungeon levels in this place that many DM's decide to excise - but why?

The big complaint is that the nodes themselves are a slog. Some of them are much larger areas than the dungeon levels but only have 20-30-something encounter areas - and that's in this newest version where they took the extra effort to flesh out the nodes instead of making it a zone of purely random encounters. They can be tricky to get in and out of of as well depending on how your party is equipped and what they know. It's also entirely possible that your group may not have a great picture of what these things are for or why they should care about exploring them.

A secondary complaint is that these things are a serious hassle.  The whole area is slow to explore, some of them cause environmental damage just for being there, many of your spells are altered as far as how they work or even if they work in a given node. Also as mentioned it can be tricky to get in and out of them as the various gates between them are scattered around and must be located anew in each node. All of this ups the hassle factor a great deal and a party that's just spent months of real time clearing out temple bad guys may not think it's worth all of that. I get it.

For me personally I've run and played in several attempts on the Temple over the decades and none of them ever made it to the nodes. I don't think this is particularly unusual. They're mainly accessed from the 4th dungeon level and by that time a successful party will have basically wiped out (or be close to wiping out) the whole operation. If you destroy all of the factions and creatures in the place you've effectively ended the current threat. It's true that the seeds for a future revival of the cult will still exist but the heroes don't really have to venture into the elemental nodes to put this one in the win column. 

So why am I planning to keep them in my campaign right now? A few reasons:

• For one, Goodman Games put in the effort to make these a more traditional keyed map with specific fixed encounters in addition to a table for wandering monsters for each node. This is a big improvement in what we had before and makes it quite a bit more "runnable" from the DM side of the table.
• I think with the right setup these turn from a slog into a search for some items that are needed to accomplish the ultimate goal of the adventure - sure, you can wipe out the cult but if you go about things right you can destroy the whole temple and its source of power - ending this particular evil for good rather than just for now. 
• Most importantly these things put the "Elemental" in the Temple of Elemental Evil! A lot of the dungeon is not terribly heavy on the theme. There are main temples and shrines and things here and there but the environments and the opposition tend to be fairly "normal" humanoids and monster types. Players may be wondering "where is the fire"? - well, here you go - a chunk of the elemental plane of fire you need to investigate to implement a final solution - and it's full of fiery things and terrain and creatures and it's one piece of a 4-part finale to this big honkin' adventure! 
  
  It is interesting when you see people complain that the temple isn't "elemental" enough - and I agree with that to a point - as they also mention that the nodes are a boring slog that they are eliminating. I mean, how about we make those things less boring and use them to add a huge dose of "elemental" to the final section of our campaign?

I will grant that ideally the nodes would be more integrated into the main dungeon areas or at least there could be more elemental stuff in the main dungeons - this would be more on-theme - but it's important to remember that the elemental thing is kind of a scam too - the divine powers involved here are using it for their own ends and are not really elemental powers themselves. It's really more of a cover story and marketing for beings otherwise not all that appealing to the masses. 

I'll talk more about my thoughts on setting up the nodes for a better game in a future post - for now let's look at the numbers involved. I'll warn you now - it gets pretty silly.

• Air Node: There are 32 keyed areas here and it adds up to just over 85,000 experience points. If we take our theoretical 6-man party from the prior post that was at 23,000 XP and 7th level after clearing out the other dungeon levels (but has not defeated the Big Bad) we can add over 14,000 XP to that total - they will hit the next level at 34,000 so our new 37,000 puts them easily into 8th.
  
  Now that seems like a lot and it is but over half of it is wrapped up in 3 big encounters and two thirds of it comes with 6 total encounters so this area is going to be some big fights in some fairly open areas. 
  
  
• Earth Node: Here we have 24 keyed areas which add up to just over 68,000 XP. This means just over 11,000 per character putting us at 48,000 total XP which his just enough to hit 9th.
  
  Here too about half of the points come from about 4 encounters but this area is much more confined so this will be a more dungeon-like set of encounters in a set of natural caves. 
  
  
• Fire Node: This node has 36 keyed areas and yields just over 63,000 XP. Our 6-man party will add 10,500 to their total here and 58,500 is still well within 9th level. 
  
  This is another carved rooms & tunnels type dungeon area and looks a lot like the prior temple dungeon levels - just with more fire. Over half of the experience here comes from just two encounters so those should be exciting to say the least.  
  
  
• Water Node: In this node we have 24 keyed areas and an impressive XP yield of 96,000! That puts our party up to 74,500 which is over 10th (64,000) and halfway to 11th!
  
  This is a large open area and of course being able to breathe under water is significant here. Roughly two-thirds of this XP comes from just 3 encounters so there could be some big moments in this section. 

This is ignoring wandering monsters - many of which in the nodes are part of a lair anyway - but even with some additional XP from those I think 11th is still too far away to be achieved this way. 

However, this total does not account for defeating the big bad opponent in this adventure which is possible and awards a variable amount of XP based on the condition it is when the fight happens. There is also an additional XP award for destroying the temple itself and that can actually earn enough XP to make it to 11th for our party. That's not counting any side adventures or wilderness encounters or locations. 

One final XP note - a character could be as high as 4th level when they start this and while they might hit some levels earlier than starting at zero the numbers get so big that those initial few hundred or few thousand XP don't change the ending point of 10th or 11th level. 

Also a reminder  -this is pretty close to the maximum. Odds are an actual party playing through it will have somewhat lower XP numbers than this and of course the number of PCs will make a big difference here as well. My point in doing this exercise is to show that it's there if your party wants it.

There is also some variability here in how much XP one awards for not just beating down opponents. There are many opportunities to negotiate with opponents all through the temple dungeons and yes even in the nodes too. There are a lot of intelligent creatures in this one and they are not all fanatical cultists nor do many of them even like each other nor are all of them volunteers! This can be a delicate area as if your players find out they are getting less XP for talking through an encounter than they would for solving it with violence then the talking may go by the wayside outside of dire circumstances. I'm leaning towards keeping the full XP regardless as solving a problem is solving a problem but I need to think through it more.

The last thing I have to consider now is that having done the math is that my goal of moving on to "Against the Giants" after this is .. actually dead on. Tales from the Yawning Portal (which contains the 5E version) recommends starting it at 11th level so ... wow ... that works out very nicely.

Now of course I have to see how the chaos of a big group actually playing through this works out. It should be a lot of fun and I am looking forward to it even more now that I have run through this whole effort.

Temple of Elemental Evil 5E Style - Experience Points

 

I thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to check how much XP is actually available under 5E style rules (technically ToV but they are the same). Some of this is to help me figure out where the party should be as they make their way through the adventure in case I need to make adjustments. It's also to give me some idea of where they might be when they finish it up. 

This analysis will be from the Goodman Games two-book version of the adventure. 

A couple of other notes: 

• I am assuming the party will "defeat" all of the monsters in a given area or level. There are hidden areas in this adventure but I don't think there is a point to trying to calculate the chance they will or will not enter a given area. Let's assume they figure it out and go after everything and if they come up a bit short, well, that's on them. 
• I decided not to count wandering monsters in this exercise because you never know how much they are going to show up in play. I know some people use them and others don't. I do intend to use them but since both the frequency and composition of those encounters is tied to random chance I decided it was better left as potential bonus XP rather than counted as part of the fixed stuff. This applies to both the wilderness random encounters and the dungeon ones. 
• I am not including the fixed wilderness encounters either. The GG team added some interesting side treks in the area and I am sure a few of them will come up but I'm not sure how easily my players will be distracted from the Moathouse and the Temple so I don't want to assume which ones - or that all of them - will be investigated. My suspicion is that many of these will come into play when we are short most of the party. Again, I'll treat these as bonus XP.
• As a hopefully unnecessary note I am not tallying up Hommlet either. It's not that kind of campaign and I don't have that kind of player group.
• Finally I decided not to tally up money and magic items as part of this - yet. For one, Bullgrit did an excellent summary of this years ago and the treasure is not greatly changed in this version. Secondly I don't care that much how much treasure they pick up as it's not XP in this version and they aren't likely to be crafting magic items with it in this version either. I will look at magic items in a separate post as I may end up tweaking those too but for now I don't want to post up a "loot list" where my players might see it if they remember I have a blog where I talk about this stuff.

 So our first area is The Moathouse:

• The upper level of the Moathouse totals out to about 1,350 XP. If we figure a party of six  - I expect 5-6 to be my average - we can see that we're a few points short of the 300 needed to get to second level as we are coming in at 225.
  
  Now this is close enough that a random wilderness encounter might put them over the top. I also expect that some of them will not be at 0 XP as there are several ideas out there for "things that happen on the way to Hommet." I may also be running some prelude adventures with the part of the crew that is not tied up for the rest of the month. Outside of a raw new character coming in at 0XP and heading straight for the Moathouse I think it's safe to assume most of the party should hit 2nd level after this. Fifth edition and similar games are set up to make 1st and 2nd levels go by pretty quick.
• The Moathouse Dungeon totals out to 5,450 XP based on creatures and then there is some opportunity for a little more depending on rescuing prisoners etc. Assuming a party of six again that should be more than enough to get us to 3rd level (900 XP), even for a totally new character. 
  
  Prior XP, side encounters, wandering monsters ... all of that still nets out to a party at level 3 here. I do not see any real way anyone gets to 4th and that's fine. I think hitting 3rd as they finish up the Moathouse is perfectly fine. 5E/ToV doesn't really have an official "Quest XP" element like 4E did but I will likely award some kind of bonus here for clearing out the Moathouse which is the closest den of evil to the village. It's a big deal and hey - for years this was as much as you could do to fight the temple!

Technically the expected next area is the wretched hive of scum and villainy known as Nulb. There are things that can happen here but it's not really expected that the party is going to start clearing out the village - even this awful village. It's more about schemes and interaction and discovering clues. So I'm not going to assign a value here. There is likely XP to be earned but it could go in any number of directions or the whole place could be skipped entirely - who knows? We will just have to see.

Then we finally get to the temple proper!

The Upper Works:

Between the various spread-out encounter areas in this chapter there is 4,150 XP to be found here. All of this is concentrated into 3 main areas and bad tactics in any of those could turn into  a real challenge for the party. If we assume an average of six PC's at 3rd level by this point then they will still not make 4th at roughly 1600 total XP.

With a bunch of enemies in a small divided area - this area's theme for sure - the trick I think is to draw them out and not get pulled into a crushing melee where a small group could be overwhelmed. Smart use of barriers like pools of flaming oil could be important here too. That's my pregame assessment anyway - we will see how it goes. If my guys have eight 3rd-level characters when they hit one of these we may just see a brute-force collision as they try to simply plow through the opposition and it may work. This will be an interesting time. 

First Dungeon Level:

It is a big dungeon level, really big. There are 53 marked rooms and it adds up to just over 24,000 XP. Given a party of six that's going to put them at 5600 XP total which is 4th level (2700) headed for 5th (6500). There are two main areas on this level that look particularly dangerous - if you're familiar with the adventure then you probably know what I'm talking about:

• One involves an area with multiple groups of dangerous undead that could hit the group in waves and drain their ability to overcome the negative effects. I suspect we will see how tough ToV characters really can be here. I can see a range of results here from "that was a little sweaty" to "TPK". A cleric will definitely help here - maybe bring two! 
• The other is a group of fairly tough creatures in what amounts to their home environment that pretty much have to be dealt with to accomplish certain goals. This one has a lot of good treasure but it's not all obvious and getting it over their dead bodies will be something to brag about. Analyzing the opposition and playing smart will be important. 

Now that said one of the knocks on 5th edition is that characters are too powerful and the threat of death is rarely present. That may be true but it will be tested here and that is one of the beautiful things about running an old-style adventure with no apologies or concessions to balanced encounter design. They will be at least 3rd and possibly 4th by the time they hit these so they will have experience with what their characters can do.

Second Dungeon level:

This one has 46 marked areas and yields about 49,000 XP. For a party of 6 that's another 8000 XP each which puts our party at 10,700 or 5th level, halfway to 6th. I don't see as many potential problem areas on this level - it feels like things are a little more broken up. There are a lot of humanoids but there are also a lot of named NPC's running the show here and creating opportunities to get involved with some factional warfare. 

Third Dungeon Level:

This level is a little weird as it is setup differently than the others. There are 52 marked areas and if the party fights through all the critters on this level it adds up to about 48,000 XP. So, 8000 each for our hypothetical party which puts them at 14,700 or just over the line for 6th (14,000). 

Now what I left out of that total is that the major opponent of the adventure is on this level and if defeated awards from 33k-50k XP - there are things the PC's can do to affect the toughness of this fight and the easier the fight the less XP we get. Now this confrontation may not happen at the same time as much of the rest of the level so I've broken it out separately but that is a big chunk of XP hat could push the party to almost 7th. Let's track that separately for now. 

Fourth Dungeon Level:

There are only 35 marked areas on this level. Now on this one especially my numbers may be off a bit as there are a lot of notes on creature X is here unless an alert is sounded in which case they go to X and these other creatures move from Y to here. So I may have not counted enough of one thing and counted too many of another but I think it's pretty close. The number is right about 54,000 XP or 9000 each for our party. This would bump them to 23,000 XP or right at 7th (which is achieved at 23000). 

Now that's not accounting for the big bad thing which could add another 5500-10K which would put them at the halfway point or more but not all the way to 8th.

Conclusions:

We're going to pause here and tackle the nodes in tomorrow's post but this covers all of the set encounters from the Moathouse down through the 4 conventional dungeon levels and gets our hypothetical 6-man party to 7th level. 

This does not include wandering monsters (some of which are accounted for in fixed location numbers and some of which are not) or wilderness locations out in the countryside around Hommlet, Nulb, and the temple. It also does not encounter for any side treks the DM decides to drop in as I will likely do when attendance is low for a session. There is enough XP out there for the taking to potentially make a difference on when your PC's level but I think the total is still going to top out around 7th.

Tales of the Valiant - a Look at the Rules

 

I've talked about the setting for the new campaign but today let's talk about the rules. It's been a while since I've run a traditional fantasy RPG and with the 50th anniversary of D&D this year and a bunch of new D&D type games coming out I figured it was time to do that for our next campaign. The crew agreed. I pitched them a few ideas and we ended up with ToEE/Greyhawk/Tales of the Valiant. 

Why ToV? Well, my guys have played a lot of 5th edition over the years and some of them are burned out on standard 5E. There are several alternate 5E's out or coming out now - MCDM, DC20, ToV, and some others I am forgetting. ToV is still close to 5th but different enough it feels like a revised edition of the existing game in a lot of ways. I wasn't looking to break compatibility as I have a fair amount of material for 5th that I want to run and I don't really want to convert it all to a completely new system. So once the Kickstarter books arrived I had read through them and realized it was a great fit for a prospective 5E revival retaining that compatibility while still feeling like something new. 

How about some specifics on the changes:

• Race is split into "Lineage" and "Heritage". Basically one is nature and one is nurture. This lets players get creative with their backstory and lets them mix some mechanical options in new ways. Say you're putting together a half-elf character - now you could choose an elf lineage with a human heritage - or the reverse. I had someone play a half-orc once where the other half was supposed to be elf. With this approach he could have actually chosen the parts that might have fit that better than the traditional half-orc racial features. It's not a tremendous change once you are playing the game but it is one more way to customize a character.
• Additional note: race no longer gives an ability score modifier. Lineage covers some physical traits like darkvision and then heritage gives some things like a choice of skill proficiencies but no more +1 Dex or +2 Con etc.
• Backgrounds are similar to 5E and fill the same role  - Lineage, Heritage, and Background pretty much sketch out your backstory - but every background grants a Talent, the ToV version of a Feat. Most of a character's Talents will come with the "Improvement" granted every 4 levels where you can choose an ability score boost or a Talent but those are gated by your class choice - more on that below - so this is a rare chance to pick up a Talent outside the usual type for your class. It is a short list of specific Talents, not just choose one from a category, but it makes the background more important mechanically.
• Talents are divided into Martial, Magical, and Technical. Most classes can only pick from one of those categories as they level up - Rangers and Mechanists get to pick from Martial and Technical - so that background option, or the Human Lineage bonus of being able to pick any Talent, could be important. Say you're a more fighty type of cleric and you see a Martial Talent that you like - the only way to take it is by being human or by taking a background like Soldier if it's on that list. So while it's not wide open there is some flexibility there.
• The "Improvement" every 4 levels has some options: +2 to one ability, +1 to two abilities, or +1 to one ability and choose one Talent. I suspect that last one will be extremely popular. 
• The classes are generally similar to the 5th Edition classes but there are tweaks to the levelling progression - mainly no dead levels. The sub-class levels are unified across all classes at 3-7-11-15. This does break compatibility with prior 5E classes & subclass options but it does open up the interesting possibility of a subclass that's not tied to a particular class. There are none in the main book and I'm not sure what that would look like but it would be an option now that we did not have before. Classes and subclasses in particular are another obvious direction for future expansion - especially for Kobold Press.
• There is also a standard cross-class feature at 10th called the Heroic Boon and at 20th called the Epic Boon. Right now for 10th at least there are usually a couple of choices for each class that set the tone for how you want to play that class. For example the Ranger has an option to make their fighting via their Mystic Mark class feature better -or- to improve their spellcasting options with more cantrips and rituals. There is only one option for the Epic Boons per class right now but this is another obvious area for future expansion and since they are all at the same level, and presumably of comparable power levels, this is another area where you could have cross-class "boons" to cover some unusual  concepts. 

• One big question: Did they fix the Ranger? Declared the "worst" class in 5E from very early on this tends to be an area of focus whenever 5E's weaknesses are discussed or whenever someone starts talking about new classes. So did they? I don't know. It looks better to me on paper but we all know how that can go. I do have one in the party though so i will be watching.
• Spellcasting has a lot of holdovers from 5th but there are some tweaks. You have the usual cantrips for at-will stuff, regular spells as we all know and love, and then Rituals which are the extended casting time operations like Identify, Animate Dead, and Find Familiar but they are broken out into a separate category so they do not interfere with either your cantrips or your regular spells. This should help make Rituals a more useful and common thing in the game than I have seen previously.
• The other big spellcasting change is that there are no class-specific spell lists - there are 4 big lists (similar to Pathfinder): Arcane, Divine, Primordial, and Wyrd. This means Wizards and Bards, both Arcane, are casting from the same spell list so yes, Bards can cast Fireball.  Clerics and Paladins use Divine, Rangers and Druids use Primordial, and for now only Warlocks use Wyrd. 
• Class-wise one other item of interest is the new class - the Mechanist. I keep seeing this one mentioned as ToV's Artificer and while it may fulfill a similar role it works quite a bit differently as it is not a spellcaster. The class abilities are tied up in various devices it can build and enhance but it has specific features to do this - it's not coming from a spell list. So it is not exactly the same thing - it just looks like it on the surface. I will have one in the party for this campaign so we will see it in action right from the start.

One of the more notable game changes is Luck. This is a replacement for Inspiration which if your experience was similar to mine was easily and often overlooked or forgotten in the heat of play. Coming from a long Savage Worlds campaign I do like the idea of some player Fate point/Force point/Bennie mechanics in D&D and this looks a lot better than Inspiration.

• Everyone starts with 0 luck
• If you miss an attack roll you gain 1 luck
• If you fail a saving throw you gain 1 luck
• The DM can award a point of luck for all of the usual reasons
• You can never have more than 5 luck and if you end up going over you immediately roll a d4 and now have that much luck instead
• After you make a check you can spend 1 luck to add +1 to the roll - up to as much as you have
• After you make a check you can also spend 3 luck to re-roll the d20.
• You can't create a nat 20 or offset a nat 1with luck

This is a really smart mechanic. It's easily understood and easily flows in and out during actual play and puts a lot of the responsibility for keeping up with it on the players instead of being solely on the DM. I like everything about this one and I would bet that this is the single most "stolen" thing in this book for use in regular 5E games. 

There are also Downtime rules in the Player's Guide. This is another nice addition that gives a mechanical framework and some firm options for doing something active between adventures. I'm planning to use it as a filler for players who miss a session. Characters can make some money, do spell research, and make contacts, among other things, using this system. 

Overall I'm looking forward to trying this set of rules out. That should happen this coming weekend and I will definitely be discussing it afterwards.

40K Friday - Not a lot of 40K - It's mainly about D&D Mini's this week

 Not playing much 40K here right now so while I'm doing a little work here and there on the Tyranids, Orks, and Fists I am mostly sitting out the Pariah Nexus stuff for now. It may change but it's not like I don't have a backlog and other things to focus on as well.

Among both of those things are several Age of Sigmar armies and I do have some interest in getting the new rulebook but for now I will likely just use the free download edition starter packs if we get a chance to play. No strong opinions on it yet other than realizing I have too damn many armies for a game I play rarely these days. Ah well ... I at least figured a fast painting scheme that I like and think will work for the pile of Stormcasts I've built up. More on that down the road.

The main focus this week though has been D&D miniatures - mainly miniatures for the upcoming campaign.  It's weird how a lifetime of picking up miniatures for the game leaves some surprising gaps when I stop to take inventory. Some things that are fairly common D&D monsters - like Bugbears - turn out to be completely absent from my collection while I have 5+ Kenku of all things which I might have used once in the last 20 years.

Yeah like these

Back in the early days the main focus for a lot of us was getting some decent miniatures for our own characters and ones our friends might use too. The monsters were a secondary concern. I had a few, as did most of my friends, but they were rarely enough to run a full encounter. The monster stuff really took off when the plastic D&D miniatures came out around 2000 with the launch of 3E because they were numerous and fairly cheap with the bonus of being pre-painted so they didn't add to whatever backlog some of us might have had. WOTC has kept these things going through several generations now and Pathfinder has their own line as well and it is truly a glorious time for building up a stable of monsters for your fantasy game. 

Regardless of the picture up top I am pretty well stocked with elementals - those things turn up all the time as either opponents or summoned allies - so I am doing pretty well there. But there are some blind spots like the bugbears - also hobgoblins and human guard/soldier types. I often use my Warhammer minis in my RPG's (so never needed official D&D Orks) so my Chaos Marauders and Chaos Warriors appear regularly on the battlemat, my Daemons show up as needed,  and my Beastmen are what I use for Gnolls but sometimes you want a different look.  So I've been doing a lot of specific searches for the things that appear in the ToEE to try and fill out the missing elements - heh.

I did this a few years ago when I started running Odyssey of the Dragonlords and I realized I was missing a lot of the creatures from Greek Mythology so I went on a sustained acquisition campaign to pick up enough of everything to run the adventure. It was very satisfying to pull out whatever I needed for the campaign

For our Deadlands campaign I already have a pile of Deadlands and general old west miniatures from previous runs so I didn't really need anything else and for the weird stuff I tend to draw on the D&D and Warhammer miniature files anyway. Pretty sure I used ogres, lizardmen, flesh hounds, a skeletal dragon and a bloodthirster during that game - but I didn't need anything new. 

With MechWarrior I did buy some new mech miniatures but some of that was just getting into the new style plastic stuff. I did lay some groundwork for future battles but I didn't actually need anything new to run the game.

Then we get to the new Temple campaign ... 

I'm going through the Moathouse and the ruins of  the Temple and the various wandering encounters and I'm just stunned at how much of this stuff I do not have. I've been doing this for over 40 years and I don't have bugbears?! I just ran Keep on the Borderlands 5 years ago and there's a whole lair full of them - what did I use? Probably beastmen, but still - I should really be able to run the Keep at least with no missing units. So I resolved to fix that this time - pick up enough of whatever to run all of the encounters without having to get too crazy with substitutions. 

He's waiting to get some time on the table ...

I've made a lot of progress but I am not there yet. The gaps are still weird, like Gargoyles - how do I not have gargoyles? I think every 80's module TSR published had at least one gargoyle in it but somehow I never grabbed one. Now, oh look - here's a room with twelve of them waiting to defend the area ... great.  I'm thinking my old Dark Elf harpies may have to assist there because I can't see needing that many gargoyles for anything else, ever. 

So anyway - tips for anyone else who's thinking about this kind of thing:

• eBay is the go-to here for specific individual miniatures, especially the ones coming out of the random box thing like D&D minis tend to be sold. There are separate stores online that do this too but eBay will let you compare prices across multiple sellers.
• If you need a lot of something look at fantasy army stuff like Warhammer, Age of Sigmar, Kings of War, etc. if you need 20 Orcs it's likely going to be cheaper to pick up a regiment that way than buying D&D ones though you may have to decide how important a paint job is to you.
• Individual big monsters are worth a look like this also - dragons, giants, demons, chimeras, hydras - these get a lot of use in miniature wargames too. There are whole units of minotaurs in the various Warhammer games for example - you might a better deal on 3 or 6 that way if you need a few.
• Buying multiples makes the shipping very reasonable so if you know you need, say, 3 harpies, 5 satyrs, 5 centaurs, a hydra, and some giant scorpions it's worth tracking down a single seller that can cover as much of that as possible. That's an important trick to making this more economically reasonable.
• So if you get 3-4-5 of something odds are they will be identical - how do you tell them apart? Well, on traditional miniatures I paint them differently. On the pre-painted stuff I do this:
  
  
  
  You can pick up these colored dot stickers at an office supply store or on Amazon. They are not expensive and you just use the color to distinguish them - "47 points of damage to green and a Dex save or he's prone" - that kind of thing. 

One final note on storing these things once you have acquired them: the fancy hand-painted fragile stuff goes into the display case or a padded Chessex type case but the pre-painted ones go into a more utilitarian home:

The minis are pretty durable so utility drawers + a label-maker and you have decent enough storage that can be brought out of a closet whenever you need it. I have this kind of setup for the plastic Star Wars miniatures and one for my old west stuff as well and it has worked fine for me for years.  

So there's a bunch of mini talk that is -not- tied to 40K for a change!

Next week: let's talk about the rules.

Valiant Swords of Greyhawk - Setting Details

 

Well the setting is obviously Greyhawk but it was not automatic. I considered running it in the Forgotten Realms - mainly because it's pretty familiar to my group (and to everyone else right?) - but ToEE is one of the definitive Greyhawk adventures where the locations and the gods and many other elements of the thing are just tied to that world and are not really generic. Sure, it's possible to relocate it - I've done it - but this just feels like the right move. 

The unfamiliarity with Greyhawk is now a plus as well. With my guys being somewhat burned out on 5th edition D&D changing up the system to some degree and also changing the setting to one they haven't seen in a long time (or ever for some) will freshen things up as well. My first 3rd Edition campaign was set in Greyhawk 23 or so years ago and part of that campaign was Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil which ended in a memorable TPK that still comes up in conversation today. After switching to a different setting for a while that group eventually came back to Greyhawk with a new party because they wanted to finish the adventure. They didn't, but we had some memorable moments there too. Three of my players from those campaigns are still with me for this game so I expect a lot of callbacks to those days and hey, even some of the NPCs from back then might show up.

The other issue here - strictly my own issue - is when to set this thing. When I was running Greyhawk back in 2nd Edition I decided to set all of my games in the same timeline and I retroactively decided the C.Y. 576 date in the original folio was effectively 1976 in the real world and just advanced things year for year with the real world calendar. So all of our games in the 80's were in the 580s and then my 2E games in the 90's were in the 590's and I kept that going with the 3E stuff as well so my own Return to the Temple was in 601 and later in my Greyhawk. This wrecks the official continuity of course with the Wars and From the Ashes etc. but I don't really care about maintaining a sacred canon timeline anyway - it's  MY setting and my players' setting, and we will do with it as we please in our own games. 

The only time this really causes consternation is when we replay a particular adventure or as in this case when we played a sequel 20 years before we played through the original. I'm partly inclined to reset the whole thing back to say 574 and keep it in time with the current year all over again. That said though, since I have some of the same players, I'm also inclined to keep it going and just say the history of the original temple's destruction still applies, then the Return decades later, and now a revival of the original still more decades later. I'm still thinking it over and it doesn't really impact our actual play but I will eventually make a call here.

Within Greyhawk the location of Hommlet and the temple are well documented but I'm looking to add some more details to the area - like side adventures. 

• I'm thinking B1 (which I also have the Goodman Games version of and have not run) would be a nice drop-in.
• I may convert the old Haunted Keep and drop it in somewhere as well using the Dragonsfoot expansion as a base. 
• If the need arises I could use Sunless Citadel. I should say re-use as that was part of that original 3E campaign back when.
• Forge of Fury would also be a decent option if I need something interesting beyond starting level.
• Some of the One-Page Dungeon entries should be handy as well for short expeditions. 
• Who knows, maybe the old DMG Monastery will even make an appearance! I ran it as "Dungeon of the Fire Opal" from an issue of Dungeon I believe - this was also back in 3E. A few tweaks and I don't think my veterans will recognize it.

I think lower level stuff will be more useful early in the campaign as I expect that the group will focus in on the temple proper as they dig in and as their characters become more durable.

Early on in this exercise I was also thinking I would love to find a way to work in the Saltmarsh series as well but I think it's too far away and best kept as a potential side campaign if the need arises. That way characters could cross over if wanted but it wouldn't be an assumed part of the game. If we need an extended side expedition because people are going to miss or if they get tired of dungeon delving the whole sailing the Azure Sea angle would make for a nice break and they could stay with it through similar levels or break off and head up to Hommlet and the temple if they wanted to later. I like to have some contingency plans in mind as it makes it easier to lay down some connections just in case. 

Long term the goal is to run through the entire ToEE - hopefully without a TPK this time - and then journey forth to go Against the Giants. Then of course the dream is to investigate the Drow and their spider-queen, possibly with an Expedition to the Barrier Peaks along the way. It's a lot to pack in to one campaign and it's a heavy diet of classic adventures but I know they will be a blast - so why not aim high?

More to come for sure. 

Valiant Swords of Greyhawk - Session Zero

 

Feels like it's official now.

So we had a little get-together last weekend and talked through the new campaign and enough details that it effectively turned into a session zero for the game. Decisions that we made (taken from the summary email I sent out afterwards):

- Point Buy for stats

My group is not terribly concerned with balance between PC's but this was the one option everyone could agree on. It should be fine.

- No alignment (other than for your own thoughts on your character). It's not mechanically present in ToV anyway so it doesn't hurt anything game-wise.

In general I am not in favor or pulling alignment out of D&D type games as I think it's one of the building blocks of the genre but this system does not include it so it's not really a mechanical issue. We opted to leave it as an optional shorthand for describing things - because 40+ years of habit will not go away quickly  - but we're OK not having mechanics for it. How very modern of us.

- Replacement characters if you die will be same level min XP. So if you're a 5th level character with 10,000 XP and you die then your replacement PC is 5th level with 6500. 

A lot of my more recent games - mainly Savage Worlds -  have taken the very modern (soft) approach of handing out XP every session and keeping all characters at the same number regardless of attendance and keeping your XP total if your character dies. This simplifies things for the party and for the DM  but I wanted to incorporate some old school approaches this time and to change up the XP awards I had to loosen up the "dead character" policy a little.

- We will use a "get out of the dungeon by the end of the session" rule. There is a %chance to get out if we don't actually RP it and if you fail t he roll there is a table for things that could happen to your character. I will modify the one we looked over last night to take out the off-screen death result.

This is something that's been around for a while on various blogs like The Alexandrian and Jeffs Gameblog but I've never actually tried it out myself. The idea is to provide a strong incentive to get your characters out of the dungeon by the end of a session. This is another piece of "restructuring" how we play. We run almost every week but not everyone is going to make it to every session. If you stop in the middle of a fight or 3 levels down in the dungeon and then the mix of players is different for the next session you have some re-working to do. In the past we just handwaved things but this is not always satisfying and in the Battletech game I was running it could really change up the situation. For this campaign I would like to start every session "back in town" so that the group can go in whatever direction they want each time. I did agree to change any lethal results - likely to a "captured" type entry - as no one wants their character to die offscreen to a random roll. My guys like to get their characters killed by their own decisions! This also enables some other changes discussed below.

- Using this approach lets us start every session fresh regardless of who was there last time or who is there this time. I think this will be easier to manage. This also means we won't be doing automatic XP every session. We may get some level differences in the party but I don't think that will be a big problem. Characters who aren't there can use the Downtime system to try and accomplish something even if they aren't fighting evil that week. There might be some timing issues there but we will work through them. We will also look at Downtime if I have to cancel a session.

Individual XP! If you don't play you don't level! Having an actual Downtime system gives those PC's something to do when they miss but it's not an automatic XP boost.

- The backup game will be side quests in this same game. If we only have 3 people, say, then instead of diving into the Temple you might want to investigate rumors of a bandit camp or a haunted cave nearby - something that might not need the full resources of the entire group but could still be fun. This might also lead to making a few side characters back at 1st level as the party levels up.

We've had fun with various backup games, often ICONS or Marvel Heroic, but by going with this "out of the dungeon" approach then even a small group could go out and accomplish something within the same game - so we likely won't need a backup game. I love being able to change things up but it is a huge pain as the DM to find out the day before - or the day of - the game that we are too short to continue the main campaign and I need to switch out to another game. I mean, I've done it, but it makes for more work and less fun going in. This approach may not solve everything but I want to try it out and see.

- Henchman & hirelings are also a thing in this campaign. In old school D&D you could pay for "hirelings" to join your crew and you could also acquire "henchmen" which were more like friends & allies and were limited by your charisma stat. This is an old school adventure so there are people in Hommlett and in other places that may be willing to join you for a share of the loot or sheer gratitude in some cases. It's something to think about, especially for those nights when we have lower turnout.

This was just a reminder that these are a thing and are very present in this adventure (Temple of Elemental Evil). We talked about it a little bit and this could also help with how those sessions go when we are short on players as well. Another old school piece that can help alter the feel of the game. I remember many sessions back when that involved hirelings, sidekicks, war dogs, horses, and mules and I'm going to try and push them in that direction a bit.

- In general if there's something we need that's not in a ToV book yet (like hirelings etc.) we will fall back on the 5E DMG etc.

Just establishing the precedent here. We are keeping strictly to Tales of the Valiant for character options but as the DM if there's a number or a system I need I will go to the 5E book until the ToV book arrives sometime in August.

Characters so far:

Grognard Mike: Bard

Battletech Terry: Ranger

Paladin Steve: ?

Boom-Gun Brandon: Fighter

Shootist Will: Mechanist 

Variable Dave: Cleric (War)

Former Apprentice Blaster and Next-Gen Patty were not at the session and have yet to chime in. Mike had multiple character concepts ready to go while Steve was all over the place - maybe a Paladin? Maybe a Rogue? Who knows? I suspect he will end up going Paladin though.

It's an interesting mix - no wizard so far, just a Bard on the Arcane side of things. Mechanist is ToV's crafter type class and it's not exactly an Artificer as it does not cast spells - it makes gadgets that have some magical power but does not have a spell list. It does look interesting and we will see where Will takes it. 

So that's where we stand right now. It will be a few weeks before we start playing as half my players run the annual convention they are involved in but there will still be some chatter and obviously there are some more character decisions to make. I expect those to be settled before session 1. I will also be setting up an Obsidian Portal page for this campaign and I will link it here too.

Campaign Decisions - The Next Game is ...

 

So, after poring through multiple older school and newer school rulebooks - the ones I mentioned here, mostly - I ended up deciding to run this campaign using Tales of the Valiant. I think this is the best mix of the new and the familiar for my crew - just enough new to make it interesting without having to learn an entirely new system. Most of those other systems I checked - like 13th Age, Level Up, PF2E - are all candidates for something down the road but this is the plan for now. ToV is probably 75% 5th Edition so it's easy enough to fall back to those rules if I encounter a gap and feel the need but I don't really see that being a problem.

On the setting side I decided on ye olde Temple of Elemental Evil, set in Greyhawk, pretty much following the original setup. I'll be using the Goodman Games 5E adaptation as the main document but I will play around with using the ToV Monsters where they are relevant. 

My players are excited and already looking at character options  even though the start for the campaign is a month away. I've warned them that even though it's a 5E version the caretakers at GG did not go through and rebalance the encounters - if there were 12 Ogres in a room on the second dungeon level in the original then they are still there now - just with updated stats. We played through Goodman's B2 and X1 a few years ago so they know it will be different than a modern WOTC adventure. This should balance out to some degree as I have 8 players and even if they don't all show for every session odds are I will have at least 6 most of the time. 

I am excited too - I haven't run Greyhawk in quite a while and I last ran the Temple in 4th edition - hard to believe that was 13 years ago - and I am looking forward to re-introducing the world and the adventure both. Greyhawk was the setting for a lot of my 3rd edition games - including a lot of time spent with Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil - and at least 3 of my current players were around for those days. 

So there's the new thing for us. I'll be posting more about here as I prepare and as we get going.

40K Friday: Balance Dataslate and Thinking About Age of Sigmar

 

The new balance document is out as is the new points update. There are a ton of changes there  - except for Tau for some reason. I'm playing a lot less 40K these days so I find myself caring less about these kinds of adjustments and getting more annoyed when they have to make major changes to army books that were released just a month or two back (orks) and make dramatic changes to how things such as universal stratagems work. I'm much more a fan of start adjusting points first, possibly for multiple rounds, then if you still have a problem you start adjusting the rules mechanics. With this edition it seems like it takes forever and is heavy-handed when it does come through.

Age of Sigmar is getting a new edition in a few weeks and I will probably check it out as a I have several very-low-mileage Sigmar armies floating around. I'm not sure how hard I'm going to dive into this one as interest has been low here in general. They do seem to be changing up quite a bit of the mechanical side of the game so it should be an interesting read at least. That said the starter box is looking mighty pricey and considering I have no interest in a Skaven army I may be buying just the book this time. We will see.