Back to Playing

All right, after a long break we have resumed playing D&D.  We are back to playing in person and Omar has rejoined the game.  Carter is not playing right now because of scheduling issues but we may Skype him in at some point if he gets more free time.  I'm so glad to not be using roll20.

The party is on  a mission from the god Pelor to find a healer who has gone missing.  Tyr is playing a rogue bard drow.  Hal is play a human wild sorcerer.  Omar is playing a barbarian dwarf.  They have just gotten onto the trail of the healer.  Our next session should prove very interesting.

DMing for Children

One of the great things about having children is being able to share your love of D&D with them.  Children take to the game quite naturally because they still have vivid and creative imaginations.  There is no set age to start children playing, it really depends on each individual child and you will have to tailor the game to your child’s abilities.  Playing D&D is good for children on a lot of levels.  It teaches them social skills, creative thinking skills, problem solving skills, math skills, and reading skills.  Below are some tips for being the DM of children.

1.Choose by hero type and not stats.  Let them choose their character based on what they want their character to do and not on maximized stats.  Ask them what they want their character to do.  Do they want their character to sneak in shadows?  Do they want a front line fighter?  Do they want to heal others?  Do they want to turn into animals?  Ask them questions like this to determine what class they will play.  Describe the different races to them and let them choose the race they are interested in even if it isn’t the best fit for the class they’ve chosen.  For younger children you may want to skip delving into the backgrounds but if you’re using them don’t worry about maximizing the character by picking a certain background let them pick whatever background suits their fancy.  Finally let them draw their character how they envision it.

2.The Rules.  When it comes to DMing for children you have to think of them more as guidelines.  Don’t get caught up in the rules.  Yes, you need to have rules but don’t be afraid to bend or break them if you need to in order to give children the best experience.  It’s not about the rules it’s about getting children bit by the D&D bug, as they get older you can stick closer to the official rules.

3.Expect the unexpected.  Children have a very different way of viewing and interacting with the world and that goes for the fantasy world you’re creating for them too.  You never know what choices a child is going to make when you present them with a situation in the game.  Be ready for scenarios that would make absolutely no sense to an adult and let the children play out the game their way.  As the DM you’ve got to be ready to roll with anything they throw at you.  It’s best not to over plan the quest you are running for them because you’re going to need your best improv skills.

4.Keep things simple.  Children really aren’t overly complicated and their quest shouldn’t be either.  Don’t be afraid to steal plot lines from their favorite books or cartoons.  Children enjoy things that are pretty straight forward.  Plots with lots of layers and twists tend to lose them.  Don’t feel like you are cheating them by keeping things simple they won’t see it that way.  Keep things simple with the reading of character sheets and dice rolling too.  Only ask them to read and roll on their level.  You can teach them the important words that they need to know on their character sheet and only ask them to do math at their level.  You want them to have fun not get frustrated at what they can’t do.  For really young children you may want to run the quest like an interactive bedtime story with no character sheets or dice rolls.

5.Keep things moving.  Children have short attention spans.  Keep this in mind when planning the pace of your quest.  You don’t want them to spend too long in any one interaction.  Don’t rush them along but you want to keep each interaction shorter than you would when being the DM for adults.  Adults can be entertained by spending half an hour in a tavern but with children you want to plan shorter interactions to keep their interest.  Children tend to like action and movement.

6.Stick to short quests not long campaigns.  Again children have short attention spans and like instant gratification so it is best to stick to short quests.  Design ones that can be finished in a session or two.  They can keep using their character in future quests but have a definite goal for the children to achieve and have them be able to achieve that goal in a session or two.

7.Have fun.  The most important thing above all else is to have fun.  As long as the children are having fun you’re doing it right.  Once you start DMing for children you’ll figure out what it is that makes D&D the most fun to the children you are DMing for and you’ll build off of that for your future quests.  Don’t let rules or anything else come in the way of having fun and teaching kids an activity that can help them develop important skills and give them a lifelong hobby.  You’re never really too young or too old for D&D.

Amara's Hand: The End of a Campaign

Well the campaign has finally come to a close and I can’t really describe how that makes me feel.  It’s like something is missing.  We started this campaign on May 25^th of 2015, it’s been 9 months with these characters and this story line.  I’ve put a lot into it and so have my players.  The best way I can explain it is a sort of separation anxiety.  It’s not that we can’t or won’t ever go back to these characters but it’s kind of like leaving behind a group of longtime friends. 

Our session last night was a little shorter than usual since we were finishing the quest but it was fun.  The party appeared in back in Lord Falafel’s chambers, where Lord Falafel was accompanied by four of his clerics.  It turned out that Lord Falafel was a psionic, which meant that Hal’s barbarian took more damage than usual.  The lord was the first to fall.  The clerics battled on, loyal to the leader even in death.  They cast inflict wounds and hacked at the party with magic longswords.  After much battle two of the clerics fell only for the remaining two to cast revivify on them.  The party immediately rekilled one of the formerly fallen clerics but the other was able to heal and battle on.   Tanis, Carter’s ranger, dealt hefty amounts of damage with his bow using colossus slayer.  Hal started out with horrible rolls and just couldn’t get anything going but by the end of the battle he was doing massive damage with the trident he got from fighting the fallen angels.  Finn, Tyr’s monk rogue, got in his hits and did some serious damage with sneak attacks and a vampiric dagger.  Tyr’s cleric inflicted wounds and healed the party.  It was a good battle.  Ultimately the party defeated Lord Falafel and his clerics.

Before the battle dust had even settled Amara, Tannis’s love, came bursting into the room and threw her arms around Tannis.  Let me just say it’s very awkward to play the NPC love interest of your brother’s PC.  I played it from the third person instead of first person.  It takes away from the game a bit but it’s just too awkward to play it first person.  Servents had relayed to her that her father had the clerics send Tannis and the party away, she knew that her father was not a good man.  She shed no tears over her father’s demise, she was just overjoyed that Tannis had returned and that her father could no longer stand between them.  Tannis told her that they must be married right away and Amara told him she already had a cleric who wasn’t loyal to her father ready to marry them.  While Tannis and Amara were having their moment, Finn and Argon were searching the bodies and throwing the corpses out of the window.  We ended the campaign with Tannis and Amara’s wedding.  She is now the lady of the city, ruling it with Tannis at her side.  Will they live happily ever after?  Will the city accept a half-elf as their new lord?  Maybe we’ll answer these questions in another campaign. 

The Source of Feathers

The journey through Ilotha continued last night.  Last session the party had defeated fifteen harpies outside of an old temple.  They made their way toward the entrance and opened the hefty stone door to the massive temple.  It opened into an enormous round room with twenty doors.  Each door had an elven ruin on it.  Things like earth, air, fire, water, elk, wolf, and tree.  Their first instinct was to look for a door with a ruin that had an animal with wings but there was none.  Argon, Tyr’s goliath cleric, used a wand of conjure fey, that they had found earlier in their travels, to conjure a fey dire wolf.  He used the wolf to seek out Selena the kidnapped shop keeper they were seeking.   The fey dire wolf led them to the door with the ruin for air.  The door was trapped and Tyr’s shapeshifter monk rogue, Finn, botched his disable trap so the group was pierced with darts that shot out from the walls before they could open the door. 

They proceed up some stairs until they came to a door that lead into another massive round room.  This room contained three doors that were unmarked.  Argon again asked the fey dire wolf to seek out the right door.  Again the door opened into a stairway.  Finn proceeded up the stairs triggering another trap that released a poisonous gas.  This last door led into another massive round room at the top of the temple.

On the far side from the door was a half angel bound and restrained in the skeletal hands of an enchanted statue.  She was gagged and obviously worse for the wear.  It was obvious that she had been through some kind of torture.  There was nothing else in the expansive room.  Above them there were holes in the ceiling where parts of it had crumbled away.  Tannis, Argon, and Gaunt stayed close to the wall near the door while Finn stealthily snuck over to the bound Selena.  Finn removed her gag and asked her what the situation was.  She quietly and quickly explained that her kidnappers had taken her to try to force her to send them to another dimension that they wanted to conquer.  She told him that they would be back any minute.  Then through the ceiling came two fallen angels.  Finn quickly gave Selena an invisibility potion since he couldn’t free her at the moment and the party got a surprise round against the fallen angels who weren’t expecting intruders. 

This set off an intense battle that pummeled the party.  The angels’ weapons delivered intense blows bringing each party member near death more than once.  Many rounds were used up taking healing potions instead of attacking.  Finally, Finn, still near Selena, asked her if the fallen angels had any weaknesses and she told him that they didn’t but they were resistant to anything that isn’t a magical weapon.  This was a valuable piece of information for the party as none of them were using magical weapons and they needed to regroup and come up with a new strategy.  Finn tossed Gaunt, Hal’s halfling barbarian, his magic vampiric dagger.  Tannis, Carter’s ranger, took a round to coat his arrows with a potion of sharpness to make them magical.  Gaunt was near the “gold” angel which was 75 feet in the air.  This didn’t do him much good since he couldn’t reach her with a melee attack so he dropped the magic rope that they had and commanded it to tie up the “gold” angel and dashed back towards the “black” angel which was closer to the ground to see if he could get a shot at her.  Tannis started to do some serious damage to the angels with his enhanced arrows.  Argon dealt some damage with his spells.  What really helped was that the “gold” angel failed her dex check and was tied up by the magic rope and came crashing to the ground.  Gaunt dashed over and finished her off with a couple of stabs from the magic dagger and a bash from his magic shield.  Argon finished off the “black” angel by casting shatter and exploding her head.  For their trouble the party got to take the weapons the angels had (all of which dealt massive damage plus radiant damage); a long bow, a great sword, and a trident.  They then unbound Selena.  Argon cast dispel magic on the statue holding her and they were able to break it away to release her.

The trip back to town was uneventful and they returned Selena back to her shop/home.  Then they headed to see Ri-el and Ki-el to let them know they were successful and to collect Argon’s ram.  They then all went back to Selena’s shop where she thanked them and led them into her basement where she would perform the ritual to send them back to the realm of Ravensrest.  She drew a magic circle on the floor and performed the ritual.  The party asked if she could send them back to exactly where they had come from and she said there was no guarantee that they may wind up somewhere within a couple of miles from where they came from.  They began to feel like their bodies were collapsing in on themselves and they began to travel through the dimensions….

Next time we find out where they land and what will happen when they encounter Lord Falafel again.

Sexy Orcs

We haven’t played in a little bit because I was in the hospital but we finally got back to playing last night.  It felt so good to get back in the fray.  We just don’t get to play enough.  Our campaign is nearing its panicle though and I’m looking forward to it.

Since it’s been a while I’ll give a quick recap of what’s happened.  Tannis had come back to his home town with his prize so that he could have the hand of his love, Amara, in marriage.  Her father had no intention of honoring his word and sent the party to another dimension.  There they met an uncle and niece, Ri-el and Ki-el, who offered to help them.  They led them to a potion store run by a woman who was said to be able to send them back to their dimension.  Unfortunately, the woman had been abducted and it looked as if she had been taken to the caves outside of town.  The party has been working their way through the caves and thus far had avoided confrontation and even found help from a fae-dueragar. 

This is where we picked up our journey last night.  The party was faced with three tunnels, the first path they chose led them to a round cave whose only contents was a chest chained to a skeleton.  They unlocked the chest and found a couple of potions.  Finn decided to check for a false bottom which the chest had.  Inside he found hand drawn pinup pictures of orc women.

They then found the right tunnel and came to a bridge which had a magical trap.  They didn’t check for any so they triggered it and became entangled in vines.  They managed to break their way out, except Hal’s halfling who had to be extracted by Tyr’s goliath cleric.

Eventually they came to an underground temple with a winged statue on the front.  The cleric tried to get a sense of the temple, he was unfamiliar with the goddess but he sensed that the temple had the air of the fallen.  They did not make it to the door though as they were attacked by 15 harpies.  It was a constant battle for them to avoid being charmed by the harpies’ songs.  Finn (Tyr’s shifter) and Tannis (Carter’s ranger) used strategy to bring the harpies down while the cleric tried to give the party advantage against the harpies’ songs.  Finn shifted into a giant eagle so that he was immune to their songs and made a single attack on one harpy and then flew to another to draw blood.  This meant that Tannis could target the injured harpies and use his colossal slayer to send the harpies’ dead bodies crashing to the ground around them.

We play again in two weeks the party will attempt to enter the temple and see what it has instore for them.