Eleven Foot Pole

Well, Obviously

2009-11-27T13:01:00.003+11:00

I thought I should get around to formally conceding there's nothing going on on Eleven Foot Pole.

* Yes, I am well and alive and happy.
* No, I am not writing much of anything at the moment, including blog posts.
* Yes, you are welcome to contact me by email.
* No, I am not ruling out the possibility of more posts here in the future but there is no schedule or firm intention in that regard.

The magic of the internet allows you to keep Eleven Foot Pole on your RSS feeds and watch lists at a cost of zero effort to your good selves so that would appear to be a worthwhile thing to do. At the very least if I end up writing anything else on another site I'll leave some notification here.

Thank you to the huge number of people who have read the blog, you are all excellent!

Winterhaven Revisited

2009-08-22T22:00:00.003+10:00

A mini-post, for Saturday:

Between my writing here, the several games of Keep on the Shadowfell I've played in or run, and the discussion I've had about it on forums, I feel like I know Winterhaven pretty well by now.

Which makes it very odd to see Winterhaven rendered artistically from the original KoTS map and find it recognisable. Like it's a place that actually existed, and that I've been to.

Some of you, I know, are already well acquainted with D&D Doodles - particularly its author Crazyred, who's an Eleven Foot Pole reader! Somehow Crazyred's failed to heavily promote his site here at EFP so I'll do it for him. All of you who haven't been there before, go give it a quick click.

Relevantly to the focus of Eleven Foot Pole, D&D Doodles features an awesome series of Nentir-vale related sketch art and maps. They do a great job of bringing 4th Edition's "default setting" to life and making it seem like a real place that people live in. If you've not seen it before, go and check out his Winterhaven, his Fallcrest, and the wealth of other excellent doodling and cartography that's on display.

Hall of Howling Pillars

2009-08-20T22:00:00.000+10:00

There's not much to say about this encounter so I'll keep it brief.

The Hall of Howling Pillars is a straightforward ambush. Players need to get their hands on the bell of fury's calling, located on an altar in the southeast, but they're obstructed by (a) the "howling pillars", which are horrific columns of living, tortured flesh that scream (and vomit) at adventurers who disturb their domain, and (b) a pack of carnage demons hidden with the pillars.

When the PCs get near the altar, the carnage demons emerge from their hiding spots and a battle ensues.

I actually ran this one wrong; I had the demons emerge too early, allowing the PCs to pick them off in pairs, so I've got no real feel for how it works when used as intended.

Probably the most interesting aspect, mechanically speaking, of this encounter is the bell itself. All of the items hidden in the rooms around the Proving Grounds are in some way cursed, and the curses tie into the themes of rage and madness that underlie the history of Saruun Khel. It's interesting in that cursed magical items, although part of a long tradition of D&D, have been removed from 4th Edition, and to some extent Thunderspire is going to lengths here to re-introduce them.

The intention of the 4th Edition rules is that magical items are always beneficial. Their usefulness varies, but you're never worse off as a result of finding them. And so the cursed items in Thunderspire follow that idea. Each of the three items has a horrible drawback, but it's balanced out by a compensating benefit.

For example, the bell of fury's calling has a handle covered with terrible spikes. Ringing it causes the wielder to take 2d10 damage. Everyone who hears the sound goes into a mad frenzy, causing their defences to lower but their attack and damage rolls to enjoy a healthy +2 bonus. It's a vicious item and players have to think carefully about the trade-offs involved.

I actually really enjoy this approach to magic item design. These kind of "cursed items" really convey a sense of the risks involved in dabbling with magic, and I'd love to see sacrifice/buff items explored further in Adventurer's Vault supplements. Like all min/maxing items there's very real potential balance issues involved but judging by what we've seen so far of the Adventurer's Vault 2, item balance is clearly not something that troubles the developers, so we can at least hope for broken items that are cool.

Shortcut

2009-08-19T22:00:00.001+10:00

Here's the thing: when the players win, the DM doesn't lose.

The second of Baphomet's tests is called the Hall of the Crimson Whip, and it features one of the most memorable environments in Thunderspire Labyrinth - a lake of blood watched over by two mammoth statues of whip-wielding minotaurs.

Two podiums at the far side of the lake hold the haft and blade of the bloodhorn blade, one of the four items players will need to cross the Proving Grounds. There's no obvious way to get to the podiums without walking into the creepy red pools.

It's an obvious trap. Players know they're going to get screwed; the excitement is in finding out how. It's going to involve the statues, and probably the blood itself. Players are asked, essentially, to bet on how they think the trap is going to work, with a good guess allowing them to minimise the damage they take when it springs.

As it turns out, stepping into the blood, or putting so much as a foot on the walkway that divides the chamber in two, springs the surprise. The two statues pivot at the waist so as to strike practically everyone in the room - if they hit they do damage, knock the target prone, and slide them into the blood. The blood itself deals damage to any non-humans who are immersed in it, and to make matters worse there are three evistros (carnage demons) hiding under the surface. The evistros deal bonus damage in the blood pool and get massive buffs for hunting as a pack.

It's a vicious trap and it doesn't get better once the bloodhorn blade has been retrieved - at that point, the blood starts to drain from the chamber, creating a tide carrying everything in it to the west - that is, away from the exit.

This is a good encounter; it's an excellent example of a trap with character and menace and it's probably going to be one of the most memorable bits of the module. You should look forward to this one.

My guys, though, neutered it.

I don't often mix the anecdotes of my personal game with the general analysis of the encounter, but I think it's worth the time here. When my group got to this encounter, they correctly guessed that stepping into the blood would be bad news. So our Eladrin Fighter, Alcarian, put on his boots of water walking and took a casual stroll across the surface of the lake to get the blade.

The trap still triggered; it went off when he got to the walkway. But high Fighter defenses allowed him to avoid the statues' attacks, and the rest of the party were safe in the doorway. The evistros were unable to catch him and pin him down, and with the aid of some double moves, his fey step, and a dose of luck, he scooped up the magical items and hightailed it to the door without taking so much as a scratch.

My first reaction was to be immensely frustrated. A combination of factors had come together to let the group skip one of Thunderspire's best moments. But it was a bad reaction.

Alcarian didn't shortcut the encounter by dumb luck or by abusing some inherently broken mechanic. He did it by using an otherwise underpowered magical item that he'd earned through combat, together with the iconic strength of his class (Fighter high AC) and race (Eladrin fey step). In other words, he did the job he'd specifically built his character to do. That's a huge success for him both as a player and as a character, and it's a more memorable victory for him than any amount of evistro-killing would have been.

Sometimes breaking an encounter can be more satisfying for a player than completing it as intended. Beating the system can be more memorable than mastering the system and when players earn a shortcut, giving them the benefit of that will make everyone have a better game as a result.

My guys earned their shortcut here. But for everyone else, let me know how this one went for you, won't you?

Tidbits

2009-08-18T22:00:00.003+10:00

I'm having a very busy real-life week which isn't leaving a lot of time for blogging, but so you don't all just assume I've died, here's some loose thoughts, which I'm sorry don't fit well into the overall scheme of the blog. Some of them barely rise above reconstituted news.

Dark Sun in 2010

* Wizards have announced the 2010 campaign setting for D&D as being Dark Sun. I was hoping for Dragonlance, but Dark Sun still excites me a lot more than Eberron or the Realms.

For those not familiar, Dark Sun is a kind of post-apocalyptic setting of barren deserts, slavery and dead gods, where each and every use of magic makes the world die just a little bit more. Metal's rare and psionics are common and just surviving the environment is every bit as much of a challenge as defeating its inhabitants.

Designer James Wyatt says he "felt it was time to show the breadth of what’s possible in the game, just what a broad swathe D&D’s kind of fantasy can cover." That's a noble sentiment, and it's entirely possible that 4th Edition's going to step up to the plate. There could even now be an evolution taking place as the ruleset ripens into a fuller and more mature incarnation.

On the other hand, I can't help but feel they're setting themselves up to demonstrate how essentially weak 4th Edition's non-combat mechanics are, and how little the combat balance is able to withstand mathematical tinkering. Still, better to try and fail than never try at all, I suppose.

Storytelling and the Dungeon Master's Guide 2

* The Dungeon Master's Guide 2 has a whole chapter devoted to storytelling, and the surprise is that it's not merely competent but actually rather good. The kind of D&D For Dummies nuts-and-bolts approach of the first (deeply lacking) DMG holds up surprisingly well when applied to things that are worth saying. The fusion of creativity and connect-the-dots formulaism it uses actually ends up bringing something new and interesting to the discussion.

It sounds like the DMG 2 could be a book worth buying. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

Item Sets and Peer Pressure

* Can encouraging teamwork go too far? The idea of your success or failure resting not just on your own actions but those of your allies is great for building party cohesion and social bonds, but when your survival is dependant on someone else's actions it gives you an investment in their decisions. Anyone who's ever been pressured into playing a healbot just because no-one else wants to run one understands this principle.

Adventurer's Vault 2 takes it a step further with "group sets" - collections of magic items that give you bonuses based on how many allies are also wielding items from the set. It's the sort of thing that tickles me as a player - it's just kind of cool - but it's possibly not so good when you're at the less confident end of the player pool. The sets generate a mechanical pressure to wield weapons that are suboptimal or just plain not fun in order to "fit in" and help out your buddies; that's not, ideally, a choice a player should be asked to make, and I can't help but feel that this kind of design is the start of a slippery slope.

Hall of Enforced Introspection

2009-08-12T22:00:00.008+10:00

I give these modules a lot of grief for not making sense. Thunderspire has more than its fair share of contrived plots, half-baked schemes and unlikely scenarios.

But at the end of the day, if the game is fun, nobody cares whether it makes sense.

That's a philosophy that's fuelled many classic D&D dungeons. It's led to magnetic ceilings, antigravity rooms, frictionless corridors, and such ridiculous-but-wonderful creatures as the rust monster, mimic, and gelatinous cube. To a large extent it's the core of traditional D&D - finding bizarre solutions to improbably deadly conundrums.

It's not something that either Keep on the Shadowfell or Thunderspire Labyrinth have embraced until now. They've hovered in the middle, presenting encounters that are ludicrous, yet not fun. The Proving Grounds, though, is where Thunderspire finds its old-school form.

This encounter is the Hall of Enforced Introspection, one of the tests of Baphomet that players must overcome as a precursor to facing the Guardian. It's an L-shaped room that players enter from the south, with an altar in the northwest that holds the Face of Baphomet. The Face is a cursed mask, one of the four items the players need to complete the Proving Grounds.

The catch is that the room is littered with columns, and each column is plated with mirrors. The mirrors are magical, and have a variety of effects. At the start of each player's turn they are "attacked" by a mirror; a successful "attack" means they've glanced into the mirror and are subject to its effects.

The mirrors nearest the entryway and the altar are teleportation mirrors; looking into one teleports you to its twin. This means that characters can travel straight from the doorway to the altar and seize the mask - but there's two catches. The first is that the altar is guarded by a pair of vicious Boneshard Skeletons, more than capable of ripping apart any adventurer unlucky enough to encounter them without backup. The second is that, of course, the mirrors are two-way, and the character who teleported to the altar on his first turn will be yanked back to the entrance again on his second. (This makes for a cruel surprise for characters who navigate the mirrors the hard way, only to be sent back to the start just as they reach their goal.)

The second variety of mirror is a more traditional trap. It's called a "draining mirror" and simply does a big dose of necrotic damage to its unlucky victims. The players, by the way, can avoid all these mirrors just by closing their eyes - although that leaves them blinded and offering combat advantage to the Boneshards, which has its own problems.

It's the third type of mirror which makes the encounter memorable - while at the same time being its biggest weakness. The "trapping mirror" transports anyone it "hits" to a demiplane known as the Oubliette of the Empty Mind. It's a small room with no exits; there's no way to get out from the inside. The room's only feature is a gnoll, who got trapped here when Maldrick tackled the tests and is now starving and half-mad.

Being trapped in a confined space with a hungry gnoll sounds like an exciting scenario on paper but in practice it's deeply dull. One-on-one combats don't work well in 4th Edition, largely because neither combatant has any real reason to move. The fight boils down to a series of flavourless attack and damage rolls and it's hard to hide the fact that the gnoll is only here as busywork for adventurers luckless enough to get trapped.

The real problem is if three or more of the party get hit by the trapping mirrors. Without enough heroes remaining active in the "real world", defeating the Boneshards can be extremely difficult (especially given they detonate with a damaging area-of-effect attack when bloodied, and again when killed). The only way to free those trapped is by triggering an indentation on the altar, which isn't easy while locked in combat with the undead. Unlucky rolls can make this encounter end with dead PCs and some or all of the party trapped forever in an extradimensional prison.

(The module, to its credit, suggests that if the PCs do become completely trapped, Maldrick's gnolls may eventually release them to interrogate them. By that time the captives will be dead and the Proving Grounds will be rendered moot. It's an ugly solution that undermines Thunderspire's few remaining strengths.)

The awkwardness of the Oubliette aside, this is an encounter that players seem to love. Mine had a blast - in fact they liked it more than I did - and in trawling the web for play write-ups it's one of the most commonly described (and enjoyed) encounters in the module.

Questions:

Bearing in mind that this encounter works, so I don't really care:

[1] How did Maldrick's gnolls beat this room without killing the Boneshards? Does the magic of the Proving Grounds regularly resurrect the skeletons, perhaps?

[2] It's a DC 15 Perception check to figure out how to use the altar to free those trapped in the Oubliette. Was Maldrick honestly so callous that he couldn't be bothered to press a button in order to save one of his troops?

[3] Not actually a question - but for those following along at home who are wondering why the holy items aren't with Maldrick, the module explains that they teleport back to their "home" rooms after being used to summon the Guardian. Convenient.

The Slow Build

2009-08-11T22:00:00.000+10:00

Here is something that the Well of Demons does well: building tension.

Without a doubt the best section of Thunderspire Labyrinth is the Proving Grounds. This is the central portion of the Well of Demons, intended to test potential worshippers of Baphomet before allowing them access to the inner sanctum. The Proving Grounds is essentially an extended lock-and-key puzzle consisting of a total of five encounters and culminating in an epic battle with a green dragon.

Thunderspire knows that the Proving Grounds is good. It knows that fighting a dragon on its home turf should be a big thing. And so it finally does what it should have been doing all along: it gives us a little showmanship.

The module introduces us to the Proving Grounds end-first. The very first part of the puzzle that the players see is the conclusion - the massive purpose-built arena in which they'll end up fighting the dragon. Of course, at this stage they don't know about the dragon, and very fact that such a massive and complex area is apparently unoccupied is both ominous and foreboding. There are a number of deep holes, a looping corridor with disturbing grooves in the floor, and other odd features such as glowing pools of liquid and ruined statues; players have another four encounters before they see how it all works and that's plenty of time for their imaginations to hype the area into a killing floor of unmatched ferocity.

The first of the four preliminary encounters is one of Thunderspire's rare non-combat moments. Shortly after beginning to explore the Proving Grounds, the players come across the ghosts of a group of past adventurers who failed Baphomet's test. The three ghosts are essentially good guys, and are willing to share some information if they feel the PCs are equally motivated by unselfish goals.

The ghosts aren't exactly wacky Ghostbusters-esque spirits. They're ever so slightly more gritty. Each of the trio bear the marks of their death - one's head is crushed by the dragon's jaws, one's features are deformed by the dragon's breath, and the third has his torso rended by giant draconic claws. Throughout the encounter no one says the word "dragon" or reveals the nature of the Guardian, but the clues are there for players to begin harbouring some suspicions. It's great for players to see three competent heroes who have already failed at the task the PCs are attempting, and it builds the reputation of the climactic encounter well before its nature is even revealed.

As-written, interacting with the ghosts involves a skill challenge, with the ghosts interrogating the players and the players attempting to show their good intentions. I've never been a fan of the skill challenge mechanic and it's as clumsy as ever here. Rolling on Diplomacy, Bluff, and Insight seems appropriate, but, realising that that would leave one player doing all the talking, the designers have added extra skills. Players must roll Athletics to flex and pose for the pleasure of the martial ghost; Arcana to please the magical ghost with random trivia; but apparently not Religion for the paladin, presumably because Divine characters tend to come with Diplomacy as a class skill and will already have enough to do.

Personally I threw the mechanical element out the door and roleplayed it but I guess that's dependant on how entertaining you find skill challenges.

Here's what the ghosts reveal: to pass the Proving Grounds and progress to the inner sanctum, players must open the gate at the south-eastern end of the test. Doing so requires finding four holy artifacts of Baphomet and laying them simultaneously on the four holy circles scattered around the central complex. When the items are in position, the gate will begin opening and the Guardian will emerge to administer the final test.

One of the items is the Book of Wrath Unveiled which players have already liberated from the gnolls; the other three items are in the three rooms adjacent to the central arena. Each room contains a test that players must pass to secure the relevant artifact.

So this is the Proving Grounds - a slow and ominous exploration of the central arena, a conversation with ghosts, and then three gimmick-focused tests leading to a climactic brawl. This is a near-perfect example of how to build a satisfying traditional D&D dungeon, and how to manipulate pacing to have players genuinely excited about finding out what happens next. They'll be straining at the bit to try themselves against the Guardian, and thankfully Thunderspire - finally - doesn't disappoint.

Confession:

[1] Actually, according to the printed text, the ghosts do reveal the Guardian is a dragon, if players get enough successes in the skill challenge. But it's such a vastly better set-piece if they don't that I'm exercising a kind of willful blindness. It's obvious enough from the injuries that there's a dragon involved; spelling it out in words just seems so crass.

Friends Like These

2009-08-10T22:00:00.005+10:00

Building an encounter in 4th Edition requires more than just slapping some level-appropriate monsters together and calling it a success.

We've seen an example of an encounter built around the theme of "grabbing", where focused design made a creature team-up more than the sum of its parts. Here we see the other side of the coin, where theoretically competent enemies are just unable to work together to present a credible threat.

The through-line for the Well of Demons is the gnoll Maldrick Scarmaker. He's keen on re-dedicating the Well to the gnoll deity Yeenoghu, and to that end he's left a bunch of his troops guarding the entrance rooms of the Well while pressing on to the Inner Sanctum with his best men.

This encounter represents the last of Maldrick's "entrance guard"; a gnoll "demonic scourge" stationed at an old shrine to Baphomet. The Scourge has a pet Barlgura in the adjacent chamber, and when combat inevitably ensues, the two will join forces.

I mentioned before that the designers didn't seem to be aware of how Barlguras work. They're heavy hitters with a long reach and weak defences; like any glass cannon they need a competent defender ally in order to do their job. The Scourge isn't a defender; in fact, it's another brute. The two enemies have a lot of damage output between them but no way of staying alive long enough to make use of it.

What's more, the most memorable special ability of both the Scourge and the Barlgura is an ally buff. The Barlgura gives all allies in burst 5 a to-hit buff when it goes bloodied; the Scourge gets a damage bonus when it has at least two adjacent allies, and can give up to two adjacent allies a free melee attack when it manages to bloody an enemy.

As a pair of individual monsters, the Barlgura and the Scourge are totally wasted. They don't have enough allies to maximise their buffs, and barring the possibility of some very lucky rolls they're not going to stay alive long enough to knock anyone into the bloodied range, let alone provide a real threat.

There is a wildcard in the fight. The room also features two tieflings, who are here to trick the gnolls out of some unspecified "items and lore" that the gnolls have found in the Well. They're opportunists, and if the fight starts going badly for the PCs they'll help the gnolls, but it won't, which leaves them sitting on the sidelines.

After the fight, there's an opportunity for the PCs to ally with the tieflings, whose names are Azkelak and Katal. The tieflings are wearing black, are hanging out with gnolls apparently of their own free will, and didn't come to the players' aid during the battle. It's a foolish party who trusts these two (even without the magical lie-detector of a good Insight roll), and indeed the Tieflings will stab the PCs to death in their sleep if given the opportunity.

My players took the uncharacteristically unheroic step of cutting the tieflings down where they stood; a quick search of play write-ups of the Well suggests they're not alone. A long history of traitorous NPCs, starting with Ninaran in Keep on the Shadowfell and continuing on to Terlen Darkseeker in Thunderspire, might leave players rightfully intolerant of suspicious adventurers claiming to be their friends.

The encounter's at least necessary. After turning the occupants of this area into corpses, players are free to take The Book of Wrath Unveiled, a holy text of Baphomet which is one of four items the players will eventually need to enter the Inner Sanctum and confront Maldrick.

Questions:

[1] How did the tieflings get past the phalagar and its friends? The gnolls can claim safety in numbers, but surely the tieflings should have been eaten alive?

Minimum Threat

2009-08-06T22:29:00.005+10:00

I think the statblock for the Barlgura changed between Thunderspire Labyrinth being conceived and typeset.

There's a couple of reasons for that belief; one is that the writers don't seem to know how 4th Edition Barlguras work, mechanically. The other is that they put a lone Barlgura up against a five-man party.

Barlguras, for those not aware, are a type of brutish low-level demon. They're a natural fit to a location called the "Well of Demons" and indeed they feature throughout the area.

The Well of Demons utilises a system of random encounters, much like the ones I've described earlier. Rather than providing interesting sidequests, these encounters are designed to discourage adventurers from slowing down while assaulting the Well. The Well works best when it's blown through in only two harrowing adventuring days, and the random encounters are a rather clumsy way of expressing that.

It works like this: you roll on the table each time the adventurers take a rest, whether short or extended, and apply the resulting events. Consequences range from the spooky (ghostly minotaurs haunt the players) through to the disturbing (a rift opens to the Abyss), with a dash of the oddly helpful (a quasit shows up and offers to answer the party's questions in exchange for cash).

One of the encounters is a lone Barlgura.

The Barlgura is a level 8 brute. It's got a lot of HP and it hits hard, but it's got a very narrow range of attack options, isn't very mobile, and has defences that would look poor on a monster two levels lower.

A fight against a lone Barlgura goes like this: the defender tanks the Barlgura, and then everyone else drops their highest damage encounter power into it. It lasts a maximum of two rounds and doesn't move or do anything interesting. It gets two attacks a round, each of which is at a less than 50% chance of hitting a level 6 defender's AC, for a maximum of 62 damage if all four crit, or a more likely output of about 20 damage if two hits land and do average damage.

The average damage over its lifespan is only slightly higher than a healing surge, and that's assuming it doesn't roll badly and the PCs don't drop dailies.

In short, the Barlgura doesn't reach the minimum threat level - it's simply not capable of costing the PCs any meaningful resources that won't renew at the end of the enccounter. Rather than actually running the combat, the DM is better off just asking players to describe how they think the fight is going to go, and letting them off unscathed providing they describe an awesome enough battle.

Minimum threat is something 4E struggles with. The line between a weak encounter and a pointless one is very fine. Smart, optimised parties can find same-level battles so trivial as to be dull. Newer groups or ones with deliberately gimped builds will often struggle with those same encounters. It causes problems for module writers - how do you write an encounter that challenges a good party without making it a TPK for a more casual group?

It's not a question that Thunderspire has good answers to.

Treasure Parcels

2009-08-04T22:00:00.000+10:00

4th Edition has new treasure rules.

The days of rolling up random treasure hoards are over; under the new regime the words "Treasure Type S" are gibberish. 4th Edition uses treasure parcels.

The treasure parcel system described on pages 125 and 126 of the Dungeon Master's Guide turns assigning level-appropriate loot into simple maths. You break your entire campaign down into chunks of ten encounters. Every ten-encounter chunk has ten associated treasure parcels. Treasure parcels range from a level-plus-four magic item at the top end down to a measly handful of gold at the bottom end. The parcels might get handed out one after each encounter, or they might bunch up with none in one encounter and two in the next, but presuming players are at least industrious enough to search the room after each encounter they'll walk away with a predictable amount of treasure after completing all ten challenges.

The magic number of "ten" in relation to treasure parcels isn't random; that's how many encounters it's expected to take characters to level up in 4th Edition. A standard level-appropriate encounter gives out one-tenth the XP necessary for a five-man party to gain a level.

A ten-encounter treasure parcel spread for five players contains four magic items, and exactly enough cash to buy two more, providing they're level-appropriate. That has a couple of implications. First, a character can expect to gain roughly one new non-consumable magic item per level. Secondly, because items become obsolete within (roughly) five levels, players should expect at any time to be wearing no more than five or six items of level-appropriate gear. That's an issue, because there's nine equippable item slots.

Luckily, some items never go out of style. Acrobat boots, which let you stand from prone as a minor action, become available at level 2 and are thoroughly useful all the way to level 30. Gauntlets of the ram are the best hand-slot item for a character focused on forced movement from level 8 all the way to endgame (on a Malediction Invoker their property can trigger as often as four times a turn); for everyone else, the (deeply broken) antipathy gloves are ridiculously good.

These non-scaling powers are a bit depressing. Once a character gets a solid pair of boots that won't become obsolete they can afford to snub their nose at anything else for that slot that comes along, selling it for cash and buying the latest edition of their weapon-of-choice instead.

How then, does Thunderspire Labyrinth treat the treasure parcel system? Simply put, it ignores it.

Possibly treasure parcels came late in the 4E development cycle; possibly the authors never got the memo. Thunderspire gives out loot exactly as often as it feels like it, which is roughly never, and takes a perverse pleasure in ensuring that sums of cash are never divisible by five. While it's not quite as bad as Pyramid of Shadows (which seems to contain nothing but Wizard loot), the treasure in Thunderspire Labyrinth also suffers from being overly specific. There's nothing like telling your players they've found a +3 item, watching their faces light up, and then adding that it's a weapon that none of them wields.

The Pig And The Practice Hall

2009-08-03T22:00:00.001+10:00

The Seven-Pillared Hall plays home to several subterranean trading cartels; one of them is the Deepgem Company, owned by the dwarven cleric Ulthand Deepgem.

Recently one of Ulthand's mining expeditions was slaughtered by unknown assailants, and their beast of burden - a dire boar Ulthand had raised as a family pet from childhood - was stolen. A lesser dwarf would want revenge on the monsters that killed his friends and employees but Ulthand will settle for having his pig returned. It's a quest he's not shy handing out to anyone who asks him about the glowing yellow exclamation mark above his head.

Ulthand's boar has, in fact, been captured by gnolls. It's not clear why the gnolls would kill a dwarven mining expedition but leave their (clearly dangerous) pack beast alive, but they have, and the boar now serves as a target in a cruel kind of gnoll archery practice.

Players entering the Practice Hall find the boar penned into a crude enclosure, surrounded by hyenas. Gnoll archers hiding behind a clumsy barricade take turns firing stinging arrows into its side.

There's a wonderful kind of double standard at play here. It's unclear whether the module designers really thought this one through but the dialogue they're expecting from players must run along the lines of, "Animal cruelty! That's awful! Let's bash the skulls of these hyenas in so that we can free that poor pig!"

We'd probably better assume that pigs are more endearing animals than hyenas and move along to the combat. There's an oddity here created by the battlemap. Obviously the major terrain feature is the barricade separating the gnolls from the players (who enter from the north end of the map). Getting into melee with the gnolls seems to require charging and climbing over the barricade.

What's not shown on the battlemap is a corridor linking the doors in the northeast with the doors in the southeast. Players leaving the map at the north end can take a leisurely stroll through the adjacent tunnels and ambush the gnolls from behind, driving them up against their own barricade and easily defeating them.

It's a good example of how what the DM chooses to depict or not depict on a battlemap can focus players' thinking in unrealistic ways. DMs need to remember that players aren't operating in a perfectly rational universe; they're vastly guided by the way DMs present the game, and by altering that presentation DMs can alter players' actions.

In any case once the gnolls and their hyenas are dead, players are left with the issue of the boar. It's half-mad from the abuse it's suffered and if players want to get it back to Ulthand and complete the sidequest they'll need to calm it down. Doing so involves the horrible skill challenge mechanic but neverthless it's the kind of thing I wish Thunderspire had more of. It's a dramatic change of pace from the tactics and room-clearing we've had up until now and it appeals to types of player who Thunderspire has previous overlooked.

If players are successful with the skill challenge they end up with a dire boar following them around. That's awesome. There's a problem, though - the remainder of the Well of Demons is ill-suited to the presence of a large nervous animal. Player are either going to have to chain the boar up in one of these entry rooms, turn around and take it back to the Seven-Pillared Hall, or play the remainder of the dungeon with a noisy ill-tempered wildcard at their side.

Notes and Improvements:

[1] The barricade used by the gnolls is, as-written, hay bales. Really? Hay? What, did they import that from the surface just in case they happened to steal a dire boar? I'm not a farmer, but do pigs even eat hay? It doesn't make sense and you should probably change it to either loose rubble or broken furniture.

[2] The flavour text for the room contains a troubling detail - murals show minotaurs fighting other minotaurs, and the text makes a point of emphasising the minotaurs are unarmed. Knowing the Labyrinth's backstory it's clearly just intended as history but it's irrelevant history. Players, assuming they wouldn't be shown something like this unless it was in some way relevant, may be inclined to think going unarmed is the solution to a future puzzle. It's not, and you should probably take the time to make that clear here.

[3] The Dire Boar is not just a monster, it's also a mount. Players with the relevant feat to unlock a mount's special abilities will discover the Dire Boar's mount power is the awesome furious charge - an eight square charge dealing 1d10+9 damage, pushing the target two squares and knocking them prone, and following up with a further 1d10+9 gore attack. It's a great way of demonstrating how useful mounts can be, so if no-one in the party has the relevant feat DMs may wish to give players who choose to ride the boar a "freebie", allowing them to try out the furious charge for one battle as a kind of introduction to the mount rules.

Keep on the Shadowfell Maps

2009-08-02T22:00:00.000+10:00

I don't normally post on a Sunday, so as to save my work for when people are actually reading, but seeing as people seemed to appreciate being linked to the Prince of Undeath conversion, I thought it wouldn't hurt to direct you to some other resources for the H series modules.

For today it's Loyd Blankenship's fantastic battlemaps for Keep on the Shadowfell, based on the originals by Mike Schley. These are remakes of the printed maps, with the monsters, traps and secret doors helpfully cleaned off, leaving them ready to be printed off for use at your next game or imported into MapTool or other virtual tabletops.

It's just the Keep - for the kobolds, the burial site and the interludes you'll have to use the poster maps included with the published module. If you bought the original PDF or downloaded the free one you're out of luck.

The links all point to Loyd's threads on the Cartographer's Guild forums. The first floor of the Keep is here (encounters 1 to 5), here (encounters 6 to 8), and here (9 to 12), and the second level of the Keep is here.

Naturally, you're all well and truly done with Keep by now and these are of no use to you. But just in case - enjoy!

Eleven Foot Pole at the July RPG Blog Carnival

2009-08-02T09:52:00.007+10:00

Just a quick note to let you know my post "No Roll To Hit: Rationale" is featured in the July 2009 RPG Blog Carnival over at 6d6 Fireball. This month's carnival was on the theme "Dungeons & Dragons" and I have to say I only realised it was on in the last couple of days of the month.

As a result, "No Roll To Hit" isn't the article I would have written to deliberately address the carnival, but (as of today) 69 comments on it seem to suggest you guys found it at least a little bit interesting.

Thanks again to all you fantastic readers of Eleven Foot Pole!

While we're here - I know through the magic of analysis tools that the vast majority of you read Eleven Foot Pole through its RSS feed. So if you're someone who doesn't often visit the actual site, can I suggest you take the time to come by occasionally and vote in the polls? Also, it's incredibly cool seeing all those friendly faces looking out of the Google Friend Connect window so if you have an OpenID compatible identity (pretty much anything these days, most notably Blogger, Wordpress, LiveJournal, Gmail and Yahoo), take the time to sign up as a Follower and add your avatar to the growing horde!

Gnoll Barracks

2009-08-01T22:00:00.002+10:00

Look, gnolls aren't a bad monster, but putting them next to demons just doesn't do them any favours.

Unless the DM has been making a lot of use of the random encounter table, the Gnoll Barracks will be the players' first run-in with Maldrick Scarmaker's gnolls. It features a gnoll huntmaster and his pack of hyenas. Gnolls being a kind of unpleasant hyena-man, it's a natural match-up. There's a couple of gnoll brutes thrown in for good measure.

There's nothing wrong with this encounter. It's a pefectly by-the-numbers dungeon scuffle. There's some humanoids who need killing, and the players kill them.

The sin is only that players have been here before. It's an identical set-up to any number of battles both in Keep on the Shadowfell and earlier in Thunderspire Labyrinth. You could replace the gnolls with goblins, hobgoblins or duergar and nobody would notice.

Compared to the memorable and imaginative encounters elsewhere in the Well of Demons, this is the ugly stepsister. Hurry through it; there's better coming.

Improvements:

[1] Not an improvement as such, as it's strongly suggested in the module itself, but the way to wring the most out of this encounter is by emphasising the flavour. The hyenas aren't just hyenas - they're vicious, hungry animals in an enclosed space. Their howls will echo up and down the stone corridors and be virtually deafening at close range. They should be, really, quite frightening. Of course, that doesn't change the fact that they're level 2 monsters in a level 6 encounter and there's a good chance of them falling over the first time someone breathes on them.

Chamber Of The Well

2009-07-31T22:00:00.003+10:00

Last time we looked at the 4th Edition grappling rules I was a little dismissive. I described the "grab" action as "an exception we did not need to have".

I think I need to backpedal on that.

Okay, in 95% of cases, grabbing is still a bad option for players. But monsters, on the other hand - they can really get leverage from a good grab attack.

The first encounter in the Well of Demons is the Chamber of the Well. The well in question is 10 feet wide and 30 feet deep and completely dry. It does not contain any demons.

I actually had to stop for a minute, coming back to this encounter. Clearly the well in this room is the eponymous Well of Demons. I'd actually assumed that the Well of Demons was a different, larger hole located in the Proving Grounds. The Proving Grounds hole contains a dragon; I was probably letting my memories of the black dragon Khisanth emerging from the well in the original Dragonlance module colour my thinking.

In any case, while there's no demons (yet), there's no shortage of monsters. The room is home to a pair of cavern chokers, chameleonic ceiling-dwellers notable for their long claw-tipped tentacles. There's also a paralysis-inflicting ghoul, and a phalagar. Phalagars are new to 4th Edition in Thunderspire Labyrinth and are basically burrowing tentacled monstrosities.

This is the sort of oddball monster team-up that 4th Edition loves, and this is an example of it done exceptionally well. Thunderspire suggests the four creatures have by a kind of symbiosis learned to work together to turn the entrance into a kind of specialised killing floor, and indeed that's the experience players will have when they trigger the encounter.

I'd mentioned before that the Well was originally a minotaur monastery. When players first enter the room, a sort of magical recorded message starts up, welcoming "seekers of Baphomet's boundless glory" to the Well and urging them to "prove worthy" of his attention. However, before the message can even complete its cycle, the chokers take advantage of the players' distraction to attack.

The chokers are attached to the ceiling. They use their (reach 2) tentacles to make surprisingly effective grab attacks at the players, which flavour-wise represent the tentacles wrapping around their victim's neck and lifting them, choking, into the air. Victims of a successful grab take a whopping -6 penalty to escape, and the choker can use the hapless hero as a body shield to absorb damage dealt out by the hero's allies.

Meanwhile, the phalagar is burrowing underground towards the players. Concealed beneath the heavy stone floor it's completely impervious to most attacks, only offering a vulnerability when it sends its tentacles to the surface to strike. Like the chokers, it's focused on grabs, and is able to target enemies up to four squares away for this purpose. It also has an awesome rechargeable tentacle flurry which imposes grab (and a big handful of damage) on every target within close burst 2. It's a Large-sized monster, so that's a 6x6 area of effect we're talking about. Creatures grabbed by the Phalagar take ongoing acid damage every turn they remain grabbed.

Being grabbed ~~imposes the "restrained" condition. Being restrained~~ imposes the "immobilised" condition. That's where the ghoul comes in. Ghouls can paralyse an enemy with their basic claw attack, but their real viciousness comes from their ghoulish bite, only usable against an immobilised, stunned or unconscious enemy. If the bite lands, it hands out a whopping 3d6+4 damage and inflicts the worst condition in the game - stunned. That's the one that makes you miss your entire round.

Anyone who didn't have respect for the grab mechanics is going to learn it very quickly. Players who've been on cruise control through the last few Duergar fights are going to be shocked to find things getting rapidly out of control as they try to deal with this set of very focused enemies.

I love this encounter. I love the way it showcases very different monsters working together. I love the bait-and-switch of the recorded message covering the approach of the monsters. I love the way it makes the grab rules really work, and I love the three-dimensional feeling of chokers from above, phalagar from below and ghoul in the middle. There are some really excellent set-pieces coming up later in the Well but there's a simplicity and elegance to this first offering that holds a real place in my heart.

Dungeon Masters take note: this is how to start a dungeon. Be surprising, be vicious, and be challenging. There's a short series of unexciting gnoll encounters coming up before we get to the Proving Grounds but despite their weak mechanics there's real tension through all of them. And why? Simply because of this first encounter, which has a simple and well-delivered message for players: heads up - shit just got real.

The Well of Demons

2009-07-30T22:00:00.001+10:00

The third and most significant mini-dungeon in Thunderspire Labyrinth is the Well of Demons.

That's a dramatic name. It's got "demons" right there in the title. But jaded players might be too burned out by the repeated disappointments of the Labyrinth to really get excited about it. "Oh boy, demons," they'll be declaring sarcastically as they make their way to what will probably be another laundry list of unexciting beat-'em-ups. Demons are a classic enemy dating right back to the earliest editions of D&D, and it's just plain cruel to tease them if you're not going to follow through.

So it's great, then, that Thunderspire finally delivers.

The Well is crawling with demons. Your players are probably going to see more of the extraplanar buggers in the next ten encounters than they will in any place outside the Abyss itself. Once the players get past a couple of introductory encounters they'll barely be able to go two steps without running into an Evistro or a Barlgura.

This is the promise of 4th Edition, finally made good: Epic Tier encounters on a Heroic Tier budget. Players don't have to wait 20-something levels to go toe-to-toe with the fiery fury of the planes beyond - they can do it right at the start of their careers, and feel damn good about it all the while.

Demons aren't even the best of what's on offer here. The Well features the best-designed encounters in the module, starting with a exotic match-up against a group of grab-happy abominations, continuing to a trio of clever puzzle rooms and concluding in style with two fantastic set-piece boss battles. This is classic dungeon-crawling done well, and it's almost good enough to single-handedly lift the rest of Thunderspire Labyrinth out of mediocrity and into the ranks of the halfway decent.

So what's going on here plot-wise?

The Well of Demons is yet another piece of local minotaur history. In the days of Saruun Khel the Well was a monastery dedicated to Baphomet, demon god of the minotaurs. It included barracks for the minotaur priests, and an inner complex known as the "Proving Grounds" designed to test the dedication of potential Baphomet devotees.

Today, the Well has been invaded by a band of gnolls. Their leader, Maldrick Scarmaker, is intent on rededicating the Well to the gnoll god Yeenoghu. He's obtained two slaves from the Duergar that he intends to sacrifice on Baphomet's altar as part of the rededication ceremony. These, naturally, are the two slaves the players are still trying to rescue.

Maldrick's got some kind of vague deal going on with Paldemar. Paldemar's giving him... something... and in return Maldrick's providing Paldemar with any "artifacts and items" he finds in the Well. That relationship is never really elaborated on in any form that the players can get to grips with, which leaves the Well feeling like yet another disconnected station on the all-stops Thunderspire railroad. Thankfully, the inherent quality here is high enough to stop you from caring.

The goal for players, then, is to overcome the gnoll guards, solve the riddle of the Proving Grounds, and burst into the inner sanctum of Baphomet just in time to stop Maldrick from sacrificing the captives and completing the rededication.

Sounds easy enough, right?

Poll Result: Striker

2009-07-29T22:00:00.000+10:00

Time for a a long overdue response to the most recent Eleven Foot Poll, which shows that you like playing leaders a lot, but strikers ever so slightly more.

Roles, of course, are something new to 4th Edition. Or at least, the delineation of roles as an explicit design goal is new. The aim is for every class to have something meaningful to do in combat, and with that in mind classes are split up into Leaders (who heal, and provide buffs and other benefits to allies), Controllers (who specialise in area of effect damage, debuffs, and enemy positioning), Defenders (the game's "tanks", who manage enemy target prioritisation and aim to absorb the majority of enemy attacks), and Strikers.

Strikers are probably the simplest of the four roles. Their job is to do damage. It's easy to measure whether you're a good striker - the more damage you do, the better you're performing.

The original Player's Handbook presented three Strikers - the Ranger and Rogue from the martial power source, and the Warlock as an arcane alternative. Subsequent expansions have added the Avenger (divine), Barbarian (primal), Sorceror (arcane) and Monk (psionic).

That's seven of the current (I think) 20 classes. Over a third of the playable class options are Strikers, which may have skewed the poll a little. (Leaders get 6, Controllers get 3, and Defenders get 4, for reference).

Is it accident that Strikers are so dispoproportionately common? Probably not. You'll note that our poll numbers aren't far off the overall class distribution, which suggests that the role proportions more or less line up with the distribution of play styles across the player base. Classes appear to have been assigned roles in proportion to the demand for that role.

So why do people like Strikers so much? The simplicity is an obvious factor. It's nice to know when you're doing your job well. On the surface, Strikers are the most visibly effective part of the team - newcomers to the game can clearly see Strikers doing more damage, while the benefits of the other classes might not be as immediately obvious.

Another issue is that strikers tend to have a high chance to hit. They're less susceptible to the frustrations of seeing a turn wasted on a miss, which makes them that much more enjoyable as a whole.

It's probably significant too that Rangers, Rogues and Avengers are all, flavour-wise, "outsiders". They're easily cast as loners and antiheroes who don't play by the rules and are secretly awesome. As detrimental as that kind of character can be to a game, there's no real question that it's an archetype that roleplayers love. Roleplaying has never been mainstream, and so a lot of players really identify with flavour that sees outcasts being both empowered and valued. It's basic wish fulfilment and it's what D&D does well.

What about you? What is it that you love about playing strikers? Or alternatively, why do the other roles work for you? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Bonus Post: Demon Prince of Undeath Conversion

2009-07-29T11:55:00.009+10:00

Bonus post time: a certain someone has been poking me via email to mention the Demon Prince of Undeath conversion on Eleven Foot Pole.

I need to say this - I heartily approve of being emailed about anything and everything to do with Eleven Foot Pole. It's great to have people I've never met get so interested in what I'm writing that they send me correspondence. That ranks very highly on the scale of awesome.

With that in mind, I'm mentioning the conversion.

What is it? It's a community-driven attempt to reconcile the H series adventures into a single coherent plotline themed around Orcus, the Demon Prince of Undeath. It involves major changes to Keep on the Shadowfell, Thunderspire Labyrinth, and Pyramid of Shadows to keep them on-topic, and includes new plot hooks, skill challenges, and maps.

In short, what you're getting is a way to transform the retail modules into an honest-to-Bob campaign. And if you think it can be done better, they'd love to hear your suggestion as to how.

I know a lot of you come here at least partly to find ways of improving the published modules. So if you haven't already spotted the conversion for yourself you should go check it out over on the official Wizards forums.

Also, community member Myrhdraak is compiling it all into one Dungeon-style PDF with some really great production values. I'd advise reading the actual thread for context but if you want to jump straight to the PDF you can do so here.

Click here for the Demon Prince of Undeath conversion.

Paldemar and the Bronze Warders

2009-07-28T22:00:00.003+10:00

Here we are, two thirds of the way through Thunderspire Labyrinth, and the module's Big Evil has yet to show himself. It's a sad state of affairs - so sad I've barely posted for a week (or at least that's my excuse).

It's time for that to change, though. When players return to the Seven-Pillared Hall after trouncing the Duergar, they learn that they've finally got someone's attention. That someone is Paldemar, master villain of Thunderspire, and he steals a page from Kalarel's book in order to set one of the lamest traps in the history of archvillainy.

I've spoken a little about Paldemar before. He's a Mage of Saruun - one of only two still residing in the Labyrinth - and he's gone rogue. He's dropped out of contact with his colleague Orontor and retired to a hidden structure called the Tower of Mysteries, where he's begun to dabble in the forbidden worship of Vecna, god of secrets and undeath.

Paldemar's plan is pretty straightforward mad sorceror stuff. He plans, firstly, to seize control of the Labyrinth. That's kind of a strange goal, seeing as the Labyrinth isn't exactly a palace of wealth and luxury. For the most part, if Paldemar wants to rule over crumbling minotaur ruins and spiderwebbed tunnels he's welcome to it. Of course, in typical villainous style he won't be content with Thunderspire, and plans to extend his domination to "surrounding lands".

The key to Paldemar's plan are the Bronze Warders. The Warders are giant bronze statues of minotaurs, presumably constructed by the original inhabitants of Saruun Khel and now left scattered throughout Thunderspire's tunnels and chambers. Each Warder is bound to a control amulet; when someone who possesses the right amulet speaks a certain set of mystic words, they become the master of the Warder and can command it to come to life and serve their bidding.

The Mages of Saruun, during their early explorations of the Labyrinth, uncovered several of the control amulets and used their magic to ferret out the control words for them (each amulet requires different words). The Warders now serve as the Mages' elite enforcers, called upon whenever the Mages need a show of overpowering force to keep the rabble in its place.

Paldemar's plan involves the creation of an "infernal machine" which will override the command amulets and bind every Warder everywhere in the Labyrinth to his will. With an army of giant bronze soldiers at his command he aims to wrest the Seven-Pillared Hall from his fellow Mages and rule the area with an iron fist. In a loose attempt to tie Thunderspire in with its eventual sequel, Paldemar's long term goals also include attempting to unlock the power of a vaguely-described "Pyramid of Shadows".

So what does Paldemar have to do with Hobgoblins and Duergar? Really, nothing. The module states that Paldemar has been urging the Bloodreavers on to "new heights of depravity" in an attempt to "sow the seeds of confusion and unrest" within the Labyrinth but exactly how this helps him is unclear. Certainly depravity seems to be business as usual in the Labyrinth. The same Mages who didn't blink at the Duergar running a slave-trading ring out of the Seven-Pillared Hall are unlikely to be worried by a handful of goblinoids getting up to mischief in an old minotaur temple. As for the Duergar, Paldemar doesn't seem to have any connection to them whatsoever.

In any case, despite the fact that the PCs have no dispute with Paldemar, haven't impacted on Paldemar's plans and indeed may not have even heard of Paldemar, Thunderspire's resident Mad Mage eventually decides that they constitute a threat to his plans and forms a half-baked plan to send them to an early grave.

The plan has more in common with a Saturday-morning cartoon than with the genius-level intellect that Paldemar supposedly represents. A kobold named Charrak delivers an unsigned letter to the players offering them some vague and mysterious assistance and asking for a meeting in an out-of-the-way cavern.

It's so obviously a trap that it's more than a little insulting. Paldemar could have at least made the effort to suggest a location that didn't scream "ambush" so loudly, or used a messenger that wasn't of a race famous for its evil and treachery. Plot-wise, it's important that players attend the ambush in order to learn more about Paldemar, so really at this point the module is relying entirely on the players' morbid curiosity to get them turning up for Paldemar's ham-fisted treachery.

Mechanically speaking, the encounter is an introduction to the Bronze Warders. Players who arrive at the meeting site get ambushed by one of the giant metal statues, along with a pair of tieflings who bombard the PCs with ranged attacks from a set of high ledges.

The battle teaches players the key attributes of the Warders - namely, that they have a lot of hit points, they resist damage, and they can knock enemies prone just by moving through their space. Taking one down is an epic process, and the Warders easily win their place as Thunderspire's most powerful and iconic enemies.

The Warder will eventually die, though, and once players mop up the tieflings they'll be treated to the roleplaying cliche of a damning note on their attackers' corpses. The note reveals Paldemar as the instigator of the attack, and goes on to suggest that Paldemar is in league with a group of gnolls who are even now engaged in nefarious business at a part of the Labryinth known as the "Well of Demons". Paldemar, always helpful, provides a map.

Horrifyingly generic ambush aside, the introduction of Paldemar marks the beginning of the "good part" of Thunderspire Labyrinth, so after a quick look tomorrow at the results of the last Eleven Foot Poll we'll get started on the Well and the memorable set-pieces it's home to.

Improvements:

[1] Paldemar may not be introduced until late in the module, but that doesn't mean his plan must be a similar slow-starter. Show off the Bronze Warders early; let the players see Orontor using one to break up a fight, and then highlight more of these giant metal hulks tucked away throughout the Labyrinth - at the entrance to the Chamber of Eyes, for example, or gathering dust in a Duergar storeroom. Paldemar's intention to activate all the Warders should feel epic, and the more of them you've shown off, and the more locations you'e shown them in, the more effective that's going to be when players learn about it - and possibly see it happen.

Bonus Post: The Cutest Lil' Displacer Beast

2009-07-23T22:00:00.004+10:00

Today, instead of me being too lazy to do a post, you get this picture of the world's cutest displacer beast. It's arted by Wuffie, who is starting up a pretty awesome Etsy shop at Elsie Levels Up. You can also find her on Twitter and Livejournal. Her profile info is my writing so if awesome geek art isn't your thing you should at least go have a read.

Wuffie plays Horatio Beverage, elven cleric, in my weekly Maptool game, which has just polished off Rescue at Rivenroar and is moving on to the Siege of Bordrin's Watch after a short hiatus.

If anyone else has D&D themed art or craft they want to show off you should feel free to send it through to starfall2317, at gmail.com, with links you'd like connected to it. If I get a bunch I'll do a post of it.

Side Trek #4: Court of Bones

2009-07-13T22:00:00.001+10:00

They can't all be winners. After three genuinely excellent side treks, the fourth and final encounter presented in Dungeon #156 is merely average.

The Court of Bones has two interlocking hooks; if the DM is using the Random Encounters from the as-printed module, the players may encounter Az'Al'Bani, a deathlock wight. Az'Al'Bani is searching for the hidden tomb of a minotaur necromancer, and he's managed to discover the sole key that will open its ancient doors.

Az'Al'Bani's not the only one looking for the Court; the drow merchant Gendar is on its trail also, and when players return from the Horned Hold with Urwol's skull scepter Gendar is quick to send them on another quest - this time to break into the Court and recover a valuable crystal which was entombed with its occupants.

As written, the side-trek has players hunting down Az'Al'Bani to obtain the key and then assaulting the Court - or, alternatively, players can just anticlimactically pick the lock. That skips over the various intriguing scenarios involved in bargaining with the wight or even joining forces, but to be fair to author Greg Bilsland it's reasonably clear that those aren't explored for reasons of space rather than any blindness to the idea as a whole.

In any case, when players finally reach the Court they've got a textbook undead battle in store. The minotaur necromancer in whose honour the Court was built is, of course, clinging to unlife, and when players arrive he animates in the form of a lethal Specter. He's attended by a pair of axe-wielding minotaur skeletons and a duo of fireball-throwing undead mages.

It's essentially just a hackfest. If the party doesn't have some divine classes available to totally trivialise these undead, victory still requires nothing more clever than a bunch of damage output and some competent tanking. As is, by now, a Wizards trademark, there's a mosaic in the middle of the floor that provides a trivial regeneration boost to enemies who stand on it.

It's not a bad encounter; it's just not inspiring. It's much like any number of other encounters published both in the retail modules and Dungeon Magazine, and it's probably not worth wasting your players' time on now that the Well of Demons is in sight and we're finally getting to the good parts of Thunderspire.

In short, Thunderspire has more than enough average for go around; we don't need to go to Dungeon Magazine looking for a top-up.

Side Trek #3: Houses of Silence

2009-07-11T22:00:00.000+10:00

The Houses of Silence is another side-trek from Dungeon Magazine #156, which takes players to a kind of minotaur graveyard far to the west of the Seven-Pillared Hall.

The impetus to come here arrives from another resident of the Seven-Pillared Hall. Terlen Darkseeker is an explorer who does work as a guide for travellers, operating out of the Seven-Pillared Hall. Recently during his travels he stumbled across the Houses of Silence, where he activated a lingering curse intended (in a rather vague way) to dissuade graverobbers.

Now when he delves too deep into the Labyrinth the curse transfigures him into a violent, uncontrollable werewolf. Terlen doesn't remember these transformations and no-one who's witnessed one has survived to tell the tale. The quest starts when PCs engage Terlen as a guide, fall victim to his lycanthropic attack, and then presumably subdue him until he changes back into a human and learns of his affliction.

Terlen's condition has a charming resonance with the idea of the Underdark as the human subconscious; when he "delves too deep" he loses his ability to reason and becomes a creature of pure instinct. There's not really a lot of chance to play that up but it's still a nice touch.

In any case, players who attempt to help Terlen out will be directed to the Houses of Silence.

Much like the other side treks, the Houses of Silence break the pattern of doors-and-runners that Thunderspire has so comfortably settled into. It relies on an extended (and very dramatic) trap to engage player interest. The main chamber is divided into three forks; the left and the right forks end at single minotaur statues, while the main passage terminates at two minotaur statues holding a gong.

When players approach the gong, or when either of the side-corridor minotaurs make "eye contact" with a PC, the trap springs. Starting from the single statues, oil filled cressets on the walls burst into flame, blasting everyone nearby and engulfing the corridor in an ongoing inferno. On subsequent rounds, the flames progress up the corridor, driving players towards the room with the gong, where the next threat waits - a pair of flame-resistant hellhounds and a wraith that can walk through walls. All three take advantage of being able to enter terrain the PCs can't to deliver vicious attacks with only minor fear of retaliation.

Given the history of the place, the wraith is, presumably, a minotaur wraith, which sadly is not illustrated with the awesome piece of artwork that that concept brings to mind.

It's also worth noting briefly that both the original Thunderspire writers and Greg Bilsland on the side treks have managed to keep their devils and demons straight, which is noteworthy mostly because I always forget and use them interchangeably. Devils hail from the Nine Hells and are associated with gods such as Asmodeus (and indeed, two appear in the Horned Hold). Demons come from the Abyss and pay homage to masters such as Baphomet - and, as expected, both here and in the Well of Demons we'll find only demons, not devils. I've never really grokked the arbitrary distinction but it's nice to see that they're at least keeping their story straight.

My guys didn't get to run the Houses of Silence, so I don't know how it works in practice; it seems like it could either be dramatic and exciting, or misfire and end up with players either locked out of the encounter by a wall of fire or frustrated by the cheap tactics of the hounds and the wraith.

Side Trek #2: The Cisterns

2009-07-10T21:00:00.002+10:00

I cannot express with the English language how glad I am to be done with the Horned Hold.

But before we move on, let's take a look at another Side Trek from Dungeon #156. This one's called the Cisterns, and takes players to an out-of-the-way shrine to Torog, god of the Underdark.

Like much of the optional content of Thunderspire, the Cisterns has a pretty excellent backstory. It draws on Vadriar, one of the characters featured in Thunderspire's description of the Seven-Pillared Hall.

Vadriar is a human sage who has recently stumbled upon a secret trogolodyte temple located near the waterways beneath the Hall. He's discovered that the trogolodytes are planning to collapse the upper levels of the Labyrinth as a tribute to their god Torog (killing everyone within), but upon being detected by the trogs he's become the victim of an evil curse that prevents him from telling anybody what he's discovered or leaving the mountain.

As a result, players are going to find Vadriar as a trembling wreck, absolutely terrified of the apocalypse he knows is coming but powerless to do anything to prevent it. He is, though, able to point players towards a vague threat in the general vicinity of the Cisterns and hope that they're able to join the dots and save the Labyrinth.

The encounter itself doesn't intially seem as good as the set-up. Neither the Trog Maulers nor their pet Grick (a kind of subterranean snake-worm) are very exciting - they're just your basic bruisers. Instead, the encounter relies on a Trogolodyte Curse Chanter to provide flavour and character to the fight, and dual-level terrain to provide mechanical interest.

The players start on an upper level, with the Maulers and the Grick. The lower level has the Chanter, along with yet another instance of the cliched defence-boosting magic circle. There's a 20 foot drop separating the upper level from the lower, which can be safely traversed using a conveniently located slippery slide. In short, the players can get down easily, but getting back up is tougher.

The cleverness here is that the encounter reverses expectations. Up until this point, players have been taught to get into melee with casters as soon as possible and dispatch the hired help once the brains of the operation are squashed. The caster, however, turns out to be entirely un-worried by meele - between its aura and the circle it has a staggering effective AC of 26 - and players who head straight to the lower level will find themselves bombarded by the Maulers' javelin attacks as they struggle to escape the Curse Chanter and return to higher ground. In short, the Chanter is bait in a cleverly executed trap.

In the event players engage both levels simultaneously, the Chanter is able to teleport his allies to his side, where they can all gain the defensive bonus of the circle - not ideal, from the Trogolodytes' perspective, but a strong answer to divide-and-conquer tactics from the players.

I really like this encounter. It does a lot with only a handful of enemies and a very small map. Much like the Tower of Sunset, it's a nice change of pace from the main module content and, provided you can find room in your XP budget for it, it's well worth running.

Too Many Gods

2009-07-09T22:00:00.001+10:00

I am a great fan of focus. The developers of Thunderspire Labyrinth are not.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the pantheon of evil deities that appear in the module.

Thunderspire opens with the Chamber of Eyes, an abandoned shrine to Torog, the King Who Crawls. We move to the Horned Hold, where things are run by Murkelmor, a paladin of Asmodeus. Next we go to the Well of Demons; this was originally a temple to Baphomet, demon lord of minotaurs, but the gnolls who have invaded are trying to re-dedicate it to Yeenoghu, the gnoll deity. Finally we wind up at Paldemar's Tower of Mysteries, where Thunderspire's Big Bad turns out to rather inexplicably be acting on behalf of the lich-god Vecna.

That's five separate Lords of Evil who get name-checked. Vecna actually shows up in person to officiate ceremonies during the final chapter. If we move into the bonus Dungeon Magazine encounters we find a former follower of the Raven Queen and another shrine to Torog.

What's going on here? None of this is central to the plot. These evil gods are being waved at the players for no better reason than that they can be. Torog, Asmodeus, Baphomet and Yeenoghu don't have any particular beef with the players or anyone they care about, and Vecna is so deeply un-committed to his own evil scheme as to abandon Paldemar in exchange for a few paltry secrets.

It's doubly confusing for players who've beaten Keep on the Shadowfell. "Hang on a minute," they'll say. "Weren't we fighting Orcus?" It's typically unwise to pick a fight with a second evil god before you've finished off the first one. By the end of Thunderspire players can have more epic-level adversaries than they have fingers on one hand.

This is the real problem, of course. There's no closure. There's nothing wrong with a brief tussle with Baphomet, providing that it has a conclusion. Thunderspire offers nothing - no beginning, no middle, and certainly no ending - and when it's all over you have to realise that the sole purpose of all these Elder Evils is to lend artificial significance to an otherwise deeply mundane story.

Murkelmor

2009-07-08T09:00:00.006+10:00

There are two ways to get to the Slave Pits; one involves taking the passage through the wights and the empty crypts to reach the Slave Pits through a secret door.

The other involves fighting the ogre at the south gate and then stumbling into the chambers of Murkelmor, commander of the Horned Hold.

It's interesting that you can completely bypass the Horned Hold's "boss fight" - and, in fact, my players did, so I've got no direct experience of how this battle plays out. (That worked out fine, though, as it allowed me to keep Murkelmor around for a role in my substantially modified finale to the module.)

Presuming that you actually run this encounter, though, Murkelmor's a bit of a beast. He's a level 7 elite, with the hit points to match, some absolutely savage at-will powers and a rechargeable heal that can be applied to either himself or his allies.

Once again, though, having a name doesn't make Murkelmor a character. He gets a couple of lines of textbook villain rant when the players breach his room, and then enters battle. This is theoretically the climax of the Horned Hold, but the players can't be invested in defeating this guy because they may well have never heard his name prior to getting here. At the point where players run this encounter, they've got a more meaningful relationship with Brugg than they do with any of the Duergar of the Hold.

Just to make absolutely sure that this isn't a satisfying showdown, it turns out Murkelmor is a runner. If he starts losing, he'll use a secret door to flee to the slave pits, and then double back looking for allies through the rest of the Hold. The dramatic clash of wills teased when the players first enter can devolve into a tedious running battle through a series of rooms they've already cleared.

Improvements:

[1] Forget about the secret door and forget about Murkelmor fleeing. There's nothing he'll find outside this chamber that'll be more satisfying for players than seeing him get beat down where he stands.

[2] Give Murkelmor the chance to show off either his strength or his villainy prior to the battle. Possibly have him visit the Seven-Pillared Hall and throw his weight around before players start the Hold. Maybe have him in the process of murdering one of the captives when the PCs burst in on him. At the very least have the other Duergar tell the players how scary he is. There's just no fun in defeating someone you've never heard of.

The Slave Pits

2009-07-06T09:10:00.002+10:00

NOTE: Sorry about the lateness; Blogger seems to be having trouble with scheduled posts lately. Any solutions appreciated!

The Slave Pits is an important encounter, but there's not a lot to say about it.

This is, in a way, the culmination of the Horned Hold. The room holds three pits, once intended as cisterns. One is still filled with water, but the other two have been emptied out to serve as makeshift slave pens. The captives that the players have been searching for ever since they came to Thunderspire are chained up within the pits.

All the captives? No; two of them are missing, sold onwards to a band of rogue gnolls. The goalposts have moved again, and the PCs are going to be dragged by their nose to yet another dungeon to find the last slaves.

But before the players can start planning their next move they need to survive this encounter. The slaves are guarded by a group of Duergar and a couple of Spined Devils.

The Spined Devils are awkward. Sure, the Grimmerzhul Duergar are aligned (as we'll shortly discover) with Asmodeus, Lord of the Nine Hells, and sure, I guess they can summon up some devil guards. That said, one wonders about a Duergar outpost that uses extraplanar monstrosities to guard its helpless prisoners while leaving a gaping hole in a critical line of internal defence. The real reason they're here, of course, is not for reasons of flavour but simply to provide some variation to the rotation of Duergar we've been seeing since we got to the Hold.

Once we've all suspended our disbelief and accepted the Devils, they actually work quite well here. They fly, which lets them hover above the slave pits and avoid melee. They provide a sense of accomplishment to reaching what should, by all rights, be a rather anticlimactic jail cell at the rear of the fortress.

On the other hand, once everyone stops being impressed by seeing their first Devils, it's all a little underwhelming. The Devils are backed up by only three Duergar; with no option to engage the Devils in melee, the party will swarm the dwarves and neuter them before they can do anything memorable. It's then a simple matter of picking off the Devils from range (providing the party can't immobilise them or otherwise put paid to their flight). The encounter does PCs an accidental favour by forcing them to focus fire.

Questions:

[1] The captives include Gru, "a goblin who was sold by his fellow Bloodreavers to the Duergar." Gru "can provide no useful information about the Horned Hold or the fate of the other two slaves", and he's not foreshadowed during the players' earlier visit to the Chamber of Eyes. What is this oddly specific named NPC doing here? Is he an attempt to replicate sidekick characters such as Splug or Meepo from other modules? Or is he the remnant of a layer of detail that hasn't made it into the final adventure?

No Roll To Hit: Rationale

2009-07-04T14:59:00.023+10:00

The goal is fun, right?

The other week I made the following prediction:

Providing that an eventual 5th Edition continues in largely the same direction as 4th Edition, the next edition of D&D will eliminate the concept of rolling to hit. Powers will always be effective to some degree; only their degree of effectiveness will retain a random element.

And I said if I got comments, I'd provide the rationale. Well, I got (as of today) 23 comments, so I guess that explanation is owed.

1) Minimising player downtime

It's a truism to say you can only enjoy playing the game if you are, in fact, playing the game. When a player has no meaningful input into the proceedings, they're not a player, they're a spectator.

D&D historically has had four key situations in which players were not able to meaningfully contribute. Firstly, when players were unconscious or dead. 4th Edition addresses that issue by making accidental death much less likely, and by giving unconscious players saving throws to avoid slipping closer to "death's door" (with an associated 1 in 20 chance of regaining consciousness).

Secondly, when players are engaged in a challenge which tests the skill of only the most proficient member of the party. Diplomacy is a classic example, where the best speaker is often the only speaker. 4E hasn't done a lot about that, although the skill challenge system appears to at least recognise the problem.

The third situation of downtime is during combat when it's not the player's turn. The "attack of opportunity" system gives players an out-of-turn action under certain circumstances, thus requiring them to pay attention to the board-state. Also, the increased emphasis on team positioning and buffing party members means that players need to stay alert to call for bonuses and request backup.

The fourth and final situation is the most relevant for our purposes, and that is when, during the player's turn, they take a null action. That is to say, an action which creates no change to the state of play. The most common example is rolling to hit and missing. Play goes on, with the player having contributed nothing.

Missing is simply not fun. Having waited a full round of initiative and then achieving nothing is functionally identical to skipping your turn. If you expend an encounter power or daily power and miss, you're actually worse off than when you started. It's hard to argue that powers with an "on-miss" effect, or powers with the "reliable" keyword (not expended on a miss), aren't palpably more satisfying than options with higher rates of risk regardless of the proportionately higher return.

It's a big issue for new players. Coming to D&D as a newcomer and watching roughly half your attacks go wide can make you feel impotent and a liability to the team. It's immensely frustrating and more than a little dull. Newcomers more than anyone need to see their initial experiments yield positive results, but it's hard to optimise at low levels and you're locked out of the most effective power options. Your first experiences with the game can be the sessions where you're most likely to watch entire encounters go past without having achieved anything.

Improving the overall experience, eliminating frustration, and making the game more accessible to newcomers means eliminating the possibility of missing. If you're going to continue to go down the path that 4E has started it's an inescapable conclusion.

2) Tactical thinking

4th Edition emphasises tactical thinking. That is to say, it asks you to choose between known options with predictable outcomes but complex interactions. The real skills it calls upon are not managing risk, but rather efficient targeting, optimised positioning, and teamwork.

Risk runs counter to tactical thinking. It can turn bad moves into accidental successes and solid plans into disaster. Yes - that is a realistic outcome. But it doesn't automatically make for good gaming.

Tactical gameplay is learning gameplay. It's about experimenting with new ideas and assessing their effectiveness. It's about adapting to known external changes and evolving your technique to deal with new threats.

Risk inhibits learning. It provides a discontinuity between action and results. A good idea can be made to seem bad, and sloppy thinking can be hidden behind improbable victory. Risk makes it harder for new players to see where they're going wrong and it's frustrating to experienced players who are denied the results of their tactics thanks to occasional probability skews.

To create a more open, understandable game table, and make the game more accessible for new players, risk needs to be minimised.

3) Redundancy

Rolling to hit is redundant. When players make an attack action, they are making two separate rolls to determine its effectiveness - to hit, and damage.

There's no need for it. Why not have a single roll? Either just a "to-hit" roll, with the margin of success determining the damage, or just a damage roll, with every attack assumed to be successful and only the extent of success in doubt.

Every third thread on the official forums is, "How can I make combat go faster?" When we're looking at the next edition, there's a clear improvement staring us in the face: eliminate the attack roll redundancy.

4) Complexity

The roll to hit is by far the most complex roll in D&D. The to-hit equation is 1d20, plus half your level (rounding down), plus trait modifier, plus weapon/implement modifier, plus feats, plus buffs, plus race/class bonuses, plus conditional modifiers including charging, cover and combat advantage.

All that maths goes to a single question: did I hit? It can be eliminated by uniformly answering: yes.

Maths is not, normally, fun. And in any case, it's not what D&D's here to do. The rulebooks don't bill it as a game of "bold warriors, mighty wizards, and mental arithmetic". There's been a consistent trend since early editions to do away with this kind of number crunching, which covers the elimination of THAC0, the re-engineering of dice rolls to make "high" always equal "good", and a major overhaul of the Armor Class rules.

The multi-variable maths attached to every attack is an albatross around D&D's neck and it's hampering the game's acccessibility. In 5th Edition, it has to go.

5) Over-specificity

Rolling to hit is unnecessarily specific.

Look at it this way: let's say you hit on a 5. So that's 75% of the time. You hit on three out of every four attacks.

Why are we micromanaging? Why not just say you hit all the time, and do ~~33%~~ 25% less damage when you hit? It's the same end effect. And if you want to (despite the above) retain risk and randomness, you just vary the damage, so that the new damage per hit is an average, subject to dice roll.

How it might work.

So if we eliminate the to-hit roll, what does the game look like? What's armour good for? What's weapon specialisation about?

The simplest answer is to put it all into the damage roll. Armour represents damage mitigation, soaking a certain amount of incoming HP loss (which is more realistic anyway). Weapon competency increases your damage, or decreases the effects of armour, or results in debuffs or other non-damage penalties to the target.

Another answer is to rip out the to-hit subsystems entirely. Eliminate them. Feats can concentrate on buffing particular powers or classes of powers; proficiencies unlock new power categories.

The final result, I have to confess, will not look a lot like D&D as it's been understood between its origins and 3rd Edition. It will, in fact, be a hugely different game. But that's clearly not something that's significantly bothered the 4th Edition designers, and in the end result a better game is a better game.

So - that's my rationale. Now go nuts. Defend the roll to hit.

UPDATE: This post was featured in the July 2009 RPG Blog Carnival at 6d6 Fireball, which had the theme of "Dungeons & Dragons". Big thanks to 6d6 Fireball for hosting and for including this article. Now go check out all the other excellent entries!

Monte Cook at Origins

2009-06-30T16:18:00.004+10:00

I don't really have a post for today, but to throw something to all of you who took the time to come looking for one, hey, did you see that Critical Hits have the report of Monte Cook's seminar at Origins 2009?

Cook, a former TSR/WoTC guy and lead designer of D&D 3rd Edition, has spent the last decade living in the indie gaming wilderness as one of its elder grognards. In a bit of synchronicity his comments at Origins run scarily close to the arguments I've been having on the official forums the last couple of weeks. It's a bit disconcerting to find myself agreeing with Cook; I feel dirty.

Origins 2009: Monte Cook "Being a Better Game Master" via Critical Hits.

The Empty Crypt

2009-06-26T22:00:00.001+10:00

Every so often in a published module you get a room that seems to have been forgotten about by the module designers. In Thunderspire Labyrinth we get this small room up the back of the Horned Hold, sandwiched between the Ruined Chapel of the wights and the Duergar Slave Pits.

The module calls it the "Crypts", and offers the following descriptive text: "The remains of about two dozen minotaur warriors lie here in burial niches along the walls. In the southern hallway stands a statue of a grim-looking skeletal minotaur with a greataxe - a minotaur version of the Grim Reaper."

That sounds like the setup for an awesome undead-themed encounter. Even as your players make their way into this room, they'll be sharpening their weapons and patting each other on the back and declaring, "Oh boy! The Minotaur Grim Reaper!" The skeletal reaper is a classic archetype, and here we have a new bull-headed twist on the idea. It's a great way to build on the undead from the last encounter and really tie the Horned Hold into the ongoing minotaur-themed history.

Unfortunately, yet again, it's not to be. The statue doesn't come to life; the dead don't rise from their graves. There is, in fact, no tactical encounter for this room whatsoever, making it the only part of the Hold not covered in this way. Players will be completely baffled as to why nothing in this room is animating and trying to kill them. It does, after all, run contrary to their entire previous experience.

We can't be clear on exactly what was going on here. An oversight by the developers? An encounter cut to fit the page count? Or just a minotaur crypt that genuinely doesn't present a danger to adventurers? We may, in the end, never know.

Endowment Effect

2009-06-25T22:00:00.003+10:00

Thunderspire Labyrinth must have been getting sick of Duergar (I know I was) because suddenly we get a Ruined Chapel full of wights.

This is the Horned Hold's "secret passageway". Once players have reached the western guard post, they can choose to come here via a neglected and disused corridor as an alternative to fighting through orcs, ogres, and a very grumpy paladin of Asmodeus.

The Duergar apparently avoid this area because they're too lazy to clear out the undead that infest it. The undead in question are wights, described here as "long dead human warriors in tattered black mail".

This, of course, doesn't make a lick of sense. In case we've somehow forgotten, the Horned Hold used to be a minotaur fortress. More recently, it's been run by Duergar. How armed undead humans managed to make their way to this single room of the complex is a mystery mortal minds were not meant to solve. The obvious improvement is to make the creatures here either Duergar wights (meh) or minotaur wights (highly awesome).

Players of previous editions know wights as monsters to avoid. That's because of their energy drain, also known as "level drain". That is to say, by merely touching you they could strip you of a character level. Recovering that level by any means other than re-acquiring the XP called for one of several medium to high level cleric spells. Those are spells, naturally, that PCs don't get until many levels later.

The level drain was scary. It was a longstanding tradition. It was one of the memorable things about fighting undead.

But, importantly, it was bollocks. Losing things is not fun. We hate it. In fact, we hate it disproportionately.

In 1980 a man named Robert Thaler noted that, contrary to standard economic theory, people seemed to place a higher value on items that they own than an equivalent item that they didn't. That is to say, people would ask for more money to sell an item that they currently had than they would pay to buy an identical item. He called this the "endowment effect".

In 1990, Tversky and Kahneman went on to demonstrate this as a result of a specific form of cognitive bias called loss aversion. Humans, they argued, are essentially averse to loss. We find losses more distressing than equivalent failures to gain. We are much happier about missing the opportunity to gain $100 than we are about losing $100 we thought we had.

What does this mean for game design? It means that taking things away from players is a big stick. It is a disproportionately big stick. It means that people will make bad decisions when a loss is a possible consequence. It means that people will get irrationally upset when a feature or resource of their character is deleted.

You only need to look at the forums to see this. People hate having their favourite class nerfed. They're not nearly so worried about missing out on being buffed, though. People scream loudly about cancelled D&D Insider features they thought they were getting; they're not quite so vociferous in requesting additional features that haven't already been offered.

D&D 4th Edition has taken loss aversion to heart. Classic "progress eating" game mechanics have been dramatically changed. The Rust Monster, for example, no longer deprives players of thousands of gold worth of magical items without offering commensurate reward. Enemies with "weaken" powers no longer lower stats, and being raised from the dead won't permanently erase a point of Constitution.

And the wight, our feature monster here, doesn't drain levels. He instead knocks off his victim's healing surges. A horrifying permanent loss has been replaced by a temporary elimination of the PC's ability to regain hit points.

It's an improvement. I can tell you, I am absolutely never going to miss having one of my levels drained. That is an experience I am overjoyed to see in the past.

But at the same time, I kind of miss knowing that there were things out there that could steal levels. How are DMs going to terrify low level players now?

Poll Result: Mind Flayers

2009-06-24T22:00:00.003+10:00

A day late and a dollar short; Tycho and Gabe at Penny Arcade have already declared open season on mind flayers. I'm coming in after the first shots have been fired, it seems.

I'm actually a bit blown away by the poll result; the good old illithid was my pick for victor but I'd expected the drow to be running a close second, lavender eyes flashing in the darkness. Possibly it's time for Bob Salvatore to start up a new series about a good-hearted mind flayer living in self-imposed exile, tortured by the brain-eating ways of his kin?

I'm a bit baffled by the two guys who voted for Derro (or possibly one guy on two computers). Really? Derro? I'd love to hear a compelling argument for their awesomeness; I've always considered them the also-rans in the evil dwarf marathon. I guess this is why we have polls; to establish that Kuo Toa are scientifically three times as popular as Derro, despite apparently ~~not even having a Wikipedia page~~ my incorrect spelling of their name.

But let's look at why the mind flayer wins.

Mind flayer and illithid are interchangeable terms; I'm not sure if they're used in connection with each other as far back as the mind flayer's original appearance in 1975 but certainly by the late 80s and the birth of AD&D 2nd Edition they're inseparably pinned together.

Mind flayers are notable for their humanoid appearance, topped by a squidlike head festooned with writhing tentacles. These tentacles burrow into the brain of the mind flayer's victim to feast on the goo inside. They are deeply intelligent, often displaying genius-level cognition, and are naturally psionic, able to deploy a devastating mind blast from which they partly derive their name. In addition, many illithids are accomplished magic-users and they make use of cutting edge magicpunk-style technology (culminating in the titular extraplanar vessels of the Spelljammer campaign setting).

I think the reason the mind flayer has become so iconic is the way it straddles so many horror and fantasy tropes so effectively. Not only is an individual mind flayer a mastermind-level campaign villain, it comes from an entire civilisation of such beings. It's a deadly psion, able to turn your own thoughts against you, and at the same time it's a powerful archmage (some mind flayers ascend to undeath to become a ridiculously-named illithilich.) Its humanoid appearance lets it fit any number of regular character roles, but at the same time it's a Lovecraftian abomination, a Thing-That-Was-Not-Meant-To-Be. 4th Edition has mind flayers once again hailing from the Far Realm, which is in keeping with their whole Elder Gods flavour.

There's also the ongoing theme of penetration and invasion. The mind flayer is one of the horror genre's rape-surrogates. The illithid invades your thoughts; its tentacles drill into your brain; and its spawn, the repellant illithid larvae, grow to adulthood by entering a parasitic and ultimately lethal relationship with a living human host.

Mind flayers are a huge number of successful horror monsters rolled into one; and if the basic illithid doesn't completely meet your antagonist needs you can graft an illithid larvae onto any number of other monsters to create a ridiculous mind flayer hybrid - anything from the half-svirfneblin "mozgriken" to the beholder-illithid "mindwitness" through to the too-awesome-to-be-silly "brainstealer dragon".

Personally the image that stays with me of the mind flayer is of an illithid, its arms folded within its voluminous robes. It doesn't need to unfold its arms to kill you. It doesn't need to move. It controls your brain, and you walk towards it, and it feeds.

Man, I love those guys.

Prediction #1: No Roll To Hit

2009-06-22T18:27:00.003+10:00

Hi all, sorry for the silence. I've been struggling with swine flu's mutated cousin the regular flu, which is less likely to hospitalise me but just as all-round annoying. Interrupted sleep, a constant flow of mucus and a head stuffed full of codeine do not a productive blogger make.

So while I finish up my recovery (and get around to a post about mind flayers I owe you) I'm going to leave you with a prediction for D&D 5th Edition I've been mulling over. It is this:

* Providing that an eventual 5th Edition continues in largely the same direction as 4th Edition, the next edition of D&D will eliminate the concept of rolling to hit. Powers will always be effective to some degree; only their degree of effectiveness will retain a random element.

Think it over in the comments; if you've cared enough to have responses I'll back it up with the logic when I'm recovered.

South Gate

2009-06-17T22:00:00.001+10:00

Theoretically the Horned Hold has two entrances; this is the other one.

There's no good reason that PCs couldn't approach the Hold from this direction (provided they found someone to show them how to get there). However the module obviously doesn't expect players to do that - there's no details on breaking down this door or entering the Hold from this room.

The door, in fact, is a "sturdy double door of iron plate", "secured by a bar inside the room". I think that's supposed to be code for "unbreakable". It's a shame the Duergar didn't install this advanced door technology at their main entrance.

As encounters go, the writers phoned this one in. It's four orcs and an ogre, and it goes exactly as orcs and ogres have gone since the beginning of D&D - they draw weapons and start rolling to attack. The ogre, in fact, "has no tactics", which is suspiciously convenient as the space allocated to this encounter didn't leave room to describe any.

Once again runners are the prime consideration here. Escapees from the Western Guard Post don't stop to back these guys up - they keep moving, heading for the chambers of the Hold's commander. The orcs will flee, too, given a good enough reason, and go provide additional backup to the level 7 elite in the next room.

From a DM's perspective, the significance of this room is mostly that it offers a way out of the Hold. If players rescue the captured slaves without clearing every room of the fortress, this back door is a mere two rooms from the slave pits, offering easy egress without having to mop up the remainder of the Duergar.

Photos From The Front Line

2009-06-16T22:00:00.002+10:00

Surprise! Instead of a post, today you get photographs.

At our last session of Thunderspire Labyrinth the talented Julia, who plays Dreyfuss the human rogue, got busy with a camera. Some of her photos are reprinted today with permission to give you all a look at our game that I'm sure you probably won't care about.

Pictured left is AJ, who plays our group's striker, Tolliver Green, who is totally not a thinly-veiled caricature of a certain DC Comics bowman.

On the right here is Katherine, who's running the group's main healer, Dramia, Cleric of Pelor and disliker of dark, cramped subterranean spaces. We're thinking she might want to rethink her career as a dungeoneer.

These photos were all taken during the Proving Grounds encounter in the Well of Demons. The group were attempting to hole up in a secure room and force a Green Dragon to fight them on their own terms; you can see a certain frustration in Katherine's face as the tactic doesn't quite work and she gets Luring Gazed into the deadly path of the Doom Sphere for the second time in one encounter.

This next one is me. Sorry to everyone who had me pegged as a dashing seducer of women. Unfortunately the large size of the map and my placing at the end of the table meant I spent most of this game on my feet trying to reach my party-destroying Dragon and move it in search of its next victim.

At this stage Wizards doesn't cast a model of a "Doom Sphere" so to represent the giant ball of magical force I broke out my Beholder model and had that chasing players around the inner track of the Proving Grounds.

Here's Julia, who's deployed her artistic genius to provide us with this photo essay. I'd like to say she used her psychic powers to manipulate the camera and take her own picture but actually it's Andy behind the lens for this one.

Julia plays Dreyfuss - thief, bigamist, and essentially good-hearted ruffian. At this stage Dreyfuss is one encounter away from saving his captured children from an evil band of gnolls, but Julia's getting more than a little frustrated because of eight consecutive failed saving throws against the slowed condition imposed by the Dragon's breath weapon.

This is Tony, who plays Alcarian, the group's defender. Alcarian's Eladrin fey step and a range of mobility-focused powers makes him play more like a mark-and-forget Swordmage than the Fighter that he actually is. It's eternally frustrating for me as GM to watch him start each combat by teleporting into melee with the enemy artillery and proceeding to neuter them for the remainder of the battle. However, it's saved the group from wiping several times over so it seems churlish to complain.

Lastly, here's Andy, who's taken up the challenge of playing Hydraan, a Dragonborn Cleric of Bahamut. He delivers a range of melee attacks by way of a greatspear (which has reach 2) and takes an almost unnatural joy in finding places to really make his turn undead and dragonborn breath count.

As an extra bonus, here's the party roster in miniature form. From left to right: Hydraan, Tolliver, Dramia, Dreyfuss and Alcarian. Also a bonus appearance by the rarely used and much maligned d12, which we eventually discovered Julia had been throwing all session instead of a d20 but landing hits anyway.

Tomorrow: a real post, I promise.

Western Guard Post

2009-06-15T22:00:00.002+10:00

The Western Guard Post is the entry to the Horned Hold proper. Regardless of whether players are coming from the Duergar Workshop or the Great Hall, they find that both bridges across the chasm lead to this room.

The setup is this: each of the bridges dead-ends at a door.
The southernmost doors (left-hand side of the map) are "iron-reinforced" and "barred from the inside". Duergar inside the guard post are watching this approach like hawks. They are apparently dead keen on preventing any attacks from their own southern fortress (the one with no external doors).

A little to the north of the Duergar is the bridge to the northern fortress and the outside world. This bridge terminates at an unguarded, unlocked door. Players can come straight from the Duergar Workshop and across this bridge without being detected.

Possibly it's a secret bridge. Possibly the Duergar didn't think that anyone would dare attack the western fortress without first neutralising the southern one. Possibly Duergar just aren't very good at counting past one. Certainly the module gives no reason why the dwarves are focusing an ungodly amount of firepower (including two semi-sentient animated crossbows) on one bridge while completely ignoring the other.

However you run it, though, this encounter is focused on doors.

Players coming up the guarded bridge are in for a world of hurt. The Duergar, watching through arrow-slits, are able to deploy both damage and debuffs against targets exposed on the walkway while gaining superior cover against return fire. The module offers some alternate combat resolution, in the event that players have crossed the bridge "unseen or in disguise", which is a nice change, with characters able to bluff guards, force the door or pick the lock.

If players get through the door or, more sensibly, have used the unguarded bridge, the Duergar are going to want to restrict player movement. The unconventional setup of this area really limits both line of sight and range, and one Duergar standing in a doorway can effectively hold up an entire group of players. The module offers no rules on barring or barricading the interior doorways but if a DM lets either Duergar or players get busy with the doors it can turn the battle into a doorway-based tug-of-war.

It's a shame there's no doorway rules, actually, because controlling these doors is a key part of the fight. Like the last couple of encounters, the Duergar here are more than willing to run for help, and it's a particularly difficult area to catch fleeing dwarves before they get away and alert their friends - who include two elites and a level 8 brute.

By the time my players got through the portcullis, the workshop, and then the numerous doors of this room, they were willing to specifically request that there be no more encounters based around barring or breaking doors.

Cut and Thrust

2009-06-14T22:00:00.004+10:00

There is an attitude in discussing DMing. It is an attitude that says there are many ways of DMing, and they are all valid.

If you've been on roleplaying forums, you've seen this. It says, "You do it your way, and I'll do it it my way, and we'll both run great games."

Well, no.

This isn't politics. This isn't consensus-brokering. We don't all have to get along. I'm not in your game and you're not in mine and it's just fine to claim that one is better.

This is where roleplaying suffers. If DMs were companies, selling a product, some would have more customers than others. Some would have a lot more customers than others.

We need competition; we need debate that won't settle for less than victory. We need to take the position that some games are better, and find those games, and learn from them. We need to remember that although bad DMing is a forgivable sin, it's still bad DMing, and improving involves more than just finding players who are on your wavelength.

Let there be debate. Let there be pride. Lay on, and let there be no quarter.

After all, don't we want a better game?

--
Cut and Thrust, Part 2: This Time It's Impersonal
A late addition to the original post, 15 June 2009

Wow! Well, this post stirred up some disagreement. Which is great. Possibly I've not phrased my argument terribly well though; that's what comes of posting late at night, perhaps. The argument is this:

(a) Some games are better than others. If there can be a "bad" game, which there plainly are (the entirety of this blog being dedicated to that proposition), it follows that there are other games which are better.

(b) Games which are better are better for reasons which are identifiable and recreatable.

(c) All DMs can benefit from having the tools used by "better" games in their toolbox.

(d) We may disagree about which games are better.

(e) If we all agree to disagree we never identify those better games or raise them to the highest level of analysis.

(f) We should therefore not be afraid to defend our beliefs and advocate our ideas to the fullest extent possible.

I'm not sure if it's still so controversial now that I've put it in those terms. Let me know.

The Great Hall

2009-06-13T22:00:00.001+10:00

At its heart, the Great Hall is an exciting and well-tuned skirmish, and providing that you take Thunderspire's regular gaffs with a grain of salt players will probably have a great time here.

This is the Horned Hold's "southern fortress". It lies directly south of Urwol and the portcullis, with a narrow tunnel connecting the two outposts. (Note that north is to the right on the encounter maps.)

The essence of the encounter is a "levelled up" version of the fight the players have just won against Urwol. The orcs from the last area are replaced here by Duergar Guards, who pack a mean warhammer punch, and they're backed up by more of Urwol's Duergar Scouts.

I didn't mention the Scouts in the last post; they're more understandable if you think of them as Duergar Rogues. They can turn invisible roughly every second turn and they do bonus damage when they have combat advantage. In the cramped terrain of Urwol's smithy they were pretty useless but in the more tactically complex Great Hall encounter they can really be a threat to players.

Urwol's role is filled by Rundarr, who's bigger, meaner and all-round more interesting than the Master Smith. Rundarr is an Elite, he comes with 180 hit points, and like the Duergar Champion's he's based on he has the ability to grow in size when bloodied, assuming a Large size template and rolling an extra +2 to hit and +5 on damage. Ironically, this much more memorable opponent only gets a single line of characterisation - "Rundarr's temper is legendary among the Grimmerzhul, who are bad-tempered by nature" - compared with Urwol's three redundant paragraphs of roleplaying notes.

I've written previously that Thunderspire Labyrinth is training players to control "adds", the additional monsters that might join an encounter if enemies are allowed to flee and find allies. Starting now, they're going to have to demonstrate that they've learned the skill.

If any of the enemies from the Duergar Workshop escaped, they'll flee here and warn Rundarr's troops, giving the otherwise scattered Duergar a chance to take up optimum positions. Later, when Rundarr falls, the rest of his command will flee to alert and join up with the western fortress, who as we'll shortly see barely need the help. If players want to keep fighting balanced, winnable encounters they're going to have to take steps to stop the beaten Duergar from escaping.

Almost as an afterthought, this area also contains three human slaves. They're named Arum, Bessa and Calder (only marginally better than Slaves A, B and C), and while they're not the captives the players are looking for they do know the western fortress and make daily trips there to bring the captives food. The module doesn't take the step of saying it, but one assumes clever players could use these characters as part of a plan to gain a slightly less suicidal access into the the western fortress and the "main" area of the Horned Hold.

Probably the biggest issue with the Great Hall is that it's redundant. Players can skip it and move straight to the western fortress (as mine did) and there's nothing here that advances the plot, enriches the atmosphere, or rewards players for exploring. The Horned Hold isn't such a fun area that you'll want to prolong it, so while it's not a bad encounter in its own right it's ultimately just getting in the way of a focused, excitingly-paced progression through the Hold.

Improvements:

[1] Cut the Great Hall out entirely and use its monsters to replace the ones in the Duergar Workshop. Rename Rundarr as Urwol but still use Rundarr's stat block in preference to Urwol's. You'll have one tight, tough encounter rather than two loose ones, and Urwol will now survive long enough to do some talking and give the Horned Hold some of the personality it's otherwise lacking.

Duergar Workshop

2009-06-12T22:00:00.003+10:00

The "delve format" of official 4th Edition adventures creates some odd quirks.

Under the delve format, each encounter is completely self-contained. All the information relevant to the encounter is printed on the same one or two pages, including battlemaps, terrain features, and the complete stat blocks of every monster that appears in the encounter. Very important encounters sometimes get a third page.

The method by which page counts are allocated appears to be this: the encounter is given the minimum amount of space required to accomodate its map and its monster stat blocks. Any remaining white space can then be filled with description of the encounter and additional flavour text.

The first encounter in the Horned Hold ("The Portcullis") had a small map and only used one type of monster ("Orc Beserker") with a very simple stat block. As a result, it fit on a single page. We got almost no information beyond the monster tactics and the terrain rules, turning the encounter into a puzzling and almost insurmountable roadblock with no hints on how players should overcome it.

By contrast, "Duergar Workshop" uses three enemy types, including a named Controller, so it just spills over onto a second page. The authors are left with a lot of white space to fill, so they use it to provide a pantheon of utterly irrelevant background to what's almost certainly going to be a tank-and-spank slugfest.

A little primer: this encounter is home to Urwol, Master Smith, commander of the northern mini-fortress (one of three minor buildings comprising the Horned Hold). Urwol's a Duergar, and as his title suggests he's responsible for forging the Horned Hold's weapons. As a Controller, he's got a whole pile of unique forge-themed powers, including the ability to heat opponent's weapons to hand-burning temperatures and unleash a trinity of vicious area-burst debuffs. Players might have to be reminded that Duergar are psychic dwarves in order to understand Urwol's near-wizardly manipulation of molten metal.

The encounter description includes a big heading, "Roleplaying Urwol", and three paragraphs of notes thereunder. We learn that Urwol is a bully, that he's impatient, that he has a hatred for surface-worlders and particularly dwarves. We hear about his attitudes to his superiors and to the Mages of Saruun. He's vain and confident and proud of his work.

That's all great. DMs should really take the time to pack as much of that into Urwol's first free action as possible, because that's all the time they're going to get between the players bursting into the room with the blood of orc guards still fresh on their weapons and the moment when they identify Urwol as a Controller and focus-fire on him. Urwol has 64 hitpoints and an AC of 20; an un-buffed level 6 Ranger hits him on a 9 and can kill him in two standard actions.

When, exactly, was Urwol intended to be roleplayed? Was it before players murdered the sentries in the next room? Or is he going to have a quick chat with the armed surfaceworlders after they come strolling into his supposedly secure military smithy? Players can get into melee with Urwol on the same action that they enter the smithy; it's entirely possible to eliminate him before he even acts.

In cramped quarters where the players are maintaining momentum from the last encounter, this is going to be a massacre. The Duergar have no room to manouever and they're going to be cut down like wheat by any competent party. It's a complete waste of a named opponent and an incredibly poorly-planned introduction to the Horned Hold.

On the plus side, Urwol had that scepter that Gendar was looking for. Quest XP, anyone?

The Horned Hold and the Portcullis

2009-06-11T22:00:00.004+10:00

The Horned Hold is a fortress. It is a well-defended military installation filled with intelligent, alert, trained soldiers. It is built into the walls of the Labyrinth and straddles a vertiginous chasm over which only two thin bridges allow passage.

There is no way that a group of adventurers should be able to penetrate the Horned Hold and defeat the Duergar inside.

Of course, that's the essence of adventure. Doing the impossible is what makes good drama; the harder the task, the more satisfying when it's accomplished. Typically a D&D adventure posing this kind of set-up would go on to reveal a secret entrance, a clever ruse, or a narrow window of opportunity that players can use to slip inside what should otherwise be an impregnable bastion of evil.

Not so the Horned Hold. The module lovingly describes the Hold's vicious Duergar guards, its reinforced wooden doors, and its only two entrances, which are locked and guarded, and then throws up its hands and asks, in effect, "So - what do the players do next?"

Let's be clear about this: as printed, there is no way into the Hold without teleporting. The module does not offer players the chance to bluff the guards. It does not offer players the chance to disguise themselves. The Hold's "back door" is barred from within and apparently unbreakable, while the front door features a sturdy iron portcullis that can only be opened from the inside.

The portcullis forms the location of the first of the Horned Hold's encounters. Rules are given for breaking down the portcullis - a DC 25 Strength check (requiring a 17 on the dice from even a level 6 character with 20 Strength) - or a total of 60 points of damage delivered to the gate. During the process of breaking down the gate, five orcs standing behind the portcullis have free rein to shoot the players with crossbows, poke them with spears, and run for help and alert the remainder of the Hold.

That's the total of the encounter. It's a railroad to certain death. This is, as printed, the only assailable part of the Hold, the portcullis must be breached to proceed, and there's no way to breach the portcullis without giving the guards inside time to go for help.

There are some possible ways to survive the encounter as-written. An Eladrin or a Warlock might teleport through the portcullis and open it from the inside. Someone with the power to fly or climb might make their way around the fortress exterior to the bridges spanning the chasm (although they'll still be stuck between two locked doors while Duergar inside shoot at them). Diplomacy or deception might prevail, although the module doesn't seem to contemplate this scenario or describe any particularly effective lies or disguises; neither are the orcs given any needs, wants or fears. It would be nice, though, if the module gave the slightest clue as to how it expects players to make their way into the Hold.

As a last note, the Horned Hold isn't forgiving. If players leave the Hold for any reason after completing this encounter, they return to find the portcullis repaired and a new garrison of guards defending it.

Questions:

[1] The encounter description for the portcullis lists some exhaustive mechanics for dealing with players who climb over the barricade on the ledge leading up to the gate (leaving them standing on the edge of the deep chasm). The orcs aren't going to leave their well-defended guardpost - why do we need such complex terrain rules for the area on the ledge outside?

[2] The ceilings here are apparently 25 feet high. Even remembering that the Duergar have re-purposed what used to be a minotaur outpost, that's a high ceiling. Why the copious headroom?

[3] If this encounter wasn't already enough of a headbanger, the module notes that Duergar who survive the Trading Post brawl will return here and warn the fortress, resulting in even more orcs waiting to snipe at the players as they struggle with the portcullis. Is that really intended to be a survivable encounter? Are players really supposed to be punished for not murdering semi-peaceful merchants by way of a Total Party Kill?

The Wisdom of 1989

2009-06-09T11:39:00.004+10:00

This is incredibly old news to me but it occurred to me that it might be fresh to some of you. It's an article written in 1989 by game developer Ron Gilbert, best known for his work on the original Secret of Monkey Island, about puzzle design and storytelling in adventure games.

"Most good adventure games are broken up into many sub-goals. Letting the player know at least the first sub-goal is essential in hooking them. If the main goal is to rescue the prince, and the player is trapped on an island at the beginning of the game, have another character in the story tell them the first step: get off the island. This is just good storytelling. [...] It's very easy when designing to become blind to what the player doesn't know about your story."
- Ron Gilbert, Why Adventure Games Suck (And What We Can Do About It)

It's a great article for DMs and for interactive storytellers generally and if you've managed to remain ignorant of it for the last two decades then take the time to go read it in full right now.

Gendar the Drow

2009-06-04T22:00:00.001+10:00

Gendar is the Seven-Pillared Hall's resident information broker. He's a dark elf, but, as is the fashion among drow these days, he's abandoned the Lolth-worshipping ways of his people in order to live a solitary existence as an exile.

Characters who took the "Trade Mission" fetch quest prior to coming to Thunderspire will find that Gendar is their quest destination; he'll take their delivery off their hands and introduce himself as a dealer in "old treasures from the Labyrinth". It's unclear whether that's code for "magic items", but it probably is, as there isn't otherwise an item-seller in the Hall.

Gendar's also got a side-quest for the PCs. It's entitled "Treasure Seeker", and it has Gendar tasking players to "recover" an ancient skull scepter from a Duergar in the Horned Hold. It's one of Thunderspire's better side-quests, because (a) it occurs somewhere that the players were going anyway, and (b) "skull scepters" are an item thematically linked to Orcus, which again ties players to what will eventually be the overaching plot of the module series.

I'm actually more than a little frustrated that my players missed Gendar entirely, and never picked up this quest.

The Forgotten Realms conversion for Thunderspire in Dungeon #156 fleshes out Gendar some more and gives him a handful of extra treasure-seeking sidequests. To be honest, Thunderspire didn't need more quest hooks - it's already got way more than the players can meaningfully interact with, given the pacing and XP budget - and these ones are particularly unhelpful, as they send the players to places that aren't detailed in either the module proper or the supplementary Dungeon Magazine material.

Finally, Gendar sells information. In return for big wads of money, or as payment for quests completed, Gendar will hand out information about the Labyrinth and its denizens. Exactly what information he might give out isn't detailed, but you can imagine it might include the back route through the Horned Hold, the location of the Court of Bone, the solution to the Proving Grounds, and maybe even Paldemar's surprising secret master.

Players who decide not to fight at the Trading Post, or who forget to leave some Duergar alive for interrogation, can pay Gendar in order to get set back on track towards the Horned Hold. Sacrificing money in order to not have to fight is the closest Thunderspire gets to a non-combat problem resolution, so anyone who goes this route should take a bit of time to bask in it before moving on into the next round of Duergar-killing.

Grimmerzhul Trading Post

2009-06-03T22:00:00.002+10:00

Following events at the Chamber of Eyes, the players will know that the captured slaves are in the possession of Duergar - but they won't know where these Duergar might be. So it's back to the Seven-Pillared Hall to look for clues.

The most obvious place to start looking is at the Grimmerzhul Trading Post, where the Duergar come to do their business with the residents of the Hall.

Thunderspire does its typical bait-and-switch here. It starts off describing the Trading Post by saying, "The Duergar here aren't interested in fighting but depending on the PCs' actions, a fight may break out."

So, great. This is a diplomacy encounter, then, right? The players are going to get the relevant information out of the Duergar by wit and deception, and they'll only end up in combat if they make a mess of the chatting?

Wrong. The Duergar "don't say much, answering in as few words as possible and being evasive if asked probing questions". Further, "the guards order the PCs to leave if [..] the characters press them about slave trading. If the PCs refuse to leave or if they try to enter another part of the trading post, the Duergar attack."

So it's a railroad. Once again, talking is only a prelude to the inevitable hitting-things-with-swords phase of the encounter. Just to reinforce the point, the encounter ends by reminding DMs that there's only three ways the players can find the Horned Hold - interrogating a captured duergar, ransacking the trading post, or (and I'll come to this option in another post) paying an exhorbitant price to the Hall's resident drow.

Combat in the Trading Post raises an ugly problem for continuity in Thunderspire Labyrinth. The Trading Post lies within the boundaries of the Seven-Pillared Hall, and its residents are largely peaceful members of that community. It can't be said that the Mages of Saruun are unaware of the Duergar propensity for slave-trading - they clearly permit the Duergar to do their business in full knowledge of the proclivities of their people. So when the players go deliberately causing trouble, why on Earth wouldn't Orontor descend on them with the full force of his magic and his animated statues?

One answer is that he needs their help to find his rogue brother Paldemar. But if the guardians of the Hall go making excuses for the players now, it significantly undermines their authority from that point forward. The supposed wrath of the Mages is what forces good-aligned surface dwellers to co-exist with Brugg and the other disreputable types dwelling in the hall. By ignoring this unprovoked attack on peaceful traders, Orontor (and the DM) are risking the start of a town-cleaning crusade , which at the very least is a significant diversion from the adventure that Thunderspire has planned.

As is often the case, none of this is a difficult problem to clean up for a confident DM, but it's another occasion of the module as-written being wilfully perverse, and holding out roleplaying with one hand while clubbing you with the combat-stick held in its other.

Bonus Post: XP Totals

2009-06-03T21:17:00.005+10:00

Everyone loves bonus content, right? Here's an extra post in addition to the one queued to publish at 10 PM.

Eleven Foot Pole commenter Brian took up a challenge I set when I was talking about Thunderspire's XP budget. He's gone away and done the maths to bring us the total XP handed out by each of the three modules of the H series. I think that's incredibly awesome and I'm secretly gratified that it doesn't turn out to contradict me. I'll give you his words:

Brian: I have totals for H1, H2, & H3. Assumptions are that all encounters are finished, one major quest is awarded per module, and all minor quests within them (Find the Boar, etc.) are completed.

H1: 4047
H2: 11447
H3: 25838

This'll obviously vary somewhat if you don't do Quest XP, skip parts of dungeons, etc. but it looks like you end up on the cusp of level 11 at the end of H3 if you actually manage to clear the whole thing out. It also means that you do indeed end up over-leveled if you add in side treks and random encounters without adjusting XP. It is possible to skip/miss parts of H3, though, so that might not be a big deal... depending on how complete your party normally is.

--

Thanks Brian! And you can check out his blog at The Amber Tower.

Poll Result: Combat and Diplomacy

2009-06-02T22:00:00.002+10:00

The latest Eleven Foot Poll is in and the numbers say that 47% of you like combat.

That's no surprise; it's like saying you enjoy shooting things in Halo or rolling dice in Snakes & Ladders. Mechanically speaking, combat is 4th Edition, and it's certainly the best designed and most intricately elaborated part of the 4th Edition package.

That being so, I talk about combat at least every other post, so I'm going to skip right past your love of bashing things and look at the runner up: diplomacy.

Diplomacy is the odd man out on the list of poll options. It's anomalous because it's not supported by rules. 4th Edition spends quite a bit of time detailing the mechanics of shopping, of looting, of levelling up, and of overcoming traps. It's got rules for skill challenges - in fact, it has a bunch, with the original skill challenge mechanic having been errataed, revised, updated, explained, apologised for, and then featured in an extended series of patronising and contradictory articles in Dungeon Magazine. The 4th Edition focus on battlemaps lends itself naturally to mapping, and in as much as Dungeons & Dragons is a game where players make choices that have consequences puzzle-solving is built right into the foundation.

So where's the diplomacy? We've got skills called Diplomacy, Bluff and Intimidate you can roll against, and when you roll against them a bunch of times in succession we call it a skill challenge. But is that really a rules system? Is that really a game? Or is diplomacy just an extended session of improv acting that gets inserted in between the things that 4th Edition actually cares about?

There is a dilemma that arises whenever your character enters a conversation. It is this. Is conversation intended as a challenge to your character - that is, a test of the accumulated words and numbers on your character sheet? Or is it a challenge to the player - a test of skills and abilities possessed by the human portraying the character?

Dungeons & Dragons - and indeed, most RPGs - have never resolved this duality. D&D tries to have it both ways. It's both, it says. And it suffers as a result.

It's not a problem we have with combat. Combat is clear - it's a challenge to the player to deploy the resources represented by their character to achieve the best tactical result. There's a division of skill (player) and resources (character).

In conversation, however, there's not that clarity. On whose side does the skill fall? Are resources a relevant issue?

One approach to take is that both skill and resources lie with the player. The words the player says are the words their character says, and the DM makes a decision as to how NPCs react. In the absence of strong mechanics for combat, this typically makes for the most exciting and interesting gameplay.

It has its problems, however. If the player is the mouth of their character, the character can only ever be as intelligent, as witty, as eloquent and as confident as the player. Naturally poor speakers - those with stutters, with weak English, who are overshadowed by their louder peers - are disproportionately penalised - especially given that the scrawny and obese have no problems leaping and smiting all hours of the clock.

How do statistics fit into this model? When a half-orc with an intelligence penalty delivers a stunning well-rendered argument through their player, which just makes sense, do we all ignore it because "it didn't sound that smart"? How smart is too smart? What debate can an Intelligence 9 character aspire to that an Intelligence 8 character can't?

On the other hand, we can treat the character's abilities as resources, and the player can apply them. Need to convince a guard to let you in? Roll Diplomacy. If you roll high, we'll assume you said something sensible-sounding. We never hear what's actually said, and the fact that characters' skills are accurately represented comes at a cost to immersion in the game world.

We also have the issue in 4th Edition that conversation resources are infinite. If you can Bluff one goblin, surely you can bluff every goblin? Can not one character with maximum Bluff swindle his way through an entire dungeon, leaving nothing for his allies to do? Combat uses an attrition model, where victory typically comes at a cost to healing surges and power availability, but a successful use of Diplomacy leaves the player in the same strong position that they started.

Many DMs opt for a hybrid model - get the player to say something, and depending on how good they sound, give them a modifier to their roll. I've been known to do it myself. But isn't this the worst of both worlds? We're averaging the skills of the character and the player out. The weak speaker knows that no amount of stats will fully compensate for their lack of eloquence, and the player with the gift of gab knows they can safely ignore the "talking skills" because they can use their own abilities to even it out.

As written, if 4th Edition had to choose a camp, it would seem to be a mechanical approach. All dice rolls, all the time. The shame of it is, if it had explicitly chosen to go down that path it probably could have come up with much better rules. It would be entirely possible to design a system that made a conversation as dynamic and interesting as combat, without overly abstracting talking into something artificial.

Imagine a system of conversation points - physical tokens assigned to you in proportion to your stats that you can spend to "get a word in edgeways", "make your opponent's argument look weak", "cite supporting facts or precedent", "call for support from onlookers" or "stir emotions". We could create a system where the resources to create a strong argument are finite (requiring important decisions from players on where to spend them) and derived solely from the character. Points might refresh during an extended rest, but in the short term they're a valuable, exhaustible resource that should be saved for when they're needed. It would work well with a hybrid system as even the eloquent player knows that he'll have to have points available in order to get a chance to be heard.

I'm actually surprised that in my travels through the RPG world I haven't, to my memory, come across any "finite resources" conversation mechanics. Have any of you readers seen any? Leave your experiences in the comments.

Duergar

2009-06-01T22:00:00.002+10:00

Duergar are silly.

There is the germ of a good idea lurking in the Duergar soul, but they are in essence, concept, and execution silly.

It starts with their name. Duergar (pronounced "DWER-gar") hardly rolls off the tongue; that's not really their fault, though. Although the Duergar mythos seems more akin to the Norse "Dvergar" (dark dwarves), the particular D&D spelling is lifted straight from the Northumberland dwarf-men of English mythology.

The silliness continues in their concept. Dark Elves, their spiritual kin, have a strong hook - they're backwards elves. They live in caves instead of forests, they worship evil instead of good, and they have dark skin instead of fair. Everyone can get on board with the idea of things having an evil twin.

Duergar don't quite make the cut, though. As "backwards dwarves" go, they're sub-par. Their "evilness" largely amounts to living underground, being relentlessly mercenary, and having a fundamentally grumpy disposition. An untrained observer might find it tough distinguishing them from the good version.

It gets worse. Time and subsequent editions have not been kind to the dark dwarves.

D&D 3.5 established that Duergar were naturally psionic. Possibly it was hoped that "evil psychic dwarves" was more memorable than mere "evil dwarves". Among the inherent powers of these psychic dwarves was the ability to increase their size, becoming giant dwarves. (As Order of the Stick points out, an oxymoron.) Evil psychic dwarves have many excellent roles in literature, all of them played by Michael J Anderson, but the ability to "hulk out" defeats any aspirations the psionic Duergar had to pulling off "creepy" rather than "ludicrous".

4th Edition delivers another savage beating to Duergar self-respect. Says Thunderspire Labyrinth: "Duergar beards and hair conceal long, stiff spines that carry a burning venom. They can pluck and hurl these quills like daggers."

Apparently so ubiquitous is this quill-plucking that the Monster Manual 2 defines it as their racial trait. Dragonborn breathe fire, Eladrin teleport and Duergar throw their hair at people. This is in addition to their psionics, apparently - the Duergar Champion is still kitted out with his super-growth hormones, and will not hesitate to deploy a Large miniature base the second he gets bloodied.

These, then, are the theme enemy for the second of Thunderspire Labyrinth's mini-dungeons. As players get ready to explore the Horned Hold, they'll be looking forward to a whole mess of fighting against size-changing mind-reading hair-throwing little people. The stuff epics are made of.

Random Encounters

2009-05-30T22:00:00.003+10:00

One of the most memorable things about previous editions of Dungeons & Dragons was, for me, the tables.

I loved the tables. As a 12-year-old, I could spend hours at the back of the 2nd Edition Dungeon Master's Guide just rolling up hordes of loot for imaginary Ancient Gold Dragons. You were using 2d10 to simulate a number from one to one hundred, and if you happened to roll that double-zero you knew you were adding something extraordinary to the loot pile.

Hand in hand with the loot tables went the random encounter tables. If PCs were travelling overland, or deigning to camp in a dungeon, or exploring some unmapped part of the city slums, the DM could get out a handful of dice and hit them with some roaming group of random nasties straight from the darkest corners of the Monstrous Compendium. Few were the heroes combing the sands of the Desert of Desolation who would expect to come face to face with 2d10 flumphs!

Okay, let's be honest - the tables were rubbish. The Deck of Many Things alone could derail a game and the 1-in-200 chance of finding it on the corpse of a random orc was a campaign-destroying timebomb waiting to go off. Having a night's sleep disrupted by 2d6 bandits or 1d3 rabid dire bears was not fun, it was tiresome.

The tables were rubbish. But they were great rubbish. 4th Edition takes them out completely, and I think that may have been a mistake.

Here is a thing about humans: we are bad at assessing probability. We do not intuitively understand long odds and we disproportionately value the unlikely. We respond illogically to random reward schedules and the knowledge that a one-in-a-billion payoff could be right around the corner will keep us buying lottery tickets in defiance of the mathematical improbability of returning a profit.

Put simply: random tables don't have to make sense. We will endure 1d3 rabid dire bears again and again in the knowledge that if the DM had rolled a 96 on that table we'd be getting a wish-granting genie. We'll keep fighting the 2d6 bandits in the hope that next time the random encounter table will deliver a modron, or a tarrasque, or an asswere, or something else that we'd never normally see in a serious campaign.

Put simply, we'll enjoy a bad idea because of the promise of a disproportionately unlikely payoff. We're dumb like that, and if being dumb means we can enjoy things that don't make sense, then it's a curse with a shiny silver lining.

So: Thunderspire Labyrinth comes with a random encounter table.

If PCs crawl around in the Labyrinth too long, or go somewhere the DM wasn't expecting, or just if the DM was feeling bored, there's a table to roll on. The module provides 10 complete level-appropriate encounters that tie into the flavour and mythos of the mountain. Better yet, each and every encounter comes with a backstory and is either the end of a side-quest or the start of one.

A treasure-seeking wight, for example, drops hints of a loot-filled minotaur graveyard (coincidentally detailed in the Dungeon Magazine side treks). A mad dwarf attempts to enlist PCs in his one-man feud with his clan. My personal favourite is a gelatinous cube attended by three wraiths - the undead are bound to their corpses, which the cube is still slowly digesting. By my reckoning, there's more story in each of these random encounters than there is the rest of the module combined.

The encounters could have been the high point of Thunderspire, and it's a shame that there's a few impediments to their use. One is the XP budget I mentioned in the last post- the biggest and meanest of these encounters gives players nearly a half-level of XP all by itself. (Speaking of which, the option of rolling randomly for these encounters was surely tongue-in-cheek - a DM who puts a level 4 party up against a level 8 random encounter is asking for an accidental party wipe.)

Another issue is that none of these encounters really tie tightly into the main plot. At best they're supplemental (and redundant) to the key areas - there's five rooms of gnolls in the Well of Demons; do we really need another two random encounters of them? At worst, they're completely tangential to what's going on in the central quest chain - it's great to hear about a distant ruin filled with treasure, but if players want to check it out, they're going to be doing it instead of the content the module had planned for levels 5 and 6, not as well as. The problem with level-appropriate content is that there's only so much of it you can do before you level.

Anyway, it's nice that the module plans for the possibility that players would rather go randomly exploring than slog through a tedious sequence of rooms filled with Duergar, but it probably would have been better off just spending the time and page space making the Duergar suck less.

I really, really love this random encounter table for its intention, for its content, and for including a gelatinous cube, and if we're going to have 4th Edition random encounter tables this is absolutely the way to do them... but ultimately it doesn't work with Thunderspire. It's asking you to make a choice - Thunderspire, or random encounters - and it's not a choice that leaves Thunderspire looking good.

---

Notes:

[1] This article is entirely rhetorical; I did the maths, and then ignored it. The actual 2nd Edition chance of having a Deck of Many Things turn up in orc loot is 1 in 5,000 lairs, with no chance of finding one on a random individual. The wish-granting sort of 2nd Edition genie is either a common Efreeti or the ultra-rare Noble Djinni (representing 1% of Djinni civilisation). Both must be captured before they will grant wishes. You'll find these monsters on 0.51% of random encounters in tropical or subtropical desert, or 1.53% of random encounters occurring on the seventh level of a dungeon complex (chance of finding one on the sixth or eighth level of a dungeon = zero).

Side Trek #1: Tower of Sunset

2009-05-29T10:55:00.014+10:00

As with Keep on the Shadowfell, the material presented in Thunderspire Labyrinth is supplemented by a couple of articles in Wizards' online Dungeon Magazine.

Dungeon 156 presents a series of "side treks", additional encounters to be inserted between Thunderspire's main hubs. Unlike the ones for Keep, the Thunderspire ones are reasonably decent. They've got new enemies and situations, and they do more than just remix battles the players have already beaten.

The main obstacle to using these side treks is pacing. Thunderspire is operating on a fairly strict XP budget which it's already significantly blowing. The module is supposed to take players from level 4 to level 6 but most groups will be a high level 7 or low level 8 by the time they're done, even without harvesting XP from quests or random encounters. As it turns out, the final encounter of Thunderspire is tough even for super-players, but the next module (Pyramid of Shadows) isn't so robust, and is really expecting PCs to have only just hit level 7.

One solution is to water down the XP. Dropping the reward-per-encounter lengthens the Thunderspire experience without over-levelling the characters. I've mentioned before, though, that the level 4-6 range isn't something worth prolonging, so that might not be the right option here.

In any case, if you do find time to use the side treks, the first one (entitled "Tower of Sunset") is pretty good. A witch and her two gargoyle pets have been harassing travellers on the roads near Thunderspire, and players are sent to the very peak of the mountain to find the witch's lair and defeat her.

This is the only time that players will get to see the upper reaches of the mountain, or traverse a portion of its exterior, so it's a great opportunity to provide a sense of scale and context to Thunderspire's typical gloomy corridors. The witch herself is a Shadar-Kai, a race native to the Shadowfell, and that forms a nice way to tie things back to the party's experiences in Keep on the Shadowfell and to further foreshadow their eventual campaign against Orcus in the paragon and epic tier modules.

The witch is a speaking, sentient creature; players might contemplate diplomacy. If they do, though, they haven't learnt Thunderspire's lesson - swords first, questions later. The side trek has the witch launching into combat mere seconds after players enter her tower. She fights with the aid of a "shadow hound" and a pair of iron defenders (a rather silly kind of metal dog-golem), and then retreats upstairs to gain the aid of her gargoyles.

The gargoyles are problematic. The quest hook suggests that the gargoyles are the real problem here, and calls for their "elimination". However, the encounter doesn't provide their stats and they're not included in the XP budget. A quick look at their write-up in the Monster Manual reveals they're significantly higher level than the players and even if the PCs have a way of assaulting their near-impenetrable defence stats it will be a long and tedious process to bring them to justice.

In my game I changed the goal to "loot the tower" rather than "kill the gargoyles"; after the witch was defeated the gargoyles fled, and everyone got to do a victory dance. It's hard to see what the writer actually intended, though.

Puzzling gargoyles aside, this is still a strong encounter, and it's a nice change from the hobgoblins and duergar that the first half of Thunderspire is drowning under.

Improvements:

[1] Getting your players involved in the side quest might be tricky - after all, those slaves aren't rescuing themselves - and the implied time-limit may dissuade characters from taking on busywork. In this situation, you can substitute the rather lame quest hook with something more story-centric. Possibly the Witch is the only one who knows where the Chamber of Eyes can be found? Or maybe the assault on the Chamber turns up no clues, and only the mystical powers of the Witch can alert players to the Duergar being their next target?

Moving Goalposts

2009-05-26T22:00:00.003+10:00

The players may have defeated Krand and finished the Chamber of Eyes, but there's a question still remaining: where are the slaves?

The whole point of assaulting the Chamber and grappling with the Bloodreavers was to rescue the innocent surface-worlders who the hobgoblins had enslaved. It's annoying, then, that when the mini-dungeon is complete no rescuing has occurred.

It turns out the Bloodreavers have sold the slaves to a nearby faction of Duergar (evil dwarves). There are a couple of random Duergar included in the last battle to help set up this link, and if that's not enough for players to put two and two together, Krand (like any good villain) is carrying a note on his body to make sure even a half-ogre can tell where the plot will be going next.

That's great for moving the players on to another enemy-packed killfest, but from the players' perspective it's unsatisfying. They've just slaughtered their weight in hobgoblins, and at the end they're no closer to achieving their aims than when they started. The goalposts have moved.

The combat is good in 4th Edition - so good it can lead to backwards thinking. It can become tempting to use the plot as the way of leading players to the next fight. That's the reverse, of course, of using fights as a means of furthering the plot. It's a trap that Thunderspire falls into both here, and over the course of the next mini-dungeon.

Combat should be about something. It's more that just the triumph of the players over the monsters - it's also about the triumph of order over chaos, or community over selfishness, or life over death. At the end of each and every battle, players should feel that they've achieved something larger - that the world has changed as a result of their actions.

You can't move the goalposts. When your plot has a climax, and the players survive it, you have to give them something. Whether it's a horde of cheering villagers or the discovery of an ancient and powerful secret, the final defeat of a hated rival or just blowing up the dungeon after they leave, there has to be both closure and progress. It's not acceptable to just say, "Great, but can you do it again with dwarves?"

If you're running Thunderspire there are a couple of ways you can mitigate the damage here. One is to foreshadow that the slaves have been on-sold long before players get to the Chamber; their goal then becomes not to free the slaves but to discover their location, which is something they'll fully achieve. Another way is to emphasise that the slavers are about to mount a new expedition - this time to the Seven-Pillared Hall, or some other place that the players care about; by cleaning up the hobgoblins the players have saved named NPCs who matter to them from a horrible fate.

Whichever way you choose to go, though, you'd best make it good, because there's still a long slog ahead through the Horned Hold before we finally get to what passes for Thunderspire's "good bits". In the mean, I hope you like Duergar, because everything we just saw in the Chamber we're about do again. With dwarves.

By Contrast

2009-05-24T22:00:00.002+10:00

I went on something of a scavenger hunt through my house today; it didn't turn up what I was looking for, but it did reveal my complete set of the original Dragonlance modules (DL1 through 13), compatible with the first incarnation of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

Flicking through the first module, Dragons of Despair, I was struck by some of its similarities to Keep on the Shadowfell. It features a small town (Solace), a semi-distant dungeon (Xak Tsaroth) and an expectation that the players will travel from the town to the dungeon and kick some butt.

Unlike Keep, it features some 80 encounters, three artefacts, a new player race, a foreshadowing of the future progression of the module line, a hundred square miles of fully fleshed-out overworld terrain, an eight stanza poem detailing the module's distant backstory, and a song, complete with sheet music (!).

It's hard to see under what circumstances 4th Edition would bestir itself to include sheet music in a module, which makes me suddenly disproportionately sad.

On the other hand, it should be said that the pre-rolled party that come with DL1 mixes third-level characters with sixth-level characters, it's very easy to lose the thread of the main plot while exploring the overworld, and as awesome as Raistlin is in the novels, schlepping around with 8 HP and the devastating might of Sleep for six months of play just does not cut it when it's you holding the character sheet.

Torog's Shrine

2009-05-23T22:00:00.002+10:00

Torog's Shrine is the climax of the Chamber of Eyes.

If players are happy just to kick down the Shrine's main doors, they're in for a treat. The central chamber of the Shrine is dominated by a massive Dire Wolf, who'll immediately occupy players while Hobgoblin Archers snipe from a surrounding balcony. As the encounter goes on, reinforcements arrive from the bedrooms to the north, including one of those Hobgoblin Warcasters I like so much, and eventually the dungeon's chief villain, Chief Krand.

It's a tough fight, but an exciting one. The raised balcony is not just physically higher but symbolically higher, and players making their way to Krand on the upper level will be fighting a literally uphill battle. It's tremendously satisfying to storm the balcony and wrestle with the dungeon boss beneath the intimidating gaze of the huge Idol of Torog.

However, if your players are either smart or stealthy, they're much more likely to avoid the main doors and clear the bedrooms first. It's a strategy that turns an exciting set-piece battle into a staid tank-and-spank in a dull, narrow corridor. The Dire Wolf is made irrelevant (due to its size it can't fit into the living quarter corridors), the utility of the archers is greatly diminished, and surplus melee characters will have nothing to do while the party tank single-handedly takes on all seven of the humanoid opponents.

It's safer, to be sure. Competent parties who use this back route will find it fairly easy to lock down their enemies and murder the hobgoblins at a laid-back pace. But it's not much fun. There's nothing thrilling about kicking down a line of tactically-neutered enemies one at a time. It almost feels as though players are being punished for their competence.

In D&D, survival isn't the greatest reward a player can gain; in fact, it's a distant outrunner. Excitement and adventure are the reason players come to the table in the first place and there can be no higher encouragement of players than giving them an extra helping of awesome. When players perform well, the game should get less predictable, not more.

The wolf-and-balcony fight should have been presented to every group. It's potentially one of the module's best fights and Thunderspire does itself a disservice by allowing players to miss it. The module's mistake is that it lets the better players dodge it; instead, it should have let the better players own it.

Let's see rules for mounting the wolf's back and riding it back towards the hobgoblins. Let's see an option to use the wolf as a stepping stone for vaulting straight to the balcony. Let's have the damage that the big stone idol does if you knock it free from its base and roll it down the stairs. The two-level terrain is a classic swashbuckling cliche and the developers really missed an opportunity here by not taking it to its ultimate extreme. It's hard not to imagine a chandelier in the room, so strong is the urge to swing on it.

The lesson is: don't be afraid of your climactic fights. Don't think that avoiding or minimising them is something your players should aspire to. When you've got a big bad guy and an interesting map to fight him on, revel in it.

It's a mistake, unfortunately, that Thunderspire will make twice more, before finally overcompensating in its eventual conclusion.

Adds

2009-05-22T07:00:00.002+10:00

Thunderspire Labyrinth is keen on training you up in a new type of tactical complication. It's a mechanic that players of online games know as "adds".

In 4th Edition, combats are usually divided up into encounters. One encounter is an appropriate challenge for a balanced party. Adds occur when monsters from one encounter flee to an adjacent one, and then return with allies. These new monsters are additional to the encounter's original roster - hence, "adds".

Adds are a bad thing for players. In a best case scenario, they'll make your encounter significantly harder. In a worst case scenario, they'll get you killed.

The main bad guys in Thunderspire Labyrinth are hobgoblins, duergar and gnolls. Each of these factions is both cunning and tactically competent. They will not hesitate to go for help when things go sour. If players want to make progress without being constantly on the verge of death, they'll have to take careful steps to contain fleeing foes and prevent adds.

It's an issue in the Chamber of Eyes. Areas are heavily interconnected and segregating encounters is tricky. Luckily it's a small dungeon, and the final encounter in Torog's Shrine is specifically built to rely on unavoidable adds.

It's also an issue in the Horned Hold, though. The Horned Hold features 40 monsters divided into eight quite tough encounters. The enemies are fighting on their home ground with the assistance of well-designed defensive emplacements and terrain that heavily disadvantages invaders. Players will need to brush up their skills in the Chamber of Eyes, or have some severe problems in the Hold.

Adds present a problem for the DM. The added realism involved in monsters who run for help comes at the cost of potentially exterminating parties who get unlucky or make minor tactical errors. Missing a runner is an easy thing to do, with disproportionately devastating consequences.

As written, Thunderspire's solution is generally to state that monsters will only run for help once they are the last man standing. This has the advantage of being predictable. It's also an easy situation to prepare for, as generally the last surviving monster has already lost hit points and is in base-to-base contact with at least one player.

It's interesting to note the tactical changes required to deal with runners. Stopping escaping monsters places a higher premium on ranged attacks, and on mobility. Characters with shift or teleport powers are ideal to track down fleeing enemies; low-mobility melee characters (such as melee clerics) will feel frustratingly impotent by comparison. The Avenger, introduced in the Player's Handbook 2, seems purpose-built for this very task.

It's not a topic I've seen discussed a lot on the official forums; I'd be interested to hear the experiences of others with runners and adds in 4th Edition. Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Refectory

2009-05-21T07:00:00.000+10:00

Sometimes you look at an encounter and can't help but feel it only exists to fill out a map.

Players who've completed the Guard Room can proceed straight to Torog's Shrine to wrap up the Chamber of Eyes mini-dungeon. All roads from the last encounter lead either to the Shrine's big double doors, or to the series of living quarters that adjoin it.

However, if players walk past the double doors and down a tiny side corridor, they can reach the Refectory, a room filled with a mix of goblins, hobgoblins and humans who are apparently spoiling for a fight.

The Refectory's sole claim to fame as a tactical scenario is that it features a cramped entranceway. If players are reticent about coming through the western doorway, the hobgoblins can effectively block the only way into the room and delay the adventurers while their allies get help through the secret passage in the east.

There's nothing to be gained here by players. The secret passage yields no advantage for characters who find and use it, and the only notable loot is a +1 lifedrinker scimitar. It's not a great discovery, as scimitars are a sub-optimal weapon - they compare poorly to longswords, the other military heavy blade, trading the longsword's valuable +1 to hit and "versatile" property for a lousy "high crit" keyword (enabling it to do an extra 1d8 damage on a critical hit, the equivalent of just over 1HP every five rolls).

Luckily, if players come here after completing the Torog's Shrine finale, the riff-raff quickly flee, sparing everyone from a dull a pointless battle.

Improvements:

[1] Delete this room from the map and forget it exists. It's a dull repeat of the fights in the Guard Room and the Shrine, and for that matter it's strongly reminiscent of the Into The Mountain encounter and the hobgoblin area of Keep on the Shadowfell. Move your players quickly onwards towards more interesting content, and don't look back.

No More Minions

2009-05-20T07:00:00.002+10:00

Thunderspire Labyrinth has no minions. Not one.

It may have been a deliberate stylistic decision, but I suspect not. I think Thunderspire was being written while the 4E rules were still in flux, and Richard Baker never got the memo that minions were a D&D thing now.

Minions are a new thing to 4th Edition, although the concept's been floating around in games like 7th Sea for over a decade now. "Minion" monsters have the defences and special abilities of a regular monster, but they do fixed damage rather random, and they die as soon as they take damage.

They're a great mechanic. Killing a minion is just as satisfying as killing a real monster - maybe moreso - and they let the DM field enemies on a scale that would have slowed previous editions to a crawl. They let players really feel like they stand head-and-shoulders over the average opponent, and the ineptitude of minions makes "real" monsters even more impressive by comparison.

Minions aren't just a flavour issue. They're built right into the game balance.

Warlocks gain a minor bonus every time they drop an enemy to zero HP. So do Battlerager Fighters. Both these characters are custom-built for removing minions from the battlefield. Wizards, Druids, and any other area of effect class are more effective when there's more minions on the board, as their powers can hit more targets and yield a much higher proportionate reduction in the enemy's damage-per-round. Paladins get better when they get surrounded, and Fighters get a lot of value out of Cleave-ing onto adjacent minions to earn two kills for the price of one.

Rangers, Avengers and Rogues, by contrast, can be significantly hampered by minions, who are able to restrict their mobility at little cost and render irrelevant the large damage totals that a striker could otherwise deliver.

So when Thunderspire forgets to include minions in its encounters, it's a real issue. If you're playing through this module, you're going to find levels 4 through 6 are the era of the striker, with high damage ruling the day, while other classes feel as if there's something fundamentally missing from their game experience. There is - it's minions.

Improvements:

[1] Wherever possible throughout Thunderspire's combat encounters, remove one regular enemy and replace it with two minions of equivalent level. In large combats, swap two enemies for four minions. You'll find the fights are better paced and more satisfying.

EDIT: It's been suggested in the comments that three or four minions per normal monster is a better ratio, and I agree. Depending on the effectiveness of your characters, you may want to go as high as five or six.

[2] A real danger throughout Thunderspire (which I'll be talking about eventually) is what MMO players refer to as "adds". Outnumbered monsters routinely flee to adjacent rooms and bring back allies, which can quickly turn a balanced encounter into a party-killer. You can kill two birds with one stone by declaring all non-named adds to be minions and awarding only half XP for their defeat.

There Will Be Blood

2009-05-19T13:30:00.010+10:00

The Narthex presented an interesting option for players. Rather than just barge through the front door of the Chamber of Eyes, they could trick or reason with the goblins inside to gain entry.

That's great, but if the end result is avoiding combat, Thunderspire Labyrinth wants none of it. The next encounter, entitled "Guard Room", states:

If the adventurers enter through the double door, regardless of how they gained entry, the goblins recognise them as foes and attack.

That's an imperative. There will be a fight. And if the players avoid the main doors and creep in through the balcony?

If the PCs approach from the balcony and avoid being noticed, they gain a surprise round.

That's a surprise round of combat. The initial flirtation that Thunderspire had with non-combat conflict resolution ends here, and doesn't resume for quite some time. From this point in, the players will be wading to victory over the corpses of their enemies whether they like it or not.

That's not all bad. Combat is what 4th Edition does best. And if we remember back, one of the possible quest hooks required players to eliminate the Bloodreavers, which was going to be tricky to achieve without a bit of hack-and-slash.

The real problem is that the players are offered a choice at all. Giving them three options for entering the chamber when they are all just going to result in combat will make players feel railroaded. If there's not going to be a choice, you're better off being honest and leaving a direct confrontation as the only available route right from the beginning.

Narthex, Defined

2009-05-17T07:00:00.002+10:00

I love how roleplaying builds your vocabulary.

The average person on the street is unlikely to know a glaive-guisarme from a voulge. They probably don't know where one wears a periapt or how one wields a shillelagh. Not so the roleplayer. These are all tidbits that a life misspent in dungeon delving will indelibly etch upon your brain.

A quick browse of the official D&D forum shows that, by and large, the fanbase is unusually literate, especially by comparison to the trolls native to many videogaming fora.

It's not surprising. Simply looting a room will expose players to tomes and talismans, braziers and censers, phylacteries large and small, and all manner of potions, philtres and unguents contained within a plethora of vials, phials, decanters and gourds.

Here's a thing, though. You're probably familiar with magic librams from which you can learn fell dweomers. They're the type of thing you'd find in a magocracy.

Those are some great words - libram, dweomer, magocracy - but as it turns out, they're not, in the strictest sense, authentic. In fact, dweomer and magocracy in all probability trace their first uses back to the late Gary Gygax himself, in his first edition of Dungeons & Dragons (along with the term "magic-user", apparently never previously invented). Libram is a coinage of author Jack Vance. For those who doubt me or simply seek further information, Stephen Chrisomalis has a great article on this topic from which I've liberally stolen.

Today those not au fait with their religious architecture will be learning a new word. A narthex is, apparently, the entrance or lobby area of a church or temple. Here in Thunderspire's Chamber of Eyes we find that the first room of the mini-dungeon is described as the Narthex, and provides a place for players to group up and plan before engaging with the monsters now residing in the ruined shrine.

The Narthex has two critical features. One is the giant temple door (the one inexplicably decorated with a beholder). As one might expect, the hobgoblins within the temple are closely guarding the main door and won't open it unless tricked, reasoned with, or intimidated.

The other feature is the high balcony along the chamber's north wall. The module explains that in the dying days of the minotaur empire, priests of Torog would appear on this balcony to preach to pilgrims clustered on the level below. The balcony includes a door that leads into the temple, which is significantly less guarded than the main entrance.

It's a change of pace for players fresh out of Keep on the Shadowfell - this is a challenge that can't immediately be overcome with combat. To progress, they'll either have to convince the goblin guards to let them in the main entrance, or make the tricky climb to the balcony and sneak in through the balcony entrance.

It's all in vain though. The players aren't, ultimately, granting themselves a reprieve from combat. They're still going to have to fight in the next encounter. The only question is what tactical advantage they gain (or lose) while entering battle.

A Thousand Words

2009-05-16T07:00:00.002+10:00

Thunderspire Labyrinth comes with a chunky handful of art to jump-start your imagination and bathe players in raw atmosphere. Pictured above is the Chamber of Eyes Narthex, the first area of that mini-dungeon.

Module-specific art is a fantastic resource. Wizards' access to the world's best fantasy artists is one of its greatest advantages over the competition, and it's always a pleasure to wallow in the sumptuous graphics that come as part-and-parcel of Dungeons & Dragons.

It's a little unfortunate, though, that the art in Thunderspire doesn't always match the module. Take the picture above. It represents the following descriptive text:

Two fearsome looking statues squat on either side of a stairway leading up to double doors. Inscribed upon the doors is an image of a great eye with multiple eye stalks, as well as a symbol of a circle with a crossbar rising out of it.

Well, the statues are there, and so are the stairs (sort of). We've got an eye, but where are the eye stalks? And the circle-crossbar motif (the symbol of Torog) is nowhere to be seen. Much like with the map of the Labyrinth, it seems the artist wasn't working from the final text of the module.

The image is also a little disappointing in that it doesn't depict the most important feature of the room. A balcony runs along the room's northern edge, terminating at a second-storey door that opens into the hobgoblins' lair. It's a deliberately-placed opportunity for players to try an approach other than just bludgeoning their way through the front door. It's sad, then, that the front door is the sole emphasis of this picture.

Luckily, the remainder of the art is pretty solid, and with the un-troubling exception of a picture of the Horned Hold that doesn't quite seem to match the battlemaps, players and DMs can look forward to a selection of great images to enhance their Thunderspire experience.

Bonus Post: Rules As Written

2009-05-15T15:00:00.001+10:00

This is an edited version of one of my own comments to my post on Rules Lawyering. Commenter Alex suggested I post it in its own right, so here it is. If you enjoy, great. If not, look forward to a real post tomorrow.

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In discussing D&D 4th Edition on the official forums and elsewhere, there's a lot of importance placed on the concept of Rules As Written (RAW). It's something that can be difficult to understand for those who've made the transition from previous editions.

Prior to 3.0, large tracts of the D&D rules were skeletal. Not only did the rules envisage you creating your own rules to resolve many conflicts, but the Rules As Written were in many places contradictory and unplayable. As a result, the tradition of homebrew is so deeply embedded in the D&D community that playing 100% by-the-book is psychologically repellent.

It's an attitude we need to change, though. D&D has evolved, and the design philosophy behind it has sharpened. 4th Edition specifically intends to be a comprehensive ruleset, at least in so far as it applies to combat, and for better or for worse it's not content to leave lacunae, loopholes and handwaving

As such, Rules As Written is an essential concept for use in discussion. Everyone homebrews, but there's only limited utility in discussing everyone's homebrew. If you take homebrew as the default state of play, you never end up with better core rules. Your game becomes increasingly self-customised and the value you're getting from your purchased official material becomes progressively less.

To design and develop a better game it's essential that the discussion engages with the rules as written. Having a vague dissatisfaction with a game mechanic and ignoring it in your home game is great for one group but it's much better to precisely identify why the rules as written do or not work to improve the game for everyone.

I, for example, don't use the lighting rules. They're just too much trouble. But I understand how they work, and if a future expansion ever does something that makes them attractive again I'll revisit them.

The RPGA (Wizards' official organised play organisation) confines itself strictly to rules as written. And I think that's good for the game. Knowing that there's a place where the literal interpretation of rules will be viciously exploited in any way possible provides a spur to the developers to make better and more robust rules.

I've spoken before about how the philosophy of game design in videogaming is decades ahead of where RPGs are at, and I think this is one reason why - there's no "homebrew" in that medium. You have to get it right.

The Chamber Of Eyes

2009-05-15T07:00:00.002+10:00

The Chamber of Eyes is the first of Thunderspire Labyrinth's mini-dungeons. It's the lair of the Bloodreaver Slavers, and if the party are serious about rescuing the Slavers' victims this will be their first stop after reaching the Seven-Pillared Hall.

But what is the Chamber of Eyes?

As I've mentioned previously, Thunderspire is obsessed with its minotaur-themed backstory, even though the minotaurs never actually turn up. The story of the minotaurs is basically a re-telling of the legend of Moria from The Lord of the Rings.

Long ago, the minotaurs came to Thunderspire to build a great city in honour of their god Baphomet. They created a vast empire that stretched from Thunderspire to the borders of the Underdark. However, they delved too deep, and discovered that the lower caverns lay beneath the shadow of the deity Torog, the Patient One, known as the King that Crawls.

The Patient One got his claws deep into the minotaurs; sects to him sprang up, temples were built, and a nation once dedicated to Baphomet turned to the worship of an even darker and more vile patron. Civil war raged between the Torog followers and those faithful to Baphomet, and in the end both sides fell to a violent madness that consumed and destroyed the entire race.

None of this is at all important to the players, but in the Chamber of Eyes we start a kind of reverse archaeological tour of the minotaurs' holdings, beginning at a temple to Torog built in Saruun Khel's final days, and eventually continuing to a civil-war era fortification and finishing at one of the original temples to Baphomet.

Minotaurs and Torog have long since abandoned the Chamber of Eyes, which lies some distance from the Seven-Pillared Hall, "deep within the labyrinth". The Bloodreaver Hobgoblins have taken over the abandoned ruin and now use it as a headquarters.

It would have made sense, given the above, to call the area, "The Temple of Torog" or "The Cursed Temple". Neither of those are terribly imaginative but they have the advantage of being both descriptive and firmly in the D&D tradition. Instead the developers went the extra step and called the place "The Chamber of Eyes".

It's not just a name. The approach to the Chamber features a lintel carved with "five staring eyes", and the door of the Chamber itself shows an image of "a great eye with multiple eye stalks".

Even as your players come to this doorway, they'll be sharpening their weapons and patting each other on the back and declaring, "Oh boy! Beholders!" Beholders are a classic enemy and one of the great things about 4th Edition is that the Monster Manual comes complete with low-level versions of iconic monsters, so that even a 4th-level party can tangle with an Eye Tyrant.

Unfortunately, once again, it's not to be. There's no Beholders in the Chamber of Eyes, or anywhere else in Thunderspire for that matter. Possibly they're hanging out with the Minotaurs and the Mages of Saruun. Never mind that the developers inexplicably drew a Beholder on the dungeon's door - it's all just a fake out. If you don't reset their expectations quickly, your disappointed players will spend hours searching the Chamber for secret doors, convinced they still haven't found the room with the Beholder in it.

What we do have in the Chamber of Eyes are some very cantankerous hobgoblins and a big frikkin' wolf. Which is good, and all. I suppose. But wouldn't a Beholder have been great?

The Mages of Saruun

2009-05-14T15:00:00.005+10:00

Thunderspire's Seven-Pillared Hall is governed by the Mages of Saruun, the arcane order who tamed this section of the Labyrinth half a generation ago.

They're clever enough that they've subverted several of the ancient minotaur magics to their own use, including the giant Bronze Warders that they use as guards, and they're powerful enough that both the Drow and Duergar are wary about angering them.

The mages have a secret, though - they're not actually present. Regardless of how many Mages might once have dwelt in the Labyrinth, only two remain. One, Paldemar, has gone rogue, and takes the role of Thunderspire's final villain. The other, Orontor, remains in the Hall, trying to keep things ticking over despite the absence of his peers.

The disappearance of the Mages is never explained. The module offers that Orontor "keeps the fact hidden that he is the only one of the Mages of Saruun currently in residence in the hall". It also seems that the Mages have been gone for some time, as Paldemar went rogue "while the Mages were away", and, as we'll eventually see, his schemes have been in motion for an extended period.

Where did the Mages go? The preamble to the Tower of Mysteries area suggests they "departed Thunderspire to engage in the various arcane studies that often occupy their time", although wherever they've gone it seems that Orontor can't contact them, as he ends up needing to hire adventurers to check up on Paldemar.

Given the central role of the Mages in Thunderspire's setting, it's baffling that we aren't told their whereabouts.

It may have been a smart choice, though. It's important that events in Thunderspire can only be solved by the players. The Mages represent a potential deus ex machina that the developers have wisely taken off-stage. Their uncertain whereabouts sends a clear signal that summoning them back to the mountain is not an option, and that whatever salvation is ultimately achieved will come through the direct action of the PCs.

Questions:

[1] Despite there being no current information on the Mages, the backstory gratuitously volunteers names for three of the order's founding members - Hasifir, Niame and Samazar. It's a suspicious abundance of information, given that the three aren't referenced anywhere else in the module. Are these an in-joke - possibly holdovers from one of the developers' previous campaigns?

Poll Result: Rules Lawyering

2009-05-14T07:00:00.000+10:00

So - another Eleven Foot Poll draws to a close. The question this time was "As a DM, which of these player behaviours annoys you most?" and you've thankfully avoided a humorous tie between "indecision" and "no team focus" by expressing a clear hatred of rules lawyering.

A couple of years back I was privileged at a convention to meet Steve Jackson, creator of the roleplaying game GURPS. It's a game is known for its almost endless supply of supplements, expansions, and conditional rules, and speaking on that topic he said, "I would rather be dragged through a knothole sideways than play one of my own games using all the crunchy bits."

Here's the thing: in a roleplaying game, rules aren't rules. They aren't laws that govern the universe and they aren't immutable commandments governing the one true way to play the game. They're a toolbox; a list of options available to DMs to aid in resolving conflicts and stimulating desired player behaviour.

DMs should use the rules. They should understand the rules and know why rules have been crafted in the manner they have. In well designed games - and 4th Edition is a well designed game - the rules are deliberately crafted to achieve a particular goal, in preference to other systems which were trialled and found wanting. A DM modifies the rules at his peril, knowing that he is substituting his personal brainwave for something that has the benefit of experience and playtesting.

At the end of the day, though, the rules belong to the DM. They live in his toolbox and they only come out when he wants them to. If the DM decides that today is the day for a screwdriver instead of a hammer, the players can point out that they like the hammer, but not demand its appearance. The player who thinks they're entitled to the hammer is a player who's mistaken.

Rules lawyering is the manifestation of that mistake. Rules lawyering stems from the belief that the printed rulebooks represent a higher authority than the Dungeon Master, and that in times of dissatisfaction they can be appealed to in order to provide relief. But they are not a higher authority - only, at the best of times, a wiser one. A player dissatisfied with their DM's games is best served to argue not using their rulebooks, but using their feet. The game your DM runs is the game he runs - if you don't like the game, don't turn up to it.

Surina

2009-05-13T10:06:00.011+10:00

Surina doesn't work.

The Thunderspire Labyrinth developers obviously think she does. They give her half a page and a stat block, making her the most fleshed-out character in the Seven-Pillared Hall. But as printed, she's just not a success.

Surina is a female Dragonborn Warlock, on something of a crusade. She's apparently the veteran of past campaigns against gnolls and suchlike in other parts of the world, and she's brought her war with her into the Seven-Pillared Hall. The module describes her as agitating for aggressive action against "the evil factions within the Hall" (the duergar and drow) and she's engaged in an attempt to turn the Hall into a kind of armed base-camp for military expeditions into the Underdark.

Her story arc is a traditional tale of corruption. She's letting her zealotry guide her into some fundamentally bad decisions involving violence and intolerance, and eventually someone's going to get hurt as a result. It doesn't help that she's picked up an Imp companion somewhere who's giving her some mischievously terrible advice.

That's a great character, but it just doesn't fit Thunderspire Labyrinth. The players can't get involved in her story. The module has the players scheduled to fight the Duergar in Act 2, before they head off to the Horned Hold. If they get into a fight early, they're going to significantly complicate things later, and when it is time to take on the dwarves they don't need any encouragement.

On the flip side, the players aren't likely to want to stop her, either. She's right. The Duergar and Drow are vile, malevolent slavers who bring pain and misery to everyone they meet. If Surina announces an intention to declare war on the entire Underdark, the best the players can do is pat her on the back and say, "Go get 'em, tiger!"

Much like Brugg, Surina is ultimately an accessory character - to be used or ignored as your particular game demands - but the problem really is that she has an arc. If you want her to help the players when they attack the Duergar, or confront the players if they get too friendly with the bad guys, then it really works best if you introduce her early. On the other hand, if you do introduce her early, you're in danger of your players jumping straight on her Duergar-slaying bandwagon the moment they meet her and picking a fight they're not ready to win.

This is the problem with the Obvious Questgiver model of adventure design. Both Keep on the Shadowfell and Thunderspire Labyrinth are replete with random strangers who have tasks they'd like someone to do. So when a basically well-intentioned Dragonborn idly mentions that it'd be swell if someone murdered the entire Duergar race, players are all too likely to obligingly note it in their quest logs.

Brugg

2009-05-12T16:11:00.010+10:00

I love this guy.

Brugg is one of the many denizens of the Seven-Pillared Hall. He's the face of the non-magical enforcers employed by the Mages of Saruun. He's your typical brutish, aggressive ogre, and players will likely butt heads with him several times over the course of the adventure.

His job is to "keep the peace", "collect protection money", and "act as muscle for the mages". It doesn't require the DM to read far past his Chaotic Evil alignment and his devastating Greatclub attack to know that Brugg isn't going to be buddy-buddy with the players.

In the ordinary course of events, this is the kind of bully players would swat in the opening act as a warm-up to getting down to the real dungeoneering. However, his status as an employee of the Mages puts him in a unique position.

There's no question that the Seven-Pillared Hall only exists by the grace of the Mages of Saruun. It's fear of their power that keeps everyone in line, and lets halflings, tieflings, duergar and drow commingle without murdering each other in the street. If a little rough-and-ready hired help is the price of that peace, it's a price most of the Hall's merchants are willing to pay.

As such, Brugg is a nuisance that players are going to have to put up with. Getting physical with the ogre may well have dire Mage-related consequences, which means that the DM can play Brugg as loud and swelteringly obnoxious as he likes for much of the adventure before the big thug finally gets his comeuppance.

It's good drama. Brugg brings a sense of tension to the Hall, and helps define its rough-cut frontier charm. He's the physical face of the Mages' magical muscle, which (as we'll eventually see) is critical in maintaining the Mages as a real, active presence in the story.

It's also good roleplaying. When players see Brugg threatening their new friend Rendil, they're going to have to resolve the situation without combat. When Brugg demands an "entrance tax" from newcomers, they'll need to pay up or do some fast talking. Brugg is a first step towards reversing Keep's "all combat, all the time" game philosophy, and if he'd been followed up with more of the same, Thunderspire could have been a memorable and compelling adventure.

What Brugg represents, of course, is the rival. He's the perpetual challenge to the players' superiority, a challenge that can't simply be erased by violence. Ideally, there'd be a Brugg in every adventure of every campaign. He's a spur that keeps players striving to be better, in the knowledge that their every mistake lowers them to the level of the peanut gallery.

I think, though, that the best part of Brugg was getting to put the awesome ogre miniature above on the table.

About Face (and the Seven-Pillared Hall)

2009-05-12T13:24:00.001+10:00

Sorry for the delay. Long work hours sometimes get the best of posting. But the delay has given me time to reconsider my opinion of the current adventure. I've been saying that Thunderspire Labyrinth is, in the final analysis, a good module.

But... that's just plainly not true.

I'm not saying it's Keep on the Shadowfell. It's not nearly as rampantly delinquent and it's got a good supply of strong ideas scattered up and down its spine. But it's a flop. It's an adventure straining against its own constraints, unable to make its scattering of strong points work together as a cohesive whole.

We'll get into why soon enough (providing I'm not sidelined by more 50-hour work weeks) but for now my schedule says I should be posting about the Seven-Pillared Hall.

Thunderspire Labyrinth's quest hub is the Seven-Pillared hall, a large cavern which houses the offices of a number of influential trading companies. The area serves as a kind of business precinct, where merchants of the surface world come to do business with the drow and the duergar. The whole area is watched over by the Mages of Saruun, a mysterious order of knowledge-seekers who tamed this part of the mountain a half-generation ago.

The place feels like a frontier town. There's grizzled prospectors, unscrupulous entrepreneurs, friendly innkeepers, and brutish enforcers. All it needs is Al Swearengen delivering racial epithets for it to be the fantasy equivalent of HBO's Deadwood.

Unlike Keep on the Shadowfell's town of Winterhaven, the Seven-Pillared Hall is functional. It has everything adventurers will need to spend a very long time exploring the labyrinth. Magical items and rituals are on sale, there's a competent clergy able to raise the dead, and the outpost features a constant flow of interesting characters ready to hand out sidequests.

Oh, such sidequests. It seems like Thunderspire is more interested in its sidequests than in the main plot. And this is one of the problems of the Hall. There's a lot on offer here for players to discover - but will players discover it? Presuming the DM used the Slave Rescue plot hook, the players are here to rescue some slaves. It's a time-critical mission. Casually exploring the Seven-Pillared Hall and getting friendly with its denizens runs specifically contrary to the story's central drive.

Perhaps this is why the plot hooks were so casually glossed over. Perhaps Thunderspire wants you to be metaphorically yawning and stretching your limbs when you get to the Hall. There's certainly a heap to do, very little of it related to the task of slave-rescuing.

On the other hand, Thunderspire promises to cover levels 4 to 6. The main quest spine alone will take you from the start of level 4 to the start of level 7 even with a couple of skipped encounters. Players who want to spend more time in Thunderspire will need the DM to thin out the XP to avoid outlevelling the content - further prolonging 4th Edition's gruelling "sour spot".

It's a dilemma. Thunderspire wants to be a player-directed open-world environment full of places to explore and secrets to discover - but at the same time it wants to be a focused race against the clock to save imperilled innocents from evil denizens of the dark. It reaches for both at the same time and ends up hurting itself in the process.

I'm going to proceed on the basis that players and DMs intend to complete the main quest spine. I've not had a chance to experience what happens if you throw out the slave rescue and run it as a more sedate, un-directed experience, but if any of you have tried that let me know how it went in the comments.

The Sweet Spot

2009-05-03T07:00:00.001+10:00

At level 5 you get Fireball.

If I remember one thing about my time with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition, it's that at level 5 you get Fireball. Also Lightning Bolt and Dispel Magic.

In previous editions of Dungeons & Dragons there's a sweet spot. It starts at level 5 and continues on to about level 9. Your hit points are finally high enough that you're unlikely to die from a single unlucky hit. You've got some magic items in your pack. Your magic-users and clerics have evolved from dress-wearing weaklings into fire-throwing killbots and you're finally getting to fight something other than goblins and kobolds.

Later, the shine wore off. Both enemies and players gained access to a range of one-shot-kill attacks, while high level healing spells trivialised death into a revolving door. Non-casting classes became overshadowed by their godlike dress-wearing allies and on the rare occasions when no-one busted out the death rays combats would devolve into an attrition-based slog.

One of the explicit goals of 4th Edition was to take the 5-9 sweet spot and extend it out over the entire game. Largely, it seems to have worked. Almost every level in the game is pretty fun. Except, ironically, for levels 4 to 6. It's an unfortunate aspect of Thunderspire Labyrinth that it lines up its worst content with the dullest point of the Heroic Tier.

How are levels 4, 5 and 6 the weak point? Like so.

New characters are shiny. Usually they're a class, race, or build that you've never played before. They have a range of new mechanics and a new feel to them. You get at least two at-wills, an encounter power, and a daily. You're in a new campaign with new house rules, a new environment to explore, and new party members to come to grips with. At level 2 you get a utility power and at level 3 you get an encounter power, which you can use in each and every encounter if you're so inclined.

Level 4 is when it goes south. You get no new powers at all. Instead you get a couple of stat-ups and a feat. At level 5, you get a daily - something you'll probably only use once a session. And then at level 6 you get another utility - which is, again, most often a daily.

This means at exactly the point where the shine is coming off your initial new-character love affair, the game stops handing out new toys. Whatever it is that you're doing to kill enemies at level 3 is pretty much what you'll be doing in every fight until level 7.

That's a long, hard slog. With a new Player's Handbook or Power supplement coming out every other month, it's tough not to think about re-rolling during the winter levels.

The solution is on the DM side. Level 4 to 6 is the time to take off the training wheels. Encounters should be harder, leaner, and just plain meaner. Loot should be more plentiful and players should be living or dieing on the basis of their initiative and cunning. It's time to present bizarre monsters, baffling traps and your most intricate dungeon setpieces.

It's Thunderspire's tragedy to throttle back on all those things just when it should be stepping up the pace. It takes players for a leisurely stroll through a hobgoblin hideout when it wants to be pitting them in a desperate struggle. It's got a series of knock-down fights against dwarves where it should have an intricate diplomatic contest. Players accustomed to Keep's focus on minions and terrain will find not a single minion awaiting them in the Labyrinth and only the driest of tactical layouts on offer. Where Keep was showing off a different 4th Edition mechanic in every combat, Thunderspire is happy to confine itself to the most basic actions contemplated by the Player's Handbook.

Thunderspire eventually takes off the gloves. The module's third mini-dungeon, the Well of Demons, busts loose with a fiesta of classic dungeoneering, including traps, puzzles, skill challenges, and cursed artefacts. The "Proving Grounds" section of the Well is one of the best set-pieces ever presented in a published adventure.

But by the time players reach this point, it may well be too late. Over the early parts of the module, the shine well and truly wears off 4th Edition, and the level 4-6 Sour Spot will cause the majority of groups to fall to ennui before getting the chance to actually experience the final third of the Heroic tier.

Questions:

[1] Would it have been so problematic to move the Level 7 Encounter to Level 5, the 5 Daily to 6, and the 6 Utility to 7? It creates a more natural flow over the early levels of the game and puts less pressure on the DM to keep things interesting over this critical period.

[2] Races are an underused element of 4th Edition. Would the addition of a Level 5 Racial Encounter Power, gained on top of the existing Daily, help fix 4th Edition's Sour Spot?

Into The Mountain

2009-05-02T07:00:00.003+10:00

As far as 4th Edition goes, it's good DMing to shoehorn a little combat into the first session of a new adventure. It breaks up the exposition, provides a bit of early catharsis, and lets players really get physical with an unfamiliar environment.

Sometimes it works better than others, though. The "Into The Mountain" encounter at the start of Thunderspire Labyrinth feels clunky, hurried, and awkward. On top of which, just finding the encounter is a quest in itself.

The encounter takes place in the context of the players' arrival at Thunderspire Mountain. After passing through the Minotaur Gate, the PCs find themselves on the Road of Lanterns, a 30-foot wide tunnel hewn out of the mountain flanked by rows of sculpted demons holding everburning lanterns. This is the central trade route into the mountain from the surface world, and the impression is less that players are about to plumb the festering depths of the Underdark than that they are approaching something grand and wondrous - which indeed they are, providing you can make the Seven-Pillared Hall live up to its potential.

It's not clear where "Into the Mountain" is supposed to take place. The encounter description has it happening "once the adventurers enter the mountain passage" or "a short distance from the Seven-Pillared Hall". The hobgoblins in the encounter "stay near the Seven-Pillared Hall", and yet are only "a short way into the mountain". It sounds like something our handy-dandy map of the Labyrinth could fix; unfortunately cartographer and writer don't seem to have been working hand-in-hand, as the map shows the encounter beyond the Hall, requiring players to have already visited the quest hub before arriving at this destination.

It almost seems as if the module-writers are deliberately trying to hide this encounter. Not only is it geographically vague, but however you look at it, it's off the beaten path. It takes place in a room that runs off a side-passage which itself runs off the main path to the Seven-Pillared Hall. The only indication to players that there's something here they might want to investigate is a distant trickle of light from the room's open door.

Let's assume players find the encounter. Let's assume they get involved. What they have here is the chance to make an ally. Rendil Halfmoon, a halfling inhabitant of the Seven-Pillared Hall, is being menaced by a group of the very Bloodreaver Slavers the party happen to be looking for. Being the merciless doers-of-good that they are, the players will naturally come to Rendil's defence and kick some hobgoblin butt up and down the mountain.

This isn't a terribly tough battle, although it does include one of those Hobgoblin Warcasters that I love so much. In the dull terrain here he doesn't get a chance to shine, but it's a quick reminder to players what the hobs are capable of before they tackle them later in the first of Thunderspire's mini-dungeons. The Warcaster's also, for the purposes of this encounter, the voice of the Bloodreavers, and the module encourages the DM to use to him to really get on the players' bad side. If the players weren't already on board for a kind of anti-slaver crusade, this is another chance to get a feud going between them and the hobgoblins.

The room's tactically uninteresting. There's a range of tables and barrels that can be kicked over or stood on, but there's little real advantage in these tactics and in the end result the room just feels cramped and awkward.

The whole thing ends with the hobgobglins beaten and a greatful Rendil offering the players accomodation at the Seven-Pillared Hall. It gives the players a guide to what's on offer in the mountain, and puts a friendly face on an upcoming quest-hub that ultimately has more ne'er-do-wells than genuine allies.

Questions:

[1] Why is this encounter so confusingly tucked away? The Road of Lanterns is a great location. It's dramatic, and open enough to be interesting. Wouldn't it have been easier to set the encounter on the Road itself, possibly with the hobs assaulting a wrecked wagon belonging to Rendil?

[2] The encounter specifies players can overhear a conversation between Rendil and the hobgoblins if they make a DC 10 Perception check. This is less than players' passive perception (which at level 4 is at a minimum of 11), and as such is an auto-success - they don't even have to roll. Is this a typographical error, or does it date back to an earlier prototype of the rules than that eventually published?

The Labyrinth

2009-05-01T14:00:00.001+10:00

Thunderspire Labyrinth's titular maze may well not meet player expectations. Those who have seen the module's title may be imagining a kind of classic mega-dungeon, with level upon level of sprawling, mappable corridors. In the alternative, it would seem reasonable for the Labyrinth to pose some kind of direct challenge to the ingenuity of players and their characters.

In practice, the Labyrinth has little to no mechanical effect. It "covers nearly a square mile, with hundreds of chambers and passages", and "is too convoluted to be completely mapped". A rough outline (above) is provided to the DM, although it bears no relationship to any of the descriptions of distance and location scattered throughout the module. Moreover, "hundreds of small chambers and halls [...] aren't shown", and "even the major roads include countless intersections and smaller passages".

The way this works in practice is that players will need guides or accurate directions to reach a destination. Much like a computer game, players can visit new areas only once they are "added to the map".

If players try to explore without guidance, they risk wandering lost for hours before eventually ending up at a random choice of one of the module's major quest destinations. Interestingly, this can have the effect of bringing them straight to the penultimate mini-dungeon, bypassing the majority of the module's content. That's probably an effect of the module as-written that DMs should feel free to completely ignore.

Foreshadowing At The Minotaur Gate

2009-05-01T07:00:00.002+10:00

I've got a lot of nice things to say about this module, but unfortunately it's going to take a while before we get to them. Right now, I've got a problem with foreshadowing. We've barely finished talking about Chekhov's Gun, and Thunderspire Labyrinth is doing it wrong already.

Thunderspire Mountain is, as the name implies, a huge mountain whose tip is constantly swathed in swirling storms. Within the mountain lies the ruins of the abandoned minotaur city of Saruun Khel. The minotaurs apparently once ruled this area, until a civil war broke out between followers of the demon-god Baphomet and cultists of Torog, the King Who Crawls. Now their once-mighty streets are infested with hobgoblins, duergar, and worse.

Players don't necessarily have access to this information up front. However, the module isn't subtle in showing off its flavour. The players approach the undermountain through "a 50-foot-tall stone archway hewn out of the mountainside", on each side of which "a towering minotaur statue stands [...] glowering down at travellers."

This is foreshadowing. This is giant letters writ across the shape of what is yet to come, spelling out "Here Be Minotaurs" in stark red writing. This is telling players that Thunderspire is watched over by ancient guardians, and those guardians have the head of a bull.

Even as your players pass beneath this archway, they'll be sharpening their weapons and patting each other on the back and declaring, "Oh boy! Minotaurs!" Minotaurs are a classic enemy, yet not so overused as to feel cliched. They're a great theme villain for 4th Edition's second outing, and the idea of taking on a tribe of these beasties in the claustrophobic setting of a ruined underound city is enough to get you really excited about what's coming up.

Unfortunately, it's not to be. There's not hide nor hair of a living minotaur to be seen throughout the length of Thunderspire. Again and again, the module serves up minotaur statues, minotaur corpses, minotaur carvings and minotaur loot, but the cow-men themselves are nowhere to be seen. Thunderspire marches proudly through hobgoblins, duergar, gnolls, and a very human master villain without ever firing the gun it spends the entirety of its flavour-text loading.

It's not the last time we're going to see this kind of misguided foreshadowing, either. We're going to see a beholder-themed Chamber of Eyes that's missing a beholder, a Horned Hold devoid of horns, and a Tower With No Doors featuring a very prominent door. There's the mysteriously absent Mages of Saruun whose vanishing is never resolved, no less than five different evil gods to offend who never take their vengeance, and by ironic contrast the final villain comes completely out of left-field with no solid connection to anything that's gone before.

On the plus side, though, we're going to get to see a dragon...

Points of Light

2009-04-30T07:00:00.000+10:00

Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition is, by default, embedded in a campaign setting known as "Points of Light".

Points of Light is a significant departure from previous campaign worlds. It does not offer a fully-realised geopolitical landscape in the style of Dragonlance or the Forgotten Realms. In instead offers an unmapped wilderness into which individual adventure locations can be freely inserted.

There's several reasons for the change. One is that larger published campaign worlds come with baggage. In a setting like Dragonlance or the Realms, it's easy for player characters to be overshadowed by high level NPCs and have their stories pale beneath sweeping global events and epic international conflicts. Players can come to the table with unhelpful pre-conceptions based on earlier experiences with the world. DMs can feel pressured to absorb fantastic amounts of information in order to present a canonical "real" version of the setting to their players.

More importantly, though, the change highlights the core assumptions underlying D&D. The D&D universe is one where civilisation is scattered and fragile. Small "Points of Light" are divided by miles of wilderness teeming with lawlessness and horror. It's a world in which armies and constabularies are either absent entirely or deeply unable to clear back the darkness.

Points of Light is a world that needs heroes. It has problems that can only be solved with swords and spells, and those problems are so numerous that a nation of heroes could strive for a hundred lifetimes without stamping out the last of the evil. The gods are not active, the kings are not brave, and such elder wizards as exist are provincial and un-charitable. There are no higher forces making the players redundant - their characters are literally the last line of defence.

You can see the problem of canonical settings in Marvel or DC comics. Before any new hero can get a shot at defeating Dr Doom's evil plans, the writer first has to establish that the Avengers are off-world, the X-Men are busy, and S.H.I.E.L.D. have their hands full. Before an up-and-comer can go toe-to-toe with Darkseid, we need to know why the Justice League, Justice Society, Green Lantern Corps, Teen Titans, Outsiders, Doom Patrol and, in a pinch, Batman, have not already dealt with the problem. It's no fun feeling like the night-shift janitor who only gets called in when all the competent people want the day off.

Points of Light is modular. If you have five adventures describing aspects of the setting, you can use three and ignore two without leaving suspicious blank spots on the world map. There's no global cartography and the relationship of one location to another need never be better defined than "to the north and east". Moreover, if you pick up a Forgotten Realms product and like the sound of Shadowdale, you can insert it wholesale into Points of Light without worrying about its larger context.

This will all sound familiar to the experienced player. It's the way many of us have built up D&D campaign worlds since the earliest editions. Points of Light gives official sanction to this kind of simple patchwork design, and directly offers it as a design model to the beginning DMs who will get the most use out of it.

The theme of Points of Light is something that Thunderspire Labyrinth takes to heart. Thunderspire's quest hub is the Seven-Pillared Hall, a small community of traders presided over by the mysterious Mages of Saruun. The Hall lies within the underground ruins of the long-abandoned minotaur city of Saruun Khel, better known today as the Thunderspire Labyrinth. While the Hall may be a safe haven, the remainder of the Labyrinth is haunted by lawless humanoids and horrific below-ground predators.

The Hall itself plays home not only to humans, halflings, and the usual array of civilised races, but also to drow and duergar, emissaries of the malevolent Underdark races sent to the hall on semi-peaceful missions of trade. The Seven-Pillared Hall is a genuine frontier town, eking out a profitable existence in a place where an organised community should not be viable.

Questions:

[1] Points of Light may be well-designed for encouraging beginning players, but it's far less useful for selling a series of novels, something that has traditionally been a profitable sideline for Wizards of the Coast. This approach is reflected in the D&D product line as well, with a much greater emphasis on core rulebooks and far fewer setting-specific products. What has changed in WoTC's market position to prompt this shift away from setting-based merchandising?

Keep on the Shadowfell FREE

2009-04-29T10:32:00.011+10:00

Hey - here's news. Wizards of the Coast are giving away the PDF of Keep on the Shadowfell for FREE.

I paid $35 AUD for this module and felt incredibly cheated. At the very reasonable price of FREE it's a much more recommendable product, particularly if you're new to 4th Edition. It comes complete with the Quick-Start rules so you can squeeze a good six sessions of play out of it even if you haven't bought a copy of the Player's Handbook yet.

What's more - this version is significantly better than the retail edition. There are major changes throughout the module, addressing many of my complaints. For example, the errata are incorporated, including the alternate skill challenge for closing the rift in the final encounter. The finale's meager scattering of enemies is replaced with a complete platoon of skeleton sentinels. Traps are properly formatted and their areas-of-effect are clearly marked on maps. Loot is more plentiful and the skill challenges are fixed. A spectral version of Kalarel has been added to the Burial Site encounter to create an earlier introduction to the main villain and more closely tie that encounter to the main plot. The various kobold ambushes have been corrected, and the punishing Irontooth battle appears to have been slightly retooled, presumably to make it easier. Typos are corrected throughout.

Go get your copy on the D&D Test Drive page. And thanks to commenter Anders for the heads-up!

The Hook

2009-04-29T07:00:00.003+10:00

Thunderspire Labyrinth starts off with a question that's faced published modules since the dawn of time: how do you get players to travel to the location of their next adventure?

In a way, it's a false dilemma. The correct answer is to not ask them to. In a perfect world, your second adventure would grow organically out of your first. Players of Keep on the Shadowfell would be drawn into the next story by a direct threat to Winterhaven, or by a desire to continue their crusade against the cult of Orcus, or through pursuit of the specific priorities their character has developed over the preceding sessions of play.

Thunderspire isn't having any of that. It wants players to get to its Labyrinth as quickly and efficiently as possible and it's not really concerned how that happens. A charitable view sees the module as wisely focusing on its core content, but there's no real dispute that in skimping on its hooks it's doing itself a disservice.

Thunderspire offers four key hooks to get player characters involved in its story. The first is entitled "Investigate the Bloodreavers". The Bloodreavers, if we remember back to Keep, are an organisation of hobgoblin slavers based out of the distant Thunderspire Mountain. The hook involves the players taking on the role of self-appointed slave police in order to look into the unfocused and fairly nebulous threat presented by this organisation. Those investigations will lead them quite quickly to Thunderspire, which is where our story begins.

If the players aren't quite the zealous vigilantes contemplated by the hook, the module provides for Winterhaven's Lord Padraig to offer up a 1,000 gp reward for the head of the Bloodreavers' chief. There's an unfortunate escalation here; in Keep, Padraig could summon a mere 100 gp to pay for the extermination of kobolds who were directly threatening the village; now he's got access to ten times that to spend on hunting down a group who are, on any fair view of it, Someone Else's Problem.

A more pressing problem with the Bloodreaver hook is that while it gives players a reason to tackle the first of Thunderspire's four mini-dungeons (the Chamber of Eyes), there's no through-line to keep them progressing on to the rest of Thunderspire's content. If your group is characterised by a mercenary nature or merely keen practicality, it's open to declare the adventure over after defeating the Bloodreavers in the story's opening act.

The second of the hooks is worse still. It's called "Trade Mission" and it's what computer gamers refer to as a "fetch quest". Winterhaven shopowner Bairwin asks players to make a delivery for him to the Seven-Pillared Hall, the small bastion of civilisation hidden beneath Thunderspire. Once again, this will occupy players long enough to get them to the adventure location, but then give them no reason to tackle any of the mountain's challenges. Also, the Forgotten Realms conversion for Keep re-cast Bairwin as a secret cultist of Orcus, so for groups that have used that article Bairwin may well be long dead.

A third hook, "Call to Adventure", is so brazen as to be almost deserving of respect. It amounts to little more than Winterhaven sage Valthrun telling players that Thunderspire is kind of an awesome place, in which they will probably find adventures. I quote:

Valthrun doesn't have any additional information, but he longs to convince a party of adventurers to explore the place and bring him back firsthand news. "Such wonders you will see," he keeps on repeating. "Such wonders, I am sure!"

As hooks go, this is on a par with the DM declaring that the next adventure is going to be in Thunderspire and asking if anyone has a reason not to go there.

The last hook is the real meat of Thunderspire Labyrinth and is ultimately so critical to making sense of the module that it should have been highlighted as compulsory. It's called "Slave Rescue".

As we know, Thunderspire plays host to the Bloodreaver Slavers. In "Slave Rescue" the Bloodreavers have recently captured a dozen slaves from a nearby village and absconded with them to the mountain. The players are engaged by a local do-gooder (the module suggests Winterhaven's Sister Linora) to pursue the slavers and rescue their victims.

The reason this works is that the slaves provide the module's much needed through-line. When the players confront the slavers, they find the slaves have already been sold to a nearby duergar faction. Attacking the duergar (located in a second mini-dungeon) results in the liberation of most of the slaves, but also reveals the depressing news that the last two of the captives were on-sold to a gnoll band for use as human sacrifices. A desperate pursuit of the gnolls leads to the third of the module's mini-dungeons, and eventually reveals the identity of Thunderspire's master villain.

There's an opportunity here so obvious that it's amazing the module misses it. What none of these hooks provide is a personal connection between the players and the adventure. As-written, the best-case scenario sees players motivated by a combination of greed and do-good-itude. To make Thunderspire a genuinely compelling game, you need to provide a reason why these problems are the players' problems.

It's as simple as personalising the captured slaves. The faceless villagers abducted by the Bloodreavers can just as easily be the PCs' family, friends, or even the entire named population of Winterhaven. Such a simple change instantly transforms a quest into their quest and gives them a unique and dynamic stake in the outcome of what follows.

In a worst-case scenario, if all you manage to do is coax players into visiting Thunderspire, you can at least be confident that once they get there, they'll find plenty to do.

Thunderspire Labyrinth

2009-04-28T11:16:00.010+10:00

This post is the introduction to a series that looks at Thunderspire Labyrinth, the second Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition published adventure. Click the link at the bottom of this post or scroll through the archive to read the complete series.

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Thunderspire Labyrinth, by Richard Baker and Mike Mearls, is the second official adventure module released for 4th Edition.

Thunderspire is a self-contained adventure and suitable to be played straight out of its packaging, but for players of Keep on the Shadowfell, the attraction of Thunderspire is that it's billed as a sequel to Keep. Where Keep took characters from level 1 all the way to level 3, Thunderspire picks up the baton and covers levels 4 to 6. It's located in the same Nentir Vale setting as Keep, and players might reasonably expect Thunderspire to provide a continuation of the themes and plotlines that Keep set in motion.

On that count, they'll be sorely disappointed. The links between the two modules end up being trivial at best. Thunderspire is a wholly unrelated adventure with no continuing storylines or villains.

Additionally, where Keep made an effort to introduce new players to the diverse strengths of 4th Edition, Thunderspire is a more staid outing. Key mechanics are ignored completely or used poorly, and once again the loot opportunities are underwhelming at best. The first half of the adventure is dominated by a series of repetitive knock-down fights and it's only after the intermission that the module delivers the kind of classic D&D dungeoneering that rewards non-standard tactics and player resourcefulness.

Thunderspire is still a superior product to Keep. Set in the sprawling ruins of an abandoned minotaur city, Thunderspire provides a more interesting location than Keep's generic village, and sets its meanderings in the context of interesting NPCs, compelling sidequests and surprisingly usable optional encounters. Its layout is modular, letting you easily customise it or play it episodically. And while there's still a host of typographical errors and notable lacunae, they're neither as frequent nor as critical as Keep's unending parade of mediocrity.

Over the next few weeks I'm planning to go through the highs and the lows of this module. I'll be looking at what works and what doesn't, and as far as possible attempting to explain why. Feel free to follow along, and use the comments to tell me why I'm wrong.

(See all posts on Thunderspire Labyrinth.)

Poll Result: Not Enough Information

2009-04-25T07:00:00.000+10:00

Another Eleven Foot Poll came to a close while I was on holidays. A good proportion of you are sworn enemies of those damn showboating NPCs, but in the end result the consensus was that DMs who don't provide enough information are what really get our goat up.

What does it mean as a DM to provide not enough information? Does it mean we haven't educated our players in sufficient length on the history of our campaign world? Does it imply we've been stingy handing out our background notes, and anything less than a fully realised novel gets a firm thumbs down in this information-rich epoch?

Probably not.

I think in large part it's a question of meaningful choices, and for anyone who hasn't read my post on that, go check it out now - it's a good'n.

As players we need enough information to take actions that have forseeable consequences. We need to know what's risky, what's valuable, what's friendly and what's suspicious. We need the requisite clues to distinguish a party-eating level 28 Death Slime from a trivial first level Delicious Jelly. We need to know when "treasure" means an epic horde as described in legend, and when it means a pitiful scattering of coins barely worth crossing the room for. When a villain laughs at our pitiful attacks, does the DM intend to spur us on to greater efforts, or is he warning us we've picked a fight we can't win and our survival depends on an instant retreat?

As a DM there are no points to be won for being coy. Acquiring information should not always be a challenge. Sometimes you need to tell it like it is.

When should you make information easy to get? When acquiring the information is a necessary precondition of engaging with the intended content. In Keep on the Shadowfell, getting the players to the keep, or for that matter the kobolds, is fairly dependant on having the Winterhaven villagers natter on about those major quest destinations. Villagers who are distrustful and sullen around strangers may be realistic and gritty, but in practice it leaves your players in a holding pattern wondering what's happened to their adventure.

It's called gating content. You're conditioning access to content B upon successful completion of content A. You can see the problem with it in the maths - 100% of players will see content A, but only those who complete it will see content B. You want your best content to be your most visible content, so if A is a half-baked dialogue challenge and B is the meat of your adventure you're deliberately shooting your own strengths in the foot.

As a player, how can you deal with an uncommunicative DM? One way is to be frank. Say, "My character needs some guidance," or, "I need some extra information on this topic in order to take meaningful action." If the information guessing-game is frustrating you, stop playing it and tell your DM it's not working. If you don't know whether you've gotten involved in a winnable epic encounter or a player-killing meatgrinder, say so. Tell your DM your character's hope is flagging and unless there's some kind of sign you can win you feel it's time for a desperate retreat. Your DM wants to show you his best encounters and you want to experience them, so be an active conspirator in allowing that to happen.

As a DM, look for players who don't seem to be enthusiastic about their decisions. They're probably players who don't have enough information. Similarly, groups who can't decide on a course of action could probably benefit from some clarity. Remember that players often regard danger as a challenge, so if something is well beyond their ability to survive be absolutely clear in saying so. Conversely, players can overrate the most trivial of difficulties, so if they're hesitating to tackle a pitifully weak trap or monster be sure to tell them that it's something a competent hero would have no trouble with.

As with any aspect of DMing, the best way to learn is to ask for feedback at the end of each play session. Ask your players what worked and what didn't, and try to adjust for next time around.

Keep on the Shadowfell Mop Up

2009-04-24T11:22:00.005+10:00

Seeing as someone asked: yes, Keep on the Shadowfell does leave a few pieces unresolved.

The Rift: The module has nothing to say about the eventual fate of the Shadow Rift. The simplest answer is to declare that Kalarel's death ends the ritual and closes the Rift, although that explanation leaves one wondering why a garrison was required in Sir Keegan's day and how things are going to go without one in the future. A better answer, although sadly not within the scope of the module as-written, is to let the players close the Rift forever using some item they've found on their travels (Aecris, the ancient mirror, or one of the various Bahamut relics) and/or have the Keep collapse and bury the Rift for all time.

The Other Monsters: Presuming the players didn't clear every room of the Keep, there are still monsters hiding in the corners somewhere. It's incredibly anti-climactic to follow up Kalarel's defeat with a mop-up session where the players go hunting isolated pockets of low-level trash. Again, there's no help from the module - in fact, it seems to specifically envisage this mop-up in some encounter descriptions - but if you don't go with the "collapsing Keep" scenario described above, another option is to have the Winterhaven militia finally do their job and roust out the remaining baddies. Remember to add any loot your players would have missed onto their end-of-adventure reward or you'll be encouraging exactly the sort of downbeat denouement we're trying to avoid.

Winterhaven: As written, there's no good reason for players to hang around Winterhaven after they've picked up their rewards. The module suggests the village might form a useful base of operations, but contrast that with the fact that on a good day the shops stock some first-level magic items and there's no other significant adventuring locations within two days' walk. Obviously Eleven Foot Pole is going to be moving on to Thunderspire Labyrinth but for players who've really enjoyed Winterhaven and want to continue hanging out with their NPC friends there, there's really not a lot of support.

Chekhov's Gun and a Satisfying Finale

2009-04-23T09:40:00.012+10:00

"One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it."
- Anton Chekhov

The collected works of Stephen King to the contrary, writing a good ending is not a difficult task.

It's really not. It's easy, and in the context of heroic fantasy it's easier still. The key is this: that you are not merely crafting the ending to a story, but the ending to this story.

It's so easy that even Keep on the Shadowfell almost achieves it.

The principle of Chekhov's Gun suggests that every set-up must have a pay-off. Each dramatic concept introduced in the first two acts must have a part to play in the finale. Every decision the players make, every risk they take, every digression of conscience they choose to undertake will be rewarded or penalised in the story's climax.

Chekhov's Gun suggests that when the players rescue an ageing scholar, his advice will prove invaluable in planning the final assault. Chekov's Gun implies that when the players prevent the villain from acquiring an ancient mirror, they have bought themselves an advantage in the ultimate struggle.

Chekhov's Gun requires that the humble goblin that the players spared will repay the favour in the final hour. Chekhov's Gun calls on the villagers saved from the ravenous undead to buoy their rescuers' spirits when hope seems lost. Chekhov's Gun demands atonement for fallen stalwarts and vengeance for murdered innocents. Chekhov's Gun says that a holy sword bestowed by the ghost of a forgotten her o will always, always strike the decisive blow in the last clash of good and evil.

The final encounter of Keep on the Shadowfell doesn't do any of those things. Not one of the guns the module loads gets fired; instead, a bonus is bestowed on anyone who happens to be carrying one of the dragon statues they can only get from desecrating the altars to Bahamut located in the Skeletal Legion encounter.

The Shadow Rift has another problem, which is Kalarel. By now the DM is quite familiar with Kalarel's particular brand of incompetence, but for the players this is their first encounter with the final villain. It's hard to feel invested in his downfall - they can't hate him; they don't even know him.

Keep seems to know this is a problem, and spends a paragraph exhorting DMs to make him as hate-worthy as possible during this final encounter, apparently entirely by way of some dialogue that the module doesn't see fit to provide. One might be tempted to have him gloat about his evil plan, but that would require having a clear idea of what his evil plan actually is.

Besides, it's a bit late for Kalarel to gloat. This is the players' hero moment. This is their chance to kick ass and chew gum; it's the big musical finale. As DM, you've got approximately six rounds of combat to make your players feel like they well and truly deserve their victory, and any player who doesn't do something heroic is a player who's going to feel cheated when the dust settles.

So what does Keep get right in its last hurrah? The death of the villain.

As I mentioned when I was talking about the mechanics of this fight, when Kalarel hits bloodied HP he teleports to the glowing circle in front of the Shadow Rift. This raises his defences through the roof, but it also puts him only a couple of squares from the Rift itself.

This is the Rift. It's the portal to "Orcus' temple in the Shadowfell" that drove Sir Keegan mad and which Kalarel is attempting to re-open for frustratingly vague reasons. Kalarel has almost completed the re-opening and the portal is now semi-porous. Living beings passing through it will be killed instantly, but that doesn't stop an entity described as "The Thing In The Portal" from reaching its tentacles through to threaten players in the Rift's immediate vicinity.

Keep's been spending the bulk of its mechanical muscle teaching players about positioning through encounter after encounter. They've been pushing enemies down pits, over ledges, into traps and through holes in almost every significant struggle to date, and now at the closing of the day Keep deliberately positions Kalarel only two squares from a guaranteed auto-kill. It's just the right distance to be an achievable push, but just far enough to require your players to co-ordinate to pull it off.

When Kalarel hits the portal, or when players drop him to zero HP, the Thing in the Portal grabs the evil cultist in one of its tentacles and drags him screaming into the Shadowfell to meet his master. It's a great moment, because it's only possible through the combination of Kalarel's arrogance, the madness of his plan, and the prowess and acquired skills of the players. It's a thoroughly satisfying victory and it has the added benefit of having Kalarel conclusively defeated while leaving the door open for his return in later stories.

Wow them in the end, and you've got a hit. For all its wonkiness, for all its typographical errors and misfiring encounters, for all its dead ends and narrative buffoonery, Keep delivers a solid conclusion when the chips are down, and it's almost sad to realise that despite all the idiocy your players are going to walk away from the table considering that they've had a good time.

As DM, it's a bittersweet triumph. The module succeeds despite itself, and though Kalarel might be being tortured in the Shadowfell as we speak, the real villains of the piece are the module writers, who emerge from the debris unscathed and ready to produce more of the same under-developed tripe.

The Shadow Rift

2009-04-21T17:42:00.002+10:00

A brief interruption turned into a two week hiatus, but I'm back now to look at Keep on the Shadowfell's final encounter, which I'll be doing over two posts.

Today I'm looking at the Shadow Rift from a mechanical perspective. Players enter the area from the Cathedral of Shadows by descending the large chains running through the hole in that area. The chains descend some 50 feet to the centre of the large pool of blood depicted on the map; athletic characters can slide their entire length in a single action by passing a not-terribly-difficult skill check.

That's great for the athletic characters. Those without the skill have slightly worse than 50/50 chances of slipping from the chains and dropping straight to the ground. The consequence of this is taking 3d10 damage (averaging out to between one and two healing surges for most characters) and being knocked prone. That's on top of any lingering damage from the last couple of encounters. It's a nasty start to a vicious final encounter.

The monsters on offer here are two skeleton warriors (who act as semi-effective tanks), a Deathlock Wight, and Kalarel himself. Both the wight and Kalarel are party-level threats. On top of that, players may have picked up one or both of the beserkers from the Cathedral of Shadow, plus possibly the Dark Creeper, and in a worst case may also have the Clay Scout from the Ghoul Warren.

Kalarel's in the west, completing his ritual to open the gate to the Shadowfell. The gate itself is in the north, near yet another of Keep's glowing magical circles. If Kalarel's forewarned, he theoretically gets to attack the players as they descend the chains, but given that the chains can be cleared in a single action (one way or another) it's not clear exactly how that advantage plays out. Let's assume the battle proper begins once the players hit the ground.

How things go from here largely depends on the effectiveness of the party. Kalarel is devastating when he's at range or has nearby allies, but has relatively few options when isolated by a competent tank. The Wight can dish out a terrifying amount of damage and can also resurrect fallen allies, but has a measly 54 hit points. If strikers focus on the wight while a good tank locks down Kalarel, you can have the first phase of the combat managed within two rounds. You can even manage this with a couple of players dusting themselves off after a fall from the chains.

When Kalarel hits his bloodied value (93 HP), things step up a notch. He teleports to a magic circle near the shadow rift and gets a substantial boost to all his defences. Players who were already struggling to hit him will be looking for near-crits, while those who were confident before will now be on the back foot.

The shift allows Kalarel to maintain his momentum despite the probable loss of some or all of his allies. It also, coincidentally, sets him up for his final fate, which I'll be looking at in the next post.

I like this concept of phased battles. It's something that's been popularised by computer games, relevantly World of Warcraft, and it's a worthwhile addition to D&D's dramatic toolbox. Fundamental tactical shifts at key stages helps keep players engaged in what's going on, and stops boss-level fights from degenerating into battles of attrition.

What's not so neat is that there's not much for players to do here. Other than the portal and the circle there's no useful terrain features, there's no traps, there's no objectives, and there's not even a real sense of time pressure. Most groups will swamp Kalarel while one or two ranged characters handle the Wight. Given that Kalarel's not well-equipped to go solo against a back of melee types, it can leave what should be a climactic encounter feeling mechanically underwhelming.

Improvements:

[1] Set a time limit. Firmly establish that Kalarel will complete his ritual in five rounds unless killed, and have him using free actions every round to chant the final phrases of his evil spell.

[2] Create dynamic terrain. With Kalarel's ritual begin literally ripping the Keep apart, have chunks of stone fall randomly from the ceiling and mark where they land on the map as either rough terrain or vision-obstructing obstacles.

A Brief Interruption

2009-04-07T13:39:00.003+10:00

Hey there, surprisingly large number of readers!

I'm about to head off to holidays. From tonight through to 19 April I'm in Perth, Western Australia. I will be attending the Swancon science fiction convention over the Easter long weekend, where I will be speaking on a couple of panels and running sessions of my diceless one-shot games The Heist and The Island. If you are a Perthy, it is not too late to attend!

I will have my laptop with me; I'm intending to post a couple of times, if only to finish the Keep on the Shadowfell series. When Keep's done I'm planning to go on to talk about its follow-up, Thunderspire Labyrinth, so if you have any interesting stories about your experiences with Thunderspire - or even non-interesting stories - please share them in the comments. I know how it's working for my group, but the more alternate viewpoints I have the better!

Sidetrek 4: Hidden Victims

2009-04-06T11:11:00.003+10:00

Before we move on to the final encounter of Keep on the Shadowfell, let's take a quick look at the last of the Dungeon #155 side treks.

This one's called Hidden Victims, and it's an addendum to the Ghoul Warren. It expands on the apparently useless room on that map, by tacking another whole area onto it.

Hidden Victims posits that in the keep's past, refugees from Keegan's mad rampage took shelter down in this area, and then bricked themselves in (hence the room's apparent disconnect from the rest of the level). For some reason they were unable to demolish the wall that they'd made to keep Keegan out, and ended up starving to death down here. Their undead remains continue to haunt the area.

This encounter really frustrates me. It directly addresses several key problems with Keep - the fact that Keegan's story really isn't reflected in any of the printed encounters, the lack of a "lived-in" feel to the entire complex, and the (admittedly minor) issue of the useless room.

Having put those difficulties squarely in its sights, it completely misses its mark. The enemies here are zombies - common zombies, exactly the same sort that the players have just killed fourteen of in the Ghoul Warren and, for that matter, the same sort as in the Crypt of Shadows. Even the most enthusiastic of players are probably tired of this particular undead by now. It's a bit disappointing, too, in that it gives up the atmosphere of vicious monsters living in cramped tunnels and trades it for yet another stand-up fight in a series of rooms.

It's also another encounter that tells rather than shows. The backstory of frightened, starving people is strong, but it's not much use unless the players learn it, and it's simply not apparent on the face of the encounter. From the player perspective, these are just going to be another mob of nameless undead.

Finally, because this is the last time I'm going to get to make this criticism of Keep, I'll say it again here - the encounter is repetitive. The Ghoul Warren is a good area, and the side-trek ruins it by immediately following it with the exact same battle, minus the Ghoul and the Clay Scout. That is to say, it's the same fight without the interesting bits.

That's the last of the side-treks from Dungeon #155. The same issue also features a fairly average article about converting the module to Eberron, and an absolutely excellent conversion to the Forgotten Realms. In case I don't get to doing a specific post on it, the Forgotten Realms one is well worth the time of any Keep DM as its improvements are largely setting-neutral and address many of the module's biggest problems, specifically the lack of NPC depth. Check it out.

Cathedral of Shadows

2009-04-04T23:59:00.006+11:00

If the last three encounters in Keep on the Shadowfell are a trilogy, this is its Temple of Doom. It's a hapzard mish-mash of ideas that appear to have been jammed wholesale into the gap between the Ghoul Warren and the Shadow Rift.

The Cathedral of Shadow is printed on another of Keep's A3 poster maps, and once again the module really has no clear idea on how to fill the space. The players enter from the west, and discover a priest of Orcus sacrificing "creatures" in order for their blood to run in rivers through a hole in the floor down to the Shadow Rift.

The players will probably need to be told, no, this is not Kalarel, and yes, it's another priest of Orcus, who is different. For that matter, it's entirely possible you'll need to say that the hole in the ground is not the rift, it just leads to the rift.

That's emblematic of the problem with the entire encounter - it's a monster-for-monster clone of the climactic battle that will follow it. I've always said that a good story should end the way it began. Keep, which opened with twinned kobold ambushes, takes the idea to its twisted mutant heart by finishing up with identical priest-and-undead battles, back to back.

The undead here are vampire spawn, a kind of minor vampire with all of the traditional weaknesses and none of the strengths. They're destroyed by sunlight, of course - not terribly interesting when the battle is completely underground - and they're able to crawl up walls and across ceilings, which isn't really helpful on a map with few significant terrain items. In the end result the vampire spawn end up less interesting even than the kobolds, reduced to running at the players and swiping with their claws.

There's also two human beserkers, who are apparently cultists of Orcus. They're the real meat of the encounter, and they serve a dual purpose - to dish out the hurt (they can crit for upwards of 40 damage), and to keep the fight centred around the room's only tactically interesting feature - the hole in the ground.

The hole's a trap, in a non-traditional sense, and it's a little bit cruel. Keep on the Shadowfell has been training players, over the entire length of the dungeon, to use ledges and pits to eliminate enemies quickly from the battle. It's to the module's credit that it teaches players well enough that they'll repeat the tactic here without any prompting. In most plays of this room, one of the two beserkers will probably get sent down the hole.

Unfortunately for the players, the hole leads directly to the next encounter, and there's a cushioning pool of blood at the bottom. Enemies dispatched into the depths will alert Kalarel to prepare his last stand, and hang around to pump the difficulty level of an already tricky final encounter. It's difficult to decide whether to applaud the module for this well-executed manipulation of the PCs, or condemn it for subverting its own stated intention of teaching and empowering new players.

Questions:

[1] Look at that map. The rivers of blood are five to ten feet wide. Exactly how many "creatures" have been sacrificed down here, and where are they coming from? There's really not that much blood in a human body; considering the blood's draining into a hole, it's an extraodinary piece of dramatic licence for there to be that much left on this level. Also, one has to wonder whether it wouldn't be simpler to just kill the creatures downstairs, rather than have this whole inefficient draining mechanism?

[2] In addition to the priest, the beserkers and the vampire spawn, there's also a Dark Creeper in this battle. Keep doesn't bother to say what a Dark Creeper is or where it comes from, but the Monster Manual elaborates that they're unaligned gnomelike creatures from the Shadowfell, a kind of extraplanar Ferengi who might turn up anywhere if it furthers their mercenary interests. It seems like it deserves more of a story than the simple stat block afforded in the module - does it serve Orcus, is it just here to investigate, or is it the messenger of some other power? We may never know.

Ghoul Warren

2009-04-04T12:29:00.005+11:00

I'll tell you a secret. The last act makes a film. Wow them in the end, and you got a hit. You can have flaws, problems, but wow them in the end, and you've got a hit. Find an ending, but don't cheat, and don't you dare bring in a deus ex machina. Your characters must change, and the change must come from them. Do that, and you'll be fine.
- Robert McKee (Adaptation)

The Ghoul Warren begins Keep on the Shadowfell's final trilogy of encounters. From here it's a downhill run to the climactic showdown with Kalarel. Once the players enter the Warren, they're probably not going to get another chance to rest until it's all over.

This is the game's apex - it's what your players are going to judge the game on. If they have a no-holds-barred thrill ride from here to the end, they'll walk away calling Keep on the Shadowfell a success. But if the final encounters stagger aimlessly from battle to battle like a drunken hobo before falling down in a gutter, they're not going to be coming back for the sequel.

The Ghoul Warrens gets off to a good start. Setting up the Warrens on a battlemap involves deploying no less than 16 separate enemies, which tells your players straight-up that the stakes have been raised. The lead adversary is the titular Ghoul, a flesh-eating undead which moves terrifyingly fast and leaves its victims paralysed. The backup are fourteen assorted zombies, mostly minions, who despite not requiring sustenance have begun to mimic the Ghoul's corpse-devouring behaviour.

Once players have spotted the undead, the safest strategy would appear to be barricading the doorway and picking them off from a distance. However, the sixteenth monster in the room is a Clay Scout, a kind of tiny winged homunculi, who flees to warn the next two rooms if the PCs gain the upper hand.

Intercepting the Clay Scout requires charging into the midst of the room, which will leave the players knee deep in the dead and at the mercy of the Ghoul. It makes for a compellling fight and a reasonably good introduction to the adventure's final act.

The strange aspect of this encounter is the room in the west. It has no doors or stairs, and it's only reachable by a tight crallway. One wonders who would possibly have built it, or why. The ghoul appears to have been using it to dispose of the inedible belongings of its victims, as there is assorted trash in here plus a bag of holding. It's a strange addition to the area and I just can't imagine what it was intended to accomplish.

Improvements:

1] Once my players had met Keegan in his tomb, and Keegan's children in the Corridors of the Cube, they immediately asked, "Where's Keegan's wife?" It's a question the module doesn't answer, so when we reached the Ghoul Warren I made the Ghoul the lady in question. It added personality and significance to a battle that didn't previously have it and helped Keegan's tragedy continue to underpin the dungeon all the way to its end.

[2] The useless room to the west may not feature any real danger, but it's a great set-up. To reach the room, players have to squeeze through a tiny tunnel, in the dark, with no idea what waits when they emerge. DMs who feel their game could use a bit more tension at this point should feel free to lengthen the tunnel, put another undead monster at the end, and possibly have the entrance to the tunnel collapse once at least one PC is already inside it. Alternatively you could replace the physical danger for a character moment by simply playing up how claustrophobic the experience is.

Poll Result: Beholder

2009-04-02T10:44:00.015+11:00

I've closed the current Eleven Foot Poll early because I'd accidentally set it to run for an absurdly long period. Luckily we've ended up with a clear winner, with the Beholder pulling ahead of the Gelatinous Cube over last night and claiming a whopping 34% of the vote.

You two guys who voted for the Carrion Crawler, I feel your pain.

The Beholder is a mainstay of Dungeons & Dragons right from its earliest editions. It's been a regular foe of mid-to-high-level adventurers, it's headlined multiple sets of the D&D Miniatures line, and it's been the star villain of its own computer game in Westwood's excellent Eye of the Beholder (and to a lesser extent the two mediocre sequels).

It's hard to get a handle on what makes the Beholder so memorable. Its it merely that it is an abomination, a thing-that-should-not-be? So too are the Galeb Duhr, the Xorn, the Gibbering Mouther and the Otyugh, and none of those creatures have reached the Beholder's level of celebrity.

Possibly some of what makes the Beholder memorable comes from the way we react to faces. We have a natural talent for identifying human faces; we are so naturally inclined to react to our own kind that we can see faces in the grills and headlights of cars, in the gnarls of tree trunks, and in the random scatter of rubbish. What's more, we react strongly to vulnerable faces. The reason we regard large eyes as "cute" is because we are reacting to a perceived newborn; the eyes of a baby are disproportionately large compared to its skull and it is only with growth that the proportions align to adult norms.

The Beholder subverts those expectations; it uses the shape of a human face, complete with "hair", to create something wholly aberrant and unnatural. Its large main eye and plethora of secondary orbs are not its vulnerability but its strength, able to fire beams that bring death or debilitation.

Part of the charm of the Beholder, too, is its versatility. Much like the Dragon, who is able to fly, claw, use breath weapons, spells, and a fear aura, the Beholder is not bound to any single tactic or method of offence. Each eye delivers a different yet potent attack, and an enemy of the "eye tyrant" can never be sure exactly what being hit by a Beholder's beam will do, other than have a surety that it will not be pleasant.

The move to 4th Edition has not left the Beholder unscathed. 4th Edition puts an end to "save vs death" effects. As a result, the Beholder can no longer kill or petrify enemies with a single attack. How does it compensate?

4th Edition offers Beholders in all flavours and level ranges, but the Beholder Eye Tyrant is the most archetypal version on offer. As a level 19 solo, this monstrosity is well suited to act as an endgame adversary for the Paragon Tier of play.

The Eye Tyrant packs 900 hit points, gets a free beam attack on each and every enemy that starts its turn within 5 squares of the monster, and delivers a further two beams on its turn, increasing to four when it gets bloodied.

The Death Ray's still there, but like most death effects it's now a track, with the target needing to fail two saves without passing one in order to actually die, and getting weaker along the way. The Petrification Ray works much the same. There's a Charm Ray that causes characters to make a basic attack against their allies, and a Sleep Ray that sends characters unconscious until they make a save.

The star of the show is the devastating Disintegration Ray, dealing 2d10+9 followed by an ongoing 2d20 untyped damage. Making your save against the ongoing doesn't end the effect - you'll just be dialling it down to 2d6 ongoing, requiring another save to escape completely.

Unfortunately like all 4th Edition solos the Beholder Eye Tyrant is disproportionately affected by debuffs. Despite being theoretically as tough as five equivalent level monsters, it still only takes one successful hit to leave it dazed, stunned, or paralysed. Wise DMs will give the Beholder favourable terrain and an array of minions to make sure it presents an appropriate challenge.

Still, the Beholder retains its charm and flavour in this new edition, and I'm personally looking forward to running my players into one at the first opportunity.

Chamber of Statues

2009-03-31T09:44:00.006+11:00

A good trap has personality. A good trap feels like a malign force, a cruel enemy with a vicious sense of humour. A good trap seems to laugh at you even as it unleashes its several stages of lethal surprise.

The Chamber of Statues doesn't quite hurdle that bar. It's a little charmless, and it's competent rather than clever, but it nevertheless succeeds in providing a reasonable non-combat challenge for the players.

As the name suggests, this encounter is characterised by the presence of several statues. It features a gargantuan statue of a swordsman, two smaller statues of dragons, and then a collection of sculpted cherubs holding amphoras near the far door.

The room is an Obvious Trap. Players of any experience know that rooms with no visible enemies are more than they seem. When you add a collection of statues into the equation, it doesn't take a genius to see the rough shape of what's coming.

That's okay, though. Traps should speak ahead of themselves. While, strictly speaking, a completely undetectable trap is more effective, it's less dramatically interesting, and often more than a little unfair. Part of the fun of traps is knowing there's one coming, but not knowing exactly what form it will take or how to protect against it.

When players enter the room, the door locks behind them, and the big statue starts swinging its sword in a circle. Characters within its arc take damage and get knocked prone. There's only a thin space around the western edge of the room that's out of range, although there's a much larger vacant area near the dragon statues.

The dragons, naturally, are dangerous too. When PCs step between them and the swordsman, the dragons fire a force blast which pushes those it hits back into the swordsman's reach.

One place where this encounter falls short is in disarming the trap. A good trap should have several viable paths for countering it. Here avoidance is a good strategy, but players may also want to attack the statue or attempt to disarm it. The module provides rules for both these ideas, but both the difficulty and the amount of time required for success make them all but useless. Players who try to think outside the box will be brutally shut down if the encounter is run as printed.

Once players have passed the swordsman and dragons, they come to the water-bearing cherubs. Once a player has stepped between the cherubs, a magical curtain of force descends, sealing them in the area near the door (which is of course locked), and an unending torrent of magical water starts spilling from the amphoras. In three rounds it reaches a sufficient height to fully submerge the trapped player, and then commences rotating like a whirlpool, smashing its victim against the walls.

The trap falls down a little here too. Getting out of the water trap involves either smashing the cherubs, "disarming" them with Thievery, or "unmagicking" them with Arcana. It's not immediately obvious, without a little DM prompting, that the cherubs protrude through the magical barrier, allowing players outside the trap to help, nor is it clear how Thievery might help in overcoming what is apparently a magical trap. The solution is neither intuitive nor logical, which makes it that much less satisfying when you hit upon it.

Furthermore, the trap reckons without the Eladrin fey step power. In the second group that I saw attempt this room, the victim was an Eladrin fighter, who was able to contemptuously teleport to safety and watch the trap rather pathetically attempt to drown an empty room.

In any case, assuming the players actually do attempt to break the cherubs to stop the trap, they'll discover that the dragon statues have a magically increased range once the water trap is activated, and each interference with the cherubs provokes another force blast. It's challenging, but it's also frustrating and more than a little cheap.

Players who eventually overcome the combination of traps might well be asking exactly how Kalarel and his minions deal with this room on a daily basis, given it's the only way into the final chambers of Kalarel's lair. The answer is simple, explains the module - the traps only target non-evil creatures, duh.

Possibly if Kalarel was spending less time sculpting massive magical statues of swordsmen and building pretty little stone angels, he might have already opened the rift to the Shadowfell and made this whole business redundant.

Alignment

2009-03-30T11:07:00.009+11:00

Having the courage of your convictions is important.

4th Edition is full of bold moves towards a new philosophy of game design. It makes many sweeping changes to Dungeons & Dragons, and is unapologetic. But there's a few places where it seems hesitant - where it knows it needs to change, but seems unwilling to let go of the past.

One of these is alignment.

D&D's treatment of alignment is infamous. Past editions have posited that all ethical and moral codes can be pigeonholed into one of nine squares on a three-by-three grid. An individual is either Good (self-sacrificing), Evil (selfish) or Neutral (governed by enlightened self-interest). Simultaneously they are either firm adherents to a social contract (Lawful), wilfull sociopaths (Chaotic), or pragmatists who follow rules so far as convenient (Neutral).

This charmingly simple ideology gives a lot of flavour to early editions of D&D, and its concept of morality as an easily defined matrix is very attractive to the mid-to-late-teen demographic of the hobby. However, it's been holding the game back in a number of ways.

By presenting nine alignments, the game implied that all nine were valid choices for player characters. The sort of players most inclined to play Chaotic Evil characters were typically those least suited to play them. "Roleplaying your character" in the context of evil PCs was often translated into "being a jerk", and party after party lost sight of the game's core dungeon-crawling gameplay amid internicine morality wars and backstabbing. Rather than encouraging roleplaying, the alignment system ended up straightjacketing players into some decidedly odd patterns of play.

4th Edition tries to throw alignment out the window. The developers have looked around and seen that no one else in any medium is using this mechanic. Dungeons and Dragons has found its way to a lonely little ideological island where the roleplaying mainland is only barely in sight.

Moreover, the developers have remembered what Dungeons and Dragons is good at. It's about heroic fantasy, with the emphasis on heroic. If the players aren't running heroes then they need to take a good hard look at why they're playing the game in the first place.

To this end, the alignment system has been pared down. The nine point system is gone. In its place is a continuum with five divisions. There's Lawful Good, plain old Good, Neutral, Evil, and the mad cackling extreme of Chaotic Evil. The two evil alignments are specifically forbidden to players. The book is explicit - you can make a regular hero, or an anti-hero, but by Pelor you're going to make a hero.

Gone too are most of the mechanical effects of alignment. Paladins are no longer required to be Lawful Good. There are no weapons that can only be wielded by those of correct alignment. Even the Great Wheel of the Planes, where each alignment was represented by a heavenly realm, has been cast aside in favour of a confused bipolar scatter of worlds.

It's a great improvement. It theoretically opens the door to more types of character, and more types of story. Players can play their character as they feel they should without stopping every five seconds to debate whether they are correctly representing their alignment. Paladins are as narratively interesting as any other class on offer.

But you have to wonder why the developers didn't go the rest of the way down the path. Why not scrap alignment altogether?

I think the answer lies in the realm of contrast. I think we still have Good and Lawful Good so that the game could retain Evil and Chaotic Evil. I think we have alignment not so the game can say, "Act like this," but so it can say, "Don't act like this."

Dungeons and Dragons is not a game of greys; it's a game of black and white, and by retaining the extremes of the alignment system it's drawing a line, and telling us which side the players should be standing on.

Corridors of the Cube

2009-03-26T07:41:00.007+11:00

It seems like a safe bet the Gelatinous Cube will not be winning the current Eleven Foot Poll, so I'm going to go ahead and talk about it in the context of my favourite encounter in Keep on the Shadowfell, the Corridors of the Cube.

Ten foot square corridors are a staple of D&D. I love them dearly, but they don't make the slightest bit of sense. After all, excavation is hard, expensive work. It is not cost effective to make tunnels any wider or higher than they absolutely have to be.

Here in what is ostensibly a military keep you might have expected cramped passages, maybe four foot across, only just wide enough for two people to move quickly in opposite directions - but no, the builders have decided what is good enough for Gygax is good enough for them. You see it, too, in dwarven architecture, where the stubby little diggers have allowed themselves enough headroom to give each other piggy-back rides. Hell, the corridor in my house is only three feet wide, and it seems to get the job done.

One of the things I love about D&D is that these kind of mechanical cliches are not just prevalent, but so prevalent that entire ecologies have grown around them. In the Corridors of the Cube we encounter the Gelatinous Cube, a transparent ooze in the precise shape of the corridor. It is a ten foot invisible cube, with its edges exactly scraping the corridor walls.

Let's point out this isn't just a monster specifically evolved to live within a standard RPG dungeon. It's a creature specfically evolved to hunt adventurers in an RPG dungeon. One of the Cube's biggest advantages is its transparency. You can see right through it, which means that, like a particularly fine spiderweb, you can not even notice it's there until you've already walked into it.

That only works on humanoids. Creatures with heightened hearing - like, say, anything naturally living underground - won't be fooled by transparency, and will hear it coming a mile away. Anything that can see in the infra-red will notice its distinctive heat signature. It's only humanoids, with their reliance on traditional light sources and edge-recognition, who'll fall prey to its camouflage.

In Corridors of the Cube, we find the Cube in its natural habitat. Players enter from the north and then have the choice of heading east or west. The Cube waits in its alcove to the east, and won't be detected unless players specifically walk into that space. Once players have picked an end of the corridor to walk to, the Cube emerges and gets between them and the exit.

If they've gone east, the Cube will take a leisurely ooze down the corridor and engulf the players at its leisure. Once engulfed, players take 10 ongoing acid damage and become dazed, and have to make an escape check (Acrobatics vs Reflex or Athletics vs Fortitude) to get out. It can engulf multiple players on a single turn, and characters who escape end up back next to the Cube with their turn used up, so actually getting away from the thing is next to impossible.

If players go west, they're in for even more problems. The room to the southwest holds two Corruption Corpses, a disgusting kind of zombie that throws pieces of its own flesh from range and deals aura damage to anyone who gets close. The Cube will literally drive the players into the corpses, until they're taking the zombies' aura damage even while engulfed.

When players eventually triumph over Cube and Corpses, they get the chance to ransack the room to the east of the zombies. Here they find a collection of children's toys belonging to Ceinwein and Drystan Keegan. Reading between the lines, it's not hard to draw the conclusion that the two zombies outside are intended to be the resurrected bodies of Sir Keegan's murdered children, which potentially makes for a poignant, yet disturbing, moment.

Alternatively, if you're not keen on your players beating up child zombies, a second possibility is that the children still rest in their graves, and the zombies are the knights set to guard over their corpses. Although one has to again wonder where Sir Keegan found time to build coffins and set guards during his busy schedule of slaughtering every man, woman and child in the keep and then killing himself.

This is a nearly perfect encounter. It's mechanically sound, it's tactically interesting, it's clearly explained, it surprises the players without being unfair, it ties in to the backstory, and there's worthwhile treasure at the end of it in the form of a safewing amulet +1.

Questions:

[1] Where did the Cube come from? The door into the area has been hastily boarded up and marked "Closed", but it's unclear whether this is hobgoblin work or an act of the keep's original inhabitants. The ecology of the Gelatinous Cube is something that does not bear much scrutiny.