It has somewhat belatedly come to my attention that while I have chronicled our various D&D adventures in the Forgotten Realms from 1997 or so to 2011, I have not yet bothered to collect all of those posts in one place. So I guess let’s do that. In That Epic Struggle, Part One – The story of our very first campaign in 1997, from Waterdeep to Calimport. In That Epic Struggle, Part Two – The second FR game in 2000, featuring the level 5 frontal assault, the carpet collision, and giants who may or may not be on fire. In That Epic Struggle, Part Three – Our third FR game from 2006, featuring the grassy gnoll, Talos swag, and the […]

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As a partial explanation to my players for why we’ve been playing so much Mechwarrior lately, and partially because if I don’t talk about this I’m not going to have any posts in December at all, let us briefly talk about mapping in the Forgotten Realms. If you’ve been reading this blog or playing in my games long enough, it should be no secret to you that I really like making maps, and that I really like Profantasy’s Campaign Cartographer suite for doing so. I’ve gotten a lot of milage out of it over the years, and it gives me some really cool results: They also put out a very nice program that I was really excited about in 1999 […]

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Loincloth [loin-klawth] Verb, loin-cloth-ing, loin-cloth-ed. Definition: to capture a party of PCs and leave them stranded without equipment in the Dungeon Master’s evil and devious dungeon. Usage: “Oh man, we just got loinclothed again!” Origin: Derived from the computer gaming practice of having naked PCs wear nothing but a loincloth.

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In which I’m going to talk about our D&D session of two weeks ago, which I’ve been putting off. I’m going to be fairly brief about it, and here’s the thing with that: while everybody else was pretty awake for the proceedings, I was exhausted. 2 liter of Coca-Cola? No help. I was so tired I was zoning out mid-combat round and mid-sentence a couple times, and I’m pretty sure I fell asleep at least once. All of which is to say that there are going to be some fairly significant gaps in the narrative here, because I had no idea what was going on.

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So, drow have always been one of the more interesting D&D races. Some cool abilities, fun with spiders, kinky evil sex, evil rituals, they’re good villains if you need a villain, or good inspiration if you’re running a particular sort of (rather creepy, really) BDSM establishment. They also have cool houses, being big glowing stalactites and stalagmites with crazy designs, so drow are probably also good inspiration if you want that really unique abode, or maybe just want to throw a badass rave.

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One of the ways to add a little variety to combats is through creative use of terrain – a river here, a hill there, the odd tree or bush for cover, and what have you. As with everything else in the Underdark, things are dangerous. The monsters? Dangerous. The lack of light? Dangerous. The rocks? Dangerous. The bees? Dangerous. Bridges? Well, we should talk about bridges.

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From time to time, adventuring parties make choices. Sometimes these choices happen during combat. Always, these choices have consequences, and maybe not the consequences you expected them to have. So let’s talk for a time about consequences. Our party remains: Aukan, a 7+ foot tall goliath barbarian and ower of a life debt to Cujo the riding dog; Davoren, human farmer priest/wizard of Helm the Watcher; Gar Rotte, human thief; Lord X, human paladin of Helm on a religious mission to protect Davoren; Oscar the Magnicifent, halfling wizard, follower of Talos the Stormlord, and legend in his own mind; Sancho, elven bard currently following Lord X and taking note of his crazy and somewhat unwise actions. With NPC accompaniment by: […]

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So, there comes a point in the life of every adventuring party wherein the DM realizes that perhaps the difficulty under which the players have been laboring has not, as the case may be, been particularly difficult enough. Similarly, there comes a point in the life of every dungeon crawl wherein the DM must ask themselves “Wouldn’t these legions of goblins team up to fight the party all at once instead of being strung out room by room?” What follows is the tragic intersection of these two questions.

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So, to recap, my D&D party is: Akuan, a 7+ foot tall goliath barbarian; Davoren, human farmer priest/wizard of Helm the Watcher; Gar Rotte, human thief; Lord X, human paladin of Helm on a religious mission to protect Davoren; Oscar the Magnicifent, halfling wizard, follower of Talos the Stormlord, and legend in his own mind; Sancho, elven bard currently following Lord X and taking note of his crazy and somewhat unwise actions. When we last left them, they were somewhat on the sideways part of being on the outskirts of in the middle of the module A2 Secret of the Slavers’ Stockade, having somewhat riled Icar and various other rather strange yet heroic feats. Oscar, sometimes the Magnificent, is currently […]

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In which I’m going to tell you about the group’s last D&D session, because it continues to both amuse and perplex me greatly. Our party: Akuan, a 7+ foot tall goliath barbarian; Davoren, human farmer priest/wizard of Helm the Watcher; Gar Rotte, human thief; Lord X, human paladin of Helm on a religious mission to protect Davoren; Oscar the Magnicifent, halfling wizard, follower of Talos the Stormlord, and legend in his own mind; Sancho, elven bard currently following Lord X and taking note of his crazy and somewhat unwise actions. Our quest: To find the Holy Grail To infiltrate Hillfort Torbold and discover the whereabouts of the kidnapped Lady Gilda Tanislove. For those of you who actually remember that far […]

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So we just had this combat in 4e. Probably the biggest thing we ever ran. On the one side: 5 PCs 1 Hobgoblin Captain 3 Hobgoblin Archers 6 Hobgoblin Grunts 1 Macetail Behemoth ——– 16 total On the other: 1 Gnoll Captain 2 Gnoll Marauders 1 Cacklefiend Hyena 1 Gnoll Huntmaster 2 Gnoll Claw Fighters 11 Gnoll Hunters 11 Gnoll Raiders 7 Hyenas ———— 36 total For 52 total combatants. 4793 total XP and level 4. Took us about a session and a half to run, which they did with no rest at all. Probably that’s the most epic fight I’ve ever had, or run. Lots of good moments, from Caradoc’s duel with Sir Robert of Norgood to Ziiran’s criticaling […]

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Supposing that you’re running a D&D game online and that there happens to be logging enabled for this game. Supposing also that you want to use the logs to create a summary of each game session, because doing this helped the last game a lot. It’s probably better if you do this, say, after each session instead of, say, after five or six sessions and a meg and a half of log to wade through. Just saying. Also: Caradoc the Mad: so then I made a ranger for the christmas seson Caradoc the Mad: who was cool but died in 1 session to dire weasels Caradoc the Mad: dire weasals Erik Caradoc the Mad: you attacked us with dire weazels

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Today’s post brought to you by viral invaders, which are at this very moment having a nice chat with my immune system. As of right now, my immune system appears to be getting the better end of the deal, thanks to our friends Advil and Robitussin. So instead of doing what I set out to do last night, namely find some 4th edition D&D tables to speed my prep work, I got sucked into a bunch of people talking in various places about the various editions of (A)D&D, why they were good, why they were bad. Since it occurs to me that I have yet to talk about 4th edition in any meaningful sense, I’ll use that discussion as a […]

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A little bit of worldbuilding work, here. Firstly, the map: Click for a larger version. This is the third version of this particular map. The first, which got referenced a couple of times previously in this series, was in the default CC3 bitmap style, which is one that I quite like, actually, but one that just wasn’t cutting it for this particular project for some reason. Went through a lot of ideas after that, including trying to make up a style based on the 3rd Edition Forgotten Realms map (which is probably the best the Realms have ever looked, but trying to match that style…holy crap), before settling on ideas out of the Cartographer’s Annual 2007, one of which was […]

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As continued from…the post below. That aside, I really must start categorizing my posts again. Basically because it’s about time I need to start referring to this stuff, a brief reference for various things I’ve actually decided on (or close enough), followed by some actual crunch in the form of races. Races: Aischroi (kulloi/deinoi) – Two subraces, one region. Humans (humans) – With no subraces, but four different regions (Sanagos, Free Cities, Kingdom, Northlander) Ossith (lizardfolk) – Slaves of the Ssithil. One region. Peretoi – slightly changed human nomads. One region. Ssithil (yuan-ti) – The inhabitants of Great Ssithilos. One region. Vargrans (hobgoblins) – The inhabitants of the northlands. Two regions. Gods: Sanagos – In Healer/Watcher/Traveller/Ruler guises. Worshipped in Sanagos. […]

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In which we return to the world I keep jotting notes for, previously detailed in posts here and here. This time with two maps: Overview showing the whole continent, with my rough notes on who or what is going where. Note the awesome CC3 graphics, about which I shall perhaps discourse on another time. Regional map showing the whole continent, this time roughly broken down by races and regions. Eventually, this will become the basis for a Forgotten Realms-style region list, or perhaps something stuck directly into the racial rules when I get there? Let’s go over each of those and talk about them some. Black: Uninhabited Which is probably off by a little bit, but at the least uninhabited […]

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In which I’m going to pretty much post a list of what’s on my (now mostly in storage) AD&D bookshelf, and then (and in between items) I’m going to talk about it a fair bit. If that’s not your thing, stop now, before things get ugly. ====================== AD&D – First Edition: 1978 – Player’s Handbook (1st Edition) 1985 – Oriental Adventures (1st Edition) 1986 – Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide 1986 – Wilderness Survival Guide The 1st Edition PHB is pretty much the book that started me in this hobby. I found my brothers’ old copy right about the time I was really getting introduced to fantasy literature in a big way (Thanks for the Eddings stuff, Jason), and I basically said […]

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One of those things about me that most people don’t actually know is that I’m something of a map geek, especially when it comes to gaming maps. Now, most of you, my faithful readers, pretty much know this – the whole Cartographer’s Guild thing for one, and I’ve posted plenty of Campaign Cartographer doodles up here. One of the things that really really doesn’t get talked about is the fact that, in amongst my D&D things, I have a box that, once upon a time, back when they were the height of technology, contained an external 100 MB Zip drive. Now it contains AD&D poster maps. 81 of them, to be exact, ranging from the 3rd edition FRCS map of […]

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Some of you may remember this post from a time ago, in which I discuss D&D worlds and the building thereof. As I am in a creative brainstorming mood, and as I need a break from beating my head against a certain part of Weye for a moment, allow me to ramble. Coming up with unique countries that aren’t direct representations of Earth stuff is pretty hard. Just saying. So most of this stuff needs to be preliminary until I can figure out how to put my own spin on it. There’s a spot in the east, a couple islands and some coastline, that I always sort of earmarked as “Put some wizard artificer types here”, and I sure don’t […]

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In that general theme of Very Tired of School, I’m going to pretty much ramble about the D&D world I’m working on, which is so far unnamed. This is going to be pretty disjointed, but I need to scribble, it might be interesting to the gamers, and parts of it I think are way cool. If you see a bit you especially like, let me know. – Unsure on cosmology. Leaning towards very living gods/immortal god-kings type of deal. This might change depending on my whims, but I kind of like the idea that if you were very very powerful, you could become a god, or kill one. Change of pace. Then again, I might change. – Four of these […]

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Post one in this series is here. Let us return, then, to those D&D yore and the Forgotten Realms, and the continuation of that epic struggle against the forces of STD ogre mages and perhaps also evil. The year is 2000. It is the dawn of 3rd edition D&D, and the people were, well, excited. I wonder, sometimes how I didn’t wreck the car getting home from taking everyone to pick up the PHB, considering that we all wanted to see it at the same time. Including the driver. Following the disappearance of our previous heroes into the Calimport Muzad, our roster has changed just a bit: Magnus, Half-Orc Barbarian/Cleric (Cole). An exile from an orcish tribe, and continuing Cole’s […]

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Part one is here, and part two is here. In previous episodes, we learned how, in two months in 1370 DR, the merchant kingdom of Amn was saved largely through the efforts of two groups of adventurers, one of whom saved the city of Murann from almost certain plunder, then went on to slay the feared pirate, the Black Alaric; the second of whom raided the city of Esmeltaran, disrupting its monstrous occupants, then fighting a climactic battle in the ruins of ancient Shoonach which killed the leaders of the Sythillisian Empire. The year is 2006. The edition is D&D 3.5. The time is Mirtul, 1371 DR. Spring has come to Amn. Its fortunes are on the rise, though its […]

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I really need to sit down and make my combat map for my Friday game, but I actually don’t really want to right now, and reading way too much rec.games.frp.dnd, so instead I’m going to sketch out an idea I just had, so as I don’t forget it. Mainly, we’re changing spellcasting. The idea is that we’ll take all wizard/cleric spells and split them up into domains that are loosely based on the PHB cleric domains. We’ll want to end up somewhere above the number of wizard schools (to incorporate unique druidic and clerical magic), but somewhere below the current number of domains, so that a spellcaster forced to pick two or three of these isn’t totally SOL, which makes […]

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A slightly out of context transcript from tonight’s D&D game, because playing Anglaspark the dragon was quite amusing for me. Extraneous bits trimmed. Wherein previously, Our Heroes have charmed an orc, questioned it, and sent it to summon the huge blue dragon Anglaspark to a parley… *Anglaspark lands* GM: So he’s a huge-sized dragon, bigger than a lot of buildings you’ve seen. Curious sort of look on his face. Little tarnished brass crown on his head. Dinendal: Greetings Great Anglaspark! Anglaspark: Why, adventurers! And you’ve charmed my orc! How CUTE! *Anglaspark claps his forelegs together.* joesf (Tanner): does he leap into the air to do it? Erik: He kinda does, yeah. Anglaspark: Now, who might you chaps be, and what […]

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I’ve more or less finished my first map with Campaign Cartographer, and so feel qualified to comment on it now. So I’ll just be doing that for a time. I realize I’m probably the only one who cares, but for the rest of you, here’s a nice map to look at. 1. Bitmap symbols and fill styles are, for the most part, a huge plus. They look stunning, are easy enough to use, and generally have good-looking varicolor fills and so give you a wide variety of looks possible. Randomized symbols within a category is also highly useful, though there seems to a bug where it sticks on one symbol a lot. On the other hand, load and redraw times […]

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Since I keep talking about how I’ve been writing down the adventures of the intrepid heroes of the last Forgotten Realms D&D game I ran, Jason prodded me about posting them here. Since the only other thing I have to talk about is skipping class because I’m so tired from working on my ILS 501 database I can’t think to drive, I’ll just go ahead and do so. But let us not begin with our latest heroes, because that’s closer to the end of the story. Instead, let’s talk about our original heroes. The time, as best I recall, is 1997. The game was AD&D, Second Edition, with all the various game-breaking books. Our Heroes: Kink, Human Cleric of Valkur […]

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So we played a lot of D&D tonight, and that was fun, but really the night was much enlivened by the addition of a lot of alcohol. And yes Jason, we’re looking at you and that fifth of whiskey you put down. Because, as I was telling Whir, it was like this: [00:15] Dwip: We got Gorm fucking wasted tonight, too. [00:15] Dwip: Evan Williams and Cherry Coke do not mix, by the by. [00:15] Whir: What the hell is Evan Williams? [00:15] Dwip: Whiskey. [00:16] Whir: Never heard of it. Must be an Oregonian thing. [00:16] Dwip: Apparently not. [00:17] Dwip: But yeah, Gorm got a fifth of it, and chugged most of it. [00:17] Whir: Wow. [00:17] Dwip: […]

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Just because Whir did it too: I Am A: Neutral Good Half-Elf Ranger Bard Alignment:Neutral Good characters believe in the power of good above all else. They will work to make the world a better place, and will do whatever is necessary to bring that about, whether it goes for or against whatever is considered ‘normal’. Race:Half-Elves are a cross between a human and an elf. They are smaller, like their elven ancestors, but have a much shorter lifespan. They are sometimes looked down upon as half-breeds, but this is rare. They have both the curious drive of humans and the patience of elves. Primary Class:Rangers are the defenders of nature and the elements. They are in tune with the […]

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Apparently somewhere in here I gained a year. Maybe I threw a party of sorts, too. And maybe we played some D&D. Maybe it was even the debut of Tharavel. So, apparently people about half understood what I was trying for in the world, which considering the monumental task, works out ok I guess. So we end up with Cole’s dwarf ranger, Brian’s dwarf barbarian, and Jason’s elf druid and elf wizard, who turns out to be important since he’s the son of a local noble in the elf duchy of Vatan, and that’s where the game is. The whole thing is, the wizard just got called home from studying abroad because he’s needed at home due to the giant […]

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Just because I finally got done printing it out and cutting it and putting it together, I shall now offer up an image of the new and revised Tharavel map, poster-sized, 1″ = 60 mile scale. It is, most people will agree, a distinct improvement upon the old one. Yes, those two things and the penguin are the only things hanging on my walls. One of these days I also want to put up a poster-sized version of Justinian and Co. Strange taste in decoration? Maybe. Maybe. But we history types tend towards eccintricity. Just ask Marechal.

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Since I’ve been promising Cole I’d do this for like, as long as I’ve had a webpage, I guess now that I actually went and did it, I should go ahead and link it all for you. So, here is my collection of the Monroe D&D group’s funniest home videos. Except they’re not on video. They could be, I guess, but they’re not. Oh well. Enjoy. I’m off back to bed. This paper thing is sucking the life from me.

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I promised a CC2 blog entry, so here we are. Many image files abound. Fair warning: Most of them are pretty freaking large. Understand that these are all a fair amount of work on my part. The Tharavel map took probably about a week of solidly working on it, some of which was learning how to do things in CC2 I’d never done before. Niriath Henning took most of a week. Littlefang took two solid days of work. Bremberthwaite maybe about half a day, because it’s very small and simple. Utna took a good long time, since it was the first CC2 city I’d ever done. The complexity of all this comes from the way CC2 works. If you’ve ever […]

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You know it’s going to be one of those classes when your brand new D&D characters, begging for seperate lives of their own, begin having little conversations in your notebook. Picture, if you will, a dwarf, of the same general physical characteristics as Gimli, from a race where Gimli is the stereotype, sitting at a bar being questioned by somebody. “So your name is…Grog Halfplow?” “Grogni. But they call me Grog on account ‘a I likes me ale, see. The Halfplow bit, well, great-grandpa Derek was a bit…odd. Took up some undwarvish ways, like farming. Me, I liked the mines better.” “That explains the pick at your belt. What about those massive burn scars all over your body?” “There were […]

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The fight you take is equal to the fight you make, or something to that effect. So, Sunday night. Weekly D&D ritual. You may recall that we had twice previously fought a certain very large spikey black monster with psionic powers to a standstill, losing our robot, and then losing me. Well, this time, we went down for the third try at the thing. This time, we had a plan, however, involving lots and lots of fire and acid damage which it can’t regenerate. The other two times, we had had a bunch of shrieker mushrooms to have it come to us. However, last time we fried said ‘shrooms, which meant we had to explore. So we did. All of […]

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My throat hurts like hell for no reason. I’m angry about that. Anyway. So, last Sunday, we all gathered together for the weekly D&D ritual at Rema and Mel’s. Whereupon our group was hired by the Temple of Antion, the knowledge god, to go investigate some ruins we found while clearing out the demons I was talking about a while back. We’re getting paid 1500 gold per week for this task, which for the clueless amongst you means we’re not quite the equivilant of a Guatemalan sweatshop worker, but we’re close. Anyway. So we go in, start digging around. Get in an inconsequential fight with some wraiths, which loses a couple people some levels which get restored, and then we […]

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Last night was quite something. For one, Kyle came back from the Army on leave, so we dragged him over and played some D&D and such, just like old times. He had some good stories to tell about the whole thing. That was cool. So we played some D&D. It went badly, as it happens, but that had a lot to do with Jason sort of not realizing what day it was, what day we were having the session, or any of it, and having to totally fake something off top of his head. “Doctor, I’m having the strangest sense of deja vu. I’m level 8, and my mission is to investigate a strange portal that spawns dog-headed evil creatures.” […]

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So it was D&D night tonight. This is always good times, but it’s especially good times when we’re just at the end of a long fight with three high-powered demons and a high-level blackguard. We had, when we left off, just finished the enemies, losing our NPC ranger and putting most of us at 2 or so hp. So we get the hell out of Dodge, hole up, and are about to sleep and heal when… “Roll a spot check. Erik.” “Uh, 6.” “You notice the dog-headed demon about the time it slips a dagger into your ribs from behind. Take 13 damage.” “Excellent. I’m at -11. I am dead. Next time, I’m finding a bigger tree to slump against.” […]

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