Month: January 2011

Categories
DM Resources

The Best LFR Adventure Ever

What happens when you slam LFR and then are challenged to work with a game designer to come up with the best LFR experiences ever? You end up interviewing the author in question and working with him to understand the adventure’s potential. You get an exciting session of LFR available as an actual play podcast. And finally you get honest and critical afterthoughts from the DM who ran the adventure and the players who ultimately judged the success of this project.

In September I wrote the article 7 Reasons I Hate Living Forgotten Realms and it generated a lot of discussion about LFR. The article received many great comments in support of my criticisms and just as many well-reasoned arguments contrary to my own.

Three months later, after the discussion on this topic had cooled considerably, I received an email from Ben McFarland. He’d sent me an LFR adventure. I didn’t know him at the time, but you might recognize the name from his work with the Kobold Quarterly, Rite Publishing or the Ars Magica Fanzine. Most importantly for this discussion, he wrote the LFR adventure DRAG2-1: Discomfort which was published by Wizards of the Coast.

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Categories
Adventure Hooks DM Resources

Adventure Hooks: Campaigns in the Cold (Part 1)

This summer we ran a series of adventure hooks that featured numerous bizarre and strange happenings that occurred in the Sun & Moon Tavern (part 1 | part 2). These articles have been incredibly popular and continue to be among our most widely read pages from the past six months. It seems pretty clear to us that our readers want more short, quick adventure hooks.

One of the reasons the Adventure Hooks from the Sun & Moon Tavern were so popular was that they all centered around one common location. It made coming up with the adventure hooks easier for me as the DM, but I think it also made them more appealing for readers.

Before I sat down to brainstorm more adventure hooks I wanted to come up with a theme to tie them all together. The answer was as simple as looking out my front door. I decided to put together adventure hooks that all took place in a snowy environment.

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Categories
DM Resources Editorial

Putting More “Action” in Action Points

As D&D has evolved over the years many rules and mechanics have been tweaked and changed in order to make the game better. I think one of the greatest improvements was when actions points were introduced with the Eberron Campaign Setting back in 3e D&D. They began as bonus to your d20 roll. Expending an action point meant a good attack became a great attack. With 4e D&D the action point was changed and this good idea became a great idea. Now you actually got another action when you used an action point. Awesome!

Recently I’ve been thinking back to how Wizards of the Coast described the original action point mechanic. One of the reasons it was introduced was to add an extra level of excitement to encounters. This was your chance to have your character do something truly remarkable. You suddenly gave greater consideration to trying new things that were over the top and spectacular.

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Categories
Book Reviews

Review: Return of the Archwizards

Return of the Archwizards
The Summoning / The Siege /
The Sorcerer
Troy Denning

A Forgotten Realms Novel

Troy Denning’s Return of the Archwizards trilogy – The Summoning, The Siege and The Sorcerer – was recently re-released by Wizards of the Coast in one collected volume. It follows the story of the Elf Galareon, an Evereskan tomb guard, as he discovers the power and mystery of shadow magic.

Today the Dungeon’s Master team welcomes our newest contributor, Soklemon. He asked us if he could write book reviews for our site and we were happy to say yes. He is a Dungeon Master, Forgotten Realms fan, aspiring writer and high school student (in that order). He’s relatively new to D&D, but is quickly getting plenty of experience as the DM for his gaming group. We welcome him to the team and hope you enjoy his first contribution, the review of the Troy Denning Omnibus: Return of the Archwizards.

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Categories
Editorial

D&D Encounters: Keep on the Borderlands (Week 17)

This week we began the final chapter of the adventure. Over the next four weeks the PCs will help Lord Drysdale and his men defend Restwell Keep from the besieging lizardfolk army lead by Benwick and the Black Dragon. The heroes will defend the Keep or die trying.

All along I was looking hoping for a thrilling conclusion to this 20-week adventure and it looks like that’s exactly what Wizards has in store for us. The PCs are in a situation where things are happening at a rapid pace. They’ll be lucky to get short rests between the fighting. Everything they’ve done until now has some impact on what’s to come during the final weeks. I only hope that the adventure and the execution at my FLGS lives up to my own expectations.

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Categories
DM Resources Editorial

Undead Make the Scariest Villains

Would you rather fight a beholder or a zombie? This is a much more complicated question than you might realize. Look at this through the eyes of your character and not through the eyes of a meta-gamer. In-character what is the scariest monster you can imagine? For me it’s undead more than any other.

Most monsters are, well, monstrous. They are clearly different than you and they must be destroyed. The beholder is an abomination. It’s scary, and a big party of what makes it scary is that it doesn’t conform to a physical shape you’re comfortable with. It’s a giant floating ball with eyestalks swirling about. Even if you’d never seen a beholder before and knew nothing about it, your initial instinct as an adventurer would be to attack and destroy something so awful.

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Categories
Player Resources

D&D Encounters: Keep on the Borderlands Level 3 Characters

Beginning today all characters for D&D Encounters: Keep on the Borderlands have advanced to level 3. Wizards of the Coast encourages everyone to create their own character using D&D Essentials. However, for those players who don’t have the time or resources (character builder) to create their own level 3 character, Wizards has provided six pre-gens.

What Wizards has not provided are guidelines for leveling up the pre-gens. So the Dungeon’s Master team has created level 3 versions of all six pre-gens for your convenience.

You can download the characters individually or all six together in one zip file. We’ve also made the character builder files available for download so that you can equip the pre-gens with any magical treasure they might have acquired during the previous 16 weeks of adventuring.

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Categories
DM Resources Player Resources

Running the Combat Part of Combat Blisteringly Fast

Running the mechanical part of combat blisteringly fast allows you to spend more time role-playing your character and describing the action in combat. You’re not trying to get through combat quickly because you dislike it; you’re instead trying to move past the computational elements of the game so that the story-telling can take the forefront.

By focusing on the story-telling your game can become so much more exciting. Instead of waiting for the Warlord to thumb through the PHB to look up his class features (again) you can describe how the Warlord leapt from the second story balcony, dodged a provoked opportunity attack by doing a shoulder roll, toppled the gnarled hag with a low cut to her thigh, then sprung to his feet to stare down into her rapidly dimming eyes.

Below is a list of suggestions that will help you get through the mechanical part of combat blisteringly fast. These instructions are not for the faint of heart, and though some tables may pick and choose from these suggestions to speed up some areas of a dragging combat, only the committed will achieve the supersonic pace described by this article.

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Categories
Technology

Manage Your Gaming Session with the DMTools iPad App

“Egad! An app review on Dungeon’s Master?!?” Yes, only because the geek in me sometimes needs to link the love for D&D with the love for gadgets and toys. After purchasing my new Apple iPad back in November, one of first apps I downloaded was the DMTools app as I was to DM a small side story arc for our regular game. In the beginning, DMTools was a bit cumbersome to use, but after a session or two it has become an essential tool for my use as a DM.

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Categories
DM Resources

How To Handle A Split Party In 5 Easy Steps

It happens in every campaign, one player decides to go off and pursue an agenda or lead that only they understand. The player is totally focused on their objective, nothing else seems to matter. No one else at the table understands it. The DM is at his wits end to contain and control the situation. The other players are slowing losing interest and the entire adventure is about to be waylaid.

If you’ve ever sat at a table where you weren’t the player things were focused on, you know the boredom that soon sets in. The frustration at wanting to move forward, but not being able to due to the indulgence or poor planning of the DM. If you haven’t lived through this eventuality you likely haven’t been playing D&D very long, but don’t worry I’m sure it will happen to you soon enough.

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