Tag: A Season of Serpents

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Editorial

D&D Encounters: Keep on the Borderlands (Week 12)

Betrayal! Our suspicions of Benwick were well founded as the party was betrayed. After risking our lives for Gorn and Benwick we were repaid with violence. But this group of adventurers wasn’t about to fall victim to such an underhanded and evil act. We were ready to fight and expose this wrong doing.

This week our party consisted of seven players: Berrian, Eldeth, Hagen, Merric, Sola, an Assassin and a Wizard. The encounter began with the party retracing their steps through the three previous rooms. When we arrived in the room with the statue in the middle, there was Benwick, Gorn, Sal and Gordi waiting for us. Benwick explained that they were worried and wanted to see if we’d met with success or failure.

We quickly recapped all that had happened. Gorn seemed disappointed that there were no Dwarven relics, but was quite happy to hear about how much gold was collected. After much debate the party decided to give Benwick and Gorn their fair share.

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Editorial

D&D Encounters: Keep on the Borderlands (Week 11)

Using the keys found in each of the previous two rooms the heroes opened the doors and entered the vault. They’d found the treasure room. Now all they had to do was find the treasure. The only question now is what kind of guardians will they have to defeat to gain their reward?

Our party had six members this week: Berrian, Eldeth, Hagen, Quinn, Sola and another Wizard. We began the encounter by recapping the events to date for one of the new players. It’s amazing just which details players remember and believe are important when compared to what actually happened and what is actually important.

As the back-up DM for my group I have a copy of the adventure, just in case I need to step up and run an encounter or two. I also use it as a reference after Wednesday night’s game while I’m writing up the weekly article. This gives me a lot more insight into what’s actually going on and is one of the big reasons I try not to be the decision-maker for our party.

When the other players recapped the events from the previous 10 weeks I have to bite my tongue and not chime in with important details that they forgot or overlooked. Fortunately the DM of10 does jump in with subtle reminders when this happens, but not always. This is a problem that happens all the time in D&D, but I think it’s even more prevalent with D&D Encounters. After all we only do one encounter a week. After 10 weeks we’re bound to forget some of the details. Unfortunately for us, forgetting those details, even from just a couple of weeks back, made things a lot more difficult during this week’s encounter.

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Editorial

D&D Encounters: Keep on the Borderlands (Week 10)

This week’s encounter picked up with the party still trekking through the dungeon. Our party was made up of the same five heroes that entered the dungeon last week: Berrian, Quinn, Sola, an Assassin and a Wizard. It looked like this encounter was going to be nothing more than straight up combat with minimal role-playing opportunities. That was until Sola decided to shake things up a bit.

Before the party opened and passed through the doors, Sola had two things she wanted to discuss with the party. Her first suggestion was to re-activate the statue before they left the room from last week’s encounter – that way if anyone tried to follow the party deeper into the dungeon they would have to deal with the trap. The party agreed that this was a good idea; unfortunately we were unable to re-activate the trap.

Sola’s second suggestion was about division of treasure. Splitting gold three ways seemed unfair. After all the party was doing all the dangerous work. She was also not convinced that Benwick was being 100% honest with the party. So if the PCs decided to keep all of the gold what could Benwick and Gorn do about it? After all, they wanted to keep things quiet. If silence was that important then they’d have no recourse against the party if we changed the deal. If Gorn’s true interest was in the Dwarven Ruins as he said then as long as we gave those to him he should be content, if not a bit irked. The rest of the party had misgivings about not standing by the arranged agreement, but they said they’d think about it and we’d figure it out before we left the dungeon.

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Editorial

D&D Encounters: Keep on the Borderlands (Week 1)

D&D Encounters: Keep on the Borderlands kicked off yesterday. Although the number or participants at my FLGS has been steadily dwindling over the past few weeks we had enough people to run the first encounter last night.

D&D Encounters is a great way for new people to try their hand at being the DM. And that’s exactly what happened at our table. Few players at my FLGS have made every game since D&D Encounters began, but one of the most consistent participants decided that he was going to step up and DM this time around. I don’t know if this was his first time ever DMing or just his first time DMing D&D Encounters, but he did a phenomenal job.

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Player Resources

D&D Encounters Season 3 Characters

D&D Encounters season 3 begins today. Using new rules from the D&D Essentials line, the season 3 adventure is a re-imagining of the D&D classic, Keep on the Borderlands. The adventure is broken into five chapters, each one running four weeks (yes, that’s a total of 20 weeks for those of you doing the math).

Players are encouraged to create their own characters using the new D&D Essentials rules found in the recently released Red Box. Wizards of the Coast hinted that Character Builder would be updated with the Essentials materials in time for everyone to make suitable PCs for D&D Encounters season 3. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. So unless you’ve picked up the Red Box and are happy making a character without character builder, then for at least the first week you’ll have to use one of the six pre-generated characters provided.

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