As a DM, I often draw inspiration for my D&D games from the most unexpected places. This weekend I saw the movie The Hangover and afterwards I realized that the way the story is structured would work beautifully as a D&D game. For those readers who haven’t seen the movie, I won’t present anything in this article that will ruin it for you. The high points that I’m going to cover are all revealed in the trailer.
Tag: Skill Challenges
The Eberron campaign setting comes with all the intrigue of a post war setting and all the mistrust of a setting still stuck in a cold war. During such difficult times the PCs may find themselves involved in tense negotiations where a poor resolution could result in renewed hostilities.
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Poll Results
Ever since we launched Dungeon’s Master we’ve included a poll question on the right side of the page. (If you haven’t answered this week’s question, now would be a good time!) The number of respondents for each poll continues to grow along with the number of readers who visit our site regularly. Now that we’re a few months in and we’ve had the opportunity to ask a variety of questions of our readers, we decided to take a look at the results of a few polls.
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Month in Review: June 2009
For those counting, it’s been five months since we launched and we’re still going strong. We continue to get comments form new readers almost every day. The Dungeon’s Master team wants to thank all of our readers for continuing to visit regularly, helping the site grow and improve.
Tomorrow is a holiday in Canada and the Dungeon’s Master team is taking the day off to celebrate our country’s birthday. We have a special Canada Day post in store for tomorrow so we’re giving you the month in review for June one day early. For those of you who might have missed some of the articles we published in June, this is your chance to get caught up. Here are the highlights from June.
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Skill Challenge Week – Roundup
Seven new skill challenges and one Eberron-specific skill aide later, skill challenge week wraps up at Dungeon’s Master. We now offer 24 unique skill challenges and 13 skill aides in our library.
The Eberron Player’s Guide was released during our skill challenge week so we made a point of releasing two skill challenges that are Eberron specific:
When we create skill challenges, our goal is to keep them generic enough to fit into any campaign setting (including Eberron). However, if you’re looking for more skill challenges with that Eberron feel, Border Crossing was designed specifically with Eberron in mind
Our focus on skill challenges and skill aides will continue, but I think it will be a couple of weeks before we revisit them again
We welcome your comments and input about any of our skill challenges. If you’ve had opportunity to use them in your game we’d really like to hear how things worked out. And if you have any specific topics you’d like to see covered in a future skill challenge post a comment or send us an email.
Your character has just manifested a Dragonmark. In Eberron this is a big deal. Dragonmarks have a huge impact on NPC reactions. Here are some tips on how to get a little extra from your Dragonmark during your next skill challenge.
There are going to be circumstances where having a Dragonmark or being affiliated with a particular Dragonmarked House may provide advantages during a skill challenge. The forthcoming Eberron Campaign Guide will likely cover this to some extent, but until its release here are a few guidelines that you can use.
Moving from room to room in a dungeon has historically been handled by drawing the map and the DM asking the party how they advance. Do they turn right or left at the t-junction. In 4e, the amount of crawling through a dungeon has been reduced with more focus given to large rooms and the encounters they contain within. Indeed, even traps are now incorporated into combat encounters. An adventuring group in 4e is more likely to find a pit trap in a combat encounter than randomly placed within a dungeon corridor.
From time to time the PCs may find themselves incarcerated. There are plenty of reason why this might be the case, but I think it’s fair to say most PCs will try to escape if the alternative is life imprisonment or execution. How the PCs ended up in prison and what happens to them when they get out is entirely up to the DM. This skill challenge just focuses on scenarios the PCs may find themselves in while incarcerated. This can be run as one large skill challenge or a series of smaller ones.
Pirates and adventure on the high seas haven’t always been the typical D&D adventure setting. However, almost all PCs are required to travel by ship at some point in their adventuring career. The skill challenge below tackles the issue of surviving during a raging storm at sea.
Today is all about Eberron. The Eberron Player’s Guide is finally in wide release and earlier today we posted the skill challenge Maintaining the Karrnathi Army. As an added bonus, here is another Eberron-specific skill challenge.
The lightning rail is a key component of transportation and daily life in Eberron, so when service is disrupted the commerce of the Five Nations is effected. This skill challenge provides the DM with a quick encounter for the PCs that could lead to further adventure and intrigue.