Poll Follow-Up

Wow. I guess hardly anyone has any opinion about what I post on my blog since I have gotten exactly ONE comment and ONE vote. With that in mind, I guess I am going to focus on getting back to the campaign series and posting more content that DMs can plug into their campaigns.

However, if you DO care and just have not voted or commented yet - please do. I look forward to reading your comments!

A Poll

I am always interested in what YOU the reader are interested in reading about. To that end, I am putting up a poll to try and figure what you would like to see me posting about on this blog. What a concept! Please vote and feel free to comment as well. Make your opinions known!

What Topics Should I Focus On in My Blog?

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  Get back to the Campaign Building Series Already!


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  More Generic Articles Like 'What's He Got in His Pocket?'


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  HARP Stuff (NPCs, mini-adventures, etc.)


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  4E D&D Topics


• 
  
  Something Else (please comment)

view results
Free vote poll

What’s He Got in His Pocket? Nine Interesting Items for Pickpockets to Lift

Player character rogues and thieves seem to want to pickpocket random NPCs at the most inopportune times.  This can be a headache for you, the beleaguered GM, if you need to come up with something interesting for the pickpocket to lift than just another bag of 10 gold pieces.  To ease the burden, I have compiled a list of nine items for the prospective pickpocket to steal.  The items look innocuous when first inspected, but, at your discretion they can serve as adventure hooks.  Have fun with them.

A Small Book

The pocket-sized journal is filled with handwritten notes, diagrams, maps and prayers – to a particularly vicious evil deity.  The book’s owner might be the leader of an underground cult that worships the deity and is recruiting members in the area.  The notes in the book provide clues to the owner’s identity, as well as to the location of the cult’s hidden temple.  Of course, if the pickpocket asks questions of the wrong people or starts snooping around, he might well find himself a leading candidate to become the cult’s next sacrificial victim.  The book might also have been carried by a religious inquisitor that is working undercover to hunt down the members of the cult.  Of course, the inquisitor will probably want the book back and might be willing to take it by force.

A Metal Box

The box appears to be made of steel and is about an inch long on each side.  It has no obvious openings, but rattles when shaken.  The box can be opened with magic or perhaps a great deal of physical force.  When finally opened, it’s found to contain a small red bead that has cracks all along its surface (perhaps from all that shaking).  The bead is actually a ‘demon ball’ and the cracks in it have started to release its contents - a very angry extra planar creature.  Fun for all involved will surely follow.  (Yes.  The Wormy reference is intentional.)

A Brass Key

The brass key is finely crafted and appears to be designed to fit a complex lock.  The lock is on a vault owned by a prominent merchant.  A crest on the key can be used to identify the merchant.  The merchant has important papers in the vault that he desperately wants.  They might be needed to close a sensitive business deal or perhaps for something more sinister like blackmail.  He wants the key back badly enough to pay handsomely for it.  On the other hand, if the pickpocket is too greedy or slow to deal, the merchant might be content to send an assassin to retrieve it.

A Piece of Bread (Wrapped in Paper)

The bread is just a piece of moldy bread.  The paper, however, appears to be an old and faded piece of parchment torn from a book.  The writing might require translation or even magic to be read.  Once it is, the parchment is found to contain directions to the location of an ancient crypt.  The crypt might contain any number of treasures – and terrors or it might have been emptied long ago.  As an added complication, if the pickpocket uses an NPC to translate the parchment, the NPC may tip off another group of adventurers that might be interested in exploring the crypt themselves.

A Wooden Whistle

The whistle is simply carved from animal bone.  When blown, it makes a high-pitched, almost imperceptible tone.  The whistle could summon a guardian animal of some kind that might – or might not be friendly to the whistle’s new owner.  It might even magically summon a horde of small animals or insects.  Alternately, the whistle might be the key that unlocks a secret door or even a portal to another plane.

A Sealed Letter

The letter is folded and closed with a wax seal.  If read, it is found to be a steamy love letter from a well respected (and married) female member of the local nobility to a much younger captain of the local guard or militia.  She is very keen to not have the letter become public of course and is willing to pay a reasonable amount of blackmail to prevent it.  Of course, she also might pull some strings and have the pickpocket arrested and thrown into the local dungeon until he turns it over.

A Dirty Handkerchief

The handkerchief is made from fine silk.  Unfortunately, it has also been heavily used.  Even more unfortunately, the owner was infected with some sort of contagious disease that the pickpocket has now contracted.  As a less dangerous alternative, handling the handkerchief might leave the pickpocket with a strange red rash on his hands.  The rash is harmless, but of course the pickpocket won’t know that.

A Mysterious Marble

The marble is approximately an inch in diameter and appears to be made of glass.  It is initially clear when found, but as it is examined later it will turn various colors and even appear to glow from within.  It is actually just a toy created by a mage to amuse a child, but the pickpocket might well mistake it for something else.  And of course it might very well be something more powerful (or sinister) at the GM’s discretion.

A Yellowed Fang

The fang or tooth is nearly six inches long.  A character with the proper skill can identify it as the incisor of a large animal or monster.  It is yellowed and dark and looks smooth as if from years of handling.  The fang might be the component for a spell, a spell focus, etc.  It might even turn into a powerful monster if the proper spell is cast on it or perhaps if it is planted in the ground, ala Jason and the Argonauts.  Of course it might also just be an old tooth and nothing more.

4E at Games Plus was Fun!

I had a blast running 4E at Games Plus on Sunday.  A big shout out to Rob, Todd and Chad (from the Lords of Tyr) and Matt for coming out and playing.  I don't think that I did a perfect job, but I hope everyone had a good time!  More thoughts about the game later...

My DM Status is Now Official

I apologize for the lack of updates, but I have been preparing for the 4E game that I am going to run this Sunday. I did take the time, however, to take the Herald level test on the RPGA website. My DM status is now official...

D&D 4E at Games Plus this Weekend!

I am going to be running a one-shot 4th Edition D&D game at 2:00 PM this Sunday at Games Plus in Mount Prospect, IL.  The format is a 'delve style' adventure for a party of 3rd-level characters.  I can run multiple sessions if I get a big group.  If you are interested in a little dungeon crawl or just want to playtest one of the character classes from DDI, drop me a comment - and come by to play!

My Subscription to DDI Has Expired!

Well, my 3-month subscription to Dungeons & Dragons Insider has expired. I'm really torn about whether or not to renew it. I mainly joined for the electronic tools and while the Character Builder is great, there just isn't much else that excites me. I don't really use the Compendium and there still doesn't seem to be a timetable for the other tools to be rolled out. On top of that I'm not much of an 'early adopter' so the preview stuff doesn't really excite me. Dragon and Dungeon are pretty good, but I don't know if I can justify the cost just to have access to them. Decisions, decisions...

Finding the Lair - A 4E Skill Challenge

Building a bit on my previous post about skill challenges, I thought that I would post a sample skill challenge of my own design. I would really like some feedback on it. Is it interesting? Does it suck? How could it be better? Comment away!

Finding the Lair

You enter the edge of the forest, determined to find the hidden lair.

Setup: To successfully complete this skill challenge, the PCs must make their way through the forest and locate a hidden lair.
Level: Equal to the level of the party.
Complexity: 1 (requires 4 successes before 2 failures).
Primary Skills: History, Nature, Perception.
History (moderate DC): You remember details about locations in the forest that might serve as a lair.
Nature: (easy DC): You are able to locate a trail in the forest that leads you closer to the hidden lair.
Perception (moderate DC): You notice a trail sign or spoor that leads you toward to the lair’s location.
Success: The PCs locate the lair.
Failure: The PCs are unable to locate the lair. If they only accumulate 1 or 2 successes before 2 failures, they are also lost in the forest. If they accumulate no successes before 2 failures, they are ambushed and immediately enter a combat encounter.

4E Skill Challenges - Broadening the Band

I was listening to Episode 35 of Paul Tevis' excellent Have Games, Will Travel podcast and he mentioned the 'narrow band of success and failure' in RPGs. It strikes me that Skill Challenges are an excellent way to 'broaden this band' in 4E D&D. Mike Mearls has discussed creating better Skill Challenges in his excellent Ruling Skill Challenges series of articles in Dungeon magazine, but I think that we as DMs can take this even further.

We should be constructing our skill challenges (at least the more important ones) so that not only does success or failure have tangible consequences, but there is a broad band of consequences for that success or failure. I will try to create an example of this soon and post it for your comments...

The Coming Flood of 4E D&D Books

I was listening to the Wizards of the Coast DDXP 2009 Product Announcements on the latest Radio Free Hommlet podcast and the approach that 'everything is core' kind of stuck me. I don't know if I like this approach or not. If every book released and every article from Dragon and Dungeon magazines is considered 'core', I think that puts a lot of pressure on the DM to include EVERTHING in his campaign. This is further enforced by the approach of releasing a books that provides a broad overview of something (Player's Handbook for instance) and then follow-up books that provide more details (Martial Power, Arcane Power, etc.) Further enforcing this is the fact that WotC is including 'must have' components in new books like familiars in Arcane Power and item sets in Adventurer's Vault 2. I realize that there is a long tradition of 'splat' books in the RPG industry, but I still find the concept frustrating.

NOTE: Yes, I realize that I have a choice and I can say 'NO' to anything that I don't want to include, but the whole concept does tend to enforce the conspiratorial notion the WotC has a not-so-hidden agenda to subconciously force me to buy every D&D product that they release...

Printing to PDF With Character Builder

For those of you that might be interested in printing your character sheets from WotC's 4E Character Builder to PDF, I have had success with CutePDF Writer. It seems to work flawlessly (albeit a little slowly) with my Vista laptop and I am pleased with the output quality. Even better is the fact that it is FREE! Now you can save all those characters you have been generating to a USB stick and print them out at work! (Of course I would never condone such a thing...)

Hero Lab is Very Cool

I have owned Hero Lab for awhile, but I never noticed that it did HTML outptut until today. I needed to whip up a quick Ranger NPC for my 3.5 D&D campaign and so ten minutes later had I had the following:

DEITRIK CR 3
Male Human Ranger 3
CG Medium Humanoid
Init +2; Listen +4, Spot +6
Languages Common, Goblin, Elven

---

AC 14, touch 12, flat-footed 12
(+2 Dex, +2 armor)
hp 16 (3d8)
Fort +3, Ref +5, Will +1

---

Speed 30ft.
Melee weapon Unarmed Strike +5 (1d3+2) and
Longsword +6 (1d8+2)
Ranged weapon Longbow +5 (1d8)
Space 5 ft.; Reach 5 ft.
Base Atk +3; Grp +5
Combat Gear Unarmed Strike, Longsword, Longbow, Leather
Ranger Spells Prepared (CL 3, +5 melee touch, +5 ranged touch):

---

Abilities Str 15 Dex 14 Con 11 Int 14 Wis 11 Cha 13
SQ Track, Wild Empathy (Ex), Endurance, Favored Enemy: Humanoids (Goblinoid) (+2 bonus) (Ex), Combat Reflexes
Feats Armor Proficiency (Light), Shield Proficiency, Simple Weapon Proficiency - All, Martial Weapon Proficiency - All, Track, Endurance, Animal Affinity, Weapon Focus - Longsword, Two-weapon Fighting, Combat Reflexes
Skills Climb +6, Handle Animal +9, Heal +4, Hide +8, Listen +4, Move Silently +8, Ride +10, Search +6, Spot +6, Survival +6, Swim +6

---

Track You can track opponents.
Wild Empathy (Ex) Improve the atttitude of an animal, as if using Diplomacy.
Endurance +4 to a variety of skill checks. Sleep in L/M armor with no fatigue.
Favored Enemy: Humanoids (Goblinoid) (+2 bonus) (Ex)
Combat Reflexes You can make extra attacks of opportunity.

Very, very cool...

Religions and Not Just Gods

While preparing for my series on Campaign Building I have been doing a lot of thinking about the poor job that I have done in the past with building 'realistic' religions for my campaigns. I have read some good things about The Book of the Righteous from Green Ronin and I am thinking about picking it up. Has anyone else had experience with it? Comments are welcome!

Character Builder Success - Finally!!

After deleting every file that even sounded like DDI or Wizards of the Coast on my hard drive, I was finally able to get the full version of Character Builder downloaded and installed. However, I am still a little irritated by the whole affair. If it had not been for the kind people that posted their own workarounds on the WotC forums, I might have just quit in disgust.

The whole process was a real pain and I consider myself pretty darn computer savvy. What do you think the 'average' user would have done? I don't think this bodes well for future electronic releases from WotC, but I'll just have to wait and see...

A Couple of HARP Questions Answered

I got a couple of comments about my HARP post yesterday and so I thought that I would post my answers here...

Tony Reyes said...
I've been looking into HARP for the past few weeks. Testimonials of the rules set's value make me really interested in buying the book. I have a question, how would you compare it to Rolemaster Express ( which I know HARP is a simplification of)?

I can't speak for the designer (Tim Dugger), but I think of HARP as a reimagining of Rolemaster, rather than just a simplification. I own Rolemaster Express too and it is more of a straight cutdown version of the full Rolemaster.

Stargazer said...
Thanks for giving us that NPC writeup. Can you tell us how long it took you to create that NPC? One of Rolemaster's problems was that it took the better half of a day to create NPCs.IMHO HARP is a good alternative for D&D but it's much overlooked by the roleplaying community. I have to admit that even I played it only a couple of times.

I agree that creating NPCs for Rolemaster was a pain. The process is not as hard with HARP, but I think that I actually used an auto-calculating spreadsheet that I got in the downloads section of the HARP website to create this one and that eased the process even more.

Thanks for all your comments about the HARP post! Maybe I will put up some more NPCs or even a short adventure or two. Stay tuned...

HARP: A Good Game System

I stumbled across posts today about the HARP game system on the RPG Blog II and Stargazer's World. HARP just happens to be my favorite 'non-D&D' game system. It is light, fun and the free version is remarkably complete. In that spirit, here is an NPC for the system that I wrote up some time ago. Enjoy...

Hagetha – Human Hedge Wizard Level 4
Hits: 43 PP: 69 Init: +6 DB: +0 BMR: 8

St: 30 -6 Sd: 65 +3
Co: 45 +0 Qu: 50 +0
Ag: 55 +1 Re: 70 +6
In: 70 +6 Pr: 65 +3

Weapon Skills: Quarterstaff (2) +5
Armor: None

Key Skill: Endurance (3) +18, Foraging/Survival (2) +22, Healing (6) +42, Herbcraft (7) +47, Lore (Region) (3) + 27

Universal Sphere: Minor Healing (6) +39

Cleric Sphere: Calm (4) +29, Dreams (6) +39, Neutralize Poison (7) +44

Description: Hagetha is a human female who appears to be in her mid-fifties. Her face is weathered and brown from years of sun and wind. Her eyes are green and bright. Her gray hair falls well past her shoulders and she keeps it pulled into a neat pony tail. She is usually dressed in somber shades of green and brown, and she often goes out wearing a vest and breeches, a fashion usually only worn by men of the hamlet.

Background: Hagetha lives outside of the hamlet proper, but residents often visit her to trade for herbs or to ask for help treating some malady or injury. She is a loner and she can come across as a bit of a curmudgeon, but she is willing to offer assistance even to strangers if they approach her in an open and friendly manner.

Plot Hooks: Hagetha can certainly be useful if an adventurer is wounded or poisoned since she is the only real source of healing in the hamlet. She is also a good source of information about the area around the hamlet since she has rambled far and wide in her search for herbs and medicinal plants.

Character Builder Woes Continue

My problems with Character Builder continue. I still cannot get the darn thing to update correctly to the full version and it looks like I am not alone. I came across THIS thread on the WotC discussion forums and it looks like lots of other people are in the same boat. At least I have Hero Lab for my 3.5 game...

A Rant: Why I am Cancelling My Subscription to D&D Insider

I am cancelling my subscription to D&D Insider. Why? Well, the final straw for me was my experience today trying to update to the full version of the Character Builder. I downloaded, installed, uninstalled, reinstalled and I STILL cannot get the darn thing to update or to create characters over 3rd level. I'm just fed up. Once they get the darn thing working right (and the Game Table working) I might subscribe again. But for the time being - I AM DONE!! Arrghh...

EDIT: I tried to be a good boy and go through the WotC Help system to report my problem. I followed the link, input my credentials and the following popped up:

A technical error has occurred. Please close your browser and try again

Just great...

Real Life Rears Its Ugly Head

I apologize to you dear readers but the next installment of my World Building series will be delayed until at least Wednesday. I am in a bit of a project crunch at work (pray to the gods of COBOL for me) and I have not had time to thoroughly polish the post. Stay tuned!

Part Three: Decision, Decisions

Before we get down to the nuts and bolts of drawing maps, we need to make some high-level decisions about our new campaign setting. I am going to provide them without much background comment, but I will explore that further in future posts.

Campaign Setting: The East March
Geography/Climate: Similar to Bavaria/Southeastern Germany

For the campaign’s initial home base, I plan to map out an area of approximately 2500 square miles (50 miles X 50 miles) around a settlement that I am calling Ostburgh. You will note the ‘Germanic’ influence already and this is intentional. I always find it easier and more comfortable to lean a little on the real world, especially when it comes to subjects like names. Pure fantasy names always sound a little contrived to me. I don’t intend to go overboard with it, however, and I won’t try to follow any actual German language rules for naming or whatever.

Of course, there are lots of other decisions to make. I haven’t touched on religion, political structure, prevalence and location of non-human settlements and lots more. For now, here are some ideas that I have been knocking around:

There was a broad-reaching empire that ended some 500 years ago because of a great catastrophe.

Political structure is a ‘fantasy light’ version of feudalism with possible manorial system.

The East March is a border region between civilized lands and the frontier.

No more than a dozen major deities. One or two prominently worshipped in the region.

Pockets of all major demihuman races in the region, including dwarves, elves, halflings and gnomes.

That’s about it for now. The next post should go up on Monday, January 26th. At that time we will make some more decisions about our new campaign setting and prepare to draw a regional map. I would love to hear some feedback from you the reader about this series! Comment with your likes/dislikes, what you would like to see, etc.