So after a four-year hiatus, my original Librarians and Leviathans 4E game is restarting. Astonishingly, despite people leaving town, it has three out of four original players.
This isn't really a resurrection of the campaign as such. Scheduling issues abound, and with ongoing health and personal issues I'm not at all confident that I'd be up to a campaign. Instead, I'm planning to do occasional one-shots loosely linked by narration and handwaving. This should reduce the chance of being unable to schedule a game for months and then ending up DMing for eight hours straight, which proved pretty devastating previously.
One-shots are also much more conducive to group changes: people can drop in and out for individual sessions, either because of scheduling or not fancying a particular module. Perhaps we'll even have someone else DMing now and then, who knows? I certainly suspect it's less intimidating planning one single game session than taking over for an unknown period. Similarly, if people fancy trying out a different character sometime, that should be easier to handle without complicated explanations.
Planning the game
It's been long enough since I did this that I'd forgotten just how much I enjoy prep, and for some reason D&D (and perhaps 4E in particular) seems to scratch that itch better than Call of Cthulhu. It's probably partly down to how straightforward the planning is; you're looking for plausible background and fun creatures in a fantasy setting, and a reasonable game balance. That contrasts pretty strongly with the complexities of Cthulhu, where the real-life setting and semirealistic characters means there can be lots of issues you need to consider. Moreover, it's a little easier to predict how the party are likely to react to situations (though not always) and whather that's what you wanted. On top of that, D&D adventures are reasonably universal, whereas Cthulhu scenarios can easily be either in completely the wrong continent, a very different genre from what I want, have very different assumptions about playstyle from my group, and so on.
This session I'm going for the most straightforward adventure I can find. It's by Aeryn Rudel ("Blackdirge"), called Stick in the Mud, and appeared in Dungeon #171. As often, the adventure needs a bit of reskinning to fit into my campaign world, which doesn't currently feature the Chaos Scar (though I might add it in future). I also wasn't particularly sold on the adventure hooks and backstory, and my players do tend to question their motivations.
Since I'm trying to run this as a one-shot, I've decided to keep things quick by having the actual play start on the threshold of the valley, skipping lightly over the introductions rather than roleplaying it as I usually would, though I'll happily flashback to discussion with the questgivers if people seem keen. The party won't be exploring generally, but actively seeking out a stolen artifact on behalf of a powerful Guild, who trust them to handle it discreetly because of an unspecified "previous relationship". They have plenty of reason to go through with this because doing favours for the Guild will be socially and professionally useful, let alone any reward they're likely to accrue. The need to find the artifact should explain why they'd keep exploring despite finding hostile creatures, which is often a tricky question in exploratory adventures.
I'll give some more explanation of the changes I made once I've actually run the scenario, as more will probably appear.
Creativity
So one of the things I always enjoy is coming up with stuff, and this adventure is no exception.
I decided fairly early on that I wasn't going to stick with the original monsters. There were a couple of reasons. The main one was that I'd altered the background, and so the precise powers and nature of the artifact seemed to call for a change in the nature of the monsters. Rather than being trigged by the monsters, the artifact itself is the reason for their presence. As such, I wanted the monsters to emphasise the story I'm going to give the players. The original monsters, while fine in themselves, didn't really fit my background or campaign, but the Chaos Scar setting. I felt like they just felt somewhat arbitrary, and while strangeness is fine in fantasy, I'm trying to avoid things getting completely hotchpotch.
The second reason was that I tend to find encounters quickly get repetitive when you're facing very similar enemies, even when (as here) there are slight variations in the precise make-up of the enemy forces, and some creativity in terms of the tactics and environment. The first stages of Keep on the Shadowfell, with its interminable kobold battles, are burned firmly into my memory. Having different monsters for most of the battles adds more variety, while simultaneously allowing me to create a progression that should give a sense of what is happening in the... location.
To avoid unnecessary complication, I just reskinned some of the adventure's original monsters, slightly altering descriptions and keywords for the most part. I still had a lot of fun with that, and to some extent I think it's the best way to handle this kind of thing - the published adventure's supposed to be balanced and fun, and I don't have any specific problems with the monsters, so why change them too much? The idea is just that the fights will feel slightly different, and description is a lot of that.
I also had to not only pick out loot for the party, but (due to background) devise a number of lesser but still interesting items to discover for flavour. This is one of those interesting little niches: items that are curious enough to be fun to find, and potentially even slightly useful, but without reaching the level of genuine "magic items". This was particularly important as I'm not entirely sure of what gear the PCs had when I last saw them, and whether they were 2nd or 3rd level! I'm keen to avoid overloading them with magic items if they were already reasonably equipped, and so my plan is to keep the adventure itself slightly conservative lootwise, since the Guild can always be more or less generous in their rewards when I work out what they've already got.
It's really fun sitting down and trying to come up with very minor, interesting magical trinkets that aren't likely to have much use in game but are nevertheless fun. If the players do end up getting some use out of them, all the better.
Tools
Anyway, all this called for a new version of the adventure, to avoid having an illegible mass of crossings-out to deal with. The text was a bit of a pain to transfer, what with copy-pasting from PDFs being unhelpful, but the main issues were maps, items, and monster stat blocks. Thankfully, my PDF reader (Foxit, amongst others) includes a tool for selecting and copying bits of a PDF as images, which avoids too much faff.
However, this didn't solve the issue of my homebrewed monsters. In theory, this is exactly what the Wizards Adventure Tools are for; in practice, they require a subscription to D&D insider, I believe they no longer offer a downloadable offline version, and their Monster Builder wasn't very good last time I did use it.
While I did have a D&DI subscription originally, mine lapsed four years ago, and I'm not keen to fork out for another one. It's only really worthwhile if you're playing more than I ever managed, and I've no idea how many sessions we'll get in this time around.
Moreover, while $US70 a year isn't a huge amount, it's still a fair chunk of money. I've already spent quite a lot of money on D&D materials, mostly rulebooks but also a couple of handy things like wipe-clean maps and a fair number of PDF supplements. I don't begrudge it, but I'm not particularly keen to keep spending money on things that are largely for the benefit of players, which was certainly the case last time I saw DDI - the character builder and the Compendium's updates on powers were the really useful bits. If we end up doing a lot more playing, and I'm feeling strong, I suppose I could float the idea of a group subscription. I imagine this is a fairly common question for DMs, and I'm sure I've seen it mentioned before, though I haven't been able to actually find anything now I thought of it.
After some frustrating messing around with tables and trying a couple of online tools that turn out not to actually do what they give the impression of doing, I finally discovered a brilliant one in the shape of Asmor's Monster Maker. This not only generates statblocks, puts information in the right place and does some of the calculation for you, but it can auto-generate generic monsters based on your choice of level and role, and import files from elsewhere. So if you do happen to have a DDI subscription, you can actually get monsters from there and then adjust them.
One thing I would say is that the statblock as produced is technically accurate, but hugely oversized and fairly ugly. I did a quick hackjob on the .css file it uses for its HTML in order to get it looking more like a normal one, then print-pasted it into my Writer doc. I'll copy the adjusted .css below.
/*
dark green: 48542e
light green: c7c7b0
background: e7e5d3
at-will: 5b8f62 (91, 143, 98)
encounter: 811c32 (129, 28, 50)
daily: 414342 (65, 67, 66)
power gradient beginning: dad9c7
power gradient end: ffffff
*/
/* whole table */
table.power, table.monster {
padding: 0 0 0 0;
margin: 0 0 0 0;
font-family: tahoma;
width: 300px;
}
table.monster {
background-color: #e7e5d3;
}
div.sectionPlain {
width:500px;
}
/* Headings */
table.monster thead {
background-color: #48542e;
color: #ffffff;
}
thead.atwill {
background-color: #5b8f62;
color: #ffffff;
}
thead.encounter {
background-color: #811c32;
color: #ffffff;
}
thead.daily {
background-color: #414342;
color: #ffffff;
}
/* Applies to everything */
span.name, span.role, span.type, span.exp, span.initiative, span.senses, span.aura, span.hp, span.regeneration, span.defenses, span.damagetypemodifiers, span.savingthrows, span.speed, span.actionpoints, span.powerheadspan, span.powerbodyspan, span.alignment, span.languages, span.skills, span.ability {
display:block;
text-indent: -15px;
margin-left: 20px;
margin-right: 5px;
}
/* also applies to everything */
table.monster td, table.power td {
vertical-align: top;
font-size: 8pt;
}
table.monster tr.powerbody span {
text-indent: 0px;
}
.title {
font-family: fairydustb, arial;
font-weight: 900;
font-size: 16pt;
/*display: block;
width: 100%;
border-bottom-style: solid;
border-bottom-width: 5px;
border-bottom-color: #48542e;*/
color: #48542e;
}
.sectionTitle {
font-family: fairydustb, arial;
font-weight: 600;
font-size: 12pt;
/*display: block;
width: 100%;
border-bottom-style: solid;
border-bottom-width: 5px;
border-bottom-color: #48542e;*/
color: #48542e;
text-decoration:underline;
}
/* name line */
span.name {
font-weight: bold;
color: #ffffff;
}
/* role line */
span.role {
font-weight: bold;
color: #ffffff;
float: right;
}
/* type line */
span.type {
color: #ffffff;
}
/* exp line */
span.exp {
float: right;
color: #ffffff;
}
/* embedded tables */
table table {
padding: 0 0 0 0;
margin: 0 0 0 0;
width: 100%;
}
/* first block of stats */
tr.mainstats {
}
/* heading of powers */
tr.powerhead {
background-color: #c7c7b0;
}
/* body of powers */
tr.powerbody {
}
/* seconda block of stats */
tr.secondstats {
background-color: #c7c7b0;
}
/* equipment */
tr.equipment {
}
span.class {
float: right;
color: #ffffff;
}
tr.color, tr.indentcolor {
background-color: #dad9c7;
}
tr.backpng, tr.indentbackpng {
background-image: url(powerback.png);
background-repeat: repeat-y;
}
tr.backgif, tr.indentbackgif {
background-image: url(powerback.gif);
background-repeat: repeat-y;
}
tr.indent span, tr.indentcolor span, tr.indentbackpng span, tr.indentbackgif span {
margin-left: 35px;
}
span.flavortext {
font-style:italic;
}
span.action, span.powertype {
font-weight: bold;
}
span.dndicon {
font-family: 'D&D 4e icons';
display:inline;
}
p {
font-family: tahoma;
font-size: 8pt;
line-height: 120%;
width: 300px;
}
h2.sectionTitle {
font-size: 10pt;
font-weight: bold;
}
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