Yesterday, I ran a solo session for the one player who wasn’t able to make it to the first session. Now he’s got comparable experience to the others, and he’s actually in Winterhaven, which makes things easier. Anway:

Session Two: The Road to Winterhaven

As a long-time DM, I’m always on the lookout for tools and such that make my job a little bit easier. Since I really haven’t shared all this stuff with you guys yet, I figured I would. Most of this stuff is relatively inexpensive, if not downright free. Some of it is designed for RPGs some of it is not, but can be used for such. Anyway, in no particular order:

• Wizards of the Coast actually puts out some quality products that I use, and I would be remiss if I didn’t at least give them a mention on this post. First is their line of Dungeon Tiles, which are excellent. They feature good artwork, clean, easy to see and use, 1-inch grids, they’re modular, and they’re somewhat dry-erasable. Also, they’re only $10 a pop, which is nice. One caveat: I say they’re somewhat dry-erasable because I’ve got a few tiles with what seem like permanent marks from dry-erase ink that sat on the tile too long. So be careful. That said, if you find yourself having to replace some tiles, they’re not that expensive. Also useful if you use Dungeon Tiles is Jai’s Dungeon Tile Mapper, a free program for creating DT-based maps on your computer. It’s basically the same program that Wizards hosts, except that it’s actually been updated since the third DT set came out; the only one currently missing is the newest one, Hall of the Giant Kings, which may be added soon.
• Also by Wizards is their line of D&D Miniatures, which I am a recent enthusiast and collector of. Booster packs are reasonably priced, and are even more so if you shop around a little bit, but are randomized. If you want specific, individual minis, Paizo.com is a good resource, as is ebay.
• But what if you don’t want to drop all that money on minis? What if you need a mini that doesn’t exist, is hard to get, or you can’t wait for it to ship because you’re playing tomorrow? Cardboard counters are a good way to go. I usually make my own, printed on card stock, which is pretty cheap at Staples and other office stores. As far as images for said counters, there are a number of good resources available. Wizards hosts a number of character portraits, as well as a multitude of images from their catalog of products that can be chopped up in your favorite image editing software. You could also check out these D&D counters. Finally, the art forum on EN World is a fantastic resource for all kinds of RPG-related artwork; of particular note is Storn’s thread, not only because his artwork is excellent but because it’s all released under a Creative Commons license. Beware, though; EN World can sometimes run a little slow due to their massive server load.
• Another thing that’s often required for D&D (especially under 4th Edition) is small counters and beads of various descriptions to keep track of conditions like marked, cursed, bloodied, and others. You could go to a gaming store, but you could also go someplace like AC Moore or Jo-Ann Fabrics. They have lots of beads, as well as bead boxes that can be used to store and organize your beads or other things. I use bead boxes to store my Dungeon Tiles, for example.
• Finally, I recently found a website that has all sorts of great stuff, including a nice landscape character sheet, some cards for tracking conditions, and some very nice power and magic item cards (I use the Magic Set Editor, but these are nice too).

I hope this has been helpful to people out there who want to DM, or already do DM. Maybe I saved you some time.

Ok, I’ve got some stuff in the works, not for the next full session, but for a couple of side-sessions, if you will. First of all, I’m going to run my friend Mike (playing Shava) through a little solo adventure, since he missed the first session (and thus, his character was not present). Not only will this help to get him up to par as far as XP and treasure goes, but it’ll also help to explain what he’s doing in Winterhaven and why he’s joining up with the party without just hand-waving it all. Now, Shava’s a ranger who focuses on ranged combat, so I’m going to have to be a little careful with encounter design, I think. Her defenses aren’t that high, and she doesn’t have a defender’s hit points, so I’m going to try to stick with little enemies that go down quickly and enemies that fight from a distance, like Shava. I’m also going to rely heavily on skill challenges, since Shava has a few skills to bring to bear.

The other side-session is going to come about largely because Chris (playing Chance) will be out of the country for a while starting at the end of the month. I don’t want to wait too long without anything campaign-related going on, and some of my players have echoed that desire. And, since Chance is already present in the party and I don’t want to hand-wave his presence, or have someone else play him, I think that what I’m going to do is run a one-shot in which the players play some pregens in a discrete story line that folds into the main story line. In the first session, the PCs took down the crime lord Kalder Red-Eye, but Kalder’s lieutenant, Baris, got away. I’m thinking that Baris is going to gather some guys and try to free Kalder before he gets hanged, to set up a recurring villain. Here’s the thing: my players are going to play Baris and his cronies doing the freeing. That way, I get my recurring villain, my players get to see exactly how he got away, and we all get to do some more gaming. Everybody wins!

[Edit: tags and crap.]

Last night I had my first 4th Edition D&D game, and I’m still jazzed from it. It was fantastic. I did a lot of initial prep work before the game, probably more than I needed to because most of it hasn’t been used yet. The players approached the initial set of encounters from a completely different angle than I had anticipated. I was afraid I’d have to just wing it and throw out everything I had prepared for these encounters, but as it happens, it was easy to alter them on the fly and still use them. The first encounter, a skill challenge representing a negotiation with a crime lord’s thugs in order to gain an audience with the crime lord, himself, became instead a negotiation with a merchant who had some pull with the crime lord. Instead of the thugs simply letting the PCs pass, the merchant set up a meeting with the crime lord under false pretenses.

The second skill challenge was a negotiation with the crime lord himself. That skill challenge didn’t change all that much mechanically, but the stakes of the challenge certainly did. The PCs had decided that they were going to attack this crime lord in any case, and they wanted to try and get his guard down and make the fight a little easier. That’s what they’d get if they won the challenge. If they lost, they’d have to fight the fight as-is, a fairly tough fight. They won, so the crime lord’s lieutenant and a couple of his thugs left before the fight began.

The combats were also really easy to run, and were a lot of fun. I must say, kobolds are a blast to run. The fact that they can shift as a minor action makes them really infuriating to PCs, and allows them to sort of herd the PCs to some extent. During the fight with the kobolds, the PCs started out on a wagon while the kobolds were on the ground. I gave the PCs combat advantage for being on higher ground, and I was somewhat afraid that they’d simply stay on that wagon for the whole fight, but the kobolds managed to draw them off of it by continually moving away after attacking in melee and by peppering them with ranged attacks. It worked really, really well.

At any rate, here is a link to my wife’s Flickr page, on which are posted some photos from the event. And here is my session report, posted on the campaign wiki.