It’s no secret that 4th Edition D&D has a lot of powers available for PCs. Many of these powers do extraordinary things, such as creating fire, transforming people from one thing to another, or teleporting a person instantaneously. In any game, it pays to think about how the existence of certain powers or types of powers might affect the world at large; how might laws change, for example, if people are capable of hurling fireballs and summoning lightning bolts?

This particular post is going to focus on teleportation. In D&D, most teleportation powers are the purview of either PCs (who do not represent the norm in a D&D world), or powerful monsters (again, not the norm). This makes teleportation, at large, relatively rare. However, there is one form of teleportation that is much more common: namely, every eladrin in the world is capable of fey stepping multiple times per day.

What happens, then, when an eladrin must be incarcerated? Since he could just teleport out of the cell and escape (or even out of his manacles before he’s put in the cell), some sort of safeguard must be in place. In the world of Eberron, there is a working class of minor mages known as magewrights. These magewrights light magical lanterns, create minor magical goods, and so forth. Perhaps this concept makes sense in any D&D world that includes a sizeable number of eladrin, if only so that jails, banks, jewelry stores, and so forth can be warded against teleportation on a regular basis. Another possiblity is that, perhaps, there are magically treated manacles that prevent the wearer from teleporting.

Terrain Effect: Teleportation Ward
A teleportation ward is usually used to protect a room filled with valuable or dangerous goods, the room of an important individual, or a jail cell. At heroic tier, it is a 5×5 area; at paragon, it is a 10×10 area; and at epic, it is a 15×15 area. Any power with the teleportation keyword used within the area still creates any non-teleportation effects, but any teleportation effects fail to work. A teleportation ward can be suppressed with an Arcana check (hard DC, standard action); if this is done, it is suppressed until the end of the character’s next turn.

Magic Item: Anchor Manacles
Level 1 Wondrous Item (360 gp)
Anchor manacles are used to prevent prisoners from teleporting, and are frequently used when incarcerating eladrin and other fey creatures. Any creature wearing a set of anchor manacles cannot teleport. A creature can escape from a pair of anchor manacles with an Athletics or Thievery check (hard DC, standard action).

By The Great Seamus

SPOILERS AHOY

Though this review on the current season on Encounters may seem a little late to the party, I can assure you this was intentional. The previous two seasons of the program suffered from a detached sense of story – seemingly, a heaping of random encounters very loosely tied together at the end for the sake of satisfying a story. Season 2’s Dark Sun outing suffered especially hard when each week was taken individually, rather than viewed as a whole. With this season, I wanted to get a few weeks under my belt before I judged.

At this point, I have read 4/5 of the season, and I have run players through 3/5 of the story.

I can honestly say at this point that the lack of direction and continuity from Dark Sun has improved a great deal. The encounters each feel more linked. Each chapter has a noticeable and clearly defined endgame scenario, and each final fight segues into the next chapter flawlessly, moving the story as a whole to what I assume is going to be a very climatic final fight. I have noticed my players responding more to the story as whole, investing themselves in their characters and also in some of the support characters – Friar Benwick especially. His betrayal at the climax of chapter three genuinely shocked and surprised even my most hardened and jaded players.

That’s not to say this season of Encounters is flawless.

Other dungeon masters and some higher caliber players at our store have hypothesized that, as a direct result of Dark Sun’s amped up difficulty having turned off a large number of players, Wizards of the Coast “dumbed down” this season, using weaker monsters or serving up over-powered “twitter buffs” to make the experience easier for players. Many dungeon masters have resorted to “tweaking” each encounter, modifying enemies, adding reinforcements, or even inserting environmental hazards to balance out the weakly designed combat encounters. Additionally, there is still a distinct lack of roleplaying available from the beginning of the season. This may largely be due to the time limit imposed on the idea of the game – supposedly, it is meant to be a one to two hour game session focused primarily on simple combat to acclimate new players to 4th Edition D&D. It succeeds at that, as I have noticed a significant influx of new players come in and quickly pick up the basics of the game and develop an appreciation for it. These people have spent their hard earned dollars on books, The Red Box, and minis to most likely run their own home games. The rest of us, however, are left wanting something more substantial. DM burnout is high in Encounters to begin with, and very rarely do the DMs come back for the next season. This season will be no exception to that.

To troubleshoot some of these problems, I have been running my own re-tooled version of the materials in a home game. Having a fixed group of people playing their own characters (rather than pre-generated ones,) allows for them to become more invested in the story around each encounter. As a DM, it gives me more creative license to expand on the setting and the characters within it, which keeps the players even more interested in the story. I find that I am less burned out than some of my compatriots are, and actively look forward to running the sessions at home. The Encounters sessions at the store serve as excellent practice for tactics, and also to see the strengths and weaknesses of each encounter ahead of time, rather than simply trying to anticipate them on paper.

As far as troubleshooting in-store games, I have a few suggestions. Following the recommended “add another monster” formula Wizards gives for larger parties is a must, even if you only have five PCs at the table. Even newer players who started with this season of Encounters have figured the game out by now, and they are generally more than ready for what is being thrown at them. Adding one or two more monsters to the mix would even the odds for them. Additionally, modifying the minions in each encounter to make them a little tougher would be a game-changer. Even simply giving a minion some temporary hit points is a huge help in getting players to take them seriously. Finally, environmental hazards or active terrain are a huge plus, especially with minions to exploit them. Simply adding an arbalest or boulder hazard can change the battle plans of an over-powered or over-skilled party and make them focus a lot more on tactics. Also, adding some role-playing spice of your own is easy. Have a villain go into a monologue and taunt the players. Have them attempt to parley, and force the players to use those skills they picked out months ago. Try to encourage players to think outside the box, and use the rules as much as you can to do so. If your rogue wants to somersault over three enemies to try for combat advantage, use whatever rules you can to let him try. And finally, having a reward system in place for excellent roleplaying is tantalizing for players who love the current “achievement” system in video games. Maybe set up a way for players to spend their renown points for in game benefits.

This is the final member of the Dawn Chaser’s crew.

Larson grew up on an Arsubaran colony world, Heska; it was a rough and tumble world, but also highly industrialized. He learned to fix things and monkey around with machines at an early age, and it was clear he had a gift for it. When he was seventeen years old, TransGalaxy offered him a job as a ship’s mechanic on a luxury cruise ship, a job he readily accepted, if only to get off of Heska. The lack of excitement was not good for Larson, though; he began drinking too much, and getting into fights with crew and even passengers aboard the cruise ship. During one altercation, he killed someone, and he was sentenced to several years on a prison planet.

TransGalaxy continued to monitor Larson while he was imprisoned, and they noted that his exceptional mechanical skills got even better. He seemed to thrive in the rougher prison environment than he did on the luxury liner, though he still got into the occasional brawl. On one such occasion, his opponent got the better of him and used a piece of heavy industrial machinery on him, crushing his right side and nearly killing him. Mysteriously, TransGalaxy paid for his hospitalization and his new cybernetic prosthesis, and had him released from prison on one condition: that he would be the ship’s mechanic on a class-D freighter, the Dawn Chaser. Larson has no idea why TransGalaxy is so interested in him, and he doesn’t care. As long as he gets to work on machines and gets more-or-less left alone, he’s content.

Here are two more members of the Chaser’s crew; only one more to go!

An’k T’rbrik was born amongst her people, in Templari space. She was raised to believe that she was superior to members of other species, physically, mentally, and in every other way. She grew up being taught to strive for perfection. She strove for physical perfection, studying Templari martial arts and other physical disciplines, and she strove for perfection in her chosen career: the path of the space pilot. She became one of the better-known pilots in the Templari navy. Something, however, in the back of her mind always nagged her, some doubt as to the entitlement that was bred into her, the superiority of her race.

Then, one day, she made a near-fatal choice: she refused to fire upon a defenseless ship full of refugees from the Frontier Zone. For this, she was sentenced to execution; rather than face death, she chose exile. She ran from her home, haunted by her perceived failure. Even now, as a pilot for a rag-tag group of spacers on a Class-D freighter, she has trouble getting past the Templari indoctrination; she believes that she is superior in most ways to her crew, though she tries to get along with them. In the end, she is an exile and and outsider, tentatively accepted by the crew of the Dawn Chaser.

Lexi Stardust, like most Ken Reeg, started making deals at an early age. She had a natural talent for gaining peoples’ trust, and she used that talent to make a lot of money. Her penchant for compulsive risk-taking and her love of games of chance meant that she rarely held onto that money for very long, and she often made enemies just as easily as she made friends. When the chips were down, though, she managed to talk her way into a job on the Dawn Chaser, as the ship’s front-woman and dealmaker.

Since that time, she has more than earned her keep. She has contacts everywhere, and where she doesn’t have contacts already, she makes them quickly. She leverages those contacts to procure discounted goods that the crew ships and sells at a significant profit. Though she sometimes gets the crew into hot water with her thrill-seeking behavior, she is often worth the trouble.

I haven’t exactly made this a secret, but I also haven’t explicitly stated it on my blog, and I feel that I would be remiss if I did not: I am looking for a job. I would prefer a full-time, permanent position, but I am also open to freelance projects, if you would like me to write for you.

If you follow this blog, you likely know what I’m good at already, at least in terms of the scope of this job. I should also mention that I have been a teacher for the last several years, which means that I am comfortable speaking in front of groups of people, and I am comfortable imparting knowledge to others. If you haven’t already, you can see my list of publications. If you’d like to see my resume, or a list of references, you can feel free to contact me either by commenting on this post, or by emailing me at engard at gmail dot com.

Thank you for your time.

Brian

Here’s the third member of the Dawn Chaser’s crew.

When ADAM-101 (Automated Defense And Maintenance) was created, he was without free will. He had not yet awakened to the world, so he was content (if he was even capable of that emotion) to go about his work on Infocity, keeping things running and defending it from invaders. He was just one of many ADAM units on Infocity, and because there were so many, the System (a militant organization of robots that sees itself as an immune system for the Galaxy, with organic creatures a disease) attacked and took many of them to swell their own ranks. They Awakened ADAM, and attempted to indoctrinate him.

The newly Awakened robot was grateful to his rescuers for his new state of being, but he did not agree with their radical philosophies. He bided his time (robots are nothing if not patient), and when the time was right, he escaped from them. He was soon captured by pirates, who attempted to reprogram him and wipe his memory so they could sell him. This worked in the short term, but gradually his memories and his free will started to return.

When he re-Awoke, he found that he was aboard a ship called the Dawn Chaser. He found that he enjoyed the company of the crew, even if he often didn’t understand them, and while they didn’t always treat him with respect, they usually treated him with affection. This, for now, was enough for ADAM.

Last time I talked about the ship, and the ship’s muscle. Today I’m going to talk about the medic. With this character, I not only tested the character generation system, I also created a custom species (along with a custom species trait), a stunt, and some gear.

Doctor Modorion grew up on his home planet Thul. He came to Arsubar when he was young, to study medicine, and he excelled in that field. He used his natural psychic talents to bolster his keen medical mind, and graduated from the University of Arsubar, magna cum laude. Modorion started what looked to be a promising career, but his arrogance and his disdain for the law got the better of him. Convinced that nobody was his intellectual equal, he started pushing the boundaries of what was medically possible–and what was medically ethical. This resulted in the deaths of more than one patient, and he eventually lost his license. He would have been arrested, but he escaped and changed his identity. He found some street contacts and had a false medical license made, so that he could continue to practice, but he decided that he didn’t want to stay in one place for very long, lest the authorities catch up to him. He signed on aboard the Dawn Chaser as a way to continue doing what he loved among people who were in equally desperate situations, and would be unlikely to turn him in should his secret be discovered.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m going to be running a playtest demo of Bulldogs! in its current alpha state on the 19th. I thought that it might be fun to post the PDFs of the pregens for the demo as I make them. This first one is a double-whammy, because it’s got both a character and the ship’s character sheet.

The Dawn Chaser is an old ship (as are most ships in TransGalaxy’s Class-D program). Many of its systems are outdated or obsolete, and the ship-board AI has picked up more than its fair share of quirks and ghosts in the machine. As the AI, Navvy, has control over most of the Chaser’s systems, this often leads to what the crew refer to as “poltergeisting”. Lights flip on and off, showers change temperature, bulkhead doors open and close, and Navvy wakes everyone up in the morning with a rousing version of the Arsubaran national anthem. Despite the apparent inconveniences, most of the crew have come to regard this behavior with affection, and would not replace Navvy for the world. Thus far, he has never put one of the crew in danger.

Barg Drabog, like many Hacragorkans, is pugilistic, ill-tempered, and violent. He looks upon the other crew as weak, though he is quick to protect them when danger infringes upon their lives. He grew up on the planet Stakes, hiring himself out as a bodyguard or bouncer, or occasionally as a mercenary. He learned to love gambling there, though he never became truly addicted. He did, however, rack up a number of small debts to a variety of unsavory people. These were not much of a concern to Barg; these people had bigger fish to fry, and figured he’d pay them eventually. One day, though, somebody mysterious bought up all of Barg’s debts and sent someone to collect on them. Barg threw the collection agent through a window, then went to the nearest spaceport and signed on with the first crew he could find that would take him. It happened to be the crew of the Dawn Chaser.

Okay, so I just finished reading the alpha playtest document for Bulldogs!. Now, I may be biased (since I co-wrote the game with Brennan Taylor of Galileo Games), but I think this game is going to kick some serious ass. I worked a little bit on the first edition of the game, which used the d20 System back in the heyday of 3rd Edition (and before 3.5). Specifically, I wrote a supplement for the game that added psionics, as well as some races, classes, and gear. In the d20 system, the game was good, but felt a bit too much like D&D for my money, and it really deserves to feel like something different.

As I read the playtest document, it felt more and more like Bulldogs! had come home. The FATE system is a perfect fit for the game, and some of the modifications to the base game are absolutely perfect for the game’s tone and feel. Even the systems that I wrote and were modified or replaced before the alpha doc was released were well-thought out; I expected to feel some jealousy and resentment when I saw my work re-written, but it all just fit together so well that it was hard to begrudge the changes.

That’s not to say that the document is perfect. There are some rough edges; some of the examples in the book describe older versions of the rules, some rules could use clarification, and there’s one major thing that I feel is missing from the book (I’m going to tell Brennan about that privately, rather than airing it here). That said, I can’t wait to run this game.

On December 19th, I’m going to be running a playtest demo of the game at my FLGS, Family Fun Hobbies in Hamilton, NJ. If you live in the area and feel like trying this game out, shoot me an email at engard at gmail dot com to that effect. Note that, since I’m the only GM, space will be very limited. I plan on allowing only six people into the game, and it’s first-come, first-served. Also be aware that, as this is a playtest, I will expect feedback from everyone at the table. I’m going to bring questionnaires with me, and I’m going to ask everyone to fill them out. Verbal feedback will also be solicited (and appreciated). The payoff, of course, is that you get to affect the way the game works before release, which is kind of cool.

At any rate, I’m very excited. The document was a great read, and I think the final product will be even better. This is a fantastic, fun universe to play in, and the rules fit the tone of the setting so well that it’s going to be hard not to have fun. I hope to see you guys around the Galaxy!

This is the final day of NaMoMaMo.

Among the most powerful of adversaries that any adventuring party contends with is the nefarious Dungeon Master. This being is a creature of alternating craft and ineptitude, subtlety and brute force. It is a true mastermind, and virtually every world-shaking plot by evil cultists, diabolical dragons, demons, or fell gods is really concocted by the Dungeon Master. It is only fitting, then, that an epic campaign (and this series of posts) would culminate in this foe of foes.

Thank you for your time. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.