Dungeons and Dragons
I recently (well, a couple of months ago, probably) started "running" a 4E D&D game with my regular Wednesday night group at my home. Up until that point I'd played around with the system a bit, and had a good grasp of low level characters, and the sort of power and opportunities available in the Heroic Tier of the game (that's levels 1-10), but I know my players, and I know that they tend to like a bit of powergaming, so I was curious as to what the Paragon Tier has to offer. But, because it's a new system, I didn't want to just start everyone off at 11th level. We needed a better grounding in what the characters were capable of, so we "speed-levelled". For a few weeks, I ran a series of combat encounters (fully aware that character development would be stunted in the meantime) with only the vaguest of plots, and ignored XP. The rule was simple - 3 encounters and you level up. The characters got to 7th level before everyone was heartily bored of that, and so we jumped to 11th level, and I started to run the Wizards of the Coast published adventure P1 - King of the Trollhaunt Warrens.
So far, it's gone quite well. One of my absent players has returned to the group, and next week should see the return of another (I have my fingers crossed). The party (which consists of a dwarven fighter, a tiefling warlord, an eladrin ranger, a human wizard and a half-elf warlock) have defeated a group of trolls who were snacking on a horse, fought a group of hags, gone into the town of Moonstair and chatted to several of the locals, set up a training regime for the local militia, and set off for the Trollhaunt Warrens, seeking Skalmad, a troll with delusions of grandeur.
I tend to allow my players a lot of creative license in descriptions, so when they told me that they were trying to bluff their way into the troll lair by claiming that the King's pizza had been delivered, I mentally rewrote that in my head as a... more suitable claim, and let the dice fall as they would. Once inside, a troglodyte ran off to find the king, and the party then slaughtered the door guards.
Moving swiftly (they don't know how long they have until Skalmad arrives), they followed their "standard dungeon-crawling technique", which is to follow the left-hand wall.
They avoided the insane troll muttering away to a pile of skulls (I'm sure it has some significance to the adventure, but they avoided that, too...), and continued on, which led them to a door in the tunnel wall.
Being the ever-curious folks that they are, and not wanting to risk leaving any/many trolls at their backs, they opened the door and snuck inside. Well, stomped inside, really.
Which the black dragon, Gloomfang, found heartily amusing, as he lurked in the chamber beyond.
Whenever there's a choice between talking and fighting, my players tend to go for the direct route, which almost always involves the dwarf fighter bundling straight in at the enemy.
Cue one big fight, with daily powers aplenty being used, and severe risk of death and destruction to the PCs.
Needless to say, they won the battle, and came out of it quite well, discovering the magical bastard sword that the Warlord promptly snatched, since he's the only one that would use it.
That's where it was left... we'll have to wait until next week to see what comes after that.
Mutants & Masterminds
Background - The most famous heroes of Freedom City have dissappeared. No one is entirely sure where they might be. When a new group of supervillains starts a campaign of terror in Freedom City, someone must step up to save the day...
This adventure/campaign is in my notes as "Zodiac". Prior to running it, I wrote a short foreshadowing snippet of prose and then leapt into the adventure.
It all started at the mall (I wonder if the mall is as ubiquitous to modern-genre games as the tavern is to fantasy settings), where "coincidentally" all of the characters happened to be one Saturday afternoon. A loud explosion alerted them to danger, and they proceeded to investigate. That turns out to have been a good decision, as they found themselves fighting a group of criminal types in an underground loading-bay... with explosives attached to the mall's concrete support pillars. Once those crooks were defeated, several clues led them to a warehouse, where they met several more people to beat the snot out of.
The trail of clues thus found has so far led them to speak to a newspaper magnate, traipse through the sewers, rescue a young policeman being tortured, engage in a flying battle with a superpowered villain with electrical powers, spy on a sea-life centre, battle some exceptionally well-equipped crooks who were trying to steal something from said sea-life centre, discover an aquatic woman wrapped in some sort of stasis-inducing pressure membrane, and head to a museum where a theft was taking place. Phew. These are some busy heroes.
Obviously, not all of that has happened in one or two sessions. This is the result of several weeks worth of RP, and thanks to the medium being used for it, anything even remotely resembling a fight takes an age to resolve.
The culmination of the museum scene, where they fought a villainess calling herself "Virgo" (the party have already crossed the path of "Pisces"), resulted in them obtaining a magically enchanted ring, which they hope to use to bring Ms. Freezer (the aquatic woman in the membrane) out of stasis.
All the party know right now is that everything to do with these new villains has links to an ancient civilisation of snake-people that once ruled the world.
As they discussed various of their findings, one of the heroes - the paragon of American justice, liberty and truth, Liberty Belle - received a phone call telling her that her alter-ego's children had been kidnapped from school.
The group - unaware of Liberty Belle's link to the missing children - rushed to the school to offer any assistance they could.
During the course of their discussions, the FBI agent who was leading the investigation into the kidnapping got a call to let him know that the kidnappers' black SUV had been spotted... and so the heroes gave chase.
That's where that one is, now. I'll give more details on the characters in this campaign in a later post.
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