The 4E World of Errin #1

Yay, I’m done running another bad WotC module.

Now Dale gets to experiment with making his own encounters.
For my sake, I hope he doesn’t overestimate our skills. Not that I’m any expert on that…

We have an old story we keep bringing back up with Dale when we question his judgment of our PCs’ strengths.

It was early 3E, and we had paused going through the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil because Dale was getting bored with it (another module with a good beginning that turned to junk in the middle).

Dale sent us to a land under siege by undead, led by “the big C” (a.k.a. Cthulu).

We were levels 8-10 then Dale attempted to throw 4 alhoons (mind flayer liches) at us and Cthulu.

A minor player revolt got him to reduce it to one alhoon and no “big C”.
“You guys can’t take just 4 of them on?”
“Taking on just one will be a tough fight.”

So we took on the one alhoon, and barely won.

For this campaign, check out Dale’s weblog (link on the right). It’s not exactly laid out in an easy to read manner, but I’m only going to repeat things here that I need to.

All of us made it to the session and hopefully the holiday interruptions are over.

Our new cast of characters:

Aaron made a defender fighter with some cleric multiclassing so he can heal himself if need be. He’s a dragonborn named Shamash. Aaron has clearly stated that this guy is meant to take the hits, grab attention by marking, and not deal much damage. Which is what a defender should be.

Brian is playing a human swordmage name Kal. My understanding is that he’ll be a melee controller.

Scott is playing a dragonborn battle cleric named…sigh…Sephira (because plagiarism, even of crap books, is ok with a D&D character.)

Mike is playing Renald, an elven bard, using rules he pulled from being a paying member of the Digital Initiative. So far he seems to be a combination ranged striker and controller.

Justin is playing a dwarven druid named Ergot. His abilities remind me a bit of a ranger mixed with a wizard for moderate damage in and out of melee. Mike gave Justin the information for the druid from the DI as well.

And I’m playing a halfling ranger with rogue multiclass named Wildeyes. His job is to be a melee striker.

Now you’re thinking that if I wanted to do a lot of damage, I should have made the guy a rogue with ranger multiclassing. But I noticed that when Aaron was running his rogue, he missed half the time, effectively ruining the extra damage he did.

My solution was to make a melee ranger so he’d get twice the chances to get any bonus damage. I added the rogue multiclassing to get the Thievery skill and an extra 2d6 damage with a sneak attack.

For short combats this will pay off, but not so much for longer ones.

I know this because during our first combat of the night, I did 5d6+3 damage with an encounter power (2d6+3), Hunter’s Quarry (1d6), and Sneak Attack (2d6). That is with 2 attack rolls, and only one hitting.

It is possible I could have done 7d6+6 melee damage. In fact, in limited circumstances, I could do the same with ranged attacks.

And finally I chose halfling as a race because of, once again, what I saw Aaron’s rogue deal with. Valenae took a royal beating in melee. Halfling get +2 bonus to their AC versus opportunity attacks, and they get to force the DM to reroll monster’s attack once per encounter.

This group has a lot of potential to do well in combat. Though I think we actually have too much melee control and not enough ranged control. All in all, I believe that’s a minor concern.

To accommodate some of the changes 4E has brought, Dale introduced a one-way portal that many races, such as dragonborn, entered through. I assume tieflings entered via this portal as well.

The initial setting for the campaign is the city of Hillside. I could best describe it as an adventurer’s training ground. There are plenty of small jobs that the city can’t take care of.

Future potential for expanded adventuring is that this city is flirting with the idea of seceding from the control of the city-state of Oceanside. This is mainly because the city receives little from Oceanside, but pays much in taxes. The biggest obstacle preventing this is Oceanside’s large standing army, which just needs an excuse to be parked right on top of Hillside.

As you can see, Dale’s names can sometimes are a bit easy to remember: Hillside…rests on a hill, Oceanside…an ocean port city, Whitehall…the capital of a good land, Greystone…the capital of a neutral land, and Blacktower…the capital of an evil land.

We individually gathered together at different points during the day in the city of Hillside, with all of us finally congregating at the dwarven run inn known as The Magic Mushroom, a place famous for its fungus-based whiskey drink known as Mushroom Boom.

We were there to be hired by a dwarf named Burgoyne for a simple job, since all of his other groups were out on assignment.

Our job was to discretely clear out a warehouse for an unnamed and presumably wealthy family. We were told it had a rat infestation. We were not told how bad the infestation was.

Note: there was a lot more role-playing going on this night than I’m relaying. I was glad to have some.

The good news was that we killed several giant rats (minions), a pair of rat swarms, a “mama rat”, and a “ratzilla”.

The bad news was that Renald, Shamash, and Sephira contracted a disease from the rat bites. I think by the end of the session, all three of them still had it on some level.

And the worst news was that this simple fight took for-freaking-ever! People learning their PC’s abilities combined with discussing the best option made this simple fight take an hour. That was when I decided that 3 PC’s of our 6 having “slide opponent X squares” will require some learned teamwork and a tactical leader.

We returned to Burgoyne, got our reward, and found that he had no new task for us. So we set about finding someone else who might want to hire us for some special services.

And we found someone in the form of a halfling who owns the Singing Trout Inn. The owner considers himself a bit of a culinary expert and he was currently in the mood to experiment with fire beetles.

He wanted them alive if possible and gave us directions to their usual spot.
We said thanks, but not to hold his breath on the “alive” bit.

It took us a day to find their nesting grounds, and they weren’t inclined to just let us take them away.

In fact, they nearly killed half of us. But that’s mainly because we kept on grouping together so they could hit 3 of us at a time with their fiery blasts.

When the group was all bloodied (not me), we finally started working together. It probably helped that the beetles didn’t regen their fiery blast very quickly.

It was late, so we stopped there.

Next session, I start pushing ideas of working together, thinking before acting, and discussing your plans with the rest of us before carrying them out.