Artificer's Intuition

"I've been looking forward to this more than Christmas." -P@, my longtime friend and one of my players Yesterday was the D&D Next playtest that I've been planning for about a month now.  For those that are just joining us, I took various aspects of the adventure Evil Tide, by Bruce R. Cordell and brought it into my home campaign for a larger than life game session.  In the end, we probably played for about 8 hours. Before anybody showed up, I laid the first batch of tiles, put the plastic sheet over them to keep them in place, and got the basement ready for all six players.   The strangest part of the group that I brought together for this playtest was that most of the group was strangers.  Myself and my fiancee were the connection between everybody.  While that can create some confusion as to how to get the characters to connect with one another, I spent a lot of time with everybody beforehand discussing their motivations and past.  ...

"The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can't do." -Captain Jack Sparrow SPOILERS for those who are playing in my Christmas game.  This means you! I've got exactly (almost to the minute) one week until my Christmas D&D game will kick off.  As I've continued to write about before, I will be customizing Evil Tide, by Bruce R. Cordell for my group.  Like all D&D modules, I've done some adjustments to the module to suit the needs of my own campaign world and for my players.  The result?  I have a lot of excited players ready to throw down. For the longest time, I was worried/confused about how I was going to produce the Upper Caves, a network of caves/underwater passages that the sahuagin have taken over.  The Upper Caves lead to the Lower Caves, which are the ruins of a long lost underwater civilization.  Mapping the Lower Caves was no issue, I was just going to use tiles from the Essentials Dungeon ...

"Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start" - Julie Andrews, The Sound of Music SPOILERS abound for those playing in my Christmas game.  You have been warned.  I've also been having issues with pictures.  The way I put them in last week isn't working this week.  Still need to figure that out.  I'll try and tweet the pics that I've wanted to use for this blog.   I believe that HOW you start an adventure is just as important as the specific adventure you play.  The beginning needs to give players a reason to dive into their characters and care about what is going on in the world around them.  In some cases, the characters need to be introduced to one another, while in others, they need to give each other some in-character interactions. As I plan to run Evil Tide, I've started to figure out how this adventure will begin.  Here are the issues I've found myself with. Many of the players don't know eac...

I'm late, I'm late!" - the White Rabbit With the holiday season upon us, I spent the weekend with friends and family doing some of the great traditions that we do around here.  Because of that, my weekend was occupied and I didn't update.   As I've mentioned before, I'm getting ready to run the adventure Evil Tide in a couple of weeks.  I have some brand new D&D players going to join in the fray, so it's been my duty to help them create characters and feel involved in the story. I've given them the information that the adventure will start in Genkar (which is where I base most of my adventures around).  I like to ask them questions like "Why are you in Genkar?"; "What do you like about the city?", etc.  However, in order to get an idea of some of the people of Genkar, I've put together a small document that presents some of the movers and shakers.  With this, I'm hoping some players will tell me of an affilia...