Rivers Run Red Finale!

So when last I left off, the party had lost one member to a fey creature. Another had been cursed and another suffered from a magical trap.

This required magic of a higher level than they had so they went to the city! In this instance, Restov. There they meet with the mayor, hunted down some magic items, sold some of their current ones for cash, had a few social encounters as the mayor held a celebration to welcome the heroes of 'Murkwell', the name of their nation, and they meet a few people.

Now they also owe three quests in exchange for the magical services rendered. Ha! I can throw those in somewhere I'm sure.

They also burned through the last encounters of the adventure. Several of these were role playing in nature ranging from dealing with more fey, at least this time not assassin or poison using, to dealing with the enraged owlbear that attacked their town while they were hex exploring.

For the owlbear, I was super lazy. I just used a fire giant's stats and lowered the CR by 1 as I didn't give it a bite nor allow it to be immune to fire. Seemed to work out okay. Terrible damage, hits you easily, has a bucket load of hit points and little else.

But man, the party is sure tired of owlbears.

Bad new? they have a lot of Kingdom building to do. They did roughly five months.

The next adventure, The Varnhold Vanishing, assumes another one to two years of building.

And one of my friends is getting ready to run.

What?

He's a new dad. He's in school. He's getting out for a semester and is dying to try Numenera.He claims that it's easy to run, he loves the setting and art, and he's only got a limited window of opportunity to run it because once school starts back up, he'll probably be out of gaming for a while as he's got help on the child situation with grandparents, but they're only visiting for now too.

Hey, someone else wants to run? Can you say awesome? I don't mind running but I'm kind of flat on 5e. I'm too used to the rich resources that Pathfinder and 3.5 have and I keep wondering where the hell the new Monster Manual is.

On the other hand, I ain't buying Numenera. It's not an inexpensive book. He's only going to run it for a few months. I suspect I'll be getting there early and reading up on it or hoping for another Bundle of Holding or something.

Part of this is because another of my friends is talking about Dresend Files and the same guy is talking about the Fantasy Flight games like Deathwatch while another is running oWoD when I can't make it to run. That's a lot of money for games I'll probably never play on a regular basis.

I get that if you're playing a game long term, $50 bones isn't that much of an investment. That's like a ticket to a concert or 20 (or less!) drinks at Star Bucks. But I also paint miniatures which require a TON of things if you like experiementing like I do ranging from different paint from different companies, to different accessories like glaze medium, matt medium, brushes, pigments, etc...

So I'm curious to see how Numenera works out and will enjoy my break from running.

To be honest, I'm kind of surprised the group managed to make it through books one and two and even the starting adventure from the boxed set.

What's everyone else doing now? Still playing 5th edition? Waiting on Exalted 3rd edition? Sticking with the OSR?

Kingmaker: Rivers Run Red Session Two

I am continuing to enjoy Kingmaker.

Rivers Run Red continues a bit of the wilderness exploration, continuing in the same region as the first book.

This allows the players a home base of operations and a sense of what the River Kingdoms are like. I've tended to play it more 'southern' and 'country' in that the folk tend to speak simple and direct and while most are honest to a fault, there are those whose enjoyment of solitude turns them away from the intruders that the players represent.

Several players have decided to dedicate some effort to the running of the kingdom but have still yet to decide how best to advance. That's okay as outside of 'kingdom management' there are still numerous areas to explore, quests to complete and monsters to slay.

In many ways, these first two books of Kingmaker cleave close to how I often ran in the past. Some encounters with various NPCs to learn the lay of the land, what news from which country, the creation of rivalries and ending of such.

In this case, that would be Akiros Ismort, formerly of the Stag Lord, who turned his efforts to procuring the character's patronage. He wished to be awarded rank and title general but was not awarded such so he continues to toss jibes at the current general and who knows what that former bandit leader does when the players are not there?


After such meetings though, the players sharpen blades and onto slaughter! Just hopefully not their own.

One of my friends joked it was a PC version of Spartacus. "Yeah, we get together, find out some stuff, party a bit in the town, and then unsheath blade and spell and let monster burn or bleed!"

It brings me to worry about what happens when the campaign elements in the background take more center tone. The 'strength' for me is that despite my appreciation of mega-dungeons and dungeon crawls in general, the open nature of exploration, the small locations, such as an outpost or a barrow mound, allow for the illusion of some type of crawl that are more like connected encounters as opposed to say, The World's Largest Dungeon or a standard Dungeon Crawl where whole sessions can pass in dark passages.

This allows me to change things up a bit more quickly and change tone or goal between expeditions whereas a full out dungeon crawl merely requires eager foot to step into waiting maw.

I also find myself doing a lot of on the fly conversions. While I've shared my attempts at bringing the troll hounds and hodag to life, there were many more that needed such a touch that I failed to do.

For example, the classic two headed troll or the not quite as classic, stone troll. Or a troll with a few fighter levels on him. I looked at the ettin and snagged its base damage and gave higher point point totals to it, while giving the stone troll higher armor class and hit points and no bite attack. The 'king' with the fighter levels i just increased his hit point total to reflect him being 'tough'.

This is a 'problem' with using older adventures on a system that has almost as many years of history as I've been alive. The sheer variety of opposition is enough to make head swim if plans are not taken far ahead of time or if you're not comfortable doing some conversion work on the fly.

What's worse is there is no 'easy' solution for this problem. While I haven't reviewed the Monster Manual in it's latest version, I have not found one of its weaknesses to be a lack of variety.  Again, it's the history of the game providing such richness and capturing so many classic monsters including modrons, that prevent every monster possible from being updated.

It may sound strange, but as I'm of firm mind that 5th edition is the last print edition of Dungeons and Dragons we'll see, I would hope that at some point they'll do an Encyclopedia of sorts of the monsters. When 2nd edition was long in tooth, there came compendiums of wizard spells, priest spells, and my favorite, magic items in faux leather. Great stuff that I still draw inspiration from today. Very handy.

If 5th edition is the last print edition, I'd dearly love to see such a collection of monsters. If WoTC intention is to provide tools and get out of the way, monsters are such tools that I would enjoy.

Failing that, some form of license? Some form of official conversion material to take older monsters from one edition to another?

But in terms of the adventure itself? It continues well. The players managed to overcome the trolls without retreat although they had used up almost every healing potion that they'd hoarded both from previous adventure and the Mines bit that I included. They also used up a Necklace of Fireballs that they had found earlier. I was pleased to see the item in use as it lends some firepower to the ground in short term form.

Giving characters such temporary ammunition tends to be one of the 'tricks' of allowing potential TPK's to hit as the party may feel cocksure enough to fight things that may be outside their ability.

Still, the group seemed to enjoy themselves so...

How are your own adventures going? Has your group experienced any TPK's? Any switches of character in mid stream to test out different character mechanics? Any weird magic items or monsters that you're Dungeon Master has thrown into the mix?

Kingmaker: Rivers Run Red by Rob McCreary

Rivers Run Red is the second part of the Kingmaker Adventure Path. While it's designed for the Pathfinder role playing game, I've been using it for Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition.

I mixed the original starter set adventure, the Mines, with the first part of the Kingmaker Adventure Path. This worked well in most aspects in that I substituted a few bits like Harpers in the original book for Pathfinders and the city from the starter adventure with Pitax from Pathfinder. A few other changes here and there.

The bad thing is that the characters are all roughly fifth level, which puts them at a slightly advantage in this portion of the adventure. Another part thing is that I'm running seven players.

This part of the adventure also relies on the player's doing their own kingdom building. On one hand, it's an interesting concept. I was going to use the rules from the Pathfinder Ultimate Campaign but... Only one player is doing the actual kingdom building, determining the buildings and other bits that happen. I've been trying to blue book it so that it minimally impacts actual game play since only one player actual has the book and most of the players have expressed no interest in reading the rules or taking a more active part in that aspect of the game.

Mind you, just under half of the players are interested in that aspect of the campaign to speak of, so I suspect it'll just get dropped. That will upset some who are interested in it, but since their not willing to actually put the work into it, their disappointment will be like sugar on corn flakes.

I've also been doing, for the most part, on the fly conversions. I've been doing it by eyeballing it. For the most part the players haven't suffered too much. I've probably been going 'easy' on the players as opposed to going for the dreaded TPK.

I may also finally be getting around to using inspiration right. I awarded it twice in the game. Huzzah! Finally getting that mechanic aspect down.

Below is one I actually did some of the math on but I'd be open to hear any changes.

Trollhound

Beast, unaligned
Armor Class 15 (natural armor)
Hit Points 32 (5d8+10)
Speed 40 ft.
STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA
18 (+4) 13 (+1) 15 (+2) 2 (-4) 11 (+0) 6 (-2)
Saving Throws Int -4, Wis +0
Skills Perception +2, 
Senses Darkvision 60 ft., low-light vision, , 
Passive Perception 12
Languages _
Challenge 3 (700 XP)
Keen Smell. The trollhound has advantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks that rely on smell

Regeneration: The trollhound regains 5 hit points at the start of its turn. If the trollhound takes acid or fire damage, this trait doesn’t function at the start of the trollhound’s next turn.

ACTIONS
Weapon. Bite +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 7 (1d6+4),piercing damage., Disease A trollhound’s saliva is an infectious brew of contagion. Creatures bitten bya trollhound are often afflicted with bloodfire fever, a disease characterized by deep internal pain, as if the victim’s blood were on fire. Its symptoms include loss of muscular coordination and physical strength as well as lethargy and fatigue. Constituion Save DC 14; Target is exhausted. At the end of each long rest, an infected creature can make a DC 14 Constitution saving throw. On two successful saves the disease is overcome. If the user fails he takes another level of exhaustion.


I enjoy the adventure path, at least the first two books so far, because it's very open in allowing the players to do what they want. They have opportunity to explore, to hunt down monsters, to work with numerous NPCs and a lot of other bits that are not necessarily the normal standard for dungeon crawls. Mind you that's not always what the players are looking for as one of the players has expressed an interest in doing the Emerald Spire, which is what I initially was going to run before deciding to use Kingmaker.

Looking forward to next week's game as several of the encounters for it are potential role playing and a few brief dungeon crawls.

What's everyone else doing for adventures? Have you expanded the core one from the Starter Set? Have you used the two hardcovers? Taken older adventurers and converted them? Stuff off the cuff and homebrewed?