The Echoes of Heaven Developer’s Journal

4th Edition

1:26 am May 5th, 2008

Last night I tried 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons. We did this by taking the fan compilation of rules and the characters from the D&D XP and using them in an adventure that I’m told is based on the D&D XP demo adventure. Anyway, I was interested in trying it out and it was my birthday party so basically everyone had to do what I wanted to do.

They were lucky I didn’t have the urge to play Paranoia.

Anyway. It went well. Things weren’t any faster than 3.5 but there was at least one time when a player stared at his character sheet for five minutes trying to decide what to do. I don’t think that would have happened if he’d known his character. Knowing the player, I’m certain it wouldn’t have happened if he’d made it himself. So all in all, I think that it WILL be faster in the end.

One of the things I’ve been worried about is the “Simple rules, many exceptions,” philosophy of the design. I still AM worried about it, because every time you break a rule, you have a chance at power creep. Of course, the DDI we’re hearing so much about makes it easy to make changes to a public database of powers after the fact if one gets too out of hand, but I don’t know if they’ll actually implement it in that way. So those are the fears I still have.

However, this model made the game VERY easy to pick up. One of my players is uncertain where the rules are concerned. I think she feels that everyone in the group has read more rulebooks than she has. Anyway, she’s now the most excited person in our party because she LOVES 4th edition (I bought her a preorder for her birthday and she’s excited to get it now). I think the reason is simple. She understands all the rules she needs to play (movement, attacks, damage, criticals, how powers are generally used . . . she probably doesn’t know when you invoke an attack of opportunity, but I think she knows to ask). Everything other than that was right on her character sheet. So the rules were simple and the exceptions were right there and spelled out for her, and only the ones she needed to play.

Part of this is almost certainly the new, level playing field, but its definitely more than that. She seems confident enough to really explore the system.

So there’s that.

We didn’t do much roleplaying, and that’s no surprise, since the players didn’t make the characters and so they didn’t have personalities to roleplay. I don’t think many of us cared about that. We all wanted to see the rules.

It played well. It was fun. Strikers are awesome. I can’t wait to see the other rules. How they handle rituals will have a lot to do with my end opinion of the game, because I’d like wizards to still be utility casters and with powers alone, they are more like sorcerers, but rituals SHOULD fit that bill, so we’ll see.

I think that’s all I have for tonight. I’ll keep you apprised.

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City Designer 3

12:31 am April 24th, 2008

One of the great things about testing for Profantasy is I get to play with new map symbols before they release. As part of testing City Designer 3 I redid the village map from The Tainted Tears. This isn’t really a spoiler since I usually let players look at the map freely during the adventure. At any rate, Simon gave me permission to show it around.

Invill Village Map

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Interesting

1:47 am April 17th, 2008

As a point of fact, I realized something today. If the Sulvican City section comes in at my estimated 15,000 word word count, this product will be more than 97,000 words long. As a point of reference, in a standard paper back novel, that would be more than 291 pages (300 pages is about 100,000 words, and standard novel length. The warhammer novel I’m trying to get will likely be 95,000 words).

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More Sessions

1:44 am April 17th, 2008

Session 5:

Session 5 went pretty smoothly. We had Howard back.

The next day they were walking the street when the bad guy struck, killing the Sorcerer instantly. Howard’s character, the Elven Rogue, and Midd managed to chase the man onto the roof, then chased him from rooftop to rooftop. It ended with the bad guy falling from the roof and was knocked unconscious. The man stabalized and the watch came and arrested him.

They took the Sorcerer back and had him resurrected (the last time they’ll have access to that service). Then they visited the bad guy in prison, healed him, and interrogated him some. Then they went home and tried to decide what to do next. The Cardinal told them he could get the man out, and the party left to do that, because they wanted him out of the protection of the jail. Then they got there, he’d already gotten out.

The next day, they finally tracked down the bad guy (I don’t even remember how. The Urchins, I think)?

The Barbarian and the Rogue went in through the highest windows of the house. The rest of the part went through the front door.

What followed was a game of cat an mouse that ended badly for the bad guy (it’s rough when you intended to be the cat but the cat is really a 7′+ Barbarian who drops on you from above like a battlemech).

At the end of that session we covered some general business. Then the party was asked to go to a nearby village to investigate the disappearance of a priest. They rode out and found out the priest had gone into nearby woods. They found bad guys in the woods and a lot of dead people. When heading back to the village, they saw the Witch-Hunters ride in, and realized that this was going to be a really bad day.

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Big Announcement

2:11 am April 1st, 2008

Well, I’ve been beating around the bush for some time now. It’s time. Final Redoubt Press is proud to announce we are dropping all existing licenses. Instead, we will be pursuing an license to produce our settings exclusively for the game Burrows and Bunnies. We think that everyone will agree that this move will take the story in a new and darker direction.

Just read Watership Down.

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Did I Say Done?

12:35 am March 31st, 2008

This is going to be a big book.

Okay, this week I finished editing part one, which was as long as my minimum sourcebook size, all by itself. That was a bit of an exploration in tedium. As I got to the end, I found a note to myself.

I haven’t written anything on Sulvican City. That was supposed to be in this book. Shoot.

Tuesday I finished off part two and started the Sulvican City section (now Part VII, pushing the rules back to Part VIII).

Wednesday we had the game. Afterward, I wrote that blog post, which took about two hours.

Thursday became fiction day, which bled over into Friday.

Each of the days I spent at least one hour updating maps in Campaign Cartographer. I’m nearing the end of Product 3, which are the last completed maps with dungeon symbols. I’ve been updating where possible with the more photorealistic images from Symbol Set 2 for Campaign Cartographer. I like them a lot.

The weekend was the weekend.

The preorder commitments aren’t doing well enough, I fear. They are doing better than I worried they would, but we’re probably at about 10% where we really need to be. They are tapering off pretty sharply as well. They might not be enough. I still have one other source for commitments, but its an exceptionally untargeted audience, so its just impossible to guess if I’ll get even one response.

Anyway, that’s all the news for this week. Ta.

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Dragon’s Keep Game

2:09 am March 27th, 2008

Tonight I’ll catch up on the report of our ongoing game at Dragon’s Keep in Provo, UT.

Episode 3:

Our last episode ended with the party manhandled but alive. They were out of spells. There were areas behind them they hadn’t explored. The main tank was at about 3 HP.

They went back and found the one fight they had missed. Then they headed back out and camped, replenishing spells and generally searching the top level, picking up clues they’d missed originally.

The next morning they went down in and fought the biggest fight on the second level. Fear effects riddled the party, but they managed to keep just enough pressure to win the day. A helpful NPC aided them by trying to grapple PCs who ran by in fear.

Finally they reached the lowest level. Howard’s barbarian picked a direction at first and it turned out to be the one that headed straight to the end, so they skipped the hordes of bad guys on this level. When they reached the three paths that led to the ending, Michael, one of our players, instantly grasped the answer to getting through, but everyone in the party ignored him. They tried the path of guile first, and were manhandled. They then tried to path of subtlety, since half the party has at least one level in rogue. This time Howard hit on the answer right away (though no one put it together with Michael’s comments earlier). They moved through the challenge like a well-oiled wrestler (meaning no one could touch them and they glistened as they did it).

Actually, that’s not quite true (the touching part, not the glistening). Michael’s ranger took a bad critical to the ribs (we use my upcoming product Critical Matters for criticals). It broke many of his ribs and hit him with a -6 penalty on all actions. The healer didn’t have enough healing left to completely heal the critical, so they decided to continue on with him broken. If they healed him, he’d still be out of combat and they’ve has spent their last healing spell except cure minor wounds.

They took their licks during the penultimate challenge, but finally made it to the final room.

How do I talk about this fight without spoilers?

Let’s start with the basics. They were almost all at half HP or less. They had only cure minor wounds left, because they’d spent their last cure light right before going through the door. The sorcerer was out of spells. They were 2nd level and the EL of the room probably tops out at seven or so, even with the handicaps that the bad guy’s goals place on the tactical situation. They entered the room and their first attempt to beat the encounter turned everything from bad to worse.

There’s a lot going on in this room. The bad guy cast spells while the room itself attacks the party members, basically knocking them about the room at the same time.

Howard’s barbarian figured out the room’s defenses well enough to start climbing toward the big, demonic bad guy without being sent back to his starting square. The Sorcerer was blinded. Howard charged around and failed his tumble check to get through the bad guy’s reach without an attack of opportunity. He was left hurting. They began plucking away at the bad guy while I waited for them to figure out the final tactical piece of information in the puzzle.

Now, I failed them here as the DM. You see, there’s a piece of evidence that I show them three or four times in the beginning of the adventure. Unfortunately, I hadn’t brought it up this session, so while the character’s had seen it over and over again, maybe 18 hours previous (and once more walking in here less than an hour ago), I hadn’t actually mentioned it in a week. People forget a LOT in a week, and after presenting the clue to them about five times I realized none of them were going to remember it.

So I rolled for the NPC they were dragging along, he was supposed to be the expert after all. He made a check and drew their attention to the clue. Not the answer, just the clue itself. At first they didn’t know what to do about it.

The bad guy had chewed Howard up and spit him out by this point, and the cleric stood him back up at one hit point with a cure minor (remember, we’re using the try it now HP rules for 4th edition). Howard was the first one to decide to take decisive action on the clue, and one of the other characters made a good roll to see that he was right.

But Howard was separated from the bad guy now. The only other gung ho character playing had been killed our right with an attack from the bad guy. The only people in position was the cleric, who I was running as an NPC, and Howard. The problem was, the damage the room itself deals out made it impossible for Howard to approach the bad guy unless he wanted to arrive at negative HP.

I had the cleric charge and got him into position. Then I turned to the players. “If I’ve thought of a tactic that will win this entire fight, but I’m just running the cleric as an NPC, should I use it?”

They all said yes, of course, but the player playing the ranger/rogue said something far more important. He quoted the exact rule from the Player’s Handbook I was about to use.

“That’s the one,” I said, and the Cleric attacked, me feeling good that a player had proposed the idea.

About this time the Bard made a critical that dazed the bad guy for two rounds. They would have won without it, but the bad guy would have killed the cleric and Howard almost certainly in the process.

The cleric perfectly positioned the bad guy for Howard to follow up. The room attacked Howard on his way in, but even though he dropped to negatives at the end, he still managed to pull off the maneuver that defeated the bad guy for good.

They then made all haste out.

Living under the hospitality of the most powerful cleric in the country has its privileges. In thanks for covering up embarrassment for the church, the Cardinal of Belm resurrected their rogue.

Howard left then. The players raised their characters a level. We took care of final business and then wrapped for the evening.

Doing that without spoilers was probably much harder than it was worth.
Session 4:

This uses the basic plot from our first Adventure Seed product, but I don’t feel like it spoils too much to set it up, and after that I can skip the big revelations.

We started this sessions thinking we weren’t having a session at all. I had three players when I got there and Howard told me he couldn’t stay. We finally ended with four, plus a sit in who played the party’s dwarf. I decided half was enough to go forward.

We started with basic book keeping. The sorcerer ran around selling everything they’d collected. He also found an Unwed Craftsman who could rework the magic items they’d found to polish off the engravings of demons (for those who don’t know, an Unwed Dwarf is one who foresakes any chance at a family to marry himself to his occupation). An hour and a half in, they’d bought lots of stuff, sold lots of stuff, and finally settled in. They’d also been in town long enough that I allowed them to buy languages (many of them had unspent slots that they were just now having the opportunity to spend . . . the characters began