At Will

WoAdWriMo is upon us, and I’m in.  I’ve been looking for more excuses to do even more writing, especially RPG-related writing, so this will be right up my alley. Are you going to write an adventure?  what are you going to write?  My adventure is going to be 4e, but I’m still brainstorming the basic premise.  I have a few doozies lined up though.

Where was this when I was making the rootwalker?  Great simple tool that makes monster creation a few steps easier.  Now you can simply focus on the powers you want your creature to have and modify to taste.

What goes in hand with this is Asmor’s sweet MonsterMaker.  The best part is that if formats it in the monster block style cleanly and easily for you.  I’ve already modified the Rootwalker’s entry to reflect this, so check it out if you want to see the end results of the utility.

What is this?  This is a table that a GM lovingly prepared and never played on.  Players bailed out at the last minute.  The GM is crying.  Crying!  Do not do this to your GM.

So I have some time off from the next session of the blacktree game.  Even better, I have time off from the Blacktree portion of the game altogether — the introductory arc is all about a kobold incursion.  The kobold incursion is much less demanding prep-work wise, so I’ve had some time to build up the mythology and mechanics involving the mysterious blacktrees and the mayhem they bring wherever they choose to sprout from the earth.

First a little more about the blacktree. These harbingers of doom and destruction don’t literally grow.  They are summoned forth by a ritual known only at this moment by our archvillain, a  dragonborn lich known to his followers as The Golden, and the subject of another post.  Blacktrees act as gates for evil in various forms, but their most important function is to leech enough energy and to conjure enough pain and despair to create a Deathgate, which the Golden will then enter to seek his ultimate prize –godhood.

Blacktrees bring with them all manners of demon and undead, but I want a foot soldier that represents this menace, that will be iconic — a monster that, when players see it, will evoke the looming menace of the eldritch fauna.  The grunt should evoke death but also nature, a grim paradox of plants and undeath.

At the basic level, I’m looking at a zombie.  And now you’re thinking I did all this build up for zombies.  You’re dissapointed. Sad.  A little bit hurt.  I understand, but please, follow me a little further down this road.

The foot soldiers will be reanimated, but the power source won’t be necromancy.   A blacktree will be able to scatter seeds that embed themselves in and grow inside a victim.   The seed will feed off the it’s victim’s lifesource, the branches vining around the skeleton.  In the final stages, the branches will cover all of the hosts bones.  The host will become rigid, and the branches will constrict and break the skeleton.  The seed’s branches will be the victim’s new skeletons, and the seed will become the new brain and heart.  Most of the host’s innard will be pulped and replaced as well, forming a new wooden ribcage to protect the seed.

A rootwalker will rise, ready to serve the blacktree.  Black branches extrude through the skin at various points, and its dead, onyx eyes peer right through the foes of its master.  Its torso is a tangle of flesh and wood, and a pulsating red orb of light illuminates it from the inside.

The next question to answer — how do they fight?

Rootwalkers are mindless and relentless like zombies.  They need something to differentiate them from zombies so that players don’t think “tree zombies”.  I want them to think “rootwalkers”.  I can’t make them too complex though, as it will make them too hard to fight or run.  I figure that I’ve got one at-will power and one encounter power at my disposal to make them distinct.  What will make the rootwalkers different from an everyday zombie is their ability to root themselves and their ability to entangle enemies by summoning roots from the ground to trap them.

The basic stats are made pretty easy with the guidelines in the DMG.  So now I present to you, the rootwalker.

Greywulf had the epiphany that 4e’s movement frees us from the gridmonster.  I brought up the point that, well, freedom isn’t necessarily free –you go gridless and have to bring a bunch of tapemeasures and template and what have you to the party.

But then, propagandroid, as if to supply a riposte to my naysaying of a gridless roleplaying world, built an encounter board based on the maps in Keep on the Shadowfells.  I would gladly lift up my tape measure (I do play Warhammer 40k, after all, so it’s not like it’s absent from my gamer toolbox) to play out encounters on cool tables such as this.

Once he builds out all the encounters, he’s going to have a cool basis for future sessions.  Like I already commented on his blog, I’m a little jealous of his players.  Now that I’m all inspired, I might have to build something like this myself.

One thing I’ve contemplated is the use of my Heroscape tiles for terrain.  To me it seems a neat blend of the gridless approach (3d on the cheap) and the grid-based approach, with hexes instead of squares.  If you haven’t seen Heroscape setup, it is rather cool.

Because I’m a colossal dork, I raided a closing Toys ‘R’ Us and got two sets on the super cheap.  I haven’t ever played the game, but I have recently scavenged the fantasy minis for my games.  Setting up wilderness scenes with the tiles is the natural progression, methinks.

Back to the realm of grids, I just bought multiple sets of Dungeon Tiles — wish I had this 3-d sattori before that purchase — and the only complaint I can really levle against them besides their flatness is storage.  Storage is going to be a problem with any of these solutions to representing terrain of course, but it seems particularly easy to get disorganized with all the little tidbits associated with the dungeon tiles. I need to make a trip to the store and rustle up some huge econo-size ziploc bags.

The last bit of terraining that’s available is the Worldworks approach, i.e. paper terrain.  The lads at WorldWorks do stuff with cardstock that I honestly wouldn’t have thought possible.  A beautiful forest built from cardstock?  Surely you jest.

Apparently not.  With quality models like this, it’s very very tempting. You can print however much you need, so the cost will be a one time affair.  It’s probably the cheapest method of making terrain, but it also appears that it would take the longest.  I lack the skills with paper and cutting to make this a definitive assertion, though.

So, how are you thinking of escaping the grid?

The last thing you want is spend all day making encounters.  4e does make the process much quicker, but how can we we make it quicker?  Let us explore the ways.

Need to pull up encounters on the quick?  Asmor’s 4e encounter generator should be just what you need.  I’m sad but not surprised I was beat to this — good thing I always check on my “Why hasn’t this been done before?” ideas before I actually start to implement them :).  Asmor also has an encounter-a-day blog which is in the blogroll.  Check it out.

Next on the list we have an excel spreadsheet at 4venture.  It has the list from the back of the MM faithfully rendered and the second worksheet helps you calculate your budget expenditure.  Very nice tool.

On the heels of my post RE: the black trees, I wanted to discuss something helpful I’ve found in creating campaign worlds. If you can find one piece of a campaign setting, some distinguishing, unusual feature, you can add the rest of the details to that and build the setting as a natural extension from that starting point. This is different than just finding a theme. A theme is saying, “I want to do ice pirates in a fantasy setting”. Building off of a set piece is saying, “There is a living, sentient sun whose cruelty is boundless.” With that set piece in mind, you are starting small, but questions will naturally arise. As you answer them, the setting grows. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a campaign in ten words:

Where do black trees that are destroying the land come from?

To expand on this…It took me only one second of brainstorming before the notion of charred, rotted weeping willows whose bark carries the impression of its trapped souls manifested.  Sometimes in your campaign daydreaming you get an evocative idea, and you put in on hold, as you explore some other thoughts.  You note the landmark and promise to return to it, as you continue on down roads less travelled. Read the rest of this entry »

Many of you have already seen this, but it’s worth noting anyways: The Instant Campaign Builder provides great productivity tips for getting a campaign going and still having time to do the 9,9999 other things you have to do in your life.  GMs in a crunch need to read this –I know I did.  I’m already pretty deep into the start of my 1st 4th edition campaign.  Notes shall be posted in due time.

I’m a positive person mostly, so I’m not going to say we started three men down. I’ll say we started two men (well, one man and one woman) up. We’ve got Chuck and his girlfriend Rachel ready to go. I learned from the last session that I’ve got to keep distractions well away. We did have to stop by 3 Trolls to get some dice, though. I was planning on dumping a big stack of cha-ching on miniatures but a wave of people similar to myself ransacked them in the name of 4e. There’s a beer store across the way, so Chuck must stop. He is a beer geek like I am a game geek, so I don’t even attempt to argue.

so far, distractions 1, me 0. Read the rest of this entry »