Contest Winner: Goblins go BOOM!
It's no secret that I love minions. They are an easy answer to making an encounter seem like more than it really is. Sometimes just a handful of monsters is dull... I want droves upon droves of enemies coming at them from all sides! And when I don't want them to die so easily I toughen them up, but sometimes I want them to die in an unnaturally glorious way.
Recently Wastex Games had a contest called Minions Encountered, where the objective was to create an encounter where the boss used his minions in an "interesting way." I decided to submit one encounter that was inspired by my campaign.
To be quite honest, besides what you seen on this blog I've never actually submitted anything to a contest of this nature. Heck, I even failed miserably at NaNoWriMo and the NYC Midnight Short Story competition (I never even got close to finishing a submission for either one). So I looked at this competition a different way: to see if I can physically put something together in a format that others could actually use.
You see, there's a big difference in designing a campaign that you will run and designing a campaign that someone else will run. If you're doing it for yourself, you can fill in the blanks as you go, adjusting the encounter based on the how the players react to it. But when designing it for use by the general public, you either tell them very little (and hope they can fill in the blanks themselves) or explain every little detail so that there's no room for doubt. The former is meaningless for the competition, so I decided to build the encounter in the traditional format that Wizards of the Coast has used on multiple occasions.
And it allowed me to get a little more practice with Adobe InDesign CS5, for that matter. I'm not a graphic designer, so this too was somewhat of a new experience.
Now, about the encounter itself... The encounter is relatively low level, so I chose to use a concept that I'm surprised isn't used very often: the "Goblin Suicide Bomber", which is loosely based on the "Goblin Grenade" from Magic: The Gathering. Whereas most goblins are rather cowardly and flee at the first sign of trouble, these little buggers race forward to protect their leader and their sacred temple, light their fuse, then jump on the backs of unsuspecting PCs while laughing maniacally and waiting for their fuse to burn down.
But that wasn't enough! These guys would die almost immediately and they would have little effect; a poor initiative roll combined with a well placed burst attack can take them out of the equation almost instantly. What we needed is LOTS of goblins. Like... oh, I don't know... dozens of these little guys! I needed something that would keep creating wave after unrelenting wave of happy-go-lucky suicide bombers. So I turned to Save Versus Death and their "Endless Hordes"... Now things really come together! Four suicide bombers per turn, ad infinitum, should get fun quick!
But that still wasn't enough! Players could simply step aside, push them out of the way, or simply move faster than the bombers. What I needed is something to funnel the bombers so the players would have no choice but to charge in themselves, taking a boatload of damage in the process. So I chose to put the entire encounter atop narrow stone bridges over a river of lava.
Apparently that was enough.
I would like to thank Wastex Games for choosing me as the winner! I'm honored, guys! I'm sorry I can't take photos of the prize (I don't have a working digital camera; will try to get one soon), but I really do appreciate the Beholder Eye Tyrant and other minis!
Here, for your enjoyment, is my winning entry on the Wastex Games site:
The "Chamber of Fire"... or, as I like to call it, "Goblin Go BOOM!" (PDF)
Contest: Win “Heroes of Shadow”!
Having recently won a contest myself, I'm in a charitable mood. So I thought I'd try a little experiment and run a contest of my own.
If you're wondering whether you can afford to buy upcoming Wizards of the Coast books like Heroes of Shadow or The Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond, well here's your chance to win one of them!
DISCLAIMER: You will not get any manual before the dates listed below. We're giving it to you for free; we're not magicians and do not hold any power over Wizards of the Coast that allows us to get these books early.
The following information can be found on the official Contest page...
Entry Deadline: 12:00am Eastern Time on April 25th, 2011.
We'd like to see what you can come up with for a "solo" encounter... but asking for a simple encounter is just not enough. So we elected to choose a random element that the encounter or area must contain.
The element, randomly selected using the "Chamber Features" table (Dungeon Master's Guide, pg 192): 10(1d20) = "Pool, fountain or basin".
So here are the guidelines:
- Encounter must be compatible with the Dungeons and Dragons 4e mechanic. This includes fourthcore, if you are so inclined.
- The minimum requirement must be a single, actual encounter with a SOLO creature. You can add anything you want in and around the encounter - skill challenge, trap, hazard, special terrain, magic effects, other monsters, etc... - but the main adversary must be a solo monster and it must be an actual tactical encounter in which the solo monster must be defeated (Note: "defeated" need not mean "dead").
- You must create your own solo creature, complete with monster stat block. You can base it of an existing creature from any official source, but it must be sufficiently altered to be unique.
- The area must contain some sort of "pool, fountain or basin", and it must have some meaning to the encounter beyond being set decoration. We will leave the interpretation of that to you.
- Encounter could be of any level, but must be designed for no less than five PCs.
- Encounter must include a tactical map. Map could be dungeon tiles, digitally generated or drawn by hand, so long as it has a tactical grid of 5'x5' squares.
- Encounter must stand on its own in that it cannot assume any previous actions by the party besides showing up.
- You need not define monetary or item reward, but that is up to you.
- It doesn't necessarily have to be in the traditional format that Wizards of the Coast likes to use, but it has to be put together in such a way that any DM can understand it.
- Resulting document must be either PDF or a format compatible with Microsoft Word (any version).
- For legal reasons, do not include any artwork that is not yours. For example, do not use copyrighted images from any Wizards of the Coast publication. Official WotC dungeon tiles are acceptable; we mean things like drawings of actual monsters.
- We reserve the right to publish your submission on our site, regardless of whether it wins or not. You will of course be given full credit and, if applicable, we will direct link to your website or Twitter account.
Entry Submission: All entries must be emailed to contest@brainclouds.net before 12:00am Eastern Time on April 25th. You can either attach the entry to the email or link to it. Please include your contact information (name, address, email address, Twitter account, website, etc...). If you do not wish to be referred to by your real name, tell is what you want us to call you.
Entry Deadline: 12:00am Eastern Time on April 25th, 2011.
Judging: Honestly, I'm not sure who will be doing the judging yet. Worst case, it will be me... But we'll see who we can recruit.
GRAND PRIZE: ONE (and only one) of the following...
Heroes of Shadow (available April 19th, 2011) - Should be immediately available at contest end.
The Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond (available May 17th, 2011)
Monster Vault: Threats to the Nentir Vale (available June 21, 2011)
Neverwinter Campaign Setting (available August 16th, 2011)
NOTE: If you wish for any alternate Wizards of the Coast manual (core manuals, Essentials guides, Monster Vault, etc... Even official modules) , we may be able to make that arrangement so long as said book is available on Amazon. You are welcome to ask, and we'll see what we could do.
Prize will be ordered through Amazon and delivered once they become available for shipping. Subject to availability.
Prize includes shipping within the United States and Canada. Can ship abroad, but that all depends on the cost of shipping the item.
So let's see what you can do!
Robot Zombies and Exploding Mushrooms
No, I'm not talking about a Roger Corman film... This blog is about RPGs, so it has to be none other than Gamma World.
It's been a long, long time since I look at Gamma World, but I have to admit that I've been familiar with it all the way back to the first version. It didn't quite captivate me as much then, and when I did flip through the books that were available I couldn't help but think "I'm not wasted enough to handle this." Let's face it, James Ward must have been on something epic when he came up with the first few versions... Then again, looking through the original Monster Manual and Fiend Folio, maybe that was par for the course...
If you want to get a better understanding of the history of Gamma World, I suggest you read Angry DM's post "Taking the Game Seriously" and an analysis that he links to from there: "Gamma World: Over 30 Years of I Have No Idea What Is Going On". It's a great read!
Recently I picked up the latest version of Gamma World (the 2010 version), and I gotta say it is pretty wild. I look through these pages and can't help but think how much of this is lost on the youth of today. Some of this stuff is straight out of the science fiction/horror/post-apocalyptic movies I would watch religiously on cable at 3am in the morning. They just don't make this kind of cheese any more, do they? These are things that I would present to my son and he'd get a quick chuckle over, then move on; he'd much rather be bashing dragons with swords... that's much more realistic than a machine gun toting chickens and a cockroach the size of a Buick!
The thing is that, although the system is based on the 4e mechanic, it's much more simplified. It's not the content overload of D&D 4e: you don't have twenty different powers to consider, you don't have to worry about healing surges (you auto-heal at every short rest) and second wind is a minor action, there isn't an overly complex equipment system (except for Omega cards, which feels more like Magic: the Gathering than anything else. You even have to "tap" the cards when you use them) and several other things are much more easy to get started on. Strictly from a mechanics sense, I'd consider it a very good introduction to D&D 4e.
One thing I also found interesting is that, due to the nature of the environment and that nobody's supposed to be in control of mutations anyhow, character generation is completely random. If you don't like your character, take it out back, shoot him dead and re-roll another one.
To give you an idea of what this could create, using an online Javascript tool for Gamma World, I wound up with two characters:
- An Android Reanimated with a dexterity of 5, making him the clumsiest robot EVER. He carries a pair of binoculars and a canoe... 'cause, hey, in this world you never know when you'll need a canoe.
- An Exploding Fungoid that also has a canoe, but instead of the binoculars he was smart enough to bring a beer. Well maybe not *that* smart... hit Intelligence is 7. What can you expect from a sentient mushroom that just can't hold itself together?
Reading through the core manual and one of the add-ons (I have Famine at Far-Go. Still need to get Legion of Gold), it almost reads like the most off-the-wall comic book you can think of. Chickens with artillery, super-sentient badgers, sharks that tunnel through solid rock, little green men, cockroaches the size of RVs, the "yexil" (see below), etc... I may never play a game in my life but it's definitely worth it at least for amusement's sake.
Reading through all this must have affected my subconscious, because a few days ago I had an oddball idea for a short module. Well, it's either going to be a Gamma World module or a late night Cinemax movie, and I don't have the budget to do the latter. So I began to develop the story line in to a series of encounters.
But I realize I have a problem: I think I'm making it too serious. The first two encounters I created were pretty straight up, in the same style as several of my other encounters in the D&D world. But this isn't D&D we're talking about, this is Gamma World: the encounters just didn't feel weird enough. The two encounters could have been ported to D&D and they might actually fit.
I found myself out of my element for a bit, realizing that what I was doing simply wasn't in the style that Gamma World intends. To give you an idea of what that style is, look at what the sample campaign in the core rulebook has:
- Heavily armored badgers with crossbows.
- Pigs on motorcycles.
- A "yexil", which is a giant, orange-colored lion with wings of a bat, mandibles of a spider and shoots laser beams from its eyes.
- Gypsy moths that fire beams of radiation.
- Radioactive birds.
- Killer robots. Lots of killer robots.
- A giant rabbit with a katana.
I mean, God, what were these people on when they came up with this stuff?
So I decided to try something for my third encounter that didn't already exist but seemed appropriate. No gimmicks or special circumstances to it, just the PCs walking along until they come up with... wait, seriously? Is that what I think it is?
I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the module when it's done. It's technically the right length to be a Dragon/Dungeon submission, but I don't know if they're taking that sort of thing. I might resort to alternate means of distribution. I might give it away for free. Who knows? We'll see once I'm done.
In the mean time, let's see what character I get now: A Hawkoid Felinoid. I'm a bird cat... I'm my own worst enemy!
Splitting the Party
"Order of the Stick: Don't Spilt the Party" Volume 4 available at Giant In the Playground (click on above image)
Everybody says "don't split the party"... Most of the time the reason they give is "bad things will happen", which they inevitably do. The real reason is that it's a potential nightmare when it comes to doing it in a table top session. It doesn't always go over well when you tell half of the group "I'm going to ignore you for a while."
As I've stated many a time, all my campaigns as of late have been "play by post", so it's actually rather easy to split the party: just make two separate threads. Short of cloning myself, that's not a readily available option at the table.
In my campaign there are two specific instances that I can think of where the party will be split. One of them is a skill challenge scenario so it's not that bad to handle (it's basically a skill challenge in which you can't see each other), but one is the single most complex encounter in my entire campaign. And it's an encounter that I, quite honestly, really like. In fact, it's probably my favorite encounter in the whole campaign.
So when it came time to write up that encounter for the module... what do I do? I already ran the encounter once in a PbP forum and it went rather well, but looking at the original design I have to wonder how would such an encounter be managed in a table top scenario.
Here are the elements, described in the most generic sense so as not to spoil anything:
- Five PCs.
- Around 20 NPCs, most of which are neutrals and/or minions. Only one or two would qualify as true allies, and that is compensated for by the encounter strength.
- Short of a better way of describing it, one "environmental effect" that has a broad scope and affects everyone in a large area (categorized as an "Elite Hazard", if you must know).
- Two areas of potential combat that are divided geographically. That "division" involves a good two to three hundred feet, the areas do not have line of sight or line of effect with each other, and there is some blocking terrain features between the two.
Everything is peachy until that last one, and then the whole table top scenario falls apart. And it's not just a matter of mechanics, but of "fun": there is only one DM after all, so certain players might begin to feel ignored while the action occurs in an area they're not even aware of. And trying to run both encounter scenes at the same time might be a rather confusing experience; heck, I had a hard time doing it using the MasterPlan encounter manager (I had both groups in the same set).
I find myself forced to redesign my favorite encounter to make it one area. I'm not thrilled at the idea, but the whole point of creating this campaign is so that others can run it. And I don't want to create encounters that are simply not usable at the table.
So has anyone out there ever split the party? Any suggestions on how a situation such as the above would work?
Overly Complex Encounters
"Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge" - Winston Churchill
Part of my problem designing a D&D 4e module is that I haven't played a live table top D&D game in over ten years. During that time, all the games I've been involved with are "play by post": I'm currently DM-ing several online games, and playing multiple characters in many more.
And the reason I can do so many concurrently is because of the nature of "play by post". The advantage of PbP is that all the mechanics involved in managing encounters is transparent to the players, so the players may not be fully aware of the amount of work the DM has to do. Since all my games are PbP and I have a multitude of utilities in order for me to do that management, I have the luxury of making some rather complex encounters. These may not translate well to a table top setting.
Several of the encounters in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of my campaign involve NPC allies. If it were one ally that's not a problem, but I use them a lot, and in once very specific case there are five PCs, five to six enemies and - last time I counted - twenty-three allies and/or non-combatants. I can't imagine what it would be like to handle the status of thirty-four creatures using pen and paper, dealing with things like rolling initiative over a dozen times. Heck, most people might not even own that many miniatures.
So there's my problem... I really like some of these encounters (the one I mention above is my favorite in the entire campaign), but some DMs might take one look at them and think "No way I'm going to deal with all that!" For the sake of publishing, I think I'm virtually forced to modify them so that they are manageable, so that DMs won't be dismayed at running them and elect to either reduce the complexity or skip the encounter entirely.
Another option I'm considering is possibly including two versions in the module, or at least enough descriptive text to explain how to simplify a seemingly complex encounter. But that would feel kind of odd... Including a "normal" version and a "use this if you're crazy" version of the same encounter.
But something interesting happened relating to all this... In addition to all the 4e campaigns I'm active in, I'm also active in one rather epic 3.5e campaign (also PbP). In that campaign we are a group of eight 8th level players currently fighting over ninety orcs, most of which are minions. As a player it doesn't appear that overwhelming, but I can see the amount of work involved in managing such an encounter. Even dealing with all the markers on the digital map is quite daunting sometimes.
But in 3.5e it seems almost... normal, as if that level of complexity was expected and commonplace. In 4e, it's ludricrous. I assume that's simply due to the nature of the 4e mechanic, and the new level of number crunching involved.
So has anyone out there run these sort of "epic" encounters where there are few against many, or perhaps a normal encounter that has a lot of NPCs just waiting to be turned in to collateral damage?
And the reason I can do so many concurrently is because of the nature of "play by post". The advantage of PbP is that all the mechanics involved in managing encounters is transparent to the players, so the players may not be fully aware of the amount of management the DM has to make. Since all my games are PbP and I have a multitude of utilities in order for me to do that management, I have the luxury of making some rather complex encounters. These may not translate well to a table top setting.
And there's the added benefit of time. It's much easier to do that much die rolling and encounter management when you don't have five people sitting across from you at the table wondering "well? Are you done yet?"
Several of the encounters in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of my campaign involve NPC allies. If it were one ally that's not a problem, but I use them a lot, and in once very specific case there are five PCs, five to six enemies and twenty-three allies. I can't imagine what it would be like to handle the status of thirty-four creatures using pen and paper, dealing with things like rolling initiative over twenty times. Heck, most people might not even own that many miniatures.
So there's my problem... I really like some of these encounters (the one I mention above is my favorite in the entire campaign), but some DMs might take one look at them and think "no way I'm going to deal with all that!" For the sake of publishing, I'm forced to modify them so that they are manageable, so that DMs won't be dismayed at running them, preferring to reduce the complexity or skip the encounter entirely.
I've been interested in getting a feel for live games once again, even if it was simply observing and not an active player. Maybe then I'll have a better idea of whether these encounters really are as complex as I fear them to be.
About the Author
Software developer and game designer in Miami, Florida. Currently working on content for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, Pathfinder, 13th Age and other systems.
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