Running Phandelver: Parts 5 and 6

This is a two-in-one recap post, since I forgot to blog about one session before we’d done the next. Oops! So…what have human fighter Kosef, halfling rogue Rosco, dwarf cleric Bob and human fighter Kip been up to? They’ve committed the Worst Sin of a D&D party, fought their way through Cragmaw Castle, begun their own organised crime venture, turned their mascot into a real level 1 druid, and discovered the legendary Wave Echo Cave. Also, things changed on the other side of the screen…

Changing The Way I Plan Adventures

It’s no secret that I’m running a homebrew campaign (Orcus in Nentir Vale). It’s a lot of fun, but it’s also kind of hard work to write your own campaign. We’ve been taking a break for a while after the last adventure (the Sword Barrow) so that I could plan the next stage of the campaign, and I thought I had it all planned out. A nice, neat, linear adventure where the adventurers do X, the bad guys do Y, and it all ends in Z.

This adventure is terrible.

Running Phandelver: Part 4

This week the team (human fighter Kosef, halfling rogue Rosco, dwarf cleric Bob and new human fighter Pip) ran the Redbrand Hideout gauntlet. They’re not quite finished with it, but with about three rooms to go, I feel like I can post-mortem the thing.

Running Phandelver: Part 3

This week my party (human fighter Kosef, halfling rogue Rosco, and dwarf cleric Bob) made friends with a druid, learned draconic from a dragon cult (leading to Dramatic Consequences that they don’t know about yet), and killed a dragon.

Travel Case Study: Into the Wild

When I started playing D&D, I thought it was all dungeons (and dragons). I never realised how much the wilderness could play a part. And…now I’m learning. My players are trekking from one end of the Nentir Vale to the other, and I decided I didn’t want to use the “travel montage” approach (ie: “you travel for four days and then you are there. Congrats.”), I wanted to use this as its own adventure. This has turned out to be slightly harder than I anticipated, and I have learned a lot.

Making Combat Fun: Part 1

So I’ve talked before about how my main problem as DM is combat – specifically, making it fun for the players and myself. I want to change that. So here’s the first part in a series about how I am, and how you can, make combat fun.

Running Phandelver: Part 2

Last night was the second session of the LMoP campaign I’m running with my boyfriend and some of our uni friends. Bob the Dwarf Cleric brought his girlfriend, who played Leila the Human Fighter. We also had Kosef and Roscoe, a Human Fighter and Halfling Rogue, respectively.

It went very well, and throughout the night they flicked through my Player’s Handbook, working out what characters they’d like to build for our next adventure. But first – there are dungeons to delve and dragons to defeat.

The Value of Feelies

According to wikipedia, a “Feelie” is extra physical content that comes with a game (specifically Infocom’s text-based games) to help immerse the players in the virtual world. Sometimes they were crucial for deciphering the in-game puzzles, and sometimes they were just fun extras. The thing is: they’re super useful for dungeons and dragons.

You slip your hand into your pocket and tell your players: “you loot the corpse of the old, wrinkled wizard. You find an assortment of knucklebones and coins in his pocket, a couple of rusty daggers tucked into his boots, and around his neck you discover a strange amulet…”

Your hand comes out of your pocket, and you drop a necklace onto the table; a length of old chain with a huge gaudy pendant with an inscription. You spent $1 at a thrift shop on it, and two minutes of your time googling appropriately mysterious runes to sharpie onto it, and it’s probably the best moment of your players’ whole D&D career.

Or maybe they beat up a group of bandits, and you give them the actual note that one bandit is carrying. If they can decipher the code, they can discover the location of the bandit hideout.

Or how about this? The barbarian gets to level 3, and decides to follow the Path of the Totem Warrior. You tell them it’s fine – as long as they can find an appropriate token for the character and the player. Next session, the player’s wearing a bear hat, or a wolf ear headband, and they might feel a little silly at first, but you can bet they also feel awesome.

In fact, my Orcus in Nentir Vale campaign began because I had the bright idea to make a real “shattered relic” for the players to find one shard of. Now they’re obsessed with finding the rest of it and discovering what it means. Feelies work.

Magic Item Case Study: a Pin and a Frog

So in my Lost Mines of Phandelver campaign I bowed to the Wisdom of the Players and made two small items magical because they wanted to do an arcana check on them for magic, and I want to reward new players for being imaginative and understanding how the game works.

So they checked a Mysterious Pin they found belonging to their missing dwarf friend, and a small Frog Statue they discovered in a treasure chest. They rolled high, so I told them they “sensed some kind of magical aura,” and told them that to find out more they’d need to either take the items to a wizard or “attune” to them (which we’ll go over in the next session).

But of course…in the book, these items aren’t magic. So – time for some magic of my own!

Running Phandelver: Part 1

So I started running a new campaign last night, with some friends we’ve been making at uni. We’re running the Lost Mines of Phandelver campaign from the 5th edition Starter Set, and we’re using the pre-generated characters. We’ve got three players: my boyfriend, playing the Kosef the Folk Hero human fighter, and two friends playing Rosco the Halfling Rogue and Bob the Dwarf Cleric.

Here’s how it went: